An interview with David Roberts

Thanks for the memories, but good riddance. I deleted Instagram. Two days ago. The reasons are as you would expect: doomscrolling, fatigue, vapidness, and of course, all of the horrifying[1] things Meta enables. Concerning Instagram itself, the list is long. The app started innocently enough: a place to visually share what you were up to right now. A successor to Flickr for the smartphone age, and combining the on-the-go status-style of Twitter, it launched in October 2010, and quickly became successful. I signed up for the service on November 5, 2010, at 7:02pm[2], shortly after. It was a fun place of course — the early days of social networks before we (as an industry) started calling them social graphs, and other terms that made these networks business-aligned. Sharing square 1:1 ratio photos immediately from your iPhone with Hipstamatic-like filters was simple and caught on amongst most I knew. You had Twitter, you had Instagram. Over the decades, and a big acquisition, the app started to head down the enshittification path. Competitors like Snapchat, and VSCO[3] brought a bit of heat in various ways: Snapchat with its close-friends temporal content, VSCO with it’s more privacy-focused and artful social network, and then came TikTok. Instagram responded to any new comers by simply ripping-off their features wholesale. Inertia in a platform is borne out of convenience and the FOMO of connections already made. My own habits had naturally declined in recent years, and much like my abandonment of Twitter in 2015, Instagram existed on my device purely for direct messaging, and keeping tabs and supporting friends and family. My posting had gone down to almost nil, and I rarely interacted or cared about engagement anymore, even with a dedicated group of people who followed me (~3.4K, small by influencer standards, but sizable for someone who’s just doing my best to be myself). As Mastodon, and the indieweb has taken over my internet participation (this very website!), Nick Sherman summarized my own feelings on this, especially as someone who identifies with the DIY-skate-punk-musician-outsider ethos: It’s been a tough year so far but I really find joy in the community here on Mastodon and the larger Fediverse. There’s a satisfying DIY punk rock feeling to it all, as if I’m sticking it to dystopian billionaires every time I boost someone’s Mastodon post or fave someone’s Pixelfed image or try out some new Fedi app or follow some interesting stranger on some weird platform I’ve never heard of but can still interact with because it’s federated. It’s what the internet is supposed to feel like. — Nick Sherman I’m chasing a through line here with my last two posts and this one, and it’s been weighing on my mind amongst all of the modern horrors of our current world. It’s just one that I can control, and opt-out of[4]. It’s okay to like, or love something for a while in a mutually beneficial relationship, but when one side is only taking, it’s also freeing to let it go. Hey Instagram, see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya. Content warning: This is just one example (please do your own research if you aren’t aware somehow) but Erin Kissane’s reporting here is astounding, heavy, damning, and dutiful work. ↩︎ I downloaded my archive and it’s surprisingly robust. And also mildly creepy. ↩︎ Full disclosure, I worked at VSCO first as a contractor, then full-time from 2016-2018. ↩︎ If you stay, please consider not making them further money and using your data. ↩︎ Visit this post on the web or Reply via email

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Most bores are not aware they are boring. It’s not always their fault and the impulse to tell them they are boring, though understandable, is almost always a waste of time. You can’t make people interesting who value their humorlessness, bad taste and stridency.  I woke the other morning internally singing these words, perhaps left over from a dream: ‘’I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright.” I still thrill at these lines, some fifty years after I first encountered them in Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City (1951). They are the opening to Henry Vaughan’s “The World” (c. 1650). It’s the casualness of “the other night” coupled with Vaughan’s glimpse of eternity that rouses and delights me. Mystics often resort to inarticulate enthusiasm. Their experiences defy language, so they yawp, the linguistic equivalent of the early Shakers writhing on the floor. In contrast, Vaughan might be recounting this morning’s breakfast. His tone is calm, methodical, almost journalistic, the meter regular and yet conversational.   These are lessons lost on most contemporary poets. Their verse is prose and thus defies memorization, unlike Vaughan’s, whose poem I never set out to memorize but did. In a recent review of a volume by Jonathan Chaves, the poet Catharine Savage Brosman writes:   “To say that poetry in America now, though honored by public budgetary support and widely heralded, is largely superficial and ephemeral is not unfair. . . . Like other rhetorical performances, a poetic flash in the pan, a pleasing act of verbal prestidigitation, a strident accusation of injustice, a cry on the rooftops for change may attract admiration and assent; they are not in themselves good poetry. Poetry is an art.”   To intentionally write badly and impose it on others is the definition of artistic narcissism and, incidentally, tedium. Many have convinced themselves they are writing poetry. Trying to argue them out of their delusion is a waste of time. The effort would require them to rehabilitate their sensibilities, and that’s a lot of work. They want the leftover Romantic “prestige” associated with being a poet without the learning, discipline and dedication required. Brosman again:   “Nearly empty of sense, solipsistic, without appealing use of language, much contemporary writing called poetry is imitative, facile, accusatory. Of course, bad poetry has always been around. But new means of disseminating it, wealth to underwrite and popularize it, and the general degradation of culture have made a difference.”   In another recent essay, “Poetry and Western Civilization,” Brosman writes: “Poetry belongs to those enterprises which examine and preserve the past, while sifting and shaping facts to create understanding, so that human beings may know themselves and comprehend their destiny better.”

The summer after graduating high school, knowing he would face conscription into the military as soon as his eighteenth birthday arrived, Edward Abbey (January 29, 1927–March 14, 1989) set out to get to know the land he was being asked to die for. He hitchhiked and hopped freight trains, rode in ramshackle busses and walked sweltering miles across the American Southwest. Upon returning home to Pennsylvania, he was promptly drafted and spent two reluctant years as a military police officer in occupied Italy. Defiant of authority and opposed to the war, he was demoted twice and finally honorably discharged “by… read article