What Instagram Threads Reveals About Ourselves

Deep Rex vol. 6

“Deep Rex” (recommendations) is my ongoing series of mini-essays/recs for paid subscribers.

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1. What does the fiendish dash to another social media app reveal about us, as people? Oh, how dazzling it’s been to watch the craze around Instagram’s new “Twitter-killer,” Threads. Admittedly, I jumped on the initial bandwagon. Spending time on Twitter increasingly feels like peeing into the wind—yet I do want a place to share my ideas and work.

It only took about ten minutes on Threads for me to realize that, while certainly calmer and more banal than Twitter, this new tool will not be my salvation. I can’t help but feel the same sense of futility I’ve been tracking, wondering: Are we really still doing this? Pretending like it’s okay to swarm to another addictive app, enriching a corporate entity that already owns part of the internet, while we connect with a few digital avatars at the expense of our real friends and family?

Remember the early days of Covid, when “sensemakers” (like myself…) declared the pandemic to be an incredible opportunity for us all, as a collective, to “reset” and do things differently?

Well, here we are, a few years later, back to “business as usual,” with a few more folks working from home.

I suspect Threads will blast through Twitter’s numbers, particularly led by an influx of progressive personalities now that Elon has “right-coded” Twitter. But I have no doubt that the Threads hype will wane, and its subsequent crash will be meteoric. For three simple reasons:

1. Content moderation is extremely difficult, if not impossible. (Rex #1)

2. Social media algorithms, as they currently stand, evoke the most shadowy aspects of the collective unconscious, which result in emotional projection (keyboard warriors/trolls/profound insecurity) and/or self-interested narcissism (influencers/gung-ho business bros who simply cannot see the Bigger Picture).

3. Eventually, people will wake up to the undeniable fact that social media is addictive, and, like all addictions, it begets negative consequences—the most notable here being the erosion of the social fabric. Therefore, like all untreated addictions, our felt consequences will only increase in severity until a majority of us wake up and are sufficiently motivated to change our behavior. (Rex #2)

The biggest counterargument you’ll find to my above theses is that one should not fear social media, because it’s a tool. And, like I always remind folks, of course it is! Fire both destroys and fuels. When he stole flames from the gods, Prometheus gave us a blessing and a curse.

Online personalities often talk about how sharing your work on social media is one of the most “high-leverage” things you can do. I can attest that this claim is, indeed, true.

Others declare that you can even use social media to come closer to your “dharma,” and thus, recognize the illusory boundary that we erect between all things—including self and the digital world. For a moment, we’ll excuse the egregious bastardization and misunderstanding of such a beautiful word, Dharma. Because this claim is, of course, also true—social media is yet another manifestation of the universe’s creative instinct, the latest gesture of evolution.

But … What if all rationale to be “extremely online” and share your work is, upon deeper evaluation, a massive (albeit unintentional) gaslighting project? One in which we have fundamentally confused the creative force that flows within us with a capitalistic notion of human value that equates our worth with quantifiable output, tracked via pixels?

What does it say about us, as people, that we cheer the demise of evil Twitter and excitedly flock like literal dope fiends to a clone built by a corporation with an even worse ethical track record, all the while ignoring the glaringly obvious data that none of this shit is good for us—especially for our children?

Again, the solution here is not to necessarily unplug and move to the woods (Rex #3). I would, however, argue—as I have numerous times—that a collective movement in which we intentionally unplug for at least one day a week and root into our local communities is absolutely motherfucking vital. Like, it cannot happen any sooner.

Eventually, there will be better and more regenerative social media sites that we can safely use—I actually think Substack is as close (as any) to being such a tool. But as things currently stand with twisted cultural and economic incentive structures, the rest of the mega social media sites that own the internet—including Instagram’s Threads—will simply never be our salvation.

In the meantime, I’m trying my best to leverage these tools as a means to share a message that, perhaps ironically and definitely naïvely, leads people to spend less time addicted and online. And hopefully, inshallah, not taking myself too seriously along the way.

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2. Celebrity therapy-speak backlash. While I’m not one to normally track celebrity news, I found it fascinating to see Jonah Hill’s ex-girlfriend release a trove of texts that imply that he was controlling, vitriolic, and verbally dickish—all in the sacred name of his relationship “boundaries.”

This is significant because Hill just released a documentary, Stutz, about his work with a psychiatrist and now brands himself as an ambassador of “mental health.” Despite a popular reception, I found this documentary to be filled with not-so-great ideas and a metamodern “break the third wall” approach that simply did not work for me, mostly due to a feeling I could not place about Hill and his intentions.

Is his dickish behavior the result of watered-down, made-for-TV therapy, where one doesn’t actually get accountability but rather the validation of narcissistic tendencies? I don’t know. As my friend Holly reminded me, most celebrities at this level of fame are fucked up. Hill is also now pretending to be a cult leader in another pseudo-metamodern project that does not land for me.