Project Exposé

Artwork is an image of C0n71nuum that has been photoshopped in order to resemble an “avatar” (2025)

For a long time, I did not talk openly about what I was doing on Instagram, partly because the project was still taking shape and partly because I had no interest in explaining a half-formed research process to people who were already too embedded in the thing I was studying. During the pandemic, while living in downtown Manhattan with two lovely gal pals, I spent an obscene amount of time on the app, enough that my eyes sometimes felt genuinely crosswired. The experience was not just distracting or vapid or annoying, rather, it was physiological. My phone, and especially Instagram, began to make me feel ill. I have used TikTok in the past out of curiosity and Snapchat when I was in college, but I do not engage with either now. I find both uninteresting at the level of interface design, and in any case, Instagram had already provided more than enough material.

What disturbed me was not only the amount of time the app could absorb, but the social logic forming around it. I was living as close as one can get to the inner chamber of online clout, and the vibes were bleak in a way that was often disguised as glamour, taste, or social proof. People assessed one another through follower counts, aesthetic fluency, and the contrived performance of having an enviable lifestyle. Entire judgments were being made on the basis of virtual projections that frequently bore only partial resemblance to the person in question. I knew this firsthand. I also knew, from experience, that vulnerability on the internet tends to be treated less as a fact of being human than as content for misreading, projection, and opportunism.

I began watching more carefully, and then, I began documenting. What started as unease became a silent independent research project that unfolded over five years. It was not a scheme and definitely not a stunt. I was not trying to punk anyone or condescend. I was testing patterns, keeping records, writing notes, and tracking how online behavior (including my own) diverged from embodied behavior in actual life. At dinner parties and in conversation, I would often discuss the critique in broad terms because the critique itself was public-facing. 

What I usually did not disclose was that I was also involved in a much more sustained experiment, one that became increasingly layered, occasionally difficult, and, in the end, far more revealing than I had anticipated.

Part of what made the project so compelling was the distance between expression online as opposed to the body. The two are often discussed as though posting was an avenue for the display of identity. I did not find that to be true. Again and again, I saw that digital environments do not just display personality, they reorganize it. They reward impulse and insidiously train people into stylized versions of desirability, grievance, and charm. The result is not just a presentation of the self. It is a behavioral weather system, one that reaches far beyond the screen and back into friendships, status relations, self-concept, and emotional regulation.

Around that time I was listening to Marshall McLuhan on Audible with the kind of intensity that makes a person either more perceptive or slightly odd at parties. His work helped formalize what I was already sensing, which was that the medium was not just carrying content but exerting pressure, and those ideas grew my hypothesis. The damage was not limited to whatever any one post happened to say. It lived in ranking, metrics, exposure, and the conversion of social life into a system of ongoing public audition. For me, the recent Instagram court verdict did not feel like a revelation so much as a grim confirmation. A hypothesis I had been living beside for years had, at last, entered the realm of public recognition.

This legal development does not retroactively tidy up the experience. Half a decade of close observation leaves residue, and not all of it is particularly elegant. The project became complex in ways that were not always easy and not always benign. There is a tax for looking too long at the machinery. Still, I now have what I need to move forward. What began as private documentation has become the groundwork for a larger body of reporting and reflection, some of which has begun to unfold on Continuum.

Many of the essays in this journal were written over the past five years, long before they were edited and published here. These pieces emerged alongside the research and bear its imprint, even when they are not explicitly about Instagram. Others are newer and respond to current events. Together they form a record of what I was seeing, thinking, and testing while trying to understand how digital environments alter social behavior and the conditions under which a person comes to know what is real.

This project background is only a shallow introduction to that archive. The fuller story is stranger, more methodical, and more ordinary than people might expect. It is not the story of a grand reveal. It is the story of paying attention for an uncomfortably long time, then realizing that what people tend to dismiss as a side effect was actually part of the plan all along.