For a long time, I’ve believed that once you gather enough people on a platform, that platform becomes a kind of sovereign state -- a new community beyond traditional governance. The current entities that rule our physical spaces can’t regulate this kind of digital territory. This is being exacerbated in the AI era, and we’re woefully unprepared for it as many experts warn us.
Scary.
And this is actually how the founding principals of TikTok saw the platform’s potential for power. The founders set out to create a “new society” and have built a product that is now actively keeping us in a trance by way of hyper-optimized, for-you content. It makes a personalized market for us every single time we open it, by serving us content we never knew we wanted, but we will absolutely stay and watch.
When something works this well, it is hypnotizing.
My conversation this week with tech reporter Emily Baker-White about her book “Every Screen On The Planet” cemented this for me in a new way.
TikTok isn’t just another social media app. It doesn’t wait for you to find something interesting. It already knows what you’re going to like. TikTok’s product is human satiation, and it’s nailing it on the daily.
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As news continues to swirl around “TikTok” and “China,” it’s generally a conversation around national security, fear of state control or access to citizens’ data that can be weaponized. As I thought about my conversation with Emily, I began to see TikTok more as the beginning of something else even more insidious.
When we are staring into the screen, we are not thinking about any Chinese surveillance state. We are laughing, maybe sharing a very funny video to our group chat. It feels like the kind of low stakes content and experience we deserve as a reprieve from life …
TikTok is the first major consumer experience leveraging AIs that know us better than we know ourselves. TikTok’s LLM is faster than our brain’s LLM, so to speak. And this is just the beginning of humanity’s AI era. This is just the beginning of AIs learning how to please us.
I can’t help but think of our natural human evolutionary cycle and how at its current pace, it has no chance of catching up to our technology cycles. Tech is surely changing the development of our species, but we are unsure to what end and what the outcomes will be in ten years, much less ten thousand.
We are being algo-pilled.
We don’t know what this does to us yet, and still we spend hours being fed what feels like something we like … but it’s not really, it’s something an algorithm has anticipated that we’ll like. It’s changing how we think and what we want.
Here’s my conversation this week with Emily Baker-White, ‘Ep. 26: Why TikTok knows you better than you know yourself’