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In 1973, American sculptor and video artist Richard Serra uttered something to the effect of: “if something is free, you’re the product.” When originally said, it was in reference to TV, and how “The product of television, commercial television, is the audience. TV delivers people to an advertiser… It’s the consumer who is consumed.” He goes on to talk about TV delivering propaganda to the masses, which could easily be applied to Fox News now.

While seemingly prescient at the time, Serra’s thoughts can be applied to all sorts of things today: every app you use, every website you click on, and every social media account you post to. It’s genius really (especially the latter in terms of the psychology behind it) that you (I obviously mean, we, ALL OF US) are constantly posting and providing “content” for these sites to monetize engagement through.

Facebook was always borderline icky, mining your likes and dislikes with personality quizzes, and selling your data to targeted advertisers. Then it got evil, with things like the Cambridge Analytica Scandal (Cliff Notes: Facebook's corporate parent company reached a tentative settlement in a lawsuit alleging the world's largest social network service allowed millions of its users' personal information to be fed to Cambridge Analytica, a firm that supported Donald Trump's victorious presidential campaign in 2016.)

That was when I deactivated my Facebook account.

And then it kept going, and Facebook took a hard right turn into the willful destruction of democracy. (Not just in the US, but in Myanmar and China and I could go on but we’ll be here for a while! Read this if you’d like more info.)

So let’s talk about Instagram, my favorite social media platform… the one that is best suited toward sharing photos, which is now owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta. This hasn’t sat well with me since the beginning (2012!), but I stayed on the app because I enjoyed sharing my work and connecting with some great people through the app. But then things started to shift.

The algorithm was f*cked with.

Engagement went way down (to share my own numbers, I get .88% engagement/post — meaning likes, shares, bookmarks, etc). That means the reach is roughly less than 1 percent of my “followers.” That ROI is lousy.

But it’s not just me. I also realized I wasn’t seeing people’s posts in my own feed. They were getting buried or hidden. I’m getting way more ads instead. Then, recently, I started noticing people’s multi-image posts starting on the second image (“These “photo nudges” seem to occur when you scroll past an image without engaging with it. Instagram’s algorithm, growing smarter every day through the data users create, reinserts these series into your feed disguised as something new by “nudging” the second image forward.”) to encourage more engagement with something you didn’t engage with the first time around.

<tl;dr> I’m not seeing the posts I want to see, I’m being shown posts I didn’t want to see or engage with the first time again, and everything is buried in ads I don’t want. And it all feels gross… like, it’s not the sandbox I want to be playing in.

Sure, like many I’ve spent hours mindlessly scrolling, and we’ve all gotten FOMO, started comparing ourselves to others, or posted things solely to get likes. And we’ve all gotten that feeling that Instagram may not be good for our mental health but then take it a step further (into nefarious territory again) when a Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen “leaked internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and the Securities and Exchange Commission that suggested the company knew that the use of Instagram may hurt the mental health of young women and girls.” Couple that with the bots and the buying of likes and the feeling once again that Serra was right. “If something is free, you’re the product.”

And to top it all off, Instagram’s TOS is still lousy: “We do not claim ownership of your content, but you grant us a license to use it. When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content.”

All of that weighs heavy on my recent decision to go dark on there.

Over the years, there have been a growing number of reasons that I’ve wanted to leave or take a break and frequently fewer reasons that make me want to stay. I’m not sure what my next step is, but I’ve had enough questions from folks in the last week about where my pictures went (thinking the app was buggy or that there was a glitch in the matrix) that I wanted to address it.

Last week, I archived over 5,000 images (painstakingly: one image at a time). Until I got back to this my first post, a Hipstamatic image of the moon, and I was reminded of that moment in 2011, standing in my backyard in St. Pete, aiming my iPhone 4 at the sky, just wanting to share something and connect with someone even though nobody was following me and it got exactly two likes.

And I’d love to find that place again that feels real and pure. And I’d even be happy to pay for it as long as it means that I’m not the one being consumed.