"we're paying off each other's debt on this app"
when users dream of more empowering platforms
He’s standing in front of a farmhouse in a sunny field, saying he has an idea for how you can help save it from the bank. You don’t even have to put your credit card into a GoFundMe: your seconds spent watching, your tapping finger, your like and share, translate into fractions of cents that when added to everyone else’s fractions turn into a whole lot of dollars. That’s because TikTok’s Creator Fund directly pays out money based on the views and popularity of videos. With that money, this guy can buy back his childhood home.
His May 18th video kickstarted a trend where people described their debts, their worries, and their grocery bills to their phone cameras and posted it to TikTok. “I did everything I was supposed to do growing up, everything that America told me to do to be successful,” says a woman sitting in her parked car, “and that debt will never leave me.” Watch for at least five seconds. Comment four words to juice the algorithm. Only three thousand more follows needed until the monetization program kicks in. Liking and sharing every video like this, let’s save each other. A chain of people helping people, using the TikTok Creator Fund to redistribute wealth.
The main audio isn’t from the dude in the field with the house, but from another woman: “We are paying off each other’s debts on this app,” she says, and thousands nod along or lip-synch to her words in their own videos. Since TikTok started off as a music-sharing app, the core interface still revolves around taking an audio and copy-pasting it from one video to another (like previous platforms allowed you to do with text or images). The effect is a fractured chorus, broken the way puzzle pieces are a broken picture, each person posting alone from their bedroom jumbled up with the others, chanting together asynchronously.
Similar tactics are used to raise money for Palestinian refugees, for victims of civil war in Sudan and the DRC, for survivors of sexual assault, for victims of climate change-caused disasters around. Videos asking you to simply interact so that the money which TikTok pays creators for authorized views on videos can be funneled into a cause — so that the money TikTok makes off of you can be redistributed to help others and your scrolling doesn’t go to waste.
Vincent Miller and Eddy Hogg, in a recent paper called “If you press this, I’ll pay’: MrBeast, YouTube, and the mobilisation of the audience commodity in the name of charity” write, “MrBeast’s viewers are knowingly generating charitable income through their own self-exploitation as a valuable audience commodity which creates revenue for others…”
The popularity of MrBeast rests as much on provocative thumbnails and reality TV challenges as it does on a contract between MrBeast and his viewers. He will transform your engagement, likes, comments, and seconds spent viewing his videos into a form of moral action. It will no longer be time wasted, because your seven minutes of leisure, added to everyone else’s millions of minutes, will help MrBeast cure the blind. Many people get the ick from MrBeast’s philanthropy, and that makes sense. But the picture MrBeast creates of the social media public and its power to commander the algorithms and act positively in the world is fascinating — even if it’s not a realistic picture, at least in 2024. The term “self-exploitation,” which Miller and Hogg employ to describe user behavior, hits the right note of ick.
On these platforms built to exploit, what happens when we try and take control of our own exploitation? Is it still exploitation if we’re doing it to ourselves? Can you actually turn a social media platform to serve a moral goal, or is it like a casino where the house always wins in the end? Does this distract from more worthy forms of action?
Right after the TikTok ban passed, the CEO of the company, Shou Zi Chew, posted a video with 28 million views defending the app. He brought up the fact that 170 million Americans use the app (making it the nation’s largest public forum) and that there are 7 million American businesses finding customers through the app. This means that, because businesses on TikTok have to follow the rules and use the tools of its marketplace, the platform has a hand in regulating the behavior of more American businesses than a number of American state governments do. Chew added “the ironic thing is that the freedom of expression on TikTok reflects the same American values that make the United States a beacon of freedom. TikTok gives everyday Americans a valuable way to be seen and heard.”
TikTok is an arm of a brutally anti-freedom dictatorship, so the idea that it reflects “American values” is bullshit. But if we understand TikTok as a place where 170 million Americans go to hang out and 7 million Americans set up shop (not to mention all the others around the entire world who do the same), we get a different picture. TikTok is not the same thing as the company that runs it, in the same way a country is not its president. The core of Shou’s view is actually true: the community of TikTok users freely expressing themselves, hustling for money, and carrying on lively debates does reflect American values. Shou Zi Chew is the part of TikTok that doesn’t.
The “paying off each other’s debts” trend is about those American values. It is a small-d democratic fantasy.
Across the videos, you hear talk of vanished opportunity, anger about feeling powerless, profound disappointment in institutions. The authorities will not deliver liberty and justice for all, the people in the videos say, so maybe we can deliver it for ourselves using this new tool of algorithmic social media. If voting doesn’t seem to work - if the choice in an election is between two men who should have retired a decade ago, between fascism and a party that insists on running a candidate who the majority of its members did not wish to see run again - can anyone blame citizens for turning to social media platforms as a way to regain some control of their lives?
There has always been a democratic fantasy underlying the internet, as well as a very real democratizing power. By removing gatekeepers, connecting people across divides and allowing alternative forms of community, the web of the 1990s and 2000s became a liberating force all around the world. This fantasy has often been mixed up in a libertarian fantasy, or been co-opted by the wealthy and autocratic — Elon Musk’s recent shareholder vote to get Tesla to award him a $47 billion salary, as well as all his crowing about vox populi est vox dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God,” in Latin) is a prime example.
This dream is not entirely dead. Most of the reporting and scholarship on surveillance capitalism, technofeudalism, or whatever we’re calling it now has focused on autocratic forms of this power because that’s the only thing we really have experience of. Mark Zuckerberg is a dictator of his portion of the digital public square, so is Elon, so is Bezos, and, of course, so is TikTok. But just as states can be either authoritarian or democratic, what if platforms could work the same way?
The nation-state to platform comparison doesn’t work perfectly, just as the feudal principality to nation-state comparison doesn’t work perfectly. But if we’re seeing a world where governmentality is increasingly tied up in these platforms, which have become the primary field of political imagination and action for most citizens, we need the courage to craft platforms that aren’t corporate autocracies — and that is what people are doing on TikTok with this trend.1
A democratic way of harnessing the power of these platforms has to exist, and it is trends like this that offer the strongest hints of what it might feel like. Just like how a few hundred years ago people worked up the courage to imagine nation-states that weren’t hereditary monarchies, people now have to work up the courage to imagine platforms that aren’t corporate autocracies. If not, we’re cooked.
MrBeast is doing something different. His whole deal is feudal lord-coded: Jimmy is an obviously mediocre person with a lot of power whose legitimacy arises from elaborate spectacles and theatrical acts of charity (you get $10,000!) and brutality (but you have to endure this painful, humiliating challenge!) doled out to people less powerful than himself.