http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/arch...agram-20130608

Published June 08, 2013

SATURDAY SOAPBOX

The economic faultline of Instagram

By Joyce Hooi

Correspondent ([email protected])


THERE is a saying that will resonate in this city, where a frustrated middle class lives Chery-to-Jaguar with the rich: "What keeps the people from burning down the country club is the hope of joining it."

There is a remarkably instantaneous way of finding out whether you're closer to burning or joining this country club. Simply visit the Rich Kids of Instagram Tumblr blog. In the blog, photos posted by the uber-rich's offspring on Instagram are collated under the indignant subtitle: "They have more money than you and this is what they do."

Most of them are in their 20s and one of them is named Remington, the (figuratively) poor thing. He has an Instagram of his receipt from a hotel on Palm Beach where he spent US$32,951 in a night and left a US$3,000 tip. Kristal champagne features heavily across the photos. It drenches these kids' shirts, soaks the floors of their yachts, sprays the vaulted ceilings of their private jets - it goes everywhere except into their mouths.

There is one picture that will stay with me for a while. In it, only the gold bracelet-wearing hand of the poster, who goes by the Instagram handle "onepercent", can be seen. And in this hand is a bottle of bubbly that this class act is emptying into a marble-lined bathtub.

How is it that social media, the great leveller of societies, can make people feel so poor? Never before have the middle class had so much in common with the rich, technology-wise, sharing Apples and Samsungs. Now, both groups look out the same window but into starkly different worlds.

On Instagram, the rich use the same filters that the rest of us do, but their best foot forward does not need as much soft focus to be as appealing. As we peer into their sparkling lives, we are forced to confront the jagged edges of our own. No wonder the 99 per cent hate the 1 per cent so much. But how we react to this inequity says more about us than it does about the 1 per cent. The more embittered you are over this blog, the slimmer the odds are in your mind that you will join their ranks.

As I surveyed these ovarian lottery-winners lounging in the Hamptons with chiselled cheekbones inherited from supermodel mothers, I assessed my life as I stood two years shy of turning 30.

This has been a terrible decade to be in your 20s. When we were growing up, Wall Street was a place to work at, not occupy. But as we graduated in 2008-2009, we looked up from our books to find that the milestones of adulthood had been moved beyond our reach overnight by the invisible hand.

Cars, houses, signing bonuses, job security - these things became academic concepts; ironic, given how the world had turned into Billy Joel's Allentown, in which Our graduations hang on the wall/But they never really helped us at all.

In the five years since, I watched as my cohort mates' shiny and expectant faces grew worn by a world so distracted by the subprime crisis, that it cared little for how much they knew or how hard they were prepared to work. So, we became the first wave of the downwardly mobile generation, the anticlimax of our parents' hopes.

Being born in the wrong year dogs you. A study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research found that graduating in a recession takes a 9 per cent toll on annual earnings, which takes 10 years to dissipate.

It is the thin end of the wedge, and your average upstanding netizen blames the government, foreign workers and big corporations for where he is in these blighted times. It is hard to know if netizens form the majority view, or if they are right.

I am as terrified about my future as the next 20-something. Blessedly, I am in a position to fear underachievement more than poverty, and I know better than to speak for people who know hunger and powerlessness like I never will.

Is it the government's job to grant people at least the illusion that they have a chance of joining the country club? Maybe, but in bankrupt nations like Greece, it is a laughable priority. In ours, it might be a luxury even in the best of times - and this doesn't feel like such a time.

In the darkest moments of self-doubt, I take comfort from the fact that David Sedaris was first published when he was 36 and that Sam Walton started Walmart at the age of 44. (So I have eight years to embarrass my family in prose and 16 to pioneer retail at knockdown prices.)

The point is, I choose to believe that I can still join that country club, having been placed in decent proximity by the sweat of my father and those who went before him. Any failure to gain admission will be my own, and I will not insult my ancestors by accepting the facts of Allentown.

The problem is, people in less privileged situations do not have a choice about what they believe. As the Internet rubs this unrelenting inequity in their faces, there will be a readying of flaming torches as they stop believing that Every child had a pretty good shot/To get at least as far as their old man got.

With the country club razed down, we will all be on the outside.