I know this will probably be rather controversial, but it's not just instagram, the whole internet is ruining and poisoning and deconstructing whole segments of human interaction and activity and relationship.

It goes far beyond just people posting the best of the idealized pictures they took of idealized places; it goes well into the perversion that social media in general causes that is eating its way through humanity right now where idealized illusions and perceptions are posted to social media that affect others in ways that has never before been experienced by humans. We are simply not socially or even evolutionary adapted to that massive change in human relations at this point, and I can assure you is having real impacts on lives and will only start spinning out of control even more over time.

It is precisely why I deliberately do not post images on social media, not just because it is a security issue to me, but because I am damn sure I don't want to attract the zombie hordes to the places I've discovered around the world just so they can be trampled by ignorant dolts that just want to post a picture online and attract even more people.

It's really a kind of real world network effect that is gripping humanity. Austin, Texas is a good example of a foreshadowing (or is it maybe just a casualty of a transitory phase) world in which social media draws in throngs of people who then smother the thing they ostensibly like and love (Anyone remember the baby dolphin incident?)

The new social media capacity for posting and distribution of awareness, combined with the natural and social amenities of the city and events (ACL and SXSW) caused a flood of people to start migrating like buffalo to a watering hole and they have, for all intents and purposes, fully smothered what made Austin great in the first place and are well underway of trampling and overrunning the rest. Sure, go visit Austin and you'll love it too because you don't know what it was and therefore have no context or baseline, but reality is that things will be AWESOME until there's a break in the pattern. You don't understand that Austin simply does not have the capacity to support the throngs of people that have moved there, which has caused it to essentially collapse what it was; and also does not have the capacity to support larger populations with anything like the amenities that you see in other real cities. Unfortunately, these kinds of things tend to have a long run-up and build-up and an inversely sharp break-point; but the break will come eventually once the city succumbs to the unsustainable pressures. Texas and Austin actually have a long history of exacerbated booms and busts, so it will be interesting to see how that plays out in today's social media world.

Will social media prevent a bust by feeding the ponzi scheme, or will it trigger or fuel the bust as the next big thing becomes the it place to live and work and it drains the city practically overnight as the locust swarm flocks to it's new grazing grounds.

But to get back on track; there is something rather incompatible with prior assumptions about humanity and even things like overpopulation and whether the planet can support such large populations, which do not take into account or include the real world network effects we are seeing with social media. Social media is causing an intensification of the impact of human activity as people start herding far more than ever before and all flocking to the same places and things; and the second something becomes popular on social media is pretty much the death knell by simply being overrun, overwhelmed, and smothered by throngs of people.