With over three billion users, TikTok overtook Google as the single most used app in the world in 2021. As a content-sharing platform, it represents the biggest potential global audience for its users, but how does it work? Performance artist Louise Orwin does a deep dive into this murky world and reflects on what the attention economy might mean for the future of art, entertainment and society as a whole.
Working with Jaxon Valentine, a modestly successful professional TikToker with 80,000 followers, Orwin has explored how to become TikTok famous and what it takes to sustain your following. In FAMEHUNGRY, she exposes the processes behind the algorithms on which the app operates and how to play the system.
Explorative, funny and unsettling, FAMEHUNGRY is a live-stream, performed in front of an in-person live audience, with genuine viewers following online. The theatrical experience is established as a game, a challenge for Orwin to get 10,000 likes for her live-stream, which is breaking some of the rules of TikTok's code of conduct so there is an additional sense of jeopardy—as the live feed could be taken down at any point.
Of course, TikTok works because everyone wants to feel appreciated, and the simple act of putting yourself out there and having people look at it, like it, share it with others is alluring. However, growing your following has a darker side, and the purpose of making TikTok content is purely to get likes and followers, a possibly dystopian future for artists and the wider cultural industry whose broad purpose is to challenge and explore rather than to exploit.
However, it is clear that people want to see others pretending to work in MacDonalds, or dance while wearing a turtle costume, or tattoo the names of every follower on their body, or perhaps even watch someone lick a lollipop for a straight hour. In this regard, TikTok is very much in line with Berners-Lee's vision for the Web as a democratising medium that puts the power in the hands of ordinary people.
One of the key things I took from this experience was the ordinariness and banality of successful TikTok content, which, Orwin appears to suggest, presents a sadness within its creators. However, this does not appear to concur with the lived experience of professionals such as Jax, who sees it very much as a means to an end, an opportunity to create the kind of life they would like for themselves.
The show does not attempt to form an opinion about TikTok—that genie is very much out of the bottle—instead it asks: what next? Perhaps it's best to leave the last word to Jax, who tackles the question very succinctly: we evolve or die. This is urgent, powerful and frightening theatre performed with courage, precision and clarity of purpose—it's also genuinely entertaining!