I generally really enjoy Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick’s newsletter, The Trend Report, which collects interesting links about what is trending in the news, culture, and memes, alongside thoughtful mini-essays that draw on some of these patterns. I really do recommend it highly — subscribe here.
However, I was struck by a section in the most recent edition, which features an otherwise cogent essay about what it means now to go viral, especially on TikTok, and the way that regular people are not prepared to deal with it, and how brands tend to co-opt these spaces however they can (think of how often you’ll check the comments on a viral video and see a number of brand accounts commenting casual stuff, like a real person might, and the original poster asking for free stuff in the replies). As for what to do about all this, Fitzpatrick recommends a few things, including finding ways to “enable a more just economy.” Here’s the pitch, seemingly aimed at brands and users alike:
You can participate in the “viral debt forgiveness” trend, where people are gaming the algorithm and creator pay models to boost videos in the service of helping people pay off bills. This also manifests as using social gestures to amplify support causes, helping local philanthropy, and creators doing telethons: this approach refashions social media and the comment as a chaotic good. This undoes capitalism for profit, imagining social profit as mutually beneficial to the community first — not brands.
Fitzpatrick links to a number of examples, which I’ll discuss in a moment, but first let’s point out that this line of thinking, while ostensibly noble in intention, is a classic case of how commentators have tried to finagle social harmony or benefit out of extractive platforms since the platform age began. The idea that using the mechanisms of these platforms for social gain, either from regular users or from brands, is capable of undoing capitalism for profit by putting community first is an empty promise, and it strikes me as reminiscent of the oft-mocked news stories that go viral because some working class individual walks 20 miles to work every day or whatever, and it is intended to be somehow inspirational — as Vox put it succinctly, “feel-good news stories are masks for societal failures.”
Likewise, the notion that content creators and/or brands on social media can “game the algorithm” as an answer not only to the precarities and insecurities of late capitalism but also to the perversely exploitative nature of the platforms themselves is wishful thinking that, at best, band-aids for chosen individuals (typically “chosen” by whatever algorithmic metrics push the initial video to more people to begin with, it’s worth noting) while further obscuring systemic problems.
One example Fitzpatrick shares is when users and brands come together to boost a video to raise money for someone, as in this case of a user hit by an exorbitant emergency plumbing bill — they did the math and figured out that if 1.365 million people watch their video for 5 to 10 seconds, it would pay out the “just under $14,000” they need to pay for it (it turns out, based on TikTok’s payout system, they actually would need 14 million views to reach that number). Commenters went to work to help the video go viral, which it did, and the user subsequently requested that those asking to directly donate instead direct their funds to causes supporting Gaza or trans healthcare, and stick to giving their videos more views if they want to help.
Another example is this one, which has text claiming that watching the video 4 times means the user, God’s Grace Ministry, won’t have to close the first soup kitchen in Uganda. Another comes from Creators For Peace promoting a livestream fundraiser for Palestine where “every interaction matters” — as Fitzpatrick says, this “refashions social media and the comment as a chaotic good.”
I am obviously not saying that there is anything negative about how these users and creators are using TikTok — they are using the tools that they have to make a real, material difference, and you should obviously help out via your own consumption of their content if and when you come across it.
The larger point, though, is that when we frame these efforts as somehow engendering “social profit” that takes away the capitalist profit motive from these platforms, we are missing a big piece of the puzzle, which is that more time spent on TikTok (or any platform) is the only thing that really matters to them. As Rob Horning recently wrote (emphasis added):
Anything at all can be profitably presented as entertainment at the expense of the specificity of its own concept. That is, anything can become entertainment instead of what it is — it is more valuable to the system (as reflected by the infrastructure provided by TikTok and other platforms) as spectacle than as a reflection of its own content. A video recipe has to entertain; it doesn’t have to help you make something edible. What’s important is that it prompts viewers to equate viewing with doing. The resulting passivity allows the cycle to strengthen itself — one is not actively seeking any content or information, so one’s impatience and expectations of being entertained continue to grow stronger.
As a result, naturally, “the point of TikTok’s algorithmic feed is to get people to consume more TikTok,” whether it’s viral recipes or viral dances or viral philanthropy. It is all content, all entertainment, and consuming is the same as doing. Your passive consumption of a video is the same thing as taking action, meaning you have done your part. If you zoom out and think about a global politics in this context, the limitations become quite clear, transcending old debates about hashtag activism and demonstrating that a thoroughly platformized political and cultural ecosystem risks impotency in radical politics, as per usual, but also the further enrichment of the platform barons, because it’s literally all the same to them. That user may make a few thousand dollars for their plumbing debt, but TikTok rakes in a lot more from all that sustained engagement. Viewing is not doing; viewing is viewing.
Horning makes an obvious but unavoidable gesture here to Guy Debord, who wrote in The Society of the Spectacle:
The spectacle is essentially tautological for the simple reason that its means and ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory.
This resonates for straightforward reasons today, when we are inundated by international polycrisis and personal pleas, endless GoFundMes and algorithm-gaming strategies intended to patch the holes and fill the gaps in the system, except the system is all holes, all gaps. Framing these efforts as a salve to the horrors of platform capitalism is misguided. They are a warning of what our economy is poised to become for us all.
Ephemera
Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra, two of the most prominent living political theorists, wrote an excellent, short piece for New Left Review about global war and the ‘new’ internationalism: “The mass protests against the US invasion of Iraq, which took place in cities across the world on 15 February 2003, correctly identified the supranational formation of the war machine and announced the possibility of a new internationalist, anti-war actor. Though they failed to stop the assault, they created a precedent for future practices of mass withdrawal. Two decades on, the mobilizations against the massacre in Gaza – springing up on city streets and college campuses worldwide – portend the formation of a ‘global Palestine’.”
You may not think you want to read the social history of the cardboard box, but I assure that you want to read Shannon Mattern’s.
If you like to laugh, watch Conner O’Malley’s new stand-up special, Stand Up Solutions, which also does a great job at nailing the macho tech bro spirit of Silicon Valley’s fervor over artificial intelligence and technodeterminism.
Song Rec: “Dreams” by Hana Vu