Instagram fatigue and the rise of 'Resentment Reels'

A new genre of content has taken over Instagram and I think it says a lot about the economy and our relationship to technology. Instagram users are increasingly angry that they have to engage in the online creator economy, and then frustrated when they inevitably don't succeed.

You see videos expressing this sentiment all over the platform. Videos and trending audios from people complaining about the fact that they have to create content have become so pervasive, that audios associated with this type of content consistently goes viral. A perfect example of this is the "don't cry" audio that blew up last year.

I call these types of videos Resentment Reels, because of the deep seated resentment they express toward the platform, its algorithms, and the mechanics of virality.

These Reels are almost always passive aggressive or self deprecating. And, though this genre of content is new, the frustration Instagram users have been feeling has been growing for years.

Over the past two decades, the entire world has been reoriented around online content. We've witnessed the birth of the content creator industry and the media landscape has undergone a radical transformation. Now, it's not enough to be just an artist, a chef, an athlete, a stay at home mom, or a journalist, you also have to be a content creator.

I wrote an entire book about this shift, called Extremely Online, which goes into this phenomenon in deep detail. But a lot of people are having a really hard time adjusting to this new reality. And, you're increasingly seeing that anger seep out through the cracks on Instagram.

As Rebecca Jennings notes in her fantastic piece, "Everyone’s a sellout now," in 1997 the magazine Fast Company ran a cover story called “The Brand Called You" by a writer named Tom Peters. The gist of the story was that if you’re not building a “personal brand" then you're about to be left behind by the new economy, one where career success isn’t defined by moving up a corporate ladder but instead by individual growth and self-promotion.

Though the idea was considered fringe at the time, within just a few years, the first influencers began to emerge on the internet in the form of mommy bloggers. In the 20 years following, the content creator industry blossomed and its rise ushered in a creator-driven, niche media ecosystem. Now, thanks to the internet, there's an audience to be found for almost everything.

The pandemic has accelerated these shifts and it soon became almost impossible to opt out of the internet fame and content creation industrial complex. Now, everyone has to be their own media company, their own chief marketer, their own brand.

But doing this work is painful, miserable, grueling, and there's absolutely zero guarantee of a payoff. Every Resentment Reel is an expression of the same underlying anger towards this new system. And succeeding in this new landscape requires a level of effort and skill and frankly knowledge of the media landscape, that few people have. Even those of us who have worked in the content mines for over a decade, find it hard. (Hence my painfully low YouTube subscriber count!)

As I write in my book, EXTREMELY ONLINE, we are all pressured to commodify every aspect of our lives, our relationships, our careers, our passions, our interests and our art into shareable, marketable, monetizable content. Perhaps this was always the natural end point of capitalism, the commercialization of the very things that make us human. As the author Naomi Klein recently noted in an interview with the Guardian: "Neoliberalism has created so much precarity that the commodification of the self is now seen as the only route to any kind of economic security."

I hope that people can take the resentment they feel when producing these Reels, and instead of directing it at Instagram, direct it at the political and economic system that created these conditions in the first place.

Ask yourself, why do we have to live in a world where in order to succeed as an artist or small business or to get healthcare, you have to go viral online? This frustration that we feel towards instagram and content creation, is just a symptom of the broader problems with our economic system, and the rise of Resentment Reels show how unhappy it's making all of us.

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