Socality Barbie, a brilliant satire of that #authentic #pacificnorthwest life, launched five months ago. In the inaugural post, we met our star: A literal Barbie, wearing Warby Parker-esque glasses and a knit hat over her shiny brown hair, accompanied with the caption, “I believe in the person I want to become,” followed by 28 hashtags.
On Wednesday, the human behind the doll revealed herself: Darby Cisneros, a wedding photographer in Portland, Oregon.
In her final post, Cisneros wrote, “I started SB as a way to poke fun at all the Instagram trends that I thought were ridiculous… It has open [sic] the door to a lot of great discussions like: how we choose to present ourselves online, the insane lengths many of us go to to create the perfect Instagram life, and calling into question our authenticity and motives. It’s been a blast running this account but I believe SB’s work here is done.”
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Socality Barbie, rarely spotted without her military-inspired jacket, skinny jeans, and booties, carries a Filson backpack and wraps herself in a Pacific Northwest Pendleton blanket on the beach. She spends a lot of time gazing at nature, reading Kinfolk, standing by lakes, posing by train tracks, walking in the woods, and exploring with Kent, a “rad dude” with scruff and a buffalo-plaid shirt who is “a barista/model/writer/woodworker and probably one of the coolest people I know.”
“People were all taking the same pictures in the same places and using the same captions. I couldn’t tell any of their pictures apart, so I thought, What better way to make my point than with a mass-produced doll?” Cisneros told Wired in September. At the time, three months after she created the account, she didn’t make her real name public. Her followers numbered in the thousands. Today’s follower count: 1.3 million.
The strangest thing about following Socality Barbie is that, if you scroll through enough of the images, the difference between her non-existent life as a plastic toy and the art-directed lives of flesh-and-blood humans starts to shrink. It almost evaporates.
Socality Barbie succeeds in criticizing Instagram users — a specific, yet ubiquitous, subset — from within Instagram, and this her masterful feat. Instead of levying her critique from without, like a square on the sidelines who thinks the game isn’t worth playing anyway, she infiltrated the very platform that enables the behavior she’s mocked. And, perhaps the most admirable part of all, she’s walking away. She’s made her point and she’s leaving while her bit is still funny and her perspective is still salient.
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She has some company on that front, sort of: On Monday, Essena O’Neill, an eighteen-year-old Instagram celebrity from Australia, declared that the pressures of maintaining the illusion of perfection in post after post were making her miserable. She had half a million Instagram followers, plus 200,000 subscribers on YouTube and Tumblr and 60,000 on Snapchat. Elle reported that O’Neill deleted 2,000 photos and changed the name of her Instagram account to “Social Media is Not Real Life.” She also changed the captions to the photos she left up, with messages like, “NOT REAL LIFE — I didn’t pay for the dress, took countless photos trying to look hot for Instagram, the formal made me feel incredibly alone.”
In a Vimeo video, O’Neill announced that she would be quitting social media. She proceeded to “quit’ social media in the same way Jay Z “retired” from rap, keeping her Instagram public — thus bringing even more eyeballs to the images she claimed to despise — with edited captions telling the “real” stories behind the shots, and posting three videos in three days.
The first, a nearly 13-minute riff titled “Why I think social media sucks,” went up five days ago. The third, “OVERWHELMED AND BEYOND WORDS GRATEFUL,” opens with O’Neill, sniffling and in tears, saying, “I don’t ever think I’ve been happier than this moment.” Her message that “likes, followers, views, that we’re more than a number, it’s going global,” she says, before immediately spinning the camera around to show her laptop screen: “This morning, I have so many emails from people, like Good Morning America, like The Project, all these massive media outlets that want to do interviews.”
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She’s launched a website, Let’s Be Game Changers, the purpose of which is (deep breath): “to spread new age messages of conscious living, addition to technology, conversations on transparency online, minimise the celebrity culture, promote veganism, plant based nutrition, environmental awareness, social issues, gender equality, controversial art. Release an interview series with individuals that are wanting to change the game they were told to play. ALSO, make the positive collaborative forum for individuals to talk about REAL WORLD stuff, connect over ideas not likes, followers or views.”
Within days, two YouTube stars — sisters Nina and Randa, with whom O’Neill stayed on a visit to L.A. — released a response video. It’s… something. There’s a lot of “how you can say ‘no offense’ when what you said is mean?” comebacks. They call O’Neill’s abrupt non-departure from that Insta-life “a hoax” and float the theory that O’Neill’s sudden spiral was not the result of a spiritual awakening re: selfies but a break-up with her boyfriend, a guy O’Neill allegedly met through Nina and Randa.
O’Neill and Cisneros occupy a strange, self-referential intersection together: They are, this week, people who have used social media… to criticize an element of social media… which in turn helped them become even more successful… on social media. But while Cisneros’ project is purpose-driven, a character she created with the express purpose of illuminating and examining the ways in which we present ourselves online, O’Neill’s is something far less self-aware.
O’Neill became a social media star, then chomped her telegenic teeth on the hand that fed her, claiming an epiphany about all the time she feels she wasted getting that just-right-light for bikini shots or wearing dresses in sponsored posts for #brands she didn’t “believe” in (whether or not anyone can or should ever “believe” in a brand is a project for another day). Only after commenters pointed out that, uh, leaving the “fake” photos up was kind of hypocritical did O’Neill take down her Instagram entirely.
O’Neill is presenting some very basic, universally acknowledged truths about social media as if she’s blowing everyone’s minds with her breaking news. And maybe, for some of her followers, she is? Seems doubtful, considering the fact that teenagers, O’Neill’s peers/target demographic, are internet native speakers; they probably know, better than just about anyone, how manipulated and “fake” their friends’ Instagram feeds are.
Cisneros, meanwhile, uses the common tropes of a common type of Instagrammer (though, key to Cisneros’ critique is that these Instagrammers think of themselves as anything but common) to point out that authenticity, inasmuch as you can capture it on Instagram, is a performance, and that everyone in their silo thinks they’ve posted something very unique and special and real but everyone’s version of “real” actually winds up looking exactly alike, because we are all picking up on the same cultural cues that dictate what is “authentic” and what isn’t. That’s why, to cite one example of this style of group-think, every wedding you’ve been to since 2012 has featured signature cocktails in Mason jars.
While O’Neill seems to think she’s swapped something fake for something real, Cisneros’ work savvily demonstrates that what O’Neill has really adopted is still a performance, branded to look like it isn’t one. It’s just as deliberate for O’Neill to put her curly hair in a bun and be bare-faced in her Vimeo videos, shot like a low-budget confessional from a reality show, as it was for her to blow-dry her hair smooth and apply lipstick in her posts from last month.
Come to think of it, O’Neill would probably get a lot out of some time spent looking through and thinking about Socality Barbie. You know, if she were still on Instagram.