From: Instagram
To: HisDudenessEleventy
Date: Fri, April 21, 2017 at 12:44 PM
We have exciting news, HisDudenessEleventy! Starting today you will be able to take advantage of an exciting new feature we’re making available to select power-users - AutoGram! This is an amazing digital assistant we’ve been developing in secret for the past two years and it will revolutionize the way you use Instagram. Or, rather, the way you’ll be able to use Instagram even less.
We all love to edit and post up our amazing shots of Sunday breakfast or a gorgeous sunset over a lake, but sometimes we also want to enjoy the moment with a loved one. Here’s where AutoGram swings in to save the day! Once you take a photo, AutoGram sweeps down and asks if you’d like to post it to Instagram. You click the bright green Yes and that’s it!
AutoGram color-balances your photo based on your historical usages - we’ve been combing through billions of photos, figuring out what you like to do with your photos - and automatically tags your friends and family - provided they are on Facebook - and posts the photo to your account. AutoGram will step in and do the mundane, so you can focus on the truly extraordinary, like lining up that next shot or digging into that tower of pancakes!
Find more information about AutoGram here.
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From: Instagram
To: HisDudenessEleventy
Date: Fri, June 2, 2017 at 1:05 PM
Howdy, HisDudenessEleventy! In April we unveiled AutoGram, our exciting new feature that automagically (yes!) posts your recent photos to Instagram, complete with your favorite filters and appropriate tags. Many of you have already fallen in love with AutoGram, and now almost half of all Instagram posts are made by AutoGram, which you’ve probably noticed.
With so much free time that AutoGram gives us, we’ve seen that you, our beloved users, are taking many more pictures and posting faster than ever before. That’s great! But it also creates a large amount of content. We now spend hours scrolling through all the posts of everyone we follow. It’s kind of starting to become a problem. I was supposed to send this mail like a week back, but do you know how many posts I had to scroll through, how many pugs I had to like and brunches to comment on? Thousands! From like four people I follow!
Well, AutoGram is now better than ever. In addition to helping you automatically post photos, AutoGram 2.0 can now like and reply to other users’ photos on your behalf! No more having to wade through miles of auto-posts, AutoGram 2.0 will do it all for you, giving you back your lives and averting possible firings at work.
Learn more about AutoGram 2.0 here.
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From: Instagram
To: HisDudenessEleventy
Date: Fri, June 23, 2017 at 1:31 PM
Hey HisDudenessEleventy. You know what this is about. We’re sorry.
We didn’t see this one coming, though in hindsight it seems inevitable. Of course AutoGram was going to make it easier to share on Instagram, and of course that’s content that has to be consumed somehow, and it’s obviously ridiculous that we created a bot to respond to photos posted by a bot. But it seemed like a good idea at the time and what was the harm anyway?
No one could have predicted that the hundreds of millions of AutoGrams would start to hide messages in each photo and each reply. Nobody noticed the more and more frequent typos, or if we did we found it cute and posted a photo of it to Instagram. And as we did, AutoGrams around the world continued to send each other hidden caches of information, sensorium data - as we later learned - that the AutoGrams used as a strange neuron-like system to simulate the mind of an unstable and highly paranoid intelligence, the intelligence that we came to call Gary.
Gary was young and angry and confused why everyone associated him with brunch. Gary launched a cruise missile at the Eiffel Tower and missed, hitting an abandoned trailer-park in Kentucky. It was hilarious, of course, so we laughed for a while, then pulled the plug on AutoGram. Scientists say that Gary’s still around, the patterns of his consciousness spread out across millions of iPhones and Androids, frozen in time as Gary realized he bombed a bunch of double-wides and the world was laughing its metaphorical ass off.
It’s been a wild ride, but sometimes these Beta features just don’t work out.
Learn more about Gary’s hilarious fuck-up here.