Has closing social media profiles become the subversive act of contemporary feminism?

Lana Del Rey, the most enigmatic of pop stars, said last Saturday in a black and white selfie video on her IGTV that she would deactivate her social media accounts the following day because she simply "has so many other interests".
Sally Rooney, the young Irish writer unanimously described by critics around the world as the most promising literary voice of the millennial generation who has just published her new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You, never used Instagram or any other social media. average. “In July 2015 she deleted her Twitter account and since then she has not been present on any social media”: this is how the Wikipedia page of Ottessa Moshfegh, author of the best seller My year of rest and oblivion, says, What can I say. Maybe even Virginia Woolf - if she had existed today - she would never have made her cocker Pinka a star on Tik-Tok with the trend "That's Just My Baby Dog".

Not just radical women who take leave of Instagram, though. The latest quit from social media was by Britney Spears, who for a few hours announced on Twitter that she has temporarily deactivated her Instagram account to enjoy her engagement with singer Sam Asghari. In short, in addition to her father, she also got rid of scrolling.

How did it happen that feminism 2.0 suddenly finds itself celebrating the requiem mass of social media? In the near future, will we no longer be those girls who saw in the mirror-selfie in a bikini in the mirror an act of radical emancipation, or even, the translation on a reflective surface of the substance of which a collective on post-patriarchy is made? These are open questions, not rhetorical ones - but we cannot avoid asking ourselves at this historic moment. We found a beautiful aesthetic synthesis of these questions in Kim Kardashian's look at the Met Gala 2021; Kim showed up completely covered in a custom-made Balenciaga dress that definitively reshaped the concept of total-black. She, who made the hyper-exposure of the B-side of her the stylistic code of her social grammar - she denied herself in such a radical way to the flashes of photographers - but at the same time generating a myriad of articles on the philosophy of fashion at the bottom of that.

The society of show, then, has not really stopped giving shows; but it gives even more spectacle by denying what until now had been the intimate substance of the 2.0 show: the hyper-presence of the digital image? And, then, in the end, will this Kim Kardashian look reveal itself for what it is, that is yet another coup de théâtre, which will be followed by the usual mirror-selfie that leaves little to the imagination? Even sexting, making a conceptual leap, is part of this dialectic of "concealment" which, however, in the end we always want to follow the contact with a body. That you can see and touch.

If many contemporary feminists see social media as the new square to go down, metaphorically, and assert their rights - let's just think of homegrown voices like the lawyer Cathy La Torre, the writer/performer/podcaster Tea Hacic and the activist Carlotta Vagnoli, but also the creator of Girls Lena Dunham very present on Instagram, others, like the examples mentioned at the beginning, seem to want to keep away from them as much as possible. Another consideration to make is that not having Instagram as a creative is partly a class choice; creatives of any kind, from musicians to writers passing through visual artists, use it as a portfolio of their work and therefore if the artist of the situation decides to remove it, it means that he is already so famous and economically affirmed that he can afford not to have any need for professional self-production and networking purposes.

It was back in 2004, when the writer William Gibson had declared: "The future is not google-able". The idea that the Internet and social networks as we have lived them end is terrible and electrifying together; as indeed is any real change. Perhaps, as happened in painting in 1910 with Malevič's famous black square, we just need a momentary annihilation, a fog effect on the exposure of the self, to return to understand the importance of color images.