The Museum of Sauce
Much of TikTok remains inscrutable to me, but even I can tell that it has dethroned Instagram as the internet’s most vital aesthetic engine, if not yet the most broadly transformative. While TikTok’s visual imprint hasn’t quite trickled down to the design of fast casual restaurant chains and other mundane corporate environments, it has at least hammered a nail into the coffin of the previous status quo; as the app’s various side effects become more noticeable, the Instagram-friendly detritus of millennial culture, by turns Scandinavian minimalist and neon-lit (but almost always cheugily “tasteful”), now forms the bland background against which TikTok’s impact stands in relief, all the more vivid thanks to the contrast. I’ve referenced Molly Fischer’s piece on the Millennial Aesthetic and Kyle Chayka’s AirSpace essay more times than I can count; both are key texts for making sense of a zeitgeist that began to fade in the years leading up to the pandemic.
The native aesthetic of TikTok is baroque, tactile, kinetic, and loud (this has also been reimported back into Instagram via Reels, and to other social media platforms with their own TikTok clones). I could justify spending hours a day watching TikTok, as anthropological research, but I absorb plenty anyway—enough that the content feels like an ambient feature of the environment more than something that inhabits the platform itself.
And increasingly, TikTok is a concrete feature of the physical environment. The platform has its own affordances and incentive structure, which have begun to shape the landscape just as powerfully as Instagram did. Instagram’s mandate was always fairly straightforward: just look good, whatever that means. “Basicness” is arguably an Instagram phenomenon, arising from its prioritization of the simplistically photogenic over the risky, interesting, or even funny (historically, much of the funniest Instagram content was ripped directly from platforms like Twitter). As the optimal Instagram strategy became clear, the content became more predictable; after more than a decade of that, TikTok often feels downright avant-garde in comparison.
By cranking the virality all the way up, TikTok’s potential rewards seem greater (whether they really are or not), but the platform also demands more effort. To a TikTok creator, all the world’s a stage, or more specifically the set of a low-budget reality show, with formerly TV-bound tropes like the prank show and man-on-the-street interview becoming user-generated content that spills past the boundaries of its traditional medium and breaks the fourth wall. To cite one recent example among many, there is currently a TikTok trend where people simply walk into strangers’ houses. Perhaps TikTok’s equivalent of the brightly-colored urban selfie mural is just a supercharged horde of roving amateur producers looking for ways to punk you.