I really hate TikTok.
There’s something about it that makes me deeply uncomfortable. It’s not solely for the content - the cringe dance videos, the stream of “pro tips” that actually make the process of doing anything more difficult, and the transparent clout chasing and coat-tailing that allows reaction videos to garner thousands of views - because I’m certainly no content expert. When it comes to creating content I’m closer to ‘dad at the zoo accidentally taking a picture of his sweaty forehead with front-facing camera instead of his kids’ than I am to a ‘new-wave marketing guru’. So any criticisms I have of the content should rightfully be dismissed as the musings of an out-of-touch millenial airbag.
But it’s more than just the content that’s unsettling to me. It’s the technology behind the content. It’s that I know that if I were to download the app my general content criticisms would vanish as the algorithm learned my preferences and engineered a stream of content perfectly engineered to keep my face glued to my phone screen. I’m talking woodworking ASMR and probably lots of videos of philosophy and psychology ideas boiled down into quick, easily digestible blurbs that make me feel superior to everyone. And maybe some dance videos too idk I’m just a man.
The point is that it entertains you. It entertains the absolute shit out of you. It entertains YOU. You don’t use it to keep yourself entertained. It sucks you in with its grubby little algorithm phalanges and feeds you all of the perfect little videos that will keep your eyeballs on the screen for as long as possible so it can monetize your attention.
I have a really hard time expounding on this opinion without sounding like a crotchety old man who refuses to get an email address. Luckily I follow a lot of people on Substack that are smarter and better writers than I am and TikTok is a New Kind of Superweapon recently posted on The Prism made me feel seen.
The thesis of the piece is essentially that since the 2017 founding of TikTok, China has - whether intentionally or unintentionally - inflicted Superweapon-level damage upon Western nations. TikTok may be used to cause irreparable damage to American youth and society and China’s forbidden access of the app to its own children is a strong indication that they’re aware of this.
Now, I’m not a political commentator. I have no business extrapolating on the global socioeconomic societal impact that China is looking to have on the rest of the world. But I do agree with the potential weapon-like implications of an app like TikTok.
As a general principle, I think that the extent to which we engage in active entertainment - ie; reading, learning a new skill, exercising, playing with a pet - as opposed to being passively entertained - ie; scrolling through a TikTok feed, and to a lesser extent, television - has a direct impact on our personal development.
The biggest issue with an app like TikTok is that its a perfect form of passive entertainment. It requires next to zero input to function. Even on other social apps, like Youtube, you’re still required to search through long-form videos to find something to keep your entertained. TikTok’s algorithm makes it so that you can simply open the app and swipe. If the video doesn’t grab your attention in .7 seconds, on the to the next. And the next. And the next. Swipe, swipe, like, swipe, swipe, dopamine hit, dopamine hit, dopamine hit. TikTok requires you to do as little as possible - it doesn’t even care who you follow - it just wants to maximize the amount of time you spend in front of the screen.
Contrast this to entertaining yourself by learning something new. Let’s say you’re teaching yourself how to play the guitar. Learning to play the guitar - at least at a competent level - requires you to sit through hundred of hours of intentional practice. And for most of those hours you will need to deal with not being very good at it. Many of those hours will be spent trying (and failing) to play the sounds you’d like to hear. To get better at the guitar requires you to confront your current lack of ability to play the guitar and that’s an altogether uncomfortable experience. Developing competency certainly comes with a plethora of extremely joyful personal experiences as well. Those moments of ecstasy when you’re able to play your favorite song for the first time, or impress a group of friends with your ability, or even just the generalized feeling of accomplishment that stems from building competency in a skill. But you need to wade through hours of broken strings and blistered fingers to get there. And to deal with all of that wading you need to have a refined ‘entertain yourself’ muscle that can pull you through low moments.
TikTok causes that muscle to atrophy. When someone develops an opioid addiction their addiction snowballs because the more they hide their pain under a blanket of narcotics the more acutely they feel the pain when the blanket blows away. Painful emotions become exponentially harder to confront the more we avoid them. TikTok allows us to avoid boredom and to do so in a way that is as effortless as breathing and to step away from that and instead entertain ourselves in ways that are objectively more difficult and less dopamine-inducing seems like madness.
Human beings evolved with a natural inclination towards problem-solving and mastery because those things allowed us to survive and thrive in our environments and create offspring. But our instincts also evolved with scarcity in mind so that if we stumbled across a strawberry bush and this may be the only source of sugar we come across until next Spring you better believe we are going to set aside our stone tools and eat every fucking strawberry on that bush.
We can’t help ourselves.
TikTok is that strawberry bush except every strawberry that gets pulled off, another one grows in its place. And this strawberry bush has built in machine learning algorithms that recognize which strawberries you are grabbing and making sure to replace them with strawberries that more closely resemble your ideal strawberry.
You will literally never get enough strawberries.
Now strawberries aren’t a bad thing, but the nutritional value of them will never come anywhere close to the other foods you and your prehistoric homies can consume when you kill a mammoth or something. But you’re never going to have the motivation to go out there, and find a mammoth, and watch Steve from two cavedesacs (like culdesacs but for caveman lol) over get his arm torn off my a mammoth tusk if there’s this perfectly good bush of strawberries in front of you.
The only thing to do is to light the bush on fire and pull out the roots so you can’t go back to it next spring.
That metaphor has gotten somewhat convoluted, so just so we’re clear, TikTok is going to provide you with an endless stream of entertainment, and affirmation, and connection, and dopamine, but its all low-level, short-lasting, hits that will never come anywhere close to the joys you could feel from spending years mastering a skill, or from deepening a relationship, or accomplishing a long-held goal. BUT you can have those hits by doing nothing more than moving the tip of your thumb - so what’s the point.
idk maybe we’re all destined to float around in self-driven chairs Wall-E style. But until then I’d prefer to go find a mammoth - I’m tired of strawberries.