RiRi on a Rock in the Aegean, 300,000 Likes

Rihanna’s Instagram in late 2013 was its own ecosystem—a daily dispatch from a life that seemed to exist entirely outside consequence. On this particular day she was in Greece, photographing herself in a bikini in various configurations on what appeared to be sun-bleached rocks, achieving somewhere around 300,000 likes despite, or because of, the mediocre filter.

I checked her feed every day. I won’t pretend otherwise. Part of it was genuine fascination with the celebrity image machine and how she operated it differently than anyone else. Part of it was that Rihanna in a bikini is a completely legitimate reason to open an app. The Greece photos had this quality where it wasn’t entirely clear what she was doing with her body—some kind of stretch, a pose, maybe just the unselfconscious way a person exists when they’re lying on a warm rock and someone hands them a phone.

What I find genuinely interesting about her social media presence isn’t the looks—it’s the total absence of performance anxiety. She never seems to be working for the likes. The likes just happen, tidal and inevitable, because she operates at a frequency where the usual effort-to-reward math doesn’t apply. She’s not performing for you. You’re just watching.

The flower she had in her mouth in an earlier photo was probably fine. The weed in Greece was probably expensive. RiRi continues, indifferent and magnificent.