Good morning, John.

Almost exactly four years ago, I uploaded  my first TikTok and it did pretty well. My fourth TikTok got, like, millions of views,  and knowing that I had a book coming out soon and that I am fascinated by content  platforms and their cultures, I decided to push pretty hard into this thing that was,  even before the pandemic, growing very fast.

And part of me is very glad that I did.  Another part of me isn't. Kyla Scanlon recently said in a TikTok that  “our eyeballs are the most  expensive thing we own”,  and that is my new favorite way of saying  a thing I've been saying forever. It is upsettingly true that attention is the stuff  a life is made out of, and  we only get so much of it,  and theoretically, we get to  control what we do with it.

Now, obviously, many times, we are not in charge. If there's a coyote on the path, you can't really  choose to not think about the coyote. But we also want to give away that control  sometimes, which also I don't hate.

It's work to be in control all the time,  and we've always given away our attention. We give it away to movies, to books,  to storytellers, to the flow of a conversation, to the incoherent bumbling of whatever automatic  systems take over when we are not exercising control as we walk around   or drive or braid a rope. Humans have spent so much time braiding ropes.  I think this might be one of the big problems: we don't have enough rope braiding time anymore.

I want to be clear, there are lots of things that I really like about TikTok,   not like, I enjoy, but actually that I enjoy and are very good.  I have discovered so many fantastic comedians and artists and musicians,  so many great science communicators that do the job super differently and as such,  have very different audiences. Also, it is just a culture factory.  It's filled with art and  experiments and storytelling.  TikTok has created many beautiful moments, and I didn't just passively enjoy them,  I was a part of them, and I was fascinated and inspired by it, and it changed my life. But it's not just good.

Like, people are currently pretty worried about AI someday taking over the  world like that didn't already just happen. So much of the content we consume  is directed to us by artificial  intelligence algorithms.  And that influences what I believe and what I spend time thinking about,  but even maybe more importantly, it influences what kinds of content gets created  in the first place by media and creators. Algorithms and media and creators work together  to keep us on websites, no matter the cost.

And the cost doesn't seem to be insubstantial.  It seems like our mental health is getting worse, our society is getting more antisocial,  our arguments are getting more divisive. And people are not oblivious to this,  almost half of Gen Z wishes TikTok had never been invented.  So how did this happen? TikTok?

I think their greatest advantage over Instagram  and YouTube, aside from the first mover advantage, was just that it's been cooler.  Like, it's been a cooler place, and nobody can say why something is cool, but TikTok was cool. However, kind of the opposite of cool is caring, and as TikTok became more obviously powerful  and success there became more desirable, it started to be impossible   for creators to not care. And that's a problem for, like, the coolness  of the platform, but it also can kick off a bit of a doom loop with regards to the kind of content  that succeeds if no one steps  in to try and control it.  As you said on Tuesday, John, algorithms are in the business of working with  our biology to control us.

But creators like us are in the business of working with algorithms  to do that as well. And so, as TikTok began to matter more,  TikTokers fought harder in a kind of arms race to capture attention. But   there wasn't really a way to do that by increasing the quality too much,  just because there isn't enough money to be made to pay to increase the quality.  And so, you have to do that in other ways, and some of those ways are great,  but a lot of the best tools to get attention in a space of extremely high competition  for eyeballs are bad.

They are fear, controversy, moral outrage, drama, feelings of superiority.  If a platform doesn’t care, or have the capacity to care when that starts happening,  things on that platform, in  areas of it, start to suck. Now, this is not actually what my For You page looks like, but it is what a lot of people’s  For You pages look like. I have alt accounts where I’ve followed different stuff,  and I’ll tell you, there are a lot of people watching seriously antisocial, anti-democratic,  anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-immigrant content that, if you designed it to lower societal trust,  you could not have designed it better.

People work with machine learning algorithms  to control other people's attentions. That's literally what I do for a living.  And like, I can tell myself that I do it not just for a living, but also for good,  and I think that's true. But I don't just bring my talents and skills to the table, I also bring  my credibility and my audience, and that's scary.

That's, like, a freaking scary responsibility,  because I do not know who I am giving power to when I create on a platform.  Like on YouTube, I know some of those people, which makes me feel a little bit better,  but that's just who's there now. What about in the  future when it's different  people I've given power to?  TikTok, though, I think has structural reasons why it is worse at being able to handle its power,  particularly that short form video is much harder to monetize per minute of uploads, which means  more content to moderate and less money to spend doing that moderation. And yeah, also,  there is the problem of it  potentially being controlled  or influenced by a government that would rather my country have less trust in itself and be more  dysfunctional. ‘Cause here's the thing, you don't actually have to tweak an algorithm  to increase the amount of fear and outrage and division experienced by people on a content  platform.

All you have to do is just kind of let that happen. Obviously, I do not regret the experiences I have had on TikTok, now, I regret a little bit  that it made me substantially more famous, but there's also benefits to that.  What I definitely regret is having helped to put power into a place that I have no control over  and that I do not understand and that I do not think has been a net positive for society.  I didn't go into TikTok thinking strategically or worried about its impact on the world,  I went in curious and hungry and excited and amazed, and though I was obviously  manipulated by its systems to some extent, it really did deliver value for me, and hopefully  my content delivered value for others for a long time. But this world right now is messy  and it's moving fast, and  I wish I was more careful.

There is very little that I  enjoy more than diving into  a new subculture and coming to understand it. Riding cultural waves is my extreme sport,  my chosen vocation, and my greatest area  of expertise. But if I'm an  expert in the experience,  I also have to admit that  I'm an expert in the outcome,  and I am not a fan of the outcomes.

At the same time, I find it impossible to imagine  a content platform as a monolith. Algorithms do not decide what people watch alone.  People participate in that decision, both by deciding what content gets created  and by choosing which  content they spend time with.  And I often, though not all the time, feel like the parts of TikTok that I spend time in  and create for are good. So it's confusing!

If only there was a model that would make it  make more sense. For example, these things always make more sense to me if I imagine  content platforms to be what they actually are: places where we live. And a town can have  bad neighborhoods and good neighborhoods, and they can and should do things to make  the bad neighborhoods better.

And if those towns become less livable,  then people will leave them. But I do worry that if   a content platform gives people more reasons to be afraid, to be antisocial,  to not trust anyone in their society, then people will find their   real worlds less livable and the content platforms the only place  where they feel safe. That should scare everybody.

And I don’t have a ton of faith   in all of the different governments of these spaces, you know, like,  I have a lot more faith in  YouTubes than I do in TikToks. My last little point: as it has transitioned away  from being, like, fun and buzzy and cool, TikTok transitioned for me from a place  where I felt like I was doing things with people and participating in cultural creation to a place  where I felt like things  were just happening to me.  And so in addition to all this high-minded stuff, I just don't enjoy that as much.  Sometimes I get that feeling back, but I seem to have it less and less these days.  Amazingly though, 17 years  later, YouTube still feels  like something I am doing with people. So that's nice, and speaking of which,  download the Pizzamas app–there's a link in the description–to get my terrible collection of  dad jokes sent to you every day of Pizzamas!

Even though it did take   me a while to get all those jokes together, they really are terrible.  John, Pizzamas begins on Monday, which is why I will see you on Monday.