Over at The New Yorker, Cal Newport reports on Facebook’s recent attempts to earn back its lost billions. Since going back to 2010 via science or magic didn’t work and the Metaverse hasn’t happened yet (and hopefully won’t), that leaves one last option for continued growth as a social media platform: turn into TikTok.
Newport is skeptical that the strategy will work, and for good reason: social media needs youth, and Facebook hasn’t been cool in years. That’s why they bought Instagram, which has also had a disastrous video-pivot that ended with a revolt among the platform’s most popular users, who just want Instagram to be like Instagram. The problem is, Facebook & co. seem to have squeezed just as much money as they can out of their user bases, and the users don’t want change as much as the investors do. Newport also explores the idea further on his blog, which is worth reading.
None of this is news. What I find myself wondering about is Newport’s further point that TikTok, too, will inevitably fall.
TikTok, of course, is subject to these same pressures, so in this future it, too, will eventually fade. The app’s energetic embrace of shallowness makes it more likely, in the long term, to become the answer to a trivia question than a sustained cultural force. In the wake churned by these sinkings will arise new entertainments and new models for distraction, but also innovative new apps and methods for expression and interaction.
I agree. The most striking thing about TikTok has always been how poorly-suited it is for longevity and impact. Despite being far and away the most explosively popular social media platform in the world for years, TikTok barely exists for people over 30. This is probably because unlike most other platforms, TikTok still hasn’t really established a function besides watching goofy shit. I mean, most social media is still about goofy shit, but there are serious, big-brain things you can do with Reddit or YouTube, too.
Facebook became publicly available in 2006, and there was a huge, award-winning movie about it by 2010. Twitter, as Newport points out, was already so important by 2009 that the US State Department was begging them to delay server maintenance so that Iran’s Green Revolutionaries could keep tweeting. Instagram has transformed whole sectors of fashion and tourism. YouTube is a whole mini-internet at this point.
TikTok isn’t nearly so useful. To paraphrase George Carlin, TikTok doesn’t make you feel good or smarter, it just makes you feel like more TikTok.
Probably this is because TikTok just isn’t built to last. The platform really isn’t built with a stable, searchable archive in mind. You click the app, get a stream of algorithmically-tailored goofy shit you’ve never seen before, and that’s it. Stories, memes, and ideas occasionally bubble up for a few days, then burst and disappear into anonymity.
It is a place that is pushing everyone, everywhere, all the time is trying to be the loudest, funniest, cleverest, sexiest person in the room, with no space for reflection or even looking back. Well, that, or just be part of the vast lumpenscrolletariat that passively watches TikToks go by on their phones.
This seems like a poor place to store culture, which after all comes from the Latin cultus, a plot of land for growth, sustenance, and renewal. No form of social media has proven especially robust as a cultus, but TikTok’s soil is especially sour. I wouldn’t encourage young artists and creators to devote too much time and skill to a platform with such a short attention span, and even weaker memory.
The best we can hope for, as Newport writes, is that TikTok can manage to slay the old giants before it dies off:
The era of social-media monopolies has been unhealthy for our collective digital existence. The Internet at its best should be weird, energetic, and exciting—featuring both homegrown idiosyncrasy and sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into the novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections. This exuberance was suppressed by the dominance of a small number of social-media networks that consolidated and controlled so much of online culture for so many years. Things will be better once this dominance wanes. In the end, TikTok’s biggest legacy might be less about its current moment of world-conquering success, which will pass, and more about how, by forcing social-media giants like Facebook to chase its model, it will end up liberating the social Internet.
I sure hope so.