Jeff Flake at a Republican town hall about the defunding of Planned Parenthood (the next morning, the video of their confrontation had 18 million views), and now divides her TikTok presence between political statements and showing herself off in a bathing suit or Feroza Aziz, an Afghan American activist who found herself in conflict with TikTok over videos she posted in protest of Chinese detention camps. Kantayya, the director of “Coded Bias,” introduces us to a handful of TikTok influencers, like Spencer X, the ace beatboxer who actually came up on YouTube (his first deal was with Nike) or Deja Foxx, who went viral when she was 16 years old by confronting Sen.
#TIK TIK BOOM FILM MOVIE#
That may sound like a paradoxical complaint - TikTok, after all, kind of is all surface - but I wish the movie had probed, a little more deeply than it does, into how an app like TikTok is changing our habits, our society, and maybe our souls. Yet there are ways in which it’s all too content to skitter along the surface of what TikTok is.
For anyone who’s not up on the story, or who has followed it with half a glance, the documentary, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, is a lively, handy TikTok primer. “TikTok, Boom.” gives all those issues a workout. Not to mention this: What does it mean that the Gen-Z multitudes now spend obsessive amounts of time immersed in a never-ending digital casserole of content that is fast turning us into America’s Funniest/Wildest/Most Narcissistic Home Videos Nation? Beyond that, the fact that Silicon Valley, for the first time, has been beaten at its own game by China, America’s preeminent rival in the 21st-century global power structure, is its own kind of wake-up call. Does the fact that the data mined by TikTok is stored in a brain trust controlled by a Chinese corporation mean that the app, for America, represents a security risk? Some say yes. And since TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a company based in China, the fact that much of what TikTok is actually about, once you peek beneath the candy-colored surface of its endless-shopping-mall-of-videos, how-I-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-dopamine-hit mystique, is data mining (the targeting of you, the user, as a consumer, who will be digitally read like a book and pitched products until your dying day), there are sizable geopolitical implications to the TikTok story. As a result, it has shaken up the hierarchy of the tech universe. It has been downloaded over two billion times, making it bigger than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter. The sheer hugeness of the app is its own paradigm-shifting story.
There are the people who are on it: the makers of those videos, who could be just about anyone and might be doing it just for kicks, though what a lot of them want to be, if they can go viral enough, are influencers - the elite echelon of TikTok stars who have made themselves over into brands, based on a look or a talent or a signature or some combination of the above, and who succeed in attracting the attention of companies who will pay them to be casual endorsers of some product.
#TIK TIK BOOM FILM PATCH#
There are the countless people who consume it: the kids from all over the world who get addicted to watching the up-to-three-minute-long videos (dances, pranks, sexy flaunts, tutorials, monologues, protest messages) as if they were popping Sour Patch Kids. Yet as Shalini Kantayya’s sprightly, informative documentary “TikTok, Boom.” makes clear, there are more levels to the TikTok phenomenon than there are to almost any other blockbuster app. TikTok, the omnipresent video-based social-media app that launched five years ago, has always seemed a less serious, more frivolously youthquakey destination than a number of other online networking services - most obviously Facebook.
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