38 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019
that he’d “always wanted to be a cre-
ator,” using the term that has become
a catchall identity for people who make
money by producing content for social
platforms. He’d grown up admiring
YouTubers, “people like Shane Dawson
and iJustine,” and had begun making
online videos when he was twelve. He
used to post videos on Snapchat, but
he got on TikTok in No-
vember and now has two
million followers. In con-
versation, De Almeida, like
other TikTok teens I talked
to, mixed the ecstatically
strange dialect of people
who love memes—a lan-
guage in which every word
sets off a chain of incom-
prehensible referents—with
the sort of anodyne corpo-
rate jargon I associate with marketing
professionals. “In this generation, you
get steeped in the culture of online
video,” he said. “You naturally pick up
on what can be a trend.” He pulled out
his phone and showed me one of his
early TikTok hits, in which he pretended
to put a can of beans in the microwave
and burn his mom’s house down.
Later that day, in West Hollywood,
at an outpost of Joe & the Juice, I met
with Jacob Pace, the ebullient twenty-
one-year-old C.E.O. of a content-pro-
duction company called Flighthouse.
Pace wore a charcoal T-shirt and had
the erratic energy of a champion sled
dog on break. Flighthouse has more
than nineteen million followers on Tik-
Tok, and its videos reflect an intuitive
understanding of its audience: Pikachu
in a baseball cap, dancing; a girl eating
Flamin’ Hot Cheetos in a bowl full of
milk. Pace has fifteen employees work-
ing under him to make TikToks, some
of which serve as back-end marketing
for record labels that have paid Flight-
house to promote particular songs. He
was about to travel to New York to pre-
sent to ad agencies. “What gets me out
of bed in the morning is creating and
impacting culture,” he said. Figuring out
how to make TikToks that people liked
and related to was, he said, like “help-
ing to perfect a machine that will one
day start running perfectly.”
Many of the people whose profes-
sional lives are dependent on or tied to
TikTok were eager to talk to me, but
that eagerness was not shared by peo-
ple who actually work for the company.
A former TikTok employee told me, in
a direct message, “As strategic as it ap-
pears from the outside it’s a complete
chaos on the inside.” After my first visit
to the L.A. office, I sent a TikTok rep-
resentative a list of questions asking for
basic information, including the num-
ber of employees at the com-
pany, the number of mod-
erators, the demographics
of its users, and the number
of hours of video uploaded
to the platform daily. The
representative informed me,
weeks later, that there were
“a couple hundred people
working on TikTok in the
US” and “thousands of mod-
erators” across all of TikTok’s
markets, and she said that she couldn’t
answer any of the other questions.
TikTok’s primary selling point is that
it feels unusually fun, like it’s the last
sunny corner on the Internet. I asked
multiple TikTok employees whether the
company did anything to insure that this
mood prevailed in the videos that the
app served its users. Speaking with an
executive, in August, about the app’s
“Discover” page, I asked, “What if the
most trending thing was something that
you didn’t want to be the most trending
thing? Would you put something else
in its place?” The executive said that
doing so would run counter to TikTok’s
ethos. A few weeks later, the online trade
magazine Digiday reported that TikTok
had begun sending select media com-
panies a weekly newsletter that previewed
“the trending hashtags that the platform
plans to promote.” A copy of the news-
letter that I obtained lists such hashtags
as #BeachDay and #AlwaysHustling,
and it instructs, “If you’re interested in
participating, make sure to upload your
video no earlier than one day before the
hashtag launch.” Later, a representative
told me that the company might choose
not to include certain hashtags on the
“Discover” page, and that TikTok was
interested in highlighting positive trends,
like #TikTokDogs.
TikTok employees in Los Angeles
declined to talk in any detail about their
relationship to ByteDance headquarters,
in Beijing, and everyone I spoke to em-
phasized that the U.S. operation wasfairly independent. But one former em-
ployee, who left the company in 2018,
described this as a “total fabrication.” (A
ByteDance spokesperson, in response,
said that the markets were becoming
more independent and that much of that
process had happened within the past
year.) TikTok’s technology was devel-
oped in China, and it is refined in China.
Another ex-employee, who had worked
in the Shanghai office, said that nearly
all product features are shipped out from
Shanghai and Beijing, where most of
ByteDance’s engineers are based. “At a
tech company, where the engineers are
is what matters,” the writer and former
Facebook product manager Antonio
Garcia-Martinez told me. “Everyone
else is a puppet paid to lie to you.”
The direct predecessor of TikTok
is Douyin, a short-video platform that
ByteDance launched in China in 2016.
Douyin is headquartered in Shanghai,
and ByteDance says that it has more
than five hundred million monthly ac-
tive users. Zhou Rongrong, a twenty-
nine-year-old Ph.D. candidate at the
Central Academy of Fine Arts, in Bei-
jing, who has studied Internet art in
China, said that most young people in
the country are on Douyin. In particu-
lar, she said, the app has opened up new
kinds of economic potential for people
outside the country’s traditional centers
of power. “For example, I had no way
before to see these ways that rural peo-
ple can cook their dishes,” Zhou said.
Douyin has given rise to influencers like
Yeshi Xiaoge—the name means “brother
who cooks in the wilderness”—who
films himself preparing elaborate meals,
and who has released his own line of
beef sauce. Rural administrations have
begun advertising their regions’ produce
and tourist attractions on the app.
Though it remains broadly similar
to TikTok, Douyin has become more
advanced than its global counterpart,
particularly with respect to e-commerce.
With three taps on Douyin, you can
buy a product featured in a video; you
can book a stay at a hotel after watch-
ing a video shot there; you can take
virtual tours of a city’s stores and restau-
rants, get coupons for those establish-
ments, and later post geo-tagged video
reviews. Fabian Bern, the head of a mar-
keting company that works closely with
Douyin influencers, told me that some