Pluralistic: Tiktokification shall set us free (17 Apr 2026)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: Tiktokification shall set us free (17 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow



Today's links


Dore's illustration of Moses coming off the mountain with the Ten Commandments; it has been modified. It has been hand tinted. Moses' head has been replaced with Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse avatar's head. The Tiktok logo appears in the bottom left corner of the stone tablets.

Tiktokification shall set us free (permalink)

Mark Zuckerberg has a problem with your friends: they're the reason you signed up to use his platform, but they stubbornly refuse to organize your socialization to "maximize engagement." Every time you and your friends wrap up a social interaction and log off, Zuckerberg loses revenue.

After all, by definition, you and your friends have a lot of shared context. You probably feel mostly the same way about most things. You probably mostly consume the same kind of media. You probably mostly consume the same kinds of news. You and your friends make each other's lives better in lots of ways, but typically not by surprising one another. On a typical day, no friend of yours is going to absolutely floor you with a novel thought or finding that sparks hours of furious conversation and argumentation.

And speaking of argumentation: you and your friends probably don't argue that much – I mean, sure, you'll have "friendly disagreements" (again, by definition), but if there's a friend who sparks furious, frustrating, irresistible feuds that drag on and on, chances are that person won't be your friend anymore.

Facebook experienced sustained, meteoric growth by letting people connect with their friends, but Zuckerberg quickly came to understand that his path to revenue maximization ran through nonconsensually cramming strangers' posts into your eyeballs, in the hopes that you would lose yourself in long, pointless arguments.

But that, too, hit a limit. Most of us don't like having our limbic systems tormented by strangers. As anyone who is sick to the back teeth of just hearing the word "Trump" can attest, living in a trollocracy is exhausting.

Enter Tiktok. Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don't make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you "engaged" with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you'd stare at the longest with a "heating tool" that let the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn't give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those "content creators" are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms' owners and executives. They may be more "engaging" than your friends, but they're also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What's a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is "AI creators." An "AI creator" is like a "creator" in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a "creator," it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform's shareholders and executives. It's the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

But there's a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms' single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so "sticky." The platforms don't "hack your dopamine loops" – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can't even agree on what board-game you're going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it's time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends' unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

The key word here is fungible. A feed composed of things posted by people you have a personal connection to is non-fungible: it cannot be swapped for a feed of things posted by strangers. Your friends fulfill a very specific purpose in your life that strangers – even extremely cool strangers – cannot match.

On the other hand: one feed of algorithmically selected, entertaining amateur dramatics is broadly equivalent to any other feed of algorithmically selected amateur dramatics. That goes double for feeds whose performers are "multi-homing" on more than one platform – whether you see the extremely charming and interesting Vlog Brothers in a Youtube feed, a Tiktok feed or an Insta feed makes no difference (to you – but it matters a lot to the platform bosses). That goes quintuple for feeds composed of AI slop, which is literally the most interchangeable video that modern science is capable of producing.

All of which is to say: the platforms are deliberately feeding their most important commercial assets into a shredder, in a fit of pique over your friends' unwillingness to act like chatbots. Every day and in every way, the platforms are making it easier to leave them for some rival's service, chasing the billionaire solipsist's dream of a world without people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/17/live-by-the-swordlive-by-the-sword/#unfriending-tom

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Leon Trotsky, B2B visionary https://web.archive.org/web/20020211212222/http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1935/1935-ame.htm

#20yrsago What would a BBC “public service game” look like? https://web.archive.org/web/20060417123908/http://crystaltips.typepad.com/wonderland/2006/04/on_public_servi.html

#15yrsago New Zealand’s 3-strikes rule can go into effect in September https://legislation.govt.nz/bill/government/2010/119/en/latest/#DLM3331800

#15yrsago Lawsuit: DRM spied on me, gathered my personal info, sent it to copyright enforcers who called me with $150,000 legal threat https://www.techdirt.com/2011/04/14/drm-accused-sending-personal-info-to-help-with-licensing-shakedown/

#10yrsago Edward Snowden provides vocals on a beautiful new Jean-Michel Jarre composition https://web.archive.org/web/20190415045927/https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/edward-snowdens-new-job-electronic-music-vocalist-184650/

#10yrsago Uber and Lyft don’t cover their cost of capital and rely on desperate workers https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-of-uber-and-lyft/?

#10yrsago Treescrapers are bullshit https://99percentinvisible.org/article/renderings-vs-reality-rise-tree-covered-skyscrapers/

#10yrsago Before and After Mexico: a Bruce Sterling story about the eco-pocalypse https://bruces.medium.com/before-and-after-mexico-f3371c346c8a#.33e9poqnx

#10yrsago Barack Obama: Taking money from 1 percenters compromised my politics https://web.archive.org/web/20160415201709/https://theintercept.com/2016/04/15/barack-obama-never-said-money-wasnt-corrupting-in-fact-he-said-the-opposite/

#1yrago Tesla accused of hacking odometers to weasel out of warranty repairs https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/#more-like-edison-amirite

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


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Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

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