There Was Only One Societal End Game For Instagram, Really

We basically put beauty and social comparison on steroids for young girls. What did we think might happen?

Over the last decade, a confusing time that included a pandemic and massive racial upheavals and a guy with golden toilets convincing factory workers in Ohio that “he alone can save them,” a lot also happened with gender and our digital world. On the “gender” front — which people still semantically always trade off with “sex,” even though they are apparently very different things — we created all sorts of moral panics over who is what gender, and how we know gender, and which genders can compete against each other, and how old a child has to be in order to know they feel like they’re the wrong gender, etc. Those moral panics led some people to instantly jump to “society must be in rapid decline.”

As we were dancing around gender, Instagram scaled like a weed after Facebook (now Meta) bought it. Instagram is perhaps the most worthless app ever created (Snap and Tik give it a run for its money), and almost definitely the most dangerous to young women. Because I am not a vetted academic or public figure, I will hand this discussion over to David Epstein and Jonathan Haidt, both of whom somewhat are.

"The Anxious Generation"

Here is Haidt discussing Instagram and young women: