flâneur

No Filter | Soraya Roberts

thebaffler.com · 3,705 words · saved by 1 readers

“YOU’RE NOT ALONE.” “DARE TO BEGIN.” “I love you./I know.” Poetry, or Anthropologie sales rack? Is there a difference? Instapoetry, the so-named slips of inspoverse that have propagated on Instagram like the common cold over the past few years, is a boutique of perfectly curated objets de commerce—“Raised lettering, pale nimbus. White,” American Psycho’s ideal business card gone digital—selling a sanitized unreality. It is not inquiry, it is not sedition, it is not richness, it is not even really beauty. It is status quo. It is confirmation that everything you are thinking, everything you are feeling, everything you are doing, is fine, perfect even. Instapoetry is an outcrop of a space that radiates niceness, that has in fact been pruned of that which is not nice. “A cynic may note here that [changes to make Instagram a more supportive environment] are as good for business as they are for the soul,” Nicholas Thompson recently wrote in Wired. “Advertisers like spending money in places w

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