“… have been confusing.
Here you have an algorithmic ready-made documenting my first experience on the chinese app Tik Tok at a specific time and specific place. Videos on Tik Tok can be: nasty, ridiculous or virtuous: amazing moves, real life memes, Spiderman everywhere, endless moonwalking or dominoes… However the emphasis on sound is undeniable. These sounds are not about the identity of an artista or self-promotion. The idea of a song is replaced by arbitrary fragmentation trying to catch my attention span and reducing it to 15 seconds of mere amusement. Tik Tok is a compression of time and space, like YouTube on speed or the unconscious of this weird age.
I am an spectator of disparate situations where entertainment, hobby and art mixes in unpredictable ways. But my expectatorship is also actívate listening. I think this level of music collage on Tik Tok, mixing field recordings, songs and soundtracks that are simultaneously being used as templates for generating further situations is unprecedented. Tik Tok can be seen either as depoliticised pure entertainment or an ongoing global collaboration in the digital realm, where language is not always required and invites for the strangest and unexpected connections.
This is a record of our times.”
(MATTIN, My First 30 min. On Tik Tok)
I came to know this record in the current year, two years after its release and five after TikTok’s. The first thing that I asked myself even before listening to it was: what are the implications of making an audio record which consists of the sound extracted from your first experience with TikTok, a video-based platform, and even more, releasing it on cassette tape? The record simply doesn’t function, at least immediatly, as a musical record, nor does it fall in the – rather uninteresting – category of anti-music. But it is definitely noise.
As Mattin writes, “the idea of a song is replaced by arbitrary fragmentation trying to catch [our] attention span and reducing it to 15 seconds of mere amusement”. But since the video is excluded, we are left with a feeling of uneasiness produced precisely by this arbitrary fragmentation, which is the primary mark of the album’s sonic material organization. Unlike when we’re watching the actual tiktoks, the original intent of amusement is completely abandoned and we ‘watch’ – step by step – our sense of attention turning upon itself and suspending the very image that we have of the experience produced by the tiktoks in its apparent immediacy. In a way that is coherent with Mattin’s own conception of noise i.e. as a device to produce alienation, My first 30 min. on TikTok succeeds in making us rethink the processes through which our attention is constituted and projected, both on a social and on a neurological level. But first, it is important to make clear precisely the way in which the app TikTok is taken here in its structural dimension: it is a form of life.
In defending forms of life as a logical concept, Juliet Floyd remarks that its conception by Ludwig Wittgenstein emerges from his engagement with an obstinate search for the simple, as well as from his relationship with Alan Turing’s work. His conclusion (if we are allowed to call it this way), is that – in Floyd’s words – forms of life are “(…) a fluid, modular setting for human procedures, embedded in our ordinary ways of talking as these have evolved in everyday life (…) Our daily lives with “apps” today evince and instantiate the perspective. They are Lebensformen.” (Juliet Floyd – Chains of Life). Now, although the algorithmic character of the apps we use is quite evident in the way we talk about it in our everyday life, it is not enough stressed in the sense of what precisely algorithms are in the first place. It is to miss the point to think that we are only now caught up in an algorithmic web that deals with our data, the desperate novelty is that this very web is caught up in the capitalist form of value. The lack of engagement with this notion in a properly logical way possesses the danger of producing the idea that the steps performed by the programs that we use – and that at the same time use us – are endowed with a mystified opacity that prevents any form of agency which could possibly transform them radically. Along with that, it prevents us to seeing that there is no such a thing as a “non-algorithmic” life: the real question concerns the proximity of the means with which we can radically transform what we take as a step – a move in a language game, that which counts as following a rule, along with the rules that are followed – as the simple, in the apparently given structural organizations of the practices that compose our daily life, collectively.
The algorithm is blind when it comes to itself.
The criteria that determine the tiktoks organization is entirely dependent upon contingent factors such as the time and place in which the app is used. My first 30 min. on TikTok can be seen thus as an arbitrary cut in an arbitrary selection of tiktoks in an audio format. Once rigidly framed, first through recording, then by transforming it into an album, then by releasing it on cassette tape, it is clear that (1) the very concept of mediation is emphasized and materially embedded in the production of the album, and (2) in the experience of listening, the criteria that decides over the succession of contents, and consequently even which contents are to be played, are brought to the forefront. In sonically displaying these contents, “values show forth, are expressed, in that we follow them, argue over them, surrender them, and so on” (idem).
As a corporation, TikTok is mostly concerned – apart from avoiding lawsuits – with increasing the time the users spend using it. Now with over 1 billion monthly active users, the noncritical enlargement of the amount of time using the app is a direct consequence of the effective reduction of attention span and of the engineering of addiction, a characteristic mark of social media platforms. In fact, beyond a form of life, that highly influences the way in which we make habitual decisions – whether regarding the practices we choose to engage in or our very behaviour within these social practices – TikTok functions like a drug, skilfully operating in the dynamics of our neurological structure. However, we must avoid some conservative readings of these phenomena that risk falling into a traditionalist attitude towards safeguarding Art’s (with capital ‘A’) consolidated canon – as well as its formation’s structure –, I would prefer to see TikTok as just another algorithmic bundle that is coupled and integrated into the ever complex network of apps, in the broadest possible sense, that compose what we call our daily life. Such conservative readings miss the point precisely because they affirm the alleged immediateness of the effects produced by recent technology in the peoples’ psyche with awe and devotion. Fetichizing technology at the flip side of the silicon valley transhumanist coin, we’re left with no concrete means to surpass the anxiety and the real axiological crisis, which consists in the intrusion of capital’s logic in our conception of value in a generalized fashion.
As a device, My first 30 min. on TikTok’s primary weapon is the arbitrariness of the frame that is being put in a given succession of tiktoks, which is only algorithmically based on time and space. It is important to notice that the dissonance in the process of identification with the audiovisual content displayed by the app is in an inverse proportion to the time that you spend scrolling through them. Step by step you are shaping a profile for the content you receive based on supposedly immediate but surely idiosyncratic features derived from the over-reinforced sense of identity, which stems from yourself as individual, whose decisions and values are corrupted from the very beginning: the moment when commodification contaminates pedagogical processes. The problem is not so much that there is an algorithm embedded in the platform – the contrary would be impossible – but that it is an homophilic algorithm by default.
Homophilic network design is essentially the automation of familiarity, upheld by a particular conceptual (sociological) predisposition. When encounters and confrontations with the foreign and the strange are algorithmically prohibited, alienation has, in a distorted, unintended sense, been overcome. There has been little to celebrate in this instance of alienation’s overcoming. If changeless change continues to epitomize our condition, it is only reified by the automation of familiarity, and the price we collectively pay for this initial bias of “similarity breeding connection,” is captured by our deficiency in hypothesizing new perspectives.
(Patricia Reed, Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization)
In framing TikTok’s algorithmic dynamics, what is called to the foreground is the power and capacities of the app (any app or algorithmic functional bundle) “to generate further situations”, to push the limits of the source-code that supports its further labor of alienation against themselves, and to seize the control and means of this labor. Only then we can start thinking about a real and non-whimsical ethics of collective alienation, learning to willingly transform and hack into the connections that together form and inform our daily life. Thus it is somehow required that we learn a new way to deal with digital – but not only – platforms. I’m thinking of something close to what Zé Antônio coined as platform technomics, which he describes as the question of “how, in the contemporary context of platformization and computational normativity the link between nomos and techné, of norms (both abstract and concrete) and technologies is reconfigured.” (José Antônio Magalhães – Platform Technomics and Algorithmic Demogrammar). To fully grasp theses processes of reconfiguration is to attain a relative mastery of both the constitutive (‘positive’ or structural) and the constituted (‘negative’, as estrangement) forms of alienation – both stressed by Samo Tomšič in The Capitalist Unconscious – produced in singular nods that are the components of this entangled web of algorithmic relations. But for that to happen, it is an enabling condition that we first alienate ourselves from the suffocating familiarity of our daily experience with these platforms; and it is precisely this task of provoking social dissonance that constitutes My first 30 min. on TikTok as a work of noise, and thus a play with alienation.
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