I hope your e-mail didn’t change over the last 9 months because I’m back at you like a bad ex. But I’m not here with any of that weak “how’ve you been” shit. Nah, we’re getting right in to it.
We gotta talk about TikTok.
I’m addicted. Minutes turn in to hours turn in to knowing about trends among college age folks. I’ll be the first to admit, there’s a Vine size hole left in my heart and gdamnit TikTok is the closest I’ve got the glory days.
And it’s those glory days that old (millennial) viners are trying to cash in on. It’s cringeworthy and painful to when a familiar face shows up on the TikTok scroll looking older than I remember and seeming way less funny surrounded by floating heart, comment, and share buttons.
The worst part is, I am obviously doing the same thing. I'm dying to travel back in time to around 2014 when I was in the loop on internet trends enough to know what my high school students were talking about and (on good days) get a few relevant jokes off myself.
But TikTok is a completely different animal. No matter how many hours I spend scrolling I will never understand why watching Gen Xers do the same dance to the same songs is mesmerizing. It is the first social media platform that I know will have to pass me by, despite my sad and desperate attempts to be a part of it.
If I am unable to connect to what is new, then am I relegated to what is old? Will the Gen Xers eventually lump me, a ~*~MiLlEnNiAl~*~ in with the boomers? Am I as out of touch and is this what aging in the digital age feels like????
(It may or may not be relevant that I’m turning 30 in 4 months. heh.)
Please follow me in an attempt to weave a joke belongs to people much younger than me through my thoughts on articles about what it means to live in a world slowing waking up to the fact that the boomer generation still holds all the cards.
Good Read
How TikTok Holds Our Attention - Jia Tolentino
Is this a Jia Tolentino fan newsletter? Yes. Am I going to try and diversify my offerings to showcase different worthy writers? nah.
Jia knows how to take you deep without making it feel like you’re going to drown or get bored. The inner workings of the way TikTok holds our attention through advanced AI and years of observation of other addicting social media platforms reveals the kind of structural underpinnings of a world we are all rapidly creating. I heard once that computers ushered in a new plane of existence: there’s the real world that we all live in and the digital world that we are all participating in and creating as we go. Imagine that every webpage, post, profile is a building, a memo, a portrait.
For many (*cough* boomers *cough*), the prospect of investing in the digital world means taking resources (time, energy, and the almighty ~connection~) away from the ‘real’ world. But I don’t buy that kind of formula. I don’t think that we are less connected or less ‘authentic’ than generations past because we are on the internet. I think often the boomers who are very on the internet, looking at you Karen the Pearl Party addict, feel less connected and authentic online and they then assume that everyone experiences social media the same way. Karen, I found my boyfriend, my roommate, and my job online. I ain't mad about using a screen instead of pen and paper or carrier pigeon. I think the digital space is as real as the one we’ve created physically.
Of course, we have a responsibility of course to maintain our lives here in this physical realm, but time spent building something on the internet (relationships, memes, newsletters) isn’t wasted. It is productive in a way we have never been before. Communicative in a way we don’t quite understand yet. Tiktok could be like a generations folk music. The same 5 sounds are used until everyone has ‘hopped on the trend’ and in 5 or 10 years, those little tiktok babies will be like “remember when we all danced to our exes voicemails?”
I don’t think that TikTok or Instagram or Facebook in and of themselves are going to bring our inevitable doom. I think, and Jia’s piece seems to tease out, that the same things that have always been ruining our world are still at work in the digital world: inhumane human behavior supercharged by capitalistic greed.
Shit don’t change, it just changes apps.
Hate Read
Why millennials never want to leave their apartment
Alright. I get it. We all want to sell articles to paying outlets. But I am sick and tired of this trend of crafting an argument around the starter: WHY MILLENIALS……
Why millennials REALLY use Tinder (validation)
Why millennials REALLY hate boomers (college debt, etc)
Why millennials are MORE depressed than ever (ever read the news?)
It’s tired. And what’s more annoying is that the argument always ends predictably. The ‘so what’ of the 5-paragraph-essay-level argument is always “perhaps millennials are carving out a new way to live…on the internet.”
Like, no shit my guy.
This is the generation that was coding their Neopets website while they learned to fold notes in cute hearts. This is the generation that had to teach their parents and teachers how to use the internet. This is the generation that grew up online and people are surprised that they’re finding love, finding work, and finding ~connection~ there? It’s just tired and so often comes with a blanket condemnation of engaging with life online.
Stop analyzing what millennials are posting so you can dismiss an entire generation as misguided or poor or depressed or lonely. We may be all these things but the deluge of articles teasing out just how poor and depressed and lonely we are isn’t helping solve the problems that are actually making us so. And vaguely warning us about the ~inauthenticity~ about the only tools we have to crowdsource solutions to these problems is really not helping.
Rec of the Week
Super Sad True Love Story - Gary Shteyngart
In Shteyngart’s near-future dystopia, many of the things that are true today are true for the characters of the book. Infinite corporate mergers and convoluted political dealings have created a purely capitalist world fascinated with how to allow the rich to continue doing what they do forever. Meanwhile on the microlevel, Lenny, an older man fascinated with the romantics of the past, falls in love with a younger Eunice Park, a woman fully plugged in to the digital world.
I read (actually listened) to this book years ago and what stuck out to me was the overwhelming moralization of digitization.
At the beginning of the novel, Lenny wants to be one of the elite who can be elevated by money and fortitude to live ‘indefinitely’ via advances in tech. But this class of people reject him and propels a reactionary distrust of the entire system of digitization, a system he was all-too-ready to accept just chapters prior. Meanwhile, Lenny is also loved by and then rejected by Eunice, driving him even further into his belief that this world and anyone online is inauthentic and therefore on a path toward destruction.
Some destruction happens, yes, but wouldn’t you know, Lenny turns out all right. These kinds of upper-middle-class dudes always do.
It’s a fun, dizzying read that feels like a hillarious episode of Black Mirror from 2010.
That’s all y’all. I’ll be back at you next week. For now, here’s the best thing on the internet.