It was never going to last forever. But after nearly a year of using BeReal,the photo app pitched as the anti-Instagram,the novelty has well and truly worn off.
I no longer get that little rush of excitment when the daily siren goes off indicating it’s time to stop and take a photo of whatever you’re doing. Now I’m just filled with dread;another boring desk selfie,another lonely portrait at the gym.
The idea was simple. The prompt lands at the same time for everyone,and you get to see what your friends are doing at that exact moment. You were being real,instead of curated,and seeing people’s actual lives,not the highlights package.
But it turns out we want the highlights reel,the “best of”. We’re not that interested in the mundane filler that eats up most people’s days. Just give us the glamour shots from your Greek island holiday rolled out deceptively over three months,thanks.
Twitter’s adisaster – the lastfun day on there I can remember was when Rudy Giuliani hosted that press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping – and Facebook is just a stream of sponsored posts,random promotions and long Baby Boomer rants. TikTok and Instagramendure,of course.
A resistance movement of sorts has been underway for a while. Flip phones are making a comeback;they don’t demand your constant attention and it’s less tempting to check them all the time. Gen Zs,in particular,are reportedly re-evaluating their relationships with technology.
And not a moment too soon because the evangelists are intent on imposing the next instalment in their technological takeover:generative artificial intelligence. It’s a free-for-all carnival of content pooled from the infinite brain of the internet,and it can create near-perfect videos of presidents saying stuff they’ve never said,or audio of pop stars singing songs they’ve never performed,or photographs of things that never happened.
It’s afakeryfactory. The most prevalent arm of the phenomenon right now is the chatbot,which takes a human prompt and spits out a highly educated response. It allows you to have a realistic conversation with a computer instead of a friend,if that’s your jam,and it allows you to generate stories,poems,essays,news articles (heaven forbid) and pretty much anything ordinarily created from words by humans.