l waking up in the morning and moaning. A new app is making its way through the perilous landscapes of discourse and has finally come to infect my loved ones. “Add me on BeReal,” reads a friend’s script invite. I ignore it and keep scrolling for another two hours.
If you haven’t heard of BeReal yet, apologies in advance. It claims it is “no other social network” and it has been exalted time and again as the “anti-Instagram”. Every day at a random time, it sends a notification to all its users and gives them exactly two minutes to drop everything and take a couple of pictures almost simultaneously: a selfie from the front of the camera, to show your general mood ; and a click pointing outwards to show you what you’re up to.
The goal is to provide an antidote to the manicured worlds of other platforms and all their algorithmic fear. As we learned last week, Instagram now hates you and won’t stop broadcasting full-volume videos from accounts you don’t follow — despite Kim and Kylie’s best efforts. Facebook, meanwhile, is a cryptobro full of phishing memes and none of your friends. It’s clear that the promise of a spontaneous alternative has struck a chord: people are fleeing to BeReal in droves – 7 million of them in fact, making it the best free app on the App Store in Australia, the UK and the US.
But when the invitation comes in, I think: Real?”. Like anyone who played drama in high school, I’m hardly real in real life: exaggeration is my starting point; hyperbole is my bread and butter (which by the way is LITERAL my favorite meal and simply transcendent like a lovely mid-morning snack when? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ELSE suffices). This is the way I communicate on a daily basis: a parade of capital letters and unintelligible catchphrases that some would call “performative” (and most would call “annoying”). Nothing is ever “good” when it can be “sooooo dead bestie fjlsdjkflasdjklf it gives it all”. Seriousness is the enemy.
I pass all these protests on to my friends. “You’re crazy,” they reply. Reluctantly, I download the app.
The first thing the app does is yell at me, “TAP ME TO CONTINUE!” As a newbie, I have to immediately post my first BeReal within two minutes, measured by a timer that ominously resembles a bomb. Unfortunately it’s 9:30 am on Thursday and I have a huge hangover. (If you’re my editor, ignore this previous sentence.)
I sprint to my bedroom, donning sunglasses and a puffer jacket, and hold my phone away from where you can’t quite make out my pale skin and possibly a bruise on the forehead from the night before.
I hope my look “just stepped out of Berghain” instead of “not showered”. When the timer reaches zero, I take the photo with pounding heart.
Bomb defused – at least until I return downstairs, where I’m promptly told by my partner that I’m posting outside the allotted time. Against my vociferous objections, I’m presented with the evidence – a BeReal notification on his phone: “michael.pdf just posted too late”. I can’t believe I’m being publicly mentioned and shamed. “What is this?” I say. “The PANOPTICON???” He doesn’t seem impressed.
After a meager four hours, like a very needy dog, the app goes off again for my first official daily mail. Luckily I’m prepared this time – my ring light is in front of me and I finally washed my hair. Unfortunately, my partner decides this is the perfect opportunity to reveal my grotesquely crafty ways to the world, by posting an unflattering photo of me adjusting the ring light. I make a noise at him that’s somewhere between moaning and growling. This app is tearing us apart.
I am fully aware that in 2022 my resistance to authenticity makes me a sick person – or worse, an influencer – especially when all the evil forces of the universe (TikTok, trend forecasters, 19-year-olds cooler than me) have conspired to bring about the emergence of a distinctly unfiltered aesthetic. Whether it’s indie sleaze or ‘casual posting’, it’s an aesthetic that manifests itself as lo-fi, with supposedly unsophisticated shots that are often blurry and always poorly lit – a retrieval of Myspace photos and early Facebook albums that a disdain for any kind of staged calm.
I could reach the easy rebuttal: even the most authentic posts are constructed, everything online is ultimately a sham, etc. But the truth is I’m an insecure twenty-something who would love to keep catfishing all my followers with a devastating selfie every time six months.
everyone I know gets all excited about this BeReal thing, which seems to be an app where you post an ugly picture of yourself every day? think I’ll stick to fifteen deformed thoughts
— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) July 28, 2022
The only devastating thing about BeReal, meanwhile, is how sad the feed is. The first few days I only see pictures of beige breakfasts, laptops at work, blurry beer in the pub. I love you, I want to say to my friends, but I don’t want to know what your ceiling fan looks like. I screenshot a good post in the midst of the mob and discover, with a rude shock, that the app has snitched, sending a warning to the other party with breathless excitement: “One of your friends took a screenshot!” Below that, you can make out my blurry username and profile picture if you squint hard enough. How can I even be my authentic self when my authentic self is someone who takes abundant screenshots and sends them to five different group chats for analysis?
If I don’t get my notification to BeReal within 5 minutes, I think I’ll go BeAsleep
— The Leave Britney Alone, but for Marianne (@Robesqueere) August 1, 2022
Finally something shifts on day four; BeReal broke me. The app goes off just before noon this time, tapping in that menacing fashion. I am a shell of my carefully curated self, unable to muster the energy to post anything but a vague, horrible, ugly photo from the trenches (my bed).
It’s not really liberating. But it is… pleasantly boring? As it joins the swamp of other half-hearted contributions in the feed, mine starts out feeling less like a cry for help and more like a silent greeting. I see you, we all say to each other, and we are together in this miserable existence. A camaraderie of enforced mediocrity: was this always BeReal’s intention?