Chris Stokel-Walker - TikTok Boom: Chinas Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media

A ndy Warhols idea that anyone can be famous for 15 minutes has never looked shakier. In the programme for an exhibition in Stockholm in 1968, the American pop art pioneer wrote: In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. What struck many at the time as an outlandish prediction is in danger of being undercut by reality in the third decade of the 21st Century. On TikTok, anyone with a mobile phone can become known to hundreds of millions of people for a matter of seconds, and then slip back into anonymity. True, a run of successful self-shot videos can propel an individual from an everyday life into that of a multi-millionaire. Unlike in Warhols age, however, the metamorphosis from ordinariness to fame occurs not through the multiple media channels of Andy Warhols age, but through a single, super-fast, ever-mutating social media app. Which is ultimately owned in China and ruled over by an inscrutable algorithm.

Existing celebrity doesnt determine success on TikTok. Anyone has the potential to go viral on TikTok. You can have one follower or a million followers, says Yazmin How, chief of TikToks UK editorial team. It meets at 9am daily to review some of the 1.6 million videos uploaded to TikTok in the UK every 24 hours. (Only 9% of users post videos; the remainder just watch them.) How and her colleagues accounts have been stripped of the highly powerful algorithm, which serves up content according to a persons viewing history and interests. Its the Gods eye view of TikTok, drinking straight from the gush of videos being posted every single day.

TikToks algorithm works on whats called a content graph, looking at what youve previously engaged with, rather than a social graph which accounts you follow. That makes it possible for a video to go super-viral from less than super surroundings. We see things going viral all the time from people who have maybe, like, 50 fans, who crack something, says How. Theres no recipe for it. Theres no magic formula.

Such unpredictability makes the churn of celebrities through TikTok so speedy. Theyre people like Curtis Roach, whose rap about being stuck at home during the pandemic turned him from someone with $12 to his name to a celebrity musician, or Nathan Evans, a Scottish postman whose sea shanties landed him a record deal that many would kill for. One minute these people were just like you and me. Then they were put up on a digital pedestal, admired and envied the world over.

This book is about these no-one to someone videomakers creators but it also tells the story of TikToks rise and the impact its having on society, from pop music to politics. And more because to view TikTok as just the platform is to miss the bigger debate. Yes, TikToks rise is meteoric. Yes, its creating a new generation of celebrities many of whom are younger than the YouTubers who came before them. But the rise of TikTok has wider ramifications, arising from the fact that it was made by, and is still owned by, a Chinese company. Having spent so long merely making phones and computers for Western companies, China is now rapidly pushing into software and artificial intelligence. Beijing plans to spend more than $1.4 trillion in the next five years developing next-generation technologies. The country has goals beyond its borders, and TikTok is caught up in a debate held in capitals across the globe whether the short form video sharing app is a Trojan horse for a bigger tech invasion from East (Communist China in particular and Asia more generally) to West (chiefly the capitalist economies of the USA and Europe). Or whether its simply a private company trying to become a mainstay in a world previously dominated by big companies in a 130 square kilometre parcel of land in the San Francisco Bay in California, better known as Silicon Valley. The two sides of the argument are entrenched and far apart.

TikTok has mutated into something of a proxy war over the future of the technology we rely on in our everyday lives. And the outcome could potentially dictate the future direction of the apps we install on our phones, and where our data goes. For the last 20 years, Westerners have knowingly handed over the most intimate details of our lives, from our favourite brand of pasta to our illnesses to our underwear size, to the GAFA companies based in the United States (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon). Its a trust that successive scandals have shown to be misplaced. TikToks origins lie elsewhere, in a country Westerners fear would more willingly sacrifice personal rights to protect its national interests. With increasing amounts of our lives being transacted online, does it matter if our data and our money stays within the control of a few firms in Silicon Valley or starts to migrate to data servers controlled by companies ultimately run out of China?

Politicians outside China certainly seem to think so, which is why TikTok, alongside Huawei and other Chinese innovations, have become the subjects of searching criticism and investigations in the West. TikTok was thrust squarely into the sights of Donald Trump, who, while the US President in 2020, decided to make a short-form video-sharing app beloved by teens for lip-syncing pop songs the enemy in a national security investigation, with billion-dollar business consequences. At the same time, parallel investigations in India, Japan, Australia, Europe and the United Kingdom were delving into whether TikTok was, despite the analyses of multiple cyber-security experts, secreting information to Chinese spies. Politicians have shown they will act, too: India banned TikTok in June 2020, alongside 58 other apps developed within Chinas borders a move made permanent in January 2021, leaving a dedicated audience of 200 million users without a home, and thousands of employees without a job.

Unsurprisingly, given the growth and power of its business, TikTok is fighting back, in the US and elsewhere. After a steady rumble of discontent that grew into deliberate PR campaigns warning that it was becoming a pawn in a broader geopolitical battle, the company protested that the [Trump] Administration paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses. Less than three weeks later, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US President, alleging he had run roughshod over normal governmental practice and the first and fifth amendments in order to score political points and jeopardise the future of a new driver of the global economy. What was once the story of an enormously popular apps impact on our online and offline culture had been hurled into a tussle between the worlds two biggest superpowers.

This book, then, tells the story of TikTok, where it came from and how it has transformed our society and taken over the world. With the help of those whove been intimately acquainted with the inner workings of TikTok, youll learn how the company operates, what its goals are, and where its going. Youll discover the complicated lineage of the worlds fastest-growing app, and where its proving popular and why. Youll learn about the company behind it, which is challenging Google in its own backyard and wants to do much more than entertain you with diverting videos. All are important to understand TikToks out-sized impact on the world, and to make your own informed decision as to whether the increasingly heated debate over its impact stems from xenophobic agitprop or well-evidenced concerns about the long-term future of our digital overlords and their government connections.

But beyond that, well track what the growth of TikTok really means for us all, for security, privacy and propaganda for the next 25 years or more of our lives. We could be on the cusp of a significant shift in the base of power for almost everything we do online. Were not just talking about which celebrities we idolise and which app we turn to when were bored. What happens now could shape how we shop, how we bank, and who controls our data and where it ultimately ends up. Its the reason why a US President tried to stifle TikToks growth, and why the outcome of that argument being considered by Joe Biden, the new US President, amid continued frostiness with China matters quite so much.