A week or so ago, we tried to shit stir a beef between two photographers about Instagram. Jimmicane got back to us to expand, rather eloquently if you ask me, his point. (And yes, we have a Surf Europe Instagram and yes, we are hypocrites.)

“I do think Instagram is fucking over surf spots on a regular basis. It’s one thing when someone puts a place in a magazine months after it was shot and tries to conceal the identity. Yeah it creates awareness that the place exists and inspires people to figure out where it is. But when people are posting on instagram, you may as well draw a social media map to exactly where you are. It’s not hard to track down a spot when you have full access to swell and wind charts and you know exactly when the place was firing. People aren’t stupid. They can find it out.”

Shane-O is unlikely to upset anyone by giving away secret spots, as he only instagrams dead deer that he fucken bow and arrowed through the head. Although I hear Bambi and her mum are not too stoked, and one large stag on the Isle of Rhum recently commented “If that Dorian c**t ever comes to Scotland, he’s dead…”

Jimmy continues, “The situation happened to a spot in Puerto Rico last year when I was there. A couple instagrams got posted one day and the next time the place broke a week later, it looked like a crowd at Lowers. Just littered with people. The beach had like 30 tourists with their cameras like it was Pipeline or something.”

Kala da Captain at Pipe by Transworld. Nobody minds instgrams of Pipe, least of all, us.

“Sometimes people don’t even know, but their photo is geotagged. Even if you don’t put it on your “Photo Map”. Someone goes online and grabs the jpeg and it’s possible the coordinates are embedded in the file. I’ve seen it happen. So it’s something to worry about. And I’m at fault as well because I’m a photographer and I’ve exposed spots before. So I don’t want to be hypocritical. But I’m not going to talk about the place, or draw a map, or try and brag about how rad I am and how hard I scored. You’ll see some photos at some point and you may or may not try to find out where it was. If you spend the time to figure it out, and you want to do the mission to get there and go through the ups and downs of scoring or not scoring swell/wind combination, then you deserve to be able to do that. The instant thing is the part that shits me.

My biggest issue with instagram is the type of ego and person it breeds. It makes people turn into fucking idiots that all they care about is how many likes and followers they can get. And follower-to-following ratio. It’s a goddamn disease I swear. High school popularity contest.”

One regular criticism of Surf Europe is that we are immature, and obsessed with cock… and it’s pretty much spot on. This is Dane’s wetsuit bulge that I instagrammed back in October.

“As far as Burkard, I was pissed off because he was so obviously trying to brag about what he was doing and was totally blowing out a special place. I mean the guy was tagging all these people like Slater to try and make them jealous of where he was. That’s so ridiculous and childish. I’ll tell you this too, the surfers on his trip had no clue he was posting that shit because they didn’t have internet access, and they were not stoked when they found out about it. I don’t regret what I wrote and I didn’t apologize to him when we spoke about it. He knows what he did was dumb. Hope he learned a lesson.

Do that shit in Iceland and Russia all you want. No one is going to go to those places. Anywhere tropical is a different story.”

-Jimmy