TikTok girls like me are just fine The adult narrative ignores teen voices

As a 16-year-old girl living in New York City, I’m part of a cohort that’s often talked about — as a matter of head-shaking concern among politicians, academics, and journalists — but rarely heard from: as creatures with greater agency and more serious ideas than the older generation might assume.

You hear about us as being hopelessly in thrall to the infinite scroll of social media; obsessed with micro-influencers whose fame doesn’t even last 45 seconds, let alone 15 minutes; and ever on the verge of falling into eating disorders or self-harm as a result of the images and ideas that flash before our truncated attention spans. We are the “anxious generation”, mind-controlled by apps designed to be as addictive as possible. More specifically, we are framed as victims of a Chinese app called TikTok.

To be clear, the TikTok-girl crises I sketched above are all too real. But the older generation’s discourse around them more or less ignores what the people who are in need of rescue have to say for themselves. As a result, it misses the granular details that could make for better and more realistic reforms, if reforms are needed.

Famehungry — a new piece of performance art about TikTok being staged at the Soho Playhouse this week as part of the New York City Fringe Festival — is a good example of how such critiques go wrong. In it, the London-based theatre artist Louise Orwin explores the big question — TikTok, good or evil? — in a multimedia format that streams simultaneously on TikTok Live and integrates the app in interesting ways with the in-person performance. Audience members who still have the tabooed and sort-of-banned app can like or comment as the play unfolds; everyone sees Orwin acting into her phone and her screen-view is projected onto the stage. It could have been fun, but the performance was chaotic and overwhelmed by a too-on-the-nose “concern message” about people like me.

Orwin’s breakout performance in 2014 was a project called Pretty Ugly that examined the online identities of teenage girls. Famehungry covers some of the same territory, asking about the app’s effects on the mental health, self-esteem, and happiness of girls and young women.

The new work opens with Orwin sprawled onstage in various positions illuminated only by the glow of her phone. It’s a commentary on the social-media era: we only exist as we are seen online. I could relate to it some; it reminded me of staying up late with only the light of my phone in my room. She is wearing a red Adidas track suit and clashing neon green bodysuit, and she writhes around while loud and jarring ambient music plays. Next she sits down at a desk covered in pink hair and starts babytalking and making scrunchy faces into the camera. “Just waiting for a few more people to join”, she repeats, over and over and over. She also performs a few TikTok stereotypes, like waving and saying hi, drinking from her Stanley, and eating stuff off her acrylic nails (eating videos are called mukbang, from the Korean words meaning “eat” and “broadcast”).

Orwin explains during the play that she joined TikTok because she missed performing live during the pandemic, and she discovered that one of her former students, a 15-year-old named Jax Valentine, had 20,000 followers. She wondered if she could get up to that number, which was more than she’d ever achieved in a theatre in real life. During the performance, she’s hoping to achieve 20,000 likes and promises she’ll “do something amazing” for the audience if she does. Jax makes live guest appearances on another screen to coach her.

A long middle section of the play talks about what Orwin likes about TikTok. She picks the weird, outlandish, or simply brainrot videos — people running in slow motion, girls dancing in turtle-outfits — and says she likes to see all this human variety from around the world. She believes the app “democratises the flow of information” and “makes space for marginalised communities”. But she offers this praise while walking on a treadmill, speaking in an increasingly frantic voice, and she follows it up with all the rules of how you have to act to be liked, implying that the app only rewards certain types of behaviour and punishes others: turtle-dancing, yes; “fake smoking while covered in fake blood,” no. (I’m glad that content moderation prevents violent videos.) She also does attention-getting things like violently splash her face with water or eating with food hanging out of her mouth — more mukbang. During her final dance number, she pours a pink drink that looks like a strawberry Yoo-hoo over her head.

The play concludes with the artist venting mixed but mostly negative feelings. The attention is nice, Orwin thinks, but other than that, TikTok is “a black hole of nothing”. It’s “mostly people doing the same thing over and over again”, and she is disgusted with herself for participating. She also seems to be disgusted — or at least, negatively impacted — by many of her previous non-online performances. She tells the audience about ones in which she’d asked men to hit her or done other self-destructive or sexually gross things. Talking at the end with her back to the audience, she says she’s tired of “the precarious way I earn a living”, “the constant checking and rechecking”, the “dystopia”, and “making work in a system that’s broken”. She wonders why she’s doing it, and if she should have planned for her future or gotten a real job instead.

Yet what Orwin portrays goes so far beyond what the generally young, female user base of TikTok is like. I was insulted that a grown woman would put on an act that mocks young girls in the name of spotlighting their supposed misery. Orwin is a performance artist, exaggerating to make an effect, but the baby voices and the determination to humiliate herself seemed more about her than about most of us. If someone on TikTok says they’re “just waiting for a few more people to join”, it’s because they’re legitimately waiting. Sometimes people do rage-bait — act obnoxious to get attention — but the influencers who are famous and making money aren’t the ones doing that. They’re usually offering positive messages and running real businesses.

I also thought maybe that Orwin was on the app for the wrong reasons. She went there because she was “fame hungry”, and all she cared about was getting followers. And she searched out the weird live content from around the world because that was her personal preference. I sometimes see that kind of content advertised in my feed, but I don’t watch them. My followers are mostly my friends, and I don’t obsess about getting more of them from among the strangers online. I use TikTok as a side tool in life; it’s meant to be fun. I capture fun moments with friends in nice outfits, take clips of interesting city views, and follow fashion, health, and beauty content. I didn’t mind deleting the app because as long as everyone was off of it, I wasn’t missing anything.

Many young women have mental-health problems, to be sure, but those result from all kinds of social and personal factors, not just TikTok. Some people might act foolish and inappropriate (especially when they have an audience of one to five people, who are probably just bots), and that isn’t good for them. But it’s also a mistake on that person’s part, not solely the fault of the app. Orwin herself is a good example, because she tells us she has been making disturbing and self-harming work long before TikTok existed.

I don’t know what danger the Chinese ownership of the app truly presents to kids, but I do think it’s dangerous to condemn something you don’t know much about, or whose positive attributes you’re unable to see. I stay mentally healthy despite the stress of the junior year of high school by getting a lot of exercise, eating real food, and spending time with my friends. Orwin poured soda into her Stanley, mocking a teen-girl cliché. I carry a Stanley everywhere, I admit, because I go from school to sports practice, and I get headaches when I’m dehydrated. Mine is always full of water enhanced with Liquid IV electrolyte powder, which is good at preventing them. It really works — I learned about it on TikTok.