Let’s face it, you’re here for the video, but I’ve got a job to do and a word count to hit so you’re going to have to bear with me.
Whether you’re on the Gram yourself or not, you’ll probably have seen people scrolling through the Instagram app with the dexterity of, you guessed it, a human with two opposable thumbs. Up and down on the feed or left to right on the stories, we’ve all become accustomed to navigating our way around social media with ease on our devices.
But, until now, social media has mainly been a human thing. True, we may use it to look at endless animals photos, act like sheep or communicate like brain-dead zombies, but it was always some semblance of a human being on the other end (discounting the bots).
All that is about to change, however, as it turns out chimpanzees are catching up and learning how to use social media.
It was only a matter of time really, wasn’t it, what with evolution and all… But to see a primate scrolling through the digital interface of Instagram, and seemingly understanding how it all works, is both amazing and scary.
The chimpanzee is even looking at photos and videos of other chimpanzees – is this so meta it is the cute animal video to end all cute animal videos? The video was shared on the Gram after all, so the natural progression will, ultimately, be this primate eventually watching itself watching Instagram videos on Instagram, and so on and so forth.
The video was posted by Mike Holston, aka therealtarzann, who shared the video with his 5.3 million followers, saying:
Every night I go to bed thinking how I can help change the world and inspire people to love our beautiful wildlife and ecosystems! I’d legit take a bullet for any animal at any day and anytime that’s just how much I care for them ! Idk what kind of fire god set in my soul for animals but the love is deep and real ! I was placed on this earth for 1 thing and that’s exactly what I’ll do for the rest of my life ! Let’s all love one another and save the planet together as one
Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention how or why this chimpanzee is scrolling through Insta, but let’s watch it anyway:
And now I’m off to throw my phone in a river. See ya!
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via stories@unilad.co.uk
Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.