I write the songs
I Write the Songs
In this insightful essay on TikTok by Eugene Wei, he describes the app as “for many, including myself, the most entertaining short video app going.” Like most analysts, he attributes this to its “eerily perceptive” algorithm, which can “adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it.”
The beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph [TikTok’s data base of which users are interested in what] can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is passive personalization, learning through consumption. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high. Because the videos are entertaining, this training process feels effortless, even enjoyable, for the user.
By “training process” Wei seems to mean the algorithm, but it applies equally to the user. The passive personalization is equally ambiguous — it applies to both the algorithm that is figuring a user out and the user who is being made to feel like a person without having to do anything but watch videos. They don’t even have to “like” them. The app’s environment transforms users’ passivity into behavioral data freighted with intimations of their true selves, their real desires. “When you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you,” Wei writes.
If one overlooks the double-sidedness of this relation — how sorting algorithms and users mutually shape each other — one risks celebrating TikTok (and other algorithmically driven systems) for magically catering to the pre-existing desires of individuals. But these interests are induced by what the app is capable of supplying; the app shapes its potential audience. The relation between what we want to see and what we end up spending some much time watching is pretty tenuous to begin with; TikTok is designed to steadily widen the gap into an abyss.
Often this is described with gushy enthusiasm, with claims of how much “fun” it is to be on TikTok. And whenever I see something described as fun, I reach for my Baudrillard to trot out the passages about the “fun morality” — the compulsory nature of enjoyment in a consumer society. “Fun,” as I interpret the word, is not just a synonym for having a good time; it’s an “aesthetic category,” in Sianne Ngai’s sense of the term, that captures a structure of feeling peculiar to the way capitalism subjectivizes us. It indexes the degree to which our capacity to experience pleasure has been subsumed by consumerism.
“Fun” thus primarily evokes the kinds of pleasures typified by the “experience economy,” commodified time available on demand and saturated with an “authenticity” that deconstructs itself. But it also evokes mediated “experiences” as well — on-screen entertainment, often presented serially in feeds. (Channel flipping and “doomscrolling” are fun’s inverted cousins.) Fun presumes — or rather prescribes — a sense of time as a uniform emptiness, a blankness that must be filled with various prefabricated chunks of spent attention.
Gunther Anders 1956 essay “The World as Phantom and as Matrix” links “fun” to the individual’s disavowal of cultural indoctrination.
To transform a man into a nobody (and one who is proud of being a nobody) it is no longer necessary to drown him in the mass or to enlist him as an actual member of a mass organization. No method of depersonalizing man, of depriving him of his human powers, is more effective than one which seems to preserve the freedom of the person and the rights of individuality. And when the conditioning is carried out separately for each individual, in the solitude of his home, in millions of secluded homes, it is incomparably more successful. For this conditioning is disguised as "fun"; the victim is not told that he is asked to sacrifice anything; and since the procedure leaves him with the delusion of his privacy or at least of his private home, it remains perfectly discreet. The old saying "a man's own home is as precious as gold" has again become true, though in an entirely new sense. For today, the home is valuable not only to its owner, but also to the owners of the homeowners—the caterers of radio and television who serve the homeowner his daily fare.
Wei’s claim that users “enjoy” TikTok’s algorithmic training process should be understood in these terms. The conditioning is carried out algorithmically for each individual in the solitude of their own phone. But this is experienced as freedom because it appears as specific to us, and thus dependent on us. We make it happen! The proprietors of algorithmically sorted feeds — the “caterers” of content providing our “daily fare” — are ultimately the “owners of the phone owners,” capturing our data and our time, which together produce the capture of our minds.
I wrote about that Anders essay before, but mainly in terms of how social media structure users as both broadcaster and audience. As I explained there, broadcasting allows us to be audience to ourselves — it allows us to engage with ourselves as a media object. Talking to no one in particular is a way of listening to oneself. But recommendation algorithms make us a media object for ourselves in a much more immediate way. You can interact with yourself as constituted by a recommendation; serial interaction with a stream of videos chosen “For You” projects that selfhood forward while also implicitly erasing any sense of self that is rooted in past experience. You can look into TikTok to see yourself reflected back in the shape of the currently most trendy form of media.
Anders claims that “modern mass consumption is a sum of solo performances; each consumer, an unpaid homeworker employed in the production of the mass man.” But as Deleuze argues in the “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” “we no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become ‘dividuals,’ and masses, samples, data, markets, or ‘banks.’” So we can update Anders’s “production of mass man” to the production of the “dividual”: Everyone on their phones is constructing and reinforcing the idea of the modern consumer as a mesh of configurable data points. Our “solo performances” on apps aggregate into a new kind of selfhood that is disseminated back to us.
In “Why the Next Song Matters: Streaming, Recommendation, Scarcity,” Eric Drott details this process with respect to recommendation algorithms in music streaming services. He traces their shift from marketing themselves on their seemingly infinite libraries to their purported ability to serve up the “perfect song,” much as TikTok devotees champion its uncanny ability to provide the content users “want.” Streaming platforms, Drott argues, sell users not on fulfilling a lack but the lack of a lack. They claim to solve the “scarcity of scarcity” that the digital surfeit has supposedly brought on. This is a familiar trope across tech companies: They have brought us access to so much goodness, to such a “consumer surplus,” that they now need to spoon-feed the good to us.
Drott notes how the problem of “too much choice” manifests as nostalgia for someone who knows better than us what we should listen to: “These figures include the clerks who once staffed now-shuttered independent record stores; the enthusiasts responsible for the vibrancy of local music scenes; or — more intimately still — older siblings whose role as unofficial ‘cultural intermediaries’ was inseparable from their status as musical ego-ideals.” The streaming services want us to replace those figures with algorithms, which are presumably better because they appear as our servants; they seem to merely organize the proclivities we already have and are trying to discover in ourselves. (I still tend to think of record-store employees as contemptuous taste tyrants with a zero-sum attitude toward cultural enjoyment.)
But this shift in marketing reflects a shift in what streaming services offer, a bait and switch. You wanted more music; you got Big Brother. “Recasting abundance as scarcity is performative in that it fabricates a need,” Drott points out. That is, it invents what it pretends to discover. I think this applies to algorithmic “discovery” in general — it aims to produce a desire that you can recognize as your own, which in turn stabilizes your sense of self as someone with legible tastes. As Drott explains, “The gap between individual and the subject position that is symbolically constructed via music appears to collapse: the streaming service apparently interpellates us as ourselves and as nothing else.” I am music and I write the songs.
Rather than merely listening to what we like, as if we had tastes that were separate from our essential self, what we like is collapsed into who we are. “What services touting their curated selections are selling clients is, in addition to music, a range of subject positions they can adopt through music,” Drott writes, “alleviating them of the burden of having to fabricate such subjectivities themselves.” But the fact that there is a “range” reflects the instability of the self that the recommendations bring into view. Even as algorithms promise an accessible self, they also take for granted that users are alienated from their own desire and need a prosthetic for experiencing it.
But why would anyone want an algorithm to perform the work of fashioning a self for them? Why has wanting things become so difficult? One way of describing that difficulty is in terms of a capitalist crisis of overproduction: How can profits be realized if there are too many goods and not enough consumer demand for them? “Without the production of desire, there is no continuous self-transformation of capital,” Drott notes, glossing Marx. “And without the continuous self-transformation of capital — its transmutation from money into productive capital into commodities endowed with surplus value back into an increased sum of money — one is left with a collection of inert entities: money that buys nothing, labor that is idle, machines that gather dust, commodities that nobody buys.”
This tension, which saturates capitalist culture and its institutions, places intense pressure on individuals to want things. Alienation from our capacity to desire is not an intrinsic psychological truth; it is a socioeconomic condition. It is reflected by the sorts of desire made culturally available, the sorts of “fun” on offer, which are premised on alienation and built of contradictions (contrived spontaneity, reified “authenticity,” achievable aspiration, etc.). Capitalist culture interpellates us as both insatiable and easily satisfied by such products as TikTok videos and pop songs. The result of this contradiction is that the more we consume on these terms, the more we feel the requirement to want more. Thank you, next.
Another way of putting this is that capitalism requires that our consumption become deskilled — that we unlearn how to satisfy ourselves (assuming we ever know in the first place). Anders’s claim that we are all unpaid workers “employed in the production of the mass man” anticipates the late Bernard Stiegler’s idea that consumption is a form of “proletarianization,” as Jason Read explains in this excerpt from his book The Politics of Transindividuality. Proletarianization in this context means that consumption under capitalism is a sort of alienated and abstracted labor: It is “the basis for understanding the transfer of knowledge of cooking to microwaveable meals and the knowledge of play from the child to the video game” — in other words, it is the reduction of the possibilities of pleasure to “fun.” As Read notes, Stieger links such proletarianization to media consumption specifically: Video has the capability of synchronizing all viewers’ experience of time to the same rhythm of the interface. In Stiegler’s view, “the synchronization of consciousness,” Read writes, “destroys the basis for individuation.” That echoes Anders’s argument about radio and TV making people “proud of being a nobody.”
For Stiegler, proletarianization through consumption — what I want to call the invention of “fun” — is necessary to deal with overproduction, which it solves by stripping consumers of their “transindividuality” (the way they are particularized and grounded within a concrete community), rendering them as atomized sheep in a herd, a statistic in an overarching balance sheet. In this condition, their affect suitably waned, they are amenable to having their desire for things induced serially and perpetually. “The consumer resolves the problem of overconsumption by quickly and obsessively adopting new technologies, new needs, new objects,” Read notes (you could add “new playlists, new songs, new apps, new videos”), “but in doing so it produces a crisis of subjectivity, a breakdown of individuation and responsibility that is incapable of constituting itself in relation to a future.”
That is where the algorithms come into play. The endless consumption dissolves the self, but algorithms reconstitute it externally, and presenting it to a user. In the process, algorithms train users in what is supposed to be “fun” — what links that dispersed self back to them — reinforcing lessons we have already absorbed from other entertainment forms. But this is not at the level of content (it doesn’t matter what the TikToks are “about) but in an orientation toward time: Time needs to be “consumed” so that we can realize ourselves as having recognizable interests, so that we can produce ourselves as a “self” through consumption. It doesn’t matter what specific sort of thing Spotify or TikTok recommends to us, only that it continues to do so.
Algorithms, in other words, teach us to locate ourselves in what Drott calls “next-ness”: a foreshortened sense of the horizon of the self. Within that narrow span of space-time, the self is readily dissolved into the range of subject positions that streaming services offer through the content they automatically provide: in Drott’s words, the dividual “subcomponents into which individuals can be — and have been — discomposed.” The “normative listener” doesn’t have a particular consistent identity, the way one might have belonged to a subculture or modeled oneself after a particular type in the late 20th century (The Breakfast Club model of subjectivation, where one is a nerd, a jock, a preppie, a rebel, or a weirdo). Rather one’s tastes, Drott argues, “cohere … by virtue of a steadfast refusal of any positive principle of coherence, fluctuating according to context, affect, setting, and other contingent factors.” The conformity of what Anders called the “mass man” is organized not around specific shared tastes but a common condition of being broken apart into these configurable subcomponents, signifiers of identity that are now spoken by feeds (much like they were once spoken by consumer goods laden with “characteristics” in Kelvin Lancaster’s theory).
Another way of describing that condition of susceptibility to consumerism, that proletarianization of consumer demand and the “new technologies, new needs, new objects” that we are obliged to fasten onto in the spirit of “next-ness,” is through Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick. “In a world in which everything is made to be sold for profit and engineered to appeal to what a consumer is preshaped to desire,” she asks, “how can there not be a philosophically as well as historically meaningful uncertainty at the heart of the aesthetic evaluations through which we process the pleasures we take in it?” That uncertainty is what she calls the gimmick, an aesthetic category fundamental to capitalism that is not simply about clever novelty but also about how commodities seem to lie:
All subjects in capitalism find something gimmicky. When asked to explain why they are characterizing their specific object this way, their responses become tellingly similar: because it is trying too hard, because it is not working hard enough, because its promises of value are unconvincing, because it is instructing me exactly how to consume it (and so on.) …
Gimmicks tend to seem like cheats or short cuts — anything that feels exploitive — but they also can appear as clever hacks (another form of exploitation). They seem to foreground their obviousness in a way that demands we judge them, but it’s “a judgment in which skepticism and enjoyment coincide,” Ngai writes. In judging something a gimmick we complete it rather than negate it. A gimmick works by inciting a reaction. As with a P.T. Barnum exhibit, the point is not to fool us but to engage us with debased ingenuity. Calling something a gimmick is a “way of communicating the falseness of a thing’s promises of reducing labor, saving time, and expanding value, without disavowing their appeal or social effectivity.”
As with most marketing and advertising, a gimmick works by letting us see through it and feel superior to it, even as it lodges its framing of the world in our brains. We want to believe and disbelieve simultaneously. The gimmick offers a way to hold those contradictory impulses together, allowing us to examine and disavow the desires through which capitalism subjectivates us. It cloaks our complicity in those desires and registers our ambivalence about the erstwhile necessary labor it saves — what it would otherwise require to desire things, to produce ourselves as selves. We displace our induced desire for capitalist culture (characterized by novelty, disposability, status positionality, reification, fetishization) onto gimmicks, which we enjoy through debunking as much as through enchantment — they become bound up with each other.
Under capitalism, gimmicks are the inauthentic other that allows us to believe in authenticity elsewhere. This displacement allows us to imagine a “real” taste established in the void left behind, one that consists of enjoying all the nongimmicky things that prove our superior taste yet which we somehow never find ourselves enjoying in the present moment.
But then, everything in capitalism is potentially a gimmick — that is, a commodity, a meme, brand equity, a trend, a throwaway, a status symbol, a thing that is not true to itself or in itself but marks a debased strategy to get along in the capitalist world that demands competition and winning. “All ideas are susceptible to gimmickification under the information-driven, knowledge-saturated conditions of capitalism, and especially when produced for circulation in a ‘marketplace of ideas,’” Ngai argues.
Tech platforms, especially, rely on gimmicks — something that Wei notes in passing. You can trace this at the level of content, with how prominent all the memes are, or at the level of the interface, where users are offered some new way to process or produce content, whether that is wacky image filters and AR lenses or algorithmic feeds, as TikTok epitomizes. The algorithmic gimmick is obvious in how wrong its recommendations can be and how little this does to diminish the sense of attachment it generates. It offers to save us the labor of making a self through media consumption — an imperative under neoliberalism to make our personalities productive — by handing us a gimmicky self: an overtly false identity that conveys how thoroughly we have been surveilled and the hidden truth about who we really are under capitalist conditions.
“The conjoining of enigma and transparency in the gimmick points to a key shift in the way illusions become socially effective,” Ngai notes, with respect to conceptual art, but it applies equally to notoriously black-boxed algorithms. “It ultimately reflects our simultaneous recognition of what we can but also cannot grasp about a productive process from an artifact’s appearance … as well as a double-sided gestalt: ‘work’ conjoined to an equivocal ‘zero’ or disappearance of work.” We know how algorithms are supposed to work in general and why they can’t possibly “really” work to define us and predict us, yet we find ourselves trapped in their world, being predicted, contained, controlled.
In his discussion of music-recommendation algorithms, Drott argues that streaming companies are heavily invested in predictive analytics “not because they have some virtuous interest in matching musics and users, despite marketing rhetoric to that effect, but rather because it opens a temporal horizon just wide enough to enable the ongoing reproduction of their business — which amounts to the ongoing reproduction of capital.” But he wonders whether listeners will be taken in: “Whether it matters as much to listeners remains an open question, though it is one that streaming platforms and other digital media companies are striving to resolve in their favor, deploying the considerable resources they command in an effort to fabricate a desire for the curation services they provide.” TikTok seems to be succeeding on that front, selling the waning of affect as a service. It aims to be the last gimmick, the master gimmick, the one that resolves all the ambivalence and ambiguity of capitalist desire into a single, ceaseless stream of subjectivizing content. The next thing you see will reveal how you die.