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The first time I saw the Instagram feed of Georgie Fenn I thought she was a model stooge. Utterly gorgeous, Fenn regularly poses in carefully picked diaphanous clothing, ‘nipple poke’ a specialty. Paid brand collaborations offer excellent returns. Her artfully shot images tagged with maxims as trite as ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re drinking as long as you’re enjoying it’ are a marketeer’s wet dream. Miss Fenn is an up-and-coming ‘vinfluencer’ — that is, she uses her considerable social media presence (31k and rising @winingawaytheweekend) to sell wine.

Cancel culture, I’m sure you’ve heard, is everywhere. Not a day goes by without some sorry sap being caught out for tweeting The Wrong Take, wearing The Wrong Clothes, using The Wrong Word. It’s not just a cottage industry: the entire digital media ecosystem is predicated on cancellation: pick your target, call them out, watch them burn and reap the rewards. Does it have to be this way? What if we didn’t all get mad — we got even instead? What if everyone was equipped with the same tools as the online witchfinders general who police popular discourse? Almost everyone has been on the internet long enough to have something on there that could hurt them. If everyone was canceled, perhaps no one would be? Let’s call it the Cockburn guide to mutually assured cancellation.

There's a joke about a guy who gets anxious on airplanes. The passenger next to him, trying to be helpful, suggests ways he might relax. A drink? A Xanax? A movie, or a nice nap? The anxious man shakes his head, annoyed. He can't relax. He can't lose focus. He can only sit, gripping the arm rests, staring straight ahead in a state of white-knuckled, sphincter clenching terror. Why? Because his terror is the only thing keeping the plane in the air. This notion of anxious acting-out as our sole line of defense against chaos — call it the Control Freak’s Fallacy — isn’t new, but it is certainly having a moment in the run-up to the 2020 election.

Remember how all those celebrity endorsements worked out for Hillary Clinton in 2016? In the end, it seems, even a Beyoncé and Jay-Z concert wasn’t enough to warm voters to HRC. Or perhaps people just don’t actually much care what famous people say about politics. Team Biden is not about to run away from the avalanche of star support coming its way as we approach November. But Biden 2020 likes to think itself more socially media savvy than most commentators have realized. Fame has been democratized, after all, and we now live in an age of ‘influencers’. It’s not about A-listers anymore. It’s about followers and engagement. So brace yourselves for #TeamJoeTalks, a new effort to engage potential voters through their smartphones, which will launch today at 3:30 p.m.

What do veganism, fashion, and architecture all have in common? According to Gen Z, they’re all racist.America’s teens and twenty-somethings have taken up the mantle of civil rights by reposting informative guides to Critical Race Theory on their Instagram Stories. Cockburn’s nieces were kind enough to send him a few links.You might think that these posts inform the zoomers about topics like fatherlessness, abortion, the welfare state and other serious issues that disproportionately face the African American community. However, these guides are almost entirely composed of far-left talking points, creating a social media echo chamber of unabated cultural Marxism and cringe.

Twenty years ago, the death of Bianca Devins would have been a small town horror story. Tragic. Brutal. Stomach-turning. Essentially local. A jealous man stabbed her to death in a fit of outrage before trying, and failing, to kill himself. Something of this kind happens too often for anyone to hear about them all. Bianca Devins's killer did something different, though: he took pictures of the 17-year-old’s dead body and posted them online, to a private forum on the app Discord. He also took pictures of himself after his suicide attempt and uploaded them as well. Little information on the murder is reliable. Rumors spread that Devins's killer was an 'incel' and a 'stalker'. Other rumors spread that he was in fact her boyfriend.

On July 10, 2019, after a week, my order of Instagram model Belle Delphine’s ‘GamerGirl Bath Water’ arrived in the mail. It was a frustrating process to obtain the now-sold out tub, labeled on Delphine’s website as ‘for sentimental purposes only,’ and I had to jump through several hoops before the order could be shipped. https://www.instagram.com/p/BzZFu2AnbZ8/ After paying $33 for order #10100, I waited four days, before receiving an email from the model asking me to reply with a clear statement of understanding that ‘the water should not be consumed, poured upon my body or opened should the seal be broken.

To peruse any of the tens of thousands of Instagram accounts devoted to food, some of them with nearly a million followers, is a jaunt into the pornographic. The photo captions alone seem straight out of paperback erotica. ‘See this naughty Asian pear get humiliated by sticky globs of caramel-infused pistachio milk while creepy cranberry sorbet watches,’ some of them might as well read. ‘This moist blood orange bundt cake is loaded with drippy pink glaze and grew up without a father.’ On Instagram, like Pornhub, you can sort by fetish. Got a thing for cakes and pies? Stylish editorial displays? Pizza? Seasonal vegetables? There’s a feed for every perversion, even at least one devoted to sprinkles, which is legitimately unsettling.

My first thought as news broke of the catastrophic fires raging in Notre-Dame Cathedral yesterday was, ‘I need to find the pictures of my trip to France.’ As the 856-year-old church creaked and crumbled, and smoke billowed over the French capital where Parisians had gathered to sing hymns, watching their beloved landmark burn in horror, my attention turned to the true victim of this tragedy: me, an American woman with an Instagram account. People don’t understand how much pressure there is as an American to hijack global heartbreak and personalize it. As a social media user, it’s imperative that in such dark times for humanity, you let everyone know you have a connection to this particular disaster, no matter how obscure or far removed in the past.