Transition: From Bookstagram to…?
It started with getting hacked, and it’s ending with me leaving Instagram.
I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted. I needed that time to think about my relationship with Instagram. I needed that time to weed through what I love and don’t love about social media. More than anything, I needed that time to imagine other options and to decide what I want to devote energy to instead. I appreciate your patience with giving me that time.
To sum it all up: I’m leaving Instagram. My account will still exist; I hope to use the messenger portion to stay in touch with folks. But I won’t be posting anymore. If you want to find me, I’m at www.rebelmouthedbooks.squarespace.com. For those of you who like the conversations we have together about books, or who like my commentaries, or who maybe feel like I do about social media, I invite you to reach out; I’m looking to build community meaningfully with you. We don’t need Instagram to do that. Read the rest of this post to learn more.
Let me share what’s been going on the last month that has led to this moment.
Some of you may not know this about me, because I know how corny it sounds and therefore don’t speak to it often, but I hate social media. When I say that I’m leaving Instagram, don’t get it twisted; I’m not leaving because of the people or content, rather, I’m leaving because social media fucks with my head and, ultimately, it’s not a space for me.
Let’s back up.
I’ve never been hacked before. When I realized my Instagram account was being hacked about a month ago, I kind of panicked. I tried to do what I could to protect others from it, while recovering my own account. Eventually, once I had done everything I could, I laughed. Why do I care if my account got hacked? Just delete the account and move on.
Well, I cared because of Bookstagram.
I joined Bookstagram— the Instagram book-ish community where readers can engage in discussion and make friends— about two years ago when I moved to Oregon with my partner. Though I loathe social media, I started an Instagram account as a way to stay connected with my friends and family back East. Initially I planned for my engagement to be minimal— only posting every once and a while so my family could see what I was up to. But I started seeing posts about books, then I started seeing accounts that were exclusively about books, then I started seeing multiple such accounts interacting with one another. What treasure trove is this?! Bookstagram. I was into it. I started posting my thoughts about books and writing. I started making friends. And soon enough I was planning my reading lists and posting commentary regularly— looking forward to engaging with my friends about what they were reading too. I was really happy. Of course, what always happens to me with social media happened again here, though I really hoped it wouldn’t. My happiness was fleeting.
Before I go on, I want to celebrate some of the specific things I love about Bookstagram:
The people: When I travel, I connect with other Bookstagram folks who live there. On a number of occasions, I have met up with Bookstagrammers at their local bookstores, where we peruse together, discussing the titles we are excited about, goofing off, and getting to know one another. But even when my interactions with Bookstagram friends is entirely online, the love I feel for them is strong. Friendship is something I really don’t want to lose during this transition period.
The politics: Not to insinuate that everyone on Bookstagram is political or takes an active role in decolonizing reading and publishing (many don’t), but the ones who do make me want to stay. There have been a number of examples over the last year where an author or a book was racist and/or oppressive in other ways and the Bookstagram community rallied in opposition, putting pressure on publishers and the author to take accountability, and encouraging other readers to be mindful about who they support with their dollars. In this manner, Bookstagram can be a place of direct action and a means of spreading vital information, which I’m all about.
The comradery with booksellers: I recently wrote a piece about the vitality of bookstores, despite the myth that bookstores are dying. Inspiration for that piece partially came from Bookstagram— from witnessing a surge of love and support for local indie booksellers in cities around the world. In fact, I participated in International Indie Bookstore Day in 2018 with a friend I made on Bookstagram. Bookstagram has been partially attributed by journalists for the swell in bookselling— an upsurge that is giving so many people hope. Since publishing my piece about bookstores, I have received a number of emails from readers sharing their renewed sense of hope and validation. I feel pride in the Bookstagram community’s role in supporting indie booksellers in the age of Amazon.
My love and appreciation for these three pillars of Bookstagram can’t be overstated. I am highlighting them specifically, because I don’t want readers to take away from this post that I hate Bookstagram. I don’t. Rather, I don’t like social media at large. Furthermore, I believe the three pillars I listed can be cultivated in other spaces outside of Instagram.
So why do I hate social media?
Social media promises connection, but the connection delivered is not the connection I need.
Like all social media, Instagram forces us to compare ourselves to others. Social media rewards popularity by numbers. Metrics like followers and likes are the bedrock of interactions but these metrics are deceiving. Instagram rewards small transactions of engagement, while providing little infrastructure for on-going community-building— something I desperately need. On Instagram, what does that engagement look like? A follow? A like? A comment? A share? A live video? I don’t know about you, but me liking pictures as I mindlessly scroll is not engagement. Me leaving a quick comment is technically engagement but, most often, a cosmetic kind. Sharing information is perhaps one of the most appealing things to me about Instagram, but would I call swiping through stories engagement? On occasion, maybe. The live video route works for plenty of people, but for an introvert like me who doesn’t like being on camera, it’s just not of interest.
From my personal experience, out of my 1,167 followers, about 20 are meaningfully engaged (20 people that I absolutely LOVE). To me, meaningful engagement translates to on-going conversations over comments and messages that may be rooted in books but branches out into other parts of our identities. I know that my definition of meaningful is a high bar; I wouldn’t dare place my standards on others. For many, the kind of engagement that Instagram offers is perfect. It’s just not for me.
And this is all without even touching the subject of the algorithm and ads and corporate profits.
In Instagram culture, the reality of connection is fixed. If you don’t like that kind of connection, then you’re shit out of luck. Building something new is beyond challenging when customizing the platform is totally out of your control.
I know I’m not alone in this line of thinking. And I know I’m not the first or the last to speak to it. None of this is new. None of what I am saying is special.
The reason I stayed with Instagram for so long is because of my friends. I had resigned myself to staying on Instagram, despite how it made me unhappy, because of these friends.
Then, I got hacked.
To recover my account, I had to take some time away to make sure the hacker had actually stopped messaging people from my account. I downloaded all of my data just in case. While I took that time away, it got me thinking: Is this worth it? Is recovering my account worth it?
When I saw the outpouring of love from friends telling me that they hope my account can be recovered and that they want me to stick around, I felt so guilty about wanting to leave. Like I said, I love my friends. I didn’t want to leave them. But I also didn’t want to stay.
This was all happening around the time George Floyd was murdered and the recent wave of BLM protests began.
At first, I was encouraged by the sweeping support I was seeing on social media for BLM, for anti-racism, for justice, and for liberation. I was seeing people post about racism who I’d never seen do so before, indicating that real-life conversations about racism were expanding. I interpreted this as new blood entering the movement. I saw that in the streets too. People I’d never seen before were taking action and getting involved. I was moved.
I stopped posting my book commentaries on Instagram. It didn’t feel right for me to do that while Black and Brown and Queer leaders were risking life and limb for revolution. It felt childish for me to post something about what I was reading. This kept me disengaged at a time when I was already uncertain about whether or not I wanted to even be here.
I stayed offline. I focused on my local community. I focused on the leaders here in Central Oregon. I focused on building community around me. To be honest, I forgot about Instagram. Well, I wanted to forget about Instagram.
But the blackout trend pushed me over the edge.
Basically a lot of White allies thought that posting a blacked out photo on Instagram was a way of showing solidarity with BLM. I’m White; I was almost fooled into it. Then I started hearing from Black and Brown activists on the front lines saying how detrimental that trend was for a movement that was battling the police state— a police state that censors Black and Brown voices, a police state that was already using Instagram and social media as a surveillance tool, a police state that thrives off of White people’s silence. And here we were voluntarily shutting up in a revolution. I saw how many Black and Brown folks tried to educate others on Instagram about this trend being toxic and I saw how many were ignored. The trend itself was nothing special, though. Social media loves trends because social media loves patterns. Trends are patterns that arc toward popularity, even when the thing itself is shitty.
I saw then and there that social media was more than a thing that depressed me. Social media is a thing that structurally works against liberation movements.
In an ideal world, had the internet been born from pure curiosity and a desire for accessible knowledge, then maybe social media could serve as an information-sharing medium that serves equally, fuels critical thinking, and offers a communal space outside of capitalism. But that’s not the world we live in.
It’s not just that social media platforms are run by corporations that want our money but don’t love us. It’s not just that social media platforms fuel a new age of capitalism. It’s not just that social media platforms censor posts and accounts fighting White Supremacy, while allowing White Supremacists to do what they like. Precisely because of the things I mentioned earlier (surface-level exploration and engagement), social media empowers ignorance with regards to liberation movements. Only when such movements become profitable do you see any sort of support (example: #BLM commercials from Discovery Channel). Don’t be fooled. It’s all surface. It’s all for trends. It’s all for profits. Social media platforms don’t want us to be free, because the defeat of capitalism is the only path to freedom and without profit, why bother?
For the liberators out there utilizing social media to build consciousness and to build solidarity, thank you. Their labor and energy are not to be discounted. They build movements through their words. And that’s exactly what I want to devote my time and energy to: building movements through words. While Instagram can be that place for others, I understand now that Instagram is no longer my place. And that’s okay.
So, if not Instagram, then what? This question has been the root of my distress while considering the idea of leaving Instagram. And, honestly, I didn’t have an answer until I wrote this post.
I have a website called Rebel Mouthed Books— a radical space focused on decolonizing the literary world through writing and reading. Like you have seen in my Instagram posts, I write about reading and writing from a political context, appreciating that no book, no writer, no story is a-political. My goal through my writing is to explore liberatory pathways.
But I see the irony here: my website is still on the internet. Social media’s problems are the internet’s problems too. They aren’t at all separate. So it’s not like I’m looking at my personal website as some cure-all for the ailments of social media. Rather, I’m looking at my website as a starting place for building something else.
For those of you still reading this, I want to invite you in on building that something.
Through the community organizing work I have done so far, I’ve learned that small is good and local is even better. With you, I’d like to build together a small, intimate, (ideally local but we’ll see) community of diverse, radical readers and writers. We can make it whatever we want.
Currently, my website is just my writing, but it can become...
Become what?
A place for others’ writing beyond my own. A community center. An on-going workshop. A site for shared exploration and knowledge. A communal hub for curiosity. A residency. A supportive network of activists. A virtual reading space. A place for mentorship. An affinity space. A storytelling collective. A micro-publisher. A zine. A space where each of our unique loves can intersect with reading and writing. Wanna learn how to grow veggies with a special guest author? Wanna smoke weed and talk about graphic novels? Wanna create book-ish ASMR? Wanna write with others in shared quietude? Wanna wanna wanna? It’s up to you and us.
Maybe we— as a small community who care deeply— can build something we love.
Maybe.
I’ll let you decide. Because I can’t do it alone.
Come visit www.rebelmouthedbooks.squarespace.com to see what’s there right now. We can talk about what kind of home you’d want to build together. And we can get started building it. Naturally, Rebel Mouthed Books will always be about books; you can find my commentary there anytime (including all of my Instagram posts). But it won’t just be me here. I hope you’re here too.