How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?

In less than four years, TikTok became the most culturally significant product in the world. It rode the tailwinds of AirPods and memes to reach over 1 billion DAU’s and is now the best way to create and consume video content on mobile. Everyone should be watching to see what they do next.

TikTok enables and invites the pointed, witty, playful, allusive, zany and endlessly inventive combination of video, music and text. But the creative energies of its more than one billion users are circumscribed and channeled by the architecture of the platform.

TikTok’s spectacular success in enlisting consumers as producers depends on making

... See more