september 16–29, 2019 | new york 121wider social circle, but I am a more atten-
tive close friend. I am rarely moved to
capture moments for public consumption
since eliminating the step of priming
them in Instagram’s gloss. I am less
frightened by the mundanities that fall
outside the black hole and have come to
see that they are actually luxuries: wait-
ing, in-betweens, the minutiae that make
up my daily routine.
My system created a buffer that
allowed me to piece together a private
life and probably the clarity necessary
to finally shut down Rookie. I don’t
know what would be on a private fake-
public account now, as I pretty much
share everything I want to and don’t
share everything I don’t want to. I still
have my anxious skin habit, but I
respect myself a little more, knowing
that I’ve made decisions toward a less
stressful life.
After Rookie folded, I watched my fol-
lower count drop from 544,000 to
509,000. I saw in my analytics that I have
more followers in the 45-to-54-year-old
bracket than the 13-to-17-year-old one.
When I first noticed these shifts, they felt
significant, and I was struck with the feel-
ing that I still “need” to use my account for
work. But my job now is to finish writing a
book and a movie. Any sense of obligation
I feel toward sharing myself on Instagram
is more out of a fear of being forgotten or
of missing out on the opportunities
granted to those with strong personal
brands. But not wanting to keep up a per-
sonal brand is part of why I folded Rookie.
Not paying attention to numbers is why I
could enjoy it as a passion project for so
many years. When the thought that I need
to get back into the game grips me, I refo-
cus on my work. Being paid to write and
perform is what I wanted this whole time.
I hope my system has helped me care
less about being liked, but I don’t expect
ever to fully unlearn the inner salesperson
or the shareability lens, nor do I necessar-
ily want to. The never-not-branding feel-
ing of being on Instagram—and the seeing
the world as a reflection of your brand,
which comes with it—can also be part of
being an editor or curator. Knowing you
could always end up writing about what
you’re experiencing is part of being a
writer. Watching yourself within a moment
can be part of acting and is certainly part
of the self-promotion that comes with
doing any of the above for a living.
I think the internet is at its best when
it’s used to move forward in time. To be
surprised by something outside of myself,
outside of my own control—like an audi-
ence. To learn and share and, though it
sounds trite at this point, connect. Amid
all the self-worth-measuring that has
made up my experience of the internet, I
believe there was also self-actualizing,
and that there still can be.
At a Rookie book signing just last year,
a 14-year-old asked me if it was okay to
“change who you are even if it’s different
from who you are on your blog.” My
answer, of course, was “Of course.”E
arlier this year, I decided to
use Instagram to reacquaint
myself with these possibilities. I
paid attention to people who I
thought looked like they were having fun
on the app, like the comedian Chloe Fine-
man with her many ingenious impres-
sions. One weekend in March, Ivanka
Trump posted a sinister video of herself
on Twitter, and I posted a video parodying
it. It was widely circulated, and I’m happy
people found it funny.
After noticing how few likes my posts
of book excerpts or event fliers had gotten
by comparison—like, so few that I
thought people weren’t even seeing
them—I tried using the platform to test
out a theory I’d heard about Instagram’s
algorithm while fundraising for Rookie:
that it prioritizes faces and videos in peo-
ple’s feeds over other types of content.
(The feed isn’t chronological but is sorted
by an invisible algorithmic hand.) This
notion encapsulated my agony over the
idea that being a face, a personal brand,
was the most likely way to get one’s con-
tent seen on the oversaturated World
Wide Web. I made a video of myself ask-
ing my followers to tell me where my
video fell in their feeds, and many con-
firmed that they were seeing my new
posts high in their feeds for the first time
in months. They were divided on whether
that was because Instagram explicitly
favors certain types of data or because
Instagram prioritizes, for each user, con-
tent similar to other content they’ve liked.
Not one to let a joke die without blud-
geoning it, I spent a couple of hours walk-
ing around Times Square, filming myself
searching for the algorithm—as in, back-
drops that would perform well on Insta-
gram. I tried the love sculpture and
Angelina Jolie’s wax figure at Madame
Tussauds, and I hashtagged the videos
#myalgorithmjourney.
Doing these videos became a good
exercise in making things, putting them
out there, and moving on. I jotted down
notes for characters and spent hours film-
ing myself and editing the videos. I read
most of the comments myself and learned
that panic spirals are less likely when I
like what I’ve made and don’t care if peo-
ple hate it.Some commenters told me I had
“snapped” or “lost it,” and thousands
unfollowed. Others were supportive and
replied with jokes that made me laugh
alone in my apartment, and I was sent
back to the connective internet of my
youth. Then I went off to a writing resi-
dency, then started acting in a new play,
then stopped getting ideas, or at least
none I wanted to spend hours executing.
I learned that unless I put them up right
away, I would get worried about the
black hole. I would overthink and change
my mind.
After posting these videos, Eva Chen,
Instagram’s director of fashion partner-
ships, DM’d me to come to the compa-
ny’s offices and learn how the algorithm
works. There, two Instagram employees
who said their jobs are mostly to “myth
bust” around the algorithm—at least to
people like me, who have a big follower
count—told me the algorithm does not
explicitly favor faces or videos and
mostly “shows you more of what you
already like,” though they would not say
how it measures data similarities. I
don’t know what it means that Insta-
gram users like it when the people they
follow post pictures of their faces. As a
photographer friend pointed out, por-
traiture has always been the most popu-
lar genre of painting “because people
can read themselves into it.”
Instagram didn’t share anything that
isn’t already public knowledge, except
for an impressively detailed, NDA-pro-
tected packet with analytics on my
account. The Instagram employees also
told me that celebrities, models, and
influencers had recently been coming to
them wanting to know why their casual
selfies outperform their posed red-car-
pet photos and editorial shots. Chen
explained that aspirational photos did
better a few years ago, but now users
crave posts that seem to be behind-the-
scenes, candid: “People want to see you
letting your hair down.”
Forbes and a handful of social-media-
marketing websites echo that appetites are
changing. People are sick of unrealistic
lifestyles and picture-perfect aesthetics,
they say. The next era of Instagram is all
about the “relatable influencer,” with
trends like #nomakeup, #nofilter,
#mentalhealth, #bodyimage, and “Insta-
gram vs. Reality” memes. I now realize
that in this essay, I’ve hit five out of five.^ ■Subscribetoournewdailynewsletter,
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