In 2020, at the peak of the pandemic, before the first vaccines had rolled out, I took Instagram off of my phone. Peak pandemic had led to peak scroll; those of us lucky enough to be stuck at home on lockdown had too much time to peer into other people's lives, filtered and algorithmically served up to sate our curiosities and stoke our insecurities. My screen-time reports were embarrassing. I was served an army of beige influencers; from their square frames, they stared back at me serenely in their beige loungewear with their beautiful beige children inside these airy, spotless beige homes in whatever vacation destination they had escaped to.
Where was the mess? Where were the piles of laundry? Books? Toys? Where were the tears? Where was the rage? The pandemic exposed so many cracks in our society, and certain swaths of Instagram projected a version of reality that seemed untouched by it. I logged off for many reasons, but this was one of them.
If this story makes me sound holier-than-thou, let me swiftly disabuse any notions of my so-called willpower: I never fully deleted my Instagram account (I still lurk on desktop), and I downloaded TikTok instead. I simply diverted my scroll addiction. But on TikTok, something else was happening: Behind the dances and pratfalls and cooking videos and #grwms were people's real and messy spaces. They also had piles of clothes on chairs behind them and a stack of envelopes on a table that maybe they also would never open. That projection of authenticity is a critical part of TikTok's appeal and contributed to its massive user spike during Covid.
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