Last week, if you — as I'm prone to do — went to check up on Dua Lipa via Instagram, you would have found absolutely nothing. The popstar had wiped her account of all previous posts.
She followed it up a few days later with a single snap of herself, but now with red hair (!!!).
As far as posts-per-follower ratios go, 1:88.8 million is pretty impressive — but we doubt that Dua did it for the bragging rights.
Instead, she was likely making way for a new "era" and album in addition to the new look (her last full-length release was Future Nostalgia in 2020). In fact, she's even done this before, deleting everything on her Instagram in the lead-up to that album.
And she's far from alone. At this point, the social media blackout is a tried-and-true trend for musicians and artists to essentially "pre-announce" new music and projects.
In the past decade, everyone from Radiohead and Taylor Swift to The Kid Laroi and Gang of Youths have all pointedly deleted posts, entire profiles and even their websites.
So how did we get to a stage where artists generate a heap of headlines for doing next-to nothing? And while crying over deleted Instagram posts might seem a little ridiculous given, uh, everything else in the world, are we losing something in the process?
Who invented the social-media blackout?
Pop-culture powerhouses Kanye West and Lady Gaga — both masters of provocation, for better or worse — are some of the earliest adopters of the social media wipe.
Back in 2013, both artists deleted their Twitter posts to tease new albums. Kanye simply posted "June Eighteen", the release date of his album Yeezus, while Gaga, naturally, got a little more theatrical in the lead-up to ARTPOP. She removed all posts and her profile picture, posting a cryptic message about a "temporary shutdown".
Following their example, other artists began to experiment with deleting-as-album-hype.
In 2015, British pop group The 1975 went a step further by (briefly) deleting all their accounts, sending fans into a frenzy that they were breaking up; in 2016, The Weeknd wiped his Instagram; Radiohead even went so far as to remove their website ahead of A Moon Shaped Pool.
The few strands left by each artist — respectively, a comic, an Instagram bio saying "Starboy" and some leaflets Radiohead sent to some fans' houses — became clues of the album to come.
In a way, these promotions took inspiration from ARGS, aka Alternate Reality Games. These games — mostly marketing tools — unfold piece-by-piece as you dive down rabbit holes online, following cues from intriguing billboards, street posters, social media posts or anything else eye-grabbing. The reward at the end ranges from an unseen movie teaser to new background on a video game.
Probably the most successful ARG came from The Blair Witch Project. The 1999 horror film was able to use a cultural unfamiliarity with both the internet and found footage visuals to convince people the film was a documentary — one whose mystery they could solve by investigating cryptic clues and videos online.
But the clues behind a lone photo or an Instagram bio aren't quite as involved, and the mystery is pretty obvious: it's new music. Unless you can elevate the social-media blackout into a cultural moment.
The Taylor Swift effect
In 2017, Taylor Swift embraced the power of a blank space — she disappeared, receding from public events and press before wiping her Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and website in August.
Without diving too deep into Swift-lore, the hibernation followed a mainstream tide-turn against the pop-star, losing favour for having a calculated public persona, and for moving away from her country charm roots in the effort to become a "stadium sell-out".
Her response? A blackout, followed a few days later by videos of a snake, and comeback single Look What You Made Me Do, a moody EDM track that played into Swift-as-master manipulator.
If you were there, you know: this return — and the resulting album, Reputation — was all-eclipsing, the true beginning of Swift as one of our few current monocultural figures.
Each move conjured tabloid coverage, fan conjecture and outright conspiracy — now standard for Swift — who plays into it with plenty of ARG-like "Easter Eggs" across videos, social media and virtually everything she posts.
It makes sense, then, that the social-media blackout blew up afterwards: the next year, everyone from Grimes to Miley Cyrus and BROCKHAMPTON followed suit.
With some artists, it does more than generate headlines. Taylor's blackout made thematic sense, for example, openly re-inventing herself for an album that plays with ideas of contrived pop personas and media narratives.
It enriched the album, just as a great music video or album cover can — but can the same be said for Sir Paul's social media managers deleting posts?
We're in our ephemeral era
The social media wipe has caught on outside of music and celebrities, too, with fashion and beauty brands chasing the trend.
That almost feels more intuitive: where social media was once seen as a window into our lives — or, at least, a diary of some kind — now it's more like a shop window of ever-changing new wares, the old display chucked in the skip.
But does that render our artists as more product than person on social media, with only the present edition ever on display?
I'm not expecting to find grand revelations about Dua Lipa via Instagram, but it is nice to scroll through the evolution of an artist, even if that's just following their hair journey.
More than any one artist's history, it's the spontaneity that social media once offered — the chance to connect to artists you love — that has been sanded down.
When even deleting everything is to be expected, maybe it's time to try and do something new.