34 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
TikTok doesn’t ask you to pretend that you’re on the Internet for a good reason.
BRAVE NEWWORLD DEPT.
THE MEME FACTORY
How TikTok holds our attention.
BY JIATOLENTINO
ILLUSTRATION BY NICK LITTLE
M
arcella is eighteen and lives in a
Texas suburb so quiet that it
sometimes seems like a ghost town.
She downloaded TikTok last fall, after
seeing TikTok videos that had been
posted on YouTube and Instagram.
They were strange and hilarious and
reminded her of Vine, the discontin-
ued platform that teen-agers once used
for uploading anarchic six-second vid-
eos that played on a loop. She opened
TikTok, and it began showing her an
endless scroll of videos, most of them
fifteen seconds or less. She watched the
ones she liked a few times before mov-
ing on, and double-tapped her favor-
ites, to “like” them. TikTok was learn-
ing what she wanted. It showed her
more absurd comic sketches and su-
percuts of people painting murals, and
fewer videos in which girls made fun
of other girls for their looks.
When you watch a video on TikTok,
you can tap a button on the screen to
respond with your own video, scored to
the same soundtrack. Another tap calls
up a suite of editing tools, including a
timer that makes it easy to film your-
self. Videos become memes that you can
imitate, or riff on, rapidly multiplying
much the way the Ice Bucket Challenge
proliferated on Facebook five years ago.
Marcella was lying on her bed look-
ing at TikTok on a Thursday evening
when she began seeing video after video
set to a clip of the song “Pretty Boy
Swag,” by Soulja Boy. In each one, a
person would look into the camera as
if it were a mirror, and then, just as the
song’s beat dropped, the camera would
cut to a shot of the person’s doppel-
gänger. It worked like a punch line. A
guy with packing tape over his nose be-
came Voldemort. A girl smeared gold
paint on her face, put on a yellow hoodie,
and turned into an Oscar statue. Mar-
cella propped her phone on her desk
and set the TikTok timer. Her video
took around twenty minutes to make,
and is thirteen seconds long. She enters
the frame in a white button-down, her
hair dark and wavy. She adjusts her col-
lar, checks her reflection, looks upward,
and—the beat drops—she’s Anne Frank.
Marcella’s friends knew about Tik-
Tok, but almost none of them were on
it. She didn’t think that anyone would
see what she’d made. Pretty quickly,
though, her video began getting hun-
dreds of likes, thousands, tens of thou-
sands. People started sharing it on In-
stagram. On YouTube, the Swedish
vlogger PewDiePie, who has more than
a hundred million subscribers, posted a
video mocking the media for suggest-
ing that TikTok had a “Nazi problem”—
Vice had found various accounts pro-
moting white-supremacist slogans—then
showed Marcella’s video, laughed, and
said, “Never mind, actually, this does not
help the case I was trying to make.”
(PewDiePie has been criticized for em-
ploying anti-Semitic imagery in his vid-
eos, though his fans insist that his work
is satire.) Marcella started to get direct
messages on TikTok and Instagram,
some of which called her anti-Semitic.
One accused her of promoting Nazism.
She deleted the video.
In February, a friend texted me a You-
Tube rip of Marcella’s TikTok. I was
alone with my phone at my desk on a
week night, and when I watched the
video I screamed. It was terrifyingly funny,
like a well-timed electric shock. It also
made me feel very old. I’d seen other
TikToks, mostly on Twitter, and my pri-
mary impression was that young people
were churning through images and
sounds at warp speed, repurposing real-
ity into ironic, bite-size content. Kids
were clearly better than adults at what-
ever it was TikTok was for—“I haven’t
