Dump, post, repeat: how Instagram became a social media junkyard

‘That is why the dumps persist. They feel like antidotes to the high-sheen aesthetics of influencers, an invasion of personality upon a vapid land of sponcon.’ Photograph: BremecR/Getty Images

Last year, I took 658 photos during my four-day trip to Venice. Fifteen years ago, I would have posted every single one of them to Facebook. And as I waited the three hours for them to upload, I would have opened another tab to look through all 500 photos in my second cousin’s friend’s FLORIDA 09 Facebook album, which would have included 48 shots of the same sunset and 16 of a chip flavor she didn’t have back at home.

Nowadays, with Instagram as our primary photo-sharing method, that packet of chips would end up on slide seven of what my second cousin’s friend would call a dump: a retrospective of her summer compacted into a carousel of artfully artless images.