The Instagram Posts of Doomsday Preppers

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Amelia Acker, who shifts our focus to the use of Instagram by Preppers: U.S.-based communities who prepare for the collapse of society that they are sure is coming. This research involves digital ethnography, archival works, and photographic documentation.

Prepperism is a new online social movement, and includes participants from super-rich “tech” preppers to reality show contestants. This is an extreme form of the emergency preparedness that U.S. populations have been told to practice since the height of the Cold War, but stands as a practice distinct from survivalism, which sees people disconnect from society altogether already, living ‘off the grid’; by contrast, preppers take the more moderate step of merely preparing for all eventualities.

Preppers use ‘everyday carry’ (EDC) bags or cases that contain their preparedness equipment, and frequently post photos of the contents of these bags on Instagram and elsewhere to show off or compare with their peers’ choices. In this context, the posts elsewhere often respond to specific events (from natural disasters to civil unrest), while Instagram is more for sharing EDC photos, advertising gear sales, reviewing equipment and stores, or sharing instructions.

The present study captured Instagram posts from a variety of relevant hashtags and focussed on everyday carry posts, and coded the post types and composition. There is a strict grammar to the layout of the images: individual items are arranged neatly in squares, and items like knives and utility tools with blades are very common. Hand sanitisers are very rare, contrary to ordinary emergency preparedness advice. Worn items are often placed selectively alongside new items. Overall, it often seems unlikely that all items would fit into a single carry case.

Key themes in the posts are the pleasure in the containment and revealment of items, the commodification of prepper items, and the imagination of the future. There are different hierarchies of bags here, too: a one-day ‘go bag’ in the car, a three-week ‘when shit hits the fan bag’ in the garage, etc., and these bags represent different scenarios envisaged by the preppers – from brief disruptions to the complete collapse of society.