I’m not gonna recount this whole journey here — that’s for the Substack — but I want to get down some numbers and some intention setting.
My plan is to watch all of my liked TikToks. 2114. I counted. I don’t have any kind of average length, but today I clocked in at about a minute a tok. So that’d be 35 hours, end to end. I’m committed though!
Why am I committed though? It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while now, before any of this Restrict Bill jazz started playing. Mindfulness mediation uses a practice called “noting” to acknowledge a thought, thereby letting it disappear. Like, someone keeps making the same joke over and over and you laugh to get them to stop.
Liking a TikTok does something similar. It says “I’ll watch this later,” or “this is a really good idea,” or “that recipe looks good I’ll make it tomorrow night.” By noting the TikTok, you don’t have to think about it anymore.
Truly world-changing ideas, and spot on recommendations, and lovingly crafted pieces of art disappeared in my thousands of liked TikToks. I want to try and recover some of them.
Something I think about a lot is the unarchivability of internet culture. Stuff just disappears. Some platforms try to keep track of everything, but others — particularly social media — lean into the bubbliness of art and conversation generated on the platform.
It reminds me of “right to repair,” the counterpoint to planned obsolescence. I’ll find links for this stuff as I go forward with the project!
At the end of day one though, without any deep research or drafting… the task is very daunting.