I was up all night and, because I am not at home and so didn’t have any of my usual resources, ended up looking at Instagram on my phone. I re-joined it because people so often use it as their webpage and I was sick of trying to access it through a browser.

Once, Instagram was a place where I could look at people’s nice photos, and I posted a lot of photos on it myself. Now it’s a sort of quasi-TikTok, feeding what it thinks are my interests.

Like Facebook, which I also quit a couple years back, it tried to get me to follow people I know, even though I haven’t allowed it access to my contacts. When it ran out of people I know, it offered me a selection of people offering various sexual fantasies, an assortment of celebrities I’ve vaguely heard of, and a weird assortment of strangers. There’s nothing I can do to make it stop trying to get me to follow people.

Likewise, there was almost nothing I could do to restrain the relentless march of the algorithm. If I’m going to look at short videos, I would like them to be about Philadelphia, baseball, the soccer World Cup that is flooding my city, and possibly, I don’t know, people who do interesting things.

It did offer me some baseball, mostly videos of events involving teams that I don’t follow.

Also, it seized upon America’s Got Talent, a wide variety of television series, a lot of old movies, some talk show appearances, and crowds and crowds of human interest stories filmed and staged by people who make their living by being influencers. Oh, yeah, and heartwarming real-life stories of puppies, kittens, disabled children being condescended to, and examples of “sportsmanship” that were supposed to warm my heart but instead annoyed me.

Although I was a very early adopter of social media, I am now someone who goes to maybe two movies a year and I don’t watch television at all, so I felt as if I was watching the world through the wrong end of a telescope.

I watched Instagram all night, pretty much, because the alternative was Reddit’s “Popular” feed (and Reddit is just mean-spirited a lot of the time) or my Mastodon feed (which is not algorithmic and therefore didn’t produce the addictive boredom of Instagram, plus I ran out of posts by the interesting people I follow).

It didn’t help that I spent a good chunk of the evening out at the beachfront arcade playing Halo with the grandson. We finished the game. Both of us are now periodically thinking about slack-headed armored zombie monsters that appear out of nowhere, only to be torn to shreds by imaginary machine guns.

I am going home today. When I am home, if I am not able to go to sleep, I will get up and make myself some food, then take a nap in my recliner. I have a number of books I’m avoiding reading. The cat will lie down on me. I will probably not look at Instagram again until the next time I am far from home in a strange house and trying not to wake anyone up.