It’s a TikTok world, creative and sprawling and strange and anarchic and tedious and gross and you can’t stop scrolling and you can’t stop looking and you just want more. So what’s the problem?
Words by Roxane Gay | Illustrations by Natalie K. Nelson
July 9, 2024
Here are some of the TikTok rabbit holes I’ve tumbled down, pleasurably wasting hours and hours of time.
(I regret nothing.)
The influencers, yes, with their perfect makeup and strategic camera angles and professional lighting, all to make their lives seem enviable while narrating their days in a strange monotone. They show off massive homes with the house numbers in the font of gentrification. They travel around the world, mostly in first or business class, discussing their enjoyment of champagne and caviar and perfectly cooked fish and sumptuous desserts. They review hotels and lie out on beautiful beaches overlooking crystalline waters. They adventure and ride camels and visit rainforests. The world, for these TikTokkers, is an abundant oyster, from which they pluck pearls of audience engagement.
There is a young woman, Nara Smith, who is a model and influencer married to a model and influencer named Lucky Blue Smith. They are zygotes, relatively speaking, and already have four children (one from Lucky’s previous marriage). Though they rarely say it, they are Mormon (and there are a lot of similar influencers on TikTok). I am chagrined to know this, and yet. … Most days, Nara makes videos, speaking in that ubiquitous monotone people on the platform use, as she makes the most ludicrous things from scratch. She makes her own marshmallows and Turkish pizza and granola and mozzarella cheese. She can make Snickers bars from scratch and ice cream and also chewing gum. Clearly, she is doing this, in part, to mess with her very large audience, who often express bewilderment, admiration, and/or disdain as she appears in her perfectly appointed kitchen and starts cooking while wearing a lacy evening gown or other outfit that is not conducive to cooking. She is selling an enviable lifestyle — one where she is unencumbered by how the dishes are washed or who is tending to the children while she makes her videos, one where the particulars of her financial situation are inscrutable as she surrounds herself with the trappings of conspicuous consumption. Don’t get me started on Ballerina Farm, but it’s a whole thing.
Families with 10 or more children, often evangelical, who own innumerable coordinated outfits, and think quite highly of themselves even though they are never doing much of anything on camera. Parents sharing a day in the life, sometimes with medically complex children. Throuples sharing a day in the life. Pet owners sharing a day in the life. People getting ready to go out for a night on the town or to a birthday party or work. Couples sharing, in precise detail, what they’re wearing from underwear to the scent of the day. Makeup artists offering tutorials or showing off their skills. People sharing what they eat every day or doing meal prep for the week. Aestheticians and dermatologists cleaning pores and pulling viscera from body cavities. Hairdressers and barbers performing their services on a range of people from weekly clients to people who haven’t washed their hair in months or years and need a little care and tenderness to undo the damage. Doctors and nurses offering medical advice, or dancing or sharing what a shift is like or making fun of annoying patients, which, I’ll admit, doesn’t always inspire a lot of confidence in the medical establishment.
Comedians go for the laugh, sometimes making a joke, sometimes responding to another video, sometimes offering a pointed look at the camera while something else happens in the background. Once a comedian finds something that works, they tend to do that thing over and over so much so that it leaves you wondering, “Is this all there is?”
There are so many “viral” dances. So many. These dances are usually created by Black creators and end up as memes that Kansas grandmothers and everyone else try to mimic to great or not so great effect. And there are the many, many niche communities. So many. Women who pack lunch for their husbands and detail everything, including the silverware and napkins. The quantity of food these men take to work is staggering, in case you were wondering. Housewives with a yen for organization and clear plastic storage goods. As in, you can watch videos of people bringing groceries home, emptying their refrigerators, cleaning them, and refilling their refrigerators, with everything neatly organized. People will remove things from one container only to place them in another, with a neatly printed label. It’s hypnotic but also deeply distressing when you start to think about the environmental impact.
A very, very attractive farrier reshoeing horses. A guy who chops down trees for a living making a lot of innuendos involving his mighty ax. Men in gray sweatpants thrusting their hips to highlight their … assets. A masked chef cooking in the woods over a campfire, making everything from scratch and feeding scraps to his handsome dog. Home cooks and chefs preparing dishes, sometimes delectable, other times, not so much. People setting up elaborate camps in the wilderness or building elaborate homesteads using, like, a shovel, some dirt, some water, and a twig. There are the sick young women who narrate their bedtime routines involving sanitizing medical equipment, preparing solutions for feeding tubes, and self-administering their daily medications and vitamins. There are people on dialysis and in rehab for catastrophic limb injuries. There is a young man who is the caretaker for his 99-year-old great-grandmother. Every day he gently lifts her out of bed so he can change the sheets, all while murmuring soft kindnesses to her.
And then, of course, there are the memes — an endless stream of people doing what everyone else is doing, hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands of people worshipping at the altar of replication. Sometimes it’s repeating a snippet of dialogue or song playing to an inside joke. For a few weeks, people would lip-sync the line “All that work and what did it get me?” from the musical Gypsy with text over the video speaking to some unique irony from the person’s life. Or children asking their parents, “Dance or get back with my dad?” while Sexyy Red’s song “Bow Bow Bow,” is playing or “Dance or get back with my mom?” while Chief Keef’s “F My Baby Mama” is playing. I’ll admit, this is a favorite. The mothers always, always dance, vigorously. Nine times out of ten, the fathers look pensive and shuffle from foot to foot and choose not to dance. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. The first few times, it’s funny or interesting or charming. Then it becomes a little weird. I start to wonder, “Just how many people are going to offer their variation on the theme of the day?”
TikTok is creative and sprawling and often strange and anarchic, which mirrors the internet more broadly. There are few rules; the platform takes all comers. Chaos is inevitable. You can find absolutely anything; it’s incredible to witness how many different ways there are to be, how creative (or uncreative) people are, how we crave attention, hoping that if we make the perfect video, we might be catapulted to some version of fame. It is also … haunting, how so many of us yearn to be seen, to be understood.
My father, of all people, introduced me to TikTok. I’m not sure how he learned about the app, but it was probably via Instagram or one of his many WhatsApp group chats. He is technologically competent but doesn’t do much on social media. When he began to send me videos from Haitian TikTok, I was immediately hooked. For one, Haitian people are hilarious; I felt such familiarity watching skits of younger Haitians imitating their parents and explaining the nuances of Creole and evangelizing about the excellence of Haitian food. Now my dad and I share our favorite videos and have good laughs. It’s all very wholesome. But also, I was curious how someone like my dad, in his late 70s, not only knew about TikTok but was an avid user, well before I did, and I am someone who is fairly online.
It is fair to say TikTok is ubiquitous and massively popular. There are more than a billion active users on TikTok. Only five social networks have larger user bases. As is the case whenever a new social media platform rises to prominence, people are scrambling to figure out how it all works, and how to master the platform. But the real engine of the platform is not the people clamoring for attention, it is the algorithm that makes decisions about what we see as we swipe from one video to the next. The For You Page is where the algorithm shines brightest. As we use the platform, it collects all manner of data — what we’re watching, for how long, what we share on other platforms, what we like or comment on, and more. Then the algorithm analyzes that data and makes educated guesses about what we want to watch next. It’s uncanny, how often the algorithm gets that right. Sometimes it serves me things I didn’t even know I would be interested in.
TikTok is not the first platform to serve users videos or other content using an algorithm. There was Vine, an app where users could create six-second — and, later, longer — videos, many of which went viral and launched careers, however short-lived they may have been. It was on Vine that I learned about eyebrows on fleek from creator Peaches Monroee. I saw a cute young girl in a pink tutu dancing. I watched pop star Shawn Mendes covering well-known songs. I laughed and continued to laugh at a young man asking an officer, “WHAT ARE THOSE???” before pointing his camera down at a police officer’s very … utilitarian and uncool sensible walking shoes.
There is also YouTube and Vimeo and Instagram. The internet age has afforded us a great many things, and primary among them is the ability to expose ourselves, without a filter. This exposure has created its own inscrutable economy where a few lucky creators rocket to fame (sometimes niche, sometimes mainstream) and earn massive amounts of money while the rest of the creative class tries and fails to re-create the alchemy fueling the bright shining stars.
At first, I spent all my time on the app enjoying Haitian TikTok, but then the algorithm, in its infinite digital wisdom, found a way to pull me in deeper. Did you know there are people who make a living caring for cows’ feet? There are, and many of them on TikTok are Irish or British. They pull a cow into the crush, a steel cage that holds the animal, allowing farmworkers or veterinarians to safely access the animal. And then they get to work. As they address a white line fracture or clean out a pus-filled cavity, they narrate what they’re doing. It is fascinating and somewhat gross. It has nothing to do with any aspect of my life, and still I find it incredibly hard to look away.
On TikTok, anything and everything can be content. For those who are willing to play that particular game, they can film and share and monetize every mundane or salacious aspect of their lives. Nothing is sacred and everything is scalable.
But TikTok is not simply the content the app serves. It is a moneymaking machine. In 2023, ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, made $120 billion worldwide. In the U.S. alone, the app made $16 billion. Because while it’s serving videos, the app is also serving ads and shilling for products and supporting creators who are also shilling for products. They mine our data and sell that, too, creating a host of alarming privacy issues, though said issues are certainly not unique to TikTok. Every social media platform, search engine, and website traffic in the robust information economy, whether it’s Facebook and its ancillary companies or Google or Snapchat or any of the e-commerce or other websites you visit. To go online these days means you will, one way or another, surrender some part of yourself for the privilege of accessing the bounty of the internet.
The TikTok platform has deployed a vast network of trackers to learn where its users are going on the internet. The app tracks what we’re watching and commenting on, how much time we spend not only on the app but on each video we watch, where we are watching videos from, the details about the phones we are using, how we’re typing into our phone, the content we make, the messages we send within the app, what we buy through the app and from where, our contacts we sync with the app, any information we share when communicating directly with TikTok support or customer service, information they infer about who we are, including our demographic details, and, like most other apps and websites, they deploy a range of cookies for a range of reasons. It’s not only TikTok data they scrape. If we use a third-party login like Facebook or Google, they will scrape data from there, too. Their privacy policy is more than 8,000 words long and they know most people won’t take time to read so much fine print. Again, internet sites and social media platforms use this tactic of flooding users with information, often presented in the tiniest of fonts, knowing we’ll simply scroll to the bottom of the screen to click that we have (not) read whatever policies they’re trying to get past us. If you do not want your data to be exploited online, you must remain vigilant, and even then, protecting your privacy is difficult. It becomes something of a Faustian bargain, because our online habits and behaviors are carrion for tech vultures. As we scroll, they feast.
After a while, there is a certain tedium to TikTok. The feast becomes overwhelming. Our taste buds dull. Our eyes dry. TikTok understands that once you start scrolling, it is so very hard to stop. And TikTok creators understand that to keep the app’s users scrolling, they have to try to outdo themselves and everyone else on the platform. For better or worse. TikTok also understands that most people are insatiably curious and sometimes, insatiably nosy. We want to know all the things that discomfit your husky each day and how you travel around town with your triplets in tow. We want to know what you pack in your purse for a day of work and errands. We want to see the pranks you pull on your parents. We want to know what you’re making for breakfast and lunch and dinner. We want. We want. We want.
You see a video or two where people are performing a dance or a meme and it’s clear they are in conversation. It’s interesting enough. But then you see 50 more videos of people also trying to be part of the zeitgeist, and that is, eventually, far less interesting. It’s striking that TikTok, on the surface, prizes individuality but what truly sustains the platform is imitation and repetition and the all-too-human desire to be just like everyone else. Despite the many charming or strange or jaw-dropping videos on TikTok, far more of the videos are fairly mundane. They receive little attention, but the creators seem undeterred. In the absence of an audience, the hope that an audience might yet find them sustains.
As users, what sustains us is the hope that if we keep scrolling, we will continue to be satiated. But the longer you scroll, the more it takes to hold your interest. Creators know that, too. For every heartwarming or strangely hypnotic video, there is some dark, terrible video lurking at the edges of the algorithm, waiting. While many of the platform’s critics are rightly focused on the app’s many serious privacy issues, the unsavory content deserves equal opprobrium. The unapologetic misogynist Andrew Tate flourished on TikTok before his account was deleted. His videos degrading women and espousing his toxic ideas about masculinity and the dominance of men received millions of views and were shared and discussed ad nauseam by his army of acolytes. They still are.
There is the rampant misinformation and the way that many of the videos TikTok serves devalue experience and the depth of knowledge. Users watch a three-minute video on a complex subject and feel endowed with expertise when they’ve barely scratched the surface of that subject. While trends are very popular, some of the trends are tasteless or absurd, and even harmful. And sometimes people, assuming that the creators they follow are experts, start to self-diagnose physical and mental health disorders. It’s all about the anarchy — a platform with few guardrails. At some point, everything will crash and burn.
After spending too much time staring glassy-eyed at TikTok, I am reminded of porn. For centuries, people have enjoyed the prurience of the forbidden, the titillation and taboo of porn. First, images and stories and eventually movies. Now, online, porn proliferates. Anyone with a camera or a good smartphone can film one or two or many more people engaged in sexual acts that sometimes defy belief. The porn industry understands that it needs to defy belief to sustain itself. To maintain its audience, porn has to push boundaries, test limits, give an insatiable audience more and more and more. And right there, in plain sight, is TikTok, a platform hosting the new pornographers, savvy, hungry creators willing to push and test and give, more and more and more. ◊
Roxane Gay’s writing appears in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many others. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Difficult Women, and Hunger. She also is anthologized in Marvel’s World of Wakanda series.
Natalie K. Nelson is an illustrator, picture book maker, and collage artist. She creates images with humor, color, and found photo bits for magazines, publishers, websites, musicians, and companies large and small. She is the author and illustrator of the Dog and Cat’s First Baby board books, and I’m currently working on the next two titles in the series: Dog’s First Christmas (Fall 2024), and Cat’s First Halloween (Fall 2025).