No, I am not going to the photo walk

Instagram owns your local art scene

As many of you know—and are probably tired of hearing—I quit Instagram cold turkey at the start of the year. I’ve now been Meta-free for nearly seven months. This is not worthy of applause. It’s not even particularly interesting. I am simply… not on Instagram.

I don’t miss having my photos arbitrarily cropped to fit a grid. I don’t miss Stories, where hundreds of people silently watched my life in ten-second bursts and rarely engaged in any meaningful way. Likewise, I don’t miss the constant barrage of ads, the algorithm’s clumsy guesswork, or the artificial low-grade anxiety about whether my photos would reach beyond the usual handful of viewers. Outside the Metasphere, I’ve come to accept that those who want to see my work will find it—and that’s enough for me.

I also don’t miss the endless treadmill of new features and shifting priorities—every “new way to be seen” that mostly just wastes time, energy, and goodwill.

What I do miss is knowing what’s going on.

And it’s not like I’m completely off the grid. I’m on BlueSky. I have an email address. I’ve got accounts on Flickr, Foto, and Glass. I obviously have a Substack. I own a phone that theoretically makes calls (though I wouldn’t recommend testing that). And yet, somehow, I still have no idea what’s happening in my own creative community. There’s no reliable, centralized, self-serve alternative for sharing or discovering events.

Instagram is the de facto telephone pole of our generation: simultaneously soaked in excrement and plastered with flyers, posters, and save-the-dates for everything happening. You don’t have to like it (I don’t), but if you want to know when something is going down—a gallery opening, a pop-up, a panel talk, a zine fair, a photo walk—that’s where it lives.

In my neck of the woods, not being on Instagram means living in a kind of cultural blackout. Choosing to reclaim my time and protect my mental health has come at the cost of basic awareness. I had no idea that several photographers I admire were giving a talk just down the street last Thursday. I only found out about the photo walk—the one that happened yesterday—minutes before it started, when someone texted to ask if I was going.

And it leaves me wondering: how would I have known? What’s the alternative? Do I need to stalk community bulletin boards like it’s 1997? Should I obsessively check the events tab on a dozen local websites each week? Should I deputize my friends to text me every time something interesting pops up? Is there a magical print calendar I haven’t discovered? Short of rejoining Instagram, no solution seems to stick.

My workarounds have been laughably ineffective. I’ve spent hours combing through various websites that list maybe half of what’s going on. I’ve asked friends to keep me in the loop, which lasted about two weeks before we all forgot. It’s like trying to catch water with your hands.

And this isn’t just about FOMO. There’s something more troubling about how centralized platforms dictate who gets to participate in local creative life. If Instagram is where the information lives, then leaving Instagram doesn’t just mean missing events—it means being systematically excluded from the cultural conversation. It erects a barrier to participation that has nothing to do with talent, interest, or availability, and everything to do with your willingness to feed data to Meta. So Meta isn’t just profiting from our intellectual property—it’s also gatekeeping our culture and shaping how we experience and interact with it.

At least with the old BBS forums, you could lurk anonymously and still learn what was happening.

Modern alternatives simply don’t operate at the same scale. BlueSky feels like a void. I do not want my community updates served with a side of Elon’s extremism. Flickr doesn’t even try. Glass and Foto are delightful, but event discovery isn’t in their lane. Email lists and public calendars should work, but we’ve outsourced nearly all our casual connection and local communication to arguably the worst app for the occasion. There’s no infrastructure waiting to pick up the slack—because Instagram didn’t just replace the old systems. It devoured them.

This makes local creative scenes more insular by default. If you’re not on the platform, you’re not in the loop. And if you’re not in the loop, you’re not really part of the community—no matter how much you care or want to participate. It’s a kind of soft gatekeeping that no one intended, but everyone sustains.

There’s something absurd about relying on a platform so loathsome just to know what’s happening down the street. But that’s the trap. You can leave Meta, sure. You can reclaim your time, your data, your peace of mind. But unless you’re willing to build your own telephone pole—and somehow convince everyone else to use it—you’ll spend a lot of time wondering what you’ve missed.

Despite Instagram's alluring promise of being 'in-the-know,' I can't bring myself to return, not when I feel so much better without it

The photo walk happened yesterday. I wasn’t there. And honestly, unless the cultural reliance on Instagram as our town square subsides, I’m not sure if I ever will be.