“It brings us back to the darker side of surrealism.” “The only response to an existential situation is absurdity and humour,” Goldsmith says. He sees TikTok’s popularity as a natural reaction to the oppressive mania of a global lockdown – it is a pressure valve for people cooped up indoors. “Surrealism is embedded into the DNA of the internet,” says Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Wasting Time on the Internet. The platform frequently has the surreal quality of a fever dream: videos riff on arcane internet ephemera or make nonsensical jokes. People surprise family members, impersonate celebrities or set up elaborate punchlines. The most important thing to understand about TikTok is that it is anarchic: it has no internal logic or guiding principle. “They write, ‘I love her so much, she’s my Queen,’” she says. She tells me that some young girls have set up a fan page about her on Instagram. “When I go to bed, I think about ideas for tomorrow’s video,” she says. Mai-Davies also plans to give the TikTok influencer thing a go and is posting daily videos. “But now you don’t get on the For You page as easily as before.” (For You is the landing page on TikTok, tailored to users’ interests.) “Before, if you uploaded a video, you could easily get 100,000 views in the first hour,” says Ali. With this influx of new influencers comes competition. “There are a lot more people jumping on,” he says. “Are you serious? Just wash your ass!”Īli says TikTok was already popular before coronavirus, but that the lockdown has supercharged it. “Everyone is going to the supermarket to grab toilet rolls!” Ali says in one video. Ali quit his job as a Sainsbury’s cashier to pursue his TikTok dream: his videos satirise Somali culture or feature Ali on caterwauling form. “I want to be a content creator and make people laugh,” says 24-year-old Akafi Ali, from London. We’ve been in hundreds of articles in 20 different counties.”īecoming a TikTok influencer is now a viable career.

“They want me to FaceTime Holly and Phil. “ This Morning got in contact with me,” she says breathlessly. (At the time of writing, it had 1.6m views.) Sudden fame has left Mai-Davies punch-drunk on her own celebrity. Mai-Davies became a TikTok influencer after a video she posted of her boyfriend pretending to break the coronavirus lockdown – by creeping down their road in a grass-covered costume – went viral. How does she feel? “To be fair, it has been a headfuck,” she responds, before reeling off more figures. In less time than it takes for a banana to go brown, she has accrued an online following double the circulation of some national newspapers. “So the bush-man video went viral on 16.5m views,” Mai-Davies says giddily, “and the video where I pretended to surprise my boyfriend naked, now that’s got 12.5m views.”Īfter joining TikTok just six days ago, the unemployed waitress from Stevenage – like almost everyone else in the hospitality sector, coronavirus cost Mai-Davies her job – has 210,000 followers. I keep asking 18-year-old Madeline Mai-Davies what it’s like to be an overnight TikTok celebrity, but all she can do is rattle off numbers for me. In lieu of going to bars, pubs or clubs, Britons would be staying in – and whiling away our time on TikTok. For the week of 23 March, when lockdown was enforced, UK installations surged by 34%. The week before Boris Johnson announced the lockdown, 278,000 UK users downloaded TikTok on their phones, up 6% from the week previously. But since the lockdown, TikTok has become a seething leviathan of user-generated content, chewing down our boredom, our fatigue and our fear and spitting them back at us in 15-second chunks, to be digested ad infinitum.Īccording to mobile industry analysts Sensor Tower, one in three Brits – 24 million people – has TikTok installed on their devices. Users create 15-second clips set to music or soundbites, which they can overlay with digital special effects.īefore the coronavirus pandemic, TikTok was predominantly favoured by British teenagers, who posted prank videos or the latest trending dance routine on it. Founded in 2012 by Chinese entrepreneur Zhang Yiming, TikTok is one of the most popular video-sharing apps in the world, downloaded more than 2bn times globally.

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