THE NEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 30, 2019 41
services: like a utility—gas or electricity
for the new A.I.-driven world.
“People say TikTok will run out of
money, that it’s going to end up like Vine,”
Bern, the marketer, said. “But TikTok
has one of the biggest companies in China
behind them. ByteDance is way ahead
of everyone else already, in terms of the
way they use A.I. They know everything
about a person. They can give that per-
son everything they want.”
In August, I took the train from At-
lantic Terminal, in Brooklyn, to Patch-
ogue, on the South Shore of Long Is-
land, where the eighteen-city Boys of
Summer teen-influencer tour was stop-
ping for the day. It was sultry and cloud-
less, and as I walked up to the desig-
nated venue on Ocean Avenue I saw a
pack of girls, who looked to be thirteen
or fourteen, in jean shorts and braces
and tube tops, and a few floppy-haired
boys who looked slightly older—Tik-
Tok-famous heartthrobs named Sam
and Josh and Payton, who were hug-
ging their fans, taking selfies, accepting
scrunchies as offerings and stacking
them on their arms. “I love you,” the
girls yelled. “I love you, too,” the guys
said back. Video-making had been in-
corporated into this ritual in a startlingly
seamless way: before one girl could finish
asking a TikToker to make a video say-
ing hi to her friend Adrianne, the Tik-
Toker was halfway through a video say-
ing hi to her friend Adrianne.
Inside the venue, parents were drink-
ing Michelob Ultra and staring into the
middle distance. Kids were making Tik-
Toks everywhere, phones propped up
on bar railings; they were moving on
and off the Internet, dead serious about
getting their content. In the meet-and-
greet line, I talked to a blond fourteen-
year-old in a white bucket hat named
Dylan Hartman, who has more than
half a million followers, and whose vid-
eos often feature him shirtless, brush-
ing his hair back, lip-synching to rap.
“That’s the one they all want to marry,”
a mom who was chaperoning her daugh-
ter and a friend whispered to me. An-
other TikToker, Grasyn Hull, was wear-
ing a “Virginity Rocks” shirt that a fan
had given him. “I make memes and stuff,
and I just blew up,” Hull said.
The crowd was almost entirely fe-
male, and about three-quarters of the
TikTokers were male; occasionally, a
sharp hormonal whiff of agony and long-
ing would enter the air. Nearly every-
one was white, and nearly everyone was
mouthing along to hip-hop and doing
viral dances, making sinuous, jerky move-
ments. This is the way people learn to
move, perhaps, when the ruling idea is
that your physical presence should pop
when viewed on a smartphone. I watched
Zoe Laverne, a blond social-media star,
make content on outstretched phones
as reflexively and smoothly as a Presi-
dent shakes hands along a receiving line.
Then the lights went down and
the children started screaming. The m.c.
asked us to raise our left hands and prom-
ise, in unison, to have a “lit time.” Later,
in line at the merch table, I talked to a
thirteen-year-old girl named Beau, from
New Jersey, who told me that a good
TikToker was someone who “did things
that made you want to watch them.”
She’d been on short-form-video plat-
forms since the third grade, when she
downloaded Musical.ly. Many of the
kids I talked to said that TikTok made
them feel connected to other people
their age. The memes surfaced glanc-
ing sensations that might otherwise be
forgotten, or stay private: what it was
like to sit in the back seat while your
mom drove around listening to Calvin
Harris; what it was like to be little, and
sleepless, standing nervously outside
your parents’ bedroom door at 3 A.M.
I had stopped impulsively checking
TikTok after a month—I already have
enough digital tools to insure that I never
need to sit alone with the simple fact of
being alive. But I could understand being
thirteen and feeling like the world would
be better if as many people as possible
could be seen by as many people as pos-
sible all the time. I could imagine expe-
riencing a social platform as a vast, warm
ocean of affection and excitement, even
if that ocean needed money that it could
generate only by persuading you not to
leave. I wondered how many baby siblings
of these TikTok fanatics were at home,
sitting in front of iPads, adrift in an end-
less stream of YouTube videos. Perhaps
the time had come to let the algorithm
treat the rest of us like babies, too. Maybe
it knows more about what we like than
we do. Maybe it knows that if it can cap-
ture our attention for long enough it
won’t have to ask us what we like any-
more. It will have already decided. Preview: October 5, 12-5; October 7 to 9, 10-6
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