Joey DeBruin

Out of all of the articles you skimmed, how many could you cite specific points from by memory? How many shaped your thinking in a way that will last for years?

Internally we’ve experimented with a simple process to encourage more deep reading, thoughtful reflection, and a simple writing habit — one that makes it feel totally ok to print an article out, get a cup of coffee, sit in your comfiest chair, read it, and then just write for 15 minutes. We realized there’s no reason we can’t just let you all in on the process!

You may be thinking, is this just a book club in digital form? Yes, it is, and there’s nothing wrong with book clubs except the fact that they’re mostly excuses to eat cheese, but also is that so wrong? It’s a digital article club where we’re being pretty careful to avoid groupthink, but where you can still compare notes with other people who have dug into the writing in depth.

Sound good? Well then, let’s get started!

Our next read: When Multiplayer Went Mainstream

More and more people are choosing to redefine how they live and work, going from typical economic activities into loose structures of collaboration with others―defining a new multiplayer game of life for themselves. This shift has picked up a lot of steam, but we have absolutely no idea where this is going, and how deep its impact on society and the economy will be. This piece gives us some good tools to start thinking about that.

What does the future of multiplayer work mean to you? How does it affect you personally?

We’re excited for this experiment, and hope you will find it as valuable as we have. We know it’s valuable and fun because this isn’t our first time doing it! Our first session was run internally at the Kitchen, and so that you can see the final result we’re sharing that first iteration publicly below.

Previous read: The Anxiety of Influencers

Kids these days aspire to be influencers rather than what we grew up aspiring to, even the most lofty ones like astronauts, basketball players etc. What does that mean for the future of the Creator and products they’ll use and what audiences will want to consume?

How is the TikTok generation really different from older generations? Are they more likely to be successful in their creative goals? As members of society?

You can stop here, read the piece, and write down your thoughts before reading further, if you haven’t done that!

There’s an anecdote by Barrett Swanson that sticks in my mind, his reflection on the somber state of his students: “Sad in a way they cannot explain, desperate for something they don’t know how to have. It’s a sadness that seems more than casually related to the ways in which we’ve defined what it means to be a person.”

To understand the raison d’etre of the TikTok generation, you have to consider many factors - combine a vicious and competitive job market that has raised the minimum barrier of entry in recent years with an institution that essentially democratizes the prospect of fame. Sprinkle in the looming prospect of mental health becoming more tied to limited perception, engagement and external validation. You can understand their motivations to survive.

Swanson shares the stories of Baron Socho and Christopher Romero, average teenagers who rose to fame from just a few clicks. He shares the stories of influencers raking in thousands of dollars a month from sponsored meals, thousands of clicks from simple activities. All of this is to paint a larger narrative that seems to almost be internalized by the influencers he chats with: that this was something effectively anyone could do. 

In past generations, systemic injustice made sure opportunity was afforded to a select few. There was largely one way to make it in the world, with wealthy and privileged (white) families often holding the key to capitalism’s ripest fruits. As the opportunity gap closed, college tuition skyrocketed, the tech industry boomed, and everyday people found a path to fame through content, this changed the game for the average teenager. College was more an option than a necessity. A good piece of content could reverse generations of failed social matriculation.

People lusted over the admiration they got from strangers, the commercial value of their fame, the small dopamine jabs from likes and shares. As their fame grew, they left in their wake the have nots. The students Swanson refers to become sad beyond belief.

True, older generations have lusted over their own version of an American Dream, but often with finite outcomes: a house, the ability to send their kids to college, a happy retirement in a warm climate. It’s unclear what the ultimate end game is for the TikTok generation. It’s a sad notion that influencer Brandon Westenberg touches on: “How long can we entertain everyone for? How long before no one cares, and what if your life was worth nothing?”

It seems a lot of TikTok influencers succeed purely because their survival and self-esteem depends on it. Attention is their income and they will often go to absurd ends to receive it. Their identity is molded by the wants and needs of their audience. This often leads to perverse incentives: a lack of critical thinking, dumb stunts, even sometimes borderline illegal acts. It’s unclear whether attention is a resource that is always aligned with people being good members of society. What good is it to learn and grow if your audience doesn’t care? 

While I truly admire the creative ambitions and pursuits at the core of the TikTok generation, I can’t help but be haunted ultimately by words Swanson pens as he watches the brightest of the app’s stars party together: “Empty at the absolute center”.

On the surface, this piece reads like some sort of ethnographic research, or a documentary of an “objective reality” about the lives of this so-called TikTok generation. But I would argue that this is not what it is. Instead, it is a deeply personal story. It’s a masterpiece in painting a vivid picture of how someone who is older experiences younger people growing up and doing their thing. This experience will always be wild, intense. It has become even more so given how fast things change from generation to generation, both technologically and culturally. This means that it shouldn't be a warning that our younger generation has gone wayward, but more of an artistic portrait of a generational change, and how that makes Swanson feel.

Like Swanson, I’m also a millennial. Our generation is very different from the TikTok generation in a very specific thing: our social reach. We grew up at a time where our social reach was very much local, where we interacted with a small group of friends wherever you lived and studied―and that’s it. Our concerns were to be liked (and popular) among that rather small group of other humans. This “TikTok generation” has unlimited social reach. In a very real way, that “social game” has evolved dramatically in scale, and that comes with all sorts of questions and concerns. 

There is no way back, however. This reach isn’t something that we can scale back, and that’s a good thing. What I’m seeing here is an unprecedented amount of global scale social experimentation, where young people full of creativity and energy are interacting with each other, taking in real-time feedback, and making profound changes to culture and norms along the way. This type of change is always scary, but the world doesn’t optimize for what doesn’t feel scary. 

This “anxiety” that is present in the title 

existed in teenagers: it’s that anxiety of self-affirmation, self-discovery, popularity contests and finding their place in the world. What has changed now is how visible that anxiety has become to everyone else (you just need a TikTok account, or access to millennials writing pieces about this topic online). It’s easy to argue that this anxiety has become worse, though. But, how are we supposed to believe that if all we have to go by is our biased views of our own teenagehood? Also, how do we handle the fact that we are much better at diagnosing and talking about mental health issues today? 

History shows us that as the world changes (as it always does), our best bet as society is to not reject, or invalidate, how younger people start doing things differently. Every generation will generally improve upon the older ones, and we should trust that we are in good hands with this new TikTok generation. All this reach and creativity will be a force for good, and people are generally able to solve problems when they arise. Yes, there will be more problems along the way (there always are). Still, mitigating those is precisely where we, “older people”, can help the most. I’m staying curious and hopeful―let’s see where this new generation takes us!

I’d like to double click on the fact that just about every forward looking article I read on creators — whether utopian or dystopian — cites the same fact that more and more kids want to become influencers. They tend to cite the “54% would become an influencer, if given the choice” stat cited in this article which comes from Morning Consult (an analytics company). Or they cite a study commissioned by LEGO (as part of a campaign around the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing) which found that 3X as many kids in the US choose “YouTuber/vlogger” than “astronaut” when given a list of a few choices for “what do you want to be when you grow up.”

So to start, both of these studies are highly motivated to find a particular result. Morning Consult is proving the utility of their social media monitoring tools, and LEGO is presumably betting that parents will buy one of the new 50th anniversary building sets as a way to mitigate the risk their kids forget the noble pursuits of the past and become a YouTuber (whatever the heck that means!). The LEGO study also features a comparison to China where a higher percentage of kids want to become astronauts, which seems hard to ascribe to anything other than shameless prodding of the fear some Americans have of being technologically overtaken by China.

I don’t mention these things because I find the studies bogus. In fact I cited the same one in the launch post for this collective. I buy the fact that kids trust and admire influencers, and spend more of their time interacting with them than we did when we were their age. 

The reason I want to sprinkle a few grains of salt on the interpretation of these stats is because I think we need to be careful to suggest that most kids are thinking of nothing else but becoming full time social media artists. No doubt it’s easier than ever to create and share content, and even to quickly go from nothing to famous, as this article correctly points out. But I would guess that most kids are simply trying to be cool and popular just like we were when we were kids — they just have different tools and a less geographically defined audience to engage in that timeliness pursuit.

Don’t get me wrong, I'm secretly convinced that TikTok and all this new fangled stuff is bad for us, and that it was better when we were young. I really vibed with this article because of that secret feeling. But that’s also what my parents told me and what their parents told them, and when you really unpack the data people tend to throw out I’m just not sure how to make this argument in a way that doesn’t feel curmudgeonly.

So when you lay it out, I think the TikTok generation probably is more likely to achieve their creative goals. The tools are far simpler to use, and lower cost of distribution means creators have more proportional power than in the past, which means technology will continue to evolve in ways that make their lives easier. And as to whether they will be more successful as members of society, I do find the scene on the basketball court poignant and tragic in my eyes, but I think that’s just nostalgia for the society I knew when I was their age. I’m fairly confident the TikTok generation will be more successful than the rest of us in the society of the future because it will be the society they build, and I think only history will be able to judge if it’s truly worse than the ones that came before it. 


Let us know what you think of this new experiment―and happy reading!

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