(2/3) Canon.
Feeling that familiar sense of dread about being erased from the internet, I asked AI - ‘given the fact that I secured all of my Instagram data from the past 13 years, is there any way we could analyze that data to determine more about my likes, my dislikes, and the way in which I’ve used Instagram as a platform?’
AI gave me all kinds of good ideas, but I ultimately landed on a thought of my own: ‘let’s dig out the top ten shoes I talked about, year over year and we will call that my sneaker canon’.
Boom. A task. A goal. An idea.
It took a while, but we ultimately came up with a list. A list, with which, didn’t make much sense to me. Like…I guess…I thought I knew something about myself and my tastes, but…Travis AJ1’s? Nah. That’s really not me. I couldn’t give much a shit about the Travis AJ1’s. Any of them. That’s not me at all. Right? I mean, that’s not me like ‘Drake’ isn’t me…or…so I thought.
Me, to AI: ‘This list doesn’t make much sense, can you show me a handful of my posts where I talk about the Travis AJ1?’
AI gave me a sample of listings where I mentioned the Travis AJ1, with nearly ZERO of those posts actually showing the Travis AJ1. Did we code this incorrectly or was something else going on? I looked at a couple of the posts that it gave me as examples and read through them:
‘while the world goes crazy for Travis AJ1’s, I’m over here lacing up my…’
‘even though Travis AJ1’s hit number one on the top 25, the real MVP of this week was the…’
‘I could buy exactly 42 pairs of the shoe above with the same money I could get from a single pair of Travis AJ1’s…’
So…I said to AI: ‘it looks like the shoes I talk about aren’t actually the shoes I show in the pictures. Is there a way we could scan the pictures?’
AI: ‘That is an important hallmark of the way you write. It appears as though you often write about one shoe in order to illustrate a point about another. This one will take much longer, but we can scan the image and the caption and see how many actually match, then we can analyze from there. It’s going to cost a bit in API tokens, though, are you willing to go there?’
Me: Yea. Let’s do this.
After several false starts and many functional bugs, we finally performed the scan, which ended up running overnight. The results came back towards something that ended up making more sense…
AJ1 - the definitive shoe of the culture
Travis AJ1 - a more hypified-version of the definitive shoe of the culture
Air Max 90 ‘DQM’ - My favorite shoe of all time
AJ4 ‘Craft’ - wut? ohhhh. I wrote a super long, fake story about how this one came to be. Kind of funny in retrospect but this shoe doesn’t even register on my top 500 shoes of all time
Nike Dunk Low ‘Paris’ - one of my wildest thrift finds and the benchmark for absurd SB prices
Dunk Low ‘Panda’ - the pandemic sneaker
Truth be told…this list made sense…but I still felt I was missing something. You can’t tell me that my hours and days and weeks and months of posting and commenting and engaging established my personal canon as a simple generic list of sneakers that get talked about by everyone, right? I mean, I guess if I considered myself like one of the regular major blogs (ie: Complex, NiceKicks, etc.), this would make sense. But if I prided myself on thinking differently and standing apart from the crowd - how in the world does this list make any sense? Surely there’s gotta be more to me than this list, right?
Stay tuned for the thrilling conclusion…here’s a bit more context to the data I pulled from my IG dump: ‘Canon.’