Fontaines D.C. dropped a new song last week. “Marianne” is the lead single off the Irish band’s forthcoming album, Dopamine Chamber, and it’s a good one with a sinewy groove that’s similar to ‘90s Depeche Mode. The band, whose last album, Romance, is one of my favorites in recent years, only dominated my Instagram feed for a couple days. It was just long enough to convince me to sign up for the Hollywood Forever ticket pre-sale, which I don’t even know if I’m going to do because I’m not in the mood to fight with bots over tickets that probably cost more than I should spend. I guess I was supposed to pre-order Dopamine Chamber, which is out in October, too. I could take my pick between the $47.58 deluxe gatefold, the $28.03 blue vinyl and the $25.48 regular vinyl on Bandcamp, but, nah, I would rather wait until the record is out and support my local brick-and-mortar indie record store.
In the lifespan of today’s clip loops, this Fontaines D.C. one was pretty short. It was quickly supplanted by Slayyyter’s cover of Hole’s song “Violet,” which popped up on my feed through most of the weekend. I don’t think I’ve heard the whole song yet, but the chorus is good, I guess. I don’t know. I had the sound off most of the times it appeared. All I can tell you is that MTV was never this bad about repetition. Instagram, though, has no chill. Like one song and, all of a sudden, the artist usurps your timeline.
Between the clips and the memes and the influencers and the dumbass comments from bots/bot-brained humans, Facebook and Instagram are doing a good job of making me annoyed by things, and people, that I actually like. I’ve seen my own feed get hijacked by one musician after the next this year alone. But, it doesn’t stop there. The same thing has happened with sports figures, politicians, podcasters and influencers whose names I can’t even remember. I’ve come to resent how brazen Instagram is in its manipulation. It’s constantly trying to push me into creepy stan territory, regardless of the amount of posts I ignore.
The ease with which social media can be used to manipulate opinions isn’t some new phenomenon. If it were, President Donald J. Trump wouldn’t have ever been a thing. Yet, here we are, living in the midst of MAGA 2: Pathetic Trumpaloo. Some people get sucked into pop culture standoms, others go MAGA.
“But, I bet if you turned off the Internet and forced them out of their loop, they wouldn’t be like that,” I say to some friends at a club when we start talking about this shitty timeline and how some people still support that turd in the White House.
We get on the subject of the Meta trial and I say that I get that it’s easier to drum up support when you talk about how this is harmful for the kids, but, really, social media is messing with all of us and it’s just getting progressively worse. These algorithm-based feeds that now dictate so much of what we believe to be true are fucking with all of our perceptions of what’s real and what isn’t.
I’ll relate this to music, since it’s the only thing I really know. This year, my timeline has been taken over by Gorillaz, Kneecap, The Strokes, Slayyyter, Tomora, Madonna, The Strokes again, Madonna-and-Kylie, Fontaines D.C. and Slayyyter again. Those are just the ones I can remember offhand, mostly because they’re all artists I like and none of them are particularly obscure. They have fans. In a few cases, they have multiple generations of fans acquired over the course of decades. And, if you looked at my timeline at various points this year, you would think that all of the artists had recently “gone viral.” That’s not quite the case. I just happen to be in the subset of users who are being served viral levels of their content at different points in time. When I play the specific songs from these seemingly viral clips at the club, the reactions are roughly comparable to how crowds reacted to new music 20 years ago. Some people dance, some people don’t and the response gets better after each spin at the club. Whether or not it has “social media hit” cred is irrelevant since we’re in a roomful of people who all have different timelines. And, yes, that’s as true for Madonna as it is for newer artists.
“People are getting really weird,” I say to my friends. I say that a lot and I’ve been saying it for at least the past six years, but shit just keeps getting weirder. We’re all living with one foot in our timelines and one IRL. That’s not an accident. Every platform we use is designed to keep us locked in, believing what we see in the endless scroll even if, and when, a stroll in the real world would prove that what’s in our timeline isn’t true.
We know that this isn’t good for any of us. Most of the research I’ve seen has been on young people and social media, but I think it’s safe to say that most of us know what it’s like to try to have a conversation with someone who is locked in the scroll. We probably all have friends who send us far too many memes or Reels or TikToks, but never actually text a “Hey, how are you?”And I’m certain that we have all argued with people who cannot be convinced that the viral news they’re quoting is actually 100% not true. The so-called Loneliness Epidemic is just scratching the surface of what’s wrong with us. I think we’re losing a shared sense of reality, if we haven’t lost it already.
Recently, I read a CNBC report saying that the Meta case could be the end of what we know as social media. Goodbye algorithm! Goodbye perpetual scroll! Goodbye autoplay videos! The CNBC story makes this sound like a bad thing, but, if I could light a candle to make this happen, I would. TBH, I think we’re totally cooked and IDK if anything short of a Butlerian jihad will fix this, but, an end to the infinite scroll and the repetitiveness of the algorithm is a start.
Liz O. is an L.A.-based writer and DJ. Follow on Instagram or sign up for the weekly, Beatique newsletter for updates on new stories and gigs.
Listen to the August 2026 edition of Beatique with music from Arctic Monkeys, Divine Comedy, Boy Harsher, horsegiirL, Turnstile and more.
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