A.I. recommendation engines. These plat-
forms collect data that the company ag-
gregates and uses to refine its algorithms,
which the company then uses to refine
its platforms; rinse, repeat. This feedback
loop, called the “virtuous cycle of A.I.,”
is what each TikTok user experiences in
miniature. The company would not com-
ment on the details of its recommenda-
tion algorithm, but ByteDance has touted
its research into computer vision, a pro-
cess that involves extracting and classi-
fying visual information; on the Web site
of its research lab, the company lists “short
video recommendation system” among
the applications of the computer-vision
technology that it’s developing. Although
TikTok’s algorithm likely relies in part,
as other systems do, on user history and
video-engagement patterns, the app seems
remarkably attuned to a person’s unar-
ticulated interests. Some social algorithms
are like bossy waiters: they solicit your
preferences and then recommend a menu.
TikTok orders you dinner by watching
you look at food.
After I had watched TikTok on and
off for a couple of days, the racist lip-
synchs disappeared from my feed. I
started to see a lot of videos of fat dogs,
teen-agers playing pranks on their teach-
ers, retail workers making lemonade from
the lemons of being bored and under-
paid. I still sometimes saw things I didn’t
like: people in horror masks popping into
the frame, or fourteen-year-old girls try-
ing to be sexy, or rich kids showing off
the McMansions where they lived. But
I often found myself barking with laugh-
ter, in thrall to the unhinged cadences of
the app. The over-all effect called to mind
both silent-movie slapstick and the sort
of exaggerated, knowing stupidity one
finds on the popular Netflix sketch show
“I Think You Should Leave.” Some vid-
eos displayed new forms of digital art-
istry: a Polish teen-ager with braces and
slate-blue eyes, who goes by @jeleniewska,
makes videos in which she appears to be
popping in and out of mirrors, phones,
and picture frames. Others drew on sur-
prising sources: an audio clip from Ce-
celia Condit’s art piece “Possibly in Mich-
igan,” from 1983, went viral under the
track label “oh no no no no no no no no
silly” after a sixteen-year-old found the
film on a list of “creepy videos” that had
been posted on YouTube.
I found it both freeing and disturb-
ing to spend time on a platform thatdidn’t ask me to pretend that I was on
the Internet for a good reason. I was not
giving TikTok my attention because I
wanted to keep up with the news, or be-
cause I was trying to soothe and irritate
myself by looking at photos of my friends
on vacation. I was giving TikTok my at-
tention because it was serving me what
would retain my attention, and it could
do that because it had been designed to
perform algorithmic pyrotechnics that
were capable of making a half hour pass
before I remembered to look away.
We have been inadvertently preparing
for this experience for years. On You-
Tube and Twitter and Instagram, rec-
ommendation algorithms have been
making us feel individually catered to
while bending our selfhood into profit-
able shapes. TikTok favors whatever will
hold people’s eyeballs, and it provides
the incentives and the tools for people
to copy that content with ease. The plat-
form then adjusts its predilections based
on the closed loop of data that it has
created. This pattern seems relatively
trivial when the underlying material
concerns shaving cream and Crocs, but
it could determine much of our cultural
future. The algorithm gives us whatever
pleases us, and we, in turn, give the al-
gorithm whatever pleases it. As the cir-
cle tightens, we become less and less
able to separate algorithmic interests
from our own.O
ne of TikTok’s early competitors
was Musical.ly, a lip-synching app
based in Shanghai that had a large music
library and had become extremely pop-
ular with American children. In 2016, an
executive at an ad agency focussed on
social media told the Times that Musi-
cal.ly was “the youngest social network
we’ve ever seen,” adding, “You’re talking
about first, second, third grade.” Byte-
Dance bought Musical.ly the following
year, for an amount reportedly in the vi-
cinity of a billion dollars, and merged
the app with TikTok in August, 2018. In
February, the Federal Trade Commis-
sion levied a $5.7-million fine against the
company: the agency found that a large
percentage of Musical.ly users, who were
now TikTok users, were under the age
of thirteen, and the app did not ask for
their ages or seek parental consent, as is
required by federal law. The F.T.C. “un-
“Now show him projected sea levels on his golf course.” covered disturbing practices, including