I know I sound like an out-of-touch, curmudgeonly, troglodytic Luddite when I say that I hope TikTok is gone for good, but I’m not. I was actually early to TikTok. It was the only trend that I’ve ever been on time for, let alone early. I was even on TikTok before my Gen Z kids. I downloaded the app in December of 2018, and I loved it. It was fresh and original and just like Vine before it, full of creativity.

There were creators who would spend hours elaborately applying makeup and prosthetics to create original characters and then make a series of videos as that character. Then, they would wake up the next day and create a whole new character. I admired their dedication and imagination. And the dancers! I envy anyone who can move and control their body like a talented dancer. I especially enjoyed watching all of the shuffle videos. No amount of slow-down tutorials could help me grasp that movement.

But then, in April of 2019, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots popped up on my FYP, and I thought to myself, Well, this app is dead. Once the celebrities find out about an app, the plumbers, pressurewashers, and landscapers aren’t far behind. Before long, your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are on there, using it wrong.

Hindsight And All that

Obviously, I was wrong. If COVID hadn’t happened, though, would I still have been wrong? I’m not so sure. I closed the app in April 2019 and didn’t open it up again until May 2020, and omg, how it had changed. The creativity was gone. It had no spirit, no edge, and no originality. Now, it was nothing but people pontificating in their parked cars.

I get it. The only privacy most people have access to in the course of their day is in their car. But for fucks sake, has everyone become so narcissistic that they can’t be bothered to think about their audience and create an aesthetic experience for their viewers? Of course, most viewers probably aren’t even looking at their screens while the videos are playing, which is why they’re not bothered. Apparently, it works, though, because these videos are rewarded by the algorithm, prompting more and more people to make bad videos.

Even the creators who had put so much thought, time, and effort into their videos a year earlier were now just talking to their cameras. And, of course, there were oh so many landscapers, plumbers, and pressure washers. Then came the trend of uploading pressure-washing videos with totally unrelated audio. The app was truly ruined. I’m sure a lot of my disdain for TikTok comes from my healthy, adult attention span.

My Eyes Are Here, Pal 👀

My biggest peeve about TikTok, though, was the vertical format. I don’t know about TikTok’s other 170,000,000 users in the United States, but my eyes sit next to each other, horizontally on my face. They are not situated one above the other. Watching vertical video is like trying to look through the gap between boards in a fence. It’s unnatural and wrong. During the Woolsey Fire in 2018, I drove by a bunch of people taking pictures of the fire across the valley through the filthy windshields of their cars, and they were all holding their phones vertically. Those are gonna be some award-winning pics, I thought to myself as I drove by.

Shorts: The GoBots Of Short-Form Vertical Video

YouTube Shorts is even worse because it’s just recycled TikTok’s and clips from movies and TV shows. Movies that were shot in a 16:9 aspect ratio and meant to be viewed on a giant movie theater screen are cropped and edited for a 9:16 phone screen. And the people editing them can’t even be bothered to edit them well. Instead of cutting from one character to another, they slowly pan between them, so the whole time one person is talking, all we see is the background of the set until they come into view just as they finish talking. You’re uploading someone else’s work, and you can’t even put forth the effort to edit it well?

It’s Not Really Goodbye, After All

TikTok, unfortunately, is not gone for good. They didn’t even have to shut down the app last night. The Biden Administration said they would not enforce the law banning Byte Dance from operating in the U.S. That means that no one made Byte Dance shut down TikTok. It punished itself. I’m sure the incoming Trump Administration made a deal with Byte Dance to kill TikTok today so that he could resurrect it when he becomes president tomorrow and be the hero for so many drug-addled, ADHD, Gen Z dopamine addicts.

Bonnie was in Starbucks this morning, and the two baristas were lamenting how sad the world is today without TikTok. One of them said, “But Trump said he’ll bring it back, so it’s not gone for good!” Everything is politics now. Even an app that started as a platform for teenage girls to shake their asses at the camera.

Fuck Me!

I couldn’t even finish writing this post before TikTok was reinstated.

Are we great again yet?