For
Joanna Guelas
I miss Vine this, Vine walked so TikTok could run that. Bestie, there’s a reason why Vine couldn’t run. Vine was gentrified TikTok before TikTok was a thing. On Vine, there was Lele Pons, Liza Koshy and Gabbie Hanna on repeat, but on TikTok? You can have cottagecore lesbian TikTok, tarot card TikTok, straight men queerbaiting TikTok, self-insert so you can date Tom Holland’s Spider-Man TikTok, without even stumbling upon Charlie D’Amelio or Addison Rae. All the Vine compilations are just different orderings of “Staph, I could’ve dropped my croissant” and “Road work ahead? Uh, sure hope it does”. There is no flavour to Vine anymore. Let her rest.
But it’s cringe! Only twelve-year-old eshays use TikTok! Wrong. You’re just scared. You’re clinging onto tradition so hard you can’t embrace modernity. It’s the microtargeting of the For You Page that scares you, isn’t it? Well bestie, Facebook and YouTube use microtargeting to give you advertisements about Oodies and they steal your data too.
TikTok is fun. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that to be valid. And if you stopped letting the insecure “I am cool girl, girl that is cool” you take control, then maybe you could have some extra serotonin too. Could you imagine feeling embarrassed over an app? Bye.
Against
Nishtha Banavalikar
The year is 3021. The earth is in ashes. All that exists of humanity is Jeff Bezos’s incest-ridden lineage. They sit comfortably in their McMansion spaceship, pondering humanity’s last century as Jeff Bezos Jr. Jr. Jr.’s hand hovers over the big red button.
A haunting melody filters in:
“Renegade, renegade, renegade.”
A tear rolls down his cauliflower skin. Were those not happier times? When humanity had merit? When filters would do the work of isolating attractive children women for him and content could be freely stolen from Black creators as his ancestors had dreamed.
Another tear falls.
When E-girls and furries held hands and toed community guidelines in their school uniforms. When algorithms benevolently filtered out the ugly, non-white and non-able bodied. When predators roamed free without discrimination and thousands of tiny, mentally ill voices sang the anthem of his great grandfather. CEO, Entrepreneur…
Time was running out to make a decision. In moments like this, he asks: WWQARD? (What would queen Addison Rae do?)
Nay… his ex-queen. She’d chosen him over her. Chosen… Trump… He growled under his breath and hit the button. Tiktok was dead. Now, he would carve humanity in his own name.