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Initial Speculations Regarding TikTok’s In-built Slippage
Part One: The High
I don’t smoke weed. When I did, years ago, during my undergraduate degree, I was never that into it because the experience seemed to me to be so extreme. It felt like what I imagined much harder drugs felt like. Meth, crack. Too fast, too forward. Flinging me ahead, while somehow also leaving me behind. As I watched my friends slow down and chill out, my own mind revved up and began to quickly unfold. Only very particular conditions suited me on weed, suited the pace at which things were figuring and disfiguring themselves inside me. I needed to be somewhere soft, somewhere quiet, and somewhere alone. I needed to be in the foetal position with my eyes closed.
I’d see a conveyor belt of images moving quickly through my mind, one after the other – things I’d never seen in my life, rendered somewhat in the French style of surrealist painting, but slightly more photorealistic – kind of tacky, would-be AI-ish depictions years ahead of their time. Impressions of odd inventions and configurations, colourful animated forms, usually some play on different animals or objects merged into one thing … They all rolled through my brain, one after the next, from left to right, without time for my mind’s eye to stare, wonder at their origins, or spare a moment’s thought for their surprising originality. Given that the conditions were met, and I could relax enough, I was able (and this happened just a couple of times) to reach a state of mind in which I could both pay full attention to the images and relinquish myself to the fact that I was forever outpaced by them.
This high, in other words, had to be a hyper-live experience – more live than live, breaking the live speed barrier – refusing any analytic tendency, refusing even any piquing of curiosity, any attempt to commit an image to memory, to hold on. Anything short of surrender to the impossible pace of things created obvious and major dissonance, whose only paths back to homeostasis were nausea, panic, or paranoia. The dreamlike carousel stopped for no one, offering no more (and no less) than an unending series of accelerated glimpses of ideas and images selected by the unhinged algorithm of my unconscious, baked-ass mind.
Part Two: The Scroll
Many years later, I am an occasionally abstaining TikTok addict, faced daily with the opportunity to scroll – doomily or joyfully – through a similarly unending algorithmic flow pulling approximations of both my apparent interests and my less-conscious fixations from the great data pool. Unlike with ganja, these images do not rise up from my insides, but rather belong to a massive and growing arena of content, whose algorithmic placement plays an increasingly, probably disturbingly significant role in how many of us know what we know… ∞ <scroll> lesbian talking about preferring to eat pussy that’s been on a hike than pussy fresh out of the shower <scroll> cat whose owner made them a personal ‘elevator’, a piece of rope tied to a duffel bag <scroll> toddler breakdancing at their doctor’s appointment when supposedly ill <scroll> vodapay ad <scroll> guinea pig that looks like a wig being combed in preparation for a show in the netherlands <scroll> wwf ad <scroll> guy who owns pigeons telling story of rejection by a tinder date due to him owning pigeons and potentially being autistic <scroll> temu ad <scroll> south african doctor explaining the flu variants doing the rounds in 2025 <scroll> woman doing a bit pretending to be a bay leaf going live and making herb jokes <scroll> footage of a rather horrifying-looking roller coaster <scroll> nivea ad <scroll> sped up footage of three pigeons thick as thieves, walking around among other pigeons <scroll> woman doing the panic shack aka jez girls dance on her own <scroll> woman saying she doesn’t like a popular cape town brand of leggings because of cameltoe <scroll> annoying liberal south african debating racist south africans on piers morgan show <scroll> song for josh <scroll> queer theory that jojo siwa will be the first celeb to cycle through every letter of lgbtq <scroll> ∞
Part Three: The Search
Although offering a dreaminess that parallels my youthful experiences of being high, this scroll appears different, giving users the opportunity to pause, rewatch, skip, or investigate each piece of content – tools, ostensibly, of agency. One of my fascinations with TikTok is its ‘search’ feature. Unlike Google, which delays its search suggestions until the user has begun to initiate her direction, the TikTok search bar is always already filled in, based on what it believes to be the most obvious search users would follow given the content they have just consumed. To proceed with the suggestion, one only needs to tap …
As far as I know, TikTok’s highly suggested searches are not generally passed down by some mystical or sinister management body (although algorithmic and human bias, censorship, and bigotry certainly exist here). The TikTok search function seems to approximate some form of quantification of each video’s caption and tags, as well as its comment section. The result is that each piece of TikTok content is accompanied by a crowdsourced curiosity pathway determined by the audience’s most popular hot takes, references to other TikToks, and follow-up questions.
Slightly different to the traditional doom scroll, a TikTok search-driven rabbit hole involves the user taking the bait and meandering down one of the platform’s millions of suggested pathways: watching content, following search prompts, watching content, following search prompts, and so on, in endless open loops of low-effort (and mostly fruitless) investigation. What’s particular about the TikTok rabbit hole is the implication that the answer to any question is always contained in yet another TikTok. This is regardless of the fact that: a. TikTok strongly suggests what we should search for, and b. it is, in any case, rather rare for the search function to actually pull up content that adequately answers one’s search enquiry and matches us with relevant content.
<scroll> dark-web story about a creator who bought a pair of red-brown stained shoes on the dark web from a seller selling more of the same, labelled with peoples’ names and ages, along with corresponding vhs tapes <search> “shiloh hill shoes tape” <top search result> commentator on the dark-web shoe creator saying that the stain is obviously blood and that there’s no update on the tape <search> “waylon burnett” <top search result> someone apparently called waylon trying on cowboy boots with a cowboy-sounding song <search> “lollipop lollipop don” <top search result> meme of influencer chloe ferrero with a lollipop <search> “lollipop” <top search result> same influencer commenting on the lollipop video <search> “chamoy pickle kit”
Often, search results seem to be completely random (from dark-web bloodied shoes to a pickle kit, in a matter of a few searches), or, otherwise, lead quickly to randomness. Should a user scroll further than the initial search result they selected, they are led into a kind of associative dream scroll that quickly evades any connection to the initial search. Interestingly, though, accurate, satisfactory, or truthful answers, and insightful perspectives and opinions are not the point of a TikTok rabbit hole. The real sauce of the TikTok search is that it seems to reshape our original intentions to the extent that we can no longer take for granted that we are, in fact, seeking the answers our searches would imply we are.
In my own experience, internet rabbit holes usually seem to follow informational pathways that grow increasingly particular, moving from initial Google searches, say, to larger websites, academic studies, Medium opinion articles, YouTube videos, niche tweets, and small subreddits where fellow investigators can gather and discuss sources and their own opinions, sometimes co-producing new theses. But the absolute pleasure, ease, and power of TikTok’s search function seems to fundamentally replace our desire for answer-seeking, placating us with new content and the potential of new searches, which yield still more new content and new searches, in a perpetual series of not-quiteness that is incredibly fun and very difficult to leave. The appeal of these bottomless red herrings is multiplied when we discover that thousands of others have traversed the same ‘obscure’ digital pathway, creating micro-collectives in which a series of shared references are the basis for the production of new content.
Part Four: The Form
In South Africa, with its particular brand of rainbow-nationism – a decidedly apolitical and ahistorical proposition – I question the effects of this referential circularity, which seems to lack any true temporal or historical awareness. I noticed some time ago that there is a significant contingent of TikTokers who express a deep affection for President Cyril Ramaphosa, the nation’s ‘Cupcake’, in TikTok comment sections. Regular clips of him having fun, dancing, and greeting citizens in public (largely posted by Athi Geleba, Head of Digital Communications in the Presidency of the Republic of South Africa), as well as repeated classics – like his sweet-looking, tiny self struggling against his Covid mask during a 2020 Family Meeting – circulate on the platform. These clips, apparent key references for how we know who Ramaphosa is, seem to have gradually replaced his political history and shady corporate profile, on TikTok at least. No longer the Anglophile, enabling CEO of an exploitative British mining company and partial perpetrator of a massacre of democratically striking miners, Ramaphosa’s charmed digital referentiality stands in for a politics based on the material and social realities of what his power actually represents.
And TikTok cannot assist in the task of context-building: When I typed “Marikana M-” into the search bar, the first suggestion that appeared was “Marikana Mascara”. This unserious rhetorical replacement is emblematic of the platform’s tendency to find ways to meander away from and depoliticise key questions at hand, often proposing preposterous humour as an alternative.
Variant terms – like ‘mascara’ for ‘massacre’ – are common on TikTok, where numerous words get flagged and videos removed. The threat of censorship has thus largely defined the ways that creators use language. TikTok bans a swathe of talk about sex and violence, and is rather bigoted when it comes to ‘issues’ of LGBTQIAs. Common workarounds include alternative spellings, like “le$bian”, “seggz”, “org@sm” and replacement words, like “to unalive” being to kill, “grape” referring to rape, “corn” referring to porn, and “SA” to sexual assault. These examples are incredibly common – but it is just as common to see creators doing “story times” (a catch-all for creators talking about experiences they’ve had), in which they improvise terms for words that may be flagged by the algorithms.
The net result of this is a bizarre linguistic layer atop any political content or content describing, unpacking, or contending with violence. Those discussing patriarchy and sexual violence or warning the community about dangerous men – this is most often the work of women and queers – must do so in a language of euphemism, with the understanding that the expression of frank truths will be censored. This mandate to communicate and document, but also to talk around and watch one’s words, continues the slippage of meaning that is built into the platform.
In some cases, creators and users collectively exploit these slippages, piling fake references and tags into videos and their comment sections to ‘hack’ the search function. This has been seen especially in relation to TikToks pertaining to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, Palestine, where, for instance, creators raising money for Gazan families urge their audiences to comment below the video with particular phrases related to trends, products, or celebrities. By manipulating the metadata associated with this content, it becomes inaccurately catalogued in ways that are more likely to make it go viral. Like the avoidant language of TikTok, the particular shape of this front-end algorithmic ‘hack’ creates a rather dystopian rhetorical juxtaposition of content of trauma and light-hearted pop commentary – a corner dialect of TikTok that has become typical of its politicised content.
The incapacity to say what we mean (because of TikTok’s unclear censorship rules) and to find what we are searching for (because of TikTok’s – potentially intentionally – bad search system), and yet the simultaneous experience of being given exactly what we believe we want, are emblematic of the platform’s in-built slippage. When we think about algorithms, maybe it would be useful to think about the power that good algorithms may have in overwriting and actually shaping our desires through suggestion.
A ‘storytime’ of being ‘SA’d’ collapses into a void cat anecdote, into a hot take on a centuries’ long colonial history and the necessity for reparations, into a rap verse duo, into a theorisation of gingers as black, into a cancelled influencer, into a dark-web investigation, into a genocide, into a Dubai chocolate, etc. Ultimately, the scroll and search functions of TikTok – though presenting us with the impression of agency – may in fact represent as much of a fast-rolling high as the weed did.
Anything short of surrender to the impossible and beautiful and dangerous nonsense of this digital universe creates obvious and major dissonance, a dissonance whose only paths back to homeostasis are deep frustration and censorship (or, maybe, touching grass).
