Instagram's inside story

I was not excited to review a book about Instagram. Sure, I’m glued to the app; right now those pictures of dogs and babies and my friends’ home-cooking are my main source of quiet pleasure in these miserable times. But it didn’t feel like the moment for a list of reasons — as so many books in this genre are — of why this app was bad for me, and for the world.

Then I started reading.

Written by the San Francisco-based Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier, No Filter  has a deceptively simple goal: “To bring you the definitive inside story of Instagram,” a photo-sharing app one billion of us use every single month.

But in fact — and happily — this is a book about Silicon Valley. It is a record of a single app moving through the place. And in making that record, in hewing closely to Instagram and its founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, while giving new texture to the Valley’s major players, like Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg, Ms Frier tells the story of how that place works.

Like many tech founders, Mr Systrom hailed from a frat at Stanford, but he always saw himself as more artistic than the other ambitious engineers. Instead of dropping out of school to accept Mr Zuckerberg’s offer, in 2005, to join his start-up called TheFacebook.com, Mr Systrom studied abroad in Florence. He’d always liked nice things (espresso done just right, fine clothes, old bourbon), but his photography professor made him give up his fancy camera for a simpler device, one that only shot blurry images in square frames. The experience taught him to embrace imperfection; that “just because something is more technically complex doesn’t mean it’s better.”

NO FILTER: The Inside Story of Instagram

Author: 

Sarah Frier

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Price: $28 

Pages: 327

 

Interning at the podcasting company Odeo, a 22-year-old Systrom sat next to a 29-year-old engineer, Jack Dorsey. Improbably, this NYU dropout “with an anarchist tattoo and a nose ring” befriended him. Odeo eventually gave rise to Twitter, an idea he’d dismissed (“They’re crazy, Mr Systrom thought. Nobody is going to use this thing”) just as he had Facebook. Ms Frier at first blames Mr Systrom’s conservative tempe­ra­ment for his pretty bad judgement, but eventually concludes nobody else knew any better than he did. “Silicon Valley looked like it was run by geniuses,” she writes, but “from the inside, it was clear that everyone was vulnerable, just like he was, just figuring it out as they went along.”

After a stint writing marketing copy at Google (which he found so deeply boring he used the office espresso machines to make latte art), in 2009 he built Burbn, an app for people to find their friends and go out. After VC investors pushed Mr Systrom to find a co-founder, he and Mr Krieger — a former Stanford classmate and a more skilled engineer — soon turned their focus solely to photo sharing, a feature Burbn lacked. Most cellphone cameras were pretty crummy, so they would provide filters to make the pictures prettier. In 2010, that app became Instagram.

The book manages to be cleareyed and objective about the founders and their many flaws, without sensationalising or oversimplifying — a hard balance to strike in tech coverage right now. Their backdrops are hilarious: Basically all of the corporate drama in the book happens around fire pits, at themed bars or twee espresso spots, in hot tubs and at Lake Tahoe. But mostly fire pits.

If there is a villain in this tale, it is Mr Zuckerberg. After Mr Systrom sells Instagram to Facebook in 2012 for an (at the time) astonishing $1 billion, Mr Zuckerberg comes off as controlling and cruel, maniacally focused on growth at the expense of all else. Mr Systrom stayed on as Instagram’s chief executive, but Ms Frier outlines the ways in which their new owners began to undermine the founders, highlighting the clash in corporate cultures. Instagram has no reshare button by design (“all your posts were yours. That was what the founders wanted”); Mr Zuckerberg wanted constant viral growth. But with this growth came the new worry that Instagram’s success would “cannibalise” Facebook’s, so Mr Zuckerberg began to downplay Mr Systrom’s brand alongside Facebook’s news feed. More upsetting, when Mr Systrom tried to build protections against abusive comments, the former Facebook engineers on his team, reluctant to weed out opportunities for higher engagement, proposed controls that would be prohibitively hard to find and use. These portions of the book read as a kind of sequel to the movie The Social Network,  an update on the sort of man that young protagonist grew up to be.

Ms Frier had a lot of access to the insider Valley gossip, like who got invited to Mr Zuckerberg’s parties (and that he served Mr Systrom the boney mystery meat of an animal he had personally killed). She also had access to the Instagram founder himself, from whose perspective this book often seems to be told. The axes to grind are his axes.

Now that company — and the pleasure it brings us — are so deeply entrenched in the ever-growing behemoth that is Facebook, we need a book like this to explain what it is I’m tapping on all day. I spend hours staring at the screen, and now I have a better sense of who’s staring back.

©2020 The New York Times News Service