BeReal: The Anti-Instagram App Taking US Colleges By Storm

But is it really the future of social media?

Clark Boyd
7 min readApr 1, 2022

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I’ve been reading about Heraclitus this week. He’s the philosopher who is supposed to have said, “You can never step in the same river twice.”

It turns out he never said that; Plato (that prankster) came up with the “quote” to exaggerate and mock Heraclitus’ real statement.

What he actually said was, “Upon those who step into the same rivers different and different waters flow.”

Plato’s version is catchier for sure, but the real version is distinctive. The river (the form) is constant; the water (the substance) is always changing.

Heraclitus’ great insight was to see that the world is always in flux. It is a vast set of opposing forces, held together by tension.

His view is related to what Alexander von Humboldt and Charles Darwin would later see in nature. Add too many predators to the food chain and no-one wins — not even the predators. Too few predators and the system collapses, too.

When competition works, it harmonises rather than destroys.

And you thought you were about to get a sneering review of the latest social media app, huh?

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Clark Boyd

Tech/business writer, CEO (Novela), lecturer (Columbia), and data analyst. >500k views on Medium. I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.