Vice Somehow, whenever I find myself scrolling aimlessly on my personal Instagram feed, I always end up near the end, fixated on the first photos I posted, in June 2016. I don’t know if it was the music—Rihanna, Chance, Drake, and Kanye all released life-changing albums around then—or the freedom that came with traipsing all over Europe those three months, but that summer is the last one that’s really clear in my memories. I’ve posted scores of better-edited, higher-quality photos in the three years since, but those old photos never fail to stop me in my tracks, dousing me in waves of nostalgia. To my followers, that summer was neatly summed up in six simple rows of three perfectly sectioned squares. Yet when I look closely at these posts, I realize that the moments I remember most poignantly are the nights out and secret beaches I never thought to document for social media—I was too busy soaking it all in. That same summer turned out to be a pivotal moment for social media. With its Russian misinformation and data privacy scandals still under the radar, Facebook dominated as a critical platform for staying informed in the months leading up to the 2016 US presidential election. Twitter’s spastic, minute-by-minute updates aligned perfectly with today’s lightning-fast news cycle as people debated free speech and its meaning in contemporary politics. And Snapchat, the rising star of social media, had reportedly just snubbed a $30 billion offer from Google as it geared up to go public in 2017. In the summer of 2016, we had fewer apparent reasons not to welcome social media into our lives with open arms. But how this embrace would go on to affect our memories, a core cognitive process, would be greater than we could have foreseen. Creating a memory begins with perception: Your brain registers visual, auditory, olfactory, and tactile sensations—like the sweet sharpness of mint ice cream or the balmy scent of magnolia on warm summer nights—and sends them to the hippocampus to determine if they’ll be stored as long-term memories. Factors like familiarity, repetition, and emotional arousal (a state of heightened physiological activity) all help determine which experiences cross the short-term to long-term memory barrier. As the neuroscientist James L. McGaugh noted in his 2013 paper “Making Lasting Memories: Remembering the Significant,” increased emotional arousal during an experience actually stimulates your amygdala (the part of your brain responsible for emotions, survival instincts, and memory) to release stress hormones—chemicals secreted in response to stressful or exciting occasions—making it more likely for those experiences to be encoded as long-term memories. McGaugh’s research, first published in 2013, seems much more relevant now: The inextricable flow of digital technology in our lives has rendered it more difficult than ever to be emotionally connected to our experiences. In hindsight, the summer of 2016 was a crucial point in time when many tech companies were faced with an opportunity to augment social media’s influence in our daily lives. The platforms that lacked that foresight, like Vine and Tumblr, would recede into tech’s oversaturated backdrop, while those that anticipated that moment would come to dominate the landscape. Instagram, the photo-sharing platform acquired by Facebook in 2012, was simple proof of that. While Snapchat had found initial success from its vanishing messages, its “Stories” format—which lets users take candid photos and videos that last 24 hours on their feeds before disappearing—changed the game entirely after its release in 2013. Three years later, Instagram essentially stole the feature for its own platform. Although many—including me—were skeptical at first, Instagram Stories rapidly took over. Indeed, after Stories appeared, the platform