The following message was posted by the admin of @uploadforfree on Instagram on October 5th, 2024, at approximately 10 PM EST. The next day, around 8:30AM EST, @uploadforfree was suspended by Instagram, with no explanation and no option to articulate an appeal. By October 9th, Instagram had permanently suspended @uploadforfree. To this day, no explanation has been given for this action by Instagram—the account, before this, was in good standing, and had posted nothing in that time period that explicitly broke Instagram’s rules.
There is no viable appeals process to get the account back. It was less than 200 away from reaching its goal of 10,000 posts.
Upload For Free, like much of the web, is now a ruin.

It is with great sorrow, tumult, and hopefulness that I announce the end of the most meaningful experiment I’ve ever participated in: Upload For Free.

After October 10th (our one-year anniversary), at 10,000 posts, Upload For Free will cease accepting submissions.

Thursday night, I had the pleasure of spending ten hours calling uploaders one-on-one to share this news, but furthermore to express one thing a million different ways: I love you. That truth has been encoded into every DM I’ve uploaded. You have all done this project perfectly, and created something nothing short of unlikely. I am immensely grateful for the energy and care you have brought to a simple premise I thought up in my dorm room at SUNY Purchase. If you have ever contributed anything to this page, I love you, forever and always.

My decision to adhere to the plan I announced in April, in which the 10k posting goal would be the last, was a difficult one. Throughout the life of UFF, it has assumed many roles: performance art, periodical, ritual, and community forum to name just a few. Upload For Free’s ability to connect people, reveal conditions of internet life, and become a force for goodness has been nothing short of extraordinary. Upload For Free has never had more energy behind it, and my dedication to this project is far from waning. The temptation to just ignore this (not very popularized) promise and continue on has been hard to resist. Know that I, like many of you, am immensely sad to see this page end. However, I see the prospect of UFF’s finality; to see the experiment finish, and learn its lessons—as profoundly potent.

Upload For Free’s greatest strength has always been its volatility. UFF is distinctly alive, maintaining itself at the whims of one of the most exploitative media machines ever to exist, one mildly unstable 26-year-old, and nearly a thousand strangers. The stakes of this have always been central to UFF’s premise, and it has been in conversation with death since the day it was created. As a distinctly human project, UFF is no less subject to death than you or I.

Despite how unique the dynamics of this page are, and how often the practice of uploading feels like a refusal, Upload For Free cannot rescue us from the conditions of the capitalist internet. As users of Instagram, we are constantly being spied on, ascribed to traits and proclivities in an infinite map of associations, all for the sake of advertising and manipulation. While skewering this issue has often been beyond the scope of UFF (it’s perfectly legitimate to assert that UFF is simply a vessel for photos of, say, beautiful trans women, asinine imagery, and/or very niche memes), it has been interesting to witness Instagram begin to understand us, and therefore capitalize from us, more and more. Indeed, when we hit 10,000 posts, Instagram claims they will give us a special achievement badge.

It is my greatest wish that this account, in all its intricacies, reveals to you productive queries about yourself, your life online, and your relationship to images. This was precisely my own personal, selfish motivation as an internet artist when starting this account: to embrace, juxtapose and accumulate enough digital visual material to maybe even begin to ask the right questions. Meeting you all, whether via your images or in person, and creating a platform for experimentation and connection was a profoundly life-changing side effect of this goal.

To be an uploader is to refuse the frou-frou labels of internet workers: content creator, Instagrammer, even artist. An uploader is a plain, descriptive term that supposes no imagined, smarmy relationship with an algorithm, in turn leaving room for a more imaginative future for citizens of the internet. As long as I have any semblance of digital life, I will always be an uploader. I invite you all to embrace this term, and carry with it whatever contexts you desire.

@uff_two will now be known as @uploader.network, a place for uploaders, community organizers, artists, archivists, and more to coalesce, create new projects, and organize irl events. While Upload For Free may have an end, I have faith in our ability to further process our internet lives in playful, artful, and exciting ways.

The first project of this new organization will be “Upload For Free: Collected Writings and Offerings,” a collection of critical and poetic writings, visual works, and other printed material reflecting on this project as well as conditions of internet life, digital identity, and accumulation. You are all encouraged to contribute. Information about this project will be shared on @uploader.network soon, with a tepid goal of publishing later this winter.

We are also working on getting an Upload For Free funeral together for somewhere in late October/early November. If anyone has a connection to a very chill church with an organ in the NYC area that could host, please let us know.

On the 10th, we will be celebrating the birthday of Upload For Free at The Living Gallery in Brooklyn. I hope you’ll join us by RSVPing in the bio.

If uploading as a ritual still resonates with you—if you still crave an outlet to dispose of, affirm or accumulate your images, I invite you to continue. The concept of an Upload For Free 2.0, or even multiple, doesn’t offend me whatsoever. However, this page, after 10k, will stand as is. And, as far as I can foresee, this page will always have one admin.

I’d like to extend my gratitude to everyone who made this project what it is. As a profoundly non-exhaustive list, and in no specific order, here are some folks who contributed greatly to the execution and thoughtfulness of this project:

This is not goodbye.
With love, adoration, and gratitude,
Your admin, Kevin