When Home Is Where Instagram Is Illegal

From a 10-day trip back home to a Netflix documentary about Instagram.

There is a phrase between a good friend of mine, Mel, and me — after she returned to China after four years in the US that seemed like a lifetime we shared — “Instagram freedom.” Whether she has Instagram freedom or not at the moment completely depends on whether she is physically in China or not. Taking a vacation traveling to Europe, yes, she is back to “having Instagram freedom”; having dinner at home in Beijing, no, she does not have Instagram freedom.

A little bit of unnecessary quick background info:

Do you know that Instagram is blocked under the great firewall of China? Maybe you do. Maybe you also know that all Google products (of course, it includes Gmail, YouTube, or the Google search engine), Netflix, Facebook, and most academic websites (e.g., my Alma Mater, UCSD), are blocked too?

It doesn’t mean that one like Mel has no access to Instagram 100% of their time in China. Based on my experience, there are a few ways around it: (1) As a traveler to China who is using a US phone sim card (I don’t know about sim cards from other countries) with international data-roaming service, there would be no “wall” for them to access any websites like mentioned above. Or (2), install a paid or free VPN service on a phone/computer device. Such VPNs would give users open access to services beyond the great firewall of China. The streaming speed or experience is oftentimes dependent on whether it’s paid or free. Interestingly, when a device is on a VPN service, streaming local websites is usually painfully slow — such as WeChat, the omnipresent chat/social media/payment service, and Baidu, the search engine monopoly in China.

However, using such VPN services are defined as illegal actions by the law. I remembered once posting and asking for recommendations of a quality VPN service on the social media section of WeChat—a known to be a heavily supervised platform (just like any other services within the wall), I was DMed by a family friend on WeChat telling me to delete the post because it could easily cause both me AND the VPN service provider serious legal problems. (They also gave me access to their paid VPN service log-in, knowing that I’d only be using it for a few days.) Having a data-roaming service with a US number is also not accessible for many different reasons.

I am mad about this, and I keep telling myself to get over it. I tell myself that all this anger is in every way based on my continuous personal addiction to Instagram all these years studying and working in the US: not only did I already feel guilty of all the binge screen use, but now an actual action that comes with possible legal consequences.

Then, I thought of something told by an engineer I knew from Facebook, one day after they came back from a training session.

“Do you know which country has the highest average daily usage, of Facebook?” He asked. (I honestly forgot the original wording and specifics of the question, but the idea might be there.)

I took a few guesses, countries from Asia where I knew from the huge use of mobile phones. And then a few English-speaking countries, where I thought Facebook was more familiar to its audience.

“Syria,” he said. He might have explained a little bit that the more turmoil the society is, the more its people would use social media to communicate.

“Well, unless it’s like, blocked and banned, by the government,” I mumbled.

So has anything happened during my 10-day trip back home in China? With no legal way to get on Instagram or my Gmail (Method 1 mentioned above wasn’t working because my US sim card does not support international data roaming outside of the US/Canada/Mexica), my urge to go on Instagram and share with friends around the world of what I’ve been eating, seeing, and experiencing in my home country, has only maintained, if not increased.

“I have never seen this side of China. It’s actually kinda cool.” My colleague replied to one Instagram story I posted.

Seeing replies as such had only increased my wanting to share more of the unseen side of China, either mundane neighborhood glimpses, or couples walking down the beach: the real lives. (No. I also couldn’t wait to post them later after exiting China. Instagram ain’t later-gram for me. Unless when I wanted to reminisce.) I wanted to share boring things that made me feel like a less-angered person. While other times, I only wished to share snapshots of the regime-amplifying and ubiquitous political slogans on a piece of the local newspaper, initiating discussions of what Chinese people are exposed to on a daily basis as well as how they are expected to act. But in those cases, I’d only look like someone who “climbs beyond the wall to shit about the place that raised her” — and to be honest, on a platform where ordinary Chinese people just cannot see or access.

Fun fact. Many people — I bet more than I can ever imagine — don’t know that we have that firewall that blocks everything. Most people know about censorship, but maybe not the wall. How would I know that I was kept away from something if I had never seen, that, thing?

While the irritation of not having access to Instagram still gets to me, I am already on the plane from my home city to New York, the city I am familiar with and where I now work near. With my headphones cupping my ears, I open the Netflix app on my phone and see that I downloaded an episode in the US before I returned to China: “Abstract: The Art of Design — Ian Spalter: Digital Product Design.”

Many things in this documentary helped me process this unsettledness in me, rationalizing why I hoped to see the Chinese public have access to Instagram so much.

“Instagram’s all about showcasing the things that other people are creating. And so our job as designers, in a lot of ways, is to give them the tools they need to express themselves and then get out of the way.” — Brett Westervelt

By the great tools Instagram has provided, I — by no means an artist — feel like a superman making collages that not only help me share my mood but inspire me during the quick-creation time.

“The app is not just about content, it’s actually about, like, forming strong relationships with the people that you’re connected to on the platform as well as the things that you’re most interested in. — Ted Boda

Instagram, as a result of the fun experience of sharing and creating my own life as well as following creative, inspiring, and sometimes sad but important things around in the world, helps me connect with friends on Instagram. I started to feel a little missed out on friends who do not have access to Ins, or more straightforward, they would miss out on my spamming too, which I also declare to be creative, inspiring, and sometimes sad — but important things.

I also noticed myself having a lot of fun on the “infinite scroll” feature on Instagram, which the inventor of such interaction Aza Raskin speaks of the struggle and responsibility that products like Instagram and Facebook bear:

We are not giving people the stopping cue. And so it’s literally wasted hundreds of millions of human hours. It’s no longer enough as a designer to think about the constraints of just one individual using my product. Instead, we have to think about the fractal version up to technology-society interaction. We haven’t really fledged that out as a field yet. And now we’re seeing that our technology not only distracts us. But if you think about what Facebook does, they build this simulator of you, for one-forth of the human beings on Earth.

Another researcher (I couldn’t find this female speaker’s credit, will keep trying) follows up on this idea of infinite scrolling, where she is / they are being brutally honest about misinformation and unhealthy patterns enabled on Instagram:

You are the product. You don’t get the service for free. You are handing over your data. You are being targeted. This business model, especially with Facebook led to the proliferation of fake news. It led to misinformation being spread out there. You know, there’s a fine line between micro-targeting, manipulation.

It’s also allowing us to compare our fake, fabulous lives to other people’s fake, fabulous lives. I think that can be problematic for a lot of us. Because Facebook owns Instagram now, there’s been, I think, more pressure on Instagram. And especially now with the pressure of making money, especially with the pressure now of Facebook not doing as well as it was, and Instagram kind of being, like, this golden child.

I think the challenge for Instagram is going to be staying Instagram.

Ian Spalter, the person featured in the documentary talks about his feelings from one research trip to Japan:

“I try to get to the point where you’re just there, and you’re actually just letting it flow through it you like what your eyes and ears…and what you’re smelling, you’re able to let it go through you. That’s what you want. It’s less about, “oh, eureka. I have this amazing idea about this next thing.” It’s, like, no, that’s not what you want. You just want it to be able to flow through you, and that will create the space in your mind so that when you come back to those things, there’s more room to breathe and to see different connections that you never saw before.”

I am so happy when I am listening to this narrative of his, with the screen showing his wandering around streets, architecture, and mountains in Japan. It gives me peace. I am also glad that he was the one leading the major Instagram logo re-design project a few years ago, which I was also frustrated among a group of people. Later when I started to love it, I felt this connection I never saw before.

Home is where Instagram is illegal.

Yea, Instagram would probably disappear, replaced by new products in the future.

And people from home might be doing just fine with other local social media products, heavily censored and not tolerant of any different voices, and who am I to tell them that this is not enough?

But it’s the disconnection — the intentional and purposeful disconnecting of human experiences that was unbearable to me.

There are folks that are in war zones who need platforms like Facebook to search and share information; there are folks who don’t have internet access, if not electricity. And there are folks within a wall. I know the world had bigger problems, but for now, this is my problem.

I thought about what Jonathan from Queer Eye said in one episode in response to someone who wanted to leave his home country to find more freedom,

“It’s not in the same way, but I guess what it is to, like, kind of feel like you can’t live your all-the-way honest truth in the situation that you’re born into, and then you need to escape that. But it still is true that freedom is found from within.” — Queer Eye (Japan season Episode 2)

And that’s why I wrote this piece, to find some peace within myself.