Enter the Washing Machine

For a while last year, when I was overwhelmed with an endless to-do list and not enough time in the day to do it (just like everyone else), I would go on Instagram Reels in the Explore section of my app. I started to do it in the mornings, before I even put my glasses on, watching random videos from people I’d never met. I referred to this as “reel time” when I talked about it to my friends. Before long, my flatmate and I, trying to motivate each other to get work done, would take each other’s phones away, then wordlessly hand them back on a break, with the implicit understanding that we were entering reel time for five blissful minutes.

I understand how seductive an interface can be – if Instagram had specifically asked me whether I wanted to watch videos of strangers doing dances or saying hyper-specific things about attachment styles, I would have navigated away. But presenting the option as part of a puzzle – the mosaic of Instagram’s Explore page usually features a reel, moving in the corner – makes me want to press play, even when I know that half of the time it’ll just turn up drivel I don’t understand.

By contrast, TikTok is something I’ve resisted using for a long time. The majority of the TikToks I’ve seen have been shown to me on someone else’s phone or through videos cross-posted onto Instagram. But for this article, I wanted to experience it myself and see if the smooth hollows of my already internet-addled brain could become smoother still. Despite my preconceptions of TikTok, in practice it was a blank slate – somewhere I’d never been before on the internet. I was excited, embarrassingly so; I told my friends and the majority of them expressed surprise that I didn’t already have it.[1] “Perhaps no social media embodies our daydreams more fully than TikTok,” Leslie Jamison writes in a 2022 essay for Astra Magazine. “People act out their daydreams, make fun of themselves daydreaming, reproduce the interiors of their daydreams as absurd picaresque microdramas: endless food without calories, fantasies of flight.”

The TikTok basics: the first page after you sign up prompts you to choose your interests. I had options such as Oddly Satisfying, DIY & Home, and Art. The first video was of three cats, all swaying to a sped-up version of 50 Cent’s ‘In da Club’. Videos are short, snappy and easy to understand; often based on a trending audio or meme format; and presented with a plethora of tags in the caption, with the option to search for more of the same if you like what you see. The widest possible range of videos, viewed in such a short amount of time (navigated through a simple swiping up motion), should have put me off, but it worked. Unlike other social media – such as Facebook or Instagram – you get fed a random range of videos until the algorithm narrows down what niches you’re interested in, as opposed to seeing content from people in your in-app social network.

In September 2022, executives at TikTok revealed that this was (understandably) a core part of how their app has been designed. The first eight videos that you’re shown feature different music, trending topics, and users – and the app iterates from there. The last time TikTok revealed details about its algorithm was in 2020 – Axios reported that the platform seeks to gain “enough data about the user” to “map a user’s preferences in relation to similar users and group them into ‘clusters’. Simultaneously, it also groups videos into ‘clusters’ based on similar themes, like ‘basketball’ or ‘bunnies’.” Through machine-learning technology, TikTok’s algorithm then “serves videos to users based on their proximity to other clusters of users and content that they like.” Consuming an endless stream of disjointed, hyper-personalised clips like this definitely had an effect on both my brain and my willpower. The first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t see the time on my phone anymore, because the interface took up the whole of my screen. The second thing I noticed was that at least 20 minutes had passed since I signed up.

My opening minutes on the app were both hypnotic and incredibly annoying. The first five videos on my For You page were, in quick succession: a teacher-student shuffle battle; some guy playing the video game Skate 3 and emphatically saying into a podcast mic, “I just got called out”; a teenage boy doing a POV of when your mom calls your name (I don’t think that’s what POV means, but that’s neither here nor there); a targeted ad for the Swarovski Calendar that had apparently been reduced from £90 to £24, which two earnest looking 15-year-olds were nodding about; and a posh boy imitating other posh boys, based on which university in the UK you went to. Every tenth video I got was an invitation to join a Live, which I can only describe as some random, ordinary person talking to the camera. I steered clear of these. Every other few videos presented a Stitch – a video in which a user can piggyback off the opening clip of another’s. You will rarely see two videos from the same person in quick succession, and videos often cap out at 30 seconds.

“The first thing I noticed is that I couldn’t see the time on my phone anymore, because the interface took up the whole of my screen. The second thing I noticed was that at least 20 minutes had passed since I signed up.”

Sound on TikTok becomes a meme too. Sped up, chipmunk-y versions of popular songs (right now, it’s Steve Lacy’s ‘Bad Habit’) are as much of a way to navigate the app as the tags themselves. In May 2022, Sonia Rao at The Washington Post wrote about how pop musicians took to TikTok to publicise how they were being asked to manufacture viral moments on the platform. “Months ago, Charli XCX mentioned her label asking her ‘to make my 8th tiktok of the week,’” Rao wrote. “In March, Florence Welch of Florence and the Machine posted a video singing a cappella because ‘the labels are begging me for ‘lo fi TikToks.’’ In a since-deleted post, FKA twigs said she ‘got told off today for not making enough effort.’”[2] There are other forms of sonic markers on TikTok too, such as the robotic female voice that reads out text on screen, which I’ve heard too many times to count. This retrofitting of an existing accessibility tool to aid content creation seems to be a Gen Z invention – something about the voice’s uncanniness is hard to miss and it also feels context agnostic, making it quick and easy to replicate.

Even though the audience most commonly associated with TikTok are teenagers, or at least people in their late teens, its influence seems to have rippled outwards. TikTok’s chokehold on monetisable authenticity is part of its seeming appeal, even as this has looped back in on itself with corporations now spending thousands of dollars to create something low effort in order to look authentic. All you can post on the app is videos, meaning that users film and produce daily vlogs, or else videos about making a certain meal or a specific workout. It means that a greater range of content has made its way onto the app through a purely visual format (unlike Instagram, for instance, where you may see mostly captions or replies, or even YouTube, where descriptions can be extensive and accompanied by tons of links). Early on in my TikTok experience, I wondered how long it would be before the app showed me things I was actually interested in seeing. But I found it mind-numbingly easy to navigate – the haptics needed no explanation because I’ve both seen other people use it, and seen other apps mimic its swipe, tap, tap, tap, swipe, tap, functions. I’m not the first person to say this and I won’t be the last, but it was wild how quickly I felt the algorithm adapting to me. I’m a 25-year-old woman in a major city, and it seemed to cotton on quickly to the kind of content I was interested in (vegetarian recipes, day-in-the-life blogs,[3] politics explainers) but it never managed to fully satisfy the itch. I felt myself being sucked in, constantly swiping up, even after a string of videos that I knew I didn’t like, the algorithm morphing gradually to deliver content that kept me coming back.

I had thought that getting on TikTok would help me pinpoint trends or phrases or memes earlier in their trend cycle, but it felt more like being in a washing machine, unsure of what came first and what was coming next and when the cycle would stop. Rebecca Jennings at Vox has written about TikTok outstripping Instagram or Pinterest to become the dominant platform to forecast emerging trends, brands, clothes or even micro-trends (like a subsection of a trend, often even more fleeting). “While Tumblr and Pinterest were tools for curating inspiration to define and explore one’s personal aesthetic, Instagram was meant for performing it,” Jennings says. “TikTok, however, combines both in a single app.” Trends materialise and coalesce from TikTok to the street and back again, creating a kind of accelerating feedback loop that feeds into consumer culture. “Together, with the help of the supercharged TikTok algorithm that blasts viral content to millions of users within hours or days,” she says, “these videos shape what mainstream culture considers stylish, which therefore can affect what we choose to wear ourselves.”

Overwhelmingly, what TikTok seems to prioritise – or at least what it enables – is a proliferation of thousands of micro-trends, endlessly iterating and re-iterating in a version of what trend forecaster Ayesha Siddiqi calls “aesthetic submarkets”; essentially online microgenres. The visual language of TikTok lends itself to increasingly hyper-specific niches. These are given signifiers that fall into the noun-core pattern (cottagecore, goblincore, fairycore), and are accompanied by products that you too can buy to fit into the genre – a kind of headband, or sports bra, or mug, or keyboard, or pair of shoes. If TikTok can squeeze money out of something as nebulous as y2k fashion,[4] it can squeeze even more out of subdivisions such as y2k fairycore and y2k gorpcore. Every niche is content that can be monetised, and every bit of content can be turned into a niche for monetisation. TikTok’s Creator Fund, for example, pays users when they get 100,000 views in the previous 30 days, although this is further dependent on their precise content and number of followers – the app notes that it is not only the number of views that it accounts for, but also “the authenticity of those views [and] the level of engagement on the content”. Influencers may also have deals with specific brands that will pay them thousands of dollars to post videos featuring their product – usually something that looks authentic.[5] But while branded content exists on TikTok, it proliferates slightly differently than it does on other platforms.

“Every niche is content that can be monetised, and every bit of content can be turned into a niche for monetisation.”

As John Thornhill of the Financial Times explains, “AI-trained algorithms promote content to those on the platform with similar interests, rather than it being spread via networks of followers. In theory at least, the app allows more ‘nobodies’ to become somebodies.” This structure means that anyone, in theory, could become a part of that Creator Fund or start to slowly make a living from viral content – all it takes is for one or two videos to gain traction.

For a long time, American social media companies had cornered the market on the attention economy and everything that spawned from it. As such, TikTok, which was founded in 2016 by Chinese company Bytedance and took off globally a year later, has sparked geopolitical consternation in the United States over what access to the app’s 1-billion-strong global user base the Chinese government may have. In July 2022, US Senators Mark Warner and Marco Rubio called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to open an investigation into the app. “TikTok, their parent company ByteDance, and other China-based tech companies are required by Chinese law to share their information with the Communist party,” Warner said. “Allowing access to American data, down to biometrics such as face prints and voiceprints, poses a great risk to not only individual privacy but to national security.” In the second half of 2022, the typical American TikTok user spent an average of 82 minutes on the app per day, reported to be twice as long as the time they spent on Facebook or Instagram.

“AI-trained algorithms promote content to those on the platform with similar interests, rather than it being spread via networks of followers. In theory at least, the app allows more nobodies to become somebodies.”

— John Thornhill

It’s not surprising that every app wants to look like TikTok. Part of its success can be put down to its slot-machine interface, which makes it hypnotically easy to scroll what’s happening on the internet without ever leaving the app. This interface has a bearing on the way that information is passed around, what becomes prioritised and what becomes devalued. You don’t see consecutive posts from a person unless you go on their feed, and the actual videos that you see can range drastically in production value and content, even within a one-minute span. In the midst of this runaway success, TikTok has run afoul of the same murky practices as other platforms. A 2022 investigation by TIME and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism found that poorly paid microworkers in Colombia and other countries in Latin America were being tasked with monitoring the platform for offensive and violent content. Inevitably, they were failing to keep up with the scale and immensity of the content they face, with one worker listing the subjects he is regularly expected to sift through as “[murder], suicide, pedophilic [sic], pornographic content, accidents, cannibalism.” The same worries about addiction that circulated around Facebook and Snapchat have now begun to find their way into lawsuits against TikTok. A €1.4bn legal action is currently in the Dutch courts, having been brought by parents concerned over the scale of TikTok’s data collection and the proliferation of risky challenges being attempted by users and promoted across the app.[6]

Yet every social media app, wishing to appeal to younger demographics, seems to be attempting to emulate TikTok. Facebook’s pivot to video may have come several years before TikTok was founded in 2016, but Instagram’s Reels feature is a clear imitation, with users often just reposting TikToks onto their profiles to boost engagement. On Twitter, generic popular accounts increasingly post screenshots of TikToks with no context, so the moving image becomes static again. It reminds me of what artist Hito Steyerl calls “poor images”: images stripped from their context that circulate until they’re a low-resolution version of their original; “ghost” images that have been “squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution”.

“With TikTok, I felt this weighty, nodal network of bodies, hardware, software, users, and connections wrapping itself around me. I felt overwhelmed, and I felt time compressing.”

As TikTok has grown, it’s transformed from just being a place where kids spend their time and money. A study by the Pew Research Center found that 26 per cent of American adults under 30 regularly get their news from TikTok, although the total number of American adults that do so is around 10 per cent. TikTok actively encourages this, with journalists and newsrooms increasingly maintaining strong presences on the app.[7] If you watch one clip about a breaking news story – say, the Twitter takeover by Elon Musk – you can go as deep as you want, watching more and more. But misinformation on the app is rife, as are the now fairly standard stories about bad faith actors on other apps.

“Similar to both its meaning in chemistry and to the meaning of ‘language,’ ‘interfaces’ are the point of juncture between different bodies, hardware, software, users, and what they connect to or are part of,” write Matthew Fuller and Florian Cramer in the 2008 book Software Studies: A Lexicon. With TikTok, I felt this weighty, nodal network of bodies, hardware, software, users, and connections wrapping itself around me. I felt overwhelmed, and I felt time compressing. The app was jarring, but I found myself picking it up time and time again while waiting in line for the self checkout, or on the bus for ten minutes. Memes and clips of videos that I’ve both never seen before and seen too many times proliferated on my screen, alongside explainers of what interest rate rises actually mean, or why COP27 is a cop-out. Understandably, TikTok is a microcosm of the internet – I found myself on the app, typing in “fall soup recipe”, instead of searching through pages on Google or the NYT Cooking app, a functionality that the New York Times reporter Kalley Huang has observed means that TikTok is not just a social media platform, but “a search engine, too”. Rather than navigating through unusable web pages with broken links – or articles behind paywalls – I was unnerved at how quickly the app picked up on things I didn’t know I was interested in (crispy tofu, low-effort pilates, a sheep farmer in Wales) and turned it back around on me: how much it had spread its tentacles through the motions I was used to doing.

In her essay for Astra, Jamison says: “Watching this TikTok, even just reading its caption, is like reading the CliffsNotes version of my deepest desires, outsourced to the internet.” People often compare TikTok and Instagram to each other, but the experience felt more like using a dating app. Inevitably, as you stare down the grid, you begin to circulate through the same questions: will the thing after this be better than what I’m currently looking at? Do I have to interact with it? How much time do I have to spend on this before this gives me what I want – and how much longer until this app can tell me what I want?

[1] “You spend so much time sending me dumb videos already,” said one.

[2] Ironically, these videos gained millions of views, leading some to ask whether it was all a publicity stunt.

[3] Semi-ironically.

[4] y2k fashion includes things such as butterfly motifs, low-rise denim jeans and rhinestoned velour tracksuits.

[5] Rather than a highly stylised photoshoot featuring a product, creators will post a day-in-the-life video in which they host a dinner party where all of the products used happen to be from a particular brand. Recent regulations mean that influencers now have to disclose when they are being paid, but there are still workarounds.

[6] The Blackout Challenge, for example, is alleged to challenge people to suffocate themselves until they pass out.

[7] Planet Money’s Jack Corbett, for example, is fluent in the vernacular of TikTok, and journalists such as Sophia Smith Galer use it as their primary way to disseminate breaking news and underreported stories.

Words Sanjana Varghese

This article was originally published in Design Reviewed #1. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.

Heartbeats

Patching the Machine