The Locusts We Raised

Some girl, twelve years old, stands in front of a bathroom mirror and checks whether her thighs touch. Somewhere nearby, a teenage boy is arranging a Supreme hoodie on a hanger with the reverence most people reserve for religious artifacts. We made both of them—not anyone specific, just everyone who spent the last decade pressing heart on images of washboard abs, cheekbones like axe blades, and legs that photograph well against infinity pools.

I was part of it. I watched those accounts grow. The platform pivot from Facebook to Snapchat to Tumblr to YouTube and then, definitively, to Instagram—the app that distilled every other platform’s logic into a single frictionless dopamine machine. The more followers, the more legitimate. The more legitimate, the more brand deals. The more brand deals, the more followers. It wasn’t a media industry. It was a swarm.

The Dandy Diary video Influencers of the 21st Century lays out what we’ve actually built with all of this: a cultural wasteland handed to the next generation dressed up as aspiration. The critique isn’t new—social media aesthetics have been flattening personalities and bodies and interiors since the first flatlay—but watching it laid out plainly still lands. We celebrated a very specific kind of body, a very specific kind of apartment, a very specific kind of tan, and then were surprised when an entire generation organized its self-worth around achieving those things.

The locust metaphor is accurate. Influencers sweep through platforms chasing follower counts, leave behind a scorched idea of what a good life looks like, and move on while the wreckage stays with the people who were watching. The twelve-year-old with the mirror doesn’t know she’s been sold an aesthetic that was already dated by the time it reached her algorithm. What I find hardest to shake is the complicity. Nobody forced anyone to double-tap. The machine needed fuel and we fed it willingly.