One Armed Grambit
I’ve wasted enough money on slot machines to know that I have no business being near them. The spinning reels and lights lull me into a euphoric sense of false hope right before punching me repeatedly in the stomach. I’ve gambled until the sun comes up, which is fine if you are playing poker and enjoying company, but slots are a solitary, sad scene. I like the term “one arm bandit”, it perfectly describes these infernal machines.
Instagram is a slot machine, the one arm in this case is my own arm, and its being robbed of its duties in dog walking and driving and a million other important things other than gathering completely useless information. Just as you pull a lever, a swipe of the finger stimulates your brain with millions of colors and sounds. This is the payoff. A person will usually get up from a slot machine after they run out of money. The game has ended and its time to lick wounds and hit the buffet. Instagram on the other hand, there are no credits and the game never ends. A slot machine occasionally will pay out, but social media does not. The best you can hope to achieve is to buy shoes from a brand of which you’ve never heard.
We’ve all found ourself at one point or another staring into our phone, wondering why did I pick this thing up in the first place. When there are emails to be read, the process ends when I mark all as read. When I am checking weather, the process ends when I see that it’s rainy today. When I open instagram, I’m bombarded with 100s of disparate images, with very little context. For a moment, I feel like I am catching up with friends, except that most of the people that I follow are casual acquaintances I met 10 years ago and haven’t seen in person since. Twitter, despite its myriad of flaws, provides me with news, humor, and a place to fire off one-liners to one of the 3 people that like my tweets. Instagram is a bottomless pit. There is no end game. I scroll until I feel like I’ve been hypnotized, walking around dazed before mindlessly pulling my phone out to share a photo of latte foam to a bunch of people I no longer know.
The stories feature is interesting, in that it is completely plagiarised from Snapchat, missing IMO the best feature (face swapping). Using Stories is like flipping through the channels on cable, only there are no Simpsons reruns or Twilight Zone marathons to find. The worst casualty of all, is that they’ve convinced us that shooting vertical video is NOW correct, after years of “hey moron, turn your phone sidways (the right way) before you start filming a street fight”. Not being able to use the app or watch video in landscape mode is failure of their own design. Being fully enveloped by a video would only distract us from pulling the lever again. I even second guess myself when shooting stills because I’m worried that a landscape won’t have enough detail on a 2” screen. I didn’t start taking photos to get validation from strangers, and I simply can’t continue to do so.
