The escape club
On Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal published another of its investigations into the TikTok recommendation algorithm. This one adopts a sensationalistic "What about the children?" tone to ostensibly warn about all the morals-corrupting content that TikTok serves to minors, though for any minors reading, it would likely work great as an ad: "Endless spools of content about sex and drugs"? Sign me up!
In signaling out specific kinds of content as uniquely dangerous, the article undermines the idea that the form of algorithmic recommendation is problematic no matter what content it serves, whether it is bible-study videos, the milk-crate challenge, or "Kinktok." (Be careful, kids: Kinktok is not about the Village Green Preservation Society.) Instead, it seems to suggest that TikTok should better refine its algorithms to program audiences in the parental or WSJ-approved ideologies. "Every second you hesitate or re-watch, the app tracks you,' the article warns. "Through that one powerful signal, TikTok can learn your most hidden interests and emotions, and drive users of any age deep into rabbit holes of content — in which feeds are heavily dominated by videos about a specific topic or theme." If it were true that TikTok exposes viewers' "hidden interests," one would have to conclude that secreted in the hearts of most TikTok teenagers is a desire for videos about weed and sex (though these were not especially hidden interests when I was young). Wouldn't this then make TikTok a force for moral good, directing an X-ray into the dark corners of the soul so that these dangerous cravings could be exposed and corrected?
As I have argued before, recommendation algorithms don't reveal hidden interests but posit them. They try to establish viewing habits; they produce "interests" in the form that the app can cater to. Users can see themselves reflected in those recommendations, or they can use recommended content as a means for understanding what they are not — consumption can also be a form of rejection.
But the article takes a less dialectical approach, citing an expert who seems in the grip of a moral panic:
About a dozen of the Journal’s 31 minor accounts ended up being dominated by a particular theme. This can be especially problematic for young people, who may lack the capability to stop watching and don’t have supportive adults around them, said David Anderson, a clinical psychologist at The Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit mental-health care provider for children. He said those teens can experience a “perfect storm” in which social media normalizes and influences the way they view drugs or other topics.
Some content undoubtably glamorizes and normalizes antisocial or self-destructive behavior. Some content — possibly the same content — also makes that same behavior look ludicrous and laughable. Only if the perfect storm is behaviorism would this pose a massive, concerning problem. But what do I know? All the albums with backward masking on them that I listened to as a kid must have programmed me to be naive.
The level at which ideological inculcation is happening on TikTok is not so much in the content itself as at the level of process: It teaches that watching more videos is a means of self-exploration (not necessarily bad), and that you should passively wait to see what the algorithm will permit you to explore next (probably not good — Erich Fromm would probably call it an "escape from freedom"). The danger is not that some TikTok content viewed by teens would be rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America; it is that most TikTok users, as the WSJ article also notes, "didn’t search for content and instead simply watched videos that appeared in their feed."
If the WSJ stayed with that idea, its investigation might get to more interesting questions about how curiosity is incited and then contained, and what happens to a person's relation to attention under such conditions. But it would rather try to manipulate parents and appeal to their guilt by playing up their children's vulnerability to naughty content. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Porky's..."
This week at Real Life, in "I'm Not There," R.E. Hawley wrote about the "don't perceive me" meme and dissociation as a coping strategy for the inescapable visibility brought on by ubiquitous media. Not only are we are often visible to others against our will in ways we can't control; we also don't know who or what is looking, when they are looking, or in what context we are appearing. The advent of yet another glasses-camera-network combination threatens to only intensify this situation.
This is an "online" problem not because the visibility occurs in "cyberspace" (that metaphor is incoherent), but because "online" makes for asynchronous communication and endlessly overlapping layers of media consumption that complicate one's sense of certainty of being in a single time and place. "Log off all you want — throw your phone in a river, if you wish — but somewhere, someone will still be looking at you," Hawley writes.
Because the internet was misconstrued as a separate place, it seemed to be a site of escape. "Where the early internet was once a space onto which futuristic ideals about life detached from the physical self were projected," Hawley writes, "it is now a very different environment, one in which our appearances, mannerisms, and manifestations are constantly observed and analyzed with continuously heightening stakes." That is, "online" is not an "environment" at all but a condition, a specific and probably untenable form of self-consciousness in which the loops of social reciprocity become innumerable, suspended, held open.
One way to cope with the sense of personal disintegration and dispersion across time and space is to reconsolidate a sense of self through the paradoxical act of mentally vacating the spot where you imagine that self to be held together. Hence, dissociation. "Dissociation is not a vice," Hawley argues, "it’s a strategy of the subconscious, meant to remove the conscious mind from a potential overload of discomfort when a true escape cannot be made." The dissociation memes are not self-pathologizing but instead conjure a "vision of the internet free from compulsory body awareness."
That sounds like an attempt to be seen as unseeable, to have an image of no image — a venerable strategy that dates at least as far back as the first time anyone worried about being "authentic." In psychiatric diagnoses of dissociative disorders, patients are believed to be trying to escape traumatic memories by undoing the coherence of the self. But here, dissociation serves as a kind of negative theology of self, a belief that what's real about ourselves is only that which can't be mediated, that can't appear at all.
Also this week at Real Life, Callie Hitchcock wrote about what could be described as new technologies of escapism in "Take Me Away." These include any new media form that is designed to elicit parasociality: YouTube videos, TikToks, podcasts, Twitch streams, and so on. Hitchcock uses the example of cottagecore videos:
While isolation was mandated for many, these videos aestheticized it — perfect solitude, silence, and soothing spiritual equilibrium, bolstered by drone-shot videos of the mountains and valleys of Washington, or the forests of Minnesota, or the fjords of Sweden. Yet the women also spoke directly into the camera, directly to me. I was not a voyeur or an eavesdropper, positioned behind the fourth wall, but addressed in what seemed like real time, as if we were in front of each other. This combination of simulated human connection with the transportive negation of the limits of time and space made for a perfect technology for escapism.
Whereas previous forms of escapism have by necessity invited a kind of imaginative projection into other people's lives — a vicariousness by which you live through them and forget your own situation — these new forms of parasocial escapism allow us to live with the aspirational avatars, pretending not to be them but to know them as true friends. The vividness of that emotional connection sustains the feeling of escape, the same way the vividness or wish fulfillments of a narrative might have in previous forms of escapist fiction.
This shift from vicariousness to parasociality changes the sense of what is being escaped from. "YouTubers tell you a story, share intimate vulnerabilities, joys, triumphs, disappointments, worries," Hitchcock writes. "The viewer is trusted with this intimate knowledge without having to offer anything of themselves — they venture no vulnerability, they do not have to present themselves to be perceived, they do not risk rejection or disappointment." Parasociality, that is, could be understood as an escape from the burdens of ordinary sociality that media technologies have made more complex and more onerous; in that sense, it parallels "don't perceive me" as a coping strategy. Of course, those same technologies have made parasociality possible, providing an endless stream of videos that all take the form of directly addressing the viewer as an individual, regardless of whatever other subject matter they take up.
"Escapist" has generally been a pejorative term meant to discipline the escapees for shirking their duty to be present for others who feel entitled to controlling their time. Calling something escapist is a way to pretend concern for someone while you are telling them what they can and can't do. Hence reading novels, going to the cinema, watching television, and playing video games have all been subject to their own similar moral panics. It would be easy to add "watching streamers on YouTube" or "KinkTok" to that list. But that doesn't mean all escapisms should be conflated. Identifying what is specific to each successive form of escapism can clarify the different kinds of pressure people face and want to escape from.
For all the condemnation of escapism, most forms are positively encouraged, and even compelled. You must join TikTok! You must like and share! Obey! This creates a Baudrillardian situation where escapist media is pointed at itself, and we seek to escape the demand that we escape. Escapism becomes a fantasy of authenticity, of returning to a more real reality through some purified form of consumption, or through some more engaging form of interactivity. Parasocial media forms are in the midst of the process of changing from something that seemed more "real" than the other media derided as escapist to become itself the paradigm of escapism. Seeking more "reality" inevitably becomes the most escapist move of all. They are all blue pills.