Tiktok and popular immiseration
Part 1: The blue Instagram of my youth
Surely, sometime in the early-to-mid 2000s, the creators of the initially derelict websites that would become social media had a thought: these websites will make people happier. Either they’ll help us connect with friends, or feel less lonely, or express our creativity, but there will be some tangible benefit that deserves my effort. There was no previous grossly successful social network whose founder they could idolize as the god-entrepreneur and whose business model they could imitate. They just made platforms they thought would be useful.
Ostensibly, social media is still meant to make us happier. It’s not interesting anymore to say that in the long term it probably doesn’t, but if we had no faith in the intentions of Instagram and Twitter—if it was clear as day that using them would immiserate us now and forever—I think we would sour on them if favor of simpler platforms, maybe just group messaging, and they would have much less appeal.
Instead, the current consensus is that yes, social media is designed to give us a temporary rush of dopamine, hence be addictive, hence earn a lot of advertising revenue. But even though in our heads we’re outraged at how ready Zuck is to exploit us, in our hearts we can’t help feeling that these platforms are still ours—that we can derive happiness from them as long as we’re the shrewder of the two parties in the trade. Other people will watch Instagram Reels, click the Mafia City ads, buy the Wish garbage on the last slide of meme account galleries, but we’ll use them as they were meant to be used. We’ll browse our timelines as peacefully as we can. Our private social media will survive as the oasis we dip into for just a little dose of refreshment and pleasure; the bad men will try to break its spirit, but it will always belong to the open plains.
Whether the mustang’s mane is still glossy black and green fire still burns in its eyes, only you can decide. But I want to forget about the Mafia City ads for a second, and remember a time when there were no sponsored posts, a time when Instagram had a color—and that color was blue.
The age of John Appleseed, 0 followers, had its faults, but it was simpler. People used Instagram to do worthless activities that they enjoyed doing. You could slap a filter on a picture of you and your friend after a big hike and make the caption “Me and my friend after a big hike!” You could follow your distant family members and find out what they were actually up to. Every comment was precious, a fat ruby of social interaction. There was nothing shameful about having 40 or 50 followers. The defining quality of this period was that the content you consumed was actually social: this person is at a lake somewhere for a family reunion, this person got a new pet, this person saw some fireworks. The bar for participating was incredibly low. Instagram wanted it to be that way—if it wasn’t nobody would want to post, there would be nothing to see, Instagram would be empty, and the network effect would fail.
But slowly the value of a post grew higher and higher. Maybe follower lists were diluted by co-workers and distant acquaintances. Maybe the celebrities, who initially posted inane things like everyone else even if they were lavish inane things, were enticed by their agents into using Instagram for the inherently competitive field of endorsements and promotion. Maybe the explore page highlighted content that was already ahead of the curve. Maybe we were the ones to blame—maybe we saw too many big hike posts and got tired of them, so started seeking out new pleasures, started experimenting with more aloof captions.
Over many years, Instagram became Casual Instagram. As an article by Jill Risberg puts it,
“Casual Instagram rejects the notion of curation while it curates. It claims to be an authentic and ‘casual’ picture of real life while it only features photos of things that, in some shape or form, fit a specific aesthetic or brand.”
So that means no more of your pitiful little hike photos—post old furniture in the afternoon sun and your off-center reflection in Mexican restaurant bathroom mirrors instead. Don’t be unoriginal; don’t be unspontaneous; and above all, don’t try.
I think the defining feature of the Casual Instagram era is the appearance of apathy. You must appear to not care, or not care about not caring so much that you do care, et cetera. It’s embarrassing to seem invested in something when other people aren’t, meaning the casual paradigm raised the bar for participating higher and higher. Even people who stuck to photos of their friends and outings were forced to adopt short, nominally-related captions. But in such a competitive environment, the gains naturally accumulate to a select few. Why would you want to see your friends’ low-budget attempts to be cool when you could look at Emma Chamberlain or Timothée Chalamet’s high-budget ones?
Instead of attempting to fix this, Instagram encouraged it. Feeds became non-chronological, influencers were catered to, the explore page became ever more important. It isn’t surprising that they did; media that is actually social doesn’t make life seem sexier than it is, but media made up of highly-tailored content, zealous opinions, and your distant acquaintances pretending to be Emma Chamberlain is aspirational morphine. It makes the world feel much less bland than it did before, full of charming places and self-assured people. It infuses surprises, it infuses the appearance of meaning, into a time of your day that before had none, and you find yourself addicted to something that doesn’t give you any lingering happiness after you set it down.
With that, we’re finally at the current date: the place where Instagram is ready to make a truly harrowing redesign. I like this article because you get to see the paper-thin rationalizations the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, comes up with.
“Mosseri says Instagram wants to help individual creators earn their livelihoods on the app, whether by becoming video stars or e-commerce moguls. From Patreon to TikTok, it’s clear that that’s where the opportunity is in social apps, he said.
‘We’ve been thinking a lot this year about what Instagram is about, and keep coming back to this idea of emergent culture — of culture on the fringe,’ Mosseri said. ‘I think we always have focused on emerging culture — it’s why we focused on youth, and it’s why we focused on creators. These are groups that set trends in many different industries, in many different countries around the world.’
Given the amount of shopping that transpires already on Instagram, adding a dedicated tab felt like a no-brainer.”
To Adam Mosseri, selling embroidered hats and Travis Scott x Rick and Morty phone cases is how you support emergent cultures. And what did the shopping tab replace? The page where you could see how your friends were interacting with your content: following you, liking your photos, leaving you comments. In Instagram’s book, their QVC internet bazaar is more important than your interactions with the people you love.
I said that this first part was about how Instagram could not care less about its average user anymore, and hopefully the reason why is taking shape. Slowly, Instagram got more and more uncomfortable with the idea of you posting: maybe your life wouldn’t be sexy enough, or maybe you would turn someone off from the app with your flavorless and uncompelling content. They were happy to show you new accounts to follow, as long as you stuck to the consuming side of things. And so—because the people who mattered would know where it went, of course—they replaced the post button, which for the entirety of Instagram’s history had been in the most inviting and accessible spot possible (the very center of the bottom bar), with Instagram Reels.
Part 2: Bored? Try Tiktok! :)
So, we hang our heads and say that Instagram doesn’t want us anymore, or don’t want to show us off to our friends at least. But maybe it doesn’t matter—for more than a year now, Instagram has been playing catch-up with the true platform of the moment.
There is much to be said about Tiktok, much more than I know or have the perspective to write about, and I recommend this article by Eugene Wei which takes a deeper look at its success. As Wei writes,
“TikTok's story begins in 2014, in Shanghai. Alex Zhu and Luyu ‘Louis’ Yang had launched an educational short-form video app that hadn’t gotten any traction. They decided to pivot to lip-synch music videos, launching Musical.ly in the U.S. and China.”
This alone is enough to justify the claim that Tiktok had a fundamentally different start from the other big platforms. Lip-synching videos are not about your life—they’re just content, they can consumed by strangers as easily as by your friends. There was never anything to Musical.ly besides entertainment; it was not meant to build meaningful relationships or make people feel less lonely. Unlike the early days of Instagram and Twitter, Musical.ly didn’t need its average user posting—a few prolific users could make enough material for everyone else, and at a higher degree of quality. Sure, a lot of 13-year olds made their own videos, but they were mostly there to idolize older, more sophisticated 18- and 20-year olds.
Tiktok is also not particularly interested in having you interact with people you know—the For You page it defaults to is meant to be entertaining, to show you things that you haven’t seen before, things that make the world feel less bland, not update you about your social circle. The friends and acquaintances you follow on other platforms are not the ones making the most wacky, hilarious, mind-blowing videos on the planet, so why go through the charade of having you follow them? Why force you to sift through their unsexy lives?
Instead, just like Musical.ly (and now like Instagram), a tiny fraction of users is enough to produce the content consumed by the rest of them. Yes, millions of people might do a dance challenge, but most of them are normal people. They’re not particularly good-looking, nor do they do the dance very well. They’re probably in a bland American living room, they don’t have their attractive friends smiling next to them, their facial expressions don’t stir up any emotions inside you. The average person also doesn’t give away hundreds of dollars to homeless people, or decorate pastries, or have a baby french bulldog they can bottle feed, or have access to a hydraulic press, or make a skillful and unique form of art, or have any other avenue to attract a following. Unless they get extraordinarily lucky, their videos are not the ones making it to the many For Yous.
Well, is that a bad thing? If the purpose of Tiktok is to entertain, why not make it more entertaining? Eugene Wei writes,
“There’s a reason that many people in the U.S. today describe social media as work. And why many, like me, have come to find TikTok a much more fun app to spend time in. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built on social graphs, and as such, they amplify the scale, ubiquity, and reach of our performative social burden. They struggle to separate their social functions from their entertainment and utility functions, injecting an aspect of social artifice where it never used to exist.”
For a lot of its users, for tens of millions of them, Tiktok is fun—it’s distracting and it shows them things they haven’t seen before. They enjoy that regular folks are not the ones making the content. If it improves their lives, good for them, they should keep enjoying it. But I suspect there are also millions of people who feel increasingly empty the longer they spend sliding down their For You—they might feel empty on Instagram and Twitter as well, but Tiktok is better at its job than any other platform. As Wei points out, it doesn’t have the baggage of being an actual social network.
When you take away the social component of social networks, when following your friends is only a thin facade over rapidly consuming short-form digital media, the genie has fully left the bottle. The sexiness of life on the platform, and the staleness of life outside of it, know no bounds. Why should you settle for the work of a single comedian when you could enjoy the one, best skit of millions? Why should you watch the second-most attractive girl dance and smile at you, really smile, when you could watch the most attractive one just as easily? Why should you listen to one catchy song when you could listen to multiple of them at the same time? The crowd will quickly find the sounds, sights, ideas, that give us the most dopamine, and Tiktok will feed those things to you. Like puzzle pieces, they’ll click perfectly into place.
And, at the same time, you’ll have no recourse to participate in a meaningful way. On Tiktok, there’s no safety-net audience of your friends and family: there’s only main character energy. If you aren’t pretty enough to win the hearts of the masses, if you don’t have a shining balcony overlooking the beach to prank your parents on, if you don’t have an unusual aptitude for short-form humor or a quirk for people to laugh at, you are just a consumer.
That’s why Tiktok feels so nefarious to me, whether it deserves suspicion or not. It’s the fentanyl version of the Instagram explore page. It has been successful enough to force its precursors to undercut their own social components and make their offerings equally tailored to your individual interests (and equally fast-paced). I don’t know what the long term consequences of staring into the magic mirror are, but I’m frightened to imagine what the platform that outdoes Tiktok looks like, the app that will one day force it to play catch-up.
There are a huge number of caveats to all of this: plenty of sub-communities exist on Tiktok happier than they do elsewhere, its business model isn’t fundamentally different from other platforms, it’s a great way to share knowledge, etc. But there is one argument worth putting some resistance against.
That argument is that yes, there are plenty of attractive and wealthy content creators, but there are also plenty of completely unremarkable teenagers, middle-aged people, scenes of surprisingly average life, that make the For You page. Tiktok really is a social network—its users might be making a different form of social connection, but those connections are equally valuable as any other kind. You might have to be lucky to make it big, but everyone has a chance.
It’s absolutely true that Tiktok wouldn’t be a success without its users interacting with each other: without duets, without parodies, without comment sections giving support after someone telling the story of a traumatic event. If you removed these things, the user experience would probably feel much more hollow, more like the right pane of Snapchat. But I think the connections Tiktok forms are fragile at best. It’s intoxicating to post without having to consider what everyone at your high school will think of you, without having to please both your friends from college and your grandparents, and be rewarded for a joke you have or a video of something interesting from your job. Maybe you get tens of thousands of followers for showing off how good you are at laying bricks. What other app could make you feel so proud of the work you do? But as soon as you get bold and post a video of your daughter’s band concert, you’ve crossed an unspoken line. Your followers weren’t there because liked you as a person: they were there to see more bricks. They were immersed in a platform incredibly good at building someone to stardom, then blasting them down to nothing just as quickly. When your actual social circle isn’t watching, there’s an incentive to be exactly who the crowd wants you to be, to tell the embarrassing personal story the way it will get the most views. That works until it doesn’t, and the audience’s lack of unconditional love for you (or any other meaningful social bond…) means they simply walk away.
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The first issue was about Kanye and 2C-B.