December 9, 2023 - 8:00am
This week, social media site X once again managed to raise uproar over a TikTok video, this time featuring “Dinks”, an acronym for dual-income, no-kids couples. While the video comes across as obnoxious, and rightly so, there’s a key aspect that X users overlooked — the couple at the centre of it wasn’t serious. They were joking.
As it turns out, it was just one of several memes posted to TikTok, a joke format in the spirit of the once-popular “Shit People Say” videos, which at the beginning of the last decade parodied stereotypes ranging from everything from one’s culture to gender to subcultural affiliation. These were obviously caricatures, much like the Dinks craze.
But this week’s Dink episode also isn’t an isolated incident. It’s a regular, and politicised, back-and-forth that happens on an almost weekly basis. Right-wing or more broadly “anti-woke” commentators on X attack TikTok users they assume to be (and who occasionally may actually be) liberal, in order to paint TikTok as a cesspool. Accounts like @LibsofTikTok have capitalised on this tendency by aggregating — or cherry-picking, depending on your vantage point — videos showing off the worst traits of the app’s liberal users, resulting in all sorts of misunderstandings.
A non-exhaustive list of other examples includes a woman complaining about being rejected by a matchmaker as well as a largely X-inspired “trend” of people reading Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” and “stanning” him.
This mindset has spilled over from the cultural war zone into electoral politics. For instance, in a recent Republican debate Nikki Haley claimed that “for every 30 minutes someone spends on TikTok, they become 17% more antisemitic.” This followed Representative Mike Gallagher’s assertion in the Free Press that TikTok is indoctrinating young people into supporting Hamas, allegedly with assistance from the CCP.
The problem isn’t that the critics are always wrong, either in the abstract or about the specific TikTok videos they’re attacking. It’s fair to wonder why a product manager who earns a high salary and has excellent benefits is making lifestyle videos for social media over work. But the real issue is that the objective often seems to be attacking TikTokers or the platform in general, and the attacks aren’t always informed. Quite often, the critiques degenerate into the internet trope of “making up a guy to be angry at”.
Not only does this guide the discourse in such a way that it misses how TikTok is a powerful and sometimes dangerous platform, but the critics chip away at their own credibility. The Right and anti-woke centre routinely make the same error the Left does: shadowboxing stereotypes of their enemies. This results in further political polarisation, which begets a negative cycle in which groups over-generalise based on short videos, make it go viral, and then mock the straw man they inadvertently create.
Like whining about violent video games, rap music, or the Left’s incessant moaning about how a particular celebrity is an undercover Nazi, the sugar rush of sensationalist accusations will never galvanise real change. Eventually, people wise up and get sick of the performance.
Katherine Dee is a writer. To read more of her work, visit defaultfriend.substack.com.
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SubscribeNeat observation…
… but I can’t agree with the final sentence:
Actually, people will just move onto other newer and more fashionable media taking their petty mindset with them. Obviously the problem lies with the users not the medium which enables them to broadcast their idiocy to the world.
TikTok, like all social media, is awful for a whole host of reasons.
I remember when t’internet became a thing and we all had hopes that the information super highway would herald a golden age of knowledge and learning and instead it’s just porn and social media. I think it’s time we give it up as a failed experiment. Shut down all the servers, support people through the withdrawal and move on.
Excellent idea. No email, no online banking, no online shopping, no transacting your business with government departments online, no seeing or reading TV shows/films/newspapers except what you can get on broadcast TV or at the newsagent…
And if you’re genuine, you won’t campaign for this by posting on UnHerd; you’ll stand at your window and shout.
– Agree. And we have clearly become dumber
I doubt that very much; those who wish to just have the means to display their “dumbness” for all to see now, whereas before it went unseen.
It’s not the internet. Hopes for TV were similar if not quite so grand. Indeed the hopes for mass education were similar. The problem is that we overestimate what people actually want and like. Eventually any medium seems to dumb itself down until it meets the desires of its user base.
However, that still leaves nooks and crannies of worthwhile content. The internet is still a rich place, but you need to take the side streets and not just stick to the main road.
‘give it up as a failed experiment’ – the human race?
Obviously we can’t ‘give it up’, it’s a Pandora’s Box, and the problems it creates are technological magnifications of essential human problems and psychologies, such as tribalism, in-group v out-group boundary policing, etc
Glad I ignore both X and TikTok then.
It’s not compulsory to swim in the cesspit
Shadowboxing stereotypes of your enemies is easier than living with nuances and shades of grey. It’s also in keeping with the Dopamine Cycle which encourages such discourse.
TikTok is a cheap-looking and unpleasant social media platform which is doubtlessly one of the main reasons it’s under political attack.
Otherwise, it’s clear an instrument of espionage and subversion on the part of the intelligence agencies of the Chinese Communist Party.
In the UK, and I imagine elsewhere in the West, we also see the disturbing phenomenon of teenage girls and raised levels of suicide owing to bullying on such internet platforms.
It’s amazing how memes never die and have a very long shelf life; ‘Dinkies’ first emerged as a term at least 30 ( or is it 40 ?) years ago I think but I hadn’t heard it for years.
Why is it bad to be dual income, no kids?
It’s not. It’s the being smug about it that’s irritating.
The ‘woke’ tend to project their own tribalism onto others.
So just a mild criticism of their recently acquired & fairly makeshift views puts you in the ‘Far Right’ category in their eyes.
And then there is perhaps a danger of leaning into a RW cultural ecosystem and tribalism too much. I think that’s a good point.
But it’s difficult to escape the vulgarization and gentrification of the Left, and the fact that it has become so mainstream. (Tik Tok not to blame, but it gives some extreme examples)