Intimocracy and the Culture of the Dump
The habit of "dumping" is excellent news for social networks. The return of spontaneity and randomness, for a personal touch that goes beyond conventions.
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Karen X Cheng, a highly influential creative director, delivered an extraordinary talk at Adobe Max 2023. At the heart of her demonstration: a tension, even a contradiction, between the artist and the algorithm, increasingly untenable.
“Social media is a hell of a drug and like a drug addict I spent the rest of my life chasing that high. It was always the same cycle, I would post a video, get high, crash. Then I would need another hit. So post another video, high in a crash.”
Karen X Cheng
Her analysis follows what we experience every day: algorithms excessively reward extremes, and we are encouraged by algorithms to play the game of these extremes.
As Karen X Cheng summarizes: “one for me, one for the algorithm,” a logic implemented by many users, especially on Instagram or TikTok. For example, integrating a sexier story in the middle of a speech to boost engagement and avoid being penalized by the platform. These platforms influence us and force us to alter our spontaneity and even our editorial lines to satisfy them. This can lead to a leveling down of our narratives, both personal and collective.
Photo Dump: Against Instagram Aesthetics, a New Instagram Aesthetic
A post by
titled “I regret what’s in my camera roll” echoes this homogenization of content on Instagram, which leads to a form of melancholy.“I was constantly absorbing how people sold things and in turn I was thinking about how to sell myself. Eventually, anything and everything could feel like a commodity.”
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Instead of enjoying taking photos of the randomness of life, we would spend more time looking for the perfect image or video (understand: the one that fits TikTok or Instagram codes) by developing ultimately very conservative aesthetics.
Photography is a practice anchored in our modern humanities; the ease of use has transformed the camera into a permanent companion of our individual narratives. Kristen Joy Watts, in charge of fashion and arts for Instagram back in days, talked in her thesis about pictolect, “a dynamic hybrid of pictures and text.” At stake: the number of photos has exploded since the iPhone and Instagram, creating a new dialect, a hybrid mix of signs, habits, and cultural codes. The pixels of the images are heavy with meaning and, in short, would break our sacred fire, our spontaneity. As if being understood by others primarily meant playing by Instagram or TikTok codes.
Against this harmonization, the “photo dump” trend emerged (understand: a dump of content far from perfect but representing a user’s life more rawly over the past month). An explosion of dumps occurred during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which also accompanied the great return of film photography.
The word “dump” is not anecdotal: it is indeed a desire to let go, to create one's own space against overly formatted spaces. If it is a trend now adopted by many Instagram users, it seems to be resisting by maintaining a messy, surprising side, which encourages us to go to the end of these small albums to understand what the person we are subscribed to feels.
Intimocracy, Wonders, “Us”
In a very beautiful post by artist and documentary filmmaker Mai Hua, I discovered the notion of intimocracy. Our digital world would be so inspired by commercial universes driven by brands and platforms that our most intimate tastes could lead to a form of exclusion against all subjects “that do not speak to us.” The dump could thus be a nice little parade: daring to show a versatility of images without necessarily any connection between them; pushing the conversation beyond an identity reduced to one or two criteria like sexual orientation or political color; taking the time to accept our own wonders, worries, and inconsistencies to create an intimocracy that brings together.
Karen X Cheng's words in her latest post “The Internet Is Broken” are reassuring:
“People are smart. People are starting to feel the effects of our digital cigarettes. And we’re ready to make some changes.
We’ve reached our tipping point, and now is the time to tip back.”
Karen X Cheng
We are the mess of our ideas, and the mess always escapes.
Number of the Week: 64%
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Amazing Links
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Shifting is exploding among young people, driven by TikTok accounts. An article to read at Mixte Magazine
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All of this is particularly resonating to me at the moment and really loved reading Totally Recommend's piece as well