I. Hush now, and watch these videos.
There was a time before I joined TikTok where I didn't understand the appeal of TikTok. The videos auto-play. The For You Page—the "algorithm"—uses reinforcement learning to cater your recommendations into your biases. I swipe, and there is no transitional state between watching one video and watching another video besides the momentary flick of energy from my thumb.
When platforms roll out features like non-configurable video auto-play, they're trading agentic utility for passive control. Predicated on the implicit reduction of agency a user must condone in order to participate in any digital spaces that are part of that platform, TikTok's hose of content takes the opposite approach of social media of the past: instead of browsing and playing a video that you've discovered, you are presented, one after another, videos that TikTok has decided you shall watch. You can skip a video, but you cannot configure how this experience happens to you.
It's hard for me to participate in social relationships that are not agentic. An agentic relationship is one where all parties involved actively and intentionally participate in shaping the relationship's direction and dynamics. An agentic relationship is one where people exercise personal agency—meaning they take initiative, make conscious choices, and actively engage rather than passively going along or letting things happen by default.
On TikTok, personal agency is purposefully limited to the specific modality of information consumerism that the app employs: a barrage of video content, one after another. Due to the way scientific progress and reasoning is vilified by specific groups who seek to gain and retain power, along with cognitive complacency that is encouraged to survive beyond its evolutionary limits, our society is not yet able to fully articulate how short-form videos with rapidly changing context is influencing how we participate in our communities.
But we are starting to see the results of studies that examine TikTok and the platform's effect on our behavior and cognition. Last year, researchers in Germany found evidence to corroborate a growing concern among misinformation and disinformation researchers: that TikTok was replicating in the general population an effect that has, up until now, been a detriment to knowledge workers specifically:
Online interruptions are the most common in the workplace and are associated with increased workload, chronic stress, and mental fatigue. Specifically, this stream of video information continuously fills our mental buffer, which causes us to eliminate potentially useful information in favor of more superficial or irrelevant information provided by the social media feed. Past research in workplace contexts has demonstrated that context switching has a detrimental impact on cognitive functions and task performance. However, the impact of context switching in social media is not well understood.
II. Contextually collapsing contexts.
Context degradation is a foundational component of psychological warfare. Think about it: if a video were to pop up on people's feeds that brought attention to something important happening somewhere, how might you design a platform to inhibit the mobilizing effect of that video?
You would immediately and rapidly follow that video with something else. You would switch contexts.
You would force the brains of the people using the platform to rapidly tear down and build up a new context for a new video. You would also ensure that the platform's affordances—the things it enables you to do—limit how quickly context is able to be transmitted and constructed.
In this way, TikTok's platform seems specifically engineered for context collapse. Each swipe erases the cognitive framework built for the previous video, replacing it with fresh demands for attention and understanding. The platform's design doesn't just make this context-switching inevitable—it makes it compulsory. There's no pause button for processing, no space for connection-making. Just an endless stream of disconnected moments, each one washing away the last.
The result is a kind of cognitive waterboarding, a constant drowning of meaningful context in a flood of new stimuli. We're beyond the concept of distraction; this is about the systematic prevention of sustained attention and collective meaning-making.
And perhaps that's the point.
III. Paying for digital mutuality.
Before the election, I felt driven to use TikTok to help alleviate some of the turmoil that misinformation and disinformation precedes. I felt driven to contribute to my digital communities because healthy communities are cultivated through the mutuality of its members. And one of the many important things Dr. King reminded us was that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.
But there's an inherent tension in using a platform designed to degrade context to fight against context degradation. Each video I publish goes into an algorithmically curated stream, subject to the same forces of context collapse I'm trying to resist. The platform's non-agentic nature means that even as I exercise agency in creating content, I surrender control over how that content reaches and impacts others.
Maybe this is the new paradox of our social lives. How do we maintain meaningful connections and share information within systems designed to fragment our attention and dilute our agency? The challenge isn't just about resisting misinformation—it's about preserving our capacity for deep context and intentional engagement while participating in spaces that seem engineered to erode both.
IV. Where have you been, Dinner Pancakes?
Here's the thing: I'm interested in meaningfully engaging with concepts and ideas, and to meaningfully engage with concepts and ideas, context communication is necessary. TikTok does not provide a platform for meaningfully engaging with ideas; the comments system is not designed for meaningful discussion on videos, the video player is not designed to give the viewer agency over how they engage with the content, and the specific norms and mores of TikTok video creation and interaction perpetuate a system of ephemeral contextual data.
That is not the way I like to engage with ideas. I don't like the way TikTok's comment system disables collaborative context construction; I don't like that the platform implies a always on, always transmitting feel. I have over 500 videos there, at least half of which are educational and largely timeless (e.g., my lectures on misinformation). Yet the platform's design does not present me as a publisher of a library of content in a way that we might expect a fiction author's website to showcase an archive of written (past tense) work. Instead, content creators are faucets that are either on or off; there is an implicit expectation of on-ness that, when not present, leads to parasocial anxiety.
Maybe this is just my own sensitivities to things influencing my perception of TikTok, but we ought not be quick to dismiss how sensitive people interpret systems that nurture and, at times, exploit our sensitivities.
Can people learn something new from TikTok? Of course they can. But learning and awareness spread through TikTok is happening despite the platform's design, not because of it. New things we're made aware of on TikTok are a product of both creators and viewers working harder than necessary to use a platform designed to sell products and confirmation bias as a means of transferring critical information about the world around us and the ideas we find our lives enmeshed in.
Long-form writing like this and microblogging platforms like BlueSky both resonate more with how I prefer to engage with ideas. Since the election I haven't felt the need, the call to serve that I felt when I watched the disinformation around the Butler Rally this past summer spreading like wildfire. I haven't posted on TikTok since the election because there's not really much more for me to do in this idea of service to my community. I am, before anything else, someone who creates things, and while I have a strong background in misinformation research, this election has really driven home the idea that TikTok is not a platform to distribute information meant to change people's minds. This is especially true given the fragmented nature of social media technologies in general, something that is going to continue as long as corporations and people are inextricably linked.
I'll post on TikTok when I feel like I have something to say, I can promise you that. For now, though, I don't feel like I have anything to contribute to the platform. I feel kind of put off by how TikTok buckets people into cognitive bias reinforcement networks. It's great as a creator who is interested in audience capture; it's terrible for sensitive people like me. It's overwhelming, it's overstimulating, and it's frustrating.
This could just be post-election psychological self-care, I don't know. I am without external employment, living right now off of supporter subscriptions and savings, so my focuses are really the things I want to be focusing on: my creations. Music, fiction, nonfiction, game development, software, public (written) conversations... these are all things that I like to create and participate in. Visual social media like TikTok is extremely performative, though, and it's difficult to feel motivated to create on a platform that rewards performance and compliance rather than expression and exploration.
Maybe I'm just too sensitive of a person to really "get" TikTok. I'm an introvert, after all, which means I am charged not by social interaction, but by alone time. My social batteries need to recharge away from the social situations that drained them. But something tells me that it's not my introversion that is propelling my lack of motivation to participate in the TikTok content firehose. Maybe it's that TikTok is just a very emotionally and mentally draining experience, and when we are constantly inundated with emotionally and mentally draining experiences, the unique exhaustion of self-playing videos and rapidly shifting contexts leads to a kind of numbness against self-preservation.