<
https://www.wired.com/story/inside-tiktok-unhinged-home-remodeling-videos/>
"If you’ve been on TikTok at any point in the past six months, chances are
you’ve stumbled across them, as I first did during a fairly routine doomscroll
one night this summer. For me it started with two videos somewhat incongruously
tagged #homeremodeling and #housedesign. One of them featured a CGI man
summoning a baby phoenix outside of a tree that he planned to turn into an
apartment. Then a robotic AI voice started to narrate how the CGI man,
identified as “Little John,” was going to build it. Over the next 90 seconds,
Little John transformed the tree into a maniacally space-efficient luxury unit
in an AI-generated ballet of flying galvanized square steel, ecofriendly wood
veneer, and expansion screws.
The other video, featuring nearly identical CGI and the same hypnotically flat
AI narrator, followed the story of a couple with a billion children that, like
Little John, decided it was time to improve their home. And those two videos
were only the tip of the galvanized steel iceberg.
There are hundreds of accounts posting these videos to TikTok right now, and
they’ve become immensely popular, racking up millions of views. Even the
“character” of Little John has become a meme of his own, with people making
skits where they pretend to be him.
The videos struck me as a fascinating case study of how TikTok trends have
evolved—or rather devolved—over time. What was once an app full of human beings
making content in conversation with each other has become a dizzying world
where irony and sincerity, memes and spam, blur together into a slurry of
bizarre content no one is quite sure what to do with. As I set out to discover
who was making these videos, I assumed that lifting the rock would reveal an
even stranger world of broken social networks, AI content farms, and shady
engagement hacks, wiggling just beneath the surface of the web. Which it did!
But stranger still, in the end, it turned out these videos hadn’t become huge
as a TikTok trend at all."
Via
Garbage Day: Stop listening to the strategists
https://www.garbageday.email/p/stop-listening-to-the-strategists
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
