(3/3) Laced.
So here I am with two lists in my hand:
the list of shoes I talked about most over the past 13 years of Instagram, which just looks and feels all types of wrong.
the list of shoes I posted pictures of time and time again over the past 13 years of Instagram and it just feels generic and boring.
Neither of them feel right and neither of them tell me anything interesting…except…maybe…I’m far less interesting that I think I am.
BUT. AI did tell me that I have an interesting way of talking about one shoe to illustrate a point for another. So I take it a step further. Maybe…just maybe…I can look a bit deeper into that idea…what ‘points’ exactly, am I trying to ‘illustrate’ or ‘say’ through sneakers?
And that’s when the concept of the Spotify ‘Wrapped’ hits me square in the head: this is deep. I know it is. It has to be because I have given 13 years of my life to it. And the amount of time and effort and vulnerability I put out there is not insignificant, nor should it be taken lightly. But how deep is it and how deep can I go programmatically?
I hit up AI: ‘neither of these lists are grabbing me. They’re stupid. Is there any way we can categorize my captions based more on thematic elements than actual, physical shoes?’
And after a lot of back and forth, we determined what that could look like. And I referenced ‘Wrapped’ several times. And then we wrote a pretty comprehensive script and ran it. Again, an overnight thing. Lots of bugs. Another day of vibe coding.
We had a few false starts and a few tests and a few teasers, and the data it had returned on each was getting richer and richer. Like…way deeper than I thought. And when we ran the script overnight on the second night and I took a look the next morning…I was kind of entranced. Mostly because it felt like I had just found the key that unlocked my social media subconscious (which, really, wasn’t all that different than my actual subconscious). And there it was. Clear and on screen - right in front of me.
Over my 13 years on Instagram, AI determined that the five most common themes I surfaced were as follows :
Wearability vs. collectibility. Should shoes be worn or worshipped? Your most persistent argument — a shoe is for feet and asphalt, not a glass case.
My first thought: yeah, I still don’t know how to determine what I should wear and shouldn’t. I have number-based guidelines (ie: if I can get $500 or more for a pair of shoes I will not wear it)…but they’re not rock solid (ie: if I’ve been trying to sell them for more than a year at that price, why not just wear them instead?). But I still cringe when I see others wearing things that should be in museums.
Authentication as the search for ground truth. You read shoes for what’s real — dates, digits, label placement. The guy who can tell when nobody else can.
Authenticating shoes used to legitimately scare me. I thought it was, like, this mystical thing that only guys like Fake Education and shop owners could do. I was wrong. Despite the fact that there was never anything really documented, I had been unwittingly looking at the things that actually matter for years before I knew they even mattered.
The market as a flawed, absurd arbiter of value. You’re fascinated and irritated by the idea that resale prices decide cultural worth — and that the number is almost always wrong.
As a dude with an economics degree - this one doesn’t surprise me much and I’m happy it showed up where it did. I’ve been looking at the ‘value’ proposition behind sneakers and collectibles for years, and often in skewed ways. I hate that I tend to have an idea in my head that I operate from for years and then new information can suddenly change my whole outlook.
Taste from the edge. Inside the culture but never of the hype. You position yourself as the outsider, always a little apart from what everyone’s chasing.
I think this has to do more with having fallen into the hype cycle early on and with little to show for it. The social marketing worked on me more than the brand marketing did early on - although they can probably be traced back to one and the same. I was that dude keeping up and lining up and camping out on NYC streets, and when I realized it didn’t make my life any better it more often than not left me feeling gross and cheated. I moved on and love telling people they can, too.
Memory and the passage of time. Sneakers as time capsules — the people, places, and eras attached to the pairs. The throughline beneath all the shoe talk.
This is really exactly what I thought my account was really about. And it hit number 5! As a reference - I originally wanted to call my substack ‘A life as lived through sneakers’, in which I would use shoes to share some of my most transformative memories as a human being alive before, during, and after the internet. Bobbito Garcia has always been one of my favorite figures in the space, and I unintentionally modeled a lot of my writing off of what I think he’d be stoked to read…so…there’s that.
But the number one thing that I find fascinating about this list of themes: I started my Instagram as a promotional outlet for The Sneaker Savant as a business: the first sneaker grading company on earth. And…for fuck’s sake…there isn’t a single mention of my business as a being a prominent theme across my whole multi-year archive. One thing is crystal clear: I am a shitty businessman on Instagram. And I definitely will not be earning that 'Greatest Salesman of All Time’ award at any time in the near future.
But maybe that just goes to show…business really isn’t all that humanizing.
Early on I simply refused to participate in social media. I just didn’t understand it. Like what makes anyone think that their voice would attract listeners? I remember the first time someone was talking to me about Twitter and my response - verbatim - was “why would anyone give a shit about what I have to say?” And then when pictures came - the same thought - who wants to see my shitty, out of focus pictures? But then somewhere along the way I realized…maybe this could act as an artifact of my personal history.
When I was a kid, I moved to Great Britain for a few months. I kept a diary and ended up putting candy wrappers and sports cards and stickers and newspaper clippings and random flattened out knickknacks that I found amusing from my time in the UK. And I still have that diary to this day. I’m even kinda proud of it. It brought me through a lonely, scary and introspective time - much of how social has done for me since having become a parent.
That’s what my time on Sneaker IG has taught me - I ain’t a businessman, I’m a business, man. I do what I do and I do it well, despite the fact that I don’t really actually need to talk about it. And, fuck, how uninteresting would my account be if all I did was post about the services I provide and the products I (try to) sell?
And that’s the question I have for you. If you took the time to convince AI to spend an inordinate amount of time analyzing your public persona, what do you hope it would find? What if it’s not there? What do you think it would find, instead? And what surprises are lurking beneath the surface?
It took me 13 years of posting and a global pandemic and a worldwide revolution in machine learning to read every word I’ve ever posted just to find out that I've been keeping the same diary I kept as a little kid in Great Britain - I just didn't know that that's what it was. Surely, this has got to be the longest possible way around to something I learned when I was 14 years old…
‘Laced’.