Before you assume this is yet-another "doomscrolling on Instagram broke my self-esteem" stuff, I quit this service in 2018 and only returned for like two weeks in March, 2020. I never descended into Instagram-driven madness like other people, in fact I left it because I noticed how shallow and limiting the people on there behave on it.
The only reason why I re-downloaded this app today is to merely delete and deactivate all of my abandoned accounts before they get thrown into Meta's AI. I didn't do it back in 2020 because I grew so repulsed of Instagram that I just wanted to gone from my phone and far away from me. So obviously the first thing that put me off was how much Instagram's UX changed radically to resemble... Google. Well, at least IG's account management looks identical to Google's now.
Someone messaged me 103 weeks ago, letting me know that they haven't heard of me for a while and simply wished me well. We actually met on Tumblr and I remained active on there until September, 2023, so why didn't they use Tumblr to chat and maybe exchange phone numbers? Hell, I had several other profiles listed and even dropped a brand new email address for such cases!
I didn't bother to respond since my accounts were about to get wiped, so I took a quick glance at what some of the people have been up to during the past five years.
I barely recognized the vast majority of my former schoolmates who now unironically try to emulate an upper-class lifestyle. I never really tried to stay in touch with any of them mostly because I never really trusted them in the first place (hint: some bullying was involved), however I never felt to repulsed by them until now. Two guys straight up act like the stereotypical entrepreneur on LinkedIn, a girl who promotes "women in coding" doesn't code herself at all since finishing her MSc and instead uses GitHub Copilot exclusively to feed some LLM with Pinterest posts (yes, a LLM being fed pictures; not a DALL-E-type AI), all whilst suddenly wearing tons of makeup and focusing on her looks alone. Another girl apparently had a full-blown breakdown and now keeps her head shaven whilst acting... well, stereotypically jobless. Yet another girl works for our Green party, yet will gleefully talk the Taylor Swift concerts she attends. Some other girls got heavy, another didn't announce to even be in a relationship until she was close to giving birth to their first child, whereas another girl, already a single mom back in 2020, now got two children - again, as a single mom.
I'm not going to claim that I'm in the right for trash-talking about people, yet what I got to see just before I finally closed my Instagram account proved my long-held distrust of them because pretty much all of them changed to the WORSE - and some of them already were, dare I say, deplorable in the first place. I can see why all of them continue to use a platform as shallow and parasitic as Meta's Instagram, it fits their personalities.
What I just don't get is how excessively they rely on it to the point they look like caricatures of insanely broken people. Something's just so off about them that I wouldn't even blame it on me getting older or perhaps even going insane with the amount of solitude I treat myself with - in fact, keeping myself away from them actually caused a funny incident back in year 9 where we did a dictation test and only six out of roughly 20 kids manage to get graded between B and C (or 2 and 3 in the German grading scheme). Those same six kids eventually broke all contact with the rest of our class, myself included, as I got a C (and a pitiful look from my German teacher who later admitted that she would have loved to see me in her German course if I'd have chosen to get my Abitur). Most kids, the same people that now give me straight-up nausea, barely got any D's but mostly E's and F's and failed the dictation in a rather spectacular fashion. All but one ended up passing their Abitur for some reason but certainly not because they suddenly got smarter, considering most still aren't capable of writing something in English that isn't a copypasted "inspirational" quote found on some quotes aggregator. But even their German is... unusually bad for former "Gymnasiasten" (grammar school students").
Maybe I'm being hit with some sort of culture shock. I know I changed a lot and cringed immensely at my old posts that gave me a similar feeling of unease - hell, I was pretty much on some sort of autopilot at that time myself but luckily grew out of it - but not to the same extent as the profiles of my former schoolmates. They became carbon copies of the most bland stereotypes one could come up with and ultimately as uncanny as any AI bot. Hell, they act more robotic than an AI bot.
In a sense it's like the "dead internet theory" but reversed. It's not bots dominating the internet but real living people starting to act like bots.
I never wiped a profile this fast as my old main Instagram profile. I don't want to be exposed to this parallel universe in any way. I can deal with 4chan-type shit and whatever Tumblr's remaining culture encapsulates but not THIS. This is just terrifying.