Now That Botox Is The New Normal, Normal Aging Looks Weird

A tale of two celebrity Instagrams

I don’t often find myself on celebrity Instagram. It’s a bad neighborhood I try to stay away from — I don’t feel safe there. But this weekend I was visiting my 98-year-old grandmother and found myself anxiously scrolling a lot. Maybe it was the stark confrontation with mortality, something I’m not quite used to in this form. I would turn from a manual task, like fastening my grandma’s bra, helping her go through her iPhone contacts to delete the people who’ve died, or washing the breakfast dishes, and find myself in a kind of compensatory reverie, lost on social media for fifteen minutes, as though trying to even some imaginary scales, reset myself.

Doing this, I was reminded of a review of Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine that I read in Bookforum last year. The book and the piece, by Max Read, are about what’s driving our social media addiction from a psychoanalytic point of view. “What the Twittering machine offers is not death, precisely, but oblivion” Read writes, “an escape from consciousness into numb atemporality, a trance-like ‘dead zone’ of indistinguishably urgent stimulus.” We engage with it in order to manage the disappointments of the present moment, of the world we actually live in.