The Year TikTok Made the Multiverse Real (And Murdered the Newsfeed in the Process)

[Celerity]

As TikTok and its cunningly customized rabbit holes subsume culture, the rest of the internet will splinter further into algorithmic isolation.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/12/the-year-tiktok-made-the-multiverse-real

https://archive.ph/QKAv5



Foretelling the death of monoculture is a pastime as old as pop culture itself: Following the death of Elvis in 1977, the Village Voice obituary from rock writer Lester Bangs famously declared, “I can guarantee you one thing: We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis. So I won’t bother saying goodbye to his corpse. I will say goodbye to you.” It’s always the end of some kind of era, and now the bell has tolled for the most recent stage of the internet, where advertiser-driven economies of scale have dictated the rules of play for the better part of the last two decades. That’s led to endless Kardashian coverage, personality quizzes, a lifetime’s supply of heartwarming animal videos, and article after article about tertiary Housewives.

One day, when we look back on this era, we may well find it shocking how a handful of dominant tech and media players shaped such a relatively shared experience. When you saw The Dress, I saw The Dress. But it might not work like this for much longer. Over the past year, one platform in particular has morphed from a savvy contender for online attention into a fearsome force rewiring the rules of the internet itself. In our search for the next feed, TikTok has now come unnervingly close to delivering the product that the original Web 2.0 visionaries only dreamed of: unlimited, fully customized content tailored to passive consumption, without the bothersome searching or following or liking or hearting or profile dressing.

And it’s changing everything. TikTok is coming for YouTube’s lunch, but also the Google search engine’s, and also Amazon’s. It has upended the music industry, publishing, fashion, and Hollywood, wherein your next hit show may or may not be predicated on the presence of TikTok-worthy choreography. It’s changing language. It’s possibly a threat to national security. Lawmakers in Congress proposed a bill this week that would “block and prohibit” TikTok’s transactions in the US. Reportedly, TikTok is on track to make nearly $10 billion in ad revenue in 2022 (more than twice as much as last year); at the very least, it appears to be the only big name in Silicon Valley that’s still hiring.

TikTok’s crucial point of difference is its much-vaunted tailoring. The lightest batting-away of videos you don’t like in favor of ones you do goes on to influence the algorithm’s future range of offerings in a way seemingly more sophisticated than the rudimentary logic of, say, YouTube rabbit holes. This has delivered a decisive blow to the centralized feeds of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, et al.—not that any of those platforms have been helping themselves of late—or, in other words, what was left of the monoculture. The future TikTok promises, and has been busy delivering, is instead one of inexhaustible niches. So automatically can one be whisked off into AnythingTok and WhateverCore. If everything is trending somewhere, how can any trend be real?

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