here I was, uploading a photo of my two-year-old stroking a puppy to Instagram, when I got a follow request from a cheeky weed leaf. I could tell it was cheeky because it was winking. I saw, when I clicked on his profile pic, that he was a drug dealer. I knew this because he was using Instagram as a street corner, a little like a Christmas pop-up, but somehow less desperate. There was his hand, filled with pills. Here was his desk, piled with identical little packages of weed. A sheet of LSD appeared to be resting on a box of unopened fish and chips.
I followed the hashtags and found hundreds more, a veritable round-the-back-of-Secrets worth of drug dealers, a whole community, their profiles varying shades of neon; their pills varying shades of come-down. They favoured imagery last seen on the walls of suburban bedrooms that smelled of socks and weed; variations on “Take me to your dealer” cartoons and other forms of satire.
I found it oddly comforting. Among Instagram’s baby pictures, elaborate cocktails and photos of the user as a fancy-dressed four-year old, I’d stumbled upon a thriving pharmaceutical industry. The easiness of it, the anonymity, almost made me nostalgic for the days of face-to-face humiliation, of seeing friends sold eighths of oregano outside Camden tube by a real living sixth former rather than through the blinking screen of a digital drug den.
I was briefly shocked, as I tend to be when confronted by the icy reality that I am a million years old, like one of those trees in Nevada – one of the ones you see on Instagram – and then when that passed, I was fascinated to realise that this is how the world works now.
Essays about Instagram concentrate on the tensions between what is shown and what is hidden. The illusory effect of a well-cropped image, a carefully placed pot plant, the quest for perfection. The self-styled academics of the internet cite a triumphant stew in a heart-shaped Le Creuset pot (fight about historic infidelities unseen); a view from a snowy bridge (photographer’s friends having dropped out of the walk an hour earlier, in favour of a better walk, with more photogenic bridges); a group shot that has taken 45 minutes to get right; a two-year-old stroking a puppy, minutes before she squeezed it too tight and everybody cried.
These educational essays quickly became redundant. We realised the worlds on our phones weren’t real – it made no difference. We know that nobody is happy and pretty all the time, and that one way people today will attempt to get over a break-up, or a rejection or a bad afternoon is to think of Instagram as a kind of stage which can be set, a fantasy land where a version of you will bake, and laugh forever, where everybody likes you, and you can tell because of the hearts.
To remind users of the way Instagram works, how images are altered, has become a contemporary cliché, like a flat filled with “midcentury modern”, or the trope of the “cool mum”, or adding bacon to sweet things, or saying “spoiler alert!” in an anecdote. The mechanics of the selfie – the editing required, both mental and physical – have been discussed so widely and with such chin-strokery that to hear somebody rev up with an “Of course…” as they launch into their footnoted thoughts on the dangers of social media makes me want to run from the building until I see sea.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that drug dealers now use Instagram, sliding into blank-faced strangers’ DMs with a badly spelt offer of a better time. No surprise that hidden on Instagram, where users who have exhausted Juno, Reyes and Nashville, may find what promises to be the ultimate filter.
Apparently dealers lurk on Tinder, too, a swipe too far for those looking for love, or something that briefly feels like it. Uploading my carefully edited toddler pictures, my discovery of the new drug dealers proved there’s one thing you can be sure of when scrolling through your options. Getting completely out of your head will go a little way towards pretending life is perfect, if only for 20 minutes. And that MDMA will make even the pishiest sunset look like it’s on fire.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman