Off the grid

Should we really try to capture our moments?

Today’s accompanying tune: “Dirty Work” by Steely Dan

I saw a glimpse of this with the naked eye, but it took phone camera technology to really see it. Does that make it real?

I didn’t pull my phone out as we cruised into Yosemite Valley. Not for lack of views — Yosemite is never short on awe-inspiring scenes large and small — but because I simply didn’t think of it. It hadn’t crossed my mind, until I saw the line of arms sticking out of car windows in front of and behind me, watching the granite walls in miniature as they zoomed by.

The compulsion to pull out my phone and snap a photo is occurring less and less often. Though I like photography — dare I say, adore and revel in it — the need to document everything — the mundane, the pleasant, the everyday — has dwindled so much as to be hardly present at all. This isn’t for lack of trying, and to give you an idea of how drastically this has changed, I present my camera roll: a whopping 38,000 photos and 1,400 videos. But the cadence at which those numbers tick up slowed drastically since this start of this year. Instead of rows and rows of similar photos, I only see glimpses. Here, a grainy concert video from Las Vegas. There, a quick shot of my friend’s kid pushing my suitcase as I walk out the door, the only photo from a week-long trip. Here, a running trail in Washington. There, a running trail in Chicago. Static snapshots of some of the richest months of my life, captured not for posterity but because I felt I should capture something. Anything, to mark time.

As I contemplated this shift — really thought about the how and why of each time I wanted to capture a photo — I inevitably ended back up at social media. Before, it was routine for me to share a quick photo or video in real-time, whether to Instagram Stories or on Twitter to liven up my overly professional feed. For so many years, photos were the currency in which social media dealt. Phone eats first. Do it for the ‘gram. #TBT. Pics, or it never happened.

So, then, what has changed? If the compulsion to take photos is so tightly braided into social media use, and social media still exists, is that braid starting to unwind in my mind’s eye? Well, for one, social media is a lot less fun than it used to be. It’s full of AI-generated garbage and outrage bait and sponsored content, where it used to be full of friends’ life milestones and daily updates from that one coworker you barely remember but nevertheless refuse to unfollow. While social media may have always been encouraging us to post into the void, now, it actually feels like we’re posting into the void. What’s the point of sharing a moment if no one else sees it?

And see, that thought there is where the original sin of social media lies. In posting at all, even in the rose-colored glasses days of the Paris filter, I was doing it for people other than myself. To validate my restaurant choice, show off a new manicure, perpetually piss off my friends in the Midwest with balmy January scenes. Sometimes, I captured moments for me, moments I wanted to remember and keep tucked away in my digital scrapbook to look at years down the road. But more often than not, I captured to share, to validate, to explain. To perform for a captive audience on the other end of the phone. Some time this year, that all came to a crashing halt.

The best way to describe what has happened across social media and our concurrent, real-life awakening, was coined last year and then instantly dubbed the word of the year: enshittification. A talented journalist was looking at changes to TikTok, the video sharing social network, particularly around TikTok Shop, a tool popular users could employ to sell their own merchandise or peddle items from other companies that had sponsored them. Seemingly overnight, TikTok went from a weird, user-generated space full of niches to something akin to the Amazon home page — full of cheap crap you don’t need but someone somewhere is convinced it would make your life better, easier, less miserable. Quickly, though, the concept of enshittification caught on, with pundits and journalists applying it to Amazon itself, to book review app Goodreads, and of course, to Instagram. Everything, everywhere had been optimized into oblivion, the end goal of getting users to spend a few bucks on some productivity hack item instead of whatever these companies’ original purpose was. Friends no longer see your posts on Instagram, but your feed is full of ads from people you don’t follow and never have. The entire first page of Amazon results are from companies you’ve never heard of and are at prices that are simply too good to believe. Google, now, doesn’t even show news articles when searching specifically in the news tab, instead opting to push job and house listings. The internet we knew, even for a time, is gone, and with it, the compulsions it created. In its place is a digital ennui for which we don’t yet have the words, but we feel it all the same. We feel drained from scrolling, fight our shrinking attention spans, add opinion disclaimers to our posts to ward off those intent on making everything a fight. We always knew that, in a free-to-use product, you are the product. But that reality has become impossible to ignore, and its presence makes anything other than revenue-chasing feel useless, lost to the abyss into which we launched ourselves so long ago.

When I think of the photos those Yosemite visitors will post, I think of how many other photos of Yosemite I’ve seen before, how many captions I’ve read that are better and wittier than anything I could ever think of. The ones that explain, in detail, their commitment to leave no trace principles while also posting directions to a trailhead. The ones at sunrise. The ones at sunset. The ones with the faint glow of the aurora borealis hanging on the horizon. The ones with clouds. The ones with perfectly blue skies. The ones shrouded in a layer of smoke. The ones with the red sun. For some people, these are the only memories they will make, the only time they will ever get to experience such an awe-inspiring place. But many others are doing it for the performance, for the ‘gram. For the likes and the comments and the “oh I saw you went to Yosemite” small talk that has become disturbingly commonplace. This isn’t to fault those people at all — I used to be in that camp, willingly, not too long ago! Sometimes, I still take those photos. I even post them. I have nearly a hundred photos of Half Dome from this trip alone, all at slightly different angles in different weather and light conditions. Are they unique photos? No! Did I post some of them? Of course! Did I feel badly when I did post and only got a handful of likes? Yes! Old habits die hard, but the lack of compulsion, deliberation, and high-intensity strategy of what and how to post them has fallen away. In a way, it’s freeing. These photos are for me, I’m sharing them because they make me happy and maybe they can make someone else on a different corner of the internet happy. I’m not trying to be funny, or helpful, or performative. The spell is broken.

It’s not that I’m choosing to forgo these habits intentionally, though I wish I were that person. It’s more that it has slipped from my trip itinerary, a forgotten item in a packing list that slipped through the cracks and hasn’t been missed. It’s as passive a death as my participation in its life ever was. I’ve opted-out, unintentionally, from playing a passive part in other people’s digital lives. Instead, I text a few photos to the handful of people I know will want to see them. I opt-into being an active part of their lives, even if from a distance. Even if from behind a lens. I want to share the sense of wonder, the smallness I experience when standing among the towers lining Yosemite Valley. I can tell them how I sat, patiently, while the colors changed gradually as the sun sank closer and closer to the horizon, until it was gone entirely and the sky was set aflame. I compose the scene — I think about light, shadows, cloud cover. I crouch and angle myself to get a photo that captures how it is I feel instead of what I simply see. I go for quality over quantity, slowness over optimization. Subtle hues over oversaturation. Active over passive. Sharing, but with intention.

This is all a long way of saying that, really, social media and its friends no longer feels fun. I’m not sure if it ever did. And finally, I feel that the spell has broken.

There are times I lament having too few pictures, wish I’d captured something on video and committed it to the internet archives to watch back later. More often than not, though, I’m happier in the moment, the memory searing itself into my brain even better, even richer, than a video ever could. I remember how my friend’s kid felt as he sat next to me on the train at the Lincoln Zoo. I remember the feeling of flying along the running trail in Washington, the sun doing its best to convince me it was spring. I remember sitting on my friend’s bed in Chicago, intensely hungover, while we helped pick out her outfit. Mundane things, all of them. But all worth remembering, even if they weren’t worth capturing, a word that itself inspires the sense of caged-ness. To capture is to take, to remove, to restrain.

Maybe instead, it’s time to let our memories run free, to release our experiences from the captivity of digital performance and see what comes back. To see what we see, feel what we feel, without the weight of the digital world keeping that wildness in check. Maybe it’s time to stop feeding the grid, the algorithm, the enshittification that wants to devour us all. Maybe it’s time to put the phone down to enjoy the drive through one of the single most awe-inspiring valleys on earth.

Here’s to feeling small, logging off, and taking a break from the grid.

- Megan