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To All the TikToks That Are No Longer Available
Taking a journey through my TikTok Favorites — the ultimate digital wonderland
Recently, in order to commemorate the whirlwind of a year that was 2020, I decided to go through all my favorited TikToks, back to about January, which was when I started using the app consistently. As I begin my scrolling journey, I pass through the various eras and layers of TikTok (DeepTok, anyone??), through filters and glittering pixels, through beat drops and edits, and intricately choreographed dances.
But amidst all of that, there are spaces in my Favorites page where there is just…nothing. Instead of there being a TikTok, there is just a gray rectangle with a broken video icon on it. The view count, in the corner, is simply zero.
But it wasn’t always like this. Back months, weeks, even days, or just hours ago, these spots were dedicated to some sort of meme, joke, dance routine, cool project, or just something I thought was interesting at the time of favoriting. Whatever it was, a piece of information, music, or idea, it was something I wanted to save. Something I wanted to hold in my digital time capsule, to come back to later, whenever that later would have been.
But now it’s just nothing. A vortex of bits and pixels and computing memory, a black…