you did this, for what, tik tok?

It’s no secret that TikTok is an obsession of mine. I spend hours in the app, HOURS, laughing uncontrollably at videos like this one (thanks for that one, Dodai!)

I think I love it so much because my experience of it is still so deeply pure. It’s the only social system that I regularly check that I also have absolutely no personal desire to be involved in. It’s a gift when I get the jokes and hand gestures, but I’m so happy to be a tourist, zooming around on a double decker bus, oohing and awwing at all the sights and scenarios. I recently made a TikTok, because corona, and it was so funny to me that I wound up sharing it publicly, but over all, the app feels like zero stakes investment, pure enjoyment through consumption. I just really love seeing all the ways people interact on there.

Everything just feels creative and weird, and the weirder and more low-key / random, the better. The same dynamics that exist on other social platforms (perfection, beauty, better lighting, wealth, privilege) don’t immediately seem to function as rainbow stars that make you invincible and advance you through the game. Weirdos rule: These frogs, a person using audio from the show ‘Catfish’ to talk about their body dysmorphia, and this “gender-fluid check.” Adam Martinez’s entire thing, the ‘make his pockets hurt’ audio track, pretty much all of lesbian TikTok. In a way, TikTok is the perfect social app for this moment. It’s made for social isolation and creative boredom, for projecting your most secret self from your bedroom into other people’s bedrooms.

I took a three-week hiatus from TikTok after reading the piece Taylor Lorenz published about a young choreographer in Atlanta named Jalaiah Harmon who created a series of moves called the “renegade” that is one of the most familiar dances on TikTok. The piece cut me to the core — it perfectly presents the heartbreaking reality for so many black creatives who share their work online and find themselves erased in the process. As the piece notes: “In 2020, virality means income,” and I couldn’t reconcile my love of the service with the pain it caused this lovely young human.

It reminded me of a TikTok I saw recently of a young man using Autotune to tell a hilarious story about a racist shopper in the grocery store where he works. Later, a woman uploaded her own version of this while doing her make-up. Her version was way more popular, frustrating the original poster who aired out some of those grievances online. The commenters laughed at his reaction, pointing out that is how the service is supposed to work. TikTok is built for repetition and replication, a piece of code capable of copying itself. If you browse through any audio sample or a hashtag, you can see for yourself the evobio dynamics at play. People do the same things over and over and eventually, somehow, one of them becomes the new baseline for that meme, sound, hashtag, action. Unlike Instagram and Twitter, where blatant copying another creative is often seen as foul, TikTok’s beauty comes in seeing how different people interpret and mutate an original idea. Success (or at least, popularity) feels like an opaque combination of flair, lack of selfconsciousness (or deep self-consciousness, it all depends!), idiosyncrasies and oddities that are hard to anticipate and hard game.

But even that is an illusion. The Intercept recently released a searing report that shed light on TikTok’s moderation policies which at one point, included the directive to suppress videos featuring “unattractive, disabled, or poor users.” And it’s not hard to unearth Black TikTok’ers expressing frustrations that they never see their community featured on the “For You” page, one of the most coveted curated spaces on the app, and general sentiments of feeling ignored, downvoted and the way white users get popular using black culture. TikTok feels like it prioritizes ingenuity and creativity, acts of vulnerability — something more ephemeral than what tends to work on the other platforms, but the truth is it has its own internal priorities that are all kinds of ists.

Why do we accept that? Where do those rules come from, and who do they benefit the most?

Charlton D. McIlwain recently published a book called “Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter,” that roots back to the origins of computing systems, and reminds us that they were built to be inherently biased and continue to operate that way - even if they seem like they don’t. This book is mostly talking about how those algorithmic systems contribute to more surveilling and profiling of marginalized bodies, but it also applies to thinking about how we value black creators and creativity, and see black Americans as suppliers for source materials that don’t deserve or require credit.

“Black software is a story about how computing technology was built and development to keep black America docile and in its place,” he writes. “Those in power use computing technology to destroy black agency by nullifying black people’s hopes and dreams, aspirations, human potential, and political interests and limiting the heights we were meant to achieve.”

Here’s the line from McIlwain’s book that sat with me the most: “Will our current or future technological tools ever enable us to outrun supremacy?”

It goes back further than the Internet. My beloved Wesley Morris wrote exquisitely on the origins of minstrels in the 19th century, where you can trace the origin of American entertainment to a white performer named Thomas Dartmouth Rice who came across an enslaved black man singing while grooming a horse. Rice “took in the tune and movements” and began performing the earliest minstrel shows in this country. In other words, American entertainment has its origins in stealing from black creators and profiting off of it, a dynamic that is not unique to TikTok, but perhaps felt there most acutely as it scales up into a global phenomenon.

We live in a world where culture and creativity are synonymous with economy. John Howkins wrote a wellish known book in 2001 on ‘creative economy,’ the notion that ideas “may be transformed into cultural goods and services with their value determined by the intellectual property it contains.” But what good is that economy if a fundamental part of it is to elevate it to a place where people with more favorable advantages can manipulate it for their own gain and prosperity?

On her fantastic new podcast, “Your Attention, Please,” Kimberly interviewed the dancers Lil Buck and Jon Boogz (founders of the incredible non-profit dance collective MAI) and asked them how they balance their desire to share black dance with the world — and protective they feel over it. They said that they think about it constantly. “The dances that we are practiced in are very cultural dances,” they said. “They’ve been here before us. It’s a big deal to take these dances and elevate them as high as they can go.” In other words, practicing their craft publicly makes their own cultural history even more fraught, and vulnerable to appropriation.

The comments on Taylor’s piece are especially sympathetic to young Jalaiah’s plight. One person wondered aloud if there’s an easy solution to the problem — perhaps original choreographers could date-stamp their videos somehow — and it’s a sweet suggestion, even if it flawed. The point they’re making, however, is valid: We could choose to value those contributions if we wanted to. We could choose to give brilliant young people credit for the work they make and share online. Naomi Shimada’s riveting anthology called “Mixed Feelings,” is about many things, but namely, wanting a healthier relationship to the dynamics and economics social media. The entire book wonders aloud: “How can we stay connected and do so responsibly?”

The answer, her book finds, is up to all of us — we have to demand it from our services, of each other, and of our new systems.