Bobby Allyn: Call it the rise of Grid Zero. Once the province of visual dedications to life milestones and jaunts to Mallorca, the Instagram grid has increasingly become something else: A deliberate blank slate.
When scrolling an account, the decision to leave it blank, almost always, delivers a disappointing jolt to our primal instincts to probe. And it sometimes rouses incredulity. Wait, no grid, photos, and no tagged photos? Let me reload a few times just to make sure this isn’t an Instagram glitch. Really Nothing? Got it.
The badge of honor is IG’s way of sign-posting this decision. A pencil-thin camera in a circle with three bold words: “No posts yet.” Yet. But maybe not really?
Surely there used to be posts on this account. Likely many. Some of which depicted exes, cities, jobs, friends of yore. A millennial generational stamp likely occupied the very bottom of the feed: sepia-toned, slightly-blurred portraits of mundanity with those old IG filters meant to mimic Polaroids. Maybe a corny hashtag or two. Now all of that is gone. Those visual relics are retired and untraceable. And more users are noticing the blank-slate strategy and joining the ranks.
I see Grid Zero more and more often these days.
The motivations are fairly obvious. Taking a stand for some modicum of privacy by depriving lurkers of any digital breadcrumbs, a sort of shield from a rando’s prying eyes. A separation from one’s not-so-distant-but-forever-ago-feeling past. (Probably not much more than a decade ago.) A minor act of resistance in our struggle against data-guzzling social media companies that have compiled personal dossiers on us.
It represents opting out of the Instagram slot machine where being at the right party, or notching some incremental career success can ring three cherries, drive a bunch of likes, and spur a dopamine rush. It’s a way of throwing your hands up and leaving the casino. The reaction to maximalist posting is cutting back entirely. “We’re living in a moment of extremely exhausting oversharing, over-preening self-presentation. It’s like, everyone is in your face at all times every day direct to camera,” Cassandra Marketos, a Los Angeles-based digital strategist, told me. “It seems like all the hot brands and hot people these days are taking the tack of withholding.”
Another friend explained his empty grid more nonchalantly: “No enthusiasm to post I guess.” Someone else said she took all her grid photos down because “I got weird about privacy.” Another friend who has noticed the trend explained it this way: “Caring about an ‘aesthetic’ feed is ‘cheugy’? The less you care, the cooler you are.” (Is pruning your life back to a few or zero posts letting go of aestheticization, or the ultimate form of it?) Someone else told me that Gen Z in particular does not want to “deal with the humiliation of appearing in the feeds.”
Instagram has taken notice. Last year, the head of IG Adam Mosseri said the platform has increasingly shifted resources to DMing, since the biggest growth areas for the app have been DMs and Stories. The grid doesn’t matter anymore. De-feeding your feed doesn’t mean you’re on IG less; it just means you’re probably flicking through Stories or messaging your friends, choosing fleeting or private interactions over social media permanence.
Snapchat and BeReal understood this preference shift long ago. And now, scrubbing your feed is a way of taking some control back, refusing to put your past on display. It’s a design choice. Embracing negative space. Making anti-brand the brand. Refusing to participate in the popularity contest and the attention economy.
But also, shrouding your social media footprint with some mystery piques attention, placing you slightly out of reach, and maybe making you more desirable or interesting than the guy whose feed runs back to the first Obama administration. “Intrigue feels like such a rarity these days,” said Marketos, the LA digital strategist, “that when you encounter it you’re like a man in the desert who has found water.”
Bobby Allyn is a Tech Correspondent for NPR based in Los Angeles.
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From a personal experience I'm seeing a trend in making close friends and posting only to them. I'm not that IG person but more and more people of all ages care about privacy, more than I expected.
This was such a great read! Hard to disagree. More and more people are embracing the "blank slate", and I feel like Gen Z especially doesn't care that much about posting as for consuming content, so that's why they rarely or never upload to their own profiles. Social media has changed obviously, Instagram used to be a place to share your photos with friends and it grew to a influencer-occupied place, where sharing only to a select circle is not the preferred way of using the app. But hey, at least we lived through a moment of history where people used to share low quality photos taken from their iPhone 4/4s after putting on a filter to make them less detailed :)
Just recommended this to our readers 📖