Rihanna Knows

I was scrolling Instagram like always and saw Rihanna in Greece, her body twisted into some kind of stretch—not a yoga pose, not quite dance, just the kind of thing you do for two seconds and then the shutter clicks. Bikini. Bad filter, actually genuinely bad, the kind of washed-out grainy light that Instagram somehow made everyone want. Three hundred thousand likes.

You watch celebrities online long enough and the pattern becomes invisible because you’re so used to seeing it. A name plus a body plus the right kind of unguarded moment, which is never actually unguarded, which is precisely calculated to look that way. She knows what works. She’s been testing this formula since before most people had phones. If she’s posting photos like this, that’s the choice she made about what her life looks like to strangers.

I scrolled past it. Probably everyone else did. The machinery works without anyone paying attention to what they’re actually looking at.