TikTok is the modern MTV because (1) it increases consumption of music tracks that go viral on its platform as sounds and (2) any number of songs will forever summon the accompanying meme and visual choreography from my memory.

Until later in life, children think you should know exactly what they're feeling, and it takes a bit of coaxing to tease out their inner emotional state.

What Ricky Desktop talks about above is a different process in which he scores to visuals that only exist in his imagination, generic dance tropes like "pretend to play the flute".

TikTok's "OODA loop" is collective and distributed, and it spins thousands of times faster than that of big media.

TikTok's needs to improve its search ranking algorithm. Trying to find popular TikTok's I remembered seeing back in the day was much harder than it should have been using TikTok's native search. A couple that I wanted to use I just couldn't locate, and even Google and YouTube didn't turn them up (a thing you realize after trying to do it more than once is how hard it is to create a comprehensible search query for certain TikTok's).

Another feature I wish TikTok would add is the ability to sort by descending popularity on any grid of videos, like on sound or profile pages. Please.

Of course, we're all just in our FYP feeds, which just scrolls up endlessly, so it isn't an actual space. But we trust the visible view counts as evidence FYP is doing its job getting many of us with the same tastes in front of the same videos, and so this evidence of common knowledge creates a liminal third place that exists [waves hands at the air in front of me] out there. I’ve tended to think of social networks as being built by people assembling a graph of people bottoms up, but perhaps I’ve been too narrow-minded. TikTok might not qualify by that definition, but it feels social, with FYP as village matchmaker.

That's why opening the comments and finding that one of the first few comments perfectly encapsulates your reaction, then seeing it already has tens or hundreds of thousands of likes, is so comforting. This confirmation of a shared response creates, asynchronously, a passing score on a form of the Voight-Kampff test. It's a checksum on your humanity.

Reading the comments on TikTok serves a communal function. It's like hearing the laughter of the crowd at a comedy show.

One measure of a platform's power is the number of things people make with it that you had never been made before. Every week, I find videos on TikTok that I can't imagine having been made on any other app.

TikTok comments are a form of distributed annotation.

a mix of a centrally planned economy and a free market

The Discover page acts as the Fed in the central economy of memes on TikTok, while the FYP algorithm is the interest rate on meme distribution.

This is why TikTok's network effects of creativity matter. To clone TikTok, you can't just copy any single feature. It's all of that, and not just the features, but how users deploy them and how the resultant videos interact with each other on the FYP feed.

a form of assisted evolution

at least on TikTok there is a chance, with time stamps and some of the literal links the app creates between videos, to trace the origin of memes more easily.

Given we know innovation compounds as more ideas from more people collide, it's stunning how many tech firms, even ones that ostensibly tout the value of openness, have launched services that do a better job of letting their users exchange ideas than any internal tool does for their own employees’ ideas.

Most of the best ideas in tech first appeared in science fiction books in the 1960s, and many of those are still waiting for their time to come

Gossip litigates and fleshes out the boundaries of acceptable behavior within groups. Whereas gossip used to be contained, social networks now give it global distribution.

Yes, there's no reason you need to react to everything. But it's human nature. This is the social contract of the social media era. If you dare to shout your opinion or publish your work to the masses, the masses can choose to shout back.

This is another of the nested feedback loops within the global feedback loop that is the FYP talent show. Once one example of this went viral, then the entire community adopted this as one of the norms of the community.

Knowing that TikTok has a Stitch feature, you can also post a question in a video and expect that some number of people will use Stitch an answer to your question and distribute that as a new video.

By network effects of creativity, I mean that every additional user on TikTok makes every other user more creative. This exists in a weak form on every social network and on the internet at large. The connected age means we are exposed to so much from so many more people than at any point in human history. That can't help but compound creativity.

This piece is long, but if you get bored in any one section, you can just scroll on the next one; they're separated by horizontal rules for easy visual scanning. You can also read them out of order. There are lots of cross-references, though, so if you skip some of the segments, others may not make complete sense. However, it’s ultimately not a big deal.

The notion that scientific theories vie with one another in open competition overlooks the fact that research ambitions and funding choices are shaped by both big-p and small-p politics. There is a reason why more scientific progress has been made in drugs for the treatment of diseases of wealth than of poverty.

science was a special example of the general liberal virtues that can be cultivated only in the absence of tyranny.

if a scientist explains nuclear technology to a bellicose despot, but leaves the ethical choice of deployment to the despot, we wouldn’t say that the scientist had acted responsibly.

A darker way of rendering the Popper vs Strangelove story is to say that falsification offers moral non-accountability to its adherents. A scientist can never be accused of supporting the wrong cause if their work is not about confirmation. Popper himself declared that science is an essentially theoretical business. Yet it was a naïve scientist working during the Cold War who didn’t realise the significance of their funding source and the implications of their research.

Strangelove struck at the heart of Popperian ideals, an unreconstructed Nazi operating at the military-industrial nerve-centre of the ‘free world’. As such, he reflected the real-life stories of Nazi war criminals imported by Operation Paperclip to the US to assist in the Cold War effort – a whitewashing project uncovered as early as 1951 by The Boston Globe. Against such a backdrop, the epistemic modesty of Popperian science was appealing indeed. Real scientists, in the Popperian mode, abjured all politics, all truths. They didn’t attempt to know the atom, still less to win wars. They merely attempted to disprove things.

A fan favorite is when she soups up the classic vanilla custard filling with a torched crème brûlée ($4) on top of the doughnut, a smoky, sugary sheen to go with a creamy filling with flecks of vanilla beans.

Their less-sexy lineup is a better catch: apple-cinnamon pound cake with a dollop of brandy cream, the puck-sized apricot Stilton financier and the pâté à choux with Earl Grey cream for starters.

I think it’s true for so many commercial spaces that beautiful women add value, by virtue of adding beauty into the logic of styling things and selling things. In the idea of ‘parasexuality’, a concept that Bailey came up with when he was looking at barmaidens in nineteenth-century England, he was thinking about how, even within strict norms of sexual morality, the presence of beautiful women in a commercial setting would raise all kinds of titillating prospects that might violate those codes of what was sexually appropriate. That is how ‘parasexuality’ works – it is not fully deployed sex like ‘sex work’, but there is something about their sexual availability that gets put to work in these commercial settings. You can see it in what in sociology today we would call aesthetic labour: the uses of women, and men, but especially women’s bodies, in everything – hotels, Hooters, you name it.

Veblen was inspired by these anthropologies of what was called the ‘potlatch’: nineteenth-century Pacific Northwest tribal societies in which there would be elaborate feasts, and nobles of tribes would compete with each other to see who could hold a bigger feast, who could waste more food, who could burn more blankets or other kinds of rare goods. And by going through that potlatch ritual a noble could assert his rank. It had lasting consequences: in humiliating a rival, claiming one’s title and gaining respect in the community.

what they say is how they want to be perceived (and perhaps how they want to perceive themselves), but what they do – in the moment – can be very different. So if I’d just done observations, I could have just said that these were clueless rich jerks. And if I’d just done interviews, I would have concluded they were actually very thoughtful, very reflective people who want to be good people.

a liberating, nonjudgmental permissiveness

We’ll settle for electability, for hand sanitizer, for something less than violence in the streets.

He often reminded readers that they were more than individuals; they were, in fact, pieces of a society.

Lavery, who was raised evangelical, is morally firm and comically decisive, chiding and scolding like a fresh-faced Judge Judy. A husband who refuses to use enough soap on the dishes is committing “an insult to your dignity and your personhood,” and a crazed DVD reviewer is “behaving like the majordomo of a small European country on the precipice of World War I.”

Sugar suggested, in the mold of Montaigne—or perhaps psychotherapy—that the solution to your problems lay within you, provided you confront them with honest introspection and brutal clarity, if not the force of revelation. The goal wasn’t proper napkin etiquette or resolving a dispute with your mother-in-law. It was saving your soul.

questionably cute animal videos

Dorset, England