I’m going to give you three “theories,” and you have to figure out if they’re real or if they came from TikTok: Hair theory, bird theory and burnt toast theory.
Did you guess?
They are all from TikTok. And these theories are just the very tip of the iceberg of the sort of “intellectualism” found on this app.
Every day you watch a new video on some phenomenon that someone made up, and there are already people in the comments doing think pieces on it like it was always law. Romance and friendship appreciation videos have turned into “I know this person actually hates you because of my pseudo-expertise on body language, though I’m really just projecting”.
An app where random people would just share their thoughts with random people turned into 10-minute. video essays with no nuance. The takes are either entirely based on dunking on whatever you may not like or completely devoid of seeing any other side than their own. Then, they’ll tell you that you didn’t understand the material.
The worst perpetrator of this pseudo-intellectualism is the social media platform Substack. As a current peruser of the app, I have found that through the many memes, the writers on this app consider themselves much more highbrow than other social media platforms.
In the early months of Substack, users were obsessed with flexing scrolling on Substack rather than TikTok, but aren’t you still consuming content?
For those that post, just because you took the time to write the “hot take” out instead of being mic’d up on TikTok doesn’t make the consumption “good.” It’s still social media.
Recently production and consumption as a vehicle for virtue signaling has been all the rage, making the benefits touted shallow or fallen on deaf ears.
You are a much better person for producing content that finds a way to poke holes in the most unnecessary topics, right? And surely you are a much better person for only consuming content that follows these guidelines.
The blog writing medium doesn’t automatically come with well-researched information or scholarly writers; anyone can write and anyone can speak. And especially with this app, the majority of agreeable opinions from other social media get the most engagement, so how are we really any better if we all just tell each other, “Exactly.”
On June 11, Sabrina Carpenter released the announcement of her seventh album “Man’s Best Friend” on her Instagram with an accompanying photograph of the album cover. The singer is on all fours getting her hair pulled by an off-camera man. The storm that brewed from this picture on TikTok was something else.
Many commented that this photograph was “setting women back” and “dehumanizing women”, but did anyone stop to ask why we are looking at a photograph to save women? Why should one woman’s actions be the end-all, be-all for a movement that has been going on long before women had voting rights and bank accounts?
And if one movement can be toppled by one photograph and a few assumptions about how the art will be portrayed once delivered, then it’s a very flimsy movement.
I find Audre Lorde’s quote on feminism a great look into why moments like this wouldn’t set women back. From her book titled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House,” she argues the system cannot be broken if you use the parts that helped build that system.
If you consider one woman’s actions to be the downfall or salvation of all women, you were never really interested in ending the patriarchy.
These types of sentiments run rampant on social media. If you use big words, halfway define your point and can get people to rally behind you, then you’re an intellectual. And no one takes two seconds to go against you, because then they can be lambasted for not going with the majority.
So, jargon is spread far and wide without any means to back up what anyone has said. I propose we all take a break. Take out a thesaurus and actually listen to what someone is saying before fully agreeing.
You may be on the side you swore was the wrong one.
Michaiah Stephens is a 22-year-old English major from Durham, N.C.
