A eulogy for TikTok

We can’t hope to capture every single fragment of the internet, from the first lagging days of DARPA to the videos attached to each TikTok sound, to preserve the fire hose of content we are all wallowing in. But we can have a conversation about which things we value and believe should be kept, which things should be allowed to disappear into the wa... See more

TikTok is creative and sprawling and often strange and anarchic, which mirrors the internet more broadly. There are few rules; the platform takes all comers. Chaos is inevitable. You can find absolutely anything; it’s incredible to witness how many different ways there are to be, how creative (or uncreative) people are, how we crave attention, hopi... See more

5. Algorithmic feeds are failing: StumbleUpon helped me start to understand, almost at a humanistic level, how vast the internet could be. TikTok often yields a similar result, though with a key difference. On TikTok, almost all videos trend toward a kind of visual consistency and repeatability. Silly voices or bits of speech become ‘sounds’, to be... See more

TikTok plucks niche digital aesthetics out of obscurity and serves them up to an audience that might not have known or cared in the first place. While aesthetic components were once integral to the formation of traditional subcultures, they’ve lost all meaning in this algorithmically driven visual landscape. Instead, subcultural images and attitude... See more