This story is part of a collection of pieces on how we spend money today.
By now, you've become accustomed to the tainted synchronicity of targeted marketing. You email or talk with a friend about a given topic—Instant Pots, hiking boots, desk lamps—and boom, said topic shows up in a banner ad the next day. Isn't that crazy? you say to yourself, wondering how long it'll be before the Instant Pots stop following you around. (The answer is never. They will never stop following you. On the bright side, they really will change the way you think about cooking beans.)
How does it happen? Microphones! Location tracking! An endlessly updated holistic fingerprint generated by your unspoken innermost desires! No. Well, maybe kinda yes in some ways, but evolutionarily speaking this is prokaryotic stuff: Most likely you just Googled something. Even if the circumstances seem creepy, it's just as likely that what you're seeing an ad for isn't even something you want to know about.
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However. If it's truly insidious marketing you seek—something personalized, perfectly titrated, and just a tiny bit insane—then allow me to introduce you to the Instagram Shame Silo. Specifically, to the 2019 version of the Instant Pot: Star Wars kettlebells.
It began, both literally and figuratively, at 30,000 feet. I was on a plane, scrolling through Instagram, when an ad came through my feed for an ultralightweight backpack, a black waterproof low-profile thing that could pack down into itself. I liked it, it was 20 percent off, and I have a serious backpack problem to begin with. For the first time my life, I tapped through and bought something from an Instagram ad. I already followed a bunch of bag and trail running accounts, making me a prime candidate for a company with some extra inventory to unload. Little did I know that Instagram was just getting started.
Around that time, I had joined a new gym. This wasn't a conventional gym, packed with treadmills and weight machines, but one of those CrossFit-adjacent places that programs excruciatingly strategized workouts. On a big whiteboard festooned with acronyms like AMRAP and EMOM, you'd find the day's assortment of kettlebell swings and Spider-Man pushups, mountain climbers and sumo deadlifts. Each night, sweaty and somehow exhilarated, I'd take a photo of the workout and throw it on my Instagram Story.
In my mind, this practice helped me stay accountable one day at a time—the precise time a Story would remain—while avoiding the narcissism of mirror selfies and other thirst trappage disguised as social-media motivation. But in doing so, I'd given my burgeoning interest a geotag and maybe even some AI-scannable text. I had, in other words, asked the vampires inside. And just like that, the ads changed.
First came the quadriceps. So many quadriceps! So much bulging! So much chalk dust! Then a whole universe of things made out of steel and iron. Clubs. Maces. Something that for some unknown reason are not called Boba Fettlebells. Then all the things to help me recover from the things I did to my quadriceps with the steel and iron! To look at my feed, you’d think I spent my days doing muscle-ups in $70 shorts and my nights strapped to the gills with various recovery devices.
Somehow, I loved it. People may be prone to rabbit holes, but most of us also know there are some interests that don't quite translate into casual conversations—no one wants to be The Guy At Work Who Talks About [Insert New All-Consuming Hobby Here]. Depending on the nerdiness or New Aginess of the hobby, there may even be mild social stigma to the hobby. Or the fact that it taps into a deeper insecurity. Hey, I'm convinced that my arms look like month-old celery stalks, I'm gonna go ahead and foreground that in our lunch conversation! The magic of the shame silo is that it short-circuits all of your reticence and wordlessly ushers you into a world filled with the buyable, fetishizable accoutrements.
Through some alchemy involving the accounts you follow, your own posts and geotagging, and general Facebook ad-servicing dark arts, you've got a shame silo too. Yours might be the most actuarial subgenre of tabletop game possible, or wellness supplements, or headphones. It's somehow the right kind of invasive: generally interesting but never so persistent that you feel deluged (and, crucially, never so needed that you can't resist).
At its best, the shame silo offers up a fractured version of the Sears Roebuck catalog (an institution of perusal that faded along with Gen X-ers' childhoods). At its worst, it's somehow even better—like the weird outer periphery of booths at a consumer-electronics expo, hawking products that are all the more compelling for their ill-conceived wretchedness. The zenith/nadir of my own shame silo was an ad for The Iron Neck, an enormous metal headdress that purports to strengthen your neck while having the added benefit of making you look like you're recovering from a bus collision. Would I buy that? Good lord, no. But I'm glad to know it exists.
The shame silo doesn't necessarily work—I haven't bought a single thing since that backpack—but it makes Instagram a lot more fun to use. It is the rare, and perhaps only, instance of ads improving an experience. Deep in your soul, you know that one day you'll cave. Something will come along at just the right time, at just the right price, that your thumb will act before your brain does, and you'll find yourself the proud owner of something you never imagined wanting. Even better? You'll regret nothing. There's no shame in that.
