5th March 2021 TikTok | Caro
Why TikTok works; America’s greatest biographer, in brief
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Why TikTok works
I’m not a TikTok user, and although I do understand that TikTok’s appeal is different from most other social media platforms, I don’t completely understand its dynamics. Reading a long and impressionistic article by Eugene Wei has helped with that,
When I say ‘impressionistic’, I mean that Wei himself acknowledges that he didn’t quite know how to write the piece. He urges the reader to jump sections they’re less interested in. He says he wishes he had a piece of software that would let him randomise the sections for the reader. And in an online world that lauds the strong voice with an over-developed sense of confidence, I appreciated this discussion.
As for TikTok, there’s a huge amount in here, but I came away with a few things.
The first one is that TikTok is built around ‘the network effects of creativity’:
By network effects of creativity, I mean that every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative. This exists in a weak form on every social network and on the internet at large…. But TikTok has a strong form of this type of network effect. They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content. In their app, they have a wealth of features that make it dead simple to grab any element from another TikTok and incorporate it into a new TikTok.
The second is that one of the strong forms of content on social media is the ‘reaction’. Michael Spicer’s lockdown humour in The Room Next Door comes to mind as an example:
TikTok has elevated the idea of the ‘reaction’ to an art.
Until TikTok came along, there wasn't an easy way to do reaction videos to other videos and have them make sense unless the original video had so much distribution that it was common knowledge… With TikTok's Duet feature, you can instantly record a side-by-side reaction video to anyone else's video. Duet is the quote tweet of TikTok… The Duet feature is designed simply to allow you to record a video that will play back alongside another video.
He shares this fine Duet video which uses TikTok to create a short two-hander. And of course, Duet is not just for two. Enough Duets and you eventually get to Wellerman.
The third: TikTok is the most evolved meme ecosystem on the internet.
TikTok is a form of assisted evolution in which humans and machine learning algorithms accelerate memetic evolution. The FYP [For You Page] algorithm is TikTok's version of selection pressure, but it's aided by the feedback of test audiences for new TikToks… Regardless of the provenance, any video, once loaded into TikTok, is subject to the assisted evolutionary forces in the app… TikTok's video editing tools assist in mutation and inheritance, and each remix of a source video becomes a source video for others to remix, generating further variation. Meanwhile, the competition on the FYP feed is fierce, and the survivors of that extreme selection pressure are memes of uncommon fitness.
There’s so much more here, and understanding some of the nuance probably needs more immersion in TikTok. One of the things I took away from Eugene Wei’s article was that its combination of tools and platform are designed to create a positive experience for users, unlike so many other parts of the internet. But finally, I also liked his note on the gap between the tools that tech companies share with their users, and the stultifying environment inside.
Given we know innovation compounds as more ideas from more people collide, it's stunning how many tech firms, even ones that ostensibly tout the value of openness, have launched services that do a better job of letting their users exchange ideas than any internal tool does for their own employees’ ideas. How many employees join a firm and then spend a week in orientation learning where to get lunch, how to file expense reports, mundane trivialities like that…. The free flow of ideas outside a company shouldn't, or in apps like TikTok, shouldn't exceed the rate at which knowledge flows inside a company, but I see it happen time and again.
(h/t John Naughton, Memex 1.1)
#2: America’s greatest biographer, in brief
Robert Caro is likely America’s greatest biographer. He’s in his eighties, and is finishing the fifth volume of his epic Lyndon Johnson biography. Before that he wrote a 1200-page study of Robert Moses, the man who rebuilt New York in the 20th century. I’m unlikely to start on five volumes of Johnson, but I might read the Moses book, The Power Brokers, when I have more time.
But: his short collection, Working, has just appeared in paperback in Britain, and I read it in a few days. Some of it is republished pieces, some new material. He’s candid about the reasons for publishing it; he plans to write a memoir but is conscious that he might not get to it.
Working is a pleasure for anyone interested in writing, or researching and interviewing, or 20th century American politics, or biography, or the nature of power. Caro insists that it is power that is his proper subject. He was drawn to Robert Moses because he wielded more power in New York, more ruthlessly, than any elected official, and for a far longer period.
In a book full of memorable passages, two essays, in particular, stand out. The first, ‘A sense of place’ is about the need for the biographer to immerse themselves in the literal world of their subject. (Richard Holmes says something similar in his collection, This Long Pursuit). The second, ‘Two songs,’ is about Johnson’s success in passing the Civil Rights legislation, where others had repeatedly failed, over decades, and his failure in Vietnam, which escalated catastrophically during his Presidency . The songs are both by Pete Seeger, whom I have written about elsewhere. The first is ‘We Shall Overcome’, the second is ‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’. (I hadn’t realised that it was Seeger who had changed the words from ‘We will overcome’.)
The story of the Civil Rights legislation is complex. In particular, Johnson had spent decades being a ‘Good Ol’ Boy’ in the ‘Southern Caucus’ of powerful Southern Democrats, who were certain that he was one of them, with the deep-seated racist attitudes that this implied. So you can imagine how shocked, or disappointed, they were, when he pushed through the Civil Rights Act after Kennedy’s assassination, or, in the aftermath of Selma, he made the speech announcing voting rights legislation. Caro quotes a section in Working:
Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.
There are good reviews of Working on NPR and at the Regarp Book Blog.
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