Deconstructing The Instagram Aesthetic

Bright colors, high contrasts, with politics that range from directions on how to vote early to why borders should be abolished—the Instagram carousels are an intriguing case of people stealing corporate aesthetics to convey radical ideas. This aesthetic necessarily bends to an invisible tech hand focused on selling and exploiting data, while doing what design is supposed to do: attract attention and communicate clearly.

Sometimes I twitch uncomfortably when I see them. Instagram is a platform for selling unencumbered happiness and ease. The colors and format lend a playful tone to the deadly serious content many of the slides contain. There is a troubling dissonance when someone shares information about the brutality of our world in the same language we share photos of puppies and ads for home-delivery meal kits.

Many of these slides are annoying, or just wrong. The sheer volume of them can be exhausting. There is a real danger of misleading people, or encouraging radical ideas as something to be consumed as opposed to acted on. This is not inherent to Instagram. We see the same problems on Twitter when someone yells at me to NORMALIZE FEMALE DRONE PILOTS, or when a boomer reposts a Facebook status about how a tincture of lemon balm, lavender and cinnamon can cure cancer and give you the ass of a 25-year-old. We see it on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, and in The New York Times as they manufacture our consent for wars and continuing austerity. Police have been using photos posted to social media and in newspaper photos to identify, harass, and imprison protestors from the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests.

My knee-jerk reaction may be the point. Instagram, and the advertising world at large, would be much happier to sedate my mind with the pastel promise of fulfillment by brass knobs and tummy tea. The corporate internet wants to soothe you into forgetting that the very platform exists at all. Olia Lialina, a web artist and critic, writes: “Experience design prevents from thinking and valuing computers as computers, and interfaces as interfaces. It makes us helpless. We lose an ability to narrate ourselves and—going to a more pragmatic level—we are not able to use personal computers anymore.”

Part of me wants to be visually set apart from the corporate hacks, to proudly declare I Am Not Like Them. This is understandable, but somewhat childish and egocentric. I am succumbing to the advertising world’s belief that aesthetic symbols define who I am, rather than what I do. Our critical thinking must require flexibility and understanding that sending ideas out on corporate platforms in a world dominated by colonialism, racism, and capitalism will always contain contradictory elements and eventually be co-opted. It is impossible to create a specific anti-capitalist aesthetic. Instead, as I meditate on the efficacy and purpose of these slides, I start to see all this DIY design and education as a visible fight between the application design of Instagram and a wing of radical users. The web of today refuses user input and customization in favor of user experience.

It’s exciting to see movement towards user direction and away from user experience. Arturo Escobar, author of Design for the Pluriverse, writes that “Design [should be] user centered, situated, interactive, collaborative, ecological, and focused on the production of life itself,” and defines “Co design = design expertise is no longer just with the expert, it is distributed throughout whole communities.” We are watching real life examples of co-design blossom.

Well-made design has become a signifier of wealth and gravity, and the cost of entry to creating good design is astronomically high to keep it that way. Canva, a free website that allows anyone to make graphics, has a big hand in the creation of many of these slides. The overall aesthetic of Canva is created by professional designers and influenced by design trends, and necessarily tends towards broad appeal. There is a limit to what one can do, and having an aesthetic already decided upon guiding you belies the level of control you have. Still, it provides a mask that lets people force an app made for selling us unattainable lifestyles to instead communicate radical ideas. Canva is now an essential tool for organizers with no budget to create readable, easy to produce fliers, banners and graphics, without having to rely on the barrier of professional design and the expertise to run Creative Cloud.

There are many Instagram accounts pushing a challenging, radical point of view. Accounts like @leftofnorth, @wearyourvoice, @salt.xmt, @vrye, @aafc.nyc, @decrimnyc, @thepyramidschool and @workingclasshistory use the Instagram format to push anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, anti-capitalist education, and develop their own visual language. A campaign by GLITS raised 1 million dollars to purchase a building to house black and brown trans people, and utilized the common aesthetics of Instagram to do so. 8 To Abolition managed to steal the aesthetic of a liberal police reform policy attempting to co-opt the radical energy around recent protests and swing it back to abolition with mass education.

This type of design work is exciting, effective, and has direct links to the past. The Student NonViolence Coordinating Committee created comics to explain local bureaucracy, and how to change it, in an easily digestible way. The early Soviets created ROSTA window posters, basically four panel comics (much like Instagram comics) to spread news and political education. The American Marxist magazine New Masses has a sweeping archive of political cartoons. They all focused on forms of communication that were clear, visually eye-catching, and easily distributed to a large quantity of people. Early 20th century radicals created newspapers because it was the easiest form of mass communication they could devise, and managed to organize huge amounts of people. This was also the era of “yellow journalism,” a term coined during the fight between William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer's New York World as they competed for immense profit by writing increasingly lurid, sensational, and sometimes completely fictional reporting. It was a low brow, corrupt, and thoroughly capitalist form. Does that mean they should not have participated?

Judgement based solely on aesthetics is a trick by those in power. It distracts us from structures of domination and how to effectively weaponize tools of mass communication. Stuart Hall clarified the questions we should ask ourselves: “Is the novel a bourgeois form? The answer can only be historically provisional: When? Which novels? For whom? Under what conditions?” Toronto-based group Design Justice Collective simplify their questions to: “Who benefits? Who is harmed? Who participates?”

Organizing 101 tells us to meet people where they are at, and a lot of people just enjoy an image with a good vibe on their social media page. When our ideals are sold back to us for someone else’s profit, it is our duty to remain critical—context matters more than style, but style as a tool opens doors. The United States has worked very hard to diffuse propaganda into every level of our culture and education. These slides are attractive and provide information to investigate further, something I couldn’t figure out on my own as a teen in the early 2000s, when I spent most of my time blindly searching for a way to understand the power structures I felt. In high school I had become fixated on the atrocities of the Iraq War, trying to understand how they were allowed to happen. I stumbled towards other forms of news and thinkers, downloading audio files onto my iPod each morning to listen to while drawing in art class. As I listened to people say what they thought without an advertisement-approved filter, I heard something true about the world, more true than even the supposedly trustworthy sources like NPR or MSNBC, which were considered radical in my conservative home. I felt it, but I couldn’t grasp it fully, and these resources alone couldn’t penetrate the propaganda I grew up on. I wish I had a cute graphic to spell out C-A-P-I-T-A-L-I-S-M for me. But that feeling of truth would sit with me as I drew, and kept me aligned as I grew older. The act of stumbling upon a free resource created with less legitimacy than cable news or a newspaper changed my life. While the formats are very different, I sincerely believe there are people who are experiencing the same today through these slides.

We lack the resources of the truly powerful, so we must attack with a tiny thousand cuts. Dismantling the mythos of capitalist design is one cut. Combating propaganda in every form with our own is another. When I see young people and organizers galvanized by this movement creating a message of their own design, I see a tiny blade, in sync with many others.

Colleen Tighe is an illustrator, cartoonist and designer. She’s had her illustrations appear in The New Republic, NBC News, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and others. She runs a small web store called Sluggish Wife. She is Jersey Strong, Baby.