I remember when this happened to me. That’s the sign of truly getting older, isn’t it? When everything newsworthy that swings around is immediately calibrated and compared in your mind to another time, another moment, another life. A way to wave your hands out of the sea and say, ‘my opinion mattered then, and it matters now!’.
So here I am, waving, remembering when I found out MySpace had redesigned and that all my photos, my music, my messages, my news bulletins, had sunk into the ether with no warning. Sure, I had fully pivoted from Top 8’s to 500 photos long before the official 2011 d-day. Sure, I had reconnected with my scene kids turned indie kids in our new spiritual home Tumblr. But it still stung, the sudden realisation that the internet was in fact ephemeral, that digital did not in fact mean permeance, that those hours learning HTML were largely in vain.
Recently, I attended the Barbican’s micro exhibition on being Emo, a splattering of MSN screenshots and mirror selfies barely blown up beyond A5 due to their terrible quality. It felt spooky, seeing vignettes of my past that had quite literally disappeared staring back at me. What a strange thing we had going on back then, Follow Trains, PC 4 PCs, Kate Nash.
I sympathise with the US users of TikTok, whose life will now be clearly split into two eras: before the TikTok ban and after the TikTok ban. For many, the sad but true fact is that their social world is an extension of themselves. Whilst I’m unsure of how the impending ban will shake down, visions of CIA agents pressing a big switch spring to mind, as TikTok slips into an unshakable sleep. And for those whose lives and livelihoods for the past 5 years have been shaped by the clock app, an epidemic of phantom limbs will sprout. So much so, they’re already seeking their prosthetic.
Xiaohongshu, AKA Red Note, AKA Number 1 App in the App Store right now, is the unexpected sleeper hit of Q4. With 300 million MAU’s at the time of writing, the Chinese version of Instagram has recently seen a flurry of American users transfer themselves over, referring to themselves as “TikTok Refugees”. These users are introducing themselves one by one, mainly there to spite their country with a whack-a-mole style approach to US data concerns. These users are so down bad for brain rot, they’re learning Mandarin so they can integrate themselves better with the existing user base. “You will never make me download Instagram”, one user shouts, “Down with Zuck”, a response to his controversial updates around fact checking. Wired cited “pettiness and revenge appear to be enough to motivate people to learn how to navigate Xiaohongshu, an app that is overwhelmingly used by Chinese-speaking people and was not designed with English-speaking users in mind.” Ah, the tenacity of man. Ah, the pettiness of man.
There is something inherently sweet about the interactions between US and Chinese users on the app. The aforementioned attempt to assimilate by learning the predominant language aside, its currently acting part social network part social experiment, as the two cultures aim to teach one another the basics of their existence. Chinese users help US users understand how to add captions and edit. US users detail how lunch works in a US public school. It feels like the early days of the internet, before algorithms shaped our paths and passions, where deluges of information all came at once in an indecipherable, all-encompassing goo.
If an app loses all its daily visitors, is it an app? That was the question (or there about for the pedants) Myspace had to ask itself, when all its young users had grown up and graduated at the altar of Zuckerberg Inc. That was the question that saw it dilute itself again and again until it faded into obscurity. And whilst TikTok is unlikely to stop being the shining star in the social solar system just because of some pesky US data privacy concerns, I can see why users are seeking alternatives. It’s likely the fun and novelty of a new app will fade, and the Mandarin Duolingo streaks will cease, and Red Note will fade into the tapestry of being terminally online. But what is the alternative? I think - much like India saw by banning TikTok in 2020 and further cemented by Zuckerberg’s governmental pandering - we will see Reels just sweep it all up, with YouTube Shorts running right behind with a hoover. I would prefer that to the reality in which Elon Musk buys TikTok and gives it the X-terminate treatment, but I gave up hoping sense would prevail at some point during 2016.
No man is an island, no app stands alone. Platforms will ebb and flow in popularity, and some will be taken before their time. But the app is just tech - at its best, it’s just silicon. It is nothing. You don’t love TikTok, you love the people, the creators, the communities, the shared moments. It’s simply a vehicle for that connection. As users drift from TikTok over to Red Note, and inevitably land themselves back at the shores of Meta, one truth remains. Technology may have built the beach house, but we’re the ones filling it with floaties. I’ll miss the TikTok that I knew shaped by that sweet, sweet American cultural diaspora - most notably Rush season at an Alabama Sorority - but I’m sure I’ll find them again in the soft brain smoothing grasp of another social media conglomerate. I remember when this happened to me. I was sad for a while, and then I logged on elsewhere.
SIM CITY: Tales from the Algorithm is a Substack all about the internet, social media, and the cultural anthropology of the digital world. Subscribe for more 😇