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Kernel | The Serendipity Machine

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In the first TikTok that I can recall watching, a teen girl was using a mirror effect to pretend to eat her disembodied, floating fingers to the Kidz Bop version of Evanescence's 2003 classic “Bring Me to Life.” On screen, she could barely keep from breaking into laughter. Mundane, zany, completely contextless, endless replicable: perfect internet humor. It was the summer of 2019, and TikTok had that heady, diffuse feeling that social media companies struggle to cultivate in their early days—the sense that people are gathering and coalescing into communities because something is happening on their platform. What is TikTok? What are any of the major social media platforms, these days? They are never-ending A/B tests, where a single piece of content slides onto the screen and all interactions with it—milliseconds of watch time, number of watches, likes, shares, comments, even things like phone orientation—are combined with contextual information—IP address, device type, time of day, loca

Kernel | The Serendipity Machine Issue 4 nonfiction The Serendipity Machine written by Hal Triedman edited by Sheon Han art by Connie Liu In the first TikTok that I can recall watching , a teen girl was using a mirror effect to pretend to eat her disembodied, floating fingers to the Kidz Bop version of Evanescence's 2003 classic “ Bring Me to Life .” On screen, she could barely keep from breaking into laughter. Mundane, zany, completely contextless, endless replicable: perfect internet humor. It was the summer of 2019, and TikTok had that heady, diffuse feeling that social media companies stru

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