⚡ November 11, 2022
It's About Damn Time 👩🎤
It’s TikTok! I am becoming addicted to this little app from China, and I want to document my descent into obsession in the hope that somehow, through introspection and maybe luck, I will be able to arrest my fall and recover my solid footing on earth. Does that sound too dramatic? It’s not.
Every once in a while we have a cultural shift that changes everything: electricity, cars, phones, TV, internet … and now this. This little app from China called TikTok.
It's Corn! 🌽
It’s the most connective social tool I’ve ever used, and yet diabolically, it is also the most isolating. Within the small, intimate, almost magical screen of a modern phone, you can talk in real time to an interesting person on the other side of the city, the country, the globe. In fact, you can actually walk in real time through a crowded neon Tokyo, or glide on a scooter of some sort through the deserted streets of nighttime downtown LA. It’s very intoxicating. Every sunrise, a man bicycles around the old Venice canals and carries you on his handlebars, saying ciao to strangers as he floats by. What a world!
It feels wrong. It feels wrong. It’s enticing, and it’s probably profitable, and it’s filling up with people my age and even older. And yet, it feels wrong. The other day I was watching a guy talk about his neighbor who has serious diabetes, and his way of telling the story had me literally laughing myself breathless … really too breathless … and while gasping … I began to worry that maybe there really is something wrong about the whole thing. Maybe it’s trying to kill me? Lol, for real.
On the one hand, it’s the perfect plaything for the introvert. One can spend hours on one of the huge cruise liners or in the cockpit of a jet or the underground bunker of a calamity prepper. You will always find someone richer or prettier than you, or just in general, better than you. And significantly, since you’re moving through an endless feed morning, noon, and night, come rain and come shine, something new, something profound, something tasteless, just something, anything, anything at all will pop up to amuse you. Forever. It’s endless. You wipe off spurts of invisible dopamine and keep going until something snaps you back to your senseless self.
At the time of this writing, the search engine on TikTok is actually better than Google because all the popular results – rather than paid advertisements – rise to the top, feeding the famous algorithm that brings you the Stuff; almost magical in its attentive minding of your every mood. Through careful searches you can find your tribe, and then you can view and study tribal customs, clothing, snacks, and pets. it’s like opening a door into a party in a ballroom, an anonymous conference hotel ballroom where the people are friendly and thirsty and drinks are on the house, without actually leaving your house.
The sticky goo that holds it all together and keeps it bubbling in your gray matter long after you’ve put your phone to bed is the music. The app comes with a large library of old and new tunes; some are smooth favorites and some are new and dreadful, but not since high school mornings getting dressed in the dark to the top 100 on the lit radio dial have so many people shared the same songs in the same season at the same time.
You can learn so much! 🔬
In addition to pleasure and slack-jawed wonder, you can also hoover up very valuable nuggets of information faster than you ever could on good old reliable Youtube. I’ve scattered a few links here and there, but they won’t last forever, and if you’re really curious, it’s time to pick up the magnifying glass and search here and there, learn the interface, make friends. Beware, of course, the black rabbit holes. Here’s one I found: AI and creativity. AI is growing as we feed it, if you haven’t noticed. Every time you fill out a Capcha and prove you’re not a robot, you teach a robot new tricks: like how to read through shattered glass or which street signs are legible in the shadows.
And yet people still answer the harmless poll that asks you to tell me you’re a [fill in the blank] without telling me you’re a [fill in this blank]. Remember the code our Yankee soldiers used to recognize a fellow patriot behind enemy lines? How old is Jack Benny? AI, our growing toddler, reads all the polls and learns the short cuts to nuance, and Bob’s your uncle. There’s an AI program that says it will improve this paragraph. How’s that sitting with your moral code?
New Shiny Thing! 🐿️
And, as irony would have it, I’ve discovered a timely replacement to Twitter as it becomes increasingly weird and toxic. It’s called Mastodon, and it’s strictly First Roster at the moment. If you’ve been around computers since the ’70s or you belong to Github, you will hop aboard with gusto. If you like a little more polish and hand-holding, you might have to wait until one of the users of the service makes you a ramp and hands you a map. If you want all-over pupil massage, no questions asked, there’s always TikTok.
- Reptilian species
- Reptilians
- reptilian being
- Republicans and Democrats
In my old UFO haunts, we’d often laugh at those who believe that Reptilians were poisoning our very surface so that they could emerge from their million-year-old caves and rule among us. Some are already here, readjusting their Edgar suits as they get used to our smells. Yes, way before Q there was Serpo, and the Reptilians were a reported phenomenon that we talked about so often at UFO Magazine that they even populated our official style sheets. Yes, we had style sheets. 🐔