The Mortifying Ordeal of Being on TikTok
Somewhere between the ages of “pay your own insurance” and “stop taking the risks that require it,” a person is faced with certain options.
Some choose to get really into a physical challenge— running every day for a year, training for a marathon so their mother can post about it on Facebook, or— God forbid— rock climbing. Others dive into the strategy behind credit card points, usually born from some twisted lust for fucking the system. Note: these are the same people who, at one point or another, have experimented with “kinks.” It’s around this time they’ll either reenter that world or turn their back on it in an “I found God” idealism, except that God is whatever stock app that their smarter cousin recommended.
And then there are those— faced with the growing loneliness of being out of college, the soft-basil-plant-on-the-kitchen-windowsill wilting of their career, or the sudden realization that their life is interesting and meaningful— who decide to start a TikTok.
The first thing I think of is how this sentence will look in a textbook fifty years from now, when historians try to explain why an entire generation started filming their outfits and internal monologues. TikTok carries a different weight than Facebook or Instagram, purely because I was born at a time when it would. It’s a strange, caged creature, and it already sounds like a ludicrous thing to emerge from a pundit’s lips. But the internet is a strange and bullshit world, and we often forget how our social studies teachers stood at the front of class (a universal experience) and solemnly explained how “Facebook started the Arab Spring” (a sentiment that aged like almond milk).
Nevertheless, TikTok has become part of our lives, a way many connect and many others disconnect. And who am I to judge? I’m just as caught up in it as the rest. I can scroll down that rabbit hole for hours, and I— like many of the other unlucky— have tried to enter the fray.
Not so much because I think my life is interesting and important and needs to be shared (although frankly, I do, and that’s just a sin I’ll have to carry), but more because the place I do share my life is in writing. In plays. In screenplays. And it’s been made very clear to me, and every other poor fuck I know, that TikTok has become an intrinsic part of getting the time and resources to do what you love.
Because there are agents who won’t look at you until you hit a follower quota. There are publishers championing social media starlets instead of young laureates. And who can blame them? To gain a following is as useful a skill as turning a phrase. Jesus made a whole thing out of a following—why shouldn’t Hailey Bailey?
The more interesting part of the equation is this: you’re not just cultivating a product for the people. Behind all the likes and comments, there’s a giant AI robot— who, in my mind, looks something like a toaster with too many wires. That’s what’s running the whole show. Everything you post feeds it. It decides what you’re worth.
We’ve long surpassed the age of the TikTok “town square”— if it ever existed. Instead, we’re playing a daily puzzle game: “How do I feed the monster?” The question that rings alongside, “God, I want to be honest.”
I read an article the other day— because yes, I’ve been researching this the way a nervous sixth grader looks up how to make a soufflé before endearingly (and inevitably) fucking it up— and in that article, it told me what steps to take to please not only the algorithm, but also the bots. Because there are now so many bots on TikTok that it’s actually beneficial to keep them in your target audience.
How the fuck did I end up tap dancing for Wall-E?
And no disrespect to Wall-E, we can all tell that he fucks, but I thought we were going to live in harmony with our robot overlords. Instead, I’m filming myself in a studio apartment before walking to my 9–5, specs at the ready, writing samples in the cloud, aiming desperately to please the algorithm, the Russian bots, and probably a few creepy guys from Nevada— just so some human at CAA who survived the AI hiring process will see my follower count and think: “This one is older and less accomplished than she should be, but she has good dialogue, 50K followers, and a great rack. Maybe we should tell her we’ll help her make a living wage in return for helping us train our AI scriptwriters, which we’re obviously not telling anyone about. And then we can fire her. But we’ll tell her not to worry because she’s still pretty enough to marry rich.”
And hasn’t that always been the goal.
