“Globalisation takes place only in capital and data,” the literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written. “Everything else is damage control.” We talk about politics, culture and travel becoming globalised, but on a more fundamental level, Spivak is correct that what really flows across the planet are various forms of money and information: investments, corporations, infrastructure, server farms and the combined data of all the digital platforms, sluicing invisibly like wind or ocean currents between nations. We users voluntarily pumped our own information through this system, turning ourselves into flowing commodities, too.

We users are what makes social media run, and yet we also aren’t given full control over the relationships we develop on the platforms, in large part because algorithmic recommendations are so dominant.

Pursuing Instagrammability is a trap: the fast growth that comes with adopting a recognisable template, whether for a physical space or purely digital content, gives way to the daily grind of keeping up posts and figuring out the latest twists of the algorithm – which hashtags, memes or formats need to be followed.

Wow, that's a long read!