A Letter: The algorithm does not hate us. It is not cruel. But it is indifferent.

A letter to Instagram.

Dear Instagram,

Last night, I turned a quiet carousel of fifteen thoughtful, carefully considered slides into a 12-second reel. I did that for you. And I’ve been sitting with the uneasy feeling it left in my body all day.

Maybe I wanted your attention more than I wanted my integrity in that moment. Or maybe I hoped that it might slip past the noise and into your hands if I did it this way.

I wonder if you could tell that I was performing.

I wonder if you felt it, if you sensed the awkwardness—the way I slid down the pole just a little more clumsily than the slick Instagram girls who make it all look so effortless. I knew you probably wouldn’t appreciate the black-and-white stock footage. I also knew it likely wouldn’t land because it wasn’t front-facing and perfectly lit. But I made it anyway. And in doing so, I traded something I loved—something layered and slow—for something I hoped you would like.

Instagram, when your work is textured, unhurried, and nuanced, trying to shrink it into a seven-second trend can feel like cutting off your own limbs. You and your algorithm seem to favour bite-sized authority. But what if my authority is poetic? What if my wisdom is made of long, curved sentences and open questions, not bullet points and clever clickbait?

Do I still have a place here?

Because sometimes I feel like my work arrives wearing the wrong clothes. Like it shows up to a loud party in bare feet and linen, holding a thermos of tea when everyone else brought champagne. There is something tender, almost disoriented, about watching it try to belong in a space that moves so differently. I recognise art as needing breath and pauses and open skies. But your preference is a well-lit face, a punchline, and a quick return on attention, while I am here trying to hand you something that asks to be held with both hands and considered in silence. And on certain days, I find myself wondering whether anything I make, gentle, layered and curved around the edges, can ever be fully seen here without being asked to change shape.

It is an exhausting binary to inhabit, the sense that you must either be strategic enough to satisfy your appetite for clarity and control or else accept invisibility as the cost of staying true to my own rhythm, language and heart.

How do we remain true artists and stay visible in a system that rewards speed over depth?

I have come to know the intimacy of real work. The tenderness of the words or images, or sounds that come from the place beneath your thinking mind. When I bring this kind of work to you, it can feel like laying my bare, open heart on a scroll wheel. And some days, it feels like too much, too raw, too tender—to ask that kind of work to survive the flick of a thumb or the judgment of an algorithm that was never built to recognise intimacy as value. What lives beneath the thinking mind is not dressed for display. It is fragile, unfiltered, and wholly uninterested in performance. And yet, here I am, asking my art to hold its form inside a system that does not slow down long enough to listen.

I think I am mad. Can you sense I am mad, Instagram?

I don’t think your algorithm truly hates us (most of the time). It is not cruel. But it is indifferent. It was never built to recognise when something is real. It is a mechanism created to track. It does not trace the careful arc of a thought that took weeks to form, or understand why one image, placed just so, might bring a person to tears. Instead, it looks for the familiarity of what has worked before. It scans for patterns, repetitions, and pieces it can stack neatly, sort quickly, and send on their way. It is drawn to velocity, to the rush of movement for movement’s sake, and to the kind of momentum that doesn’t ask where it’s going, only how fast it can get there. And so the work we make from the marrow of ourselves, slowly, with reverence, and sometimes heartache, slips past unseen, because it does not speak in the language the machine has been taught to hear.

But Instagram, here is the thing that keeps me up at night. I worry that over time, you will become persuasive enough that we—the artists, the makers, the ones who once created from instinct and aliveness, will slowly begin to internalise your values as our own. I fear we will hear your voice start to inform our choices. Your subtle nudge that questions the length of our sentences, or the layering of our thoughts, or the distinct and personal rhythm of our natural voice.

So, we become quieter.

But now is not the time for the artist to retreat. We must not quiet our voice in deference to a culture that no longer knows how to listen.

Because when the world begins to spin too fast, when the noise becomes constant and the pace unbearable, it is the artist who remembers how to slow time down. It is the artist who can gather the scattered fragments of our attention and hold them in their hands long enough to show us what we’ve been too busy or too afraid to feel. In times when certainty is worshipped and nuance is lost, the artist returns us to the grey spaces, the subtle, the complex, the beautifully unresolved, and reminds us that being human was never meant to be so tidy.

The artist does not simply reflect culture; they tend to the undercurrent. They trace the emotional contours of a moment long before the rest of the world has found language for what is happening. They offer us new metaphors when the old ones no longer hold. Their role is not to produce content or to entertain or to optimise their work for a screen, but to stay close to what is real, to beauty, to truth, to wonder, to grief, and to craft from that place something that holds resonance in our skin and bone.

And so when the artist begins to go quiet, not in the holy, intentional way, but in the muted way that comes from being slowly worn down by a system that does not know how to value their rhythm, something precious is at risk of being lost. We do not just lose our voices. We lose a way of seeing. We lose a way of knowing ourselves. We lose the threads that tether us to meaning in a world increasingly built on momentum and metrics. And while the machine may continue without them, the soul of the culture begins to thin.

To remain an artist in a world like this, especially now, is not a gentle thing. It is a quiet defiance. It is choosing, again and again. A decision to keep making art. It is trusting that the beauty born of attention, of care, of inner reckoning, still matters. To create from this place is not to fall behind. It is to hold the thread. It is to become a keeper of what is quietly being forgotten. And there is power in that. Immense, necessary power.

I believe there is a place for beauty and depth in digital spaces, Instagram. I know we’ll never see eye to eye on that. But also, I am not willing to dance for you again. I am, however, willing to stay.

I will continue to write in long, unhurried sentences, to follow thoughts that don’t collapse into quick conclusions, and to let beauty and care lead the way. I will not give up on the possibility that this kind of work still matters. Even inside a system that so often forgets how to feel, there are still real human hearts listening. There are still people hungry for something that moves them from the inside out. So, I will keep making for them. For me. For us.

I will be the counterpoint.

The slower pulse.

The one trusting that even in a sea of noise, there are people still listening for a different kind of rhythm beneath it all.

Love,
Jody x