lLast year I took 658 photographs during my four-day trip to Venice. Fifteen years ago, I would have posted every single one of them on Facebook. And while I was waiting the three hours for them to upload, I would have opened another tab to see the 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 that I didn’t have at home.
Nowadays, with Instagram as our primary photo-sharing method, that packet of crisps would end up on slide seven of what my second cousin’s friend would call a dumpster: a retrospective of her summer compacted into a carousel of ingeniously simple images. .
An Instagram dump is a set of impressionistic, seemingly unedited, low-stakes photographs, posted in a seemingly random order and ended with a dispassionate caption. Something like “summer in a dumpster”, or like Jennifer Lopez recently put it“Oh, it was summer.” But we know in our hearts that it is not really a “dump.” That word implies that we’re simply unloading the clutter from our camera rolls on a whim, when what we’re actually doing is much more complicated: spending an entire afternoon reducing thousands of photographs to eight, trying to create an authentic “vibe” through from them. photographs of friends, buildings and martini glasses; a couple of memes in low resolution; and a shot only of our face (for the algorithm, of course).
Thanks to a recent update, I can now post not just 10 but 20 photos from my trip to Venice, although that amount would be extremely clumsy. I won’t be looking at 20+ early fall photos from my second cousin’s friend once she, like everyone else on my feed, dutifully posts a dump-format summary of her past four weeks. Life may be happening on Instagram Stories, in TikToks, and in tweets, but the Instagram grid is where we all go to commemorate it.
We millennials, who are most susceptible to the dumping trend, have spent a substantial portion of our lives creating online visual repositories. We’ve framed ourselves according to the whims and tropes of the moment, from mirror-reflection poses to 2010s duck faces. But never has our online visual presentation been so homogenized.
Once the territory of my art school friends in 2019, dumps have taken over our feeds, with everyone from our high school’s head cheerleader to pop stars posting them. The aesthetics of the casual and the amateur are now shortcuts to cultural capital, which is why the biggest names in music design their public lives after the landfills: just look at how Dua Lipa either Ariana Grande either Katy Perry revel in your own low-resolution chaos.
These types of images could once have been a true aesthetic alteration. And, of course, taken at face value, they are an affront to Instagram’s clean, minimalist display. That’s why landfills persist. They feel like antidotes to the ostentatious aesthetic of influencers, an invasion of personality in a bland land of sponconism. In reality, they are just a way to hide the truth that we are faking joy within business templates. We communicate to the extent that we contort ourselves around the rubric of landfills. That’s all the creativity we have allocated.
Unfortunately, Instagram’s infrastructure incentivizes this type of informal formality. The algorithm (which, if we’re honest, is a word that everyone says but no one understands) is elusive by design. The posts have not appeared in chronological order for quite some time. Instead, the algorithm (whatever that is) buries them. Therefore, we post less frequently, implicitly knowing that people will be less likely to see what we upload. The less we upload, the more precious our posts are and therefore the more time we spend on them. The more time we spend on them, the more embarrassing they are, so we underestimate the work we put into them. It’s a silly download cycle.
A couple of years ago, a popular memes began circulating online saying, “I shudder, then I am free.” A more accurate version would be: “I feel embarrassed, that’s why I’m stuck on Instagram.” Shame has become to the 2020s what empowerment was to the 2010s, an attitude that keeps us posting. Be as embarrassing as you want, but when you post a dump, all you’re doing is cleanly submitting to the app’s will.
