Last year, Lillian Ahenkan – the artist-priestess better known as Flex Mami – cleared her entire Instagram grid. After more than a decade as a content creator, she was in Ghana writing her second book, a shadow-work journal titled Ask Yourself This, and felt entitled to what she called a “clean slate”: a chance to reintroduce herself to the world online. “It took about eight hours in practice to wipe thousands of posts – hundreds of thousands of hours of free content with the perhaps naive expectation that I’d feel more connected to the people who I share online space,” she says. “A belief that whatever messages were there, we received, and if they weren’t, I trust that whatever I say now is way more potent.”

Ahenkan isn’t the only one wiping her digital footprint. It’s an old-school marketing tactic for celebrities looking to signal a new project or rebrand (although I’m sure they’re not the ones deleting everything by hand). Taylor Swift did it in 2017 to mark the start of her Reputation era. Bad Bunny cleared his feed shortly after his Super Bowl performance. Just this month, Charli xcx wiped everything, only to return with a grainy black-and-white photo teasing her upcoming rock album. “It’s always fascinating to see how people, from global icons to everyday people, treat their Instagram profile as a canvas,” says Tessa Lyons, VP of Product, Instagram. It’s also another sign of how personal branding – once a necessary part of celebrity culture – has trickled down into everyday life, even for people who don’t have an album coming out.

So what does it say about our relationship to the internet that the laborious process of wiping your entire grid has gone somewhat mainstream? For photographer Emily Lipson, it speaks to a craving for an “internet expiration date”. “Sometimes I look at my feed, and I see this thing I did 5 years ago, and I’m like, oh god. It feels so old,” she says. “Why do we still have to look at it? The internet is too permanent in this way.” The shift points to a newer (and almost ironic) conundrum: part of the internet’s original appeal was that it offered us a way to document our lives and imagine that some piece of us might live on forever. But somewhere along the way, between the rise of curated feeds, influencer culture and the resurfacing of old celebrity tweets, our relationship to digital footprints changed. 

“For celebs, it comes down to awareness of two things: the permanence of the internet and the attention economy. For us normies, it’s probably more of an identity crisis”

For many, the humble Instagram grid has become just another box to put ourselves in – and one we now want to break out of. Lipson, for example, wishes creators had more control over the work that exists online, or that it would at least disappear after a certain point. “I sometimes wish the footprint were gone, and my current work were all that was available,” she says. After years of being “mined” for content, Ahenkan has now wiped her feed upwards of ten times, viewing her online presence as a “bat signal” and an extension of her in-person priorities. “I’m simply addicted to the choice of waiving what feels outdated,” she says. “I think it’s the collective thought leaders gaining sentience, realising that a big chunk of reality moves at the pace of our willingness to change what we do.” 

We can trace the craving for an impermanent internet through the rise of Snapchat, and later Stories on Instagram and TikTok, as people feel more comfortable sharing their lives when they know the post will disappear after 24 hours. The anxiety around posting to our “main grids” goes hand in hand with the professionalisation and monetisation of social platforms. Once a place to actually be social and connect with friends, the internet has, for the generation that grew up online – and therefore has the most extensive digital footprints – become a place where some people rocket up career ladders while others lose jobs because of what they post. Now, that same generation is growing into adulthood and trying to take control of how they are perceived in the process.

“I posted whatever I wanted: I would go on Instagram live, taking shots with my friends or doing OOTDs in the Wawa bathroom,” says Nat, a 26-year-old culinary student in Brooklyn. “But a few months ago, my culinary school advisor told us Instagram serves as a food portfolio and encouraged us to leverage it, with the note that if we were uncomfortable with our grandmother seeing a post, it probably shouldn’t be up – employers look at that too.” Because of this, Nat wiped her entire feed this year. She says her friends often talk (and joke) about wiping their feeds: some are wary about the wrong person coming across an old post, but others just yearn for a simpler, private life. 

Carolyn Zou, a 28-year-old filmmaker in Sydney, has wiped her feed a few times over the years. They had accumulated a lot of “teenage shit-posts”, so the wipes were often a lonely, late-night endeavour. “I did feel attached and took endless screenshots of old posts and their comments before deleting anything,” she says. “Then, Instagram introduced the archive feature, which completely lifted the nostalgic burden.” Now, she archives posts freely, treating her digital presence less like a “junk journal” and more like a curated portfolio. “For celebs, it comes down to awareness of two things: the permanence of the internet and the attention economy,” they say. “For us normies, it's probably more of an identity crisis.”

“I feel a lot of relief in wiping my grid clean, in the same way that I feel when I get a brand new notebook. You don’t get a lot of blank slates in life, and this isn't necessarily that, but it feels pretty damn close”

The desire for a fresh start online, however, is not just a celebrity matter – it’s likely a direct response to the rise of surveillance capitalism. In a time when AI is supercharging the power of surveillance technology, our own social platforms are the places where we can pretend we have any control over the role of technology in our lives. “I feel a lot of relief in wiping my grid clean, in the same way that I feel when I get a brand new notebook,” says Sara Jin Li, a 29-year-old filmmaker in Brooklyn who clears her Instagram grid every couple of months. “You don’t get a lot of blank slates in life, and this isn't necessarily that, but it feels pretty damn close.” 

When you think about it, trying to capture the essence of a person through a feed was a ludicrous endeavour to begin with. Although personal-brand culture has normalised the curation of personhood into neat content categories, our lives – and we ourselves – are constantly in flux. “What you posted a decade ago or even a year ago probably doesn’t reflect who you are now, but these posts are trapped in the proverbial amber, right?” says Jin Li. To wipe your social media clean, then, can be understood as a way of refusing to hold yourself to the standard of an older version of yourself.

Mel, a 31-year-old model in Cincinnati, wiped their entire feed two months after their dear friend passed. “I felt like I was just bleeding everywhere and couldn’t stop,” they say. “I posted some stories and photos of us together and then took them down and put them back up again because I just couldn’t hack.” Nothing online made sense anymore. They felt like a piece of them died – so it didn’t make sense to exist on social media in the same way.

For Matt Thompson, who is based in Ontario, it was Byung-Chul Han’s The Burnout Society that inspired his deleting spree. He realised his ever-present feed had become a place to say “look what I’m doing with my time” or “I matter”. “We feel endless pressure to show the world what we could be – that we have value in that we have potential,” Thompson says. “But, in the end, it all returns to dust.”