In the small hours of Sunday 16 August, five teenage boys crashed head-on into a family on their way to Dublin Airport to catch a flight to a wedding; none of the boys survived. They had been driving a BMW stolen during a night of carjacking and house break-ins. The family — three adult sisters and a little boy — were all injured; two remain in critical condition. A police spokesman described the crash as part of a trend of “gangs” of young men “trying to outdo each other” with Grand Theft Auto-style car thefts, chases and police exploits. Their audience: TikTok. Mary Aiken, a professor of forensic cyberpsychology at the University of East London, told The Guardian: “They have one foot in the real world and one foot in cyberspace.” 

Grief quickly made way for anger. It emerged that three of the boys were known to Ireland’s childhood social services agency; one had been living under their care. It also transpired that local police had been instructed not to chase them. The public responded with fury, raising more than €660,000 for the injured family in the other car. A predictable outcry was volleyed at TikTok itself, whose representatives said they were “proactively engaging” with Ireland’s media regulator. The Chinese tech giant then refused to appear in front of a government committee on removing dangerous content, saying ongoing investigations by the media watchdog and the police prevented it from doing so. 

At the funerals of two of the boys on Friday, photoshopped images of them squaring up on the stairway to heaven accompanied their white horse-drawn carriages. A vigil was held for the injured sisters that evening. An awful, indecorous story seemed to have drawn to a close. 

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Then, less than a week after the crash, the same thing happened again: five young men died in a preventable collision, this time taking two police officers with them, 37-year-old Matthew Blades and 38-year-old Tom Clough. As before, five boys and men aged 17 to 23 were packed in a Volkswagen Passat bombing the wrong way down the A66 near Middlesbrough in the early hours of Saturday morning. A night of violence by rival gangs — including a stolen car being driven into the house of one of the dead boys’ fathers — sparked a police chase. The boys evaded one squad by joining the freeway; 10 seconds after that chase was called off, they hit another parked police car. Everyone involved was killed. 

Cleveland police said there was no evidence that the fatal crash was filmed for TikTok. But one of the boy racers, 18-year-old Makai Saddington, had previously posted police pursuits on his TikTok account, according to The Sun. In May, one of these videos showed teenagers zooming through a housing estate followed by blue lights. In another, they joyride then torch a Nissan.

A Facebook tribute to Saddington shows the boy in a Nike tracksuit throwing a gang sign; “all of you” are invited to the “baloon release” in his memory. At the event, masked youths “roared around the field” next to a church vigil for the dead, according to The Times. The Prime Minister sent his condolences, then on Monday said glorifying dangerous driving online was “truly reprehensible”. Tributes to the officers described them as “heroes”; Blades was just about to begin coaching an under-7s soccer team. One of his two young sons was on the squad. His colleague, Clough, was a former soldier; his family said he was “always on public duty throughout his short life”. Nine men and three women have since been arrested in connection with the crash, some on suspicion of firearm offenses and threats to kill. 

On Monday evening another police pursuit, this time in Warwickshire, saw a 19-year-old boy die after crashing into a woman in her seventies; she sustained critical injuries. The item was among the main headlines on Radio 4’s World at One. Fatal crashes happen every day; the events this summer, it seems, represent something bigger.

The mindlessness of speeding the wrong way down the motorway is self-evident. But there have always been bored teenagers, vandals with graffiti cans, incorrigible yutes with the urge to smash up garden gnomes. There has also always been adolescent road stupidity; boy racers have been doing donuts in Morrisons parking lots since the dawn of time. But this month’s deaths are not being spoken about online as banal accidents: these twin fatalities, just days apart at the fag-end of the school holidays, have provoked an especially intense feeling of disgust. Thousands of under-the-line comments ask the same horrified question: what is social media doing to our young people?

TikTok itself is clearly not the root cause of teenage recklessness. Teenagers are, by definition, doomed to battle against their own meaninglessness. They are destructive by design, seeking dopamine and adrenaline, wired to go on borderline suicidal jaunts for the meager reward of peer admiration. What social media has done, however, is provide ASBO-ism with a new imagined audience, the wondrous potential for your midnight misdeeds not just to shock your parents but thousands of online strangers, many of whom will comment approvingly on just how mint giving police the runaround really is. 

This sort of tomfoolery is also tonally rural: teenage boys in the middle of nowhere get their kicks by terrorizing country lanes, far more than the ruffians of the metropole — many of whom won’t even learn to drive. There is something maddening about the boredom of countryside adolescence. In a village near where I grew up, two troubled foster teens were rumored to have been driven to distraction by their tutting fogeyish neighbors and took their revenge by “tatering” a goose. That is, they stoned it to death with Maris Pipers. Nowt so queer as folk, especially when those folk are teen outcasts who lack parental discipline. The Tater Taliban kept the good locals talking for years — but that was before the age of algorithm-engineered social media megavirality. 

Many a chav has smashed up a bus stop to the giggles of his four friends; today we must factor in the spectral presence of four million strangers. Teenage delinquency is a local ritual, a spell to conjure attention. The more imagined spectators, the more glorious the act. TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram turn the spotty GCSE candidate into an intrepid digital gladiator; they give his boredom meaning.

Because all teenagers experience crises of purpose and identity, each act of rebellion has its own meaning. The meaning of graffiti is “I was here”. Theft, “everything is mine”. Joyriding, “I’m not scared”. Gang-larping, “I belong”. It’s all quite touching when you look at these irritations through the clouded lenses of a frustrated adolescent. In a strange way, too, ASBO-ism is a bonding ritual for difficult young men: this is not the bedroom-bound psychopathy of a lone school shooter, but the forging of fraternities around vague notions of omertà. All of this was understood in the age of moral panic around “hoodies”, those irreverent hoodlums David Cameron once wanted us to cuddle (or so his critics said). The difference today is that the stakes go far beyond local notoriety: the world is now the teen tearaway’s stage.

Few of us would oppose the careful regulation of daft viral trends which, for example, encourage young men to drive the wrong way down the motorway. It’s common sense: platforms should be quicker to ban accounts and videos that glorify criminality and dangerous driving. The extent to which governments can compel TikTok to act is of course hampered by the usual legislative snags — Politico reported tech insiders’ concerns that the Online Safety Act gives ministers little recourse to act on any offenses other than “priorities” like terrorism. Dangerous driving doesn’t get a look-in. 

Yet the motivating principle is something we cannot possibly keep in check: the imagined audience. This is the real jet-fuel for global adolescent narcissism. Teenagers have an often desperate desire to be seen. And the hypothetical hippodrome of admirers cheering and booing the lonely boy with a provisional license makes him a “legend”. In place of talent, temerity will do. Even when under-16s are banned from social media, they will continue to exist on this new and perverse stage. Rather than dismissing this month’s motorway tragedies as incidental, we should see them as part of the new pantheon of online adolescence. 

General audiences take boy-racer videos for what they are: pleas for attention from the fast, the furious and the fuckwitted. TikTok should ban them, of course — but there’s not that much else we can do in the face of tyrannical teenagers who go around nicking cars. We can train our police in high-speed chases, issue tickings-off, and even roll out public-safety campaigns in schools, but these prove to be blunt instruments against an adolescent brain set on stupidity. 

Perhaps the real lesson, at a time when social-media firms are facing major legal reckonings over child safety, is to think more broadly about how this technology is changing the psychological picture of Western youth — making them more reckless, more hungry for attention. These stories contain ancient warnings about schoolboy rashness, but they also prophesy a frightening future where risk is rewarded by faceless people on your phone. It’s difficult to imagine this summer’s motorway tragedies taking place without TikTok, and the invisible millions who give bored teenagers something to live — and die — for. 

Social media would have us believe that this dynamic is now the norm in heterosexual relationships. Men err like bumbling toddlers; women manage and chastise and cajole them. These videos are fed to me continually on TikTok: women telling horror stories about terrible dates; women offering advice on harnessing “dark feminine energy” to manipulate love interests; women fresh out of breakups denying the value of romantic love at all. Associating with men, these videos tell us, is a matter of tragic compromise — an embarrassing slip into an enclosure of backwards baboons destined to disappoint us. The assumption, borrowed from the language of motherhood, is that girlfriends have a monopoly on reason and on perspective; their partners, on the other hand, are hopelessly in thrall to impulsive urges and emotions, base creatures reliant on sex and drink. In this dynamic, the woman’s celestial faculties have one major source: therapy culture.

The cult of the Therapy Girlfriend was thrown into relief last week in a skit which went viral on X. In it, a woman sits across from her date; she quizzes him on various attributes. Age? 28. Attachment style? Secure. Credit score? 780. Therapy? Once a week. So far, he passes muster. But then the guy scuppers the deal by asking her to “go to my place”; she weighs anchor.

Yet it wasn’t the woman’s skittishness about casual sex that summoned discourse; it was the fact that attending regular therapy was on her list of requirements — once a week being the bare minimum for dateability. Assessing it later, the commentator Colin Wright wrote that the requirement made sense because of “how thoroughly many Left-wing women view nearly every interaction through a kind of ‘therapy ideology’ with its own special language”. He went on to describe how such women conceive of therapy as a sort of “mental-health gymnasium” — part of the necessary upkeep of every healthy adult.

Rather than emerging fully fledged into the adult world, there to deal with the ups and downs of life, therapy culture has us with one wing dangling from the chrysalis — always ready to be bashed by a gust of wind. To go through life unscathed requires Joan Didion’s vision of self-centered psychological labor: “[We are] something to work at, work on, ‘make an effort’ for and subject to an hour a day of emotional nautilus training.” With all this self-discovering, who has any time for seduction?

Clearly, there are occasions when therapy serves a purpose. Men and women alike benefit from it when living with grave psychiatric disorders; in many cases, these interventions should be lifelong with otherwise disastrous consequences. But should all men, even those without troubling histories, be marched off to a headshrinker for the mere purpose of neutering defects, buffing out the bad before they are allowed near a relationship? Any reasonable dater would say no.

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And yet, increasingly, social media pins romantic disappointment on the sins of untherapized men. The language of relationship “attachment styles” is a nauseating example — a bullshit taxonomy of daters said to be doomed by early parental relationships and who, in a better world, would simply be called “desperate” (instead of “anxious”), “not into you” (instead of “avoidant”) and “normal” (instead of “secure”). The greatest trial sent a dater’s way seems to be to fall for an “avoidant” — those who run from intimacy because their mother didn’t rush in when they cried in the crib, or something — and advice on how to “handle” such partners is everywhere in the online femosphere. Such women would do better to avoid those who don’t like them back. Put that on a T-shirt. But the comforting delusion that this attachment-style discourse affords women is that it lets them avoid the horror of simply not being wanted; instead, they are free to meditate their way through an “avoidant discard” (when said partner ups and leaves out of nowhere) by a man whose inner child feels abandoned, and so is scared of intimacy, or whatever the rationale may be. As usual in the theater of hyperindividualism, everyone else is to blame. Easy to see how this flattering framework might have gained traction.

Equally, any amorous mishap can be palmed off on a partner who has failed to do “the work”: the usual, devastatingly reasonable causes of breakups — loss of feeling, wandering eyes, the contempt of familiarity — are traded for ego-friendly explanations: “He is frightened by his enormous passion for me”; “He wants to be with someone less emotionally challenging”; “He is afraid of replicating the mistakes of his parents’ marriage” and so on and so on. Let’s not face the fact that, sometimes, he’s just not that into you. Humility and resilience around this truth is an essential lesson of adulthood — far more valuable than any therapy package going.

This is not to say that the Therapy Girlfriend intentionally weaponizes counseling-speak in her romantic campaigns. In fact I’d contend that the assumptions of therapy — that we must continually enforce “boundaries”, manage “disclosures”, hold “dialogues” and seek “growth opportunities” — pervade Millennial and Gen Z dating culture to an extent that they no longer bear the antiseptic stench of their clinical birthplace. Therapy culture is hopelessly in bed with identity politics, and adherents of one are all but guaranteed to cleave to the other: its obsessions are the same, primarily the unimpeachable traumatized individual, whose needs and expectations supersede those of all others. Its emphasis on “empathy” always seems to go only one way: towards the therapy subject. Even in the context of couples’ therapy — something which, shockingly, I have known unmarried couples in their twenties to do in London (just end it!) — the “discoveries” of therapy seem far more likely to advantage the woman, who is encouraged by our culture to be more analytical, perfectionist and cautious in heterosexual dating. We go through our teens and twenties being told by TikTok dating gurus to fear and loathe men who are both guaranteed and determined to take advantage of, two-time and/or abandon us, such is the culture of fear around relationships; therapy culture is the peg with which we can hold our noses if we must associate with one. We women are encouraged to wield theories about personal growth and the emotional trigger as a sort of disinfectant: get with the program or be cast out — you’re a romantic biohazard.

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Now, don’t get me wrong — our exasperated kitchen-berator from the bed-puke breakup video can clearly do better: this man is an unsalvageable loser. The problem is that when women are encouraged to use the teacherly language of pop therapy (which, unlike real therapy, flatters the help-seeker rather than challenging them), they make losers of everyone they date. Yes, some men — like some women — are unstable to the point of being beyond saving; but a reasonable dating culture would tell us to avoid them, not to reconstruct them. But the Therapy Girlfriend necessarily turns the entire male dating pool into a shuffling army of bashful apologetics, self-flagellating for their criminal lack of “inner work” or suffering through ritual weeping sessions to show their emotional literacy.

And, critically, the Therapy Girlfriend avoids all fun. Love interests should not be cowed by a watchful therapist lingering in the background of all amorous encounters, like the forever-scowling HR team of a midsized corporate office. Men are right to be suspicious of women steeped in the language of “grounding” and “journeys”. These concepts are so often rigged towards things that do not a good relationship make: cautiousness, endless analysis and fragility. At the precious center is always the therapized person, cradling their own self-esteem. In striving to be perfect, placid and invulnerable beings, we miss out on the thrill of romantic risk; the pleasure of being around people who are perhaps not precisely like ourselves. Falling in love is by its nature “dysregulating”, a spinning blizzard, a waking dream. It very often ends in tears — but it’s always worth it. Therapy Girls reading this: send your inner child off to crèche. At some point the grown-ups have to do the talking. If not, you might just let the good times pass you by.

The star of these Chongqing streams is Long Haotian, an internet celebrity who competed for China in breakdancing at the Youth Olympics. His girlfriend-slash-streaming colleague is Yao Yao; she talks in a squeaky baby voice and emotes like an animated character on a video-game loading screen. The couple has enjoyed a strange TikTok virality in the West in recent weeks, spurring imitations and parodies and racking up millions of views. Many clips taken from their videos on Chinese sites receive tens of thousands of likes; one has half a million, and its comments overflow with baffled enchantment. “Understood nothing but could not stop watching,” says one. “This is so bizarre but I will watch them in full,” says another. “Why do I keep watching these,” asks a third. Over the course of these streams, precisely nothing of note happens. Regardless, China watches. The revenue of tuanbo, meaning “group or team livestreams”, is expected to leap from 15 billion yuan ($2.2 billion) last year to 40 billion yuan ($5.8 billion) this year. And now, we watch too.

The Chongqing dancers aren’t a one-off: whenever tuanbo makes it over to Western TikTok, we are rapt. The format is finely tuned for hyperstimulation: bright colors, catchy music, constant interaction with a hidden viewership. Elsewhere, the livestreaming models are even more overt in their roles as meaningless revenue-generators. In one video, pavements are studded with ringlights, each illuminating a pretty Chinese woman who speaks into her phone, collecting donations from viewers or selling plastic products. In some streams, performers float surfboards on wave machines; viewers spike when they fall off. Some have line-ups of four or five girls in their teens or early twenties, each of whom can be made to perform the same dance again, and again, and again. Occasionally they pass out or cry from exhaustion, fake or otherwise; this in turn keeps viewers watching. Other videos stage high-stakes scenarios, such as nonsensical factory work under the scowling gaze of a hated boss. In many cases, the audience is mesmerized by the satisfying repetition. Often these “livestreams” are in fact recorded loops: viewers rarely notice, so unvarying is the format.

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The appeal is rarely that these streamers are especially sexy, or outrageous, or original — it is that they are absurd and perform on demand. The emptier the logic of the streams, the more engagement they drum up. We are accustomed to Western influencers behaving like miniature celebrities — the principles of authenticity, glamor and charisma are piped in directly from Hollywood — whereas Chinese idol culture is about cohesion. Tuanbo performers make themselves generic and perform robotically, often literally moving like automatons. There is no interest in intimacy or sincerity. Like our baby-voiced Yao Yao, they are stock characters. On the Western internet, the individual is the star; on the Chinese internet, success means operating as a highly efficient whole. And so the two forms of content reflect the philosophies of their alien worlds.

Still, it takes a lot of effort to look that flat. China’s streaming stars are working their asses off to come across as catchphrase-bleating idiots while carrying out meticulous and highly choreographed set-pieces. The finished product more closely resembles a call center or production line than a television show. In this, the streams mirror the country’s industrial and military prowess. There is often something borderline martial in the videos’ regimentation. No other country attracts foreign viewers with the spectacle of men marching in a city square. 

Since the Nineties the West has watched, enthralled and aghast, as China has churned out vast factories, corralled hyperefficient workforces and thrown together cities seemingly overnight. Online, a similar thing is happening to pop culture. If the Californian dream of the internet was about liberating creativity, creating a boundless Eden of artists and independent agents, tuanbo offers an alternative future: content that resembles manufacturing. The livestream host is a worker in a vast attention economy, laboring under the same prerogative for efficiency that transformed the country’s factories into the workshop of the world. The principles of Chinese social media are ruthless visions of the future: hyperrationalism and scale, mass production. We are glued to them as horrified Victorians would be glued to the vision of industrial textile mills. They show us how quickly we become cogs. 

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I’d wager that Chinese streaming culture has more influence on the West than any CCP messaging. The CCP does not control these streams, of course, nor are they propaganda in any normal sense of the word. And yet, indirectly, they are engines for Chinese soft power: overt diplomacy efforts are always boring and suspect, whereas new media forms quickly become part of Western culture without anybody caring. These spectacularly weird livestreams haunt and hypnotize Western viewers just like American AI slop of talking fruits, or quasi-sexual ASMR. The difference is that China’s productions have emerged from a far less permissive social-media culture in which censorship is pervasive and brutal, and major tech firms are expected to align with state priorities.

Aside from merely degrading the quality of pop culture — a lost cause anyway in the age of TikTok — what makes tuanbo so unsettling is that it breaks down our understanding of the role of the internet as an ocean of creators, free individuals operating without limits, replacing it with a homogenized bloc of content producers and consumers who are, by definition, unsubversive. China’s novel model of scaling and optimizing online videos may in the future outcompete the Western model of individual creativity. After all, this is the country that conquered industrialized manufacturing; culture, too, could one day be “made in China”. This, I’m sure, would suit Xi Jinping’s agenda just fine. 

Maybe one day, when Xi’s forces inevitably invade Taiwan, the generation of young people who would have turned out on the streets in protest will instead be preoccupied with their phones, watching a squadron of beauty-filtered men in stacked shoes. “When the bass gets bumpin’ up in the club…”

The actors have changed since then and so have their methods. What is unchanged is the idea that political power is about the control of the media. This is why the US and the EU have been engaged in a raging dispute over social media regulation and content moderation since JD Vance criticized the Europeans at last year’s Munich Security Conference for suppressing free speech.

Last week, the EU told TikTok it must become less addictive to its users or else face heavy fines. In December, the EU imposed a fine of €120 million on X for failing to moderate its content as required by the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA). Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) like X, Facebook or TikTok are obligated to employ fact checkers and post community notices to highlight fake news. In France, failing to do so counts as a criminal offense. A French prosecutor has recently summoned Elon Musk to a hearing in Paris. Pavel Durov, the Russian founder of Telegram, was arrested upon landing in France in August 2024.

The Europeans have totally misjudged what is going on. For the Trump administration, European censorship rules of US social media is the single biggest issue in transatlantic relations. Donald Trump and the hard-Right in Europe owe their ascent to digital media. The ability to bypass the oligopoly of the legacy print and broadcasting media was critical to Trump’s two election victories. The EU’s old establishment parties are fighting a desperate battle to keep digital forces at bay. Just look at what’s happened to the venerable Washington Post. In 2017, when Trump came to power for the first time, the paper gave itself the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, a cry of despair. Now, it’s fired 300 journalists. The decline of the traditional media and the rise of the MAGA movement are linked.

In continental Europe and the UK, the old media oligopoly is more robust than in the US, but it is much weaker than it used to be, and is getting weaker every year. By and large, the political establishment still controls the legacy media. The legacy media, though, is losing control of the narrative.

This is the context in which the DSA should be understood. It forces large social media companies to issue DSA-compliant community guidelines to which users must agree. It does this with the help of so-called “trusted flaggers”, which are often NGOs and are nominated by national governments. One such organization is HateAid, a German group which was recently subjected to US sanctions. The trusted flaggers act as the internet’s truth commissars, identifying what they perceive to be violations of the rules. They directly alert the platform, and the European Commission monitors whether the company reacts to the warnings and can impose penalties as it did against X.

Washington is now preparing to respond. The FT reported last week that a senior state department official, Sarah Rogers, met with Right-wing think tanks in Europe to discuss funding to spread the MAGA gospel or, as she put it, American values. At its core this US-EU dispute is about the diffusion of MAGA political themes in Europe. Think tanks and civil society organizations play an important role in the public discourse. In Europe, they are mostly on the Left.

That story chimes with the leak late last year of a draft version of the administration’s National Security Strategy. The final, official version was already hostile towards the Europeans. It talked about civilizational erasure, and criticized transnational bodies — meaning the EU — which are “transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition”. The earlier draft went further, though, containing a passage in which the US committed itself to pry countries away from EU membership. While that was not included in the final version, Rogers’s comments suggest that this is indeed the policy.

The Americans have other instruments at their disposal. Trump could impose his favorite instrument: tariffs. He could do so even if the Supreme Court were to rule against the legality of his Liberation Day tariffs. Retaliatory tariffs against countries that discriminate against companies fall into a different category.

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The companies themselves might push back. EU legislation applies only to companies and their subsidiaries with a physical residence in the EU. X or Meta might close down their European offices, forgoing some revenue in the process. That might be a price worth paying to safeguard an otherwise lucrative business model. The EU does not have alternative providers.

European voters might also rebel against the bloc. With its data protection legislation, AI and crypto regulation, the Digital Services Act, and the Digital Markets Act, the EU has built a kind of Luddite wall against 21st-century technologies, most of which originate in the US. The idea of Europe as a museum or a tourist destination may be charming; it is not, however, a sustainable economic model. The more the Commission decouples from modern technologies and services, the more unsustainable its strategy becomes.

This political battle is about agenda-setting and control. It is not really about free speech — that is a straw-man debate. It is true that the Europeans are restricting the spread of Right-wing content and turning people into criminals for posting a tweet. But Trump’s America is not exactly a bastion of free speech either. Last year, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Turkish PhD student at Tufts University, was arrested and earmarked for deportation for writing an article in which she criticized her university for how it handled pro-Palestinian protests. She was held in a detention camp until a judge ordered her immediate release. Marco Rubio said at the time: “We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not become a social activist that tears up our university campuses.” The US is in no position to teach the Europeans about free speech.

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Philip Graham, the previous owner of The Washington Post, once called journalism “the first rough draft of history”. As historians know only too well, historical drafts often get completely rewritten over time. What appears true today is often revealed as false tomorrow. The idea that we can put somebody in charge of the truth is absurd. Yet it is no less absurd than the attempt to restrict foreign students in the US to write articles in student newspapers.

The reason why the EU will lose this battle is straightforward and has nothing to do with free speech. It will lose because the US is the senior partner in the bilateral relationship. It is Europe’s tragedy that it made itself reliant for its defense and technology on somebody with whom it no longer shares its basic values.

The DSA is a rebellion, but it falls into the category of failed putsches. It recalls the Spanish military’s attempted seizing of the Spanish parliament in 1981. The putsch failed because the junta did not control the narrative. It ended after only 18 hours when King Juan Carlos I went on national TV to denounce the putschists and ordered them to go home.

Forty-four years later, the Europeans no longer have such power, and they won’t get it back.

This is the routine they’ve flogged to millions of views. One asks a stranger (or, increasingly, a celebrity) their favorite places to eat in London; the other edits the “Nooo way, mate!” responses into a neat, reel-able montage. They don’t discover restaurants; they collect them, like Pokémon cards, to be traded, ranked, and bragged about. Their videos are interchangeable, the restaurants interchangeable, the answers indistinguishable from the ones given yesterday or the day before. London is a chorus of cloned soundbites: best pizza, best Guinness, best hidden gem, best, best, best.

Welcome to the grease-flecked world of Topjaw, with host Jesse Burgess and cameraman Will Warr enjoying clicks galore and endless hangouts with everyone from Jamie Oliver to the guy who runs The Devonshire. Alongside other perennially online influencers — from the faux-gasmic gurner “Eating With Tod” to the patronizing seriousness of James Dimitri — there’s no doubt that they’re revolutionizing London’s restaurant scene. Yet whether that’s a good thing is a very different question, and one with vast implications for how the capital thinks about food.

Not so long ago, restaurant criticism was serious business. Fay Maschler could sink an opening with a single disdainful sentence. AA Gill, for his part, famously turned reviews into prose-poems of bile and beauty. In one, he dismissed a Mayfair dining room as “so beige it felt like eating inside a wet wipe” — before segueing into a meditation on civility, cities and the theater of hospitality. Marina O’Loughlin, Jay Rayner, Giles Coren; each wielded less a fork than a rapier, writing pieces that were as much about politics and morality as they were about food.

Then came the cuts. Newsrooms downsized, supplements shrank, critics’ expense accounts disappeared. The long lunches and slow deadlines that had once produced operatic write-ups were strangled by spreadsheets. Twenty years ago, every major paper had a roster of critics; now there are only seven national restaurant critics left in Britain. The wider picture is no healthier either: investment in frontline editorial staff fell by around 15% through the 2010s. None of this is really that surprising. Why send a writer out to eat five courses when you could commission an intern to bash out “Five Rooftop Bars for Summer” in half an hour, then watch it gather 10 times the clicks?

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Social media had an impact here too, as Instagram filled the vacuum with a carnival of lurid food porn. The examples here are depressingly varied, from rainbow bagels and milkshakes topped with doughnuts to burgers bisected in high-def close-up. These are less meals than pageantry, edible pantomime staged under ring lights. Food has increasingly ceased to be about sustenance, or even pleasure; it’s mere theater for the camera, an endless striptease of yolks and cheese-pulls, consumed not by mouths but by eyes.

This didn’t happen by accident. Instagram, after all, rewards spectacle: the more unhinged the dish, the more it’s shared, liked and reposted. Viral reach means money — queues, brand deals, investment — so restaurants engineer dishes for shock value alone.

Then there’s the broader cultural context. The fact is that Britain has fewer entrenched culinary traditions than its peers. For if Paris and Rome have storied dining cultures, and New York has institutions that outlive trends, London’s food scene is young, status-driven, brittle. It grew up fast in the 2000s and 2010s, powered less by heritage than by waves of migration, fashion and finance. Restaurants here are ventures more than inheritances, built on concepts that can quickly get old.

In other words, then, the algorithm’s appetite for novelty has slotted neatly into London’s frantic zeitgeist. And with the repeatability of social media came real power. A single Topjaw reel could now transform a business overnight. When they filmed at The Devonshire a few years back, the clip rocketed past a million views in days; queues snaked down the street, reservations vanished for months, and the pub tipped into outright mania. Diageo, I can only imagine, licked its lips at Guinness’s sudden trendiness.

Yet where an old-school critic might savage you, an influencer would only ever promote. They want to be seen as a soft touch, someone who, for a free meal — or, later as they became more powerful, a figure with tens of thousands of fans — would give you a 30-second reel of glowing, excitable praise. It isn’t hard to see why. A traditional critic arrives as a stranger, armed with anonymity and the freedom to be unimpressed; their job is to tell the truth, not make friends. Influencers, by contrast, build their entire brand on access, from the kitchen tour to the matey chat on camera. Yet once you’ve been welcomed into the back office and patted on the shoulder, it becomes almost impossible to be honest; criticism feels like betrayal, not reportage.

Of course, London is far from unique here, with social media fandom now dominating the culinary discourse across many major cities. In Berlin, for instance, the online food scene skews anarchic and niche: thinking grainy videos of Turkish grill masters in Neukölln and vegan donuts in Friedrichshain. But London is particularly susceptible to the glibbest praise — and not merely because of its history. This, after all, is a city in economic churn. Rents are crippling and margins thinner than phyllo pastry. Restaurants age in dog years: if they’re not packed from day one, they die. Nine in ten fail in their first year. In this climate, a viral TikTok is oxygen. Ignore it and you might just suffocate.

Add to that society’s peculiar obsession with status. In a city where housing, clothes and cars are out of reach for most, restaurants become the accessible status marker. It’s cheaper to book the hot new pasta spot than buy a flat in Hackney. Food, then, has become a way of performing success. As so often, social media turbocharges these trends: even if you don’t eat there, reposting a reel lets you take part in the performance of taste.

It would be unfair, here, to sneer too heavily. The Topjaw lads seem nice enough, enthusiastic, polished. They haven’t committed a crime; they’ve merely given us what we want. And while the old guard of critics turned reviews into theater and polemic, they were writing for readers who had the time to sit with 1,000 words. TikTok is the opposite: food for the impatient, calories for the thumb. And it works: #LondonFood racks up literally billions of views, and even the old guard gets dragged in too.

The grandees of print — Coren, Rayner, the rest, all of whom, I should say, still write with flourish and flair — must now appear as guests on influencer feeds, mugging for the camera, trading their authority for likes, reducing their art to a five-second take. They laugh, fist-bump, faux-disapprove. Their presence flatters the influencer more than it enlightens the viewer. And you sense, watching them, a certain ambivalence. They know the format cheapens what they do, yet old-media prestige doesn’t insulate you from the gravitational pull of the algorithm. The audiences barely overlap — Times readers aren’t the ones queueing outside the latest Topjaw spot — but perhaps that’s the point: it’s the press trying to look “current,” a flicker of insecurity in an industry that has dwindled in influence.

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Either way, the cumulative effect is to turn London into a spreadsheet of “must-tries”. And it’s a profound shift, when you think about it: for most of the last century, eating out in London was defined by the food itself — whether the grand hotels of the interwar years, the postwar Formica caffs, or the explosion of immigrant cooking from the Sixties on. Restaurants were places of sustenance, community, escape; even when the food was bad, the point was the meal. The idea that dining might be primarily about experience would have baffled almost every previous generation. Only in the 21st century, as hospitality fused with lifestyle branding and then with social media, did the center of gravity tilt. Today, the food almost feels incidental: what matters is the image, the queue, the vibe, the verification. In historical terms, it’s a radical inversion: the meal as souvenir rather than the meal as memory.

The consequences are vast. Curiosity is the first thing to vanish: the chance of stumbling into somewhere you’ve never heard of, the joy of a dish that photographs badly but tastes sublime. The possibility of disappointment should always be inseparable from the possibility of delight. TikTok erases all that in advance; you have pre-lived the meal before you’ve even sat down.

This often leaves the oddballs — the places that give a city texture — struggling to survive. A bowl of stew can’t go viral. A restaurant full of silence and warmth has nothing to show the algorithm. And so, especially with those rent rises, many are squeezed out. The few who do catch the influencers’ eye face the opposite fate: institutions that survived for decades suddenly find themselves mobbed by TikTok pilgrims, their regulars elbowed aside by ring lights and selfie sticks. Take E. Pellicci’s on Bethnal Green Road. It’s a casual place I grew up going with my dad. Now, it’s overrun by fry-up fetishists.

No wonder, then, that we are starting to tire of it. As Hunger magazine wrote last year: “Once you’ve seen one Topjaw video, you’ve pretty much seen all of them.” The formula is polished to the point of parody, and by their own admission, they have no intention of deviating from it. They, along with all other successful influencers, feed the algorithm with the same set-ups, the same cackles, the same “best in London” superlatives, because that is what works.

Perhaps, even for Topjaw, fatigue will set in. Perhaps people, bored of the infinite loop, will seek out the weird, the old, the unfilmable. Or perhaps we might start eating in silence. Don’t tell anyone. Go somewhere unfashionable. Refuse the compulsion to share. Because food is not just hedonism; it’s the scrape of cutlery, the sag of conversation, the lull when nothing happens. It is accidents, mistakes, the unexpected. And these are things that cannot be edited into a reel. So next time you pass the lads outside The Devonshire, ignore them, and let them ask their questions to the void.

An X account called The Patriot Oasis, which specializes in viral culture-war ragebait clips, salivated: “Sydney Sweeney has opened the door for Woman across America to celebrate Pure American Beauty.” Of course, the post was referring to the storm in a teacup over Sweeney’s cornball American Eagle jeans ad (“my eyes are up here!”). Like Sweeney, who has become a symbol of MAGA’s red-blooded sexual power, sorority girls across America have had social media in a chokehold this month. With their clean-cut hotness, their smiley edgelessness, their blonde and white and slim uniformity, these women are considered dreamgirls by the men rejecting woke aesthetics in disgruntled corners of Reddit and X.

The irony is that no self-respecting sorority girl would so much as glance at one of her neck-bearded fanboys. But no matter: she is the gleaming symbol of defiant conservatism for men fed up with being rejected and outcompeted by women in their own lives. A retreat to the safe symbolism of Greek life — which is nationwide but highly concentrated in the more conservative South — is the antidote to their hairy-armpitted tormenters, a bucket of water to melt the feminist witch. “No blue hair in sight,” reads a comment under one Rush post. “America is officially back,” goes another. But perhaps the most revealing comment is this: “Being a 21-year-old woman must feel like having a million dollars in your pocket.”

And yet the online Right’s dream of sorority houses bursting with fancy-free girls hardly reflects the reality. The giggly hot-girl reputation is in fact carefully curated, built on years of stringent selection processes and internal policing. On TikTok, one former sorority girl recalls a chapter-wide email mandating that sisters drink and flirt with frat boys in order to maintain their party invitations. And as with many a Bechdel-flopping male fantasy, what goes on between women behind closed doors is not all pillow fights. In fact, sororities can be vicious and prejudiced — for some girls, it’s a four-year psychological war.

The system is openly discriminatory in a way that would horrify most British graduates, but these intricate snobberies are key to a sorority’s success. Each sorority has a national headquarters and distinctive prestige that must be upheld at any cost; for example, Kappa Kappa Gamma and Chi Omega are among the most competitive for recruits. With reputation comes high standards: one Chi-O chapter apparently had the slogan “skinny, pretty, fun”. It should probably have added “rich” too: sorority membership can cost thousands of dollars per year, plus room and board in plush campus housing, often with private chefs.

Conducting a deep dive into the confessions of current and former sorority girls on TikTok this week, I have found myself wondering that we don’t hear of blood-spattered Greek mutinies every term. I’ve read accounts of girls being kicked out for having had an abortion, speaking about domestic violence, or wearing the wrong jeans; one chapter would apparently “fat shame sorority girls by making them sit on a turned-on washing machine and point out any fat they have”. Every year at one college, girls are said to lie about having had childhood cancer in order to ace a chapter’s philanthropic mission for the charity St Jude’s (of course, when discovered they are dutifully booted out). Other sackable offenses included posting pictures with red cups in the background, hinting at alcohol — jeopardizing the chapter’s clean-cut image — and failing the “zip code” test (being from a rough neighborhood). Many claim non-whites are lumped together in activities and dorms if they make it in at all.

There is an atmosphere of mindless zealotry with a dash of body-horror: “We had to yell rush chants for hours until a girl threw up,” writes one woman. The tales, like all yawn-worthy university anecdotes, contain a predictable amount of vomit, tears, alcohol and piss; unlike other universities, they also involve Botox and lip filler: “They brought in a representative from a plastic surgery/beauty clinic to give us discounts,” confesses one presumably wrinkle-free alumna. And, to confirm less charitable stereotypes about the intellectual talents of sorority girls, here is the best story of all: “I had a PNM [potential new member] tell me during the philanthropy round that she connected with our philanthropy (helping the blind/visually impaired) because her shih tzu got glaucoma and had its eyes removed.”

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Of course, none of this is mentioned over on RushTok, the TikTok tradition which sees a handful of girls go megaviral each year for vlogging their attempt to join the top-tier houses in their college. The breakout star of 2025 is Izzy Darnell, the younger sister of Kylan, the “Queen of Rush”, who secured her own Bama bid in 2022. Izzy’s TikTok is chock-full of “fit checks” for each day of Rush week: in one, she wears a puffy pink dress with a big bow, golden stilettos and a matching handbag, hair in loose waves and face contoured to the nines. Yet on Saturday, she shocked her fans by dropping out of the recruitment process; an article in People magazine, with quotes from her mother, suggests that she couldn’t hack the mean-girl atmosphere of Bama Rush.

Izzy and her ilk attest to an eerie new consumerism-obsessed chapter in Greek life, in which potential recruits are judged by supermodel standards. Their outfits must be elaborate, pristine and designer. Their hair is piled Southern high, their tans are glowy and even. They start their day not by nursing well-earned hangovers but by rolling ice over their faces to depuff themselves before a full face of slap. And, of course, they never seem to do any work. Is this what being a student is all about?

The truth is sororities are high-surveillance statelets organized around the bizarre directives of mean girls. But for their new admirers, alt-Right blokes on social media, this is all gravy: the values these houses purport to reflect — charity, propriety, tradition — are clearly compatible with a traditional idea of conservatism, but the values which actually seem to lurk beneath — being hot, rich and sexually available — make up the wet dreams of the embittered incel types who slobber over these videos. That sorority girls tend to sport the “MAGA Barbie” look only adds to their appeal. Meanwhile, MAGA hatreds are mirrored in the soft prejudices which power Rush weeks across America: is she fat, is she poor, black, a lesbian — or one of us? Best of all for the internet weirdos, the sorority house is a potent symbol of what, in their parlance, “they took from us” — a vision of an older and more brutal America which whittled its wives into shape at any cost.

The online-Right fantasy of the sorority is as a dreamwife finishing school; the reality seems to be a toxic beauty pageant where the awkward but necessary experiments of university — the bad haircuts, the messy nights out — will get you kicked out. Welcome, ladies, to the best years of your lives.

Rae was 18 when she broke into our cultural imagination amid the first Covid lockdowns. She choreographed and mimicked dances in TikTok videos, and turned her millions of followers into devoted listeners. Her first self-titled album, released the following year, preached the #GirlBoss feminism of a bygone era: “I’m obsessed with me as much as you.” It was a flop. But then she let go of her self-determined pop vision, gave up attempted originality. Instead, she became something cleverer, more kitsch, consciously emulating Britney Spears and Bjork — less a pop star than someone who wants to be a pop star. Since her transformation, every single she’s released has shot up the charts to wide critical acclaim.

Her success is an index of TikTok’s power as a star maker, and the way the app has dominated not just the music industry, but fame itself. But it’s a Cinderella not lacking for a dark side: TikTok fame endangers and takes advantage of teenage girls.

Rae’s metamorphosis followed a clear-cut, and volatile, path familiar to earlier generations of teeny-pop fans raised on the Disney Channel: that of the young star who shed the snakeskin of adolescence into something sexy and avant-garde. Rae’s formula was formula. Her innovation was not to innovate at all. And so, she fulfilled the American Dream that Disney, and now TikTok, promised: an ambitious cheerleader from Louisiana — where her idol Britney Spears also grew up — could be shepherded by managers and executives waving more cash than her family had ever seen, to become a global superstar. But it’s never that simple.

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There are Disney princesses, and then there are Disney Channel princesses. Disney brought up a generation of young people who went home after school and were parented by their televisions. As society shifted, so did Disney: the soft traditionalism of prince-charming love stories gave way to high-schoolers who fought, laughed, danced, and sang for millions of young watchers; the mediators of what life could and should be. Then those teenagers rebelled, turning their lives inside out. It’s now just as much a well-trodden path to success as the one it was originally defined as a fall from: Rae became, in the words of Rihanna, “a good girl gone bad”.

The formula may be the same, but the medium has changed. The Disney Channel is a shell of its former self, with only about 100,000 viewers while 68% of teenagers go on TikTok every day. The Wild West of TikTok influencers — paid through lucrative brand deals but without contracts or stability — means that you can shoot to enormous success as a teenager without any guardrails or support.

Yet even in the Disney-dominated era, there were signs of trouble. Britney Spears shaved her head and was hounded by paparazzi; Miley Cyrus swung naked on a wrecking ball; and so on. These tendencies have found their next shape in TikTok’s algorithm.

The day after Rae flashed Coachella’s crowd and was videoed by thousands, the child star Sophie Nyweide died at 24, from a what authorities suspect was an accidental overdose. Nyweide was thrust into the spotlight when she was just 5, and her death was a sobering reminder of what fame’s aftershocks can do to the young and vulnerable. Nyweide’s death, like Britney’s breakdown, is another example of the industry’s Faustian bargain: give up control and we’ll make you into a star.

Girls like Spears, Amanda Bynes, and Miley Cyrus, who got famous as kids on our televisions, turned their Disney fame into stardom at brutal costs to their lives. They were left unable to make the usual mistakes of being a teenager without the eyes of millions upon them. This was not an incidental side effect. As a new book by the Atlantic writer Sophie Gilbert, Girl on Girl, argues, the industry was designed to feed on girls — and then discard them.

Gilbert suggests that two forces, porn and paparazzi, transformed a generation of women, impelling them to switch away from powerhouse idols like Madonna in favor of sexualized but virginal and girlish figures like Britney Spears and Kate Moss. Real women, in control of their music, were replaced by girls being shaped by their managers. This was the era of American Beauty, Britney Spears with schoolgirl outfit and pigtails, a 2003 Vanity Fair cover declaring: “It’s Totally Raining Teens!” The early Oughts showed girls that “there was only one way to exist in public”, Gilbert writes, “and it was a trap.”

TikTok has brought this trap to the doorstop of every teenager in the world. Want to use your body for likes, money, and fame? The siren app beckons. The algorithm rewards nudity, dancing, and oversharing personal trauma. The writer Roxane Gay, after sinking glassy eyed into the algorithm, observed how “right there, in plain sight, is TikTok, a platform hosting the new pornographers, savvy, hungry creators willing to push and test and give, more and more and more”.

Take Jenny Popach (whose real name is Roselie Arritola), who had 7 million followers by the time she was 15 and posts hyper-sexualized dance videos with captions like “when men can go to jail for being with you”. She rakes in a small fortune from brand deals but still has braces. When a Bloomberg interviewer asked her mom about her daughter getting famous, she said: “We loved it. We loved the attention…. I knew I’d be famous one day, I believe in destiny, and I believe in manifestation, and I believe Roselie is that.”

Kids like Popach proliferate on TikTok, dancing, making money, and dreaming of the Addison Rae model of fame: where a video can turn into a record contract, and then into the main stage at Coachella. Nearly a third of TikTok users are under age 14; and any scroll on the app will lead you to prepubescent girls, dancing, trying on makeup, playing at adult femininity but for an audience that includes not only their peers, but millions of unknown grownups, too. Gilbert’s book tracks the horrific “countdowns” that magazines and public figures had for Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, and the Olsen twins to turn 18 and be legal for sex. Popach’s 18th birthday has elicited countless such fantasies from men on TikTok.

By sharing your own life, you may eliminate some of the power of the paparazzi who stalked Spears so brutally, but you also have to accept your place in the industry’s ecosystem; or as Gilbert writes: “Young women in the public eye had been framed across media as sexy, entertaining, uncomplicated dolls, paid to entertain but never complain. Some understood the bargain.”

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Addison Rae bought into the bargain. She only got famous the same year that Britney gained control of her finances. Her tongue-in-cheek references to Spears show her ability to alchemize pop’s darkness into fun self-defense. She teased the paparazzi with her likeness to Britney when she was photographed walking down the street in pigtails reading Spear’s 2023 memoir, The Woman in Me; and in her music video for “High Fashion,” she danced next to a bottle of Spears’s perfume. Her success, we can hope, is a direct rebellion against the more exploitative forces that trapped Spears. She references Spears so frequently not just because she admires her, but because she isn’t her.

Still, as Gilbert’s book reminds us, the misogyny inflicted upon Britney and her peers never went away: we internalized it. Scroll through TikTok, and the exploitation paradigm feels like everyone’s reality. Back in the Disney days, says Gilbert, it was shocking to imagine that girls “could be most liberated while on their knees”. Now it would only be shocking to question that.

Disney doesn’t make stars anymore; stars make themselves, and TikTok profits when they do. TikTok, like Disney before it, makes its money from teenage girls, and those girls hope to get fame back from it. Some, like Addison Rae, may get everything they want from it, and emerge unscathed. But most who idolize and emulate her will not be so lucky.

When Trump assumed office on Jan. 20 and tossed the company a life raft, he did so by issuing an executive order that overrode duly enacted legislation, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court days earlier. By this Saturday, TikTok was supposed to have been sold or shut down in the United States.

Instead, Trump on Friday told his followers that a deal his administration has been hammering out “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”

He added: “We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the USA!). This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security! We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark’. We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

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ByteDance called the government’s bluff and briefly shut down ahead of Trump’s January decision, rather than sell TikTok to an American company. The firm’s unflinching obstinacy, perhaps, explains why everyone just shrugged at the first executive order and hoped for the best — and why they’re doing the same now too. Trump set investors scrambling, China hawks seething, and constitutional lawyers questioning how the move comported with the president’s stated ambition of restoring the separation of powers.

TikTok knows it has the cards. Whether ByteDance is at all interested in ultimately going through with a deal is a fair question: plenty of lucrative offers from US investors have been on the table. According to CBS News, a source said Trump was set “to sign an order initiating a 120-day period for closing the deal, allowing time to finish paperwork and secure financing”, but that “China backed out once Trump imposed the global import taxes”. Tariffs are a believable excuse, but it’s not impossible China is like Lucy with the football to Trump’s Charlie Brown.

TikTok is a major bargaining chip in a grave geopolitical struggle. Given the data users have always sent to Beijing, it’s been a bargaining chip ever since it arrived on America’s digital shores. For Trump, though, it’s not exactly his chip to bargain with: Congress already determined the American course of action. The mystery is why nobody seems to mind Trump delaying its execution — or at least, why nobody is complaining publicly.

With Trump’s 5 April deadline looming, I set out in March to query Trump-friendly conservatives on the legitimacy of his executive order. Several requests went unanswered, despite repeated efforts, while one group politely declined to comment over concerns about the sensitivity of the subject matter.

In reaching out to experts, I’d asked specifically about a summary of the executive order from Jim Geraghty of National Review. “Trump just didn’t want to enforce the law, even though it was constitutional. Nothing in the law’s text said the president could suspend it for 75 days”, Geraghty wrote. “The president and the executive branch cannot just ignore a law that was passed by the legislature and upheld by the judicial branch. It doesn’t matter if you love Trump or hate Trump, the president doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are enforced”.

Was that accurate, I wondered, and if so did it undermine Trump’s plan to champion the “unitary executive theory” in the name of checks and balances?

On the one hand, ensuring the proper scope of executive power is so important to the Right that Trump is firing commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and members of the National Labor Relations Board to restore presidential authority. On the other, he’s flagrantly ignoring Congress to improperly assert executive authority by almost any fair evaluation of the law.

It’s an important dynamic to scrutinize because Trump is — right now — claiming executive authority to override Congress on TikTok while also arguing forcefully for the “unitary executive theory” upon which the DOGE “revolution” hinges. What explains the Right’s hesitation to publicly advocate against this radical expansion of power, even as the GOP seeks to wrest presidential authority back from cabinet agencies and contain the Beijing regime?

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Shortly after Trump confirmed his decision in January, a couple of brave souls pointed out the obvious problems. “For constitutional conservatives: the law requiring the shutdown or qualified divestiture by ByteDance of TikTok, provides no statutory basis for the president to suspend enforcement. This is an illegal order. The bill uses ‘shall’ not ‘may’ in section 2(d) outlining enforcement”, posted tech writer Mike Brock.

Conservative John Hasson argued: “Per the TikTok law, Trump can only extend the window if he certifies to Congress that TikTok has ‘binding legal agreements to enable [its] execution’ of a ‘qualified divestiture’. Seeing as TikTok has no such agreement in place … Trump can’t do this”.

Flash-forward to Deadline Week and the Associated Press published a story with the headline, “Why no one is challenging Trump’s executive order that keeps TikTok running”.

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The AP noted that few members of the bipartisan coalition that passed the bill put up much of a protest over the 75-day extension, which “the law does not permit”, according to an expert quoted in the piece. As Sarah Kreps of Cornell University asked, “who’s the constituency [for challenging Trump’s extensions]? You have 170 million Americans using the app, and they’re pretty happy to see this continue to be available to them”.

And that’s probably where the mystery stops. TikTok is a substantial part of most teenagers’ daily lives, used by most people under 30, woven deeply into the fabric of popular culture, and a big chunk of the economy. If Trump can broker a deal, why rock the boat over a 75-day extension?

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TikTok critic Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins and the American Enterprise Institute told me in mid-March that “if the pause results in the sale of TikTok, in a way that meaningfully addresses the underlying security, intelligence, and propaganda, concerns, then I think the administration will have a decent argument that the pause served its purpose”.

“The problem”, he added, “is that President Trump has consistently signaled that his real goal is to strike some sort of a deal on this issue with China. Leaving aside the merits of any such bargain, the problem here is that this sends the signal that everything in the US-China relationship is transactional. The proper message would be that, if TikTok really does pose a threat to US national security, as President Trump once believed, and a bipartisan majority of senators and representatives concluded last year, then a ban or divestiture should not be negotiable. It should be a necessary step taken to protect America’s position in a high stakes competition”.

At the center of this conflict is data and, at risk of sounding dramatic, some measure of mind control. Whether you buy claims that China manipulated the TikTok algorithm to turn young Americans against Israel, there is something discomfiting about a Chinese firm retaining significant control over the US operations of an app used by millions of Americans. And the potential for surveillance and predatory data mining are bad enough without allegations of political mind control. ByteDance, of course, has repeatedly denied it’s engaged in any such activities.

But that is, of course, why a robust bipartisan coalition of American policymakers is also eager to get TikTok in the hands of entities stateside — both to wrest these powers for China and potentially use them for domestic purposes.

Trump’s motives here are not difficult to parse, and the bill in question is legitimately problematic. He’s popular on TikTok, and close to one of the company’s major investors. Conservatives have bigger fish to fry than what seems like a losing battle against the app, and most know they need to pick their public battles carefully when it comes to challenging this White House. And with the whole world seemingly allied against the president, his sensitives and loyalty tests aren’t entirely unreasonable this time around.

On this and other bold decisions from Trump, his defenders repeatedly cite the need to fight fire with fire and push back against Democrats’ perceived lawlessness, rather than fight with one hand tied behind their back. They point to Biden’s policy on student loan debt. “I promised to ease student debt for millions of folks”, Biden posted on X. “The Supreme Court blocked me, but it didn’t stop me”.

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Back in 2021, Aaron Blake criticized Biden’s COVID-era eviction moratorium policy in the Washington Post, summarizing the president’s attitude as, “It might not be legal, but even if it’s not, we’ll get some good done in the meantime”.

Both parties can play the blame game all day, arguing until they’re blue in the face about who started all of this — at least in modern US history. But that’s the point. As talking heads have spent recent weeks shouting at one another about Trump’s explicit challenges to the status quo on deportations and federal workers, his TikTok policy faded into the background. In the shadow of scrutiny, Republicans and Democrats hoping for a deal that benefits the United States may have forfeited a principle they claim to be fighting for bitterly in other theatres.

The proof is Trump’s flippant 75-day extension of his first 75-day extension. As fallout continued from his tariff bombshell — including the legitimacy of his emergency authority to implement the new rates — barely anyone batted an eye at TikTok getting another dubious bailout.

“Bop” is Gen Z slang for “baddies on point”, but has developed the spittle-flecked cadence of “slut”; these young women dance, pose, joke and tease millions of TikTok viewers as an extended advertisement for their individual OnlyFans porn accounts. Every now and then, a young edgelord will copy and paste what has become the stock snarky response to OnlyFans content: “Wonderful! Honorable! Optimistic! Radiant! Excellent!” Calling these influencers “whores” savagely scratches an understandable itch: acknowledging the true nature of these videos, supposedly innocuous clips which act as shopfronts for wank material.

The fact is that these influencers have carved out a role in mainstream social media, with the grim nature of their trade couched in cozy euphemism: they make “spicy content”, we are told, probably to remove the shame factor of slinging a teenager a fiver a month to see her boobs. (Shame, after all, is bad for business.) Not only have many of the eight Bop House “creators” neglected to make their ages public, but they have specifically styled themselves to look incredibly young. Twenty-year-old Sophie Rain, the best known of the group, is set to make $60 million this year from her childlike looks and the lure of her self-described virginity. For the babes of the Bop House, this tactic has worked: it made $10 million in December alone.

Their fans are not just slobbering men, but girlypop supporters who crowd out their comment sections with club-bathroom-style compliments (“Camilla’s outfit eats”; “cute!!!”). For these fawning young women, the videos are more than adverts for virtual sex work; they are insights into favourite celebrities — to whom their boyfriends happen to pay a monthly subscription. These girls interpret the Bops’ playfulness not as seduction but as relatability, and they almost never express horror or concern at the reason why their favourite influencers are in that house at all. The Bops’ elision of social-media cults and pornography has achieved the unthinkable: normalizing the latter so completely that there is no longer any shock, or compunction, at the fundamental transaction of their work. For many teen girls, these are aspirational figures who seem to be their own age; if it works for them, why not for me?

Part of the pull of the Bop House is its power dynamic of spectator and object, which is also inherent in traditional pornography itself. These girls are monitored at every point of their day; one mini-series sees a girl burst into rooms with a mock gun, whose trigger presents a lollipop. She marauds the house shoving it in her Bopmates’ faces, prompting looks of disdain, frustration and then occasionally seductive playing-along. These girls do not know or particularly like each other, but are forced to put up with each other in the name of content. That we are party to this hostage-like situation is part of its appeal. They are there for us. Each Bop develops her own character as the series progresses, much like traditional reality TV: the model and podcaster Camilla Araújo returned as a wildcard this month to stir up controversy amid an ongoing lawsuit, bringing her 7.6 million TikTok followers and talent for viral soundbites with her. This sex-work sorority is so profitable because it crosses the boundaries of ubiquitous, predictable OnlyFans content: its iconoclastic appeal is that it has conquered the mainstream.

The hostage dynamic has become part of the lexicon of internet virality. Last year, MrBeast locked two people in a room for 90 days with the prize of $500,000, tempting them with exorbitantly expensive “treats” such as beds and a dimmer switch for the room’s fluorescent lighting. In the end, both completed the challenge — only shelling out $20,000 on a collection of Harry Potter books and a coffee machine. The video has 341-million views. Another iteration is Fishtank Live, which sees contestants stuck in a house with no phones for six weeks — a homespun iteration of Big Brother. Divorced from the stringent regulations of established broadcasting networks, Fishtank has a viewer-interaction element which means we can pay to torment contestants, understandably framed as a morbid rerun of the Stanford prison experiment. For $300, a producer will empty a bin on the kitchen floor. For $600, they will remove a bed. Rather than being edited, Fishtank is streamed live 24/7 — the toilets are, disturbingly, available behind a paywall. All this plays into our desire for control over Sim-like subjects, and our need to inflict pain and pleasure on them, without them knowing who we are.

This is also the promise of OnlyFans, and we should see the “sellers” in that dynamic as just as strange, vulnerable and desperate as those contestants in MrBeast’s prison cell. Yes, some of the Bop House girls earn more money than I or any reader could ever hope to — but the vast majority of OnlyFans “models” do not, and leave the industry having lost priceless assets: agency, privacy and identity beyond a blur of oiled body parts. In its way, OnlyFans is its own reality show — and the Bop House in particular must truly feel like a fishtank, a panopticon, and one in which you are required not only to be constantly sexy but also constantly entertaining and likable, given your dual role as porn star and influencer.

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The boundaries of subject and viewer are collapsing, and this is affecting how real men see real women. As the Venn diagram of social media and pornography grinds towards a perfect circle, we are left with the subliminal impression that everything around us is a form of softcore pornography. Jostling with makeup tutorials, prank videos and recipes, the Bop House crucially targets everyone’s feeds; porn is fast becoming just another genre.

This was never the intention of liberal feminism; fourth-wavers would be horrified to realize that their girlboss, secure-the-bag mantra, which has casualized prostitution as a fun and consequence-free shortcut to empowerment, has landed them in servitude to the men who most despise them. But it is a product of their naivety, and of a culture of kindness which promotes tolerance at all costs — and which means that those of us who are critical of the spectre of the digital bordello are intolerant and so must be incorrect. The sacrality of tolerance is contingent on an unspoken contract of discretion, which holds that furries, hentai freaks and porn addicts have an inviolable right to arousal, as long they keep their side of the bargain by both dutifully buying our feet pics and not being complete horndogs in public life.

Yet the licensing of digital pornography, and the way it was given the green light by feminists at the dawn of OnlyFans in 2016, and seized upon as a way for young women to better themselves, has of course had unintended consequences. Ten years ago, it might have been impossible to imagine a mainstream website where young women — including my own peers — would sell homemade, bespoke pornography; now, it is difficult to imagine a world without it. This irrevocable shift came about because of aggressive marketing, with OnlyFans girls becoming their own pimps and flooding social media with adverts, something which has at points made X almost unbearable to use. Now, gooner content (look it up, or don’t) is everywhere, having bled into the mainstream so utterly that it is no longer particularly surprising to hear of a house of barely legal autopornographers hawking masturbation videos from a rented house in Florida, nor that we can expect teasers for those videos to be seen by children.

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By styling themselves as teenage girls, the Bops intend to outrage viewers — and to profit from their notoriety. Liberal feminism lends “sex workers” a curious exceptionalism in that they are rarely held responsible for the grim tastes they cater to, such as teen porn. It focuses so evangelically on individual choice and identity that it has blinkered itself to uncomfortable truths — in this case, that there is another individual on the other end of this transaction, a priapic man who likes very young girls. For a movement so obsessed with individuality, it is ironic that the OnlyFans girl — the Frankenstein’s monster of fourth-wave feminism — is not allotted individual responsibility for the twisted sexualities she promotes.

For the Bops, the existence of their weird fans only becomes frighteningly apparent when, as Sophie Rain tells MailOnline, the girls are “woken up to people knocking at the door at night”. One of the problems with digital prostitution is that it has a veneer of secure remoteness which inevitably proves permeable to “fans” who already believe that access to your body is a matter of mere negotiation.

The elision of OnlyFans with conventional social media has turned all Gen Z women into porn stars-in-waiting. In a world where everything is content, the sorts of boys who grow up calling Bop House girls “whores” in TikTok comment sections will find it difficult to handle real-life crushes, which cannot be satisfied by paying for a “spicy video”. The message of OnlyFans is the same as that of Fishtank: you, a powerful viewer, can pay to control me, a desired but despicable subject, and in that way to temporarily own my body. And while we can no longer hope to regulate internet porn nor protect its stars, we can and must wake up to the value of our own dignity and privacy. Fourth-wave feminism has let vulnerable women down. The best we can do is to insist on our autonomy: take yourself offline, jump out of the tank.

You hear about us as being hopelessly in thrall to the infinite scroll of social media; obsessed with micro-influencers whose fame doesn’t even last 45 seconds, let alone 15 minutes; and ever on the verge of falling into eating disorders or self-harm as a result of the images and ideas that flash before our truncated attention spans. We are the “anxious generation”, mind-controlled by apps designed to be as addictive as possible. More specifically, we are framed as victims of a Chinese app called TikTok.

To be clear, the TikTok-girl crises I sketched above are all too real. But the older generation’s discourse around them more or less ignores what the people who are in need of rescue have to say for themselves. As a result, it misses the granular details that could make for better and more realistic reforms, if reforms are needed.

Famehungry — a new piece of performance art about TikTok being staged at the Soho Playhouse this week as part of the New York City Fringe Festival — is a good example of how such critiques go wrong. In it, the London-based theatre artist Louise Orwin explores the big question — TikTok, good or evil? — in a multimedia format that streams simultaneously on TikTok Live and integrates the app in interesting ways with the in-person performance. Audience members who still have the tabooed and sort-of-banned app can like or comment as the play unfolds; everyone sees Orwin acting into her phone and her screen-view is projected onto the stage. It could have been fun, but the performance was chaotic and overwhelmed by a too-on-the-nose “concern message” about people like me.

Orwin’s breakout performance in 2014 was a project called Pretty Ugly that examined the online identities of teenage girls. Famehungry covers some of the same territory, asking about the app’s effects on the mental health, self-esteem, and happiness of girls and young women.

The new work opens with Orwin sprawled onstage in various positions illuminated only by the glow of her phone. It’s a commentary on the social-media era: we only exist as we are seen online. I could relate to it some; it reminded me of staying up late with only the light of my phone in my room. She is wearing a red Adidas track suit and clashing neon green bodysuit, and she writhes around while loud and jarring ambient music plays. Next she sits down at a desk covered in pink hair and starts babytalking and making scrunchy faces into the camera. “Just waiting for a few more people to join”, she repeats, over and over and over. She also performs a few TikTok stereotypes, like waving and saying hi, drinking from her Stanley, and eating stuff off her acrylic nails (eating videos are called mukbang, from the Korean words meaning “eat” and “broadcast”).

Orwin explains during the play that she joined TikTok because she missed performing live during the pandemic, and she discovered that one of her former students, a 15-year-old named Jax Valentine, had 20,000 followers. She wondered if she could get up to that number, which was more than she’d ever achieved in a theatre in real life. During the performance, she’s hoping to achieve 20,000 likes and promises she’ll “do something amazing” for the audience if she does. Jax makes live guest appearances on another screen to coach her.

A long middle section of the play talks about what Orwin likes about TikTok. She picks the weird, outlandish, or simply brainrot videos — people running in slow motion, girls dancing in turtle-outfits — and says she likes to see all this human variety from around the world. She believes the app “democratizes the flow of information” and “makes space for marginalized communities”. But she offers this praise while walking on a treadmill, speaking in an increasingly frantic voice, and she follows it up with all the rules of how you have to act to be liked, implying that the app only rewards certain types of behavior and punishes others: turtle-dancing, yes; “fake smoking while covered in fake blood,” no. (I’m glad that content moderation prevents violent videos.) She also does attention-getting things like violently splash her face with water or eating with food hanging out of her mouth — more mukbang. During her final dance number, she pours a pink drink that looks like a strawberry Yoo-hoo over her head.

The play concludes with the artist venting mixed but mostly negative feelings. The attention is nice, Orwin thinks, but other than that, TikTok is “a black hole of nothing”. It’s “mostly people doing the same thing over and over again”, and she is disgusted with herself for participating. She also seems to be disgusted — or at least, negatively impacted — by many of her previous non-online performances. She tells the audience about ones in which she’d asked men to hit her or done other self-destructive or sexually gross things. Talking at the end with her back to the audience, she says she’s tired of “the precarious way I earn a living”, “the constant checking and rechecking”, the “dystopia”, and “making work in a system that’s broken”. She wonders why she’s doing it, and if she should have planned for her future or gotten a real job instead.

Yet what Orwin portrays goes so far beyond what the generally young, female user base of TikTok is like. I was insulted that a grown woman would put on an act that mocks young girls in the name of spotlighting their supposed misery. Orwin is a performance artist, exaggerating to make an effect, but the baby voices and the determination to humiliate herself seemed more about her than about most of us. If someone on TikTok says they’re “just waiting for a few more people to join”, it’s because they’re legitimately waiting. Sometimes people do rage-bait — act obnoxious to get attention — but the influencers who are famous and making money aren’t the ones doing that. They’re usually offering positive messages and running real businesses.

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I also thought maybe that Orwin was on the app for the wrong reasons. She went there because she was “fame hungry”, and all she cared about was getting followers. And she searched out the weird live content from around the world because that was her personal preference. I sometimes see that kind of content advertised in my feed, but I don’t watch them. My followers are mostly my friends, and I don’t obsess about getting more of them from among the strangers online. I use TikTok as a side tool in life; it’s meant to be fun. I capture fun moments with friends in nice outfits, take clips of interesting city views, and follow fashion, health, and beauty content. I didn’t mind deleting the app because as long as everyone was off of it, I wasn’t missing anything.

Many young women have mental-health problems, to be sure, but those result from all kinds of social and personal factors, not just TikTok. Some people might act foolish and inappropriate (especially when they have an audience of one to five people, who are probably just bots), and that isn’t good for them. But it’s also a mistake on that person’s part, not solely the fault of the app. Orwin herself is a good example, because she tells us she has been making disturbing and self-harming work long before TikTok existed.

I don’t know what danger the Chinese ownership of the app truly presents to kids, but I do think it’s dangerous to condemn something you don’t know much about, or whose positive attributes you’re unable to see. I stay mentally healthy despite the stress of the junior year of high school by getting a lot of exercise, eating real food, and spending time with my friends. Orwin poured soda into her Stanley, mocking a teen-girl cliché. I carry a Stanley everywhere, I admit, because I go from school to sports practice, and I get headaches when I’m dehydrated. Mine is always full of water enhanced with Liquid IV electrolyte powder, which is good at preventing them. It really works — I learned about it on TikTok.

While there has been much suspicion that the CCP uses TikTok for influence operations, such as by disseminating Chinese propaganda, the app can be weaponized in even more dangerous ways. Its “For You” algorithm leverages machine learning to track users’ attention, and it employs this knowledge to show them, unprompted, whatever content is most likely to hold their attention. This makes using it a far more passive and addictive experience than other social media platforms, which gives it the potential to inflict long-term harm on young Westerners by keeping them distracted, shortening their attention spans, and, ultimately, atrophying their brains.

The app’s ability to cause mass “TikTok brain” in young Westerners should prompt consideration of its use as a new kind of civilizational weapon. Such a threat could be temporarily averted by simply banning the app, as the US is close to doing, but this is ultimately an issue that can’t be legislated away because TikTok is only a symptom of a much deeper ailment.

The first thing that should raise suspicions is that the CCP forbids Chinese kids from using TikTok — instead, they use Douyin. As American tech ethicist Tristan Harris has pointed out, Douyin is a “spinach” version of the app filled with science experiments and educational videos instead of twerkers and toilet-lickers. TikTok has imposed screen-time limits for younger users (to prevent it from being banned), but Douyin has been doing so since 2019. Further, unlike TikTok, the app is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am. Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.

China has been suspicious of Western liberal capitalism since the 19th century when the country’s initial openness allowed the Western powers to flood China with opium, which accelerated the fall of the Qing Dynasty and led to the “Century of Humiliation”. To this day, many in China believe Western liberalism leads to decadence, but one man has done more than anyone to turn this thesis into policy.

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Despite not being well known outside China, Wang Huning has been China’s top ideological theorist for three decades, authoring many of Xi Jinping’s policies. Among the Chinese, he is widely known as “guoshi”, or “teacher of the nation”.

Although Wang refuses to do press or even speak with foreigners, his books reveal something of his worldview. His 1991 America Against America, based on his travels a few years prior, has since become a key CCP text for understanding the US. The premise is simple: the conflict between America’s economic system and its value system have made the country fundamentally unstable, destined for commodification, nihilism, and decadence. And, as Wang morbidly diagnoses, the country will eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

According to Wang, America is directed mostly by blind market forces; the country obeys not a single command but a cacophony of demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere. It constantly produces wondrous new technologies, but these have no guiding purpose other than their own proliferation. The result is that all technological advancement leads the US toward more and more commodification, which eventually consumes “human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power and law”, and devours meaning and purpose. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang wrote: “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.”

To prevent China’s own technological advancement from leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture”, Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US’s problems is by instilling “core values” — a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future. This idea has been central to President Xi’s governance strategy, which has emphasized the “core socialist values” of civility, patriotism, and integrity.

So how has the push for these socialist core values affected the CCP’s approach to social media?

The creator of TikTok and CEO of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, originally wanted the content on TikTok and Douyin to be determined purely by popularity. As such, Douyin started off much like TikTok is now, with the content dominated by teenagers singing and dancing. But in April 2018, the CCP began action against Zhang. Its media watchdog ordered the removal of some of ByteDance’s apps from Chinese app stores, citing their platforming of “improper” content. Zhang then grovelingly apologized for content “that was incommensurate with socialist core values”. Shortly after, ByteDance announced a recruiting drive for thousands of content moderators, with job adverts specifying a preference for CCP members with “strong political sensitivity”.

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The CCP’s influence over ByteDance has only grown since then. The party allegedly has a “golden share” in ByteDance’s Beijing entity, and one of its officials sits on the company’s three-person board. The CCP’s intrusion into ByteDance’s operations is part of a broader governmental strategy called the “Profound Transformation”, which seeks to clear space for core socialist values by ridding China of “decadent” online content. In August 2021, Chinese state media called for an end to TikTok-style “tittytainment” for fear that “our young people will lose their strong and masculine vibes and we will collapse”. In the wake of that statement, there have been crackdowns on “sissy-men” fashions, “digital drugs” such as online gaming, and “toxic idol worship”. Consequently, many online influencers have been forcibly deprived of their influence, with some having their entire presence erased from the Chinese web.

For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West’s terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China. And yet, while cracking down on this content domestically, China has continued to allow its export internationally as part of Xi’s “digital Silk Road”. TikTok is known to censor content that displeases Beijing, such as mentions of Falun Gong or Tiananmen Square, but otherwise it has free rein to show Westerners what it wants; “tittytainment” and “sissy men” are everywhere on the app. So why the hypocritical disparity in rules? Is the digital Silk Road intended as poetic justice for the original, whereby the Western powers preached Christian values while trafficking chemical TikTok — opium — into China?

Since Wang and Xi believe the West is too decadent to survive, they may have opted to take the Taoist path of wu wei — sitting back and letting the West’s appetites take it where they will. But there’s another more sinister and effective approach that they might be adopting — the “accelerationism” of an amphetamine-fueled British philosopher.

At first glance, Nick Land could hardly be more different from Wang Huning. Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land ranted about cyborg apocalypses. In the late Nineties, he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls of his house, once owned by the libertine occultist Aleister Crowley. At nearby Warwick University, he held bizarre lectures, with one infamous “lesson” consisting of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.

Land and Wang were not just polar opposites in personality; they also operated at opposite ends of the political spectrum. While Wang became the CCP’s top ideological theorist, Land became the top theorist, along with Curtis Yarvin, of the influential network of hard-Right bloggers, known as NRx, or neo-reaction.

And yet, despite their opposite natures, Land and Wang would develop almost identical visions of liberal capitalism as an all-commodifying, all-devouring force, driven by the insatiable hunger of blind market forces, and destined to finally eat Western civilization itself. Land viewed Western liberal capitalism as a kind of AI that’s reached singularity; in other words, an AI that’s grown beyond the control of humans and is now unstoppably accelerating toward inhuman ends. As Land feverishly wrote in his 1995 essay “Meltdown”:

“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway.”

To simplify Land’s overwrought drug-fueled prose, Western capitalism can be compared to a “paperclip maximizer”, a hypothetical AI programmed by a paperclip business to produce as many paperclips as possible, which leads it to begin recycling everything on earth into paperclips (commodities). When the programmers panic and try to switch it off, the AI turns them into paperclips, since being switched off would stop it from fulfilling its goal of creating as many paperclips as possible. Thus, the blind application of short-term goals leads to long-term ruin.

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Land believed that, since the runaway AI we call liberal capitalism commodifies everything, including even criticisms of it (which are necessarily published for profit), it cannot be opposed. Every attack on it becomes part of it. Thus, if one wishes to change it, the only way is to accelerate it along its trajectory. As Land stated in a later, more sober writing style:

“The point of an analysis of capitalism, or of nihilism, is to do more of it. The process is not to be critiqued. The process is the critique, feeding back into itself, as it escalates. The only way forward is through, which means further in.”

This view, that the current system must be accelerated to be transformed, has since become known as “accelerationism”. For Land, acceleration is not just a destructive force but also a creative one; all democracies accelerate toward ruin, but an undemocratic system — run by elites unfettered by the concerns of the masses — could accelerate a country to prosperity.

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the liberal West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he embraced anti-democratic ideals, moved to Shanghai, and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star.

A few years after Land moved to China, talk of accelerationism began to emerge on the Chinese web, where it’s become known by its Chinese name, jiasuzhuyi. The term has caught on among Chinese democracy advocates, many of whom view the CCP as the runaway AI, hurtling toward greater tyranny; they even refer to Xi as “Accelerator-in-Chief”. Domestically, Chinese democracy activists try to accelerate the CCP’s authoritarianism ad absurdum; one tactic is to swamp official tip-off lines with reports of minor or made-up infractions, hoping to break the Party by forcing it to enact all of its own petty rules.

The CCP in turn views US President Donald Trump as the “Accelerator-in-Chief,” or, more accurately, “Chuan Jianguo” (literally “Build China Trump”) because he was perceived as helping China by accelerating the West’s decline. The CCP is also known to have engaged in jiasuzhuyi more directly; for instance, during the 2020 US race riots, China used Western social media platforms to douse accelerant over US racial tensions.

But the use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision. Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification because that’s what consumers want.

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Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early Nineties, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, and finally to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties are liable to fall into disuse and disrepair.

And this is why TikTok is such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth — its future — into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors. We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been grey matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ seems to have steadily fallen — which could in part be due to technology making us spend ever more time in a passive, vegetative state. Distractive media seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut”, while for American kids it was “influencer”.

The resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. And if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, one arrow, two eagles).

So, the CCP has both the means and the motive to help the West defeat itself, and part of this could conceivably involve the use of TikTok to accelerate liberal capitalism’s demise by closing the gap between desire and gratification.

Admittedly we have no hard evidence of the CCP’s intentions — but ultimately intentions are irrelevant here. Accelerationism can’t alter an outcome, only hasten it. And TikTok, whether or not it’s actively intended as a weapon, is only moving the West further along the course it’s long been headed: toward more effortless pleasure, and resulting cognitive decline.

The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is wholly the West’s. After all, TikTok dominated our culture as a result of free market forces — the very thing we live by. Land and Wang are correct that the West being controlled by everyone means it’s controlled by no one, and without brakes or a steering wheel we’re at the market’s mercy.

Of course, democracies do have some regulatory power, as evidenced by moves taken in the US and India. But although banning TikTok may stop the theft of our data, it won’t stop the theft of our attention. Just look at how users already began to flock to other short-form video sites such as Red Note. And how TikTok has inspired YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels, and X’s For You algorithm. Effortless dopamine hits are what consumers want, and capitalism always tries to give consumers what they want. The market is a greater accelerator than China could ever hope to be.

So what’s the solution?

Land and Wang may be right about the illness, but they’re wrong about the cure. It’s true that we in the West have little left of the traditions that once tied us together, and in their absence little unites us except our animal hungers. But the belief that meaning and purpose can be imposed on all of us by a Great Leader is a fatal fantasy that has littered history with failed experiments.

Sure, democracies are vulnerable because there’s no one controlling their advancement, but autocracies are vulnerable precisely for the opposite reason: they’re controlled by people, which is to say, by woefully myopic apes. China is still suffering from the disastrous one-child policy that has led to China’s current population crisis. For all our problems, we would be unwise to exchange the soft tyranny of dopamine for the hard tyranny of despots.

That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy, responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed).

But ultimately these are short-term measures. In the long-term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps such as TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies.

Whether or not the CCP intended it as such, TikTok is a time bomb that could wreck a whole generation years from now. We can’t wait until its effects are apparent before acting, for then it will be too late. The clock is ticking. Tik Tok…

***

A version of this article was first published on The Prism.

The “grippy socks vacation”, so called after the non-slip socks given to shoeless psychiatric inpatients, has become a Gen Z fixation. Like other TikTok trends, this involves a clutch of symbols, visual shorthand for entry into the club of depression/anxiety/schizophrenia “girlies”. Among these is a prominent red mark on the forehead — a coveted accessory in pouty lip-sync videos which carry the hashtags “mhawareness” and “sectioned”. These headwounds have become an appalling hallmark of British psych-ward TikTok, which interestingly has not yet caught on Stateside. The result of head banging (the only self-harm possible in such wards), they speak to genuine torment — but also seem performatively conspicuous, shown off by groups of friends. It all sharply echoes the competitiveness of anorexia wards; a well-documented perversity of the teen-girl affliction is its “epidemic” nature, which sees inpatients egg each other on, with feeding tubes becoming a similar stigmata.

But this fresh fixation on mental health reflects a new social reality: in secure-care settings, young women are nine times more likely than young men to have a psychiatric diagnosis. Whereas men in psychiatric intensive care units (PICUs) are much more likely to be sectioned for aggression, substance use or psychosis, women are overrepresented in cases of self-harm and suicidality. In the UK, Covid provoked a disproportionate increase in women detained under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act, a rise of 48% in one NHS trust in Gloucestershire. Meanwhile, American girls are reporting record levels of sadness and suicidal thoughts. We can safely assume that the data supports a Western diagnosis larger than a mere TikTok trend — yet social media scaffolds the experiences of so many disturbed young women, who gain fans (and often financial rewards) for documenting their suffering.

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By Poppy Sowerby

What is particularly alarming about the TikTok psych-ward trend is its vibe of cossetted childishness. A common theme among “grippy socks” creators is the aesthetics of infantilism; grown women sit in teddy-bear-print onesies colouring in Mr Men books, surrounded by cuddly toys and watching cartoons as their “comfort shows”. Where the imagery of ED (eating-disorder) Twitter is all skeletal legs, cigarettes and accounts with “ugw” (ultimate goal weights) in the bios, psych-ward TikTok is equally faddish about teddy bears and felt-tip pens. Their places of confinement function as trend-pits: one fascinating TikTok of a unit in Italy shows a wall graffitied with the phrase “ACAB” showing, in the most uncharitable interpretation, how damningly fad-based a lot of this is, so that an imported American political curio joins the other more predictable adolescent causes of the inpatients (there is also an anarchy symbol and less probably, the Nietzschean howl “god is dead”). But at the cutting edge of mental-health content creation, in the UK and US, it’s less about raging against the machine than cleaving to an extended adolescence: healing by collecting sheets of shiny stickers.

This psych-ward aesthetic has now so utterly invaded feminine youth culture that “fashion girlies” are lip-syncing a quote from 1999’s Girl Interrupted: “Maybe I was just crazy, maybe it was the Sixties,” they murmur in the middle of a smokey-eye tutorial. The film, starring Winona Ryder and based on the bestselling 1993 memoir by Susanna Kaysen, is the iconographic homeland of the modern mental-health influencer. Ryder, admitted to an institution with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, meets Angelina Jolie’s character Lisa, a diagnosed sociopath and long-term inpatient — who also happens to be a cigarette-puffing model/rock chick. And we meet a host of characters including Janet the anorexic, Polly the pyromaniac, Georgina the pathological liar, and Daisy with OCD and sexual trauma.  The novel, which The Boston Globe claimed “threatened to replace Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar ‘as a must-read for young women”. It equivalenced middle-class femininity and “psychological risk”, and the subsequent Hollywood film became an unstoppable draw as a template of tortured “cool”.

In her Washington Post review from 1993, Diane Middlebrook described Kaysen’s memoir as a consummate “girl’s story” because of its “preoccupation with confinement in a pink-and-white-body”. The imagery of pink and white speaks to something broader that is still true of the fantasy of the psych ward today: that it is a locus of suspended adolescence, of somatic and social liminality, whose inhabitants cower between the twin poles of protected asexual girlhood and frenzied, freighted womanhood. In 1994’s Reviving Ophelia, the therapist Mary Pipher lamented a generation of “lovely and promising” girls falling prey to “depression, eating disorders, suicide attempts, and crushingly low self-esteem”; she cited a “developmental Bermuda Triangle” caused by a “girl-poisoning” culture which had traumatised the young women floating through her office with sexualisation and body complexes. Her namechecking of Hamlet’s tragic waif nails the critical character of the suffering of teenage girls: that it is spectacular. That is not to say that it is not real — anyone who has ever been a teenage girl will know exactly how real it is — but it has a peculiarly performative inflection which affects the way it is experienced by girls and misunderstood by baffled adults.

These TikTok psych-ward influencers, then, alien and faddish as they may seem, are simply the latest embodiment of an ancient tradition. The theorist Michele Aaron has studied the cinematic archetype of female mental suffering, anchoring her in another weapons-grade source of sad-girl iconography, Sofia Coppola’s 1999 The Virgin Suicides (the Air soundtrack of which, in no coincidence, plays in the background of those Girl, Interrupted TikTok videos above). This film depicts the deaths of five sisters as watched by the infatuated boys who live across the street; though the aesthetics of girlish delirium seem disconnected from men (that pink-and-whiteness, or Ophelia’s flower-strewn watery grave, suggest this is, if anything, about a toxic excess of femininity) it is important to remember the tension between the young woman and her male spectators, and the curiously gendered inflection this produces. What began with Giotto’s 14th-century feminisation of the suicidal vice of Despair, continues throughout the Renaissance with death-struck heroines such as Lucretia (Raphael) and Dido, Queen of Carthage (in Marlowe’s 1594 play, then Purcell’s gorgeous 1689 opera). The academic Heidi S. Kosonen says the staging of these tragic women, “cogitating their suicides while holding weapons in their hands, in a state of bodily sanctity and mental resolution”, affords them the status of “masculine heroism”. In her analysis, women die for love and men for glory; we must understand the atmosphere of feminine mental illness, if not the reality, as steeped in its associations with ancient tragedy. Only then can we attempt to process the weirdness of the present-day psych ward: in drawing on shared symbols — the forehead wound, the teddies, the Girl, Interrupted quotes — these teens can ennoble their suffering.

Emily Dickinson was the ultimate American shut-in poet and muse, clad in white and known, not unlike the plushie-hugging creators of today, for her strange, confected childishness. The feminist critics Gilbert and Gubar write of Dickinson that her shunning of adult, maternal and marital society meant the “price of her salvation was her agoraphobic imprisonment in her father’s household, along with a concomitant exclusion from the passionate drama of adult sexuality”. How hauntingly familiar in the context of the suspended adolescents of today, shut away from the world of employment and responsibility and left to shuffle around corridors in socks, broken by intervals of colouring-in.

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Dickinson’s own curation of this purgatorial lifestyle might help explain the strange lure of PICU life: the isolated girl, a font of meaningful suffering, can shield herself from a cruel and intimidating public existence and spend her time instead creating doleful poems or, indeed, videos, about herself. Teen girls have always, always done this — and they always will, not understanding that this “traumatic passage” really is just that, not realising that stable, if less keenly felt, adulthood is probably just around the corner.

The modern mental-health martyr of social media is engaged in the same search for meaning as every tragic teenager before her; what’s changed is that for the first time these girls can communicate and compete, instantly and constantly. The resultant arms race to extreme and conspicuous suffering means that what might ultimately have amounted to a tricky couple of years threatens to become an extended stay in a secure unit, and an interrupted journey into adulthood.

In 2023, Susanna Kaysen gave a fascinating interview to The Cut to mark 30 years of her Girl, Interrupted; in it, she laments the “label soup” of modern psychiatric culture which, she says, can prevent “an acceptance of the variety of human emotions”. “Stowing people away” in wards is not the answer, she says — though the girls who quote her own memoir idealise just that. One senses that this is a writer who has watched her own story become cannibalised by a generation of fans, ravenous for identity and meaning. Her solution? “‘I have ADD, I have OCD, I’m depressed.’ Come on! You’re a teenager, This is what it’s like. It’s terrible. That much, I remember.”

There is a difference, though, between life-ruining psychological conditions and the transient unease of being a young woman; neither is easy, and both deserve sympathy. The danger is that teens building their fragile identities around the aesthetics of torment they see on TikTok undermines both the suffering of the gravely ill and the truth that all former teenagers learn in time: that sometimes, the only way out is through.

The latter story sent ripples through my friendship group; we were horrified by Blue’s ragebait provocations that all men should cheat unless their girlfriends are “treating them every day”. Blue, a former escort, has made millions filming encounters with married men for her OnlyFans, and her star rose when she turned on the disgruntled girlfriends of her punters, whom she called, flatly, “lazy”. It is for these statements, calculated not to arouse men but to annoy women, that she is famous.

Elsewhere in the dystopian sex-positivity scene we read a viral account of Twitter-famous “whorelord” Aella’s birthday party — a factory-style line-up of 42 strangers rewarded for their participation in an orgy with a physical badge of honour (it reads “I went to Aella’s birthday gangbang and all I got was this crappy sticker”). In order to keep these scores of presumably deeply weird men entertained, a group of “fluffers… were strewn about, lying on fuckbenches”; after seeing to the birthday girl, the blokes could “continue banging” the fluffers.

Great. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you know it’s illiberal to object to the fact that many women, from privileged artists (Lily Allen, Kate Nash) to normal if naive teenaged girls, have so deeply drunk the kool-aid of neoliberal feminism that it is somehow empowering, rather than the most degrading thing imaginable, to be sold in any capacity to men? Or to recoil from the bleak spectacle of a methodical orgy in which anonymous pervs can waddle over to a woman sat on a bench whose only function is to fuck them?

It takes little consideration to see that these latest additions to the ancient and undying canon of prostitute-lore — from Mary Magdalene to Fantine to Pretty Woman — are yet more slanted apparitions, this time not icons of feminist victory but promotional material for feet pics. Internet virality and atrophying feminism have collided — and the result is more of the same.

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Because of just how hot being a sex worker is right now, we’re obsessed with reading about it. The pseudonymous Eve Smith’s How Was It For You?, released this summer, is a bracingly matter-of-fact account of a prostitute’s progress; in it, we are told that the only “type of man” who does not visit brothels are those who “buy you half a shandy on a date at the pub and expect to get into your knickers”. We are laughing at this man not because he sees sex as transactional, but because he is not willing to pay enough for it. How desolate. Elsewhere, Smith brushes away critics’ horror by saying her colleagues are merely “grinding to buy food, to pay rent, to support our kids”; “we can’t rely on men,” she writes, though by definition she has chosen by her own account to do precisely that. The great target of her ire is not the clients who endanger her so much that she must hide weapons “around my dungeon”, or the difficult childhood which sets the scene for her entry into brothel-work, but the “liberal, middle-class white woman with a moralistic agenda”, the radical feminists who pity her. This is understandable; their concern undermines her entire way of life, and so must be infuriating.

But this does not mean their fears are baseless. The statistics on prostitution are naturally elusive, and their presentation by advocacy groups is almost entirely contingent on the group’s bias: the pro-decriminalisation Prostitutes Collective claims only 6% of “migrant sex workers” are trafficked (“many said they prefer working in the sex industry,” the website cheerily states), whereas studies in Norway and Canada put the average age of entering prostitution at about 15; one 1986 study claimed that 90% of the “adolescent prostitutes” it surveyed had been abused by a caregiver or neighbour.

A culture which shamefully casualises prostitution, whose pornification is so complete that punters can reasonably buy erotic videos from the girl who works behind the till in the petrol station, has forgotten how bad things really are. In the UK, you are more likely to be murdered as a prostitute than in any other profession. One 2008 study of 130 prostitutes  in San Francisco found 68% had been raped on the job; this figure rises to more than 90% being raped in the past year in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (in a study which also noted gang rapes by police officers). At the same time, our engagement with these facts has been obliterated by the dogma of supposed sex positivity. A 2024 revision of “Roxanne” would have the fraught heroine not pining, lost, in a doorway but grinning from ear to ear while filing a hefty tax return (girlboss!).

The most likely reason for this extraordinary lapse in critical thinking is the transformation from in-person prostitution to the digital; it is analogous to the place of pornography changing from the top shelf of a newsagent to the private, free and instantaneous ease of the smartphone screen. It’s so simple, and so much less risky and humiliating, to hop on a website and set up a profile than to stand on a street corner. But the fact that your leering client is physically absent does not alter the philosophical lie at the heart of prostitution, digital or otherwise: that consent itself can be bought.

Until OnlyFans ballooned in the cultural imagination, prostitution was subject to a different kind of fantasy, one laden with pity and horror. Think of Taxi Driver (1976), Sport and Iris spinning slowly in the pinkish light of the bordello, the pimp’s ringed, lecherous fingers in a carousel with the child’s own, small and limp. Twelve-year-old Jodie Foster crystallises the spirit of prostitution: she clunks about in too-tall shoes, brazen and glassy-eyed  — that is until, in moments of privacy, she’s revealed as little more than a costumed kitten, her backstory blurted out in southern syllables between chomps of a jelly sandwich.

Iris reveals the doubleness of the fantasy prostitute: she is both surprisingly tough and impossibly vulnerable, vixen and victim, a painted-faced trader in a stageworthy performance and a font of misery waiting to shatter and spill. The message of cinematic portrayals of prostitutes has, until very recently, been thus: succumb to your tragic fate, or be saved. Those saved tend to be young: in Pretty Baby (1978), Brooke Shields’s Violet, the same age as Iris, is saved from the brothel by the New Orleans photographer Ernest J. Bellocq. Older, more cynical working girls tend to die off, like Christie in Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 novel American Psycho who is dispatched by an airborne chainsaw. Christie is somewhat more plucky than her colleague, and so lives a bit longer. Ultimately, the 20th century would have its prostitute in her final act either returned to a state of cosseted security, or once again a tangle of limbs, paying the toll for her moral lapse.

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This fate was not always so fixed — once, prostitution at the higher levels could be a route to influence. Nell Gwynn, Charles II’s favourite actress and courtesan, escaped syphilitic destitution with wit and pluck in a world curiously both more pious and less horrified by the presence of prostitution in public life. The figure of the prostitute in the novel is, concurrently, less hinged on tragedy. The witty narrator Fanny Hill of John Cleland’s 1749 erotic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure is tricked into the game as a 15-year-old, having her “maidenhead” auctioned off (to a client described as a “liquorice old goat”) before mastering, and enjoying, her craft and being carried off into married respectability by an eligible former customer. These cheerier narratives are yet more fantasies, though exceptions to a plight which mostly meant disease and destitution.

A century later, the archetypal prostitute-victim spirals into the cultural imagination via Victor Hugo’s Fantine in Les Miserables (1862). Buffeted between misfortunes by cruel swindlers and heartless bureaucrats, Fantine descends into penury and is killed by disease, having sold her hair and two front teeth. Then, it was understood that not all prostitutes would prosper; one was far more likely to end up a Fantine than a Nell Gwynn or Fanny Hill. Now, to warn of prostitution’s pitfalls is to be intolerant, shaming and unkind. Because concerns about the very nature of prostitution are unsayable, the character of charitably termed “sex work” is warped by the few OnlyFans girls who rake in millions a year at little supposed personal cost. It is of no interest to “sex-positive” feminists (and certainly the legions of oleaginous “fans”, rarely mentioned in these discussions) that many of those shunted into prostitution are subjected to regular violence, exploitation by pimps and brutality by police.

Just as we baulk at the victim/vixen archetypes of film and literature of the past, we should question the untouchability of the 21st-century cult of the digital sex worker, whose central claim — that we can get rich with no consequences to our happiness or safety — has led god knows how many women to sell pics to dirty old men in the village for a few weeks, realise they can’t earn anything like what they’ve been told, and delete their profiles, only for that material to exist in perpetuity on both third-party porn sites and in the minds of dismal men, for whom the object-status of all women was never in doubt. How is this new myth, of the emancipated OnlyFans model, any less of a fantasy than the child victim Iris saved from the bordello, or the witty, scheming Fanny Hill? Do not believe the messaging; we are further from seeing prostitution for what it really is — a scourge which visits the bleakest of fates on the most vulnerable — than ever.

But there are limits, ones that are now being stretched to the point of deterioration by the phenomenon of “looksmaxxing”. Referring to a broad category of practices aimed towards maximising your attractiveness, looksmaxxing follows the same ideology of “optimisation”, where every facet is quantifiable. Attractiveness, in this reading, is not subjective, but rather dictated by millimetres of bone and degrees of “canthal tilt” (another term for eye angle placement). And increasingly, this obsession with surgical levels of improvement is creeping into the vocabularies of teenagers.

What’s curious is that this is happening at a time when beauty standards are allegedly becoming more flexible than ever. Most young women, after all, have been raised in a culture that claims to embrace all bodies and faces. No longer, as many Dove campaigns seem to say, do girls need to starve themselves to a perpetual size 0. Have acne? Throw a convenient star-shaped patch over it and head off to school. Crooked teeth might even get you a modelling contract.

Of course, the reality isn’t quite that wholesome and carefree. Sure, braces might not get you bullied anymore, but social media has allowed us to find flaws we hadn’t known existed. Meanwhile, the pool of people to compare ourselves with is no longer confined to those within our immediate community or those exceptional enough to be seen on TV. Rather, thanks to social media, we are exposed to an endless array of individuals, attractive or otherwise, and have been given a new language to label and scrutinise not only them, but ourselves.

Yet over the past decade, such discourse has been marked by a glaring absence: men. Although periodically a trend like “dad bods” might come along, brands rarely champion for widened acceptance towards their aesthetic pressures. It’s into this vacuum that looksmaxxing first took form.

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As KnowYourMeme explains, the term emerged in 2015 on forums like 4Chan and Reddit among incel and manosphere-adjacent groups desperate to improve their social and romantic standing. The term soon creeped into other corners of Reddit in the early 2020s with subreddits such as r/TrueRateMe, where users share pictures of themselves seeking honest opinions on their appearance. During this time, Reddit itself became increasingly mainstream: between 2018 and 2024, its monthly active users jumped from 331 million to an estimated 1.2 billion.

Meanwhile, TikTok also proliferated, presenting not only an addictive feed of comparison but a new platform for looksmaxxing and its philosophy to grow. Here, we’re shown unlimited hours of beautiful people paired with detailed explanations of why they’re beautiful, and, of more importance, why exactly we don’t look like them. Your jawline isn’t square enough. Your cheekbones aren’t prominent enough. Your nose is too wide. Your skin is too dull. Your lips are too thin. Your face is just asymmetrical enough that, whenever people gaze upon it, they will not see a worthy mate. And crucially, all of this can be quantified with precise traits and measures.

While looksmaxxing is practised by plenty of young women (one could argue women have long been participating, just not under that precise term), it is most rigidly pursued among young men. For women, our options may be more expansive: not only are the majority of skin and haircare products marketed towards us, but makeup offers us a culturally acceptable form of day-to-day improvement.

Absent of these same opportunities, it seems that men have applied looksmaxxing with more of a stringent, pseudo-scientific approach. In one TikTok from January, for example, an anonymous creator rates the attractiveness of influencer SyrianPsycho, a fellow looksmaxxing TikToker with 1.7 million followers. “Syrian has equal facial thirds, almond hunter green eyes with low set, thick and positively tilted eyebrows. He has excellent jawline visibility… he has a good nose shape and good chin projection. Syrian’s main flaws are on the jaw region, his lower jaw is slightly recessed and his gonial angle is on the higher side. He has a narrower than ideal lower third. His midface is on the longer side. Syrian is a 7.5 out of 10 facially.”

The video is filled with comments from fellow young men saying that if SyrianPsycho only scores a 7.5, then it’s “over” for them in comparison.

But through looksmaxxing, of course, any of this has the potential to be fixed. A person can “softmaxx” by getting a more flattering haircut, losing weight through diet and exercise, or improve their skincare routine. If this isn’t enough, they can “hardmaxx” instead — add filler to their lips, have the bones in their face shaven down, undergo excruciating surgery and months of recovery in order to become three inches taller. Through the help of men such as SyrianPsycho, who sell online courses on looksmaxxing and “self-improvement”, they, too, can be attractive.

It is possible, though, that as the language of looksmaxxing — and inceldom — enters the dominant lexicon, it becomes defanged. Searches for looksmaxxing topics on TikTok yield a blend of advice, criticism and jokes. While some young people continue to look towards looksmaxxing creators for insight into how to improve their perceived flaws, others have transformed it into a meme. Now, ironic references to canthal tilt likely outnumber earnest ones. For some, though, the jokes are a means of coping: “Eyebags detected, time to ropemaxx,” one TikTok with just under 1 million views reads, alluding to hanging oneself.

Ironic or otherwise, the damage may still be occurring. With guys like SyrianPsycho naming their courses “Mogwarts” — a reference to “mogging”, or being significantly more attractive than somebody — parsing what’s genuine becomes a challenge. As this all trickles down to younger audiences and becomes filtered through even more layers of memes and internet references, perhaps the true threat any of this presents has become niche. “Mewing”, for example, which refers to the practice of attempting to enhance one’s jawline through various facial exercises and tongue placement, has become a joke even in elementary schools. Among kids, mewing has become associated with a specific gesture and facial expression of pursing their lips, putting a finger up in a “shhh” symbol and then pointing to their jaws. Last week, Parents.com wrote that mewing has “taken over classrooms”, with many teachers lamenting how “disrespectful” the trend is.

Of course, every generation has had their childhood jokes that adults just didn’t understand. I was eight, going on nine, when Napoleon Dynamite was released and “Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner” entered my lexicon. I remember my mother being appalled by how my friends and I would repeat the line. But we didn’t even understand it. The Tina, who was described as a “fat lard”, was a llama in the film. We weren’t calling each other “fat lards”, but simply quoting the film of the summer.

I think of this now as my niece, 11, has begun making her own jokes about mewing. That she, a young girl who does not have her own mobile phone and isn’t even old enough to have an interest in makeup, would be aware of anything remotely associated with this phenomenon frightens me. Is she growing up in a culture with increasingly rigid beauty standards, despite all the talk of body positivity? Or is this just her generation’s set of Napoleon Dynamite-esque jokes?

Of course, the answer is probably somewhere in between. Was I not, even at that young age, already concerned with my body? And would I not have felt shame if I’d been something like a “fat lard” myself? After my niece showed me her rendition of the mewing meme last week, did she not stop to ask if her jawline needed improvement?

Be it through jokes or otherwise, the culture of looksmaxxing among young people reflects a broader anxiety towards beauty in an era where some would claim these standards to be flexible. It’s as if as some parameters have shifted, we’ve responded by drilling down with even more intensity on others. What good does body positivity do when everyone around you is assessing their faces with protractors?

It was also, always, an easier sell to men than to women, which is why frontiersmen often had to obtain a wife by mail order. What for a man might be a pioneering adventure might be, for his wife, an arduous daily grind of growing and preparing food, making and mending clothing, laundry, animal husbandry and so on, all with no family help and multiple children underfoot.

Over time, though, a slew of innovations — from cars to ready-made foods to labour-saving home devices — have made it ever easier to live life in a seemingly self-contained way. Perhaps most of all, this has liberated women to pursue individualist dreams just like men. As the American antifeminist Phyllis Schlafly once observed, women were liberated more by the washing machine than feminism.

But what if something was lost, as the grind disappeared? This was the view of perhaps the most controversial modern critic of technology: the late mathematician and domestic terrorist Ted Kaczynski, commonly known as the “Unabomber”. In his manifesto, Kaczynski argued that as “industrial society” developed, it corroded human freedom, leaving behind enfeebled, inhibited and “oversocialised” individuals unable to exercise full agency in the “power process”. He was so vehemently opposed to this perceived degradation that he pursued a campaign of anti-technology vandalism and letter-bombing that killed three and injured 23 more.

Obviously I don’t condone terrorism. But there’s something to the idea that labour-saving devices have stripped us of practical skills, making us more dependent on their services and infrastructure, even as they relieve us of effort. But if you can’t separate agency from effort, what does this imply for all those mothers condemned to the grind? This tension supplies much of the power, and also the controversy, surrounding the very contemporary cultural figure of the “tradwife”.

Across social media, these influencers document their labours as wives and mothers. In doing so, they make a virtue out of adding the very domestic chores back into their lives that earlier generations of women rejoiced in escaping. And this invites reflection. With such a reactionary message, why is their content so popular? Was Kaczynski on to something, about the need to escape “oversocialised” industrial society? And if so, what does this mean for women?

Among these figures, none is more popular — or, lately, more contentious — than Hannah Neeleman, dubbed “the tradwife queen” in a recent viral Times interview. On her Ballerina Farm social media channel, Neeleman documents the earthy aesthetic, agrarian lifestyle and expensively styled “back to the land” lifestyle she enjoys with her husband, airline heir Daniel Neeleman, and their eight children on a 328-acre farm in Utah. But if Neeleman’s popularity, output and controversy tell us anything, it’s that neither Phyllis Schlafly nor Ted Kaczynski is a good guide to the tradwife phenomenon.

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In the Times interview, author Megan Agnew describes Neeleman’s home life with a clear insinuation that something is off. She hints that perhaps Neeleman is putting a positive gloss on a life of drudgery with an overbearing husband; she did, after all, give up a place at a prestigious ballet school for barefoot pregnancy and pig farming. Perhaps, too, she was pressured by the same overbearing husband into declining pain relief for her many home births. And perhaps her accomplishments have been pushed aside and her potential discarded: Agnew details the beauty queen costumes dumped in the garage, and the room Neeleman wanted as a dance studio but was instead turned into a homeschool classroom.

Agnew observes that she has barely a moment to speak to Neeleman without her being interrupted by toddlers, or talked over by Daniel. Where, we are invited to wonder, does this beautiful, gifted woman get to be a person, over and above being a dutiful wife and mother? Since the interview was published, it has incited a storm of speculation as to the health of her marriage and the meaning of the birthday egg apron, compassion for her obviously oppressed condition, as well as an equally spirited defence of her lifestyle (including from Neeleman herself).

So what’s really going on at Ballerina Farm? Is Hannah Neeleman oppressed? Did she have her dream stolen from her? Certainly, what’s depicted in social media often diverges from reality, and it is of course true that relationships that appear loving may have less happy backstage dynamics. Some purportedly “trad” marriages really are abusive. I’m not privy to any such gossip about Ballerina Farm, though, and have no interest in adding to speculation.

But what about the structure of Neeleman’s situation? Surely the mere fact of her being diverted from her dream of life as a prima ballerina to one of agrarian domesticity, pregnant every 18 months and besieged by sticky toddlers and farmhouse chores, reveals an “abused” woman whose chance of self-actualisation in the “power process” was stolen by a domineering man?

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This, however, also misses the point of Ballerina Farm altogether: one that neither Neeleman’s would-be feminist rescuers or traditionalist defenders fully acknowledge. At face value, yes, the setting looks unnervingly antifeminist. But if you take as its message not just the content of the social media posts but the entire Ballerina Farm project, Hannah Neeleman emerges as neither classically “oppressed” nor “empowered”. Rather, she shows up as profoundly embedded in her life’s work, in a way that doesn’t map easily onto either the Kaczynski-style pioneer libertarian vision or the high-tech world that emerged from that vision to “liberate” women in the Schlafly sense.

The suspicion directed at “tradlife” is directionally correct, in this sense: if Kaczynski got his way, and industrial society vanished tomorrow, it might well return some practical agency to individual men from bureaucracies and complex social structures. But it would also remove the majority of women from public life, into the everyday grind of subsistence chores with children.

All the most contentious aspects of Ballerina Farm discourse are animated by this intuition. For example, the Times interview and its swarm of respondents on TikTok and X have all made much of the fact that the Neelemans don’t have a nanny to help with the smallest infants, because Daniel doesn’t want one. This detail is consistent with the self-reliant pioneer image, but evidently a greater burden on Hannah than Daniel. Also consistent with “going it alone” pioneer-style, most of her babies were home births, without pain relief. How far was this her choice? Who knows?

But perhaps the real question is: how “pioneer” is their life anyway? The rugged, self-contained Little House schtick is only believable as long as you never ask yourself: who’s filming? I can enjoy watching Neeleman making a “perfect summer lunch” of sourdough flatbreads, pesto and cheese all from scratch — including making and straining the cheese — because I choose to look past the obvious fact that it’s all confected for the cameras. Doing all that would be an insane amount of work just for lunch, for someone with eight kids and farm chores, unless she had a ton of help.

But, very obviously, she does have a ton of help. For starters, with production values that good there’s likely a crew on-site to assist with lighting, shooting, editing and publishing her all-natural-looking kitchen creations. Neeleman herself has detailed their 30+ employees, and shared footage of the (considerably less artfully styled) space where Ballerina Farm Oompa-Loompas package and dispatch products from the show’s multimillion-dollar spin-off food and lifestyle brand. Their farm-cum-home-cum-studio is clearly a hive of activity and people, all the time. As the interview notes, there are also domestic cleaners, plus a home tutor to educate the older children.

No, Hannah Neeleman doesn’t have a nanny for the babies. But nanny or no nanny, there is no shortage of people about to keep an eye on a swarm of kids. This is not Little House on the Prairie, with no one for miles in any direction but Ma and Pa and the brood. And nor, as evidenced by the fact that both Neelemans are actively engaged in the Ballerina Farm enterprise, is this a “traditional” domestic setup on the homemaker-breadwinner model.

This split between working husband and dependent wife, often glossed as the “trad” bit in “tradwife”, dates from the industrial era. That is: it’s not “traditional” at all, but distinctively modern. It’s also the model that, over time, drove many of the dissatisfactions challenged by feminism. But Hannah Neeleman is emphatically not a “tradwife” in this sense: more accurately, she’s a tradewife: a mother who works within an economically productive household.

Ballerina Farm is both a home and a tightly run and obviously profitable business. In it, both Daniel and Hannah are engaged in distinct but equally vital roles. It’s a lifestyle that more closely resembles the pre-modern era, than anything “trad” in the “tradwife” sense. But it’s not an attempt to go back to the pre-industrial era either. On the contrary, Ballerina Farm is only possible because it’s not a low-tech project on the Uncle Ted template.

After all, none of it would be possible without the internet: Daniel Neeleman’s IRL farming exists in symbiosis with his wife’s engagement farming. Unlike the many miserable farmers living hand-to-mouth as supermarkets squeeze their margins, Daniel can charge $139 for a box of croissants and sausage meat. For him, the difference between this and American farmers’ more usual elevated suicide risk is his glamorous, internet-savvy wife. Who knows what their relationship is like behind closed doors; but in terms of money and power, I have no trouble believing Hannah Neeleman’s characterisation of them as “co-CEOs” of Ballerina Farm.

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Seen in this light, as a family business blending high and low tech, Ballerina Farm isn’t propaganda for the “pioneer” model or its suburban successor, the bourgeois housewife. What the Neelemans have constructed is closer to a 21st-century update on a far older domestic template: the preindustrial “productive household”. That is, a home that is also a workplace, in which everyone is economically active. Even the Neelemans’ large number of full-time staff recalls the extensive historic employment of servants in productive households.

And perhaps this gives us a clue as to what’s really driving Ballerina Farm discourse: envy. For a 21st-century “productive household” of this kind is not available to all. More than ever, the internet has made it possible for mothers to have it all, after a fashion: the rewarding, economically active life, the big family, the beautiful home, all woven together with the remote-working possibilities opened up by the internet. But not all women. Just those with the skills, the money, the charisma, the space for a home office — and a spouse who shares the vision.

If that’s you, you can enjoy your flexible, rewarding career from home, with half an eye on the kids, the home help, and the rising sourdough. For everyone else, there’s the same old juggling as ever — and scrolling through Ballerina Farm as you commute.

What made a young woman eat herself to death in front of legions of viewers? One word: Mukbang. Korean for “eating broadcast”, it’s a trend which slithered out of the early 2010s and has ballooned into popular culture. These videos were an amalgamation of YouTube’s favourite genres: routines (“get ready with me”; “what I eat in a day”), ASMR (splurpy, sizzly, crunchy textural noises), unboxing (testing and reviewing products) and food porn (self-explanatory). They are by turns horrifying and awe-inspiring — often featuring pretty, young Asian women with doll-like makeup slurping up some pretty nauseating victuals. The videos are, inevitably, saturated with pornographic imagery. 

For young women, there is a morbid fascination in watching people devour huge quantities of the worst kind of food; I’ll regularly wake up on a hungover Sunday morning to watch Becki Jones and Abby Taylor Bannigan put away three McDeliveries as the kettle boils. It is a sort of liberating abandon for those of us who instinctively look to restrict our diets. My most intense period of viewing was in my first year of university when, limp from my own eating issues, I would lie in bed salivating over videos of cheese, potatoes, cakes, cookies, burgers. That’s the thing about denying yourself food: it is guaranteed to become your primary fixation. Hence the escalating popularity of mukbang; it is deeply rooted in our eating-disordered culture, fuelled by the thrilling sacrilege of bingeing for complex-ridden teenagers. Girls who once trawled Tumblr for Kate Moss quotes now stare through their fingers at TikToks by Plus Size Park Hoppers, who visit the restaurants of Disneyland trying to squeeze into the seats. The flip side is, if anything, more enticing — with genuinely anorexic creators and emaciated models aggressively promoting “clean eating” and sending scores of followers towards recovery clinics.

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There is more to mukbang, though, than just teenagers being weird about food. Something different, something supercharged, something powerful enough to set the scene for the death of an otherwise healthy 24-year-old. To find out what’s driving it, just follow the money. Ad revenue from YouTube, or earnings from TikTok’s creator fund, are notoriously low — and ordering all those takeaways is expensive. So who’s footing the bill?

Who else, but horny men with a fat fetish. The internet is awash with “feeder” culture, to the extent that the specialist forum Feabie.com terms it “a sexual orientation, sorta like being straight or bi”. Feeder, as you might have guessed, encourage — or force — “feedees” to eat to the point of immobility or death. Even more extreme versions of feederism involve “vore”: that is, partners eating one another, performing a sort of sadistic obliteration of identity. And these bizarre, hardcore fetishes filter back down into mainstream mukbang: one particularly challenging video I watched was of a women shovelling live octopuses into her mouth, prising tentacles from her face with chopsticks as they fought being gobbled up. 

Fetish communities have existed on the fringes since Adam met Eve. But the line between mainstream internet content and gnarlier sex stuff is disappearing: Twitter is awash with OnlyFans models replying to every viral post, while Facebook is flooded with weird “cooking” videos which are Trojan-horsing fetishes into clips your nan might share. And within the mukbang world, men are paying young food bloggers to produce pornified content. If you can treble the revenue from an eating clip by throwing in phrases like “I can feel myself getting bigger…”, why wouldn’t you?  It’s a quick, if stomach-churning, way to earn a lot of money.  

Enter Jellybeansweets, a 20-year-old American with 1.2 million followers on TikTok. Previously known for her dancing videos, she now prefers gruesomely fast eating sessions, shovelling down burritos the size of her head. She sits there in a tight crop top, slathering her food in sauce and letting it drip all over her face, making slurpy mouth noises and grunting. It’s probably slightly safer than doing sex work proper — but how far will she take it?

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Getting paid to do odd and harmful things to make money online is a story as old as time — or as old as Internet Explorer, at least. From the OnlyFans feet pic seller to the Dark Web gore merchant, vulnerable individuals are always poised to sacrifice health for a quick buck. But we, the audience, are as much to blame, egging these grotesques on. We have all become deliciously complicit in the spectacle as every one of our clicks clogs an artery. Witness poor Nicholas Perry, aka Nikocado Avocado, a 32-year-old YouTuber from Pennsylvania, who went from scrawny vegan to 400lb mega-mukbanger in the space of a couple of years, with clips of him screaming in despair surrounded by mountains of junk food going hauntingly viral. Just type “mukbang” into any social media search bar, and a crowd of ecstasy-wracked faces, mouth open wide, emerges. Pan Xiaoting, our mukbang martyr, was once among them – and is now just a stale nugget of internet lore. 

The bulging bodies of clinically depressed YouTubers do seem to be a neat metaphor for the overconsumption of capitalist internet culture. But I suspect the popularity of these chumps is simpler than that: as the algorithms simmer our brains, we are pulled to ever more extreme — gross, sexy, extravagant — content. And a critical part of the recipe is loneliness: these videos are totems of our parasocial existences: to pierce the isolation of the internet surfer, we all voyeuristically watch each other do things as traditionally communal as eating.

It is no coincidence that mukbang, this all-consuming trend, sits at the intersection of eating disorders, fetishes and loneliness. A fixation on what goes in the mouths of others speaks to an emptiness, a vortex at the core of modern life. And within this vacuum, the strangest human impulses are blown into obsessions, leaving individuals to scrabble about for connection by anonymously watching one another choke down 20 tostadas. Influencers lose themselves as they amp up their online personas until we, their guilty, gratified audience, have reduced them to rows of fattened ducks, force-fed attention. Mukbangs have a greater reach than any other snuff film — but that is, nevertheless, what they really are. And the worst thing is, we are the assassins. Even the most casual viewer in the world harbours an unexpected compulsion to make foie gras of TikTokers’s livers, and the hungrier their audience, the harder they fall.

The movie follows an 11-year-old girl named Riley who grows angry and unhappy when her parents move her from her happy life in cold Minnesota to San Francisco, with its one boring season and its weird pizza. Guided by cutting-edge, real-life academic research on emotions and memory, Pixar’s writers and animators enter Riley’s head, portraying her five core emotions (Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear) as different-coloured characters conferring and contending with each other at Mission Control, their headquarters inside Riley’s brain. As Riley grows more miserable in the outer world, two core emotions — Joy and Sadness — get sucked into a funny and harrowing misadventure inside the sprawling world of her memory.

This is where the super-poignant moment happens (spoiler alert). Joy and Sadness meet an adorable sack of fun named Bing Bong — Riley’s imaginary friend when she was three or four — who joins them on their quest to get back to Mission Control. When they all fall into something called the Memory Dump, a deep pit where expired memories collect as charred husks, Bing Bong sacrifices himself to help Joy and Sadness escape. As Joy and Sadness float safely to the bright surface of working memory, Bing Bong descends into the darkness of dead memory, fading and disappearing before our eyes. That is, we’re seeing the moment after which, whenever Riley’s parents wistfully bring up Bing Bong and ask if she remembers him, Riley will think hard and say, “Not… really”.

Strangely, I didn’t find this scene so terribly poignant. But my younger two kids did. The Bing Bong death scene undid them like it was supposed to undo me. Of course, my younger, who was only four, had simply grown fond of this Bing Bong fellow and was sad to see him die. But his older sister was an intelligent seven-year-old. She’d always had a spooky sense for adult meanings, and I had to suspect she was experiencing Bing Bong’s death in the way adults were supposed to, that is, abstractly and nostalgically. It wasn’t just cute funny Bing Bong she was mourning. It was the idea of the extinction of the memory of Bing Bong, and the adorable time in Riley’s life betokened by that stack of concepts, and the way the sweet stages of a child’s life slip from your awareness before you can think to preserve them. In that moment I was wondering — and this might have blocked my own sweet impalement, come to think of it — if it was “developmentally appropriate” for a seven-year-old to be getting sad and nostalgic about how the sweet stages of a child’s life slip from your awareness before you can think to preserve them.

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Of course, it wasn’t just a seven-year-old who saw that scene and was induced by its virtuosic manipulations to weep when it ended, or at least to grasp it as really sad. It was millions of seven, eight and nine-year olds taking in this vivid rendering of a child’s inner life as the content of powerful melodrama, something so intense in its significance that, when they watched it, the adults around them got weepy too. For some, if not most, of those young viewers, it wasn’t just Riley’s inner feelings being rendered as tearful climax, but their own selves being touched with this second-order melodrama, these soaring and piercing emotions about emotions. I can’t say without further study that kids being induced, via the saturating medium of Pixar animation, to get nostalgic about their own childhoods and emotional about their own emotions is harmful. I will venture that, in historical terms, it’s pretty weird, a narrative archetype rarely invented by prior cultures. 

In the sequel, because Riley is now 13 and entering puberty, the five core emotions have been joined by four new teenage emotions of Embarrassment, Envy, Ennui, and Anxiety. One more feature of the maturing Riley joins these nine feelings inside her brain, her Sense of Self. This appears as a pale blue entity that luminesces on a pedestal behind the emotions, its weave of shapes suggesting an even mix of the two main parental influences in San Francisco — genetics and yoga. 

This Sense of Self is just a passive, pretty object. The emotions are the real characters, and they’re impressively accurate, even as comic exaggerations. I was dubious going into the original Inside Out, suspecting that a children’s movie about a child’s psyche would fall back on the corny and tired inner-child schema, and its dramatic form would be the usual doltish Hollywood story of emancipation, the freeing of this inner child from emotional repression so that the kid can be herself. But I was quickly surprised at the complexity and sophistication of Inside Out’s psychological mapping. Watching that movie, I thought: “Wow. Those Pixar people are smart.” As I’ve already suggested, though, this level of smartness, when applied to mapping the inner workings of children’s brains, and then presenting the map for children to consume in movie form, is a little unsettling. It hints at other achievements eerily tinged with reflexivity and promethean insight — like unlocking the power of the atom, decrypting our own genetic code, or programming computers to think like we think. There’s probably minuses as well as pluses, in other words. 

Inside Out 2 is no less smart than the original in its mapping of Riley’s mental terrain, and in its dramatic control of the stuff that happens there. It all makes impressive sense, starting with the main character in its augmented cast of emotions, fast-moving, speed-talking Anxiety, who simply appears one day and makes herself the boss of Mission Control. It’s not just the centring of this emotion in the brain of a high-achieving teenage girl that feels apt. It’s the stuff Anxiety gets up to. When, by way of justifying her authority, she announces to all the other emotions that her specialty is the future, coming up with possible scenarios that Riley should consider in advance, she’s describing what’s practically useful and what’s potentially volatile about this capacity we have. Anxiety’s self-accounting rings true, to the adult who knows this emotion, and it promises a Pixar sort of comic wildness, which the movie quite delivers.

In the end, Anxiety’s power is reassuringly reined in by the other emotions, and by the importance assumed by the non-emotional things that make up Riley’s sense of self, her beliefs about how she should act, the kind of person she should want to be. Anxiety starts out spinning her future scenarios, which appear on little oblong TV screens, in sepia tones, and then she spins faster and faster until she’s spun herself into a literal tornado of movement, producing new scenarios so fast that Riley is finally overwhelmed by them and has a panic attack.  

Again, the portrayal of this anxiety mechanism makes both intuitive and conceptual sense — the increasing pace of worry, the way these worries seem to generate other worries. But one important detail is missing from Anxiety’s scenarios, one character, if you will, that should appear and reappear in these TV dramas of Riley’s worries but does not. That character is Anxiety herself. Surely one of the classic fears that overcomes the anxious person at some point in her descent into paralysis and panic, hastening that descent, concerns her own anxiety. She realises that the thing she’s anxious about is more likely to happen because she’s anxious about it, and then she gets anxious about her anxiety, and then anxious about this new anxiety she just gave herself by thinking about the old anxiety, and then she’s really screwed. She’s trapped, at least subjectively. Every effort to think her way out of her trap just pushes her deeper into it. 

Not making this move seems like a missed opportunity. Had Anxiety thought to place herself in one of her own scenarios, it would have given Pixar’s animators a chance to do something very Pixarish — portray a plunging regress of worried scenarios, Anxiety staring bug-eyed from a TV screen, on which is another, smaller TV screen from which another bug-eyed Anxiety stares out, on which is another, even smaller TV screen, and so on, two mirrors-style, infinitely and instantaneously. 

Then again, even if doing this could have yielded a very funny frame — the infinite duplication of Anxiety’s very funny face — it might have struck the movie’s creators as too scary as well. Or, it may have hit too close to home. Riley’s ability to escape her climactic panic attack, with the help of emotions and friends which together lift her from her worried spiral by turning her outward, is reassuring on several levels. To the young viewer it shows that a panic attack is not a death sentence, that there are practical ways to escape a spiral of worry. And to the older, philosophically stodgy viewer, it reveals the Pixar team to be working from a sort of pop-Aristotelianism, which is no less praiseworthy for being easily digestible. They show Riley’s thoughts and feelings, her individual self and her social life, training each other, teaching each other how to be in the world. They show concrete practice and concern for others as moral and psychological touchstones, healthy and virtuous corrections to vanity and selfishness, at both their common registers and their neurotic extremes. This all gave me a warm feeling as the movie ended. Gratefully I thought, “These Pixar people are not cretins.”

On the other hand, had they shown Anxiety making herself regress infinitely on TV screens, it might have pointed a little too directly at what this movie, like its predecessor, is also doing. Inside Out 2 sends a message of escaping from the individual self, of combating its unhealthy fixation on itself, but it also feeds our culture’s intensifying focus on individual psyches, especially the psyches of young people, which, one would suspect, makes those selves ever harder to escape. Let’s not forget, young viewers of Inside Out 2 are watching a movie about the dangers of selfishness and self-obsession that spends most of its time inside the head of a 13-year-old girl, and this head is obviously an avatar for their heads. This, for a child or adolescent of our therapeutic culture, is par for the course. 

A six-year-old enters his school for the first time and is confronted with a colourful poster announcing the school’s anxious interest in his Mental Health. Perhaps a school nurse or psychologist makes a visit to his classroom to reiterate the poster’s message, to let all the children seated at their little desks know that if any of them ever needs to talk to someone, about something they’re sad or worried or troubled about, the school takes their Mental Health very seriously. Six-year-olds of prior eras had literally no occasion to ponder their own psyches, especially from the outside perspective of a doctor or school functionary openly worried these psyches might need medical treatment. They just lived in their psyches, mindlessly as it were. But our six-year-old gets to confront his psyche as a topic, an institutional theme, every day, with that poster in the entry to his school, and the occasional visits and solicitations of outside helpers who tenderly address themselves to his Mental Health. And he’ll get to do this every year of school, as his psyche matures and, from the changing perspectives of those different years, revisits itself as a reification, a topic, an object of observation because a potential source of medical trouble.

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A 10-year-old gets an iPhone and immediately signs up with TikTok, whose algorithm nudges her to follow near-peers, girls a couple years older who’ve won lots of views and likes by talking about their Mental Health. Thanks to their own training in their own schools, these kids are old hands at therapy-talk. They might even have an entry or two in the DSM memorised. Our 10-year-old, already school-equipped with a therapeutic vocabulary, enters an online market of status and imitation where fluency in this vocabulary gives an apparent advantage. Casually, she and her friends start diagnosing themselves and each other and other kids they know at school. By anatomising her self in therapeutic terms, she may or may not be improving her Mental Health, but she’s definitely adding new symbolic matter to this self, new traits and definitions and layers of significance she can dwell on, wonder about, perhaps worry about. 

This is in addition to the intensified self-awareness summoned from her as she consumes and contributes to social media, even when the explicit theme isn’t teenage self-diagnosis — all the new occasions to think about herself and compare this with other girls as they submit their own selves to these new forms of publicity. By this process of constant self-publicising and self-diagnosis, her mere participation in a youth culture formed by social media and informed by psychotherapy, she has made her self much more interesting to itself than was the case with prior cohorts of young people, whose selves were quite neglected by comparison. Thanks in turn to this neglect, these selves had much less symbolic matter attached to them and were, thus, much lighter to lug around. 

These are just a few of the many ways in which our culture of augmented selfhood has grown into a many-tentacled system of spiritual meaning that changes those who live within it. I’m trying to limit myself to expressions of wonder at the historical strangeness and novelty of these processes and technologies of selfhood, rather than claiming that they’re objectively harmful. But documents claiming with some persuasiveness that they are harmful are multiplying. Ethan Watters’s 2013 book Crazy Like Us tracks the migration of American-style therapeutic understanding to non-Western countries. It shows how these understandings don’t just corrode the ways other cultures cope with spiritual pain. They sometimes propagate, as if virally, the disorders whose Western names and diagnoses they introduce into these new places. This should make us wonder about our own selves and our own culture, which are much more systematically exposed to the therapeutic paradigm. And more recently, within just a few months, the idea that therapy culture is untherapeutic has moved from figures of controversy like Abigail Shrier to arbiters of mainstream common sense like The Atlantic. 

It appears that our modern way of understanding and inhabiting and attending to our selves has turned itself into a feedback loop, a trap, that the greater cultural and institutional influence of psychotherapy begets greater need for psychotherapy. This places the subpopulation of scrupulous, virtuous, therapeutically useful people who work in the larger world of mental health in a tragic bind. At least some of the trouble they’re enlisted to treat is likely the result of the therapy apparatus they are a part of and whose influence they increase as they do their useful work. 

The creators of the Inside Out movies are in a parallel bind. They strive to portray young selves in a way that is as scientifically faithful, and as philosophically serious, as one could hope for in a computerised cartoon that’s also expected to make a billion dollars at the box office. But they do it by feeding children a picture of their spiritual lives that, while smarter and more scrupulous than what happens in schools and on social media, is still part of the same machinery of selfhood. A movie that shows anxiety as a barely controllable tornado inside an adolescent girl’s self, even if the anxiety is eventually brought under control, is still making anxiety, as well as the many other characters that animate a self and contend with anxiety, and that self itself, very urgent things for its young viewers to be aware of. It’s still adding more emphasis on the self to the culture of childhood, and a picture of that self as a place where some disturbance with a scientific name might happen at any minute. It’s still making the selves of children more interesting things for them to dwell on than the selves of prior eras ever were.  

I have hinted that the makers of Inside Out 2 are hip to these dilemmas, their involvement in the mechanisms of hypertrophic selfhood. As I described above, the first Inside Out gave a dramatically central role to nostalgia, cueing its child-viewers to cry about the evanescence of their own childhoods. This, I noted, was pretty strange, and perhaps not age-appropriate. 

The makers of Inside Out 2 seem to be thinking the same thing. A funny emotion-character makes a handful of cameo appearances throughout the sequel. In obvious ways she doesn’t belong with the other emotions. They’re young and she’s, well, old, with a pile of white hair and reading glasses worn low on her nose. This character is, yes, Nostalgia. Nostalgia periodically dodders in through a side door, wistfully, weepily reminiscing about the younger Riley, and the other emotions yell impatiently for her to get lost, because neither Riley nor the children watching are ready for Nostalgia yet. Dutifully, old Nostalgia backs through her door and disappears. This is pretty clever, the sequel’s creators taking a dig at themselves about the original. Yes, they seem to be saying, the first one did jump the gun a little, with the weepy nostalgia stuff about Bing Bong. They seem to be admitting that, in portraying the selves of children to those children, they might also be forming those selves in unknowable ways, and they are aware of this. Part of me wanted to give them credit for these cheeky metatextual moments, the hints of seriousness they contained. But another part of me just wanted to say, “Sorry. Too late.”

The “rat boys” in this case can only be described as Hollywood’s scamps — Barry Keoghan, Timothée Chalamet, Josh O’Connor, Jeremy Allen White. The “rodent boyfriend” is a left-field choice of partner for the “hot girl” but has a certain something that mainstream beefcakes could never provide — an angular broodiness, a wiry weirdness.

Of course, we must remember that the trend is, at its heart, a joke. This is the phrase that has launched a thousand thinkpieces in the past two weeks; it would be a mistake to earnestly use it as a litmus test for “Gen-Z sexuality” or what not. But what it does provide is a fascinating framework to see how male bodies move within the romantic world. Are men tired of being categorised — or liberated by an alternative to rippling abs and broad shoulders?

Although it’s tempting to frame Rat Boy Summer as a baseless media invention, the concept does speak to many of my peers. One tells me she would “date Roddy the Rat” from Flushed Away if she could. “I exclusively like rat boys because they’re flawed and cheeky,” she says. “Most rat boys have a little sparkle in their eye. Alex Turner [the Arctic Monkeys frontman] is the original hot rat boy, and I won’t hear otherwise.” Throwing in another layer of complexity, however, she adds: “I’m disturbed however that no one is distinguishing between rat boys and bird boys. Jeremy Allen-White is definitely a bird. It’s a vibe thing.” Another friend says she prefers “more feminine” men; “I mean, they aren’t actually more feminine,” she qualifies. “But something tricks my brain into thinking they are.”

One committed rugby WAG isn’t convinced. She has just two words for me: “Thumbs only.” Another shares her sentiments: “I like to feel protected. I think for me I feel weakness when a man isn’t physically strong and doesn’t have much muscle definition. And I don’t like weakness in anyone I meet because I’m mentally strong, so I can’t relate to it.” She laughs, telling me she found her latest conquest at Soho House: “That cesspool is full of rodents but he’s a good guy, actually.”

This could all be easily dismissed as just another Gen-Z in-joke blown up by the desperate media. But desire matters — and holds a mirror up to the times.

There is a clear class element to physical preferences within heterosexuality: the ripped, tanned, Daz-white-toothed Love Islander and the lanky, princely rogues of Made in Chelsea are only the start of it. On Hinge, these two tribes are sure to pack out their profiles with class signifiers. One wears the Stüssy t-shirt, bumbag slung over the chest like a bandolier, Gucci belt glinting in the disco lights of a regional Pryzm. The other sports a Schoffel gilet (logo visible), skiing gear (cheery pint on a mountain) and, if you’re really lucky, an exotic holiday photo (Kenya or Sri Lanka) involving girls in floaty linen trousers. Body type, in this context, becomes another of these signifiers, with stocky muscularity and wispy ease tied in the cultural subconscious to ancient ideas of labour and leisure.

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While Rat Boy Summer is just the latest incarnation of this, one distinctive feature is its feminisation: Rat Boy Summer shows how male attractiveness is, for the first time, framed exclusively in ways (however weird or tongue-in-cheek) that relate to the female gaze. No straight men are describing each other as “boys”, least of all “hot rodent boys”: the giggly absurdity of the sleepover, the giddy solidarity of the club toilet, has crept into public lexicon. The primarily male-male signifiers of being sexually competitive have for now at least been shoved to the back of the cupboard (“alpha” behaviour, aggression, being a hustler) and have been displaced by camp fantasies which cast a sly glance at masculinity and make, for a brief summer at least, light of it all.

Think of the endless “types” women have forever been categorised into. “Girl next door”, “femme fatale” and “career woman” have done much for the way women perceive themselves (I cannot put on a cardigan or anything remotely “girl next door” without instantly subsuming the traits of Bridget Jones). “Jock” and “nerd” would be the only comparable stereotypes for men, but they are specifically American and not specifically about sex. Rat Boy Summer signals that men can now be dragged into such categories, as certain corners of online culture (TikTok in particular) are increasingly dominated by the dating stories of young women. This is not to assign it the power of a liberating force — that would be ridiculous — but suggests, if anything, that the power of the internet is inescapable for everyone, touching something as historically impenetrable as the male gaze.

Rat Boy Summer is also part of a wider project of making sense of the chaos of personality. The timing is important here: female tastes seem to be privileging unthreatening, low-testosterone men at a time when harmony between the sexes has hit a real low. While some women still certainly prefer hunks, it may be that less manly types — or “ectomorphs” — are associated with virtuous “feminine” qualities such as sensitivity and openness (this is, needless to say, a false equivalence). I myself have always found the “protective” vibe of hench lads instinctively offputting. There’s something about the performative alpha-ing, the “don’t worry babe, I’ll square up to him on the dancefloor”. A twinkle in the eye is infinitely more appealing than manly aggression. Of course, equating slender wrists and pretty faces with “being nice to women” is, as I have learned, a mistake.

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So, what do men themselves think? In 2021, Bony to Beastly, a bodybuilding website, conducted a survey of 423 straight women, showing them four male “body types” — ranging from, you guessed it, bony to very beastly indeed. Despite the website’s entire MO being the virtues of being really muscly, the most attractive type, according to the survey, was “athletic” — a tennis player-type build and the second skinniest, with no evidence of ‘roids or obsessive chicken breast consumption. Some 51% of women chose this, with 43% going for “strong”, a moderately muscly man.

The survey then goes on to poll respondents on particulars — preferences over leanness, neck size, “v-taper physiques”, whatever that means. The conclusion? “They [women] prefer men who are in much better shape than average but not as lean and strong as most men wish to be. Certainly not as muscular as most bodybuilders. Think of the bodies of soccer players, rugby players, and mixed martial artists.”

The comments under the article show us, albeit from a strange and small corner of the internet, how some men talk about their bodies with one another. “I wish this study could have ended with the participants getting scolded for their ableism and bigotry,” sniffs one. “A weird question: how big are those butts?” ask another, who goes on to enquire about specific measurements for the ideal behind. A third reads: “Skinny guys with fat wallets win in the end.” One can only imagine a bloke writing this in between gulps of Huel, forcing a smirk as a single tear rolls down his Gigachad cheek.

The frenzied defensiveness of these remarks tells us something: that many men, in an increasingly isolating world, are joining women in seeing bodies and conventional attractiveness as barriers to social fulfilment, even love. Of this, the greatest evidence is incel culture and “looksmaxxing”. Rat Boy Summer may be an ultimately empty TikTok invention, and the media’s recent obsession with it symptomatic of an unease about masculinity. But perhaps it can at least be a comfort to these men stalking the forums of bodybuilding websites, anxiously moulding their bodies to imagined female ideals. For it shows, if anything at all, the full range of human fanciability. Every dog has its day, and every rat its summer.

Let’s start with TikTok, which the major political parties have only recently discovered, creating their accounts once the election was called. The appeal here is obvious: three-quarters of 15–to-24-year-olds, and two-thirds of 25-to-34-year-olds use TikTok, making it an attractive route to the attention of young voters.

But look at their numbers and it seems unlikely that the platform will swing the result. The Conservative Party has 61,000 TikTok followers, which pales in comparison with the number of votes they need to win over, while Labour has almost 200,000 followers, a straightforward reflection of its younger support base. As for Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform may appear to be the exception, amassing more than 673,000 followers and a number of fan accounts, some with tens of thousands of followers. It’s impressive, given that Reform supporters tend to be much older than the average TikTok user. But by contrast, Sky News has six million followers, and BBC News 3.4 million. Yes, stories about the election will circulate on the platform, but will it be a deciding factor? It seems unlikely.

Similarly, nor is this an AI election, at least not in the sense that AI-created deepfakes are distorting public perceptions. While “disinformation” campaigners like to warn about the dangers of audio deepfakes fooling the electorate, there is very little evidence of this taking place. This isn’t surprising, when you consider that AI is mostly used as a tool to analyse voter data and target us with more-or-less personalised content. It’s a handy gadget that makes campaigning easier, but, again, there’s little evidence to suggest that it’s swaying the election.

That said, obviously this is a data election, in the sense that most of the parties’ campaign spending is going into the selected digital content we encounter online and in our social media feeds. Some of this content is made for sites that don’t allow political advertising, such as TikTok. The rest is mostly paid digital advertising through Meta and Google, which has, so far, cost the Conservatives over £850,000, and Labour over £2 million.

But this isn’t new. In 2016, Cambridge Analytica became a bête noire for journalists and commentators seeking explanations for the Brexit and Trump votes. Accusations of sinister manipulation followed, as Cambridge Analytica’s bold claims of being able to psychologically profile each individual voter were taken at face value by people who had only just discovered something that had been happening for years.

In truth, the techniques of profiling voters, targeting them with tailored messaging, and measuring their effectiveness had already been honed in Barack Obama’s two successful election campaigns in 2008 and 2012. It was Jim Messina, the brain behind Obama’s digital campaigns, who then helped the Conservatives win the 2015 UK election by targeting, not just key constituencies, but key persuadable voters within those constituencies.

Almost a decade later, simple geography has continued to dominate targeting in the early stages of this election. Google only allows the use of postcode, age and gender for political advertising, but the Who Targets Me analysis of spending on Meta also shows that over half the parties’ total budget in the first week went on location-specific adverts. This makes sense: why target a seat where your candidate has no chance of winning? Or conversely, where your candidate is vanishingly unlikely to lose.

The Liberal Democrats, especially, have focused their digital resources on some key constituencies that look winnable from the Conservatives, with Facebook adverts that name the local candidate, shown only to voters in that constituency. It’s not that different from shoving leaflets through doors, except that it’s cheaper, doesn’t rely on volunteer legwork, and shows in real time which target voters respond. Smaller parties have also poured digital spend into target seats — notably the Greens in Bristol Central, and Reform in Great Yarmouth.

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Parties can narrow down the audience further within a geographical area: by age, for example (around 10% of Meta adverts defined age-related targets). More specifically, advertisers can choose a Custom Audience, consisting of contacts already acquired through other means. If you responded to the Conservative Party’s 2021 survey on Pet Theft, for example, you may also have checked a box agreeing that the Party can use your email to contact you again about other campaigns. Around a quarter of the early campaign Meta adverts were aimed at a Custom Audience.

The disadvantage of this approach is that you will only address people already on your contact list. To reach voters who might be receptive, but who aren’t already on the list, advertisers on Meta can request a Lookalike Audience of profiles that resemble a Custom Audience. Around 20% of Meta ads in the first week of campaigning were targeted at a Lookalike Audience. The Conservatives were most likely to use Custom and Lookalike audiences early in this election campaign. More of Labour’s spending, by contrast, went through local candidates.

But who did they target? Labour’s 2023 Issues Survey makes providing contact details optional, but notes in the small print that those details may be used to keep in touch about policy development, compared with “other information we hold about you”, including what you might have said to a doorstep campaigner. It will, however, “be analysed in anonymised form” and not used to “re-contact you for electoral purposes”. In other words, they’re keeping this data not to target you, necessarily, but to improve the models they use to target others. This suggests a sophistication of targeting that, like the Conservatives’ 2015 strategy, can deliver surprising results simply by focusing campaigning energy where it has most effect.

Today’s transparency rules around political adverts mean that Meta’s Ad Library should show the parties targeting very specific groups of voters with very specific messages. Indeed, Labour’s adverts do show such targeting. One video ad tells the story of a man called Nat who waited “over 100 days for cancer treatment” — shown to 45-to-65-year-olds living in the “sniper alley” of potentially fatal disease onset. Another, teaching assistant Amanda’s explanation of “why she’s switching from Tory to Labour this time”, was seen mainly by women (traditionally more concerned about education and healthcare). Both also fit the genre of relatable individuals telling the story of their own political journey.

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What of the Conservatives? When the election was called, their digital campaign had three themes: Clear Plan vs No Plan, “Starmer needs you to vote Reform (so please don’t)”, and immigration. After a week, a range of adverts attacking Keir Starmer, or asserting that Labour would make everyone £2,000-ish worse off, were added to the campaign.

But then, between 3 and 7 June, all Conservative digital campaigning stopped. There weren’t even any clips from the TV debate — despite it going well for Sunak. You might expect them to return a completely new strategy, in response to Farage’s return and the D-Day gaffe, but no: When advertising resumed on 7 June, the main messaging was the disputed £2,094 extra tax claim, and warnings against giving Labour a bigger majority by voting Reform or LibDem. There’s little sign of a Clear Plan from the Conservative online campaign team, but that’s not surprising given the disarray of the campaign overall.

And nor is it surprising given their digital form in previous elections. In 2019, Labour vastly outspent the Conservative party on digital campaigning. The Lib Dems, and third-party groups (mainly pro-EU groups) also spent far more than the Conservatives or the Brexit Party. Labour’s messages were shared widely, watched by millions — and failed to win them the election.

What mattered, it turned out, was not methodical data-gathering, the creation of engaging digital content, or mobilising supporters to share it with their friends and contacts. What mattered was offering the electorate something they wanted enough to vote for it.

In a close-run electoral race, canny use of data and ruthless targeting of swing voters in key constituencies can change a result. Microtargeting online messaging is a cheap and efficient way to do that, especially in an age when most of us spend so much of our time online. But to focus on the technology is to miss the bigger picture. Just as Cambridge Analytica did not explain Brexit or Trump, and ruthlessly efficient use of voter data didn’t explain Obama’s two terms, in 2024 it will not be TikTok Wot Won It. Not even for Nigel Farage.

But on 29 June 2020, Sharma lost his livelihood overnight — along with several thousand other content creators — when the Indian government announced it was banning 59 Chinese apps including TikTok. At that point the app had roughly 200 million users in India, making it the largest market outside of China. “When the ban was announced, I just spent the whole day locked up in my room and crying,” Sharma says. “I didn’t leave home for a month and didn’t know what to do.” 

In theory, the measure was a response to the perceived Chinese threat to India’s cyber security. The Indian government’s press release spoke of the “misuse of some mobile apps available on Android and iOS platforms for stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data”. This was an impingement on the “the sovereignty and integrity of India” and, as a result, required “emergency measures”. While there was no evidence that Beijing was actually using TikTok to spy on India, Indians were encouraged to buy “Made in India” products instead.

In reality, the ban probably had more to do with geopolitics than cyber security. Earlier that month, a skirmish between India and China in the Galwan Valley resulted in the deaths of 20 Indian soldiers and four Chinese soldiers. The battle, fought with sticks and clubs, was the first fatal altercation between the two countries since 1975 — although the two nations have long disputed the location of the Himalayan border.

“The ban was one of many steps that the Indian government took in response to the Galwan clashes,” says Manoj Kewalramani, a fellow of Chinese Studies at The Takshashila Institution. “Over 500 Chinese apps have reportedly been banned since… In general, the India-China relationship has remained deeply strained because of the continued stand-off in eastern Ladakh and broader geo-strategic rivalry. TikTok really has nothing to do with this.”

Yet even if cybersecurity was a real problem, banning an app was not necessarily the solution. “Improving cybersecurity and cyber-governance as a whole requires regulation to address a host of issues, from disinformation to the role of intermediaries and data protection rules,” says Kewalramani. “I don’t think one can discuss it simply in the context of one app… Chinese propaganda and influence operations are multi-faceted and can leverage any platform that is accessible in an open society, such as Twitter and Facebook. What is needed is broader and better governance rather than simply banning a platform.”

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By the time of the ban, TikTok had become a cultural phenomenon, nurturing a new generation of content creators from poorer rural areas. Indians posted dance videos from farm fields, construction workers filmed the process of bricklaying, and housewives expressed their personalities on the app. Based on the premise that all a user needs is good content, TikTok was able to cut through class and caste barriers. “The best thing about TikTok was that it didn’t matter who you are and where you are from — if your content is good then you’d go viral,” says Sharma. “Even if you’re sitting in a small village, TikTok will show it to the whole world.”

All this was possible because TikTok had fashioned a bespoke experience for the Indian market. It focused heavily on local language content in India, as well as targeting lesser-known regional influencers such as Sharma. “Every three months, [TikTok’s Chinese managers] would hit the streets and conduct user surveys, in Madurai, Trichy and other places,” said Kumar, a former ByteDance employee. The rise of TikTok also came at a time when India had one of the cheapest internets in the world thanks to Mukesh Ambani’s telecom network Reliance Jio, which meant that Indians from all over the country could dream of becoming TikTok stars.  

“With approximately 200 million users at the time it was blocked, TikTok in India had acquired a distinct character,” says Prateek Waghre, executive director at Internet Freedom Foundation. Not only did it allow rural and small-town Indian creators to develop a global audience, but the vast audience in India also meant that foreign creators began catering to Indians, creating a “unique cultural exchange”.

When the ban severed this relationship, copycat companies raced to fill the void. The market was soon flooded with TikTok replicas: of the top 100 social apps in the Google Play Store, at least 13 were clones. Four months after the ban, Sharma received calls from the multiple alternatives including short video apps such as Josh, MX Takatak and Moj, the last of which was launched within days of the TikTok crackdown. Sharma chose to work with Moj, where his following eventually grew to more than 8 million.

A few months later, Instagram launched Reels and YouTube came out with Shorts, offering creators more options to choose from. But this in turn split creators and users across a wide range of platforms. “The resulting fragmentation — with a split between global and Indian audiences, as well as splintering of domestic audiences across different apps — meant the cross-cultural networks effectively dissipated,” said Waghre. “Since then, many of the domestic alternatives have either merged, pivoted or folded up, with Instagram, mainly, and YouTube, to some extent, emerging as winners.” In the end, the big American companies defeated the smaller Indian ones.

Almost four years later, the US has reached the same crossroads. Last month, President Joe Biden signed a bill forcing TikTok to find a new US owner within a year or reckon with a ban. TikTok is gearing up for a fight, saying the law is unconstitutional. Though its executives insist that it is not a security threat, the Biden administration is concerned that Beijing can demand US user data from ByteDance under Chinese national security law.

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In response, TikTok claims the ban violates the First Amendment rights of 170 million US users. And some US academics agree that it is not the appropriate response to a potential national security threat. “Congress should be concerned about platforms’ collection of Americans’ data, but this ban is not a solution,” says Nadine Farid Johnson, a policy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “China and other foreign adversaries will still be able to purchase Americans’ sensitive data from data brokers on the open market. And they could still engage in disinformation campaigns using American-owned platforms. Lawmakers should be addressing the real problem, not undermining the First Amendment.”

Many are also concerned that a ban or forced sale of TikTok could escalate geopolitical tensions between the US and China. “Such actions may be perceived as aggressive moves in the broader context of economic competition and strategic rivalry,” says Justin Miller, a professor at the School of Cyber Studies at the University of Tulsa. He suggested that this could “trigger a tit-for-tat cycle of sanctions or restrictions” that could end up affecting other countries aligned with either side. Joe Biden may think he’s outsmarting Beijing — but his own country could turn out to be the victim.

But recently, make-believe has had a facelift. Gen Alpha — aged around 13 and under — have grown up to the sound of pinging iPhones. The effects of omnipresent social media have yet to appear in their entirety, but recent studies have reported, aghast, that among other things young children now “swipe” books instead of turning the pages. What is less discussed is the fate of that narrow window between girlhood and womanhood, where imitation — of our mothers, sisters, TV idols — informs the adults we become.

Enter the tween skincare addicts: girls as young as 10 slathering excoriating retinoids on their baby faces, scanning beauty aisles for hyaluronic acid formulas, bookmarking videos of the best “dupes” of £300 La Mer moisturisers. These girls are copying women who are, in turn, trying to prevent the ravages of age. It’s a closed circuit with one clear beneficiary: skincare companies such as Drunk Elephant which, TikTok detectives speculate, uses bright packaging to deliberately entice the youngest potential customers.

So-called “Sephora kids” have become a new virtual bogeyman, with videos of throngs of tweens queuing up at the beauty department store raking in thousands of likes and indignant comments. Viewers complain of children leaving samples spilling over counters, dragging parents to tills to drop a week’s wages on It-products, or slapping on lotions with the exuberance of a rebellious daughter digging through her mum’s makeup bag. For this is exactly what it is: ancient bottles of Estée Lauder Double Wear and dusty Bobbi Brown blushes found during tip-toeing trips to your mum’s bedroom have simply been replaced with slick, silicon-free Bubble and Glossier cleansers name-checked in online beauty “hauls”. Tweens have always roleplayed as the adults they see — the difference, now, is that these are strangers online espousing the rites of a new purification cult.

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In the glossed, plucked and pouty world of TikTok, anything and everything can be improved, filtered and fixed. A decade ago, when millennials began deploying filters and Facetune, photos of pub crawls and freshers weeks gave way to selfies with lolling dog tongues and colossal lashes. Gradually, women began to self-fashion to resemble these filters: they would paint on, or inject in, a Kardashian cheekbone, a Jolie lip or the Tipp-ex white teeth of a Love Islander.

But Gen Z has bucked the trend to embrace “wellness”, with its fixation on “natural” looks and lifestyles in such a way that medication, meditation and skincare have turned the scrutiny inwards. Balking at the artifice of noughties glamour, with its visible extensions, orange foundation and boob jobs, Gen Z has moved towards an extremely effortful effortlessness in the form of the minimalistic “clean girl aesthetic”. The clean girl sweeps her hair into a claw clip French twist. She has a clear complexion perfected with an arsenal of skincare solutions, and if she wears foundation it must be so light as to be virtually undetectable. She is always flushed, probably having just come in from a “hot girl walk” to fetch a matcha latte. And she can probably be found journalling, manifesting, setting relationship boundaries or drinking CBD-infused kombucha.

The look has been accused of being fatphobic, classist, ageist and racist. But what is less discussed is its focus on ritual: “clean girl” skincare regimes are not simply a lifestyle trend but a purification rite to distinguish apostles from the silicone-filled, lush-lashed “dirty girls” who are not, never, like us. The trend’s implicit snobbery attempts to rein in bodily mess and discomfort — after all, the overriding sensations of girlhood — and to erase any trace of effort. It completes the horrific logic of beauty: I am the standard, and look — I didn’t even have to try. With such an obsession with prevention, of ageing, ugliness and, above all, unwellness, did Gen Alpha ever stand a chance?

Millennial columnists have long lamented the “puriteen“: the Gen Z archetypes who swerve drink, drugs, sex and debate for wellness, regimen and homogenous “wokeness”. As a Gen Z, I think this characterisation is mostly exaggerated — a classic of the “in my day” genre. But online, within a few hours of liking the right videos, you could very quickly be led by algorithms to believe that not a single person under 25 has ever shagged, shouted or spewed. As a generation, we seem extremely put-together — and it is this facade that children and tweens are copying. Brace-faced girls lining up to spend their pocket money on premium skincare products are mimicking the performativity of their older sisters who, after long shifts “getting ready with me” on TikTok live, settle down to nights of bed-rotting, doom-scrolling and goblin-mode catatonia.

We Gen Zs know wellness is just another fantasy — but as long as influencers play pretend, tweens will pretend back. There is a danger that Gen Alpha — who are destined to grow up with exceptional internet-forged cynicism but are too young to have yet mastered this — will take my generation’s puritanical tendencies at face value, seeing them as essential and, dare I say it, cool parts of femininity. It is clear to anyone who watches a nine-year-old talk to camera about the lathering power of a cleanser that they are, quite simply, taking it all way too seriously.

And yet the awkward, gawky grossness of being an adolescent girl is incredibly important. I spent a memorable summer before starting secondary school hunching around in patchwork linen tunics with white, lace-trimmed leggings, looking like something out of an avant-garde retelling of Oliver Twist. If that seems impossible to visualise, all the better.

I didn’t get social media — specifically, Facebook — until I was 19; at the time I’d mumble something about it not “aligning with my principles” when in reality, I was self-conscious and self-aware enough to know that no digital footprint should exist of the painfully uncool strangeness of my girlhood. Although my lameness was probably exceptional, I am now so glad of this foresight: adolescence, a delicate and desperate thing, is made of private fantasies and bodily weirdness. When exposed to the disinfectant sunlight of social media, how can young girls expect to develop any sort of “authenticity” — which is, after all, social media’s holy grail? Might these children, with every squirt of their Bubble Bounce Back Balancing Toner Mist, be aligning themselves with visions of womanhood which sterilise reality and originality?

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What happens when the specific oddness of this time is combined with the purification rituals of women in their twenties and thirties? Jonathan Haidt, in his latest book, has written of the displacement of “play-based childhood” with a “phone-based” version by the early 2010s; one result of this is that today’s teens, already beset by mental health problems and doomed to an extended adolescence by our dire economy, are expecting to emerge perfect from prepubescence as miniature 30-year-olds.

So yes, little girls playing dress-up with luxury skincare products, while expensive and pointless, is not the end of the world. But the compulsion to do chemical peels when you haven’t even started your period might kill that tender, excruciating unknowingness of being somewhere in between little and big, an age at which only the bedroom mirror should bear witness to the way girls love and lament their changing faces.

Gwen is a self-proclaimed “trad-wife”, one of a number of women across TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit forums extolling a return to ultra-traditional gender roles and financial dependence on a male partner. Like the swinging dicks of WallStreetBets and crypto bros, the online trad-wife is an expression of 21st-century financial nihilism. Disillusioned by the girl-boss feminist fantasy, these young women are turning to men to pay off their loans and fund their lifestyles. And, why not? The good life isn’t coming any other way.

Growing up, Millennials and Gen Zs were sold a false promise of economic security and self-entrepreneurship. They were raised to believe that if they only worked and studied hard enough, success was in their futures; failure was a personal blight. Born between the mid-Eighties and early 2000s, their identities were shaped by the vacuum of post-Communist politics (I was sent, aged five, to a fancy-dress party styled, not as a Disney princess, but as the Berlin Wall). There was no sense that the future would be anything but Game Boys and capitalism.

It turned out not to be so easy. The speculation and excess of the Dot-com era, followed by the 2008 financial crash, undermined faith in the economic system, while the public investments in health, education and housing that Boomers enjoyed have been switched out for volatility and risk. Somewhere along the way, the dream of the good job and the good house was replaced by an acceptance that the good life could not worked for, or bought, or built. What began in general rumblings about why we can’t have it all progressed to a sense that maybe nothing matters anymore.

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If some men respond to this creeping nihilism by staying in with the curtains drawn, YOLOing their rent money on Tupperware stock, some women are choosing to retreat to a time when things felt more secure: the Fifties. Today, women are not only expected to parent like they don’t have jobs, but to work like they don’t have children. Often, they are expected to do both of these things without the public resources (affordable childcare, healthcare, and education) or social supports (neighbours, family) that previous generations enjoyed. So really, is it any wonder that we just want to watch a woman bake sourdough? Trad-wife influencers embrace the lives second-wave feminists fought to leave behind — the role of the housewife, her routine, her wardrobe, but also, if the bimbo ethos of “no thoughts, just vibes” is to be believed, her lobotomised outlook on current events. Betty Friedan’s sedated housewife in the suburbs is no longer a cautionary tale; suddenly she’s a manual for survival.

Of course, it’s no longer necessary to be an actual wife or mother to retreat to the home: nowadays, you can be stay-at-home girlfriend. While the trad-wife’s job, steeped in post-war nostalgia, is to keep her home and family, the girlfriend’s main project is to keep herself: thin, young, and desirable. She is her main project and her job is, as Jia Tolentino has written, to “always be optimising”.

Take Kendel Kay for example, whose boyfriend Luke Lintz is the CEO of Highkey Enterprises LLC. “This is my typical day as a stay-at-home girlfriend,” Kay intones in her flat little voice to her more than 500,000 followers on TikTok, sounding more like an Alexa than a real woman. Every day is more or less the same: beginning with a sun salutation in athleisure followed by various forms of superior hydration, iced waters, green smoothies, and matcha teas. There are small household tasks sprinkled throughout the routine, inconsequential things such as refilling ice trays, lighting candles, and watering the couples’ two lotus flowers. The work of content creation aside, Kay’s job is her own self-care, from workouts to complicated probiotics meals and 12-step skincare regimens.

Kay is one of a number of stay-at-home girlfriends now active on TikTok. There is also the content creator Aliyah Wears, whose videos are filled with sample sales and fat-melting treatments. In one video, she asks her boyfriend “how much do I owe you?” at the end of dinner, while showing the camera her empty purse. “It’s ok, it’s on the house,” her boyfriend says, sliding out his card to pay. Then there’s Shera Seven, who dispenses caustic dating advice such as “make sure the second date is a money date, which means shopping, some kind of gift or spending a lot of money. The faster you get him to spend money, the faster you get him to attach to you. Sprinkle Sprinkle.”

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There are tangible differences between the stay-at-home girlfriend and her older sister, the trad wife. While the trad-wife’s invisible breadwinner tends to have an honest profession that would be at home in a country music song — farmer, electrician, carpenter — the girlfriend’s partner usually has a lucrative career in tech or finance. And where the OG housewife, like her carpenter husband, can be seen to do real labour, such as laundry, childcare and vacuuming, the stay-at-home-girlfriend’s work is mostly vapor. Contrary to the Victorian mother and Fifties housewife who was “the angel in the house”, devoting herself to the needs of others, baking cakes that were perfect every time, and raising tomorrow’s workforce, Tolentino’s optimised woman is a trickier breed: she’s #thatgirl on TikTok whipping up kale smoothies, she’s the girl-online, the influencer.

While some women find Kay’s existence perplexing, many do not. Watching these videos in between school drop offs, work meetings, and cleaning up Lego is strangely soothing. I understand that I am being sold a lie, but I don’t want to think. I want to vibe. When having it all means doing it all, there’s an allure to doing almost nothing. “People used to ask me what’s your dream job,” Kay writes in one video caption. “I don’t dream of labour. I dream of living a soft, feminine life as a hot housewife. It’s as simple as that.”

Many people criticise trad-wives and stay-at-home girlfriends for setting feminism back decades. Despite what Gwen the Milkmaid would suggest, the Fifties wasn’t a golden age for women — if Betty Friedan (who actually lived through it) is to be believed, many real housewives got by on silent desperation and a permissive approach to benzodiazepines. For decades, women had to make do with care work, staying home, and a weekly allowance. And women the world over still do, not by choice, but by necessity. For this reason, many feel trad-wives are romanticising financial dependence, and maybe even financial abuse.

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Of course, there’s nothing new about the hustle of a woman getting a man to spend money on her. The economic anthropologist Viviana Zelizer devoted whole books to the complicated  economy of “treating” between working-class women and their dates, where drinks, gifts, rent and down payments on goods functioned as de facto payments for sexual favours. So why does it feel like an old trope has been given an overhaul? Maybe it’s that, unlike their grandmothers, women today can choose to stay at home because they feel it’s better than any “real” job. Or perhaps it’s that #Askingmyboyfriendformoney and #Girlmath trends are part of a broader response to deteriorating economic conditions: rather than working harder to climb the career ladder, young people all over the world are simply giving up, lying flat, manifesting wealth.

As much as these women preach an easier, calmer life away from the grind, the #Tradwife or #SAHG is just the latest niche in the long trail of “girl online” content. This work is its own hustle and produces its own income. Gwen the Milkmaid, for example, has recently cast off an online presence as an adult content creator on Only Fans. And surely few people could be fooled by Kendel Kay’s half-hearted TikTok screed against girl-bossing as she shills for a green juice brand? It’s as if the response to financial nihilism is yet more nihilism.

It might seem as though in staying at home, young women are refusing to work, retreating into something calmer in the face of economic uncertainty. But the home and the family and the body of the woman herself has never really been a place to escape to. We might be drawn to these women and their lives and their bodies because we hate what late capitalism has done to our own — but the solution we’re being sold is simply more meaningless self-care, in a retinoid or a sourdough starter. No thoughts, just vibes.

The YouTube influencer SheRa Seven’s advice for young women is as sharp as the wings of her black eyeliner. To single ladies, she offers the following on sex: “The longer you hold off, the more that he will like you.” To married ones: “Don’t give it up every time he want it. Make him wait, make him work for it still. Gotta make him chase!”

This chaste strategy, promoted by straight-talking female influencers with lush lips and eyelash extensions, is everywhere at the moment, proliferating under TikTok hashtags such as #feminineenergy and #lawofattraction. The women who swear by it have been compared with the pick-up artist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate, which has provoked a whole host of articles explaining why this comparison is extremely wrong and offensive. But it’s easy to see how these women might serve as a sort of funhouse mirror to the manosphere pick-up artists.

And yet, the advice pumped out by SheRa Seven and her kind appears to have much less in common with its contemporary male counterpart than it does with the self-help gurus of eras past. At least superficially. “Gotta make him chase” is just a reboot of “play hard to get” — a central tenet of one of 1995’s bestselling books, The Rules. Subtitled, “Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right”, it effectively schooled young single women in the art of entrapping — that is, enticing — a man. The rules number in the dozens, but they all circle the same fundamental thesis: that a woman must use her feminine wiles to stoke a man’s prey drive, just as hunters use fake rabbits on a string to train their hounds.

On this front, The Rules differs very little from the advice of contemporary dating influencers — or indeed the archaic courtship norms that ruled before the sexual revolution. And as with the YouTubers whose CashApp usernames are prominently displayed on their video content, then as now there was a certain amount of grift involved. A Time magazine article from 1996 announced: “The Rules is not just a book; it’s a movement. Around the country, Rules Girls are… paying $45 a pop to attend Rules seminars and forking over $250 an hour for phone consultations with authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider — neither of whom is a credentialed anything.”

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Of course, the influencers would say that their own lives are credential enough. They are, after all, the patient-zero success story for the strategies they’re selling. In the Nineties, the women who wrote The Rules held up their own successful marriages as proof that their method worked; today, in a YouTube video entitled “How to receive princess treatment” with one million views, TheWizardLiz says: “I want you to look at this video and think, whoa, if Liz expects this much from her partner, then maybe I can expect my partner to at least give me some respect.”

That this brand of self-help is having a resurgence right now is hardly surprising. The sexual revolution, whatever its benefits, also blew up virtually all the social structures and strictures that used to regulate romantic entanglements, leaving young people to navigate a lawless, chaotic landscape in which there’s no guarantee that the person you’re sleeping with even likes you, let alone intends to commit. Almost every trend in this sphere — from the demisexuals who insist that requiring an emotional connection before sex represents a protected identity category to the ubiquitous therapy-speak that turns ordinary disappointments into pathologies — represents an attempt by young women to reestablish some sort of order, to make their romantic and sexual lives make sense. And when young women are less likely to be looking for Mr. Right than hunting for the red flags that reveal a man to be undateable, it’s not hard to see the appeal of imposing a rigid framework on the whole endeavour, even if that framework is rooted in manipulation and pretence.

And yet, there is one major difference: for the Rules Girl, all this romantic espionage was ultimately a marriage plot. Yes, there was a material element — the big honking diamond ring on the book’s cover isn’t exactly subtle — but there was also the question, right there in the subtitle, of a man’s heart and how to ensnare it. The endgame was love, marriage, a committed partnership. The endgame was finding your person.

The new Rules-esque paradigm, on the other hand, wants little to do with that. The woman who successfully employs these methods isn’t loved; she’s pampered, paid for, and worshipped like the goddess she is. If marriage is mentioned, it’s as a business arrangement, one in which the woman trades her presence — and, if her husband plays his cards right, sex — for being kept in the manner to which she’s accustomed. Men are meant to be milked for all they’re worth and summarily discarded the moment they step out of line. One of the movement’s biggest influencers, Chidera Eggerue, actually got her start as an evangelist for the “dump him” school of feminism, which is exactly what it sounds like. The central thesis is that any relationship which makes demands on a woman’s time, energy and attention — which is to say, every relationship, ever — is better off terminated so that she can focus on the only thing that truly matters: herself.

Posting under the moniker “Slumflower”, Eggerue bemoans the “internalised misogyny” of heterosexual women who yearn to fall in love, who see any value in it at all. “YOU are the beginning and end of everything wonderful that could ever occur in your life,” she has written. Other influencers, such as SheRa Seven, insist that romantic love itself is a lie and a pipe dream; if you want to experience real love, she advises, your best bet is to have children.

Given how hard it leans into a certain variety of hardline gender stereotyping, you’d think the business-minded dating strategy peddled by influencers would overlap with the burgeoning trad movement, represented by antifeminist commentators such as Pearl Davis. (Davis is the purveyor of such spicy-hot takes as, “Can we at least admit a chick not being a virgin on her wedding day is equally as bad as a man cheating??”) In fact, it has far more parallels with a mainstream, #MeToo-era, progressive view of relationships — one in which love and lust and fondness are replaced by a bleak, transactional vision of romance, in which the only meaningful currency is power, and the only thing that matters is who is wielding it.

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As such, perhaps it’s no surprise that some people — including the influencers themselves — insist that there’s something feminist about all this. Mainly, this seems like the result of confusing power, the kind a woman can wield over a man through manipulation and subterfuge, with the empowerment of women at large. So if the man is reduced to an object — say, his wallet — and the woman gets what she wants, the woman wins, and hence… feminism? As one outraged letter to the editor from a reader who took exception to the Andrew Tate comparisons insisted: “Some women tackle power inequalities in society by the manipulation, exploitation or indeed humiliation of men, but this takes place within the context of the gender hierarchy where men retain pre-eminence.”

Granted, if you imagine that women are the eternal underdog in a relationship landscape ruled by patriarchy, it’s possible to convince yourself that literally anything you do at the expense of a man — including batting eyelashes until he buys you shoes — is a form of female empowerment. Just ignore the part where it reinforces rather than subverts every gendered stereotype of women as hypergamous gold diggers. This is how men who manipulate women’s psychology to get them into bed can be derided as loathsome misogynists, while women who take a similar approach with men are yass kweened all the way home.

But they’re both playing the same game; indeed, they couldn’t exist without each other. And more than that, they’re making the same mistake with their suspicious, mistrustful approach to the opposite sex. The pick-up artists instruct that women need to be tricked into giving up sex, their sole asset in the dating marketplace; the dump-him feminists do the same with men and their money. What both fail to understand, or maybe don’t want to, is that the desire for love and companionship doesn’t break down along gendered lines. Most people want to fall in love. Most people want to find a partner. And most people understand that these desires are not grotesque weaknesses, but a normal — and, if you’re lucky, wonderful — part of the human experience.

There is something dystopian about people competing for the attention of a famous podcast host to solve their most intimate problems. Hundreds of couples apply for a handful of opportunities to share their stories with Perel, along with her legion of listeners. Her 2006 bestselling guide to marital relations, Mating in Captivity, established her as TED-talking international authority on relationships. By the time Where Should We Begin? launched in 2017, Perel was listed in Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul 100 list of “spiritual luminaries”. Her podcast has been downloaded 50 million times since its launch.

It’s not hard to see why. As radical new ways of ordering relationships have proliferated, we no longer hold a set of principles for living in common. Liberalism’s marketplace of ideas has given rise to a marketplace of moralities: as free unbounded agents, we get to decide what is right for us. But when our bespoke moral stories clash with those adopted by other people in our lives, things get tricky: how do you resolve a conflict when you cannot agree on the rules that mediate it? Who do you turn to, to help you decide?

Enter Perel. She is fair, philosophical in encouraging a big-picture view of how to live well, and gently tough at making sure that the dynamic never falls into that of victim and aggressor. Nothing is sensationalised, and no one is demonised. She is something of a radical in the Anglosphere, where our one-strike-and-you’re-out attitude to cheating has remained intransigent even as non-traditional, non-monogamous relationships have become increasingly common. With divorce rates estimated at 42% in the UK and 45% in the US, and 27% of US adults estranged from a close family member, Perel’s more charitable approach to conflict might have merit.

She is also part of a trend. Therapists are increasingly becoming a kind of free-market priesthood, jockeying for the territory that actual priests once oversaw. With the decline of religion, we have lost any sense of a unifying story about how to live, without which we’re more likely to be miserable — as the mental health gains from being religious can attest. The claim of therapy is that it helps you shape the overarching narrative with which you make sense of the world, and how to live well in it. At best, going to one’s therapist is a substitute for confession, a time for honest reckoning; too often, though, clients see it as an indulgence, a means to divest one’s conscience of interpersonal responsibility. Once, we could have taken solace in doing the right thing by others; now, the feeling of solace comes first.

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Perel is too tough, and too professional, to let her clients avoid hard truths. But other therapy-as-content offers people that easy way out, dwelling purely on the solace. If Instagram laid the groundwork for the therapy influencer phenomenon, all pastel-coloured quotes and exhortations to set boundaries, TikTok took it to the next level. Therapists on the video-sharing site seem to see everything as a sign of trauma: transient negative emotions, feeling under-motivated, feeling over-motivated, feeling uncertain. Things that cause trauma include having to do homework, dead celebrities, and understocked supermarkets. If anyone suggests that these things might not actually cause trauma, TikTokers argue that they are “invalidating” that trauma — which, they insist, causes further trauma. The therapists who say things like this make their followers feel understood, offering sweet relief from the harsher offline world — and building their influence as they do.

An obvious concern of the influencer model of therapy is that anyone can set themselves up as a mental health expert, without any training or expertise. But most successful influencers on TikTok and Instagram are verifiably qualified therapists or psychologists. They’re careful with disclaimers too, reminding their audience that their content isn’t therapy.

But if it isn’t therapy, what is it? And who does it serve?

In The Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche describes the emergence of a priesthood class that gains its influence by stirring up resentment. Until the priests come along, you may not even have understood that you were suffering. It is only when they point out injustices that the extent of your distress becomes apparent. They present you with a new, inverted moral code in which suffering is honourable and weakness is good, while the previous virtues of strength are abandoned.

The therapy influencers peddling trauma are straight out of the priesthood playbook. If the Nietzschean priesthood is all about radicalising the underclass against its oppressors, TikTok therapists have identified a vast new audience for this. Whipping up new flavours of trauma with every new social justice movement, they target a demographic who genuinely lack full autonomy, who have resented this since forever, and who spend a lot of time online: teens.

The #teentherapists’s USP is that they get it — your parents don’t listen, they don’t validate your experiences, they’re actively undermining you. The demands of school are too much right now. Setting consequences for your behaviour is abusive parenting, and it doesn’t work anyway. They’ll even shout at your mum for you. They argue that “reparenting” is required to fix all this trauma, setting themselves as the adults you really can trust.

Much of what these #teentherapists identify as abusive behaviour looks alarmingly like differences in opinion in how to navigate the world, or jarring communication styles. The information they’re sharing is bitesize, in videos that aren’t usually longer than a couple of minutes. It’s also general: whereas Perel offers insight into a specific relationship dynamic or individual psyche, TiKTok therapists are presenting universal “life lessons”. The brevity of the messaging and its attempt at catch-all appeal does little to help its audience discern abuse from ordinary conflict. There’s also something uncomfortable about adults cultivating mass parasocial relationships with kids, especially when the implication is that these distant adults are better authorities than those who are present in a teenager’s life lives.

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The TikTok therapists have an appealing moral sales pitch — they can reach out to a massive audience who would otherwise have been ignored. The app is more accessible than therapy. But in order to get their voices heard, therapists have to actively seek followers. If a TikTok influencer takes a strong line, viewers feel heard and vindicated, they get to blame someone else, and they want more of the same kind of validation. TikTok therapists get validation, too, from follower counts, and the book deal that might accompany them. They might even get to be the new Esther Perel.

But Perel isn’t speaking to you; she’s speaking to the couples in her session. Where most therapy-as-content cares little for the public good — it tells stories about our inner lives that can only atomise us further — Perel focuses on building, rather than destroying, social relations. Her branch of therapy is closer to genuine spirituality than the TikToker’s: the sociologist Émile Durkheim saw religion as a force for ordering interpersonal relationships, creating meaning and bringing people together to communicate and affirm shared values. It’s a version of spirituality that only works when it works in common, and you can’t achieve that in a me-centric universe.

Then again, the marketplace of meaning isn’t a uniquely postmodern phenomenon. The decline of the traditions of the Roman republic brought in weird new religions, which were mixed and matched to suit people’s temperament and station, just as elements of spirituality are today. Individualist spiritualism is nothing new, either: William James wrote about the cheesy affirmations of wellness-adjacent New Thought at the turn of the 20th century.

What is new is the impact of technology. The internet gives would-be priests access to souls worldwide, and allows them to repackage their advice into compelling, publicly-available content. The reality TV show Couples Therapy has had 50 million viewers, for instance. While Perel’s episodes conceal the identity of their subjects, Couples Therapy has not only real names but faces. A misanthrope might wonder whether that accounts in part for its wild success — there’s nothing like watching a real relationship melt down in real time. We watch Love Island for the drama of hot 20-somethings cycling through new relationships. How different is it to watch a 30-something couple conclude on TV that this is probably the end, skilfully assisted by a therapist?

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Perhaps it’s about how the therapy-as-content is presented. If it exists only as emotional pornography to feed our outrage, resentment, or lust for drama, there’s nothing very therapeutic going on. When it gives us the opportunity to think expansively about what sacrifice, loyalty or trade-offs mean in our interactions with one another, then it carries both personal and social benefits.

The way those stories are packaged and sold inevitably shapes the way we use them in the wild. Create shorts for kids that introduce a layer of conflict to ordinary hardships, and they’ll probably end up more lost and distressed. Edit a day of footage showing couples bickering by the poolside into a half-hour show of shallow emotions, and you’re arguably complicit in manipulating them for malign ends. Carefully stitch together real-life therapy sessions to represent a couple’s deepest challenges, with their informed consent, as Couples Therapy does, and you’ll have a largely thoughtful audience who, though titillated, are also inclined to care about the interpersonal conflict presented, and its broader social implications.

Likewise, Where Shall We Begin? avoids the hyperinflated trauma, lurid revelations and psychobabble that get the attention on TikTok or television, instead teasing out nuance and deep understanding from its subjects. Like a good priest, Perel offers her flock pastoral care, even when she is saying things it’s hard to hear. Perel’s clients are parables for her congregation. Every session, focused on one interpersonal relationship, poses big-question questions: about what it means to be a man, or married, or loyal. Each encourages us, therefore, to think a little harder about the principles for which we no longer have a blueprint.

The #MeToo era was, among other things, a peak moment for what I have called photogenic feminism: a feminism focused on the plight of the young, gorgeous and ceaselessly hassled. While any women’s rights movement needs to concern itself with assaults in the lingerie-modelling audition room, a movement solely interested in stories that just happen to titillate broader audiences can feel limited at best — and at worst, counterproductive. What about all the unsexy issues affecting women: motherhood, menopause, mid-life crises?

Behold, a new book about ladies who have reached the top of the hill and kept going. Hags is Victoria Smith’s alternative to what she calls “non-confrontational, smooth-skinned, pre-menopausal feminism”. It is an alternative, too, to the witchy feminism peddled by writers such as Sharon Blackie, who last year released the similarly-named Hagitude. Where Blackie speaks of “energies” and “journeys”, Smith is decidedly unromantic. Getting older does not automatically bring women into a cosy sisterhood, she argues, but rather highlights disparities when it comes to wealth or care work. She’s not interested in harnessing mysticism, or recycling “you go, girl” platitudes, or supporting the (unconvincing) argument that older women don’t care what people think about them.

Instead, she comes out in defence of Mumsnet, and, more generally, of women who’ve aged out of peak hotness continuing to exist in society. Smith’s hag feminism is about speaking up even when no one is looking at you. It’s about using the wisdom that comes from years of life on this planet as a woman, rather than demurely agreeing to fade into the background. It’s a break from photogenic feminism, with its intense interest in the experiences of the most visible women. But it is also different from the woo-woo world of witchy feminism, with its coven-chic and its inspirational t-shirts.

Smith offers up a thorough survey, backed up by evidence, of the ways women past a certain age become villains. They are “Karens”, demanding to speak with the manager, and sporting the wrong haircut. They are “Terfs”, speaking of female biology rather than gender identity, and, quite possibly, sporting the wrong haircut. Smith writes: “Once upon a time getting a bad haircut might just have meant having to purchase a fetching hat; now a woman might find herself having to record and distribute a public statement claiming a rare mismatch between politics and frumpy appearance.” Throughout the book, Smith is very, very funny. But she’s making a serious point, all the same, about the way that women past a certain age are not merely ignored, but treated as all-purpose antagonists, their flawed faces signs of outdated politics. Not bad guys, but bad gals with the occasional unplucked chin hair.

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Bear in mind that Smith isn’t writing about old women. The middle-aged are her focus, not the elderly. But for women, old can start young. I remember being madame’d in Paris at 27 and knowing that this marked the end of something. Stephanie Cole was hired at 48 to play a firebrand pensioner — in Nineties sitcom Waiting for God — while Graham Crowden, the actor who played her love interest, was 19 years her senior, and therefore the same age as the character he was playing. I am not, to be clear, offended that an actor was cast as a character whose biography doesn’t match their own, but rather am struck by how readily the viewer accepts Cole as an old lady. It seems that 49 and 79 are, in a woman, the same deal: all part of an undifferentiated life stage called “past it”.

I say “are” but should really have used the past tense. One of Smith’s most interesting points is that nowadays our ability to look young into old age means that looking — and even feeling — one’s actual age reads as a choice. Where once it was only celebrities like Barbra Streisand who were commended for things like choosing to “keep” her nose, today — with hormone replacement therapy and anti-wrinkle injections — any 49-year-old women can choose to look like a 29-year-old. People who are middle-aged these days, unlike in previous eras, don’t look it unless they nobly eschew cosmetic measures — or cannot afford them. As Smith writes: “When Sex and the City was rebooted for the 2020s as And Just Like That… much was made of the fact that the now middle-aged characters were older than those in the first season of Eighties sitcom The Golden Girls yet looked much younger.” A trip to the hair salon and a good 10 hours a week at the gym and you, too, could be a “glammie”. This makes looking young forever seem both plausible and — due to such dull factors as time and finances — frustratingly out-of-reach.

Add to this the handwringing over whether a good feminist should love her hard-won wrinkles, or, conversely, do what she can to mitigate visible signs of ageing, so as to stay viable in the sexist and ageist workforce. It can feel as though it went from being anti-feminist to wear lipstick, to being a feminist imperative to look as you did 20 years prior. This new order has been sold to older women as empowerment. Visibly ageing is no longer seen as going the natural (or frugal, or low-maintenance) route; it is seen as conforming to negative, outdated stereotypes about what an older woman looks like. As Smith writes: “it is easier to justify lookism — and the attendant moral judgments — if you can convince yourself that looking like a middle-aged woman is a genuine choice.”

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The crux of the problem for Smith is that she’s pleading with an unyielding audience: younger women who’ve internalised society’s ageist misogyny, and who have convinced themselves that older women are those other ladies, and not themselves in a few years’ time. “Hawking a non-ageist feminism is like hawking life insurance to people who’ve been promised eternal life.” Smith presents herself as a recovering Cool Girl, a woman who reviled older women in her own youth, only to realise how wrong she’d been. This is partly an age-old, gender-neutral question of young people deeming their elders dorky and out-of-touch, but is also a specific issue in feminism, where younger women view older ones as avatars of a retrograde past that they are, or want to be, well rid of. It’s not clear to me that any cohort of young women will ever feel differently, but it’s also unclear that Smith anticipates that outcome. Given how much of a young woman’s power often derives from her youth, it seems unlikely that a cross-generational solidarity is imminent.

There are others to whom Hags might not get through. It is not going to reach, for instance, an audience of people who think that, actually, it’s men these days who have it worse, that it’s boys who are really suffering. And that’s fine, lots of people can be right about different things that seem to contradict one another but maybe do not. Which gets us to that other thing. You know the one. The real audience Hags stands to alienate will be those who have correctly assessed which team Smith is on when it comes to the only feminist issue anyone seems to care about these days: trans stuff. She’s with J.K. Rowling and not Owen Jones.

Most of Hags isn’t even about gender identity, but all books about women and girls are obliged to take a side these days. I find this unfortunate. Surely both sides agree that the vast majority of violence against women comes from male-identified men, and not from men claiming womanhood to sneak into women’s spaces? Surely they agree, too, that the vast majority of violence against trans women comes from men, and not from middle-aged ladies who roll their eyes at the expression, “people who menstruate”? Wouldn’t it be simpler, more accurate, and better for women if feminism reminded itself frequently of these facts?

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But the “Terf” label is as much about age as actual ideology, and “Terfdom” can serve as a pretext to label older women generally irrelevant yet potentially dangerous to listen to. Smith is onto something when she mentions the refrain, which I’ve also seen circulating, about how trans women look more like women than “Terfs” do. This is meant as a pro-trans rallying cry, equating beauty with goodness, and implying that gender-critical feminists are all sitting around wishing they looked like Barbie dolls, as though their non-resemblance to them were not intentional. What it winds up doing is defining true womanhood, cis or trans, as, to use Smith’s phrase, “femininity-fertility-fuckability”.

Photogenic feminism wavers between insisting that it’s empowering to devote your resources to looking like a pin-up, and decrying the objectification faced by those with hourglass physiques. Hag feminism, meanwhile, is not, as one might suspect, about the right to be seen as young and gorgeous when one is very likely neither of these things. (If you’re expecting Hags to be about the importance of putting ordinary-looking 50-year-old women on the cover of Vogue, you’ve got the wrong book.) It simply skips that focus in favour of the right to be respected and understood as having an inner life regardless of whether the typical man wants to sleep with you, or whether the typical woman hates herself for not resembling you physically.

Old-lady feminism, then, has plenty to offer young women. It might even benefit them at least as much as their seniors. It is, after all, young women who tend to experience the most severe angst regarding their appearances. This is easy to forget once you reach the Botox pros and cons life stage yourself, when it can feel as if virtually anyone younger than you is gorgeous and has nothing to complain about physically. But if anything, it’s the young women posting hot gym videos of themselves on TikTok — the same generation of women forming strong opinions about their “buccal fat” — who might stand to benefit the most from a feminism whose focus shifted towards women’s self-actualisation and away from an exhausting analysis of what men see when they look at us. What hags lack in collagen, they — we? — more than make up for in their ability to just get on with it.

“I may not be the woman you marry,” it says, “but I’ll be the woman you think about when your boring wife lays starfish for the entire *2 minutes* before going to sleep facing the opposite direction.”

This video is not the only one of its kind, although it is one of the weirder ones. For the past several weeks, TikTok has been replete with videos from young women proudly announcing themselves to be the opposite of wife material — and not-so-subtly labelling those who are as sexually non-adventurous. These ladies — the kitchen counter yogi, the one dancing in the driver’s seat of her car, the one wearing an oversized T-shirt and a decidedly sinister smile — are happy to declare that they will not be the one with whom you settle down. But oh, when you do, you’ll think about them.

It’s hard to trace the evolution of “wife” from an aspirational role to a reviled one, but it’s a fair bet that the broader contemporary distaste for female heterosexuality has something to do with it. In an age in which women are tying themselves into knots to identify as anything but straight, desiring men is bad enough; to marry one surely denotes you as terminally basic, possessed of the worst possible taste.

At the same time, the rise of the lifestyle influencer has breathed new life into the Madonna-Whore complex of yore, which now plays out in the form of an ongoing beef between the tradwives of the political Right and their convention-eschewing progressive counterparts. That many of said progressives are engaged in polyamorous relationships, which are often indistinguishable in all but name from an old-school harem, is a complicating factor, but also a very funny one — much like the conservative sexual mores that somehow become “queer” under the banner of demisexuality.

Perhaps it’s the classic lines of this conflict that brought the following cultural analogy to mind: what I thought of upon encountering these videos, immediately, was Iain Softley’s 1997 film adaptation of the Henry James novel, The Wings of the Dove. For the uninitiated, the story tells of a love triangle between an enamored but impoverished British couple, Kate Croy and Merton Densher, and a rich American orphan named Millie Theale who presents both complication and opportunity. Millie is dying; she’s also unmarried, and quite taken with Merton. Kate, observing this, persuades Merton to seduce Millie, so that he can inherit her fortune — and then, newly widowed and flush with cash, marry Kate.

Softley’s take on this story leans into its sexual elements, making explicit (and fully, frontally naked) what James’s novel only ever insinuates. Kate, in this imagining, is the quintessential femme fatale. Millie, pious and beautiful and doomed, is the starfish wife, albeit with an expiration date. Utterly assured of her own appeal, Kate never imagines that Millie could present a threat: when she sends Merton off to marry another woman, it’s in complete confidence that she (Kate) will be the one he thinks about. But — spoiler alert — when Millie does die, leaving Merton her fortune, he doesn’t want it. And worse, he doesn’t really want Kate, either. Not anymore. Not after everything.

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Conservatives might be inclined to see this story as a cautionary tale about the dangers of being a trollop; to me, the more interesting lesson to be taken from both James’s classic and the TikTok #notvanilla hashtag is that sex will only take you so far. In both cases, the woman’s error is putting far much stock in the allure of her sexual availability, and in the power this will forever exert over the men she shtupped but didn’t settle down with. It is, in some ways, a fantasy of immortality: “I won’t be the girl you marry”, but of course in this imagined future, the girl won’t be a girl anymore. She is just hoping that somebody remembers her that way.

Maybe there are worse ways to stay forever young, but it strikes me that this is a scenario that grows less appealing the further one gets from one’s sexual salad days. The idea of your recent ex being tormented by memories of your relationship is titillating when you’re 20; at 40, the idea of a balding, paunchy, middle-aged dad thinking of your younger self while he’s in flagrante with his wife seems not just unappealing, but a little repulsive. (Far from being titillated by the idea, I rather desperately hope that none of my former boyfriends — all of whom are now at least 40 years old — are still thinking about me at all, let alone thinking about me like that.)

Certainly, it requires an interesting view of marriage to decide one would rather be the ghost that haunts someone else’s husband than be a wife herself. If anything, the contempt these young women hold for the imagined, eventual spouse of their ex-paramours exceeds that even for the man who married her; as with so many revenge fantasies, this one centres less on one’s own happiness or success, and more on the idea that someone who once hurt you will have a miserable life.

But where are these women, in this imagined future? If you’re the one who got away, where did you get away to, and with whom? It’s hard to say if these women also, separately, imagine themselves happily coupled with someone else in the future where their exes are eternally disgruntled and pining. But surely being remembered as some former hookup’s Best Blowjob Ever is cold comfort if the best thing you can say about your life is that you were hot once upon a time.

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It’s an interesting sort of self-mythologising, an attempt to be the architect of your own legacy through the medium of somebody else’s memory, in which your own persistence is hardly guaranteed. Kate Croy learns too late that men have their own ideas about who constitutes “the one who got away”; in the end, it’s sweet vanilla Milly whose memory becomes a torment. Similarly, the self-proclaimed unmarriageable women of TikTok might want to consider that men do tend to love the person they choose to marry — and to be with her because they love her, the wild (or weird) sex they had with some other girl once upon a time notwithstanding. This is one area in which the Madonna-Whore dichotomy, classic though it is, no longer quite captures the reality of romantic entanglements. The gold standard for choosing a life partner in 2023 is not sexual purity, but sexual compatibility, which is to say that if a guy has a vanilla wife, it’s probably because he likes vanilla.

In 1959, James Thurber wrote a sprawling consideration in the New Yorker of James’s story and the various efforts (and, frequently, subsequent failures) to adapt it for stage and screen. (I am desperate to know what he would have made of Softley’s lascivious take on the material, but alas, he died in 1961.) Among the lines from this remarkable piece is a beautiful observation of how Kate and Merton end, miserably, in a miasma of survivor’s guilt and regret: “They are shadowed and separated forever by the wings of the dead dove, by the presence of a girl who is gone but everlastingly there.”

The anti-wives want to have it both ways. They want the cachet of the sexually adventurous temptress, and they also want to be the dead dove who ruined you for every woman who came after. But they will be disappointed: that ex-boyfriend, cocooned in the arms of his starfish wife, is probably not thinking of them at all.

Since we now do so much online, governments obviously feel that the law should apply to the online world as it does to the offline world. In general, it already does. The Malicious Communications Act of 1988, for example, covered both online and offline communications. Existing laws can also be used to prosecute crimes that institutions and companies might commit in the virtual realm — including fraud, libel, or failing to uphold their own professional standards.

But the translation between the actual and the virtual isn’t seamless. Technology means we do things differently. Instead of a pub conversation which is heard in context, in person, and only by those present, social media conversations can be spread to an audience of millions and survive for decades. School bullies can message their victims day and night. News and opinions can be found with the twitch of a thumb, with no editorial board responsible for tone, taste or checking of sources.

So the Online Safety Bill,  promises to establish “a new regulatory regime to address illegal and harmful content online”. It would do this by imposing legal duties on providers of specific internet services: search engines, platforms for pornographic content, and “user-to-user services”.

Video Sharing Platforms (VSPs) established in the UK are already subject to Ofcom regulation, which requires them to protect the public from illegal content, and under 18s from “videos and adverts containing material that might impair their physical, mental or moral development”. This means TikTok, Vimeo and OnlyFans are all covered. The new legislation would expand both the type of user-to-user platform, and the scope of content, that might be deemed harmful. It especially targets the kind of user-generated content that has not already fallen under the regulatory net. However, rather than the Government trying to explicitly regulate what is said, shown and shared online, it plans to delegate that task to the platform providers, overseen by Ofcom through agreed codes of conduct.

From the start, the language of the Bill has been that of harm, safety and danger. Service providers must carry out risk assessments, and then have a “duty of care” to take reasonable steps against these risks. This approach was first proposed by Professor Lorna Woods and William Perrin in 2018, drawing on health and safety regulation and the “precautionary principle”, which emerged from German environmentalism in the Eighties, and essentially preaches: first ask about the risks of harm, rather than unforeseen opportunities. Woods and Perrin laid the blame for the internet’s worst features at the door of companies who designed systems to engage ever-larger audiences and make ever-larger profits. They regarded regulation as an opportunity to force those companies to pursue a “harm reduction cycle” — and a more ethical approach to the wider impacts of their products and services.

Woods and Perrin’s proposals, on which the government’s White Paper drew heavily, discussed a wide range of harms, from physical abuse of children to damaging democracy itself. The problem is that, as Lawyer Graham Smith has put it, “speech is not a tripping hazard”. The effects of online content are subjective and social, stemming from an interaction between the post, the person who reads it, and what that person goes on to say or do — to the extent that the law has to take into account the intention of the speaker, writer or poster. The Duty of Care is therefore a completely inappropriate model for improving the impact of technology on our social interactions: somebody responsible for a building has a duty of care to maintain it, to avoid causing injury to visitors, but not to control what those visitors say to one another while in the building. “Duties of care owed by physical occupiers relate to what is done, not said, on their premises,” as Smith puts it.

The kinds of harm described in the draft legislation include very nebulous and subjective harms: psychological distress, or offence caused to a group that is (perceived to be) the target of a joke, for example. This means that putting the onus on technology companies to predict the risk of harm, especially from user-generated material that may not be illegal, is bound to have negative effects. Context, nuance and irony are stripped away on social media. Under the threat of large fines, companies will be incentivised to adopt the precautionary principle and get rid of anything potentially troublesome.

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Many social media platforms already remove, hide or downplay content that contravenes their own rules or tastes, shaping the kinds of conversations that are possible in their online “public square”. The Government’s proposed codes of conduct now demand that these platforms reduce the risk of poorly-defined harms to unspecified people. The “duty to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law” will be far too vague to enforce.

Some of the problems the Bill has faced are very practical ones. It is much easier to say that children should be protected from seeing inappropriate material online than it is to design and implement a reliable system to keep them from it. Bullying takes many forms that can be hard for other people to recognise, let alone automated systems. But the Bill’s fundamental flaw is the philosophical approach that sees online human interactions primarily in terms of danger and harm: something to be solved through risk assessments and the precautionary principle.

Unfortunately, though this Bill is specifically about the digital world, it reflects some wider trends. We’re too inclined these days to see human interaction as inherently risky — something that needs to be regulated, lest it cause harm. Asking service providers to supervise human exchanges on their platforms, as if they’re dinner ladies in a school playground, is simply a formalisation of our general unease with the unforeseeable nature of human communication.

One of the reasons so many interpersonal interactions moved online, even before the pandemic, was that virtual communication is seen as less risky. Dating via an app is more controllable than walking up to strangers in bars, trying to think of a good opening line despite the possibility of face-to-face rejection (or getting into a conversation you’re not enjoying, and from which you can’t politely extricate yourself).

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Our idea of harm has inflated — a fact reflected by the growing tendency to regard unwelcome disagreement as intrinsically damaging. And if disagreement is seen (and felt) as an attack on identity, those who feel attacked will call for the removal of content they don’t like. Enforcing an online regime driven by the precaution against the risk of harm is therefore either impossible — or the path to destroying any pluralist public sphere.

The idea that the internet can be re-engineered around a driving principle of reducing risk is, in my view, completely unrealistic. But it appeals to policymakers and others who view the offline world as beyond control. Even before the pandemic, the precautionary principle was taking over our politics.

Online life is already less risky than offline. The real world has no off button. Face to face conversations can’t be abandoned without notice or with a BRB emoji. Physical danger of harm, accidental or deliberate, is confined to the offline world, though the online world can facilitate it.

But, like the real world, the virtual one cannot be made completely safe. A risk-free, supervised, inoffensive online world is a fantasy. This confused Bill is a distraction that should be ditched, in favour of law-making that focuses on specific activities — ones that can be defined, detected, and prevented or punished. There is plenty wrong with the form that online society currently takes, but most of it is the kind of social problem that Parliament cannot fix.

Where America is unique among the rival great powers jostling for mastery of the century to come is its distraction fighting a still-virtual civil war on social media at the same time. In the midst of this global contest, we as social media consumers are like some luckless peasant community of a contested borderland, simultaneously the justification for the war, through their expressions of sincere concern for our safety and security, and the battleground, through the harvesting of our data and the endless background turmoil that now fills our lives.

Into this bearpit strode Elon Musk, carrying a sink, with a stated vision of remaking Twitter according to the dreams of its founders barely a decade ago as the “global town square”. The phrase, redolent of Socratic dialogue beneath some shaded colonnade, seems quaintly inappropriate. Few Americans, and fewer foreigners, would wish to linger long in San Francisco’s real-world urban plazas, and their virtual replacement is hardly more congenial. In the real world, far beyond the ayahuasca visions of the site’s unworldly founder, the central square is as often a place of repression and public execution as of well-ordered debate and conviviality; it is the place where political power is expressed through the raising or toppling of statues, bloody revolutions, and intimidating displays of force.

The tiresome and self-defeating illusion of many conservatives, like that of any Hyde Park orator, is that if only the passing public were given free exposure to the brilliance of their dialogue, they would soon become converts. It is the precise illusion punctured by the German political theorist Carl Schmitt, in his 1922 work Political Theology, when he observed that “a class that shifts all political activity onto the plane of conversation in the press and in parliament is no match for social conflict,” for as he notes, “the essence of liberalism is negotiation, a cautious half measure, in the hope that the definitive dispute, the decisive bloody battle, can be transformed into a parliamentary debate and permit the decision to be suspended forever in an everlasting discussion.”

But it cannot, and here we see the essential contradiction of Musk’s self-imposed mission: the conflict between free speech and the good of the community is fundamentally unresolvable. Decisions will always finally have to be made by someone, and those decisions are always by their nature political, arbitrary, and thus always a source of dispute. For the essence of politics lies in the final decision for Schmitt, then still writing as a fashionable intellectual of the Catholic Centre Party, aiming to save the Weimar state from its own dysfunction: his remorseless logic had not yet driven him to embrace the disastrous political form which gives his reputation its current frisson. Schmitt’s fundamental insight is more applicable to the Musk case than we may at first think: for now Musk has found himself mired in the ad hoc policing of speech on the site, whether through Twitter polls, or his own arbitrary decisions. 

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For Schmitt, this is all as it should be: the arbitrariness is the point, as the sovereign reveals himself as such through “a pure decision not based on reason and discussion and not justifying itself, that is, to an absolute decision created out of nothingness”. For at times of crisis, unresolvable in terms of ordinary politics, comes the state of exception in which sovereign power unveils itself, cutting the Gordian knot of political deadlock: “at times it does so as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive statute a controversy that the independent act of juristic perception failed to bring to a generally plausible solution; at other times it does so as the graceful and merciful lord who proves by pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws”.

This tension reveals itself at its most political in the edge cases, the debatable borderlands where what is lawful may outrun what is good for the community. Again, this aligns with Schmitt’s insight: his opening line from Political Theology, that “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” is immediately followed by the observation that, “only this definition can do justice to a borderline concept,” indeed, this very “definition of sovereignty must … be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.” That is, only those cases where the course of action is contested are by their nature political: and only through the final act of decision, one way or another, does the political sovereign reveal himself.

On Twitter, the edge cases are those, like Trump’s presence, on which the preservation of America’s political order have been stated to depend, and on the content most widely considered objectionable by society as a whole: jihadist and extreme Right-wing invocations to terrorist violence, and child exploitation content. Back in an earlier iteration of the platform, before the political community reached a consensus that groups such as Islamic State should not be allowed to openly congregate on social media, Twitter became one of the prime vectors of jihadist propaganda, recruitment and social interaction. It was interesting, even amusing at first, to engage in back and forth debates and snarky banter with Islamic State fighters on Twitter; then it became horrifying and unbearable as the group hurtled further into its darkness. From being a reporter whose career was largely based on the juxtaposition of monitoring Isis content on social media, while reporting the battle on the ground against their physical manifestation in Syria and Iraq, I eventually had to stop following Isis content at all: the constant blurring of the virtual and the real, between London and the Middle East, became too jarring. But is it true, as has recently been claimed, that Musk’s commitment to free speech will lead to a terrorist revival on the platform?

Experts are undecided. Moustafa Ayad, an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue thinktank monitoring jihadist use of the platform, told me that on Twitter, “the rate of Islamic State accounts being set up or used to spread propaganda has increased over the past two months under new management”, perhaps due to lax moderation as “most moderation teams have been gutted (despite public statements to the contrary) of the context and subject matter expertise required to effectively go after terror-supporting accounts.” Yet Twitter remains a site of negligible activity for the group, compared with other apps such as Telegram where discourse is far less tightly monitored (at least overtly). On Twitter, supporters of Islamic State evade banning through avoiding open encitements to terrorist violence. As Ayad notes, “They primarily stay away from posting violent content to inhabit ‘legal grey areas,’ but they continue to post branded terrorist content and share legacy material, old videos, sermons and series. They will similarly use the phrase ‘IS,’ as a means to reference the Islamic State and still argue that they were referring to the concept of an Islamic state and not the group.” It is illegal to advocate for the Islamic State, after all, but not for an Islamic state: a distinction of which Anjem Choudary finally fell foul when forced by events to upgrade his fealty from the theoretical to the real. 

Laith Alkhouri, CEO of Intelonyx Intelligence Advisory, told me that he has not “not seen an uptick in accounts returning since Musk took the helm”, as groups such as Isis already have secure and thriving networks on far less rigorously policed social media platforms. Like Ayad, Alkhouri notes that the surviving Isis Twitter accounts maintain their presence by avoiding explicit celebration of violence. The accounts he has seen “mostly focus on religious content, abstain from posting images/videos or Isis branded content, and refrain from mentioning Isis as a group. I think these evasion techniques help keep accounts alive.”

Due to the nature of America’s internal political conflict, the policing of Right-wing speech is a more contentious matter than that of jihadist content: jihadist terrorism may kill far more people, but it does not threaten the political order, in the eyes of the political mainstream. Lucas Webber, co-founder and editor of the Militant Wire consultancy, told me that “There is nowhere near the level of terrorism-related content on Twitter compared to the peak IS in Iraq/Syria era of the mid 2010s. However, some extremist elements and ideological armed movements have adapted and manoeuvre around Terms of Service violations.” The Russian extreme-Right Rusich militia, fighting in Ukraine, uses Twitter to “funnel supporters” onto Russian-owned platforms, “and then fundraise from this support base to provide Rusich with weapons, drones, medical supplies, and more – things that have a real-world impact and are used to kill Ukrainians”. As Webber notes, “elements from the “TerrorGram” movement were quite pleased when Elon Musk took over and expressed their excitement about leveraging the platform to grow their international support network. This could ultimately result in direct acts of violence — for example, the recent Bratislava LGBTQ bar shooter was deeply immersed in this space and posted on Twitter during and after the attack.”

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But in Webber’s opinion, “the hysteria from public figures and the mainstream media seems to be largely politically motivated and blown out of proportion. However, the loosening of restrictions will inevitably give more space and oxygen to extremist actors to spread their message and promote their cause.” While decision-making on the edge cases of acceptable speech remains largely arbitrary as “Musk has taken a kind of brute force approach and is aggressively forging his vision through trial and error rather than any real coherent terms of service,” Webber believes that “this aspect will become more institutionalised and stable over time, and this is where it could either revert to type, or settle on set and consistently enforced rules that provide more freedom for political dissidents, conservatives, Right wingers etc to express their opinions”.  Yet it is here, in the debatable lands between legitimate Right-wing critique of the current order, and assertions of the need to violently overthrow it, that Twitter’s speech policies have been most fraught: where does Trump, now facing criminal charges for “insurrection” fit in, having declared on January 6 a state of exception he did not bother to attend? The broadly liberal political establishment may have overreached in its muzzling of Right-wing discourse, but even here lines will eventually have to be drawn by someone, and the final decisions made will always be by their nature arbitrary.

On the heated question of child exploitation content, similar edge cases will always remain a source of political conflict. Though initially disputed by many, experts now agree that Twitter before Musk’s takeover was markedly lax in taking down child abuse material, with the Internet Watch Foundation claiming in 2019 that the site was responsible for 40% of the illegal content hosted on the public internet. Even here, legal grey areas and ambiguities remain, and will, therefore, remain a source of political conflict as the dividing lines are contested. Like Instagram and TikTok, Twitter remains host to legal but unseemly material derived from underaged social media influencers: the task of distinguishing between what is legal and what is morally acceptable proved such a headache for Tumblr that it ended up banning all glamour content (in the process driving adult pornographic influencers to Twitter en masse). Though vastly more reported — and this can only be because it has become a source of heated political distinction between the two American political factions — just the same case can be made regarding the confluence of children and drag performances now driving the American “groomer” discourse. 

As the tech writer Jon Stokes observes in this excellent recent essay, the politics of sex has become the central dividing line of American political conflict. As Stokes enumerates, “Drag Queen Story Hour, Drag Brunch for kids, Kids putting dollar bills into strippers’ thongs, doing pole dancing with strippers, or some other sex-work-related activity, School books that present sex work to kids as just another kind of work, Pride parades with kink on full display and kids present and even participating, Drag kids, Child beauty pageants, Evangelical purity balls, Gay conversion therapy, Porn use by teens” have superseded race as the central battlegrounds on which America’s two political factions contest social media. Sharply divided by the politics of sex in general, the conflict between liberals and conservatives is most heated precisely where the stakes are highest — in the protection of children — and where the boundary between what is legal and what is morally acceptable is so contested.  

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In all of these vexed debates, the central political question is, as Schmitt observed, Who decides? Who decides who may stay on Twitter, and who must be banished from the town square? Who can pluck Kanye West or the former president from their ignominious exile, and thrust them back into silence when they reoffend? It is only Musk, exercising his sovereign power. Where such decisions were once obscure, seemingly nudged behind the scenes by functionaries of the American security state, now they are on display, to be hissed or applauded by the crowd, as if watching an emperor decide the fate of a wounded gladiator. This situation cannot go on for long, but in observing the contours of the present battleground, we are given insight into both Schmitt’s thought and into the contradictory, unresolvable tensions within conservatism between advocating free speech for all that is legal, and opposing that which is harmful 

In his 1929 lecture The Age of Neutralisations and Depoliticisations, Schmitt mocked the technological utopians of his day, who, like Twitter’s founders, believed that “technology appeared to be a domain of peace, understanding, and reconciliation,” where “all peoples and nations, all classes and religions, all generations and races appear to be able to agree” because “unlike theological, metaphysical, moral, and even economic questions, which are forever debatable, purely technical problems have something refreshingly factual about them.” No, warned Schmitt, it is precisely the opposite: “Technology is always only an instrument and weapon; precisely because it serves all, it is not neutral.”

As he observes, in a passage that skewers the initial Utopian dreams of Silicon Valley, “If humanitarian-moral progress is still expected by many today from the perfection of technology, it is because technology is magically linked to morality on the somewhat naive assumption that the splendid array of contemporary technology will be used only as intended… and that they themselves will control these frightful weapons and wield this monstrous power.” Yet this is a grave misunderstanding, Schmitt warns: “Technology is no longer neutral ground” but instead, “every strong politics will make use of it” in ways which “will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground”.

It is in the friend-enemy groupings coalescing on social media, particularly on Twitter, that the political battleground deciding our future has been drawn, and it is in the battle for who controls the edge cases of acceptable speech, that the power to make the arbitrary decisions defining political sovereignty resides. It is a marvel of America’s political culture that, at precisely its moment of greatest internal conflict since its civil war, the world’s richest man could buy himself, if not the throne itself, what is likely to be a veto on who next ascends it. Similarly, for all that Schmitt has re-emerged as a source of political inspiration on the Right following his 2000s adoption by the populist Left, it was America’s liberal establishment that revealed themselves the true Schmittians, in their urge to save American democracy from its errant voters. Under their guidance, echoing Schmitt’s definition of crisis as where “a case of extreme peril, a danger to the existence of the state” exists, American politics since 2016 has become a permanent state of exception, in which the diminution of sovereign power in the White House was manifest largely through manipulation of social media. 

Like an absent-minded ascetic king, Jack Dorsey accidentally built a site of great, yet unclearly defined political power, certainly greater than many nation-states: when, by threatening Musk with sanctions, we see the European Union try to assert its own sovereignty, power frankly does not seem weighted in Europe’s favour. Whether or not Musk wishes to keep this power is an unresolved question: as he has recently declared, “Those who want power are the ones who least deserve it.” It is now too late for us to debate whether or not such power should exist: the fundamental question, for Twitter as for American politics, remains unresolved: who next decides?

Their belief that their imaginations, combined with good vibes, could change another human being’s life channelled Norman Vincent Peale’s 1952 self-help classic, The Power of Positive Thinking: A Practical Guide to Mastering the Problems of Everyday Living. Peale was a Protestant clergyman, but his ideas have had an influence far beyond the American Church. The book has inspired not only football fans, but also prosperity preachers, presidents, new age spiritualists, celebrities and, now, TikTok influencers. Key religious texts aside, Peale’s guide, which has just celebrated its 70th anniversary, is arguably the most influential book in the world today.

Peale’s philosophy is a direct descendant of the 19th-century New Thought movement, promoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other thinkers of his day, which held that a healthy mind led to a healthy body and spirit. His “system of creative living based on spiritual techniques” was an instant success, thanks to his simple formula of prayerise, picturise, actualise. According to Peale, the “spiritual energy” of mind-power is on par with the science of atomic energy, and his simple three-step technique ensures that readers won’t be “defeated by anything”.

Peale knew his audience. Preaching out of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, he spoke to a 4,000-strong congregation filled with successful, business-minded types, including a young Donald Trump, whose tyrannical father Fred lapped up the belief that a winner’s mindset could achieve anything. “It is appalling to realise the number of pathetic people,” Peale writes in prose that sounds jarring today, “who are hampered and made miserable by the malady popularly called the inferiority complex.”

Trump became a life-long advocate of the so-called “law of attraction”, which Peale summarises: “When you expect the best, you release a magnetic force in your mind which by a law of attraction tends to bring the best to you.” Speaking of his time in Peale’s church in 2015, Trump said that the pastor, who presided over his first marriage, would “bring real-life situations” to his sermons, and that “when you left the church, you were disappointed that it was over”.

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Peale’s preaching may have been exceptional, but it was also representative of a fundamental shift in American theology. Positive Thinking was the final stop on American Protestantism’s journey away from Calvinism, the austere form of Protestantism that promoted the idea that we’re all degenerates and only God can determine who will be saved. As Europe and Asia smouldered, in the Fifties it felt like America’s time had come; there was no appetite for negativity, even in church. A new band of evangelical leaders began taking a greater role in mainstream American life, equally encouraged by the spirit of the times and fearing the spread of communism to their shores.

The Pentecostal movement, a branch of evangelicalism that was particularly strong among the working classes in the South and Midwest, had already experienced a theological revolution with the Latter Rain movement in 1946. Instead of tarrying, or waiting for the blessings of the Holy Spirit to fall upon them, they decided that they could receive God’s gifts on demand. “Ask and ye shall receive” was a mantra that encouraged a wave of faith healing — a practice that has an awful lot in common with manifesting.

More radical shifts were to come. In the Fifties, preachers such as Oral Roberts began to popularise the prosperity gospel: the idea that God rewards you for giving money to your church and pastor. In “seeding” these donations, followers plant an act of faith that then grows a material harvest.

This idea thrived in large part thanks to the highly respectable Peale presenting them in a wholesome package. Kate Bowler, author of Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel, calls Peale the “principal prophet of this generation” — one who transformed “abstract theology into workable wisdom”. With a syndicated newspaper column that attracted 10 million readers, and radio and television programmes that stayed on-air for decades, his message was broadcast across the nation. The Power of Positive Thinking stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for three record-breaking years, selling a million copies.

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Bowler believes that Peale’s “synthesis of upward mobility with religious buoyancy matched the postwar mood, turning a man into a movement”. An energetic new generation of evangelists, such as Kenneth Hagin and Reverend Ike, heard the call. They, too, used new media such as syndicated radio to take this relatable, optimistic form of Christianity to the masses.

According to prosperity preachers, God cared about the size of your pay packet at the end of the week. Christ was actually wealthy, they claimed. A donkey was the equivalent of a Cadillac back then; Baby Jesus was famously bestowed with gifts; His guards at the crucifixion were a sign if his high status.

While only the boldest evangelists in America, such as Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, continue with this line of preaching today, the prosperity gospel has real currency elsewhere. Neocharismatic Pentecostalism’s rapid expansion in Asia, Africa and Latin America is thanks in large part to the promises it makes, of health and wealth. In the slums of Sao Paulo and Lagos, the idea of one day reaping the rewards of giving a little money and having a lot of faith is the only opportunity to succeed that most people can imagine.

And, just as there are some health benefits to seeing the glass half full, there’s a growing body of evidence that adherence to the prosperity gospel sees an uplift in people’s circumstances. Research in Latin America has found that people who have experienced poverty, violence and addiction have a greater chance of escaping those cycles by joining an evangelical church. In Brazil, researchers found that when the GDP goes down, attendance at evangelical churches increases, and that the support networks available at those churches further support a politics that says people should seek a hand up, and not a hand out.

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Of course, this phenomenon is far from limited to the faithful poor. In the United States alone, the self-help industry rakes in around $10 billion annually, with Peale’s work something of a Rosetta Stone for a field that relies on good vibes. But it was Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne who reintroduced The Power of Positive Thinking to a new, global audience in 2006 with her film and book, The Secret. Though Byrne claimed inspiration from Wallace Wattles’s 1910 book The Science of Getting Rich, “the secret”, we find out, is a familiar three-step solution: “ask, believe, receive”. A sexier version of Peale’s prayerise, picturise, actualise, in other words, and more than an echo of Matthew 21:22: “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.”

The secret also employed Trump’s favoured “law of attraction”, whereby positive thoughts attract positive things — in Byrne’s case, that included selling more than 35 million copies worldwide, endorsements by Oprah Winfrey, and a reported $300 million fortune. She also has the honour of being the person who introduced the concept of “manifesting” thoughts into things to a mainstream audience. In one chapter on the body, Byrne writes that “it is your thought that food is responsible for putting on weight that actually has food put on weight”.

Whereas most of Peale’s case studies were about people gaining confidence and finding success in life, Byrnes’ focus appears to be much more centred on realising material goods, like better cars and houses, or more money — reframing self-help for a new audience who had come increasingly to define themselves as consumers. Now, you didn’t even need biblical justification, or New Thought virtues. You could simply “ask, believe, receive”.

A toddler can prod the premise with a stick and see it fall apart. What if everyone who buys a lotto ticket imagines themselves winning it and says a prayer? Has no one who has died from cancer ever sincerely wished it away? But Byrne, who says that “the secret” has been understood by everyone from Buddhist monks to Shakespeare and Einstein, was, much like Peale, the right person at the right moment.

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A “spiritual but not religious” type in a secularising world, her suspicion that elites were hiding this great truth from ordinary people appeared to be prophetic. Byrne came to prominence shortly before the 2008 financial collapse, which destroyed Americans’ faith in something that had been a fundamental: the idea of an ever-growing housing market. Many turned to Byrne’s renegade optimism as a result.

It should come as little surprise, then, that the next great global shock saw a resurgence in “manifesting”. In March 2020, as the pandemic locked most of us in our homes, videos about “369 manifesting” began appearing on TikTok, amassing hundreds of millions of views. The idea here is that people need simply write down what they’d like to manifest three times in the morning, six times during the day, and nine times at night. Pop star Lizzo is one of many celebrities who preaches the benefits of thinking your way to success; she told one interviewer that “you can manifest your life and speak things into existence, if you have positive goals and affirmations for yourself”.

TikTok manifesting has launched a variety of new techniques, including “wouldn’t it be nice” and ”the law of assumption”, which provide new ways to ruminate on getting what you want. The practice appears equally popular with men and women alike, with not only Lizzo but also hopeful Liverpool fans and manosphere influencers such as Andrew Tate getting on board. For young people who feel cheated out of two important years of their lives, and conventional job and housing opportunities looking evermore slim, the resurgence in positive thinking is easy to understand. Having the right mindset might be the only thing they feel they have control over.

And crucially, the practice is flexible. You can call it positive thinking, the secret, or manifesting. It can be spiritual or religious, or dressed up as pop psychology. A variety of activities can fall into its remit, including journalling and vision boarding, and there is a wealth of new manifestation practitioners offering podcasts, coaching and online courses — almost always cutely priced at numbers like $2,222, given that manifesting and numerology seem to go hand-in-hand.

That manifesting has taken a turn for the capitalist is telling. The enduring influence of The Power of Positive Thinking points to an essential human trait: we seem hard-wired for magical thinking. But it also reveals something far grimmer. The closest that we can come now to divining the will of God, or the energy of the universe, is by noticing who gets what they want. And the closest we come to practising devotion is to imagine getting it.

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Both these competing visions of beauty have one thing in common: they are the result of many decades of the self’s extreme commodification. In other words, both are evidence of the fact that we have fundamentally lost our ability to see real beauty.

An intuitive sense of beauty should transcend trends. But our understanding of it fluctuates wildly. Just look at how the ideal woman’s body has varied in the last few decades: the fetishisation of heroin chic was en vogue in the Nineties, only to be replaced by the curvy Kardashianism of the early-2000s. Only in the last week, Kim herself has made headlines for having lost 10 kilos and “her signature curves” — heralding an era in which skinny is back.

This oscillation is the sign of a culture that has lost touch with the eternal. In its place, culture is now ruled by the narcissism of the individual — who, as Fromm put it, now “experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions”. The impact on interpersonal relationships has been drastic, and terrible. Fromm argued that one has to transcend one’s narcissism in order to see beauty in another, and so experience love — but society now precludes such transcendence, by seeing meaning-making as purely a question of economics. Community has broken down, and so we are forced to find meaning through marketing ourselves to the highest bidder.

The result is not beauty, but ugliness. Consider the marketed self that dominates social media: an exaggeration of sexual attractiveness which has, with the help of the beauty-industrial complex, become grotesque. Female bodies are made to appear hyper-fertile through Botox and butt lifts, and male bodies virile through calf implants or tummy tucks. A recent GQ article highlighted a man who spent $75,000 to have both of his femurs broken and his legs extended to increase his height by a few inches. “I noticed that taller people just seem to have it easier,” he said.

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Such comments hint at how ideas of beauty influence intimate relationships. In dating algorithm swipe culture, taller men get more engagement. So, instead of removing himself from a market in which his body lowers his chances of finding a date, this man chooses to alter his body to game the system.

As for women, almost every form of cosmetic surgery has been on the rise since the pandemic, including Botox, lip fillers, and nose reshaping. When we were forced into becoming avatars of our real lives, in both professional and personal settings, we increasingly saw ourselves as the image we projected. It inspired many to alter their bodies in ways that look good on screen but horrifying in person. Instead of resisting the urge to flatten our existence to how we appear on Zoom, we altered that appearance so that our avatars look younger and similar.

This is one form of ugliness: radically manipulating the appearance of the self in order to satisfy our sense of what beauty is. But there is another prevalent form, which is based on radically altering any shared sense of what beauty is — by declaring it to be a form of patriarchal oppression. This form is epitomised by the fat acceptance movement.

At their most extreme, fat-acceptance activists claim that health standards, let alone beauty standards, are a social construct that must be overthrown. The “health at every size” mantra of The Association for Size Diversity and Health is, in some ways, an understandable response to sometimes extreme pressures to be thin. But it goes even further,  completely detaching health from weight, despite strong evidence the two are fundamentally linked. Elsewhere, this group forgets that a plus-size model posing in a tiny bikini (inevitably sent by a sponsor) is simply an individual commodifying her appearance to gain status. Unlike other models, this status comes from playing the victim: fat activists often suggest that equating weight with health is discrimination or an affront to their disability.

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True and transcendent beauty, though, is not to be found in either status game: it lies neither in exaggerated sexualisation nor exaggerated victimhood. Quite the contrary: beauty depends on the eschewal of narcissism, and the practice of outward virtue within an interdependent community. Today, however, this is no longer possible.

The upshot is that we have begun to see ourselves as standardised products, to be compared across an image-saturated marketplace. This view is apparent in the statement ubiquitous on TikTok: “He/she is a 10, but…” By reducing appearance to a crude number, our sensual experience of someone’s being is reduced to the visual — it is completely flattened. We are losing, to use Ivan Illich’s phrase, “sensual praxis”: a way of living that appreciates the full extent we are able to experience the world.

Illich asked, “What can I do to survive in the midst of the show?”, before answering his own question with a proposed two-fold approach. First, he calls for “an ethics of vision”, which calls for us to “protect” our “imagination from overwhelming distraction, possibly leading to addiction”. Second, he suggests “ocular askesis”, a discipline by which we train ourselves to perceive the world as we wish to see it. Illich scholar L.M. Sacasas goes further: “Our task, then, would be to cultivate an ethos of seeing or new habits of vision ordered toward the good. And, while the focus here has fallen on sight, Illich knew and we should remember, that all the senses can be likewise trained.”

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Fromm says something similar about love, which, he argues, “isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.” Love, like beauty, has been decoupled both from the context of interdependence and the wholeness of embodied experience. The decoupling has left us with a crisis of intimacy: even as we reveal more intimate details about ourselves on social media, we are losing our ability to be close to others in real life.

The commodification of beauty is at the heart of this crisis. Fromm argues that “the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle underlying love are incompatible”. But we can overcome the idea that we are only beautiful if we can be marketed in specific, narrow realms. We can choose not to rate each other with numbers, or indulge the swipe culture of dating apps. Training ourselves to see the transcendent beauty of virtue is a way to open ourselves up to the expanse of human experience, to hone our “sensual praxis”, to restore our ability to be interdependent again, and to love.