(2021-02-15) Wei American Idle Remains Of The Day

Eugene Wei: American Idle — Remains of the Day. I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity

All the points I wanted to cover seem hyperlinked in a sprawling loose tangle.

I decided to write this piece in the style of the TikTok FYP feed. That is, a series of short bits, laid out vertically in a long scrolling feed.

If I had more time, I might have built this essay as a series of full-screen cards that you could swipe from one to the next. Or perhaps tap from one to the next, like Robin Sloan’s tappable essay (I wish there a way to export this piece into a form like that, if someone built that already let me know - card deck). And if I were even more ambitious, I would've used some Anki-like spaced repetition algorithm to randomize the order in which the following text chunks are presented to you, shuffling it each time a reader jumped in. (algorithmic feed)

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.

But TikTok has a strong form of this type of network effect. They explicitly lower the barrier to the literal remixing of everyone else's content

The barrier to entry in editing video is really high as anyone who has used a non-linear editor like Premiere or compositing software like After Effects can attest.

YouTube has launched almost no creator tools of note ever. WTF.

TikTok launches seemingly a new video effect or filter every week

TikTok’s Warp Scan filter is a bizarre concept for a filter in and of itself, but the myriad of ways TikTok users put it to use just shows what happens when you throw random tools to the masses and allow for emergent creativity. It only takes a handful of innovators to unleash a meme tsunami.

A longstanding economics debate is why we haven't seen the effects of the internet in our productivity figures

But I know this: to take someone else's video and insert a reaction video of my own playing alongside it on the same screen is not easy in a traditional NLE.

You won't see that show up in GDP per capita figures, but it's real.

With TikTok's Duet feature, you can instantly record a side-by-side reaction video to anyone else's video.

the Duet feature is built at such a low level that you can treat the feature as a primitive to replicate any number of other editing tools. (composable)

One such tool is to use the Duet feature as a dynamic matte

if you allow Duets to stack, well, eventually, one Wellerman can bring the whole chorus to your yard.

Knowing that others can Duet your video means you can post any number of videos as prompts.

Video prompts can come from not only other TikTok videos but commenters.

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.

Social networks, and entertainment networks like TikTok, have completed the work of democratizing reactions. Yes, there's no reason you need to react to everything. But it's human nature.

Gossip litigates and fleshes out the boundaries of acceptable behavior within groups

TikTok's Duet feature belongs in the social media hall of fame of primitives alongside features like Follow and the Like button.

Yes, yes, some of these features in TikTok came from Musical.ly. But that's just a meta form of the theme of this piece! TikTok sampled from Musical.ly and improved upon it. They remixed a remix app.

TikTok enables, for video and audio, the type of combinatorial evolution that Brian Arthur describes as the underlying mechanism of the tech industry's innovation.

people always underestimate the market side of product-market fit.

One day, the conditions are finally right, and an idea that has failed ten times before suddenly breaks out.

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 share exchange their ideas than any internal tool does for their own employees’ ideas. (compounding)

The toughest job for any creative is the cold start.

we tend to underrate the extent to which new users often churn without having ever posted anything to a social network because we only focus on those who do.

Now imagine trying to make a TikTok from scratch if you're older than, say, 19.

But the beauty of TikTok's FYP algorithm and the Discover page is that you don't have to create a TikTok from scratch

The internet writ large has always been fertile ground for the accelerated breeding of [[meme]s

But the TikTok app is perhaps the most evolved meme ecosystem to date.

TikTok is a form of assisted evolution in which humans and machine learning algorithms accelerate memetic evolution. The FYP algorithm is TikTok's version of selection pressure, but it's aided by the feedback of test audiences for new TikToks.

with an...umm...assist from the pandemic that kept hundreds of millions of people locked inside scrolling their phones, we've seen a marked contraction in the half-life of memes.

Memes used to dominate TikTok for what felt like weeks, and now it seems the memetic zeitgeist on TikTok shifts every few days

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. It's replicating all the feedback loops that are built into TikTok's ecosystem

TikTok has a a series of flywheels that interconnect, and there isn't any single feature you can copy to recreate the ecosystem.

Markets in the internet and technology age are conducive to winner-take-all effects thanks to preferential attachment.

Many like my friend Kevin use the term loops

This means that if you are first to stumble upon some flywheel

in your business, the returns are even greater and accumulate more quickly than they would've in any other era in history.

Building a flywheel, though, often requires connecting a series of features at once. When I advise various companies, big and small, I often run into objections to my recommendations because of the popularity of agile or other incremental development philosophies. We end up at loggerheads on the V of MVP (minimum viable product), V having always been contextually determined.

If a flywheel requires three or four or even more things to connect in your app, it takes more work to ship all of them at once, and that feels like a riskier expenditure of your team's time. But, I'd counter.... 3) if you don't achieve any flywheels you are, as investor updates are so fond of saying, default dead. (Is this really true? Or only true if you take OPM and are advertising-based)?

Instagram famously has never had its version of resharing (e.g. retweeting). This reduced the velocity of photos and later videos on the service, a sort of brake on spam and misinformation and other possible such downsides. But after using TikTok, it does feel odd to go through Instagram and not be able to grab anyone's photo to remix. (Slow World)

Once we all live in the metaverse, this type of infinite replication and remixability will be something we take for granted, but even now, we're starting to see an early version of it on TikTok.

TikTok is a mix of a centrally planned economy and a free market, much like many multiplayer video games where the game publisher manages the price and availability of various assets like weapons and armor while the players put them to use in the virtual economy.

The internet, and the assumption of the internet, allowed for more complex and long linear narratives in television, shows like Lost and Game of Thrones. The assumption of Know Your Meme, or just knowledgeable commenters in the TikTok comments, allows for less expository and more compact, obscure TikToks. TikTok comments are a form of distributed annotation.

I think Twitter should set up a GPT-3 bot that constantly trains on each account, and the moment most of your followers can no longer distinguish between the GPT-3 spoof of your account and your actual account, you should be forced to vacate your account and allow the GPT-3 bot to replace you. (Very Small Shell Script)

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.

On TikTok, the comments have become creative terrain in their own right.

TikTok's method of ranking comments almost always surfaces the best and most relevant comments to the top.

TikTok comments, though, feel ike they extend the canvas of the video.

Though I have said that TikTok isn't a social network—I don't know most people on the app, I don't have to follow anyone to have a good experience—the algorithm does create, through its efficient sorting, a sense of traveling through subcultural neighborhoods

Of course, we're all just in our FYP feeds, which just scrolls up endlessly, so it isn't an actual space

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.

In a year where we've been trapped inside for nearly a year now, there's something about the chaotic collectivist media art form that is TikTok that felt most joyful and genuine.

*Network effects are powerful, but there are so many distinct types. It's important to understand exactly what type of network effect you have because they all scale and operate differently.

For example, Dunbar's number is just one form of limit on a very specific type of network effect. But there are dozens and dozens of network effects, all with their distinct quirks. Someone could make a lot of money just making a reference book of the taxonomy of network effect varietals in the world.*

Like some video Minecraft, almost everything in the app is a replicable chunk of bits that you can combine into a larger configuration of bits (composable)

When I first joined the Amazon Web Services team in 2003, it was still a small Jeff Bezos-sponsored project.

A book Jeff had us read, one which he said should serve as an inspiration for how we'd design AWS, was Creation: Life and How to Make It by Steve Grand. It's a book about programming artificial life, but the core principle that Jeff wanted us to take from it was the idea that complex things like life forms are built from very simple building blocks or primitives.

The key implication for AWS from the book was about how to design the first AWS primitives. Jeff urged us to include only what was necessary and nothing more

The reason to design your primitives with the utmost elegance is to maximize combinatorial optionality.

This is one of the most elegant things about TikTok's design. It includes a ton of primitives, and they are almost all ones you can combine or link.

When I think about modern remix culture and apps like TikTok, I often think back to Mixel, an app designer Khoi Vinh launched years ago. It was an iPad collage app.

In his blog post introducing Mixel, Vinh wrote: Because of the componentized nature of collage, we can add new social dimensions that aren’t currently possible in any other network, art-based or not. Mixel keeps track of every piece of every collage, regardless of who uses it or how it’s been cropped.

Because of the componentized nature of collage, we can add new social dimensions that aren’t currently possible in any other network, art-based or not. Mixel keeps track of every piece of every collage, regardless of who uses it or how it’s been cropped. That means, in a sense, that the image pieces within Mixel have a social life of their own.

Though Mixel is no longer around, what he describes presages modern meme culture and TikTok.

Inherent to digital culture is the remix.

In Mark Ronson's TED Talk on How Sampling Transformed Music, he says: That's what the past 30 years of music has been. That's the major thread. See, 30 years ago, you had the first digital samplers, and they changed everything overnight. All of a sudden, artists could sample from anything and everything that came before them, from a snare drum from the Funky Meters, to a Ron Carter bassline, the theme to "The Price Is Right." Albums like De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising" and the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" looted from decades of recorded music to create these sonic, layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day.

Someday, any sort of remix will just be a GPT-3-like interface away from composing

The woah inspired Ricky Desktop to develop a score for the triple woah which then actually inspired dancers to choreograph and perform an actual triple woah. Can you program human movement with music? It turns out you can. You use an API called TikTok. That's delightful.

If you've watched any amount of TikTok, you've doubtless seen someone answering questions by dancing and pointing to floating text overlays.

There's no reason to have to dance to music while answering the questions.

On the other hand, maybe all this choreographed dancing is something more of us should be doing to make our messages land.

But perhaps we just lose some of our childlike exuberance and joy expressiveness as we age? Perhaps if we were more animated in our delivery, more people would remember what we said.

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.

When Charli and other TikTokers formed the Hype House in Los Angeles, they were experimenting with IRL creative network effects.

The Kardashian-Jenner clan are the clear predecessors who ran this type of crossover mindshare grab, but they're family.

In Status as a Service, I wrote about how social networks require some proof of work to gain status. ((2019-02-19) Wei Status As A Service)

A lot of TikTok's have the caption "I spent way too long on this" as a sort of plea for likes, but that wouldn't land if the proof of work wasn't visible on the screen

Have you tried using the in-app TikTok video editor? In some ways, it's loaded with really first-rate filters and effects, but in many ways, its user interface is inscrutable.

If you're a movie star like Will Smith and you get a VFX studio to produce some whiz-bang TikTok for you, it will feel off

Something about a feed that can hit you with such a variety of styles and moods in such quick succession makes TikTok feel like the most modern of media channels.

It is equal parts ironic and earnest, having long since surpassed its label as the cringey social network.

Whereas Instagram is performative, TikTok is performative and self-aware. It’s not that any single creator is self-aware, but that the Greek chorus in the comments will descend on anyone with the slightest bit of hubris like a pack of harpies.

Bytedance as a company has built its products around pitiless algorithms enforcing a high Gini coefficient economy of entertainment. It's a marketplace in which the supply side—the TikTok videos from creators—can be shown to an unlimited number of viewers. Much of the content is evergreen, so there is almost no end to the leverage TikTok can get off any single good video.

On TikTok, sounds and memes are almost inseparable. The sound is the meme is the sound.

In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace describes a film called Infinite Jest which is so entertaining people lose all will to do anything except watch it until they die. He had often written about the addictiveness of television

But the earliest form of entertainment that conjured the addictive properties of his fictional film (referred to in the novel as "the Entertainment") was video games. I read stories about players who died after playing games for so long without eating

TikTok is the second form of entertainment that brings DFW's fictional entertainment to mind

He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

TikTok is entertainment Cheetos.

every piece of entertainment is its own social network

TikTok is personalized, yet through its algorithm it creates shared stories of real scale

Andrew Niccol, the screenwriter of The Truman Show, once said, "When you know there is a camera, there is no reality.”

TikTok, by virtue of its high bar to even produce a video that anyone will see (FYP algo is like "That's a no for me dawg" on almost every video), is upfront about what it is: a global talent show to entertain the masses