It’s way too late to stop TikTok

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It’s way too late to stop TikTok

By Mark Wilson

A woman in leggings and Ugg boots poses for a selfie. A blond millennial strides along a porch in a leopard-print blouse. A leather recliner stretches across a snug living room. The images scroll by under one’s thumb, a blur of shoppable scenes.

I’m getting an early look at the new Inspire section on Amazon’s smartphone app. Set to launch this year, it’s the company’s response to TikTok: a personalized, machine-curated feed of user videos, all with “buy” links. Despite having little interest in the actual products on each page, I find myself lured in. “It’s one of those things,” confesses the Amazon spokesperson who arranged the demo, “that can [take you] down a happy rabbit hole.”

These days, everyone’s rabbit hole is a little different. Whereas in the earliest years of the internet, when each web page, icon, or piece of content was meticulously designed and more or less static, what we see online today is increasingly created in real time and tailored to individual users. The product listings on your Amazon homepage change according to your shopping habits. The songs queued up by your Spotify Discover Weekly playlists are tuned to your latest listens and likes. Your Google search results account for your late-night web surfing.

TikTok has taken that idea even further with its For You Page (FYP) feed. The eccentric, confusing, and captivating mix of rapid-fire scenes on your FYP have been optimized in response to your every tap, pause, and glance online. The result is a sort of customized cable TV channel, reflecting your (supposed) tastes.

The major tech platforms are now racing to keep up. Services including Instagram, YouTube, and even Amazon?have cloned TikTok’s design?and integrated similar flickable video streams into their platforms. (The last time we saw such shameless UX theft was circa 2016 when companies from Facebook to LinkedIn started copying the Snapchat Stories format.) More profoundly, the FYP represents a shifting internet, one that’s increasingly served up by automation—and different for each person.

It’s a phenomenon that Mark Rolston and Jared Ficklin, founder and partner, respectively, of the tech-focused design firm?Argodesign, have dubbed the “quantum internet.” The name comes from research in quantum physics, which shows that atoms don’t behave as particles or waves until they’re observed. In this case, the internet is now powered by autonomous computer code that generates many of the things we see on demand. The content, in other words, exists only for the individual trying to observe it. “When we look at this [quantum] process,” says Rolston, “[software] becomes very different . . . you’re never sure what may come out.”

We are, quite literally, no longer on the same page.

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