12/5/2023 0 Comments 2019 tiktok soundsI’d seen other TikToks, mostly on Twitter, and my primary impression was that young people were churning through images and sounds at warp speed, repurposing reality into ironic, bite-size content. It was terrifyingly funny, like a well-timed electric shock. I was alone with my phone at my desk on a week night, and when I watched the video I screamed. In February, a friend texted me a YouTube rip of Marcella’s TikTok. On YouTube, the Swedish vlogger PewDiePie, who has more than a hundred million subscribers, posted a video mocking the media for suggesting that TikTok had a “Nazi problem”-Vice had found various accounts promoting white-supremacist slogans-then showed Marcella’s video, laughed, and said, “Never mind, actually, this does not help the case I was trying to make.” (PewDiePie has been criticized for employing anti-Semitic imagery in his videos, though his fans insist that his work is satire.) Marcella started to get direct messages on TikTok and Instagram, some of which called her anti-Semitic. Pretty quickly, though, her video began getting hundreds of likes, thousands, tens of thousands. She didn’t think that anyone would see what she’d made. Marcella’s friends knew about TikTok, but almost none of them were on it. She adjusts her collar, checks her reflection, looks upward, and-the beat drops-she’s Anne Frank. She enters the frame in a white button-down, her hair dark and wavy. Her video took around twenty minutes to make, and is thirteen seconds long. Marcella propped her phone on her desk and set the TikTok timer. A girl smeared gold paint on her face, put on a yellow hoodie, and turned into an Oscar statue. A guy with packing tape over his nose became Voldemort. In each one, a person would look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and then, just as the song’s beat dropped, the camera would cut to a shot of the person’s doppelgänger. Marcella was lying on her bed looking at TikTok on a Thursday evening when she began seeing video after video set to a clip of the song “Pretty Boy Swag,” by Soulja Boy. Videos become memes that you can imitate, or riff on, rapidly multiplying much the way the Ice Bucket Challenge proliferated on Facebook five years ago. Another tap calls up a suite of editing tools, including a timer that makes it easy to film yourself. When you watch a video on TikTok, you can tap a button on the screen to respond with your own video, scored to the same soundtrack. It showed her more absurd comic sketches and supercuts of people painting murals, and fewer videos in which girls made fun of other girls for their looks. She watched the ones she liked a few times before moving on, and double-tapped her favorites, to “like” them. She opened TikTok, and it began showing her an endless scroll of videos, most of them fifteen seconds or less. They were strange and hilarious and reminded her of Vine, the discontinued platform that teen-agers once used for uploading anarchic six-second videos that played on a loop. She downloaded TikTok last fall, after seeing TikTok videos that had been posted on YouTube and Instagram. Marcella is eighteen and lives in a Texas suburb so quiet that it sometimes seems like a ghost town.
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