Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 121
Instagram is over, Caffeine-free Diet Coke is for psychos (and Elon), Zuckerberg's big bet on the metaverse is backfiring, New Yorker Cartoon of the Week, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting. Check out the archive of previous newsletters here.
Instagram Is Over
The app’s original purpose has been lost in the era of “performance” media.
This one is news to me. But I enjoyed learning about what’s happening out there in the current social media environment. This comes to us from The Atlantic so take it with a coastal-elite-media-grain-of-salt.
Earlier this fall, while riding the subway, I overheard two friends doing some reconnaissance ahead of a party. They were young and cool—intimidatingly so, dressed in the requisite New York all black, with a dash of Y2K revival—and trying to figure out how to find a mutual acquaintance online.
“Does she have Instagram?” one asked, before adding with a laugh: “Does anybody?”
“I don’t even have it on my phone anymore,” the other confessed.
Even just a couple of years ago, it would have been unheard-of for these 20-something New Yorkers to shrug off Instagram—a sanctimonious lifestyle choice people would have regretted starting a conversation about at that party they were headed to. But now it’s not so surprising at all. To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. It’s not what it used to be.
Oh no, we’ve reached the Begrudgingly Necessary stage of IG.
“Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.” In fact, a recent Piper Sandler survey found that, of 14,500 teens surveyed across 47 states, only 20 percent named Instagram their favorite social-media platform (TikTok came first, followed by Snapchat).
Simply being on Instagram is a very different thing from actively engaging with it. Participating means throwing pictures into a void, which is why it’s become kind of cringe. To do so earnestly suggests a blithe unawareness of your surroundings, like shouting into the phone in public.
In other words, Instagram is giving us the ick: that feeling when a romantic partner or crush does something small but noticeable—like wearing a fedora—that immediately turns you off forever.
“People who aren’t influencers only use [Instagram] to watch other people make big announcements,” Lee Tilghman, a former full-time Instagram influencer, told me over the phone. “My close friends who aren’t influencers, they haven’t posted in, like, two years.”
As is always the case, the ick came about quite suddenly—things were going great for Instagram until they just weren’t.
In 2014, the app hit 300 million monthly active users, surpassing Twitter for the first time. The Instagram Stories feature, a direct rip-off of Snapchat, was introduced in August 2016 and outpaced the original just one year later. But although Instagram now has 2 billion monthly users, it faces an existential problem: What happens when the 18-to-29-year-olds who are most likely to use the app, at least in America, age out or go elsewhere? Last year, The New York Times reported that Instagram was privately worried about attracting and retaining the new young users that would sustain its long-term growth—not to mention whose growing shopping potential is catnip to advertisers. TikTok is already more popular among young American teens. Plus, a series of algorithm changes—and some questionable attempts to copy features from other apps—have disenchanted many of the users who are sticking around.
The IG economy is suffering as well. The influencer market has been saturated. So where are people going?
In lieu of Instagram, Tilghman turned to Substack, where she writes the paid publication Pet Hair on Everything. She still posts on Instagram, but now mostly as a way to redirect her 246,000 followers to her writing.
Transformation is natural for social platforms (just look at Tumblr). Instagram’s fading fortunes might mean not the end of the app, but rather a reappraisal of our relationship to it.
LaTonya Yvette, a lifestyle blogger who has been on Instagram for close to 12 years, says these changes have always been part of the deal, and that Instagram’s benefits to her career over the years far outnumber the frustrations.
“I’ve always looked at [Instagram] as an extension of my storytelling,” she told me over email. “Because ultimately it should be … a tool in someone’s artistic, social, political and/or business toolbox, not the only avenue.”
New Yorker Cartoon of the Week
CAFFEINE-FREE DIET COKE IS FOR PSYCHOS
Elon Musk continues to prove that he has no taste
This essay from (zombie) Gawker is fun. The image above came from noted genius Elon Musk. He claims this to be a picture of his bedside table. Forget the guns, let’s focus on the caffeine-free diet coke.
Caffeine-free Diet Coke is what helicopter parents give their children when they think Sprite is too sugary and LaCroix is too spicy. It is for old people who eat dinner at 4 p.m. and barely tip their server. It is for boomers who claim that caffeine after noon will wreck their delicate digestive systems, but will still crush three to five Sam Adams lagers on a Monday. It is what your loser uncle-by-marriage brings to Easter and leaves in the garage fridge, never to be touched again until your parents downsize to a condo in your suburb’s “downtown” district and have to throw it away. Ultimately, it is for freaks and losers, so it’s no surprise that Elon Musk apparently can’t get enough of the stuff.
This is not the bedside table of a man who is doing 100 percent awesome in the brain. Even without the multiple guns in frame, this snapshot of his bedside table would still be a cry for help. This man, this so-called “alpha” who now owns all of our asses, is crushing four caffeine-free Diet Cokes (and many more before that, per the rings on the coaster-less table) and wants us to think he is the greatest mind since Aristotle? Give me a break.
Caffeine-free Diet Coke is one of the most beta beverages I can think of, second only to Mountain Dew Code Red. It has none of the benefits of a regular Diet Coke (i.e., a little boost without making your taste buds feel like they are coated in molasses) or a regular Coke (tastes good, somehow helps with a migraine). It is a waste of carbonation, aspartame, and caramel color. It somehow goes flat more quickly than its siblings. It doesn’t even look good — in an attempt to play off of the iconic silver of a Diet Coke can, the Coca-Cola bigwigs in Atlanta went for a muted gold color that invokes ginger ale more than anything else.
Musk has revealed himself to be a huge loser many times before this (bringing a sink to Twitter headquarters, setting Tesla share prices to $420, allegedly getting a hair transplant instead of going bald with dignity), but voluntarily sharing this disgusting information takes the cake.
“Elon Musk is a loser.” -Micah Wiener
“MARK HAS SURROUNDED HIMSELF WITH SYCOPHANTS”: ZUCKERBERG’S BIG BET ON THE METAVERSE IS BACKFIRING
Despite plummeting stock prices, massive layoffs, and deep skepticism in Silicon Valley, the Facebook cofounder is sticking with his Meta rebrand. “There is no question that AR and VR are the future,” says one start-up cofounder. “It’s just a matter of when.”
Speaking of losers.
In early October, Yan Xiaonan and Mackenzie Dern, two prized UFC fighters, entered the 25-foot octagon ring at the Las Vegas Apex arena to pummel each other for the women’s strawweight match. But unlike the countless previous fights that have taken place in the arena, which is often filled with hundreds of raucous fans, this time, the 130,000-square-foot space was eerily quiet. As cameras panned around the arena, almost all of the seats sat empty, with the exception of a select few: Right at the edge of the octagon were Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. It seems that at some point during the pandemic, Zuckerberg had been drawn into UFC fighting, and the multibillionaire founder of Facebook wanted to experience one of these fights in person. But rather than just buy two tickets to see a fight, like most normal people would—even normal ultrarich people—Zuckerberg, apparently afraid of other human beings, rented out the entire arena, according to Dern, a claim UFC chief Dana White denied.
Weirdo nerd alert! Let’s dunk on the ultra-rich just a little more:
Being exorbitantly rich, powerful, and famous affects people differently. The folks in Technoland do something entirely different. The more money and fame they get, the more they retreat into an insular world where they don’t interact with us commoners. They fly on their private jets away from the Normals. They live in homes worth hundreds of millions of dollars, and in Zuckerberg’s case, reportedly buy nearby homes so they don’t have to interact with neighbors. And—perhaps strangest of all—they surround themselves with sycophants in their own work environment and even live in their own form of digital feudalism online, rarely interacting with people outside their immediate bubble.
For Zuckerberg, the decision to keep himself insulated from the rest of the world has cost him dearly. His troubles really started a year ago when he decided it was time to rebrand Facebook, which was approaching 18 years old, and he announced that he was now renaming the company Meta. Along with the name change, Zuckerberg said the company’s direction was going to morph too. “From now on, we will be metaverse first. Not Facebook first,” Zuckerberg said during a nearly 75-minute presentation at the time as he wandered through his offices. “Facebook is one of the most-used products in the world. But increasingly, it doesn’t encompass everything that we do.” The metaverse, he believed, was the future.
The problem is—as everyone surmised at the time and still does today—no one wants to live in the metaverse.
They don’t want to go to meetings in a virtual coffee shop on the moon; they don’t want to go on dates dressed as a digital porcupine on a virtual beach with a pink ocean; and they don’t want to exercise in a virtual outdoor space with their friends who live down the block. If the pandemic taught us anything, it was that technology enables us to connect when we have no other way to reach people, but in reality, in-person connections are way more impactful and important than a digital genus. People want to experience real things now more than ever and—most importantly—they want to experience real people. Zuckerberg, as his trip to the Apex arena in Las Vegas illustrates so perfectly, doesn’t seem to want to be around real people. In fact, it appears that he’s kind of afraid of them.
So how has the shift from facebook to Meta worked out so far?
In September of 2021, a few weeks before Zuckerberg announced the name and direction change of Facebook, the company was worth just over $1 trillion dollars. A little over a year later, the company’s value had fallen to a vertiginous low of $236 billion. That’s a fall of more than $840 billion in value in a single year. To put that into perspective, the company’s worth fell by about the equivalent of today’s combined value of IBM, CVS, Goldman Sachs, Charles Schwab, Netflix, Twitter, and AT&T—all in a single year.
So what happened? He’s surrounded himself with yes men.
One former executive told me that Zuckerberg used to surround himself with executives who had different points of view to him, and that while he didn’t always follow their advice, he did listen. “The problem now is that Mark has surrounded himself with sycophants, and for some reason he’s fallen for their vision of the future, which no one else is interested in,” the former Facebook executive told me. “In a previous era, someone would have been able to reason with Mark about the company’s direction, but that is no longer the case.”
OK, so let’s assume Meta is cooked. Who cares? Well, shareholders care very much.
“This is what happens when you get a demagogue gaming the entire company’s voting apparatus in order to have full control,” the investor told me, referring to the fact that Meta has a dual class of stock and that Zuckerberg has 55% of the company’s voting shares, giving him power over all the decisions the company makes. “Visionary legacy trumps profit motive and shareholder value. It’s more than biting off a nose to spite a face, it’s creating a new nose and a new face in the universe that doesn’t exist yet, and no one, other than Zuckerberg, wants anything to do with it.”
Did Micah practice yoga this weekend?
Yes. 60 minutes Saturday at Black Swan Yoga Westgate.
That’s 44 in-person weekend classes in 48 weeks this year.
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