'Link in Bio' Ruined All Our Brains
A unified theory on the bad state of everything.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a really hard time writing about “wellness” with the current state of everything, most notably all the kids being starved to death in Gaza as truckloads of food sit idling across the border. I’ve spent far too much time these past few weeks doomscrolling, totally consumed by the horrors broadcasted on Instagram—which, to my mind, has damaged our brains in ways that future generations will look back upon as being very stupid, like how we used to treat tummy aches with turpentine.
A part of me realizes that this is all by design. Instagram is a honeypot, and I can’t remember any other app or website that has made me feel nearly as miserable and addicted in all my years on the Internet. A part of that, I suspect, is that Facebook and Twitter—while heinous in their own ways—always offered an out: you could leave the app to read something or follow your other curiosities.
But Instagram is social media addiction perfected: a beautiful walled garden, filled with unimaginable human depravity, Explore page hotties, exquisitely curated tweets, AI slop, bad fashion advice, fake news, moodboards, Subway Takes, actual news stories summarized in a few carousel slides—the list goes on and on. IG traps you within its hedges. I can’t imagine the human brain was designed to take in this much sensory information every day.
I’ve been talking to a lot of writer friends, especially about the media’s traffic apocalypse and how no one’s reading websites anymore. As a stupid example, if you look at something like PageSix, as I do on Instagram, and take note of clickbait headlines such as “Why Hulk Hogan’s estranged daughter, Brooke, was removed from late wrestler’s will: report,” the top liked comment will inevitably be the answer (i.e, “she asked to be removed.”) This is not by any means a defense of scummy best-practices for driving clicks. It’s more a metaphor for the current state of our collective psyche that Instagram has spent the last decade-plus shaping: smoother, less literate brains are just better for business.
The bulk of the blame can be placed on Instagram’s “Link in bio,” which, to my mind, has done more damage to literacy and the media ecosystem than any other innovation of the past 15 years. Link in bio makes it just annoying enough that we’re disincentivized to click out to anything that might divert our attention.
Consider the New York Times. In order to read an article, first you have to navigate to NYT’s IG page, click on the bio, navigate through some recursive third-party service like LikeShop.me or LinkTree, scroll around to find what you want to read, and then log into your Times account that you’re already logged into in your browser. (If you’re even a subscriber, that is.) (I’m real close to canceling my account.)
Stories, which essentially deaded Snapchat in the water when it was added in 2016, operates on a similar philosophy. While you can technically click a link to read something, the whole process is just purposefully clumsy enough that it’s far easier and far more frictioness to just keep mindlessly swiping.
I realize part of this is a me problem. But the smart people behind IG and TikTok have refined social media into something powerfully addictive, especially when the world feels extra doomy. This shit is fentanyl, and I suspect I’m hardly the only person who feels this way currently.
On a sidenote, I’ve been interviewing candidates for a junior editorial role (based in Montreal, sorry), and one of the questions I always like to ask is: What do you like to read? Sometimes I can see the panic metastasize across their face in real time, which bums me out, but it’s a pretty solid indicator that even aspiring editors aren’t finding interesting things to read right now. (It is also not lost on me that I am writing this on Substack, a platform that aspires to remedy some of this stuff. But I’m not sure we’ll ever get there.)
Anyway, I know this is a bit outside the typical HEAVIES purview, but my brain’s felt extra broken, so technically this is a health post, and I hope you’re taking care.
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This was so smart and I really do agree—people WANT to share interesting articles to read on Instagram, and people WANT to read what their friends and acquaintances and parasocial crushes are recommending! But it is so profoundly annoying to go from an Instagram story (with a screenshot of an interesting article) to the article itself.
The fact that people had to put "link in bio" for years for ARTICLES (while advertisements let you click directly into a product page to buy THINGS) has really oriented Instagram to be very focused on commerce, and only secondarily a driver of culture.
(And the fact that, for years, the "swipe up to view" interaction was only available for accounts with 10,000+ followers…)
In this late stage of IG (10+ years of use) I think we have to point out the cognitive dissonance in knowing these platforms are vying for our time and attention and still returning every day. Not being able to read I feel is a part of the attention spam era that blasted off during Covid.
Ironically, I t’s clear we’re not shaping culture anymore; the algorithm is shaping us and curating our desires while also determining what gets popular and seen.
A new bombshell has entered the villa ~Now with AI generated content flooding the feed, it’s getting harder to know what’s real and what’s synthetic, which makes the whole experience feel even more disorienting. Time will tell how our rapid absorption of info will change in the latest accessible AI world