Last year, I took 658 photos during my four-day trip to Venice. Fifteen years ago, I would have posted every single one of them to Facebook. And as I waited the three hours for them to upload, I would have opened another tab to look through all 500 photos in my second cousin’s friend’s FLORIDA 09 Facebook album, which would have included 48 shots of the same sunset and 16 of a chip flavor she didn’t have back at home.

Nowadays, with Instagram as our primary photo-sharing method, that packet of chips would end up on slide seven of what my second cousin’s friend would call a dump: a retrospective of her summer compacted into a carousel of artfully artless images.

An Instagram dump is a set of ostensibly unedited, low-stakes, impressionistic photos posted in a seemingly random order and finished with a dispassionate caption. Something like “summer in a dump”, or, as Jennifer Lopez recently put it: “Oh, it was summer.” But we know in our heart of hearts that it isn’t really a “dump”. That word implies that we are merely unloading clutter from our camera rolls on a whim, when what we’re really doing is much more involved: spending an entire afternoon whittling down thousands of photos to eight, trying to create an authentic “vibe” from pictures of friends, buildings and martini glasses; a couple lo-res memes; and one shot solely of our face (for the algorithm, of course).

Thanks to a recent update, I can now post not just 10 but 20 photos of my Venice trip – though that amount would be extremely gauche. I will see no more than 20 photos of my second cousin’s friend’s early fall, once she, like everyone else on my feed, dutifully posts a dump-formatted recap of her past four weeks. Life may be happening on Instagram stories, and in TikToks and tweets, but the Instagram grid is where we all go to memorialize it.

Millennials, who are most susceptible to the dump trend, have spent a substantial amount of our lives creating visual repositories online. We’ve framed ourselves according to the whims and tropes of the moment – from the flash-in-the-mirror poses of the aughts to the duckfaces of the 2010s. But never has our visual presentation online been so homogenized.

Once the province of my art school friends in 2019, dumps have overtaken our feeds, with everyone from the head cheerleader at our high school to pop stars posting them. The aesthetics of the haphazard and amateurish are now shortcuts for cultural capital, which is why the biggest names in music style their public lives after dumps – just take a look at how Dua Lipa or Ariana Grande or Katy Perry revel in their own lo-res chaos.

These kinds of images might have once been a genuine aesthetic disruption. And, sure, taken at face value, they are an affront to Instagram’s clean and minimalist display. That is why the dumps persist. They feel like antidotes to the high-sheen aesthetics of influencers, an invasion of personality upon a vapid land of sponcon. In reality, they’re just a way to obscure the truth that we’re feigning playfulness within commercial templates. We communicate ourselves inasmuch as we contort around the rubric of dumps. That’s all the creativity we are allotted.

Unfortunately, Instagram’s infrastructure incentivizes this kind of informal formality. The algorithm – which, if we’re honest, is a word everyone says but no one actually understands – is elusive by design. Posts haven’t shown up in chronological order for quite some time. Instead, the algorithm (whatever that actually is) buries them. So, we post less often, knowing implicitly that people will be less likely to see what we upload. The less we upload, the more precious our posts, so the longer we spend on them. The more time we spend on them, the more embarrassing, so the more we downplay the labor we put into them. It’s a dumb dump cycle.

A couple of years ago, a popular meme began circulating online, reading: “I am cringe therefore I am free.” A more accurate version would be: “I am cringe therefore I am trapped on Instagram.” Cringe has become to the 2020s what empowerment was to the 2010s, an attitude that keeps us posting. Be as cringe as you like, but when you post a dump, all you’re doing is cleanly bending to the app’s will.