It’s comforting to know that, in these historically batshit times, we can come together under the shared belief that Instagram sucks right now. Ever since 2020, when the platform first launched Reels—its attempt to do to TikTok what Instagram Stories did to Snapchat—Instagram has been increasingly pushy about getting the rest of us to take it seriously by tweaking its algorithm so that it now prioritizes what seem to be mostly just TikTok clones.

Last week, the platform announced that new videos would count as Reels, which has all but ensured the app’s metamorphosis from the internet’s glossy mag to a veritable grease trap of mid-2010s Facebook-level offal (which, frankly, is a disservice to Facebook, which at least informed me recently about a pregnancy announcement and two engagements I never actually saw on Instagram). Since then, users have been complaining about how Instagram’s Reels obsession has tanked their engagement and generally rendered the app unusable. Just ask Kylie Jenner! I think it’s safe to say that if Kim and Kylie are not having a good time on Instagram, none of us are.

On Tuesday, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri posted a video (ugh, sorry, I mean “Reel”) in response to the backlash (if you, like more than 1.9 million people, actually saw it on Twitter and not on IG itself, you now know everything you need to know about Reels). For two and a half minutes, Mosseri explained, with the tight-jawed tone of a partner intimating that a soft breakup is already in the works, that he understood users’ frustration. “It’s not yet good,” he at least admitted in regards to a full-screen feed currently being tested for a percentage of users, like anyone would want to be barraged with 15-second America’s Funniest Home Video wannabes in an even more maximal format.

But if we citizens of Instagram were looking for an apology on the pivot to video, we were in for a reality check. “I need to be honest, I do believe that more and more of Instagram is going to become video over time,” Mosseri warned. “So we’re going to have to lean into that shift.” Tech-exec talk for “Yeah, so, I’m going to keep doing me, sorry to you. It’s actually so toxic you’re even mad right now.” (Then, on Thursday afternoon, Mosseri abruptly reversed course and announced the company would rework the changes in light of the criticism, admitting, “We definitely need to take a big step back and regroup.”)

That Mosseri originally saw fit to remind us that he was ultimately just here to give us more of what we want, despite the desperate animal keen coming from users (including Chrissy Teigen) to stop, is in line with Big Tech’s paternalistic view of prizing data above all—never mind that said data is often flawed or simply imperfect for, you know, capturing the breadth of human intent. And at the end, even Mosseri’s insistence on Instagram’s commitment to creators sounded half-hearted: a platform changing its rules and disrupting the livelihoods of people who’ve built entire businesses around those rules is, after all, nothing new in 2022. This is how the world works, people! Mosseri seemed to be saying. It’s not that much to ask every single influencer, brand, and small business to pump out a virtual storefront (it was just last year Instagram went hard on Shopping, after all) and then pirouette into a small-scale video production company! Adam, we all contain multitudes, but not that many multitudes.

What’s also fascinating is that there’s something in the unapologetic “ship up or ship out” undertones of Mosseri’s original video that echoed a message delivered by his boss, Mark Zuckerberg, last month during a weekly company Q&A. Like other tech execs lately, the CEO had been expressing his concerns about the economy, which has led to a hiring freeze for many teams and general unease about TikTok’s looming shadow. Still, for a guy who seems truly optimistic about the fact that we’ll all want to be more online in a fake 2D world soon, he got pretty dour on the call. Per a recording obtained by The Verge, Zuckerberg appeared “visibly frustrated” when a question about continuing “Meta Days” (bonus vacation days granted during the pandemic) for 2023 popped up from Gary from Chicago.

That’s when Zuck got snippy: extra days off? In this economy, Gary?? “Realistically, there are probably a bunch of people at the company who shouldn’t be here,” he reportedly responded, which is appropriate to say if you are a reality TV host and not an executive. According to The Verge, people on Workplace (the company’s internal Facebook) went nuts; I personally salute the employee who asked, perhaps non-seriously, “Where do I submit names?” The vibes at Meta, you might say, are not great.

Zuck isn’t the first tech exec to get uncharacteristically foreboding these days—see: Elon’s “super bad feeling,” Sundar Pichai’s interesting use of “hunger” as a euphemism for “work harder”—but between his clear disdain for poor Gary, who probably just wants to plan that family road trip, and the general idea that his employees might like to enjoy their lives amid a climate catastrophe and at least two global health emergencies, it’s…pretty bleak how little he desires to sugarcoat things. Paired with Mosseri’s non-apology-slash-promise-slash-threat (“The world is changing quickly, and we’re going to have to change along with it” sure sounds a lot more like a warning, doesn’t it?) in the face of uprooting an Instagram-size stake of the creator economy, both stances are remarkable in their departures from two of the most enduring pillars that have held the Great Tech Dream aloft: the fetishization of user experience above all, and the visionary's bragging right of having reimagined work, or at least treating your white-collar workforce like royalty. You kind of get the sense that it was never about any of that, eh?

This article has been updated.