by Andrew Keen
Many others share this concern about the destructive impact of technology on the “golden age” of labor. The George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen, in his 2013 book, Average Is Over, concurs, arguing that today’s big economic “divide” is between those whose skills “complement the computer” and those whose don’t. Cowan underlines the “stunning truth” that wages for men, over the last forty years, have fallen by 28%.78 He describes the divide in what he calls this new “hyper-meritocracy” as being between “billionaires” like the Battery member Sean Parker and the homeless “beggars” on the streets of San Francisco, and sees an economy in which “10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.”79 Supporting many of Frank and Cook’s theses in their Winner-Take-All Society, Cowen suggests that the network lends itself to a superstar economy of “charismatic” teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other “prodigies” who will have feudal retinues of followers working for them.80 But, Cowen reassures us, there will be lots of jobs for “maids, chauffeurs and gardeners” who can “serve” wealthy entrepreneurs like his fellow chess enthusiast Peter Thiel.
The feudal aspect of this new economy isn’t just metaphorical. The Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin has broken down what he calls this “new feudalism” into different classes, including “oligarch” billionaires like Thiel and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, the “clerisy” of media commentators like Kevin Kelly, the “new serfs” of the working poor and the unemployed, and the “yeomanry” of the old “private sector middle class,” the professionals and skilled workers in towns like Rochester who are victims of the new winner-take-all networked economy.81
The respected MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who are cautiously optimistic about what they call “the brilliant technologies” of “the Second Machine Age,” acknowledge that our networked society is creating a world of “stars and superstars” in a “winner-take-all” economy. It’s the network effect, Brynjolfsson and McAfee admit, reflecting the arguments of Frank and Cook—a consequence, they say, of the “vast improvements in telecommunications” and the “digitalization of more and more information, goods and services.”
The Nobel Prize–winning Princeton economist Paul Krugman also sees a “much darker picture” of “the effects of technology on labor.” Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Krugman says, workers competed against other workers for resources. Since “around 2000,” Krugman notes, “labor’s share of the pie has fallen sharply” both in the United States and the rest of the world, with workers being the victims of “disruptive” new technology.82 This has happened before, Krugman reminds us. In a June 2013 New York Times column titled “Sympathy for the Luddites,” he describes the late-eighteenth-century struggle of the cloth workers of Leeds, the Yorkshire city that was then the center of the English woolen industry, against the “scribbing” machines that were replacing skilled human labor. Krugman is sympathetic to this struggle, which, he says, was a defense of a middle-class life under mortal threat from machines.
Some will accuse Krugman of a Luddite nostalgia for a world that cannot be re-created. But this is exactly where they are wrong. Nostalgia isn’t just for Luddites. And that, I’m afraid, is one more reason to mourn the end of the Kodak Moment.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PERSONAL REVOLUTION
The Instagram Moment
In the summer of 2010, Kevin Systrom, a six-foot-seven Silicon Valley entrepreneur, took a trip with his girlfriend, Nicole Schuetz, to a hippie colony on the Baja peninsula in Mexico. It was one of those retro artistic communities on the Pacific coast still bathed in the fuzzy glow of the sixties counterculture—an appropriately laid-back place to reinvent oneself. Despite graduating from Stanford University with an engineering degree and having worked at Google for three years, the twenty-seven-year-old Systrom considered himself a failure.
Systrom had come out west to Silicon Valley from New England to, as he delicately put it, “get rich really quickly.”1 But he’d yet to make the kind of “fuck you” money that would have given him the ostentatious mansions, the Bombardier private jets, and the UberCHOPPER rides that some of his contemporaries, churned out of what Forbes magazine calls Stanford’s “billionaire machine,”2 already took for granted. Worse still, he’d gotten agonizingly close to two epic deals: first turning down an invitation in 2005 by a Harvard dropout named Mark Zuckerberg to develop a photo-sharing service for a social media startup known as “TheFacebook,”3 and second, eschewing an internship with Jack Dorsey at Odeo, the San Francisco–based startup that would later hatch into Twitter.
“It was like . . . Great. I missed the Twitter boat. I missed the Facebook boat,” he later admitted.4
Systrom had come down to Baja to figure out not only how to avoid missing any more boats, but how to launch a big boat of his own. He had a startup called Burbn, an online check-in service backed by Andreessen Horowitz. But there was little about Burbn in the summer of 2010 that distinguished it from market leaders like Foursquare—a well-funded check-in service that enabled its millions of users to broadcast their exact location to their network. And so, to fall back on that well-worn Silicon Valley cliché, Systrom needed a “radical pivot.” Burbn really had failed. His me-too startup needed to be blown up and rebooted as a big bang kind of disruption.
So Systrom went into the picture business. Even as a high school student at the exclusive Middlesex School in Massachusetts, where he’d been president of the photography club, Systrom had loved taking pictures. As a Stanford undergraduate, Systrom had even spent a semester studying photography in the Italian city of Florence, where he’d become interested in filtering technology that gave photos a warm and fuzzy glow—a retro aesthetic reminiscent of the hippie colony on the Baja peninsula.
Systrom’s pivot was to reinvent Burbn as a social photography-sharing app—a kind of Flickr meets Foursquare meets Facebook app designed exclusively for mobile devices. And it was on a Mexican beach in the summer of 2010 that he made his great breakthrough. As they walked hand in hand together beside the Pacific Ocean, Systrom—ever the consummate salesman—was pitching Nicole on the idea of a social network built around photographs taken from smartphone cameras. But she had pushed back, saying that she didn’t have sufficient faith in her creative skills to share her mobile photos with friends. It was then that Kevin Systrom had his “aha” moment, the kind of alchemic epiphany that transformed a serial failure who’d missed both the Facebook and Twitter boats into the next Marc Andreessen.
What if this app featured filters? Systrom thought. What if it enabled its users to create photos that had a warm and fuzzy glow, the sort of sepia-tinged snaps that appeared so retro, so comfortably familiar that even the most untalented photographer wouldn’t be ashamed to show them off to their friends? And what if this personalized technology was engineered to operate so intimately on mobile devices that users not only intuitively trusted the social app but also believed that they somehow owned it?
Systrom—all six feet, seven inches of him—was inspired. Forbes describes a scene that sounds like a Silicon Valley remix of Jimmy Buffett’s hit song “Margaritaville”: “He spent the rest of the day lying on a hammock, a bottle of Modelo beer sweating by his side, as he typed away on his laptop researching and designing the first Instagram filter.”
And so Instagram and its photos—what Systrom, shamelessly appropriating Kodak’s phrase, calls “Instagram moments”—were born. With fuzzily named filters like X-Pro II, Hefe, and Toaster, this free mobile network became an instant viral hit. The scale and speed of its success was astonishing. Twenty-five thousand iPhone users downloaded the app when it launched on October 6, 2010. A month later, Systrom’s startup had a million members. By early 2012, as the writing on the Eastman House wall reminds us, it had 14 million users and hosted a billion Instagram moments. In April of that year, after a bidding war between then Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Mark Zucke
rberg, Kevin Systrom agreed to a billion-dollar acquisition offer from Facebook, even though his eighteen-month-old startup had neither revenue nor even a business model for making money.5 No matter. Just six months later, Instagram users had skyrocketed to 100 million, with the app hosting 5 billion photos. Over the Thanksgiving holiday in late November 2012, more than 200 Instagram moments were being posted in the United States every second.6 By the spring of 2013, just as a shrunken Kodak was limping out of bankruptcy, Systrom’s mobile network hosted 16 billion photographs, with over 55 million daily uploads by its 150 million members.7 And by the end of 2013, Instagram—with Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter—had, according to the Pew Research Center, emerged as one of the five most popular social media websites in the United States.8 Most remarkably, usage on Instagram and Facebook combined to make up 26% of all time spent on mobile networks in 2013,9 with Instagram’s 23% growth making it not only the fastest-growing app of the year but also the world’s fastest-growing social network.10
It was a cultural revolution. The London Observer’s Eva Wiseman describes how sepia-tinged Instagram moments have established themselves as a parallel reality for the network generation: “We eat, we sleep, we chat, we eat. But all the time, there’s a second plotline, unraveling on our phones. My friends preface any conversation with a brow-raised phrase: Meanwhile on Instagram . . .”
Kevin Systrom’s boat had come in. He could no longer claim to be a failure. He’d become a star of the “winner-takes-all” economy, a founding member of the Battery. He personally pocketed around half a billion dollars from the Facebook sale, giving him the instant wealth of a Gilded Age tycoon such as Kodak’s George Eastman. And like Eastman’s late-nineteenth-century startup, Systrom’s early-twenty-first-century photo network has imprinted itself on our everyday lives. The Instagram moment has replaced the Kodak moment. Not a bad return-on-investment from a day spent swinging in a hammock on a Mexican beach.
An Untruthful Mirror
But the benefits of Instagram for the rest of us are about as foggy as one of Instagram’s Hefe or Toaster filters. “Instagram is focused on capturing the world’s moments,”11 Systrom likes to say. But that’s a fiction—just like Instagram itself. In contrast with Kodachrome, a film stock dedicated to sharp-detailed, grain-free images, Instagram’s value is its graininess—designed, as the New York Times’ Alex Williams explains, to make “everyone look a little younger, a bit prettier, more cover-worthy.”12
Whoever first said that “the camera never lies” had obviously never used Instagram. If Kodachrome was designed as an unsparingly honest window, then Instagram is its reverse, a complimentary mirror “where,” as Sarah Nicole Prickett, writing in the New York Times, observes, “the grass looks greener.”13 That’s its greatest seduction. So rather than accurately capturing the world’s moments in all their colorful complexity, Instagram—“the highest achievement in Internet voyeurism,” according to Alex Williams, and “the app built to make you covet your neighbor’s life,”14 as Prickett puts it—is actually creating what Williams, citing the title of a 1959 work by Norman Mailer, calls “Advertisements for Myself.”15
“Advertisements for Myself” have become the unavoidable medium and the message of what Sequoia Capital chairman Michael Moritz calls the personal revolution. It’s a world that, Tim Wu caustically notes, is defined by a “race” among social media users to build the most ubiquitous personal brands.16 Online narcissism is therefore, as Keith Campbell, the coauthor of the bestselling The Narcissism Epidemic, explains, a “logical outgrowth of DIY capitalism—the capitalism in which we all have our own “branding business” and we are our “own agent” and “marketing department”17 No wonder Time made “YOU” Person of the Year for 2006. “Yes, you,” the magazine announced. “You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”18
Meanwhile, on Instagram . . . it appears as if we’ve all returned to the Dark Ages in Wu’s “branding race” and Campbell’s “DIY capitalism.” The billions of advertisements for ourselves that we post on Kevin Systrom’s creation are making us as ignorantly self-important as our most primitive ancestors. Indeed, the only thing more retro than Instagram’s filters is the pre-Copernican belief, encouraged by social networks like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, that the new digital universe somehow revolves around us. Fuzzy technology leads to an even fuzzier sense of our place in the cosmos. In today’s culture of Instagram moments, celebrity, or at least the illusion of celebrity, appears to have been radically democratized.
Instagram actually represents the reverse side of Silicon Valley’s cult of failure. In the Valley, the rich and famous claim to be failures; on social networks like Instagram, millions of failures claim to be rich and famous.
“Our age is lousy with celebrities,” says George Packer, who sees our contemporary obsession with celebrity as an important cultural piece of our increasing economic inequality. “They loom larger in times like now,” he thus notes, “when inequality is soaring and trust in institutions—governments, corporations, schools, the press—is failing.”19
Packer is right. The truth about networks like Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook is that their easy-to-use, free tools delude us into thinking we are celebrities. Yet, in the Internet’s winner-take-all economy, attention remains a monopoly of superstars. Average is over, particularly for celebrities. In early 2014, for example, Kim Kardashian had 10 million Instagram followers, but only followed 85 people. Justin Bieber, the most popular person of all on Instagram, had almost 11 million followers and followed nobody at all. Rather than cultural democracy, what we are seeing is another spin on Joel Kotkin’s new feudalism, in which narcissistic aristocrats like Kardashian and Bieber are able to wield massive armies of loyal voyeurs.
Hello This Is Us
Social networks like Instagram can’t, of course, be entirely blamed for this epidemic of narcissism and voyeurism now afflicting our culture. As the work of prominent American psychologists like Jean Twenge, Keith Campbell, and Elias Aboujaoude indicates, our contemporary obsession with public self-expression has complex cultural, technological, and psychological origins that can’t be exclusively traced to the digital revolution.20 Indeed, Twenge and Campbell’s Narcissism Epidemic was published in 2009, before Systrom even had his “aha” moment on that Mexican beach.
As David Brooks notes, our current fashion for vulgar immodesty represents another fundamental break with the Great Society, which, in contrast with today, was represented by a culture of understatement, abnegation, and modesty. “When you look from today back to 1945,” Brooks notes about the “expressive individualism” of our networked age, “you are looking into a different cultural epoch, across a sort of narcissism line.”21
Nor is Instagram alone in crossing this narcissism line. There’s also Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and the rest of a seemingly endless mirrored hall of social networks, apps, and platforms stoking our selfie-centered delusions. Indeed, in an economy driven by innovator’s disasters, new social apps such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Snapchat—a photo-sharing site that, in November 2013, turned down an all-cash acquisition offer of more than $3 billion from Facebook—are already challenging Instagram’s dominance.22 And by the time you read this, there will, no doubt, be even more destructive new products and companies undermining 2014 disruptors like Snapchat, WhatsApp, and WeChat.
For us, however, Instagram—whether or not it remains the “second plotline” of the networked generation—is a useful symbol of everything that has gone wrong with our digital culture over the last quarter of a century. “I update, therefore I am,” I once wrote, half jokingly, about the existential dilemma created by our obsession with social media.23 Unfortunately, however, the idea that our existence is proven by our tweets or our Instagram moments is no longer very funny. As the Financial Times’ Gautam Malkani warns about our selfie-centric culture, “if we have no thought to Tweet or photo to post, we basically cease to exist.”24 No wonder that what the Ne
w York Times columnist Charles Blow calls “the Self(ie) Generation” of millennial 18–33-year-olds has so much lower levels of trust than previous generations—with a 2014 Pew Research Center report showing that only 19% of millennials trust others, compared with 31% of Gen Xers and 40% of boomers.25 After all, if we can’t even trust our own existence without Instagramming it, then who can we trust?
“In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, ‘Hello this is me,’” the American movie star and self-confessed Instagram “addict” James Franco confessed in the New York Times.26 And so—from the tasteless Rich Kids of Instagram with their “they have much more money than you and this is what they do” tagline to the craze for selfies at funerals27 to the hookup app photos of men at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin28 to the inevitable “Auschwitz selfies,”29 to the “Bridge girl,” the young woman who casually snapped a selfie in front of somebody committing suicide off New York’s Brooklyn Bridge30 to Franco himself, who in 2014 was accused of heavily flirting with underage girls on Instagram31—the shameless self-portrait has emerged as a dominant mode of expression, perhaps even the proof of our existence, in the digital age. Presidents, prime ministers, and even pontiffs have published self-portraits snapped by their mobile phones—with Pope Francis publishing what the Guardian called a “badass selfie” inside St. Peter’s Basilica.32
No wonder the “selfie”—defined as “a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media site”—was the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013, its use increasing by 17,000% over the year.33 And no wonder that almost 50% of the photos taken on Instagram in the United Kingdom by 14–21-year-olds are selfies, many of whom use this medium to reify their existence.34