Holding up a mirror to America

There Was Nothing Ever Unique About TikTok And I Can Prove It

—By Adam Bumas

As of writing this, the Supreme Court has ruled that TikTok is banned in the US. Former President Joe Biden said he wouldn’t enforce it as he left office over the weekend. President Donald Trump has said he supports a 90-day extension to explore a 50% US ownership of the app. And ByteDance is not against some kind of deal to keep it running. And service providers like Oracle are the ones left trying to figure out the legal liability of allowing TikTok access to continue in the US amid all of this. It’s become, predictably, a big giant political rats nest. Made even stupider and uglier by the fact that, if our lawmakers were to really look at TikTok data from the last six years, as I have, they’d know that none of this will actually “kill” TikTok’s influence because it doesn’t actually have any. Let me explain.

I was studying and analyzing TikTok long before I started working for Garbage Day, but for the past few years, as part of my work on this newsletter, I’ve been tracking what’s trending on TikTok month-to-month. And my biggest insight from years of lurking on the country’s various For You Pages is that the “TikTok trend,” as we understand it, does not actually exist.

Almost everything popular meme on the app either starts elsewhere or gets popular after it moves off the platform. And this has been true since TikTok’s first big viral moment in late 2019, thanks to Charli D’Amelio, who had the app’s most-followed account until 2022. A competitive dancer, D’Amelio’s success came from performing the elaborately choreographed dances like “The Renegade” that were TikTok’s bread and butter in its early days. After D’Amelio’s video started going viral, though, she was blasted for not actually choreographing any of the dances herself, but got all the credit, attention, and ad revenue (and a cringe Jimmy Fallon segment).

In 2020, two weeks after D’Amelio parlayed her TikTok fame to a Super Bowl ad, journalist Taylor Lorenz profiled the Renegade dance’s original choreographer. Jalaiah Harmon had originally posted the dance on an app called Funimate, before reposting it to Instagram, where it then spread to TikTok. It’s been forgotten at this point, but much of TikTok’s early popularity depended on these other short-form video apps — Dubsmash, Likee, and even Vine — and completely monopolized any attention the original sources might have gotten. But TikTok doesn’t just feed off its competitors. The overwhelming majority of TikTok trends that get big enough for someone like me to actually monitor wouldn’t exist without places like YouTube and Reddit feeding them, as well.

The way TikTok gobbles up the rest of the web means finding the sources for TikTok trends is like seeing the rings on the tree for internet culture. The craze for Stanley water bottles started on a mommy blog. Aesthetics like cottagecore are holdovers from Tumblr. More recently, the efforts by other tech companies to copy TikTok have had their own successes. Skibidi Toilet started as a YouTube Short, and Haliey Welch said “hawk tuah” in an Instagram Reel.

Of course, most normal people don’t care about where the fun online thing they saw comes from. When writer Emma Stefansky for Thrillist tried to untangle the thread of a dance D’Amelio performed, Stefansky wrote, “Following an internet trend's virality is almost as complex and random as the forces that drive something to go viral in the first place.”

But the enormous financial and social — and political — dividends we’ve bestowed on TikTok popularity means it really does matter to the folks in charge. TikTok fame can wreck communities under the strain, give businesses too many customers to handle, and make tourist hotspots too hot to visit. None of these were unpopular before the algorithm blew them up, since, from what I’ve seen, they couldn’t have sustained interest otherwise. But the reason so many things now get lumped into “TikTok trends” is mostly a matter of headcount. Wherever these trends originate, the app exposes them to an enormous and fiercely engaged new audience that uses their algorithm to navigate the overcrowded cultural landscape. Ironically, they become the ones doing the overcrowding.

I wouldn’t say it’s true that nothing big starts on TikTok, but it’s got to leave it fast. The first time I covered the site it was to report on Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical in 2020. The actual show starring Tony winners, which even got Disney’s blessing to raise money for Broadway actors put out of work by the pandemic, started with a TikTok. Crucially, though, there were only about five days between a remix of the original starting the trend in earnest, and an enterprising theater kid doing the actual organizational work to mount the show. But there are plenty of other “trends” like this that languish on random For You Pages and disappear back into the digital swamp, without their obligatory TODAY Show segment.

And I honestly get a little sad when I look into the history of something that’s starting to spread on people’s FYPs and see it treated as “a new trend” over and over as the algorithm forgets and rediscovers it. Have you heard about this not-at-all-new thing called mewing, which I had to look into a few weeks ago? If you didn’t hear about the latest trend from last November, maybe you might recognize it from last March, or the September before that, or the January before that, or the July before that, or the October before that. I mean, come on!

This TikTok self-cannibalization is why it’s so rare to see a trend that’s entirely homegrown on the app. Though, it’s not just the algorithm, but the culture its total dominion creates, where you genuinely can’t be sure if anyone will see your video if the algorithm doesn’t like it. It leads to a whole new lexicon of euphemisms, hashtags that look like keysmashing, and a culture of discouragement — even fear — of posting anything not on-trend. And when there is something really new and really native to TikTok — whether that’s “Who TF Did I Marry” or the Keith Lee effect — it’s usually from young people of color, who, like with the D’Amelio dance, are forgotten about the minute a white teenager takes it and runs with it.

This all isn’t to say that there was nothing novel about TikTok. It obviously did give Americans genuinely new ways to communicate and create culture, but the culture we created with it was always there. Thanks to TikTok, America finally saw itself and it scared us. It turns out Americans don’t talk the way we think they should, don’t dress the way we expected, dance the way we’d like, or have the political beliefs our lawmakers have been told we do. A Chinese tech company gave us a mirror and our politicians hated it so much they’d rather destroy it — or try and control it — than face the reflection staring back at us.

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How Much Money Did Trump Make Off His Dumb Meme Coin?

Over the weekend, President Donald Trump launched a $Trump meme coin and, if you’ve been following the headlines about it, it has already netted Trump billions. We’ll get to why that’s not actually the case in just a second, but I wanted to explain a bit of the language that Trump’s team has been using to promote the coin because I think it’s important. The page advertising it calls it the “only official Trump meme,” which, for anyone outside of the crypto bubble, might be confusing. They’re calling this a meme because there has a been a concerted years-long effort from crypto evangelists to effectively replace memes, as we’ve understood them, with cryptocurrency. This is why Haliey “Hawk Tuah” Welch was so quick to parlay her viral fame into a meme coin. Crypto firms want to monetize the very concept of a meme. Which is as insidious as it is extremely lame.

Anyways, as crypto researcher Molly White explained, Trump did not make billions off $Trump, which, obviously, pumped and dumped upon launch. His theoretical net worth based on the current trading price of the coin and the amount of coins that exist is, when converted into dollars, is, yes, around $40-$50 billion. But it’s not real.

People are making serious — and seriously suspicious — amounts of money off the Trumpian crypto frenzy happening right now, though. Co-founder of Students for Trump Ryan Fournier has been accused of “rugging” investors after he promoted a $TikTok coin over the weekend. He sold a ton of it, the value collapsed immediately, and, in response to backlash over the alleged rugpull, he wrote on X, “I literally sold because it was going down increasingly. I don’t know who wouldn’t do that.” Hope the Federal Trade Commission feels the same way!

Speaking of the Federal Trade Commission…

Lina Khan’s FTC’s Final Act Was Revealing How Deeply Bad The Internet Has Become

Outgoing Federal Trade Commissioner Lina “The Bully” Khan gifted us with one more alarming look behind the curtain of American late-stage capitalism this weekend, publishing a report on “surveillance pricing”.

The FTC discovered that the online retailers are working with middlemen to monitor how users interact with their digital marketplaces and alter prices based on behavior. This might be something we all instinctively know is happening, but the extent of it is shocking.

“Like a cosmetics company targeting promotions to specific skin types and skin tones,” the report reads. Or a “consumer who is profiled as a new parent may intentionally be shown higher priced baby thermometers on the first page of their search results.”

As The Guardian points out, though, it’s unclear exactly how much of Khan’s work will survive the second Trump administration. It’s probably fine that every billionaire in the country attended a church service with the new president this morning.

Here Come The Executive Orders

Fox News is reporting that President Donald Trump plans on signing “200 executive orders” on Tuesday after he enters the White House. These executive orders are, across the board, all very bad and, also, in classic Trump style, vague and confusing. There are, also, a whole bunch targeted at appeasing random right-wing internet talking points, like one that would force federal employees to go back to in-person work.

Substack’s favorite TERF blog, The “Free” “Press” got ahold of the details of Trump’s big anti-trans executive order, which is called the “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” in case you had any doubts about what this is all actually about. It would effectively detransition trans Americans, as far as their legal identification is concerned, blocking any kind of gender changes to things like licenses and passports. It also aims to knock down any kind of legal protections around trans discrimination.

Though, with all of Trump’s executive orders, there’s not a lot of clarity around how they would legally work in practice. So the immediate result of all these orders will be empty virtue signaling from the Trump admin, the illusion they’re doing anything at all, and endless legal battles that clog up the courts for years. Welcome back, 2016-2020!

The Brutalist (And Emilia Pérez If You Care lol) Used AI

Very-long movie The Brutalist used AI language tools to punch up Hungarian dialogue spoken in the film by leads Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones. The Hollywood Reporter has more details about it, but basically Brody and Jones performed Hungarian, tried to fix some of the harder pronunciation in post, it didn’t work, so they created a Hungarian AI model to smooth out some of the delivery. This is not totally dissimilar from what the filmmakers of Emilia Pérez did. They used an audio AI model to enhance songs in the film that were out of actor Karla Sofía Gascón’s vocal range.

There is, of course, a backlash brewing over the use of AI in these two films, but I do think it’s a bit muted compared to the negative reaction last year to the use of generative-AI imagery in low-budget horror film Late Night With The Devil. And there are a couple ways to interpret that.

It could be that, on the whole, most people are coming to terms with the fact that little bits of AI-generated content are making their way into creative projects and most of the time, you won’t even notice. Or it could be that the audio industry is just more accustomed to this kind of thing because sampling, autotune, audio manipulation, ADR, and dubbing have been around for decades and this is a fairly natural extension of that.

I’ll just say that most of how we feel about AI in movies will be determined by this year’s Oscar race. Which may not directly comment on the inclusion of AI in these films, but if one of them wins, will definitely be seen as a sign that AI is, at the very least, permissible.

We Can’t Let The British Have TikTok

Some Stray Links

• “Behind the Curtain — Coming soon: Ph.D.-level super-agents”

• Just a reminder: “Meta Shatters Lobbying Record as House Passes TikTok Ban”

• “Is the ‘golden age’ of TikTok over already?”

P.S. here’s a little stew boy prisoner.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***