Leaving TikTok’s Attention Casino

If you’ve downloaded the app TikTok, you’ve probably had something like this experience:
You’ve brought out your phone in a moment of downtime. You decide to watch a few TikToks, figuring they’d fill a few spare minutes. Those few minutes pass, and then you decide to watch one more. You look up again, and half an hour has passed.
TikTok is amazing at holding your attention, and tempting you to continue watching. Or, as a friend said when I sent him one of the videos mentioned below: “I can’t open that app. My day will be blown.”
A lot of fascinating writing has been done about TikTok, exploring the app’s relationship to Chinese state-owned enterprises, it’s collaboration with Chinese censorship against Uighyrs, Hong Kong, and others, and its general cultural cachet among teens, but I think they miss a fundamental point about why the app works, and why it works now.
TikTok works for the same reasons a casino works, but lives in your pocket. It demands a monopoly on your attention, and holds out the possibility of the unexpected to keep you swiping up. And just like a casino, it runs off of our desperation about our daily lives by offering a little bit of an escape from it.
Before you go any further, I’d suggest you make sure you’ve read Jia Tolentino’s New Yorker essay about TikTok. It involves actual research, which I have not done, and is a great introduction to the political economy of the app.
What happens on TikTok…
I feel like I should say that I go to casinos on occasion. There are ways to enjoy yourself, and have a relatively harmless nice time, as long as you tip servers well. But one thing you will definitely notice whenever you’re in a casino: there are lots and lots of slots games with dubious racial stereotypes. (I don’t think I’ve seen these specifically, but this article provides a pretty representative sample.)
TikTok is full of questionable content about race, largely in the form of memey jokes that play on stereotypes — as well as rape jokes, stupid rich kid shit, and a surprising number of cops. It has echoes of the irony-laced content of 4Chan and bad Subreddits, but I don’t think it actually has much in common with edgelord alt-right digital communities (though there are militia members trying to recruit the teens).
What links the two is that both position themselves as escapism. “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” wouldn’t be fun if what happened in Vegas didn’t gently break the rules by being a little politically incorrect, indulging some hedonism, saying what you couldn’t other places. TikTok actively markets itself as being just about fun, and even to the point of not accepting any political or cause advertising. They want to be an escape from other platforms.
And it works. In Jia Tolentino’s words: “I found it both freeing and disturbing to spend time on a platform that didn’t ask me to pretend that I was on the Internet for a good reason.” There are very funny people who have built up audiences on the app too, and some produce genuinely hilarious content out of their bedrooms. But TikTok can’t be all about fun if limits what kinds of jokes you can tell. It has to indulge the politically incorrect. Nobody likes a scold.
Sounds and lights
Dipping into harmless fun is what makes opening the app in that moment of downtime so appealing. But what keeps you swiping? It starts with what you see and hear when you’re using the app — and what you don’t. When open, TikTok fills the screen, even blocking out the time and battery indicator on some phones. Because it relies on sounds and songs as the backbone of its viral challenges and memes, you can’t really use it without the sound on, or headphones in.
Unlike Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat, TikTok blocks out the senses that most often interrupt your engagement. This is not so different from the reason there are no windows on casino floors, along with a constant barrage of sound: it so much more difficult to think of other things you could be doing instead of gambling. (Another effect of TikTok’s use of sound: it’s very difficult to use while around any other people, unless you want to completely block them out, visually and audibly, or force them to listen as well.)
But TikTok gives you even more reasons to stay watching. It starts with the “For You” page.
Just one more
The app’s algorithmically curated For You feed is the ‘front page’ of the app: the first thing everyone sees when opening, even without setting up an account. For You pulls content from any creator’s public feed, and puts it in front of thousands of users, essentially none of whom actually know the person who made it. From there it can accumulate hundreds of thousands of likes and comments, and new follows for the creator.
What makes users so vulnerable to the ‘just one more’ time-suck on TikTok is that you never know what you’re going to get next. Because every video occupies your entire screen there is no feed to scroll like in Instagram or Twitter, making it feel endless. There is no countdown of unwatched videos as in Snapchat or Facebook/Instagram stories.
The algorithm seems to prioritize variety — I’ve rarely gotten the same meme or sound twice in a row, or even within a few swipes of each other. Some memes recur and grow stale, but there’s enough new content being produced that you’ll rarely see the same take twice. The pool of content is even larger because TikTok doesn’t prioritize recency; and there are no dates on For You videos, which means a video could be months old before its shown to you, and you’d never know, as long as it felt novel. Every swipe up is like a pull of the slot handle: you don’t quite know what will come up.
What exactly goes into the For You algorithm is one of TikTok’s most closely guarded secrets. What is clear is that TikTok allows content producers the opportunity to rocket to extreme viral reach without the backbreaking work of audience cultivation.
I don’t make videos for TikTok (yet?), but I suspect the experience is not that different than dropping a quarter in the slot machine, or rolling the dice at a craps table: you never know when you’re going to hit the attention jackpot, and the more times you try, the more likely you are to win. The only cost is time, and maybe a bit of dignity, depending on the video. In an influencer economy, the opportunity to quickly accumulate audience isn’t exactly as good as money, but it is a pathway to real money. Being internet famous is also an end in itself.
What’s good, and what’s manipulative.
When you stir all this together into one app, you get a marvelous tool for holding your attention — sometimes for much longer than you’d like. But the bottom-line of what makes TikTok interesting is that there is interesting content on it. The memes are often enough good. Sometimes there are very good ones that convey important ideas.
A fascinating trend I’ve seen on TikTok is a huge number of ‘behind the scenes’ videos of low-wage day jobs: fast food workers, Amazon delivery people, truckers, and many more. A lot of videos seem to come from rural communities, which is unusual. There’s a large number of how-to videos for random tasks, magic tricks, or cooking skills. The teens are (mostly) alright.
I don’t think it’s wrong to spend money at a casino. I do it sometimes. But casinos are definitely manipulative and profit on the desperate. I don’t think TikTok is inherently bad either. But it’s hard not to get a similar whiff of desperation from it. In a world where certainties are crumbling terrifyingly fast, the opportunity at fast viral fame, or a few minutes of pure escapism are welcome distractions.
This is the point where questions about TikTok’s ownership and political economy become much more relevant to me. If the app millions of people use to escape from the drudgery and demands of the day to day also collaborates in enormous acts of political repression, or blacks-out queer creators, it’s not actually an escape from anything — it’s just another door into the same building, and using it just makes us more and more lost. At some point, we’ll need to walk back outside, or build something much more transparent. Dystopia just isn’t that much fun in the end.
