Effective immediately, users of Instagram must be at least one of the following at all times:
• In Greece.
• Getting married.
• Eating an expensive-looking meal that—surprise!—is actually homemade.
• Visibly pregnant.
• Smiling the carefree smile of the young and beautiful.
• A sunset or a cat.
• Doing one of those mud races that people seemed to love a few years back. Are those still a thing?
• Showing off a new tattoo—but now it has to be a good tattoo.
• In an immersive Yayoi Kusama art installation.
• A baby. (Note to babies: try the Gingham filter!)
• Looking away from the camera the way models do, you know?
• A sponsored advertisement for an organic protein bar that retails for $5.99.
All Twitter users must now check a box indicating whether they’re a white supremacist or a comedian. It will just be easier this way.
Where to begin—O.K., look, we know that Facebook has let a lot of people down lately, and we’re sorry. Really. Electoral meddling, enormous data breaches, that feeling of hollowness that users are invariably left with after logging off—we regret it all. And we’re going to do better. Facebook started out with one simple, noble mission: to psychologically atomize the global population for our own economic benefit, all while doubling down on the Orwellian claim that we’re “bringing people together.” That was the plan. We had no idea that it was going to lead to this tangibly worse world we now inhabit. Seriously! Think about the empty materialism of the eighties, or the depressed listlessness of the nineties—we figured the rise of social media would, at worst, just create a new existential malaise that we could make billions of dollars from. Anyway, it looks like that ship has sailed. Political discourse is toxic, and studies show that feelings of loneliness and isolation are particularly widespread among Americans who came of age during the rise of Facebook. To combat this, our new user agreement stipulates that no one on our platform is allowed to talk about any of the stuff we just said.
Snapchat
Our message is simple: stop using the face-distortion thing that makes it look like you have big eyes. It’s unsettling and gross. Honestly, it was a mistake for us to offer it in the first place, and we’d get rid of it if we could. But the guy who coded it, James Hogarth, left the company last year, and no one else knows how to delete it. We even called in outside contractors. Nothing worked. Then we tried to track down James. He wouldn’t pick up his phone or respond to e-mails, so we went to his new address, in Atlanta. It was an empty field with a lone gravestone. Apparently, James has been dead for two hundred years. Long story short, we’re begging you—please, stop with the big-eye face-distortion thing. We’re pretty sure that it’s powered by an ancient curse. Thank you.
Venmo
All Venmo users must upload their complete financial histories for mandatory public viewing. This includes everything: the cafeteria lunches you bought in elementary school, the home you purchased with your spouse, the marijuana you promised yourself you’d cut back on but haven’t. It’s all going to be out in the open. Liberate yourself from the prison that is privacy. Stand naked before the throng of your fellow human beings. Ceaselessly scroll through everyone’s most intimate economic transactions until you lose your very sense of self. Agree to this, or figure out how to split the check eight ways using cash you don’t have. Yeah, that’s what we thought.
From now on, all LinkedIn users must occasionally use LinkedIn. ♦
