I attended a Zoom symposium about AI, run by a friend who’s something of an expert. I have immense respect for this person’s intellect and accomplishments; he has a long history of personal and enterprise innovation in a staggering diversity of fields and products.
He was doing an educational experiment: he wanted to prototype a sort of online curriculum. He wanted to see if he could explain machine learning, and the future dangers and opportunities associated with AI, to a call full of relative laypersons. He did a great job, outlining the basics of training an ML algorithm to do a task in plain, everyday language. He then opened the floor for questions.
Imagine my frustration and dismay when the entire latter half of the conversation became about killer robots.
I have no quarrel against highlighting the dangers of killer robots. I think those dangers are important to highlight. But the conversation should not start and end there. When a group discussion around AI begins and ends with killer robots, we can rest assured that no layperson in that group comes away with a real understanding of the diversity of ways contemporary machine learning impacts our present, or with the inspiration or personal empowerment to get involved to help author our future.
In other words: okay, we shouldn’t build killer robots. But what should we build instead?
I’ve been spending a lot of time on TikTok.
TikTok is an extraordinary platform for a number of reasons. If you want to hear a great rundown of these reasons, check out this podcast from Andreessen Horowitz. But the shorthand summary is: TikTok really isn’t a “social media” platform, or not in the traditional sense, anyway.
TikTok, instead, is an “interest media” platform.
Tiktok isn’t really about who you follow, in the sense that Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter are. Instead, TikTok is all about the “for you” page: an infinitely scrolling feed that you can train to show you your favorite moods, aesthetics, people, and aspects of culture.
Most websites have something like this; Instagram has the “discover'' page, YouTube has your homepage recommendations. But whereas most platforms wield these reco pages like shotguns, TikTok’s “for you” page (if you train it properly) is a scalpel.
Since TikTok is focused entirely on mapping the graph of your interests (instead of the graph of your “friends”), they can use all their resources to tag, analyze, and classify the videos people upload in order to show you things that will spark your fancy. And they only show you one video at a time–so instead of an intimidating wall of recommendations, you evaluate each piece of media in succession, like you’re swiping on Tinder.
On other platforms, there’s a network effect that buoys creators who have been on the platform longer. When everything is based around the social graph, around the people we friend or follow, by default, the people who started on the platform earliest have the biggest advantage and the most followers. There’s a sort of natural cooling effect in the culture: there’s an established slate of creators who were there early, and everyone else is fighting to be heard.
TikTok works to intentionally break this dynamic. Since it’s based around the interest graph instead of the social graph, old hands have less advantage over new kids. Sure, it helps to get the hang of the platform early–but your “for you” page is working to surface new creators. If someone makes something that falls in line with your interests, and it’s deemed good, you’ll likely see it–no matter how few followers they have. TikTok employs human curators, picking and hand-labeling.
None of these technical descriptors, though, really convey the magic of TikTok.
TikTok is an explosive diorama of your favorite feelings. TikTok is vistas from across the world, hilarious moments of comedy, and gorgeous palettes of emotion and vulnerability painstakingly assembled by teens from their bedrooms in the midwest. TikTok is a delivery system for new cultures. And the culture itself is what really matters.
I’m a huge fan of YouTube, for similar reasons. There’s a massive diversity of independent content creation; so educational and entertaining, so well produced, such brilliant artists, writers, and performers in so many niches. But YouTube suffers from the legacy-creator issue: I tend to follow who I follow, and the recommendations make me feel like I’m tunneling deeper–not being exposed to brand new things. I tend to blank them out with a browser plugin.
TikTok solves the problem somehow. It may be that the videos are so short-format that I go through them quickly, and TikTok rapidly learns what I like and don’t like. It may be their focus on the interest graph. The culture is somehow more explosive and life-affirming–it feels less like a tunnel, and more like an open plain, or a massive cityscape. TikTok isn’t really about my relationship with people I already know. It’s about discovering people, and culture, that I don’t.
The people are what I love most about the platform.
It’s not just how they look or what they say–it’s about their perspectives. Someone can take a video in an alleyway they’re exploring, and I might never see their face, but I learn so much about their perspective on the world by looking through their eyes. Or someone sits in their room and records their off-the-cuff thoughts in a vulnerable moment, into their phone. The short, kinetic, mobile nature of the format writes life’s little moments in massive script.
It’s difficult to describe the breadth and intensity of the content. I’m just going to have to show you.
Take your time, and ingest these. Don’t worry; they’re short.
https://www.tiktok.com/@reddogimagery/video/7005763844551314693
https://www.tiktok.com/@picturesofmatthew/video/6936063226023038214
https://www.tiktok.com/@galenkryvoruchko/video/6929241284146203906
https://www.tiktok.com/@whatitdolibbylou/video/6901453119276780806
https://www.tiktok.com/@colinjay_/video/6914509992208977158
https://www.tiktok.com/@jenny.tsang/video/6831676470075706630
https://www.tiktok.com/@shelldecay/video/6930666052254993669
https://www.tiktok.com/@sexifungi/video/6929962810923388165
https://www.tiktok.com/@sonyamia/video/6920291463360236806
https://www.tiktok.com/@angelt33th/video/6918630453884882182
https://www.tiktok.com/@liams_edge/video/6844968512759368966
https://www.tiktok.com/@ndpol/video/6904856664843799814
https://www.tiktok.com/@rajaaannaa/video/6902753884431863042
https://www.tiktok.com/@goodluckkarly/video/6906969765110123781
https://www.tiktok.com/@ryshorosky/video/6868454202398559494
https://www.tiktok.com/@imtaylorrae/video/6912252772557622534
https://www.tiktok.com/@wurrmdotcom/video/7075861251179466027
https://www.tiktok.com/@grimmrot/video/7066139291948453167
https://www.tiktok.com/@destructivediary/video/7055857368629873966
https://www.tiktok.com/@pineacre/video/7061813839159086383
https://www.tiktok.com/@repkochi/video/6976863019653549313
https://www.tiktok.com/@thornfromhexgirls/video/6886199312397634821
Now, hopefully, you sort of see what I mean. This is a buffet of human experience to celebrate––all delivered to your doorstep. The algorithm is the delivery mechanism, but the source, the fuel, is the people. The other human beings, here, on planet earth. This platform revives that sense of wonder between us as human beings. We’re not all just in our own little holes, our own little networks, in the midst of this pandemic. There are other humans out there, and each of us is exploring the world in our own way; tunneling through reality and bringing back the gold we find.
But even this picture I’m painting is deceptive, because it’s all still a product of The Algorithm. The TikTok I just showed you will not be your TikTok; that TikTok is catered to my interests. I included, for example, no stand-up comedy content, though that is plentiful on TikTok. I also included no cooking content and no sports content and no content about Christian evangelism, because that isn’t what the platform shows me. If you fall into the right demographic, or interact with the right videos, you’ll find plenty of that. So we’re still being cordoned off, even if it feels like we’re being shown the whole world.
Yet the TikTok algorithm doesn’t feel malicious and hidden in the same way the algorithms for Facebook and YouTube have come to feel. Since everyone on the platform interacts with it and trains it so intentionally, and since we’ve all had so much time to think about algorithms generally...it feels as though we as TikTok users are being encouraged to take an active part in the training of our algorithm.
You’ll see people posting comments like “oh crap, I’ve drifted off of queer TikTok; I need to interact with some queer content.” There is a consciousness that every move you make on the platform influences what it feeds you. I’ve tried to raise this consciousness on other platforms, with mixed success. On TikTok, that knowledge, that algorithmic literacy, seems to be an inbuilt part of the experience.
Instead of having content shoveled down your throat, it feels like you’re training your own personal pet algo like you’d train a Pokemon. Make sure to feed it healthy food.
Other small touches add to the sense that you’re interacting with a kinder, gentler version of the social media we’re all used to. For example: as you can imagine, your infinite-scrolling “for you” page with the trainable algorithm can be incredibly addictive. It’s very tempting to just keep sucking in inspiring and stimulating content. But if you’re up late at night scrolling for an hour or two, the algorithm will actively feed you a video like this one, encouraging you to get off the app and go to bed.
It’s tempting to romanticize the platform for doing this, and I want to emphasize that there are still potential issues, especially with ideological siloing. But I also want to declare loudly that this is the direction our social platforms and algorithmically moderated lives SHOULD be going.
Instead of being unconsciously subject to a network of invisible forces that shape our lives, we should have a relationship with those forces. We should be able to shape them consciously, intentionally, just as they’re shaping us, and the algorithmic structures we build should encourage this. It should be a two-way street.
This dialog with the platform is further enabled by the tools TikTok offers content creators. They’re working toward precisely the world I outlined in one of my previous posts, where the average person has access to easy-to-use blockbuster-grade special effects technology in their effort to express their perspective on the world.
This trend is only accelerating, and it’s already changing the way we engage with media. There really isn’t any such thing as mainstream culture anymore. There are communities, and these communities make media for themselves and each other, whether big-budget or from their bedrooms. If you’ve got no community, you’ve got nothing, which is why Hollywood and Comic-Con have become such close bedfellows.
With TikTok, the community element and the creative element are intimately fused together: TikTok makes it easy for each creator to build on sounds, visuals, and material from other creators. You can use a sound someone made and act out your own video, or they can duet with your video in order to respond to an argument, or you can “stitch” to their video to complete a joke or a feeling. You can craft a shared musical or visual masterpiece.
TikTok did this so that the barrier to entry for creativity is low––if someone can’t make up an original idea out of nothing, they can, instead, build on something that already exists–they can join the conversation. The platform is biased toward the idea that everyone is creative, and that everyone has something to add.
This ethos of inclusion has made other media seem outdated and irrelevant by comparison. I’m constantly seeing TikToks pop up in news articles and on other platforms like Instagram and Twitter. It’s no mystery: this is a platform that encourages people to capture their most vulnerable and most brilliant moments, and that line is often very thin. There’s so much openness and emotional authenticity here. On TikTok, people seem willing to share precisely where they’re at––their fears, foibles, and dreams. Right now, this is where culture is happening.
TikTok also, of course, currently skews young. And the young have very little to lose right now, and a great deal to say. TikTok has provided them with a platform to show us how they see the world, and their vision is kaleidoscopic and has very little to do with the boundaries within which we’ve all previously lived our lives.
One of my friends recommended a series to me called Terra Ignota, set in the near future. The denizens of this future society live in enclaves tailored to their interests and hobbies, like a sort of chosen culture. This reminds me of Neil Stephensons’ The Diamond Age, where a faction of people in the future basically LARP a Victorian society, even though they have advanced technology.
You see this kind of thing all over TikTok, with people layering “dark academia” aesthetics over themselves and their lives like cake frosting, or immersing themselves in seas of plants, or showing off the contents of their closets filled with techwear, or documenting street fashion. The most powerful tribes on TikTok are not nation or creed but your interests; what you love. The eyes through which you see the world determine your tribe.
This cultural reactor core and its demographic specificity have made TikTok catnip for brands. But many brands don’t yet fully understand it, because the community has no patience for highly polished advertising content. There are even guide videos for brands made by TikTok itself, imploring: “don’t make ads. Make TikToks.”
In other words if you want to speak to the culture, you participate in the culture. You don’t get to interrupt, and you don’t get to stand apart. There is no magical shortcut to my wallet. If you’re a brand and you make an awesome TikTok, that fits my interest graph, maybe I’ll see it.
I’ve seen a few decent brand TikToks. But my favorite moments on the platform, by far, skew directly away from polished brand content. They come from exhausted kids working warehouse jobs in the middle of the night, despondent because they have no time to make art. They come from girls hunting for mushrooms in the forest. They come from people live-documenting their experiences with homelessness.
We have less and less patience for big wads of capital that imitate culture, because culture is human-to-human connection. We’re starving for the real thing.
Facebook is a killer robot.
No, really. We started this little essay off talking about killer robots. You want to talk about killer robots? Let’s talk about Facebook.
The current whistleblower revelations about Facebook make clear: the platform’s management, and its algorithmic dynamics, directly impacted our electoral process in favor of Donald Trump, and Trump utterly failed to implement an effective pandemic response. Facebook also helped to directly spread COVID misinformation.
This combo helped cause the deaths of three quarters of a million Americans.
US drone strikes have murdered somewhere upwards of 20,000 people. 20,000 people the literal entire time we’ve been using drones.
This is not to compare these two numbers in terms of intent or depth of evil. That’s impossible to do. We cannot morally weigh pandemic negligence against the willful, imperialist atrocities of state-sanctioned murder. But if we’re going to weigh the mortality and life-quality impacts of various technologies, we need to understand what the hell we’re talking about.
It’s much more comforting to encase AI inside robots. That way we can keep track of it. We know where it is and what it’s doing, like a bee that got in the room. We want to be able to see it, and squash it.
But the flat truth of the matter is that AI is all around us–little bits of it. Simple machine learning algorithms that are showing us videos and shipping us products. Health insurance software that forecasts trends and recommends groceries. We have relationships with all of these little algorithmic beasts, feeding them data, stroking them, and following them around on leashes.
Technology is woven into our lives. And one of the things that excites me about TikTok is that it makes this technology just a little bit easier to see, and interact with, and love. Because yes, our new world must be powered by love.
One of my favorite corners of TikTok is lesbian TikTok. How did I wind up on lesbian TikTok, you ask? That’s a long story that starts with my confused relationship with gender as a young person and ends with a friend sending me a bunch of lesbian TikToks because she knew I’d like them. But more relevant to the current conversation is what I found on lesbian TikTok: powerful and startling performances of masculinity.
I’ll try to explain what I mean: men are socialized into patriarchal masculinity. It’s a box we’re told to stay inside, or else. But these women weren’t socialized into that box. Quite the opposite: in many cases they were kept or discouraged from breaking into it.
So whereas many men are simply resigned to masculinity, these women explore masculinity, they hack masculinity, they rewire and own masculinity. From them, I gained a new understanding of what’s possible inside the masculine framework, and as a man, I benefited from this exploratory lens. What if I did maleness on purpose, instead of on accident? Literally, TikTok lesbians showed me who I am.
Understand: this is just one, isolated instance of me encountering a specific subculture on TikTok. Just one cultural encounter, and it changed my life. Now imagine hundreds of such encounters, with hundreds of different subcultures that speak to me.
That’s the experience of being on TikTok.
We are right to be wary of the impact this technology has on our lives, and we should be constantly critical. And TikTok crucially illustrates one of our blind spots: the fallacy that we are somehow fundamentally separate from the technology we use.
When we choose to engage with a platform, that platform impacts us, and we impact it, and the more conscious we are of this process, the better. We tend to separate ourselves from the robots; we imagine an us-and-them relationship with self-contained artificial beings. When we imagine AI, we also think about Boston Dynamics.
Closer to the truth: our world, and we, are a cloud of emotion and technology. Our nervous systems are connected together by electrical impulses sent via satellite. We are impacted by little decisions, little nudges, bits of algorithms, and the little pieces of ourselves that we choose to share–along with the pieces of us that get shared automatically.
When single-celled life first evolved on earth, it started as simple molecules and atoms. Due to their inherent properties and charges, when those molecules interacted, they slowly organized themselves into more and more complex bits of tiny machinery, until we got life: the DNA molecule. Simple machines, and simple rules, at scale, led to complex behavior.
We’re swimming in those primordial waters right now. We’re expecting some kind of big AI monster to rear its head out of the water, and all the while we’re connecting with these tiny bits, these monads of machine learning in all our devices. And they’re evolving to transmit our feelings, our experiences, our minds. We are the nerve centers, the most complex brain-clusters, in a globally evolving network of information–not just information, but emotion, too.
This does not mean we abdicate our critique of surveillance capitalism, but it is a reimagining of what our relationship with technology can be. Because if we’re an awakening global mind, and we connect our neurons badly, we could wind up with various manifestations of global-gestalt mental illness. I’m sure we can all think of a few recent examples.
We are all cyborgs, right now, already. But we’re starting to discover that being cyborgs doesn’t feel how we thought it would. It isn’t cold and metallic, like the Borg in Star Trek.
Instead it’s warm. It’s bright. It’s as if, in that movie “Her,” the machines took us with them instead of leaving us behind.
Instead of living in an antiseptic landscape of numbers and switches, we built, on top of those bones, a fleshy body of feeling and sentiment, of tearful catharsis and playful hilarity. We swim in a substrate of AI, and TikTok is one way we, and it, dream together.
We dream in images and stories; in snapshots from our lives and in reactions to the vibrations and caresses we exchange with our devices. We are a breathing network of life, and how we construct and automate our global neuro-connective tissue has real-world consequences, both difficult and glorious.
I’d like to close by talking about one of my favorite TikToks. It’s not particularly complex or high-budget. It’s just a girl, in a dress, in the snow.
https://www.tiktok.com/@deadgirlfriend/video/6907058681293180166
But what a video. What an artifact. It’s got malevolent, terrifying, half-mad Joan Didion energy. The chorus “my daddy’s got a gun” plays over the video, but it’s slowed down to a dirge; distorted like a bellow from the id, and the camera (really, the camera-person) swoops and staggers through the howling blizzard like a drunk. What is this girl doing staging a video in a handmade prom dress in the middle of a snowstorm? Why does the image feel the way it feels? And why did TikTok present it to me?
This is one of the most interesting inflection-points of media technology: the moment when we get to combine digital clarity with human mystery. We don’t yet know for certain why specific moods, images, aesthetics, and moments impact on our consciousness. These are the same things our ancestors tried to capture when they made images of gods or painted heroic portraits. There is a moment of human excellence, and we feel it. One small difference in camera work, lighting, whatever else, and it might not have worked. But for some reason, it hits us just the right way
This is the primary thing leaking through TikTok that has affected me so much over the past few months: it’s the creative voice of the people. The sheer, irrepressible diversity of the human spirit. These kids are amazing. They’re doing more emotionally with a shoestring and ten bucks than blockbuster directors are doing with hundreds of millions of dollars. And TikTok is helping them, with both tools and distribution. Their business depends on helping them.
This is one more step in the fundamental reversal of the media landscape that’s been happening ever since the internet began: we’re doing away with the illusion that a select few have a monopoly on creative genius. There is a glut of brilliant ideas on this platform, and they’re being produced in a fundamentally new way, through collaboration between people who have never met. Imagine if an Avengers movie was made by a swarm of people that had never spoken to each other, with no centralizing director or authority.
Gen Z is also destabilizing the media landscape, via TikTok, in favor of their own aesthetic vision. If you watch music videos like this one, you see precisely the same cellphone cinema verite you’re seeing on platforms like TikTok. When a video is too well-produced or emotionally inauthentic, Gen Z labels it “millennial aesthetic” or worse. They’re already beginning to show us that their media reality is about their lives, not about their brands...and not about short, quippy assessments of what they’re about, either.
And why shouldn’t our media be about our lives? Traditional branded media is too far behind. It can’t keep pace with our lived experience, especially now, today, when everything is so insane. These kids are showing us the raw guts of the culture, and in doing so they show us the future. And they’re so closely integrated with this platform, and are training it so collaboratively and so intentionally, that they’re giving birth to an entirely new, hybrid, digital lifeform.
They’re also pointing the way for the future of technology. They’re conscious and ironic about their algorithm use, and that’s the only way we’re going to survive. We have to have a cynical, loving, indulgent, yet careful relationship with these new, globally networked parts of our anatomy. We have to strive to understand them the way we strive to understand our own patterns and complexes during therapy.
I’m not trying to gloss over the dangers of killer robots. They’re a real and terrifically dehumanizing threat, and we should be aggressively critical both of the research directions that birth them and the governments and policies that deploy them. But cyborgs walk among us too, with bright clothes and no fear. They’re children of the new aeon, showing us what culture and technology can do when you take the brakes off. They’re here, they’re queer, and they’re not going anywhere.