Staying cool: For the TikTok generation, it requires relentless commitment

By Stephanie Wood

“TikTok is just full-gas internet crazy because there’s no incentive for it to slow it down. It’s just never-ending discourse,” says American culture observer Ryan Broderick.Credit:Shutterstock

″I’m really quite confused about this – what does it mean, that he’s cheated on her?” The woman asking the question lifts her head from the phone screen and looks troubled. We’ve handed the phone around the dinner table, from one middle-aged person to the next, and none of us understands what it means – a 19-second TikTok video in which a girl surprises her long-distance boyfriend with a visit. We can’t work out what’s so interesting about it, so funny, that it has been viewed more than 65 million times on the video-sharing platform, been discussed on talk shows and news bulletins around the world and become a cultural moment for the TikTok generation.

The girl who answers the woman’s question, Lulu, is 14 years old. “It’s just funny because everybody is just like, ‘Girl, something’s up’.” Lulu is breathy, going at a million miles an hour, excited to explain what it all means to her parents’ visitors. Please, Lulu says, examine the body language of the guy – “Couch Guy”, as he and the video are now known – as his girlfriend comes into a room where he sits with three young women (soundtrack: Ellie Goulding’s Still Falling for You).

Since the video was posted on September 21, tens of millions of people have examined the body language and facial expression of Couch Guy, of the women sitting on the couch with him, of Couch Guy’s friends in the room. “The girls look sus [sic], the boys look amused, the boyfriend looks scared. … Sis … please ask questions,” is one of the 135,000 or so comments on the video.

Couch Guy, Lulu says, took his phone back from the girl sitting next to him in a quick sneaky move when his girlfriend walked in. Couch Guy might have had his arm around the back of the girl next to him. Couch Guy didn’t look so happy to see his girlfriend. Couch Guy took forever to stand up and hug his girlfriend. The Gen-Xers at the table exchange looks and shake our heads in the manner of old people.

But why did she even bother to put it up on her TikTok account, I ask Lulu. “Like, she’s probably just putting it up for friends but it went viral,” Lulu replies. Her father adds dryly: “Normally you surprise your boyfriend without a friend filming it.” Lulu’s response is withering: “Normally your boyfriend isn’t on the couch with three other girls.”

Lulu’s mother starts to describe how her daughter and 16-year-old son gabble in memes, a foreign language, the parental bewilderment – “I’m in the ghetto, ratatata, ratatata” was a recent chant (drawn from another viral TikTok) accompanied by a gun-pointing hand gesture, the “ratatata” a staccato burst indicating gunshots – but Lulu, eye-rolling, hunches back over her phone. “OK Boomer.” Did she use that catchphrase? Perhaps I only imagine she did: after all, just as Couch Guy is so last-year, the expression “OK Boomer” is so 2019, so clearly cheugy.

Try to navigate this strange, exhausting, frenetic new planet we find ourselves inhabiting, try to understand the fickle TikTok generation, and you’ll quickly realise we are all cheugy. The Gen Z neologism (pronounced choog-ee), outed in a viral TikTok posted in March 2021 by @webkinzwhore143, describes, according to Rolling Stone, “an aesthetic that is somewhere between basicness and cheesiness, or anything that seems hopelessly out-of-touch or trying too hard.”

Simply by using the word I am revealing myself to be hopelessly cheugy. “I think it came and went as a term pretty fast,” says American online culture observer Ryan Broderick via a Zoom call from São Paulo. “I think, in a broader sense, we’re just at a moment where Millennials are no longer in the driver’s seat and the younger generation is coming up with new and funny ways of articulating that.” (Millennials, or Gen Y, were born between the early 1980s and the mid- to late-1990s; those born from about 1997 onwards are considered Gen Z, or Zoomers.)

“We’re at a moment where Millennials are no longer in the driver’s seat and the younger generation is coming up with new and funny ways of articulating that.”

Certainly by May 2021, the lifestyle website Refinery29 had declared “the word cheugy is already cheugy”. I won’t attempt to explain the socio-political nuances of the word, nor the reasons it has been cancelled (they go beyond the madly accelerated trend cycle) – we just have to keep moving along on this anthropological study tour. Stay with me: it’s all about keeping up. But can you? Can anyone? Sorry Lulu, but I’m not sure that even you can.

The green dress. God forbid you’d even think about wearing it now. Julian, a 20-year-old politics and international relations student who lives in inner Sydney and whose carefully curated social media feeds reflect his enthusiasm for fashion, tells me about the green dress, a neat allegory of the kinetic TikTok generation. “No one would be caught out wearing that today, like, nobody.”

But there was a time, gosh, lost in the mists of time in mid-2020, when the $200 “Hockney” dress, created by the UK brand House of Sunny, reached the fashion stratosphere at hypersonic speed after uber-influencer Kendall Jenner posted a shot of herself on Instagram wearing it. With spherical cut-outs on the back and an abstract “palm green” lilypad pattern, the dress became a cult item, the subject of a bazillion “fashion hauls” (TikToks showing off someone’s latest purchases). “It was just like, ‘Oh my god, everyone, like, I need this dress,’ ” says Julian. But the green dress was cheugy, over, almost before it had even started. “It just shot up and then shot straight back down.”

Uber-influencer Kendall Jenner in the “Hockney” dress which became a cult item in TikTok fashion hauls.Credit:@kendalljenner/Instagram

In the olden days, trend cycles were positively plodding. A celebrity might wear something fetching and it might be weeks before a photo of it appeared in a magazine and ladies started to think about going out to the shops to look for it. But in this golden age of garment virality, an influencer might wear something in a TikTok or Instagram post and, in a triumph of commerce, within an hour, millions of young women have seen it, gone to the creator’s website or an online fashion retailer and clicked “buy”. The original sells out each time it drops and fast-fashion companies start pumping out “dupes”, cheap lookalikes destined for landfill. The mega Chinese online fashion retailer Shein, for example, adds up to 1000 new items a day to its website (say, an $11.95 Hockney dress dupe) and spreads a trend’s spores further by saturating the social media feeds of millions of young women around the world with advertising.

Quick, keep up. If you don’t, you might find yourself walking down the street in a palm-green micro-trend that’s been cancelled. (You’re likely already too late to catch the retro “twee” TikTok trend which emerged lateish last year: berets, oversized pilgrim collars, little dresses, cardigans.)

When the zeitgeist seemingly shifts with each new TikTok video (and we, humans, are producing an infinite number of new ones every day, contributing to an endlessly unfurling feed), keeping cool is a relentless, full-time job. Never mind the kids trying to keep up. Pity, instead, say, the poor filmmaker, trying to come up with storylines and scripts for the TikTok generation that aren’t cheugy even before the cameras roll; an acquaintance’s teenage daughter regularly points out the flaws in young characters’ dialogue in shows set in the present day. “They wouldn’t say that,” she scoffs.

Pity the hapless Gen-Xer throwing emojis around like hundreds and thousands on fairy bread. Sad to say, there are cheugy emojis: use the laughing-crying/LMAO (laughing my arse off) face at your peril. In early 2020, a Gen-Z consensus emerged on TikTok about uncool elements of Millennial culture, including skinny jeans and the laughing-crying emoji. (Hint: try instead the skull emoji to represent the idea of “I’m dead”, as in, “dying of laughter”.) And if you still use GIFs, those animated images used to express emotions and reactions, well, grandpa, you’re showing your age.

Pity the Baby Boomers (and anyone else) hanging on Facebook. “My brother’s like, ‘Why the f… do you have Facebook?’,” says Julian’s friend Bella, 20, a journalism student also from Sydney’s inner-west, who only keeps it for work-related groups such as one that posts bar-tending jobs. “Facebook is kind of known as an older person’s app; it’s like, ‘Oh, my aunty uses it, my grandma uses it,’ ” Bella says. Cheugy.

And pity the brand manager or marketing executive or trend forecaster trying to keep track of the shifting sands for professional purposes. The open tabs multiply, constant Google detours are required to translate bizarre and unfamiliar references, the brain explodes.

Take this example from the web culture newsletter Garbage Day: “What I think is interesting about … lucid dreaming resurfacing on TikTok is that, unlike the other kin headmate mod drama of Tumblr or the brony tulpa psychosis of 4chan, younger internet users now are adapting these ideas to fit a platform that is much more closely tied to who you are irl.” Oh my giddy aunt. I can’t even.

Ryan Broderick, a Millennial with half a beard, is the creator of Garbage Day and the man who wrote that sentence. He laughs when I tell him it made my brain hurt. “So, that’s a lot of internet references at once,” Broderick says. The simple version is that weird stuff on the internet has always existed, but nowadays that weird stuff or those strange subcultures are created to fit huge platforms, as opposed to bubbling up organically from online communities.” (I’m still none the wiser.)

“Teenagers have been able to survive a lot of new technologies. The first generation that had distorted guitars were considered the devil … every generation has their TikTok.”

I quiz Broderick about this strange new planet, about Gen-Z and its online life and TikTok, and try not to sound elderly. “The speed at which culture is generated by TikTok is just unprecedented,” he says. “People who aren’t tapped in … even myself, I’m having trouble keeping up. I think we’re very quickly reaching a point where people just accept that they can’t keep up with all of it any more.”

Then he tries to calm my nerves. “So, when I was a teenager, MySpace launched, and a lot of the same things that were said about MySpace are being said about TikTok now. I always sort of take them with a grain of salt. So far, teenagers have been able to survive a lot of new technologies. The first generation that had distorted guitars were considered the devil … every generation has their TikTok. We have to figure out what’s good and what’s bad, what we keep, what we don’t.”

Do we want to keep the guy smoking weed out of a pickle on YouTube (spoiler alert: after smoking the weed, he eats the pickle, smokes a bong using pickle juice, then drinks the bong “water”)? What about the TikTok account with more than 260,000 followers called “incometwetrust” which posts videos of disembodied hands mixing great volumes of cleaning chemicals in a toilet to create “oddly satisfying” colours and sounds?

“A video does not necessarily have to be interesting to go viral,” Bella tells me. “A friend last year got I think two million views on TikTok of her and her friends throwing plates against a wall.” The only conclusion I can reach is that, after centuries of humankind’s (sort of) steady-ish progression towards enlightenment, we’ve been sucked into a black hole of vapidity where the main cultural institutions are content dollar shops.

I talk with Maine-based web developer Rusty Foster, a Gen-Xer with Millennial inclinations who writes a newsletter called Today in Tabs “to describe what everyone is talking about”. He calls the era in which we find ourselves “the after times” but still, is not so worried about any human descent into vapidity. “Like, you give people a camera and say, ‘Put whatever you want on here, we don’t care,’ and they’ll, like, do something goofy for the camera. And that’s kind of cool, right? Like, it absolutely is just someone’s everyday life.”

Ryan Broderick adds additional layers of thought: “TikTok is an insatiable sorting algorithm that will eventually turn all human behaviour into trending
content.” Since its 2017 launch, the app has upended the social media and streaming landscape. In September, its owner, the Chinese company ByteDance, announced it had reached a billion active global users – a 45 per cent increase in monthly activity since June 2020. (By comparison, Facebook has nearly three billion global users but, as reported earlier this month, saw a drop in daily active users in the final quarter of 2021.) “Any teenager can download this free app, shoot some footage with their phone, edit it together and they’ve made a mini-movie, they’ve made something that has never been this easy to make,” Broderick says.

But that explanation doesn’t even begin to illuminate TikTok’s complex workings. For a start, lift the hood on this highly engineered machine to see its well-oiled algorithm (almost every kid I speak to about TikTok talks about “the algorithm”). “The app’s recommendation algorithm is incredibly powerful with its central feed, the ‘For You’ page, updating in near-real-time to what you’re looking at,” Broderick told Garbage Day readers recently. “Your friend sends you a TikTok of a dog, you click over to your ‘For You’ page, suddenly it’s all videos of dogs.”

The algorithm is spookily switched on. For example, “The TikTok algorithm knew my sexuality better than I did” was the headline on a piece written for the now-defunct lifestyle website Repeller in late 2020. “My feed has become curated so specifically to my tastes that it has alerted me to parts of myself I hadn’t fully embraced yet,” writer Amalie MacGowan observed.

Bella the journalism student tells me that she sees completely different content on her “For You” feed to that which her brother sees. “There’ll be certain things where people will be like, ‘Oh, are you on like X TikTok?’ and I’ll be like, ‘No, I don’t know what that means.’ Or I’ll say, ’Oh, are you on this TikTok? and they’ll be like, ‘No, I don’t know what that means.’ ” Zooming from her bedroom, backdropped by a wall with scattered vintage images (Debbie Harry, the Rolling Stones furry stiletto album-sleeve pic, a snap of Bella and friends), Bella struggles to pinpoint what the algorithm surfaces for her thematically. “Like, I spend a significant amount of time on it every day and I have no idea. I’ll get a lot of people in New York … just showing their outfits, showing going out to dinner, that kind of thing.”

Oh, she remembers, something else that showed up in her feed recently: the viral salmon rice dish video (80 million views) by San Francisco Bay Area food and lifestyle influencer Emily Mariko (9 million followers). If your teenager went through a stage in late 2021 of microwaving leftover salmon and rice with an ice cube (to keep it moist) and serving it up with Japanese Kewpie mayo, Sriracha hot sauce, kimchi and roasted seaweed snacks, now you know why.

Mariko’s salmon rice bowl, Couch Guy, any viral TikTok you care to name – they all spawn countless imitations which are as central to the platform as their progenitors. “You don’t always see the beginning of the trend before you start seeing different iterations of it,” says Bella. Salmon rice bowls whipped up in home kitchens from Dubai to Dalby flooded TikTok. Couch Guy gave birth to hundreds of hashtags (#couchguytheory #freecouchguy #couchguyparody #crimescene …) and who knows how many iterations: a wedding party has a shot at it, the bridesmaids shifting quickly away from the groom on the couch when the bride enters the room; two kids come home and surprise their parents on the couch who quickly hide the tub of ice-cream they’re sharing under a blanket …

Other users pluck individual elements of a video, say the audio, to create iterations. For example, TikTok user @pawbrey used the couch-guy now-earworm audio riff with footage of his golden retriever being surprised by a descending abseiling window cleaner outside his apartment. Or users make TikTok “duets” in which they put their video alongside someone else’s original and discuss it, as in the case of someone offering commentary on whether Couch Guy was indeed cheating on his girlfriend. (“Hello, I’m here to debunk the hand-on-back claim,” was @perzcilla’s to-camera analysis.)

“Couch Guy” is surprised by his girlfriend in a TikTok clip that has attracted 65 million views – and sparked a debate that shifted from light-hearted to menacing. Credit:@laurenzarras/TikTok

“The comments that people leave can also be pulled into videos and used as content,” says Ryan Broderick. “It’s a really good example of how TikTok has been designed ruthlessly to be a never-ending content factory, every single piece can become a piece of viral content. So when something like Couch Guy happens, there’s no break. It is just full-gas internet crazy because there’s no incentive for TikTok to slow it down. It’s just never-ending discourse. And it can be very addictive for people to dig through all the parodies and all of the comments and all of the duets and all of the remixes because that’s what TikTok wants to give you so you don’t leave the app.”

Broderick uses a word that comes up regularly in conversations about TikTok: “discourse”. Everyday users contribute to the discourse with comments and crazy memes, as do folk Broderick describes as “weird pundits that keep their massive audiences fed by commenting on whatever random topic or challenge is rising to the top of the app that day”.

Julian observes that viral videos allow individuals to become part of conversations in ways that have never previously been possible. “And I think that’s part of the appeal.” He texts me a link to a video by @n0rab0ra whose TikTok shtick is to create avant-garde fashion looks from garment odds and ends: layers, rips exposing multiple pieces on top of each other, items wrapped tight to her thin frame with twine.

“This one is good to see the sort of discussion and discourse that happens around fashion,” Julian says in the text. One of more than 26,000 comments: “It’s giving tying beef with string.” Julian, holding my hand through this parallel universe, interprets: “it’s giving” can be interpreted as “it’s channelling”. The commenter thinks this particular look from @n0rab0ra resembles a rolled roast of beef tied with string. Another comment: “giving very much fish caught in a net”.

Bella doesn’t make her mind up about a TikTok video’s content until she’s read the comments. When she first saw the Couch Guy video, she thought it was just a nice video of a girl surprising her boyfriend who was a bit awkward. Then she looked at the discourse. “Everyone in the comments was like, ‘Girl, he is cheating on you … and he hates your guts.’ I felt so bad for this girl. Like, she was getting a lot of hate comments.”

“The trend cycle is so rapid … you don’t see any videos on Couch Guy anymore, you don’t see anybody talking about Couch Guy anymore.” Credit:Shutterstock

I set out to provide a public service: to attempt to explain these inexplicable, breakneck times and deliver a snapshot of the changing of the generational guard rather than more we’re-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket hair-tearing. We’ve read the news, we know the impact devices and social media are having on the lives of the first generation of kids to have grown up with them; about the effect of screen time on brains, concentration, sleep, creativity and identity, about body image and mental-health issues, friendship dramas and “pretty privilege” (that advantage held by white, thin, pretty girls and boys in this world), we know about trolling and the spread of misinformation. I thought perhaps it was time to put the hand-wringing on hold.

“TikTok to me is sort of like a never-ending Salem witch trials machine.”

But as TikTok enters its fifth year and becomes the dominant cultural institution for Gen-Z, new things have emerged to keep up with and be bothered about. How’s this: doctors around the globe have seen an
influx of teenage girls presenting with, of all things, tics – compulsive and repetitive movements or sounds. According to an article in The Wall Street Journal published in October, the girls have one thing in common – TikTok. Studies have shown that they had been watching videos of influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome. Videos tagged with #tourettes have been viewed more than five billion times. That’s a lot of teenage girls.

But there is a broader recent concern about the platform: the discourse is mutating. Says Rusty Foster from Today in Tabs: “There’s this strange true-crime obsession energy going on right now on TikTok that I think is not a good thing at all; like it’s gonna go to a bad place real soon.” Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick, who grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, shares Foster’s
concern. “TikTok to me is sort of like a never-ending Salem witch trials machine.”

In December, Rolling Stone published an article headed, “All she wanted was to dance. Then TikTok spun a conspiracy theory that she’s a serial killer”. The article detailed the story of Michigan woman Sabrina Prater, who posted a TikTok video of herself dancing in a dilapidated basement to a remix of Shania Twain’s Any Man of Mine (Prater previously identified as a male but had recently changed her bio and come out as a woman).

What unfolded in the weeks after Prater posted the video on November 11 provides marvellous insight into the basest instincts of human nature. Her video went nuts on TikTok, clocking up more than 22 million views and, as viral TikToks do, giving birth to any number of iterations. Many of them mocked her appearance and the state of her house. The discourse migrated to a subreddit called “oddlyterrifying” (a subreddit is a sub-community on the Reddit news aggregator and discussion site) where someone posted a video taking excerpts from Prater’s TikTok content and building a story up around it: that she was creepy, that she might be holding women captive in that basement.

In comments and yet more videos, others piled on with further fine-toothcomb analysis of Prater’s content: she was wearing the clothes of her “victims”, that was a bloodstain on the floor, she was connected to unsolved missing persons cases, she was giving “Buffalo Bill” (Buffalo Bill was the serial killer in The Silence of the Lambs). Some commenters claimed they were in her neighbourhood and planned to try and photograph her at her house.

TikTok researcher Abbie Richards told the magazine that the unfolding saga was “like watching true crime, internet sleuthing, conspiracy theories, and transphobia collide in a horrific car crash”. Prater released a new TikTok. She was sobbing. “I just want to be loved and accepted, man.” The Rolling Stone article observed that TikTok’s mechanisms “tend to amplify people who may be vulnerable to exploitation or mockery”.

The TikTok generation became similarly obsessed with the case of Gabby Petito, the young American vlogger who was murdered while travelling across the country last year with her fiance, Brian Laundrie (his remains were found later with self-inflicted injuries). TikTok videos about the Petito case, mostly silly or simply wrong, exploded on the platform. “The case has become a national sensation, in large part because of the awareness generated by people who are watching it unfold on social media,” The New York Times reported in September. “Each new development has been followed by flurries of explainer posts and videos from would-be detectives on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter.”

In late January, Broderick announced the “first nonconsensual TikTok villain of 2022”: “West Elm Caleb”. A number of women on the platform realised they’d dated the same allegedly badly behaved homewares-shop employee and outed him for his gaslighting, ghosting, dick pics. “Because it played out on TikTok, it then, of course, spun out of control incredibly quickly … [it’s] totally par for the course when it comes to TikTok’s extremely young audience seeking viral vigilante justice,” Broderick wrote on Garbage Day. On Twitter, he added: “It’s getting harder and harder to deny that TikTok’s algorithm wants us to hurt each other.”

And then there was Couch Guy. It was, said The Daily Show host Trevor Noah, “the most intense forensic investigation since the Kennedy assassination”. As the feverish sleuthing into Couch Guy and his alleged infidelity mounted, Couch Guy’s girlfriend, Lauren Zarras, a student at Indiana’s Purdue University, released a TikTok analysing her initial surprising-my-boyfriend TikTok, laughing all the way as she pointed out why Couch Guy’s behaviour was innocent: “These comments are just getting ridiculous and I don’t know why you guys are assuming so much about my relationship.” A little later she posted a TikTok showing her and Couch Guy snuggling (soundtrack: Doja Cat’s Cyber Sex, which includes the most apposite line – “what a time to be alive”.)

Then Couch Guy, a student at the University of Virginia called Robert McCoy, spoke up. In early December, McCoy wrote an article for the online magazine Slate. “While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface, it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and me – people with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy,” wrote McCoy.

“I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my ‘bad vibes’.” His privacy had also been invaded: someone who lived in his apartment building had posted a TikTok of himself slipping a note under McCoy’s door, while others said they planned to confront him.

McCoy finished the Slate piece with a plea: “There will inevitably be more Couch Guys or [Sabrina] Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve.”

If there’s any consolation for Zarras and McCoy, it’s that the Couch Guy thing was over, cheugy, in a flash. “Couch Guy has now pretty much disappeared off the face of the earth,” Bella tells me. “Like the trend cycle is so rapid … you don’t see any videos on it anymore, you don’t see anybody talking about it anymore.”

Just before I file this story, I take a look at my TikTok. No sign of Couch Guy or iterations thereof but a video pops up from a fashion commentator called Mikayla (@miks_tiks) headlined “cheugy trends that are coming back”. (We could have told her that everything comes around again.) The actor Miriam Margolyes farts on what appears to be her own scatologically inclined account. Schoolies on the Gold Coast dance to Who Sexy I’m Sexy. A beautician shows that you can have full control of how you style your eyebrows after brow lamination.

I fiddle with the “create” button to see if I can make a TikTok of my own but all that comes up is a selfie of me looking, like, really ancient. I think about calling Lulu to ask her how to make a TikTok but then I realise something – I’ve got better things to do.

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