Who Is rg_bunny1: An Instagram Whodunit

Doping out the identity of an obsessive, enigmatic Instagram poster has become a favored pastime of the scrolling classes.

It is the parlor game of the pandemic. Among a certain segment of the scrolling classes, art and literary division, firing up their tablets and smartphones each morning has taken on aspects of a whodunit. Rifling through Instagram feeds, they register with half yawns the sponsored posts and thirst traps, the Throwback Thursday selfies and banal memes of cats. All the while they are waiting to happen upon the latest clue from a particular account. It is that of rg_bunny1, an enigmatic and anonymous, unabashedly niche figure who, since at least the beginning of lockdown, has released into the daily Instagram slipstream a daily torrent of quirky, particular images that, taken together, speak to an aesthetic that delights, confounds, fixates and infuriates in equal measures and that belongs to who-knows-who. Modestly at first, and then in manic bursts of oversharing, rg_bunny1 has data-mined images from an impressive cultural gold mine that seem in sequence to resemble the jumbled contents of an obsessive and over-cultivated mind.