If you’ve seen They Live then you know the scene: Rowdy Roddy Piper picks up a set of shades and puts them on and reality is suddenly revealed in black and white. The empowering logos and billboards suddenly reveal their more sinister, oppressive subtext. If a version of They Live was released today, then maybe Piper would scroll through his instagram feed with all the aspirational and motivational content revealing their true context of “You should be ashamed of your body” or “The food you eat is unhealthy and disgusting” or “The place you live in is ugly and depressing”. However, many instagram poets seem to at least bring opposing ideas into the feed, messages of understanding and body positivity, of sympathy for refugees and the disenfranchised and odes for simple bodily pleasures. The instapoets definitely exist on a spectrum that runs from skilled lyricism to tepid platitudes, but the implicit message of even the most banal insta-scribe stands in contrast to the implicit imperatives of your average health, fitness, food or cottage-core influencer.