You Can't Save the World With an Instagram Story. Shocking, We Know.

We scroll, react and forget. This is the critical thinking we're practising these days. We can even scroll past genocide the same way we scroll past a shoe advert. Take Afghan women, for example. Weeks ago, this was the only topic people were sharing on their socials. Guess what? This has been happening for five years.

Women banned from school, from raising their voices in public, from leaving home without a male relative at their side, barely break through the algorithm before the next trend replaces them.

Scrolling has trained us to watch human rights suffer and call it feeling something, to post a photo on our Instagram Stories and believe that counts as doing something, then forget the cause a week later without ever checking whether anything has changed.

That is not solidarity. That is performance with an expiry date.

Real solidarity does not compress a woman's whole life into a fifteen-second clip, feel a fleeting pang of sadness and move on to the next thing. We cannot survive on a feed built to forget.

We keep hearing how social media has become one of the main forces shaping social issues, deciding what society should be paying attention to. Apparently, these platforms filter every kind of situation to manipulate beliefs, even beliefs about what's ‘right’.

But hey, what's the worry if you post a TikTok about it and it reaches millions, only to leave their minds in the same five seconds?

The algorithm might even reward it for a while, feeding you more content on the topic. In the end, though, it will be just another repost, never an actual change or a fight for what truly matters.

Foucault used to talk a lot about how power does not need to lock you up to control you. It just needs you to watch yourself and adjust accordingly. Swap the prison guard for the algorithm, and the theory holds up uncomfortably well.

He's a wise guy.

The thing is, nobody forces you to care about Afghan women for exactly one week and then stop caring. The feed does not need to force anything. It just needs to stop showing you the story, and you will stop thinking about it on your own.

That is the whole trick. Not censorship, just disappearance.

Foucault called it discipline. We call it scrolling past. Same thing, better Wi-Fi.

Being a ‘Trendy’

For years now, we've watched horrible human rights violations unfold, and the scariest part is this: if we're living in the best era ever built for spreading ‘the truth’, how come nothing has changed?

I mean, we all know people choose to turn a blind eye because it's easier. But how far can we really go, watching women who still need a male relative's permission just to leave their own homes, who are banned from raising their voices in public, from reading aloud, even from singing inside their own homes?

Let's not even mention what happens in other countries. Afghan women aren't the only ones on this list.

Remember ‘All Eyes on Congo’? It followed ‘All Eyes on Rafah’ and took over Instagram and TikTok within days, the whole internet suddenly discovering that one of the deadliest conflicts on the planet was displacing millions, with girls and women raped by the thousands as a weapon of war.

The graphic was shared for about two weeks. Nobody kept posting once those two weeks were up, and the war never got the memo to stop.

Same pattern every time: a face, a hashtag, a burst of collective grief, then silence, while the actual thing keeps happening without us.

Not an unfortunate case. The format.

None of that made it into your Stories this week. It only makes it in when it's ‘trending’. If you're a trendy, good job.

Then the algorithm decided we'd all felt enough and moved us along to the next outrage.

Afghan women did not get five days of oppression. They got five years, and they are still living through it. We just clocked out early.

Solidarity Has a Shelf Life Now

Instead of becoming real, we became manufactured: given instructions on how to trend, how to behave, already stamped with an expiry date.

Real solidarity is not supposed to come with an expiry date, but ours does, printed right on the carton like milk. Which, by the way, is exactly why you could attach a cause to pictures of lost children and we'd still scroll past without giving a shit.

It lasts exactly as long as the topic is trending, then it curdles into whatever comes next: a breakup, a celebrity feud, a new diet nobody asked about.

Nobody is checking back in on the organisations still doing the actual work once the hashtag dies down. Nobody is asking their government what has changed.

We post the photo, we feel the sting, we move on, and we call that solidarity because it felt like something at the time.

It was not nothing. But it was not enough to be called sisterhood either.

Sisterhood does not log off.

What's Actually Left When the Feed Moves On?

So ask yourself the question the algorithm would rather you didn't ask: what actually changed for Afghan women once they stopped trending?

The honest answer is nothing, because the caring was never really built for them in the first place. It was built for us, so we could feel like decent people for twenty-four hours without doing anything that costs us twenty-four hours.

That is not solidarity between women. That is a mirror with extra steps.

For years, we thought being a good woman to other women meant curating the right feelings for public consumption: showing up glossy, showing up quotable, showing up for exactly as long as it photographed well.

Turns out that was never solidarity. That was just another outfit. The real thing doesn't trend, doesn't come with instructions and does not care if anyone's watching.

So here's the toast nobody wants to raise: less performing, more showing up on the Tuesday nobody's filming. Being a trendy got us nowhere. Being there might.

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Photo © Devon Aoki photographed by Robin Derrick.