Live, Then Gone

Every platform feature that lets you broadcast yourself live arrives with the same announcement: millions of users, instant reach, the world is watching. Instagram’s live Stories launched in late 2016 with the standard rollout—limited test in a few small markets first, then wider release—and the notable detail was that the stream disappeared the moment you ended it. No archive, no evidence, just the live moment and then nothing.

Which is either poetic or completely pointless, depending on how you feel about the whole project of streaming your daily existence to strangers. I’ve always been skeptical of the compulsion. Not the documentary impulse—I understand photographing something, writing about it, making a thing out of it. But the live broadcast, the real-time performance of being alive for an audience that mostly isn’t watching: I don’t get it. Snapchat had it, Periscope had it, Twitch had it in a context that at least involved games, and then Instagram had to have it too, because the rule is that every platform eventually becomes every other platform.

Years later, Instagram Live is still there, still used, mostly by brands and people in the middle of something semi-scripted. Most sessions end well before the one-hour limit because there’s only so long you can watch someone doing nothing particularly special in real time. The streams that survive in memory are the accidents: the unplanned meltdown, the surprise performance, the thing that wasn’t supposed to happen. Which suggests the real draw was never the format—it was the possibility of something going wrong. That part hasn’t changed.