Article
Instagram is a recurring brand in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between April 06, 2022 and May 15, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “more social media (Instagram, Reddit)”; “Instagram “find yourself” therapy culture”; “What about the age of TikTok and Instagram?“. It most often appears alongside Twitter, US, YouTube.
Metadata
- Category: Brands
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: April 06, 2022
- Last seen: May 15, 2025
Appears In
- Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
- Highlights From The Comments On Nietzsche
- Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
Related Pages
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- Twitter (2 shared issues)
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- US (2 shared issues)
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- YouTube (2 shared issues)
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- 10240 (1 shared issues)
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- 4chan (1 shared issues)
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- @slatestarcodex (1 shared issues)
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- Acemoglu & Robinson (1 shared issues)
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- Achillead (1 shared issues)
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- Achilles (1 shared issues)
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- ACX survey (1 shared issues)
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- Agamemnon (1 shared issues)
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- Agememnon (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But Xi’s main target has been the Internet. Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter were already blocked when he took power, but he added more search engines (including Bing and DuckDuckGo), more social media (Instagram, Reddit), foreign news (eg BBC, NYT, WaPo, the Economist), and even Wikipedia. This has been bad for business (China’s Internet “ranks ninety-first in the world” and is getting worse, and foreign businesses list difficulty using the Internet as one of their top reasons for not expanding into China more), but Xi thinks it’s a worthwhile tradeoff.
If Nietzsche is really saying “ignore the strictures of society; pursue the destiny written upon your own soul”, how does that differ from Instagram “find yourself” therapy culture? Other than that Nietzsche expects your soul to say “conquer Europe” and Instagram expects it to say “ditch your boyfriend and date a yoga instructor”?
Wise words - in 2011, when SRTHMK was written. What about the age of TikTok and Instagram?
Suppose that screens genuinely harm many students. Does that mean that parents should keep screens away from toddlers? It depends on the mechanism of harm. If phones harm kids by gradually damaging their brains somehow (chronic dopamine poisoning? I’m pretty sure this isn’t a real thing, but I’m sure some self-help guru has an infomercial that disagrees), and this damage is worst during childhood, then sure, keep your kids away. But if phones are merely very addictive - so addictive that college students scroll through social media instead of going to class - then it’s less obvious that it matters. You can’t realistically prevent your teenager from using a phone during college; if she has addictive tendencies, she’s going to get addicted. So why not save yourself some babysitting time when she’s three years old by letting her go on Toddler Instagram?
My daughter would absolutely dominate Toddler Instagram. RIP to all the other Toddler Instagram influencers. Or does giving kids phones at age three (when they have no hope of resisting) deny them the right to exercise their free will at age eighteen (when they might have some slight hope)? Do Caplan’s exhortations to remember the behavioral genetics literature apply here? Will those with phone addiction genes get addicted no matter how we raise them? Only 10% of variability in alcohol addiction is shared environmental (eg potentially due to parenting); should this also be our estimate for phone addiction?
Inline links: 10%