In losing access to Instagram, I didn’t just stop posting.
I lost a version of myself that had been quietly shaped in tandem with the platform’s algorithmic gaze.

What started as a way to connect across time zones and languages gradually became a canvas for self-definition—one optimized for visibility, not necessarily for truth. Likes, saves, who watches your stories and in what order—these weren’t just numbers. They became signals, feedback loops. A system that knew how to amplify parts of me I hadn’t fully named yet.

It didn’t just reflect who I was becoming—it bent the contours of identity.

As a developer and a user, it’s strange to admit how deep that shaping runs. We design systems to organize attention, but somewhere along the way, the system starts organizing us. To lose access is to realize: your digital self isn’t entirely yours. It’s co-authored—by machines, by UI choices, by feedback loops you didn’t agree to but still played into. And sometimes, it can vanish without warning.

It’s not always the grand intentions of a platform that change us.
Sometimes it’s a tiny UI detail—like who appears first on your Instagram story viewer list.
Not just who watched, but what order they show up in.

That ranked list turns a passive view into a social cue. People scan it. Decode it. Reinterpret it. Maybe even act on it. A feature becomes a signal. A signal becomes meaning. Meaning turns into behavior. An innocuous line of code—shipped by an IC4 engineer chasing an internal KPI bump—becomes a culture-shifting wave.

Offline, social tension lives in gaze and gesture.
Online, it lives in metrics. Numbers, positions, repetition.
And the way we move through it shifts: not entirely consciously, but noticeably.

We think we’re building profiles. But more often, we’re crafting mirages.
We crop, caption, filter, and post—thinking we’re in control of how we’re perceived.
But curation isn’t authorship. It’s compliance. A performance tuned for visibility. A hook, a thirst-trap, a pixel-perfect echo of longing.

Just like we project fantasies onto strangers offline, online we project optimized fragments of ourselves— only to attract attention that’s based on something we can’t fully sustain. And when that attention arrives, a weird dissonance sets in. We start performing not for people, but for patterns. The system’s patterns.

Maybe it started innocently.
A thoughtful post. A good bio. A pinned tweet.

We’re told personal branding is how we survive nonlinear careers. If we’re not climbing a ladder, we’re swinging from node to node on a lattice we built ourselves.

We call it voice. Identity. Ikigai. Give it a name.
But over time, voice hardens into signal.
Presence becomes performance.
And armor—that thing we wore to protect ourselves—starts to rust inward.

Observation causes perturbations.
The algorithmic gaze has shaped us—quietly, persistently—before we ever realized we were being seen. Now, I’m turning that gaze around. In hopes of creating a wave—one that resonates—I’m taking a stab at dissecting the human–AI interplay through the lens of an algorithmic generation, a capitalist baby, and a software engineer building products that bridge human and machine.