notes on TikTok
Last year, just as the Covid lockdown began, I read two pieces about TikTok that began in similar ways. For Bookforum, Charlotte Shane wrote:
I first shared a TikTok video in my Instagram story on April 20, 2020, right around the time I ran out of tolerable TV series to binge and an inability to read anything other than tweets set in.
And for n+1, Sophie Pinkham wrote:
I downloaded TikTok about two weeks ago. Against my better judgment I had gotten back on Twitter, thanks to a misguided craving for attention and a sick longing for hot takes about the Democratic primaries.
Shane ultimately found the app to be “a depression prophylactic.” Pinkham conceded that “Part of the joy of TikTok has been the sight of people gathering together to dance in depressing, sunless places.” Both were drawn to the app because they were seeking a proximate or more potent social media high. Bored and delirious from content-binging, they went looking for more.
On TikTok, which I downloaded for the first time last week, I was expecting hot people, lip-syncing, and shuffle dancing. What I got was hot people, pranks, and “tiktok’s frog army.” Mostly it feels like a slicker version of Vine. Occasionally it feels like a nightmare in which I am chaperoning a high school dance.
On TikTok, I feel old. Shane describes herself as a “woman of thirtysomething experience”; Pinkham is an “elderly millennial.” At 27, I don’t know what kind of millennial I am, but on TikTok I am really old. In one video, a girl tells a guy that if he guesses her age right, she’ll kiss him. When he guesses 28, she recoils in horror: “What, you think I’m all wrinkly?” She was 23.
On TikTok, you never really know what you’re getting. I’ve seen lots of gag videos, bored college students, dumb jokes, and instructional videos for Japanese. I’ve seen lots of grandparents, New Yorkers, and kids putting buckets on strangers’ heads. But I have no way of knowing, aside from extrapolating from likes and followers, how indicative this is of anyone else’s experience, as the app adapts rapidly to each user’s engagement and preferences.
On TikTok, the scroll has reached its full potential. The interface takes up your whole screen. The platform is invisible, the algorithm palpable. It is quick and ceaseless. It is stupid-fun.
On TikTok, everything feels staged or, at the very least, like it could be. The explicit acknowledgment of this is actually one of more interesting things about the platform. Everyone wants to be famous, everyone’s being obvious about it, and nobody minds. Everyone seems happy to be there. In comments, people complaining about posts being fake are accused of missing the point.
On TikTok, little is withheld. I’ve come across several behind the scenes videos, where creators show how they shoot sequences on their iPhones. I have seen many magic tricks, but they all clue the viewer in at the beginning of the video; the satisfaction is not in being mystified by the trick but in watching the astonishment of spectators. Satisfaction comes from knowing, comprehensiveness, surfeit. The point is to be amused, not amazed. The point is to do it yourself. The point is to have fun!
On TikTok, there is a Hooters waitress picking a plastic water bottle off the floor with her mouth. There is a man covered in ranch submerging a piece of pizza in a bucket of ranch. There is girl showing her parents the “MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name)” music video.
On TikTok, there are videos where you watch other people watching videos. Sometimes this is just a hot person watching stuff, leading to a whole subgenre of videos in which you watch people watch things, not to see how they react so much as just to look at them. Watching a TikTok is rarely just watching one thing; it is feeling yourself enmeshed in the app, in the feed, in a vast and multilayered spectacle of looking.
On TikTok, there is a woman packing three items into a cardboard box. The angle is bird’s eye, almost like a surveillance camera. She never looks up. She presses a button on a machine and a strip of tape comes out, which she applies to a box that she has quickly folded out of cardboard. She pulls inflated plastic from a dispenser and pads the contents with it. She flips over the box and applies another perfectly measured piece of tape emblazoned with the Target logo. A search yields dozens of similar posts with a #packingorders hashtag.
Thankless, unseen warehouse work repackaged on social media as an ASMR-adjacent life-hack might be the most grimly American thing I’ve seen on the app, but it also feels very un-TikTok: a glimpse behind the opacity of algorithms and the ecstasy of play and youthfulness, into the not-quite-automated world that sustains them.
On TikTok, there is lots of laughter. On TikTok, I have never seen anyone cry.
ben tapeworm