An Oldster's Take on TikTok
Two futures for TikTok
It is next to impossible to keep up with certain pop cultural trends through life, especially those driven by technology and mass media. Some of this is because certain artifacts are artifacted for specific generations. All those superhero movies and Star Wars iterations might win some younger fans, but they mainly draw the people who read the comics and watched the original movies in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. That’s why the story arc for a show like Wanda/Vision was heavily inspired by a comic series published in 1985.
At 47, The Middlebrow just doesn’t get some things, like depressed rappers named after pharmaceutical products. It’s okay, that kind of art isn’t being made for me and not all art needs The Middlebrow’s attention.
Which is not to say that older people don’t adopt new trends, services, tastes and habits. Of course they do. Social media was driven by Gen-X (and the Boomers followed) — from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook and Twitter. But users of those networks not skew older. The kids are not to be found on Twitter — that’s where people from their late thirties onward act like children. They are not on Facebook either. That’s where you share family photos with the grandparents, indulge in misinformation and, increasingly, are asked to join hyper-specific fan groups for late career and deceased entertainers. Facebook (along with Instagram) is to the internet what “Nick at Nite” was to cable. It is the McGyver of social media networks, or maybe even its Donna Reed Show.
The kids are on TikTok and Twitch. Twitch leans heavily on gaming and sports. TikTok is the culture spot. Both are video based, though a lot of clever writing goes into production of mini-movies for each. In that sense, TikTok probably demands more creativity than Twitter ever did by creating a micro-blogging platform dedicated to bon mots. TikTok also seems an advance over YouTube because it has ditched the follower model. Make a video on TikTok and the platform will direct it towards people it thinks will be receptive. YouTube does that, too, but it is still largely based on amassing followers.
I bring all of this up because now ByteDance (TikTok’s China-based parent company), wants to use its popularity among young and very young users to expand. ByteDance is proposing to take on Spotify in music streaming and Amazon, with fulfillment for retail orders. While this might seem an odd topic for a Substack that frequently muses on Kurt Vonnegut and Paul Auster, it is potentially a major cultural moment. Or the downfall of TikTok.
On the major cultural moment side, you get a China-based and government-connected international internet conglomerate gathering behavioral data from America’s youth based on the videos they create and watch, the music they stream and the things they buy. Of course, data from one will enable TikTok to more effectively market its other services and to add new features that feed the beast.
Will all the gathered data make its way into the hands of China’s government? No doubt. The Middlebrow isn’t entirely sure of the consequences there. It could be used to deny some users the right to travel to China or to do business there. It could be used for blackmail in some cases. It could be used to measure health and psychological reactions to the internet and to virtual or augmented reality so that the rest of the world becomes a testing ground for the next generation of Chinese policy.
But it also seems like a massive engine to transfer wealth from American and European markets to China by rivaling Amazon as a purchase influencer while at the same time exporting China’s cultural values to the rest of the world.
Now here’s the other scenario — they do this, they make a lot of money and gather a lot of data but become the Wal-Mart of the web and as their young user base grows older and tires of it, TikTok and its offshoots become as uncool as Facebook and Twitter. This seems to be happening faster and faster. The Metaverse (always a dumb term) went from cutting edge to cringe within months.
So in one scenario, the youth become TikTok zombies under the control of China’s government and in the other scenario (the one that happens over and over) the spell is eventually broken because people get bored with the platform that’s controlling them.
I still think people should just read more books. But this isn’t about me, is it?