Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Do you think that tik tok's particularly strong boosting of local content, especially compared with other social media platforms, is possibly tied to a desire by the platform to deepen partisan and regional divides across the US?
There is also something dark in the way the algorithm is great at boosting content that shows us exactly what we desire in the most degrading way. For example I'm socially anxious and insecure about my masculinity so my feed was overrun with hypermasculine extremely affable men to a ridiculous degree. I have never had that experience with any other social media platform. I haven't used the app in over a year but there was something about it that always struck me as more toxic than any other. It is almost like the mirror of Erised, the magic device that shows us our deepest desires but never gives them to us. I found it completely maddening.
I think this is too hasty of a claim to make. There are several problems that need to be explored here.
First: An obvious point, but one that bears repeating. TikTok cannot show you what you desire in its actuality, in the sense that it cannot manifest physical objects or states of affairs in reality; it can only show you representations of what you desire, in the form of videos. This allows us to inquire about the gap between the representation and the thing purportedly being represented. I claim that this gap is always irreducible, and thus problematizes any straightforward notion of TikTok showing you "exactly" what you desire.
It is easy to find examples of desires that elude direct representation. Christians have historically had a difficult time explaining exactly what the experience of Paradiso is supposed to be like, and communists have similarly had difficulty explaining how a true communist society would function, except through the via negativa: Heaven is not the state of earthly sin, communism is not the alienation of capitalism, and so forth. Plainly, if words and images alone are incapable of capturing these hypothetical states of affairs, then the combination of words and images in the form of video contributes nothing to the problem of their representation. But we need not confine ourselves to such rarefied examples; even in the most concrete and earthly desires, problems arise. Suppose you have a desire to eat steak. Suppose you are shown a TikTok video of a steak sizzling in a pan. This causes you to think: I desire to eat steak; I was shown an image of steak; thus TikTok has shown me what I desire; where's the problem? But this is based on a misrecognition of your own desire, as a simple thought experiment shows.
When you imagine eating a steak, you must always imagine that you are eating it in a particular concrete environment, in a particular location in spacetime, in a particular relationship with the other objects and people in your surroundings. You will certainly never imagine eating the steak in a pure black void, you and the steak alone in the universe; such a void would be bizarre and disquieting, and would certainly ruin the experience of the meal. Thus you do not have a pure and simple desire for "steak" as such, but rather you desire steak only insofar as it is embedded in the proper relational network. A video of a steak being cooked by a random person you don't know leaves obscure the fact that you don't desire to share a meal with just anyone; perhaps there are times where you desire to eat alone, but there are also times where you desire to eat with friends and family, people you have meaningful relationships with, in a comfortable and familiar environment. A random video can never capture the specificity of your particular relationships, of the social meanings that you attach to the act of dining with others, because it will always depict someone else who is not you.
We can imagine a magic version of TikTok that always displays your own private fantasy: we can imagine that it literally depicts you and your friends, sharing a meal, laughing and having a good time, etc. But even here, the gap between the representation and the reality of your desire can never be reduced to nothing. Consider the possibility that one of your friends (depicted in the magic video) is actually not your friend, but is instead your secret enemy, and while he is with you, he is constantly struggling to prevent himself from flying into a violent rage, even though on the surface he maintains a perfect act of being friendly and amicable. You desire to have a guarantee that this possibility can never come to pass, but how could such a guarantee ever be represented? Even if text were to appear on the video stating "this is the voice of God, and I guarantee that all the people assembled here genuinely love you, and none of them mean you harm", it would always be an open question whether that declaration were actually veridical or not. Because there can be no direct representation of the contents of consciousness of another conscious entity, your desire can never be fully sated, and it never reaches an end to its questioning.
We can easily apply this type of relational analysis to other examples. You desire beautiful women, TikTok shows you a beautiful woman who is just your type, thus it has reflected your desire, right? But don't you desire more than just the image of a woman? Don't you desire to have an authentic relationship with her, with all the vicissitudes that an actual relationship entails? All the ups and downs, the happy moments, the painful moments, even the long stretches of boredom where nothing much happens, all that is essential to an actual relationship as opposed to the falsified image of one? Because of the necessary extension of such a relationship in time, because of the necessity of the unfolding of the process itself (as opposed to the mere end result, the "final" image of happiness), it's the sort of thing that could not even be represented in a feature film, let alone a 10 second short.
Second: Continuing with the theme of the misrecognition of one's desire. Because the algorithm is based on your own volitional act of clicking on videos, your own self-reported desire, the algorithm reflects what you think your desire is, but this is frequently quite different from what your desire is in actuality. I doubt you have any serious desire for masculinity qua masculinity for example; I doubt you have made a genuine assessment that being masculine is virtuous as such. More than likely you only desire it on instrumental grounds because you believe it makes you more desirable to women, or that it accords you more social status. Imagine if tomorrow everyone around you held the opposite opinion; imagine that women found social anxiety to be attractive, and your colleagues at work started apportioning the most social status to those who were the most socially anxious. I imagine that you would abandon your desire for masculinity in a heartbeat, and you would instead become fixated on finding ways to make yourself appear more socially anxious.
Thus your "deepest desire" reveals itself to be quite fragile, and we should instead seek the reality of your desire elsewhere. The point, of course, is not to arrive at your true and final desire, beyond which there is nothing left that can deceive us; the point rather is that this self-movement and self-sublation is the nature of desire itself. The tendency of the algorithm to produce "gravitational attractors" based on your own self-reports arrests the movement of desire and falsifies it.
Third: Can TikTok represent the self-contradictory nature of desire? Desire never takes a simple and direct path to its object, flying straight as Cupid's arrow. Desire is always mutilated; it is always shattered from the start, at odds with itself.
Your issues with masculinity are not issues of knowledge or capability. If you're posting here, you're probably of above average intelligence and above average financial means, and you could enact this transformation in yourself if you really wanted to. I have personally seen men of meager means make quite dramatic personality shifts. You already know what you would have to do and how you would have to act in order to make yourself more outgoing. The fact that you haven't done so already indicates a certain trepidation on your part. You desire one thing, but also its opposite. Such is the nature of desire.
I am not in principle opposed to the idea of the direct representation of contradiction in audiovisual form. But, I don't believe that TikTok in its current form is designed with such possibilities in mind; it is predicated on the idea that you have one pure and simple desire, and that accessing the truth of this desire poses no special problems.
It does no such thing. You simply fell prey to an illusion.
Ultimately, you're just not giving yourself enough credit. TikTok did not reflect the truth of your desire. It simply took one small and insignificant part of it, a part that is meaningless when it is deprived of its relationship to the whole, and drew a caricature of it, magnifying it to comic proportions. Your desire cannot be mastered by a series of 10 second videos. It is something far greater than that. Once you start to understand the nature of your own desire, you begin to chip away at the illusion of the algorithm's power.
Interesting, good post.
Really? Wouldn't relationships be better if they lacked painful moments? Imagine an omnipotent goes all out and makes you a soulmate. Every gene, every memory, every quirk of personality and every atom is specifically designed to maximize the happy moments in the relationship and prevent unhappy moments. That is strictly superior to standard relationships. On a purely definitional level, this must be true. It's not achievable by us but it's still an ideal.
I don't really have a full answer right now. This sounds quite hellish to me:
but I'm not prepared to give an argument for why that should be the case, so I'll have to just let it stand as an assertion of preference.
This piece by Orwell is a good starting point. Utopia always gets boring after a while.
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