THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 35
seen one piece of content on there made
by an adult that’s normal and good,” Jack
Wagner, a “popular Instagram memer,”
told The Atlantic last fall—though they
weren’t the only ones using the platform.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was on TikTok,
riding a minibike and chasing a minia-
ture pony. Drag queens were on TikTok,
opera singers were on TikTok, the Wash-
ington Post was on TikTok, dogs I fol-
low on Instagram were on TikTok. Most
important, the self-made celebrities of
Generation Z were on TikTok, a cohort
of people in their teens and early twen-
ties who have spent a decade filming
themselves through a front-facing cam-
era and meticulously honing their un-
derstanding of what their peers will re-
spond to and what they will ignore.
I sent an e-mail to Marcella. (That’s
her middle name.) She’s from a mili-
tary family, and likes to stay up late lis-
tening to music and writing. Marcella
is Jewish, and she and her brothers were
homeschooled. Not long before she
made her video, her family had stopped
at a base to renew their military I.D.s.
One of her brothers glanced at her new
I.D. and joked, accurately, that she looked
like Anne Frank.
In correspondence, Marcella was as
earnest and thoughtful as her video had
seemed flip. She understood that it could
seem offensive out of context—a context
that was invisible to nearly everyone who
saw it—and she was sanguine about the
angry messages that she’d received. Tik-
Tok, like the rest of the world, was a mixed
bag, she thought, with bad ideas, and cru-
elty, and embarrassment, but also with so
much creative potential. Its ironic sensi-
bility was perfectly suited for people her
age, and so was its industrial-strength
ability to turn non-famous people into
famous ones—even if only temporarily,
even if only in a minor way. Marcella had
accepted her brush with Internet fame
as an odd thrill, and not an entirely for-
eign one: her generation had grown up
on YouTube, she noted, watching ordi-
nary kids become millionaires by turn-
ing on laptop cameras in their bedrooms
and talking about stuff they like. The vid-
eos that I’d been seeing, chaotic and sin-
cere and nihilistic and very short, were
the natural expressions of kids who’d had
smartphones since they were in middle
school, or elementary school. TikTok,
Marcella explained, was a simple reac-
tion to, and an absurdist escape from, “the
mass amounts of media we are exposed
to every living day.”T
ikTok has been downloaded more
than a billion times since its launch,
in 2017, and reportedly has more monthly
users than Twitter or Snapchat. Like those
apps, it’s free, and peppered with adver-
tising. I downloaded TikTok in May, add-
ing its neon-shaded music-note logo to
the array of app icons on my phone. T ik-
Tok’s parent company, ByteDance, is
based in China, which, in recent years,
has invested heavily and made major ad-
vances in artificial intelligence. After a
three-billion-dollar investment from the
Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, last
fall, ByteDance was valued at more than
seventy-five billion dollars, the highest
valuation for any startup in the world.
I opened the app, and saw a three-
foot-tall woman making her microwave
door squeak to the melody of “Yeah!,”
by Usher, and then a dental hygienist
and her patient dancing to “Baby Shark.”
A teen-age girl blew up a bunch of
balloons that spelled “PUSSY” to the tune
of a jazz song from the beloved sound-
track of the anime series “Cowboy
Bebop.” Young white people lip-synched
to audio of nonwhite people in ways that
ranged from innocently racist to overtly
racist. A kid sprayed shaving cream into
a Croc and stepped into it so that shav-
ing cream squirted out of the holes in
the Croc. In five minutes, the app had
sandblasted my cognitive matter with
twenty TikToks that had the legibility
and logic of a narcoleptic dream.
TikTok is available in a hundred and
fifty markets. Its videos are typically built
around music, so language tends not to
pose a significant barrier, and few of the
videos have anything to do with the
news, so they don’t easily become dated.
The company is reportedly focussing its
growth efforts on the U.S., Japan, and
India, which is its biggest market—
smartphone use in the country has
swelled, and TikTok now has two hun-
dred million users there. ByteDance often
hacks its way into a market, aggressively
courting influencers on other social-me-
dia networks and spending huge amounts
on advertising, much of which runs
on competing platforms. Connie Chan,
a general partner at Andreessen Horo-
witz, told me that investors normallylook for “organic growth” in social apps;
ByteDance has been innovative, she said,
in its ability and willingness to spend its
way to big numbers. One former Tik-
Tok employee I spoke to was troubled
by the company’s methods: “On Insta-
gram, they’d run ads with clickbaity im-
ages—an open, gashed wound, or an
overtly sexy image of a young teen girl—
and it wouldn’t matter if Instagram users
flagged the images as long as the ad got
a lot of engagement first.”
In April, the Indian government
briefly banned new downloads of the
app, citing concerns that it was expos-
ing minors to pornography and sexual
predation. (At least three people in India
have died from injuries sustained while
creating TikToks: posing with a pistol,
hanging out on train tracks, trying to fit
three people on a moving bike.) In court,
ByteDance insisted that it was losing
five hundred thousand dollars a day from
the ban. The company announced plans
to hire more local content moderators
and to invest a billion dollars in India
during the next three years. The ban was
lifted, and the company launched a cam-
paign: every day, three randomly selected
users who promoted TikTok on other
platforms with the hashtag #ReturnOf-
TikTok would receive the equivalent of
fourteen hundred dollars.
TikTok is a social network that has
nothing to do with one’s social network.
It doesn’t ask you to tell it who you
know—in the future according to Byte-
Dance, “large-scale AI models” will de-
termine our “personalized information
flows,” as the Web site for the company’s
research lab declares. The app provides
a “Discover” page, with an index of trend-
ing hashtags, and a “For You” feed, which
is personalized—if that’s the right word—
by a machine-learning system that ana-
lyzes each video and tracks user behav-
ior so that it can serve up a continually
refined, never-ending stream of TikToks
optimized to hold your attention. In the
teleology of TikTok, humans were put
on Earth to make good content, and “good
content” is anything that is shared, rep-
licated, and built upon. In essence, the
platform is an enormous meme factory,
compressing the world into pellets of vi-
rality and dispensing those pellets until
you get full or fall asleep.
ByteDance has more than a dozen
products, a number of which depend on