A Short Goodbye To TikTok for January 16

Oh, HELLO, there,

( I can show you my face now since my book came out and this platform is no longer semi-anonymous! Don’t look at my ends, thank you.)

As we draw ever-closer to TikTok’s potential sunset, I wanted to share an excerpt from my book, Revolutionary Algorithms: A TikTok Manifesto (available everywhere books are sold!).

Before that, a note: I’ve tried to write a proper eulogy about the app’s untimely end, but, if I’m being honest, I don’t know how much I’ll actually miss TikTok when it expires. I associate it primarily with disassociation—I scrolled to escape the hell of living with my ex-boyfriend, I scrolled to self-regulate while I watched my parents die, I scrolled to drown out the groan of our country’s messy plate tectonics shifting underneath my feet. It felt good to get attention from my videos, sure, but I was often frustrated by the timbre of that attention—I’m having way more fun on Substack, in other words, and have been for a while.

The TikTok ban doesn’t make me all that angry on a personal level, but the political implications of the ban turns my belly into fucking lead. I hate that our congresspeople can be bought out for less than Mark Zuckerberg spends on heating his mansion monthly, I hate that thousands of vulnerable folks are going to lose income overnight, I hate that the future seems so cartoonishly foreclosed.

Calling what I do “content” makes me want to vomit, even though it's pretty accurate - I prefer “shooting the shit” or “art”, depending on the output - but, if you’ve ever been moved by anything I’ve posted, I’m grateful for your eyeballs and hope to keep them engaged. Thank you for sticking around.

Goodnight and goodbye, right?

Here’s the excerpt:

LET’S VISIT 2020, the year everything and nothing changed.

I hope your experience of the COVID-19 pandemic mirrored the close, ecru-painted world constructed by online news outlets, where death statistics trudged bloodlessly behind bright carousels of whipped coffee recipes and Black Lives Matter infographics. Social media and its editorial lunar cycle summoned a shared, sterile reality that framed remote therapy as a panacea for the twin plagues of bigotry and isolation. Folks baked bread, they dined on sidewalks, they shamed internet influencers for clubbing maskless.

They got fatter or thinner or richer or worse. They adopted tiny, nervous dogs. They waited.

I hope, for your sake, that you were not a memberof the courier class, whose “essential service” sacrifice resulted in 7 percent of America’s adult population suffering from some form of Long COVID, a vague cluster of symptomatic lingerings that range from respiratory annoyance to disabling physical tortures as yet untreatable by our sclerotic medical system. I hope you didn’t watch your father drown on a ventilator over FaceTime. I hope you were not infected and reinfected and infected again at a homeless shelter or halfway house or refugee camp. I hope your neighbor wasn’t shot by cops. I hope you were spared from unemployment, bankruptcy, or, worse, the 27 percent uptick in drug and alcohol overdoses spurred by lockdown’s erosive claustrophobia.

If you and I have anything in common, you got laid off and moved into a small apartment in Brooklyn with two roommates, one of whom was your boyfriend of six-odd years. Perhaps you, like me, spent your days watching a man you once adored succumb to the vice that kept him afloat, or floating, at the very least. Maybe you, too, inured yourself to the clink of empty bottles, the hoarse, cyclical shouting matches. As you stared at the fuzzy pixels of your dying mother’s face over Zoom each week, itemizing every last slurred consonant and halted hand gesture, I bet you steeled yourself for a future without her, one that might also be free from the necrotizing ligaments of bad love.

My partner’s penchant for escapism led him to seek solace in liquor, but my own retreat from reality proved no less seductive. In 2020, I became one of the record two billion mobile users of the TikTok app f the record two billion mobile users of the TikTok app, a video hosting service that was ranked by Cloudflare as the most popular website of the following year, surpassing even Google in its cultural relevance. An international counterpart of Douyin, the wildly popular Chinese IP, TikTok was fashioned from the ribs of Musical.ly by Douyin’s Beijing-based founding company, ByteDance, on August 2, 2018. Its wildly sensitive algorithm and vast captive user base buoyed TikTok to the forefront of pandemic public imagination in record time, birthing a global ecosystem of economically potent microtrends, lightning-fast social solidarity, and breathless conspiracy-mongering, restructuring entire industries (music, cosmetics, movies) in the process.

While I wasn’t TikTok’s typical demographic—at thirty-one, I was already eight years older than its average consumer when I started making videos—I was immediately spellbound. I uploaded quips, observations, and rants to its idiot-friendly interface, meticulously curating my lighting and lipstick choices in order to attract more traffic. It worked. Soon, I was minting a reputation as an opinion slinger, a passably good-looking smart girl who viewers could rely on for reasonable, researched “hot takes” and the occasional gruesome dating story.

Given that I am old, have a frontal lobe, and eventually landed a real day job, I never bothered to brand myself with an eye toward increased reach; I loathed the idea of hawking vacuums or leggings to the people who came to me for ideas. Plus, I recognized that TikTok’s algorithm could be punishing in its digital game of Russian Roulette; democratizing virality is central to its appeal. I was vulnerable not only to the whims of a fickle following and obscure AI, but also to the opinion of demographics encountering my videos for the first time. While there was an undeniable, sirenic warmth to the complimentary comments and intellectual praise a well-received TikTok might garner, these voices couldturn on a dime. When a thirteen-year-old boy successfully doxxed me after discovering that I thought Kanye West’s Donda album was kind of stupid, I made the executive decision to abandon any pie-eyed notions of grandeur. Microcelebrity wasn’t worth a burst blood vessel.

Despite my misgivings, by 2021, I had a properly viral hit. I filmed myself declaring that I identified neither as “body-positive” nor “body-neutral,” but instead as “body-negative,” joking about how I’d far prefer a vaporous existence than continue to suffer the indignity of being a person. I struck gold. In the thick of global biocatastrophe and its uneven, disappointing aftermath, the notion of corporeal failure resonated with thousands of people, nonbinary folks in particular. Even though I soon learned that monetization wasn’t in the cards for me (my somewhat iconoclastic mentality could not be overcome with cash, it turns out), an audience of some seventy thousand people eventually congregated—small potatoes compared to career influencers, but nothing for a private citizen to sneeze at. I got free shots at bars. I got recognized at drag shows in Bushwick. I felt, at times, important, or seen, the more insistent acclivity of clout.

I’m hardly a breakout TikTok star; if anything, I’ma member of the digital proletariat, an enthusiastic cog bolstering ByteDance’s bottom line with my engagement. I pretend to a level of cool superiority, sure, but even I can’t deny the narcotic pull induced by a spike in “followers,” that techno-rhetorical nod to the acolytes of cult leaders or political powerhouses. There’s a reason attention is such compelling currency–it feels good.

My partner loathed my burgeoning TikTok double life, and for good reason. I was getting consistent and ever-swelling tides of positive attention from strangers, not all of whom were interested in retaining the “stranger” title. Two months after I fled the man I had spent seven years trying to love into viability, I answered a five-paragraph email from a soft-spoken lawyer who had seen my videos and found me amusing. As of this writing, we’ve been dating for two years.