Couch guy
In a recent newsletter, Ryan Broderick explained what he called "the couch guy thing," a piece of viral TikTok content involving a random college guy on a couch being filmed as he is ostensibly surprised by a visit from his girlfriend. The video, Broderick writes, set off an "absolute torrent of Couch Guy conspiracy theories" in comments and other associated follow-up content. No surprises here: a piece of content made for a platform that lives and dies by "engagement" succeeded in generating lots of engagement, which is why it came to Broderick's attention in the first place. As all content on TikTok is made for engagement, so the best consumption of it must also manifest as engagement.
What is notable about this is how engagement and "conspiracy theories" are becoming somewhat synonymous. "It seems like there is now the expectation within the app’s community that there must be a secret nefarious dimension to all content posted to the platform," Broderick writes. Why wouldn't there be? Reading a true-crime-like backstory into anything is possibly the best way to produce engaging content about the engaging content you just engaged with. It's the fundamental premise of interactive entertainment: The viewer must actively challenge the givenness of what is presented in some way, otherwise you are just passively consuming boring old regular entertainment media.
Paranoia, then, flourishes on TikTok not just because its black-box algorithms invite users to read into everything they see to figure out how they work; it also is a matter of the kind of consumption it incentivizes. In a previous newsletter, Broderick as formulated this sort of idea as "everything eventually becomes message-board drama." Another way of putting it is that the pleasures of participatory culture, or voyeurism for that matter, are intrinsically linked to the pleasures of open-ended speculation and outright fabulation. Any post on TikTok is a de facto invitation to invent stories about what it means, what purpose the poster hoped it would accomplish, the degree to which it was staged, and the kinds of correlations with other content that brought it into one's feed, what it might reveal about how the app perceives the viewer — and then make content out of that.
In other words, for consumers, TikTok posts are not operating as straightforward representations of "what really happened" to someone somewhere. The way that editing manipulations are foregrounded in the app telegraphs that the content there is not to be taken literally, not to be seen as evidence on its face. But that is what makes it fun for viewers to treat it exactly that way: as coded records of unseen intentions, or as manipulated documents that can be reverse-engineered to reveal what they are "really" about.
That doesn't mean consumers think that how they are reading a particular TikTok is getting at the actual "truth"; the point is just to find the most interesting way to engage with a piece of content (with no special regard for whether it is a more "accurate" understanding) and then make a record of it and hope other people will pile in. It's the hermeneutics of suspicion played out as a plea for attention or for the community that could emerge around a nascent hashtag.
In an influential 1997 essay about paranoid reading, theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick suggests that "some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge." Paranoia, she argues, is intimately connected with copying behavior: "Paranoia seems to require to be imitated in order to be understood; and it, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation." TikTok, which places a strong emphasis on imitation, on copying and iterating on other users' posts, would then seem a natural place for the flourishing of paranoia. I bet you think this song is about you, don't you.
Sedgwick contrasts paranoid reading, construed as a defensive strategy of assuring that one already knows the worst, with "reparative reading" that gives itself the permission to seek pleasure. By that standard, the readings of, say, the Couch Guy seem to be more reparative than paranoid. That is, those readings take distinct pleasure in trying to confirm the "paranoid" suspicions that nothing on TikTok is as it seems. These are not marked by the "faith in exposure" that Sedgwick critiques with respect to the critical-paranoid method — the belief that revealing the hidden mechanisms of oppression will make the blind see and accelerate the dismantling of those mechanisms. The stakes on TikTok are generally just to squeeze entertainment out the lives of strangers. So there is a faith in exposure instead generating more ambiguities: It is content that will spawn more content rather than end the game of voyeuristic speculation.
Since everything on TikTok is, as a precondition of its being visible at all, trying as hard as it can to get attention, content there is heavily freighted with obvious intentions and overt performances. The deadpan tone that's often adopted on the app is perhaps an ironic acknowledgment of that and an effort to disavow the overall conditions of exhibitionism established by TikTok and by algorithmically attributed significance more generally. When consumers do paranoid readings of content on TikTok, it may serve a similar purpose: It administers the kindness of attributing deeper motives to everyone posting than simple thirstiness.