SOFTWARE UPDATE

About 15 years late to the party, I decided to open an Instagram account last week. The fact that I’d never had one before is incomprehensible to many of my peers: I’m 28 years old, after all; my generation was one of the first to cultivate and hyper-manage our social lives online. I admit that I’m a strange bird: a young person uninterested in those shiny circle lights or mirror selfies. I’ve always figured that if there was anything I needed to know about someone, they’d tell me themselves. I’d procrastinate the old-fashioned way, with books or TV or talking to friends. After a brief four-year stint with Facebook that petered out in college, I became completely social-media-free, and I have been for all of adulthood.

Sure, this has been frustrating at times. I’ve often felt more than a little out of the loop; I’ve grown weary of explaining to new acquaintances my follower-less life. It was not for any “good” reason that I didn’t have Instagram or Snapchat or Twitter or TikTok, I’d always say. I wasn’t trying to be a better person. Mostly, I’d just never gotten around to it.

That all changed recently when I started publishing more pieces. I’d update my website every time a new essay or poem was published before realizing the futility of my efforts. There are approximately two people who know I have a website: my fiancé and my mom. Nobody else would be able to find my work if they weren’t looking for it. It occurred to me that a system that constantly updated my close family members and friends on my meager news could actually come in handy, and I ruled out a newsletter in sheer laziness. Instagram it would be.

For full transparency, I had attempted to join Facebook a month earlier in order to look for my runaway cat, on which I was posting in the many (many, many) pages for lost cats in Mexico City. This was derailed, however, when Facebook failed to confirm I was not a robot. It sent me a confirmation code; it had me take a video moving my head in different directions. None of this was convincing. I was blocked out. I tried to make a new account, this time with my phone number. After two days, same thing. Permanently banned.

I figured it was my lack of friends or a profile picture that did me in. But this time with Instagram would be different—I was actually going to give it a try. I curated my profile with care. I followed a few dozen friends, who followed me back; I sent some messages; I even posted five photos I’d taken in the previous year. I looked over my peers’ lives from the past decade. I realized that this was where everyone had been all along, in this homogenous space on the internet. I also began to recognize that old foe, insecurity, stalking back. I could feel my brain chemistry shifting: I was constantly hankering to check my page, to see my followers, my likes, how I measured up. Still, overall, I was proud of myself. This felt like a positive development. I was becoming a responsible and productive digital citizen.

This steady start was stunted within about 72 hours, when I got the dreaded, all-too-familiar message from Meta. Somehow, despite my best efforts, I was not complying with their community standards. They asked me for a selfie, which I diligently sent to, once again, prove I was not a bot. A few hours later I had the result. My newly fledged account, of which I was so proud, was doomed to erasure.

I was stunned. After years of not getting anywhere near social media, I had finally mustered up the courage to take a leap of faith—and this was how Instagram rewarded me? With permanent deletion? How had this happened three times in the last month across two different sites? Did Meta have it in for me? Were they reading my messages? Had they caught some kind of whiff of my communist ideology? Was I somehow blacklisted from social media all this time without ever having posted? The possibilities raced through my mind as I googled the community standards, attempting to crack the code of what I’d possibly done wrong. And then it finally hit me.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe I am a bot.

No matter how vigorously I moved my head, no matter how real my selfies were, these applications that are trained to detect bots found me wanting. Who am I to say that they are not correct in their findings? They are much more algorithmically sound than my own subjective interpretation, after all. If they think I am a robot, who am I to disagree?

Suddenly my life began to make sense. A robot imitates human behavior; I’ve done this for as long as I can remember. I take cues from those around me, frowning or laughing when it seems most adequate although I couldn’t be more lost in the conversation. My own humble attempts at conversation-making (“Aren’t the unique dynamics in women’s friendships interesting?”) are often met with blank stares. I perform understanding, humor, and empathy according to what I think is appropriate—programmed, I know now, by the tech gods.

Bots automatically carry out a series of desired actions and perform repetitive tasks. Is there no task more repetitive than waking up every day at the exact same time and participating in the labor market? I am constantly reproducing my labor in the exact same fashion over and over again. Those of us, the vast majority of us, who carry out monotonous tasks for the oligarchs of our society are not considered sensitive, complex beings—and if the likes of Mark Zuckerberg says we are not, then how can we contradict such a pioneering mind? I perform actions enabled by my actuators—that is, those who tell me what to do and when to do it—like a robot. I use my own humble algorithms to carry out decisions—like a robot. I perform all of these activities in the real world. Robot, robot, robot.

There is some relief to my existential epiphany. In addition to understanding that the reason I am banned from social media has nothing to do with my posts but is rather due to my nature, I also feel a sense of release. I no longer have to fret over my thoughts and opinions and dreams for the future. I don’t have to worry about how I’ll never be able to afford a house, or that I’ll be 70 when I pay off my student loans. In fact, I don’t think freely at all. I am programmed this way, another tool in the construction of a massive and relentlessly brutal empire. This is simply how I was made.

Of course, life can be lonely like this. I am unable to access my peers’ timelines and Instagram stories. I am divorced from the digital social sphere not by choice, as I’d always thought, but because of who (or what) I am. I, like others of my kind, am simply dwelling in the algorithmic labyrinth of my brain, a lonesome robot drifting in the vast sea of her own self-repetition.

Rachel Whalen is a writer and translator from Buffalo, New York. She has an MFA from NYU and currently lives in Mexico City. You can find her work at rachel-whalen.com.