A very public and very online funeral is taking place on TikTok.
“Well, it’s been a good run, my loves. 1.7 million followers. I don’t think I’m going to be able to replicate that anywhere,” KC Davis said in one video. Davis is a licensed therapist who gained her following by making videos showing people how to clean their homes when they were struggling with their mental health. “I know that I’m talented, but that was a combination of timing and luck and being the algorithm darling for about seven months in 2020,” she said. Davis has a new book coming out in May, but she’s uncertain how well the book will fare in the spring if TikTok goes dark in the U.S. within the next week.
Last year, President Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act into law, which would require ByteDance, TikTok's China-based parent company, to sell the app or be banned in the U.S. The law had bipartisan support in Congress due to national security concerns over Chinese governmental access to American user data. The Supreme Court decided this morning that the law does not violate First Amendment rights, but President Biden said he wouldn't enforce the ban and would instead leave it up to incoming President Trump, who will be inaugurated the day after the ban is set to go into effect. At the same time, Senators Ed Markey, Ron Wyden, Cory Booker, and Rep. Ro Khanna introduced legislation this week that would extend that deadline by 270 days, and officials in the Trump administration have signaled that the incoming president is considering issuing an executive order suspending enforcement of the law after he is inaugurated.
The situation is fluid and rife with rumors about how the next week will unfold, but in the absence of any specific announcements or changes, the people who have built livelihoods, created communities, and fashioned lives on TikTok have begun mourning.
Eli Rallo built her following from a series of viral videos about a snack jar her family made during the pandemic. “And the next thing I knew, I had 100,000 followers and a choice to make,” she said in a video. “And the choice I made was using the very random virality as an opportunity to share my passions and my talents with the world, whether that was just being creative and creativity in general, writing, theater, all of it.” She published her first book of essays in 2023 and her second will be out in the fall. “Tiktok has given me every single opportunity that I’ve ever had and more,” she said.
Even in the face of an inglorious defeat, TikTok users remain deeply unserious and absurd. There are tons of videos of people talking about, and even to, the Chinese spies they imagine have been watching them for years. One creator posted a video of themselves looking pensive with the text “When my personal American spy would report me to the IRS but my personal Chinese spy diagnosed me with ADHD and made me trans.” Another user thanked her personal Chinese spy in Mandarin: “Thank you for five amazing years. You are my best friend. This is not a goodbye but a see you later. Thank you.”
The ascendancy of the corporate social internet in the last decade has ushered in the ubiquity of the influencer. When I say “influencer,” I don’t just mean the stereotype of vapid young women showing off their shopping hauls in their bedrooms. I mean the entire framework that equates online followers and views with offline social and economic capital. I mean that mental calculation you make in your head when deciding whether to take the opinion of an internet stranger seriously when you click over to their profile and see how many followers they have. I mean the requirement that prospective authors have “platforms” before they’re able to sell their very offline, very analog writing.
I mean the way our minds arrange and digest information when we adopt these platforms as cornerstones of how we communicate: thinking in tweets, memorizing the most viral 15 seconds of an artist’s new single, and using online slang in meatspace. I mean this country that is about to inaugurate a president who owns a social networking website.
This system of social and economic capital built on top of metrics linked to digital avatars was billed as a way to build a new world for ourselves, to follow our dreams, to connect with loved ones and strangers alike. And they told us it would last forever.
The internet was supposed to be a place that never forgot, a carefully logged archive of all the people we’ve been and all the things we’d done. There was a utopian quality to early open internet rhetoric, this sense that those who worked with the tech to make it possible were more guardians of an uncontainable natural resource than prospectors eyeing land to acquire. Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and open internet advocate said in 2010, “The goal of the Web is to serve humanity. We build it now so that those who come to it later will be able to create things that we cannot ourselves imagine.” It was a place we built together, an always-growing repository for our memories and our identities and our communities and increasingly, our aspirations. Maybe it might have become that, if the internet had been treated as a public utility instead of fertile land to be conquered and harvested in the name of scale and ubiquity and more and more data.
I created my Twitter account in 2010 because I read a Gary Vaynerchuk book that said I could build the career of my dreams by posting on the Internet. The VC grindset bros like Gary Vee had an interest in normies like me buying into this idea; the more people they convinced, the more right they’d be.
They turned out to be sort of right; I absolutely would not have the career I have without Twitter, and I’m willing to bet most of the bloggers at this website would agree. I’m part of a cohort of millennials that unashamedly loved Twitter in its prime, back when the feed was chronological and it seemed like you didn’t fully exist unless you had an account there. Instagram arose not long after Twitter and I bought my first iPhone so I could create an account. I downloaded TikTok in 2019 and in the worst months of the early pandemic, I lost hours scrolling through videos that made me laugh until I wiped tears from my eyes. The TikTok feed was a Pleasure Island I could hold in my hand, brimming with bright lights and catchy songs and an interface designed to keep me scrolling. For all its darkness, for how uneasy it made me about my own relationship with my phone, it was also a tether to the world during those grim months.
But now we know nothing lasts forever. Facebook bought Instagram, then Facebook became Meta and tried desperately to recapture some of the audience that had defected to TikTok with Reels. Mark Zuckerberg went from a tech weenie with a nominal interest in supporting online journalism to a wannabe edgelord with a new stylist who thinks corporate culture should be more masculine, groveling at Trump’s feet in the hopes that he won’t destroy the company in the days ahead.
Sixteen years after Twitter was founded, Elon Musk bought it and gutted it into the chaotic vanity project that is X and my feed became full of bots, AI bros, and long threads fighting with the menswear guy. My audience, which I had spent eleven years growing and which I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I was proud of, was suddenly worthless. Journalists jumped ship to Mastodon, to Threads, to Bluesky, but nothing felt quite the same.
So much of the internet is gone now. I stopped paying the subscription fees for my college blog domain name years ago. Vine is a decade gone. I’ve lost my Tumblr login. Each year more pieces of evidence of my life lived online disappear. I never built a following on TikTok, but I enjoyed using it, and I already feel exhausted at the prospect of starting over somewhere new online.
What was intended to be an open sandbox for creativity and commerce now more closely resembles plots of land in a planned development, waiting to be snapped up by their buyers. The most common names you'll see at the top of any list of most-visited websites in the U.S. are Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—five sites owned by two parent companies, Alphabet and Meta. And when a top priority for VC investors is a lucrative exit, they incentivize new businesses to adopt worldviews that view consolidation, not independence, as the pinnacle of success. Net neutrality continues to be whittled away, which can only lead to an increasingly fractured and corporate internet experience. And the Supreme Court is currently weighing whether to limit more constitutionally-protected online material (yes, porn) in certain states based on age.
All of this adds up to a version of the internet that looks vastly different from what we imagined it could be. Even if the majority of TikTok’s users weren’t big open internet-heads, the widespread mourning on the platform this week speaks to the sense of betrayal inherent in being a user of these platforms. Yes, TikTok is stupid and annoying and a cultural shorthand for vapidity, and it’s also the place where the majority of young people have gathered on the internet for the last five years.
It’s still unclear whether TikTok will actually go dark next week. Even if efforts to delay the ban are successful, what is clear is that the moment we have existed within for the last five years, the one where TikTok represented potential and where a certain tomorrow existed on the app, is over.
I’ve got my money on the most depressing, least climactic ending for this story: rather than shut off at the stroke of midnight on January 19, the lights will stay on, but users won’t be able to download updates from the app store. It will decay on phones like a low-resolution digital photo, and eventually become useless and meaningless.
If it is indeed banned in the U.S., TikTok will be only the newest piece of evidence to pierce the illusion that the internet is forever. Scrolling through my feed of compilation videos and creator goodbyes, I feel a preemptive grief for this moment on the internet, even as I can acknowledge clearly that there is so much about it that is fucked. As TikTok has facilitated connection and expression for so many people, it’s also contributed to the rise of anti-intellectualism in this country, a casual misuse of critical theory vocabulary, and had absolutely destructive repercussions for attention spans and literacy across the American population.
My grief is for the naive optimism I used to feel when I created things on the internet and believed they expressed me more than they contributed to the bottom lines of billionaires with dubious relationships to truth and democracy. It’s grief for a version of the internet that might have been, but isn’t, and never will be.
