A Woman On TikTok
Small parasocial relationships are becoming a key part of the news cycle
She’s everywhere, she’s inescapable, because she is a pillar of our understanding when it comes to other people in the digital age. Like Atlas, the weight of the world rests on her shoulders. She is a random young woman on TikTok that is sharing her opinion on something.
While there has been a perception of social media as a hub of youthful ignorance for as long as it existed, TikTok has made the relationship much more personal. The ability to share thoughts in video form has enabled a greater volume of longer form content to be seen by the general public, often in the form of coverage by news outlets. Women/‘femme’ presenting people tend to feature more prominently in these videos, but this is not to say that the front facing video is exclusive to this group.
The ambient stereotype, in my experience at least, is that some platforms are deemed more feminine and some more masculine. Instagram and Snapchat are more feminine while Twitter and Reddit are more masculine. Women go on their social media apps to share pictures of themselves as a frivolous display of vanity, while us men bravely venture to r/GoonCaves so we may connect further with our brotherly roots. TikTok shares a lot more with Instagram and Snapchat than it does with Twitter and Reddit, which is probably why it’s a successful company that hasn't had an institutional problem with white nationalism.
The truth is, none of these platforms are overwhelmingly preferred by one gender or another. Plenty of women like to share their thoughts over the medium of text. And there also exists a long legacy of men taking to their camera apps in order to share their opinions.
But how do all these imagined differences shake out in reality? I’ll start with a practical example of how TikTok has enabled the use of women in particular as unwitting tools in the ideological machinations of others.
The culture of extreme backlash against a single video showing a woman making a point or doing something rather mundane fully came into focus for me only when I witnessed it centralized in a single person. Back in October, venture capitalist and aviation enthusiast, Jason Calacanis tweeted something criticizing a young woman named Brielle for saying that she was strung out working a 9-5 job. The centimillionaire VC said of the video on Twitter: “Oh princess… I'm sorry you had to commute and work and have a job and everything — it's like so extra!”.
Jason Calacanis is using the confusion and clear exhaustion of this random woman he has never interacted with to reenforce his world view. In the internet of the past, Jason would probably have to grumble to himself at an imagined young person that doesn’t appreciate hard work. This was because someone like Brielle would probably not be venting her unedited frustrations to an audience that includes 52 year old centimillionaires. But now Jason has access to videos of thousands of people making arguments that he loathes. He can find the ones that appear suitably weak and kick them while they’re down. In doing so, he triumphs over the perceived threat to his way of life and ideology, making both as ironclad as ever.
As evidenced by the number of replies and quote tweets, Jason didn’t exactly get away with this one. But it still took a rather egregious example of venture capitalist attitude from Jason to generate a response large enough to visibly rebuke him. Jason went along with his day and was rather unfazed over all, the same could not be said of Brielle, who has since had to delete her account on TikTok and give up on her YouTube channel because of stalking threats generated by the video.
But why would this man with more money than most people would know what to do with spend his time picking random women to go after? For those that don’t know about Jason Calacanis, allow me to give some background on how he treats the people he makes work a 9-5. Listings for jobs at Calacanis’ venture capital firm, Launch.Co, almost immediately give you an idea of how much Jason values his lower rung employees.
The one active listing shows that Jason is hiring a full time remote researcher in Canada for a yearly salary equivalent to $40,000 USD. This is well below the average salary in the Bay Area where Launch is located and would have barely covered the area’s average rent. And this is the only current active listing. Others have shown Launch offering salaries equivalent to $33,000 USD for MBA holding Canadians willing to work remote. For contrast, the average Canadian with an MBA makes about double what Jason is offering.
This isn’t even mentioning Jason’s other company, Inside (formerly Mahalo), which has a much larger employee base. A quick glance at Glassdoor reveals that many of those working at Inside would probably agree with Brielle. Let’s look at some and then consider Jason’s hostility to a woman complaining about working 9-5.
“Working for Jason Calacanis is a nightmare. He comes up with horrible ideas, wants us to push them through, then "pivots" (fires people) when his new ideas don't meet financial expectations. There is a reason beds were in the building, along with showers, washers and dryers. Be expected to work overtime with no overtime pay.” - Anonymous Employee, September 2012
“Leadership is verbally abusive to staff. The company has lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers over the last few years and lacks direction”
Advice to Management
“Hire a real CEO” - Anonymous Employee, November 19th, 2023
“Management shifted priorities at the drop of a hat. Abusive treatment of employees by CEO.”
Advice to Management
“Respect employees and watch your behavior. People are noticing.” - Anonymous Employee, January 5th, 2021
I should also say that this appetite is not purely ideological. I see a lot of you start acting like Christ on the Cross because a 15 year old said Ant-Man and The Wasp was so much better than Goodfellas. Some of the most vicious online behavior I’ve witnessed comes after someone that is clearly a high schooler shares an opinion that is as well informed and thought provoking as anything I, or you the reader, would have said at that age. The idea that Martin Scorsese’s reputation as a great and respected director was about to be jeopardized by someone in 4th period biology shows that there is a little bit of this anger inside us all.
But that is a relatively small and insignificant form of backlash in comparison to the wider phenomenon. The fascination that Jason displayed has already spread to institutional media. Tabloids like the Daily Mail are focusing not just on TikTok as a platform, but as a source. Previously, these rags would have to scrounge for celebrity gossip or human interest stories with a rare write up of some related internet drama. Now, TikTok has streamlined the content model, granting these media platforms a near infinite reserve of human experiences to write about. Where before these media outlets essentially only had the already famous or extremely strange to bring into the public’s consciousness, now anybody (particularly women) with a TikTok account was in the crosshairs.
It’s pretty easy to see why this is. I don’t need to get into feminist theory to tell you that there is a long standing stereotype about attractive women being stupid, bimbos if you like. This is a stereotype exists for men too, but given general male beauty standards, I can say that it’s a lot easier to belittle a photogenic woman than it is to try that with a guy that’s able to make abstract art on the floor with your teeth. Looking at the TikTok section of the aforementioned Daily Mail shows a preference for the feminine.
If you scroll this section of the Daily Mail website (don’t), you’ll see trends. Women feature far more prominently, and a lot of them aren’t notable beyond their single TikTok videos. These are people unwittingly being used as props, sometimes because they went viral for a controversial, but ultimately harmless statement about tipping. But then there are the other cases. It didn’t take much time to find a story about a young woman who tragically passed away due to complications with surgery that she documented on TikTok. Predictably for the Daily Mail, this story was used to highlight the supposed failings of the NHS.
This type of story that highlights a young person’s tragic death is not new. But one can’t help but feel something is different when the normal array of vacation pictures and high school graduation photos are replaced with entire videos from the deceased’s personal account. Bearing witness to this made me feel genuinely sick, not just because of the actions of the Daily Mail, but because I had been forced to engage with the digital echo of a person that was no longer there.
The slight pit I felt in my stomach and subtle buzz crawl across my skin was special, but not new. This feeling was the same one that washed over my body when I was 15 and I learned about the suicide of one of my high school classmates. I never met him and I don’t think we had many mutual interests, but I knew of him, saw him in the halls, remembered his face. He was separated from me only by social fabric. The feeling wasn’t that I could have prevented this, but rather that the death was so close and yet so distant. This was someone that existed in the same medium I was interacting with most of my peers in before departing suddenly.
Being shown someone on TikTok that died, I was being exposed to essentially this person in their most comfortable medium, their day to day life. I had gotten to know this person, formed a very slight connection with them, and it was only the knowledge that they died which made me realize that. I’m someone that has gotten to know people over the internet, some of them are now my best friends. It may have been over Twitter and not TikTok, but we all know Twitter is not where you see someone’s most professional self.
All of this is to say that the TikTok spectacle is catching on because it is far more personal than previous modes of communication without requiring social consequences. It enables the speed and voyeurism of Twitter discourse without the required reading. Instead of a thread of outlandish beliefs, one only needs to look and listen for a few seconds to get their emotional fix. It doesn’t really matter what emotion: happiness, pity, anger, amusement, because it all comes and goes as easily one wishes.
But I do wonder if this constant applying and reapplying of emotional investment will wear some people down. What this wear will reveal is yet to be seen and differs by person. Many of us may just become dulled, feeling a numb assortment of emotions while still going about our days. Maybe our flowers will be ground down under weight and time into detritus, eventually turning into coal that is burned to keep the lights on. Or maybe we can be weighed down so much that the pressure will produce a diamond of clarity, and we can start to focus on people that actually matter to us, even the ones behind the screens.