Last spring, California poppies bloomed on my screen before I saw them bloom anywhere else. Among the flowers, on Instagram, there was often a person, most often a white woman, posing in the orange-studded hills, selling something. I imagined others like me viewing these images from spaces devoid of whatever sense of carefree, adventurous leisure the flower-strewn landscape was meant to evoke; in cramped subways, or bedrooms, or cubicles. But there was something more than outdoorsy aspiration that made the poppies such a hackneyed backdrop for these kinds of posts. The bloom — a “superbloom,” occurring after an uncommonly undisrupted desert incubation period — was somewhat rare and remote. The news had to break, then one had to travel there, had to climb. Behind each model’s radiant effortlessness lay the more covetous appeal of their effort conveyed by the landscape.