Rhythmic Exertions

»In the overexertion necessary to attract attention on the platform, TikTok content produces a physical expression of the declining value of labor.«

I’ve been watching a lot of TikTok content on Instagram recently. I still haven’t brought myself to open an actual TikTok account. The little social media I do still engage with stresses me out enough to make me hesitant to fully enter a new platform. But as I peak from the outside, I find myself increasingly fascinated by the new forms I see emerging. The fact that half of the content I now encounter on Instagram is from TikTok makes me feel like I’m not the only one acting as a cross-platform voyeur. From this external position, part of what I think makes TikTok so engaging is that it is physically hyperactive. Even the logo vibrates, signaling a particular relationship to movement and energy that is different from other social media. As I watch more and more, I am struck by how intensely people exert themselves. The platform’s entire purpose seems to be in making people move, jump, push, and shake. On top of the physical exertion on display in dances and skits, there seems to be tremendous effort involved in designing, staging, and editing much of the content.

Older social media platforms are still generally committed to the idea that content posted repre-sents a window. The idea that media produce a window onto something is based on the pretense that the people, places, or events being mediated preexist the moment of mediation. This idea is of course false in a way most people are hyperaware of. We’re aware of the selective and often staged lifestyle representations that Instagram has thrived on producing. Nevertheless, the plat-form’s unspoken language of value creation tends to obscure the labor involved in staging the content, so that the premise of having been granted a window into some moment that preexists its capture is continuously reinforced. Without this basic premise, there would have been no val-ue to Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections series. Or if we think about the synchronicity between the Kardashians and Instagram and how well they were able to use the platform’s par-ticular language to leverage their brands it is because Instagram shares something of the tension involved in reality TV. Viewers are aware that they are not watching reality but a highly orches-trated version of a person or an event. The viewer keeps watching precisely by occupying the nuances of that artifice and playing a participatory role in identifying the cracks between the staged product being presented by people we know are real, somewhere beyond the layers of mediation.

TikTok seems to have abandoned the premise of the window. On TikTok, it’s much less about the gesture of disclosure – an act of revelation involved in opening a window onto a preexisting space – than about the display of active, deliberate production. If Instagram thrived on staging a life so that the life itself – glimpsed here and there through the windows of content – appeared valuable beyond the platform, on TikTok value is produced directly on the platform itself through a more immediate display of physical labor that all takes place within the frame. On TikTok you have to sweat for the likes.

»We’re aware of the selective and often staged lifestyle representations that Instagram has thrived on producing. Nevertheless, the platform’s unspoken language of value creation tends to obscure the labor involved in staging the content, so that the premise of having been granted a window into some moment that preexists its capture is continuously reinforced.«

To use another analogy, it now seems, retrospectively, like Facebook and Instagram were something like the early days of Airbnb where people could make passive income on their spare rooms with minimal effort. The room (or maybe their home when they were away) preexisted the Airbnb platform and Airbnb allowed people to convert that preexisting asset into additional cash flow. On Facebook and Instagram, it was possible to convert various aspects of one’s life that would otherwise remain private into public expressions that added value to a person’s overall brand or marketability. Building on the analogy of social media to Airbnb, TikTok, in contrast, is like a building bought for the sole purpose of renting out flats on Airbnb. If Instagram represents value, TikTok produces value. If Instagram acts as a factory’s PR department, TikTok is the factory itself. The rise of collab houses or TikTok mansions, where young influencers live together full time to produce content, exemplifies the shift toward making the labor of production central to the content. While these kinds of houses existed before TikTok for influencers linked to Youtube and Vine, TikTok has accelerated the trend exponentially.

When the value of labor is in decline, laborers have to exert themselves more for the same re-turns. At a moment where resources are increasingly scarce, the passive income that could be enjoyed within certain labor relations recedes and greater exertion is required to extract value. This is how I read the hyperactivity and amplified movement on TikTok, whose global popularity has soared during the pandemic and the accompanying financial crises. In the overexertion necessary to attract attention on the platform, TikTok content produces a physical expression of the declining value of labor. On the one hand, TikTok describes what is otherwise not directly perceptible: it takes more effort to get what you need. On the other hand, it prescribes a new set of norms: if you want what you need you have to work hard for it. If the perverse global economy that shaped the world I grew up in made it seem as if things simply appeared out of thin air, TikTok might be guiding us through the new world of scarcity where the lack of resources reminds us that value has always been tied directly to physical labor.

Moving image media has always performed a reciprocal act, simultaneously describing and pre-scribing the body’s position in relation to labor structures. The history of cinema can be seen as a record of those shifts over the course of the last 125 years, TikTok being the latest manifesta-tion of the ever-evolving relationship of moving image media to the laboring body. Along this line-age, we encounter the scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times where Chaplin, unable to keep up with the pace of the conveyor belt is swallowed into the machinery, or the famous episode of I Love Lucy set in the chocolate factory, where she is forced to eat the chocolate herself in order to keep up with the impossible pace. Both of these now iconic scenes derive meaning and co-medic effect from the body’s desperate negotiation of a new production landscape. They show the brutal incompatibility of industrial time with the body’s time. But in the absurd exaggeration of the machine’s logic, these scenes allow for a moment of resistance to the increasingly inhuman demands made on industrial laborers.

»On Facebook and Instagram, it was possible to convert various aspects of one’s life that would otherwise remain private into public expressions that added value to a person’s overall brand or marketability.«

If we accept that both early cinema and TikTok are media constellations that emerge from labor relations, it seems to me that the important difference between the early cinema producers de-scribed above and today’s influencers is that the latter lack the same awareness toward the conditions within which their labor takes place. Is TikTok content the absurd exaggeration of to-day’s labor conditions, or simply the expression of their well-oiled logic? I’m not entirely sure. When someone looks at the work left behind by influencers a century from now, they might well read subtle gestures of awareness or even resistance that from my vantage point still seem like the forfeiting of agency.

In mid January, at the crest of the second covid wave and the third national lockdown in the UK, a TikTok meme went so viral that it even reached the global mainstream media. Initially, a Scottish postman in his mid-20s posted a video of him singing a nineteenth-century sea shanty called »The Wellerman.« As the post grew in popularity, other people started adding to the original video by layering harmonies on it. Like so many other people, I found these videos mesmerizing. I internalized the melody almost immediately and over the next week I constantly caught myself humming it silently.

»We’re aware of the selective and often staged lifestyle representations that Instagram has thrived on producing. Nevertheless, the platform’s unspoken language of value creation tends to obscure the labor involved in staging the content, so that the premise of having been granted a window into some moment that preexists its capture is continuously reinforced.«

Sea shanties are work songs that grew from the labor performed by sailors on ships. These songs, which are closely linked to the tradition of slave work songs and industrial folk songs, perform a dual function. On the one hand they synchronize the work being done by multiple bodies. In learning to sing the lyrics, workers internalize their rhythms in order to push and pull as a unified force. But the function of these songs is not only disciplinary. They also serve to make the experience of hard labor less punishing, to find in it a flow that allows the burden of labor to be shared and for some kind of camaraderie to be formed as a result. Work songs point to the difficulty of determining where the body begins and ends; the songs are rhythmically carried along the continuum that links bodies to other bodies and to machines.

The viral success of sea shanty TikTok (it has become its own subdomain on the platform and the guy who started it was offered a record deal and quit his job as a postman) points to the clear position of TikTok within a lineage of media technologies and the ever evolving labor relations from which they emerge. While sea shanties fused the laborers’ movements to the masters’ tools, they also synchronized their bodies with those of their fellow workers. In that act of synchronization that relinquishes personal autonomy in favor of solidarity with others, there is al-ways the potential for resistance to the terms delineated by those in power. The pulse that travels through TikTok, momentarily taking residence in user’s nervous systems, likewise carries the sea shanty’s dual function, disciplining the body according to the demands of a specific set of labor conditions, but simultaneously containing the potential to relinquish the boundaries of the self and create unique forms of rhythmic solidarity.

 

Beny Wagner is an artist, filmmaker, researcher, and writer. Working in moving image, text, installation, and lectures, he constructs nonlinear narratives situated within the ever-shifting threshold of the human body.