Since its launch 10 years ago, Instagram has gone from a Silicon Valley startup to an ever-present factor in daily life for more than a billion users. In “No Filter,” Sarah Frier, a technology reporter for Bloomberg, tells the story of how co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, two 20-something Stanford grads working in San Francisco, created a mobile app that became a social network that became an advertising behemoth. Previous social-media services such as Facebook had risen to prominence primarily on the PC desktop. Messrs. Systrom and Krieger launched on the iPhone. The app was “mobile-first” from the start, and the idea was simple—just take a picture of your life and post it so your friends and others could see.
Instagram, Ms. Frier argues, was one of the first apps to “fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation.” What made the app a hit was its spare design and the many playful photo-editing “filters” that could be applied to a picture to evoke a mood: sunny or dark, hot or cold, dramatic or calming. “Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel,” Ms. Frier writes. “The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently.” According to Ms. Frier’s account, Messrs. Systrom and Krieger knew what they liked and didn’t like about the social-media giants at the time, avoiding, for instance, what they saw as “spammy” tactics like Facebook’s notifications. They envisioned a platform, the author suggests, where art and creativity would flourish.
By the first day, the iPhone app had 25,000 users; within six months it reached two million. Systrom, Krieger & Co. attracted the interest of investors and potential investors—including, fairly quickly, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. Ms. Frier cites an internal Facebook document, provided to new employees, that reflects the company’s general thinking around this time: “If we don’t create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will. The internet is not a friendly place. Things that don’t stay relevant don’t even get the luxury of leaving ruins. They disappear.”
No Filter
By Sarah Frier
(Simon & Schuster, 327 pages, $28)
In 2012, in a deal closed within a single weekend, Facebook acquired Instagram for $1 billion, making it the first mobile app to achieve such a high valuation. Ms. Frier’s account draws on interviews with those involved in the sale, whose price seemed enormous to many observers—but turned out to be a bargain. Mr. Zuckerberg’s foresight in snapping up a potential competitor is part of the reason antitrust authorities are now scrutinizing tech deals so closely.
After the acquisition, Mr. Zuckerberg made attempts to assure worried Instagram users that the company would keep its independence. But, as Ms. Frier tells it, the founders faced resistance inside Facebook: In contrast to Facebook’s famous “move fast and break things” philosophy, “Instagram wanted things to be carefully considered and designed before they were released to people,” the author writes. “Humans, not numbers. Artists, photographers, and designers, not DAUs, the Facebook term for ‘daily active users.’ ”
The Instagram team (the founders had stayed on to run the company) picked this period to create its first set of core values—many of which, Ms. Frier notes, revealed “not-so-subtle notes of culture clash with Facebook.” These values included such tenets as “community first” and “simplicity matters”—a dig, she suggests, at Facebook’s more mercenary ethos. Ms. Frier paints a picture of Mr. Zuckerberg as an executive always seemingly threatened by the success of Instagram and the thought that it might one day replace Facebook in cultural importance.
Ms. Frier’s account tends to reflect the point of view of the founders and those sympathetic to their original vision. In the years after the Instagram deal, the old guard at Instagram may have chafed at Facebook’s constricting leadership, but the social network itself grew and became profitable because of Facebook’s vast resources. Instagram ran its first advertisement in November 2013 and reached $1 billion in revenue just 18 months later. By 2019 Instagram’s revenue had reached $20 billion. The subsidiary benefited from having access to talented employees and the latest product features, such as integrated commerce—which lets something you see quickly become something you buy.
Instagram’s founders finally left the company in 2018, but to this day an emphasis on “creativity” and community does still seem evident on Instagram. The site is seen by many as a place insulated from the aggressiveness of Facebook. But one of Instagram’s most notable contributions to internet culture had less to do with creativity than with cashing in.
The Kardashian family—already celebrities thanks to reality TV—were among the first to recognize the potential of being Instagram “influencers.” “The Kardashian empire on Instagram was like Oprah’s Book Club in the late 1990s, with a supersize silicone injection,” writes Ms. Frier. Kim Kardashian, who has more than 150 million followers, can earn $1 million for a single post. But influencer status no longer belongs just to the Kardashians: Instagram has become a “celebrity-making machine.” More than 200 million users have more than 50,000 followers—meaning that, according to Ms. Frier, they can earn enough through “sponsored” posts to earn a living. These social-media accounts, Ms. Frier argues, are like mini media companies. Users aspire to get the picture-perfect lives they see others having on Instagram.
“‘No Filter” offers an engaging account of how tech founders’ ideals inevitably have to be squared with making profits. Yet somehow—perhaps the clarity of its founders’ vision—the Instagram experience still usually feels like it is about more than just the company’s bottom line. Over the past few months of pandemic-provoked lockdowns, many users have been trapped at home—the influencers, the “normal people,” the celebrities. Instagram has stood out as one of the platforms many of us relied on to document and connect each day, despite being physically apart.
Ms. Cromwell is the social-media editor for the Journal’s Opinion pages.
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