Remains of the Day

Time 2020-10-12 21:06:48

Web Name: Remains of the Day

WebSite: http://www.eugenewei.com

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In my previous post on TikTok I discussed why its For You Page algorithm is the connective tissue that makes TikTok work. It is the bus on its motherboard that connects and closes all its feedback loops.But in the breathless rush to understand why companies might want to acquire TikTok, should ByteDance be forced to divest itself of the popular short video app, the hype around its algorithm has taken on a bit of exoticization that often characterizes Western analysis of the Chinese tech scene these days.I kept holding off on publishing this piece because every day seemed to bring some new development in the possible ban of TikTok in the U.S. And instead of writing any introduction that would become instantly outdated, I'll just leave this sidenote here to say that as of publishing this entry, it seems Oracle will take over the TikTok cloud computing deal while also joining Wal-Mart and some VCs in assuming some ownership stake in TikTok Global. But it won't surprise me one bit if we find out even more bizarre details over the next week. This is the type of deal that I would have thought could only happen in Succession, but even in that satire it would seem hyperbolic. The 2020 Writer's Room is undefeated.In this post, I want to discuss exactly how the design of TikTok helps its algorithm work as well as it does. Last time I discussed why the FYP algorithm is at the heart of TikTok’s flywheel, but if the algorithm wasn’t effective then the whole feedback loop would collapse. Understanding how the algorithm achieves its accuracy matters even if you’re not interested in TikTok or the short video space because more and more, companies in all industries will be running up against a competitor whose advantage centers around a machine learning algorithm.What I want to discuss is how TikTok’s design helps its algorithm “see.”Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott is one of those books that turns you into one of those Silicon Valley types that use (abuse?) the term legibility. I first heard about it after reading Venkatesh Rao’s summary of its main themes, and that piece remains a good tldr primer on the book if you don’t plan to read the text (Scott Alexander's review of the book is also good though is long enough that it could almost justify its own tldr). However, I recommend that you do.The subtitle of Scott’s book is “How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.” In particular, Scott dissects a failure state that recurs across a number of domains, in which a governing body like the nation-state turns to what Scott terms high modernism in an effort to increase legibility of whatever it is they are trying to exert control over, whether for the purposes of taxation or conscription or any number of goals. In doing so, they impose a false sense of order on a reality more complex than they can imagine.It would really be fascinating to hear from Scott on the case of modern China, under CCP rule, with modern technology for surveillance, and whether he thinks they will prove or violate his thesis in the fullness of time.It’s a book that raises one’s awareness of all sorts of examples of unintended consequences in day-to-day life. We all could use a healthier does of humility when we are too flush with great man hubris. The world is richer and more complicated than we give it credit for. As an example, much of what Scott discusses has relevance to some of the hubris of our modern social networking giants. These dominant apps are designed to increase legibility of their user bases for, among other things, driving engagement, preventing churn, and ultimately, serving targeted advertisements. That, in turn, has led their parent companies into a thicket of problems which they’re grappling with constantly now.But that is a topic for another post, another day. Whereas Scott focuses in on how the nation-state uses simplifying abstractions to “see” its citizens at a synoptic level, I want to discuss how TikTok’s application design allows its algorithm to “see” all the detail it needs to perform its matchmaking job efficiently and accurately. If Seeing Like a State is about a common failure state, this post is about a new model for getting the most leverage from machine learning algorithms in the design of applications and services.I’m aware of the irony that the controversy around TikTok was the potential of user data being accessed by the CCP, or being “seen by that state.” Or that one of the sticking points of this new Cold War is the Chinese Firewall, which selects what the citizens of China “see.” And which most U.S. tech companies sit outside of, looking in.In recent years, one of the realizations in machine learning, at least to an outsider to the subject like myself, is just how much progress was possible just by increasing the volume of training data by several orders of magnitude. That is, even if the algorithms themselves aren’t that different than they were a few years ago, just by training them on a much larger datasets, AI researchers have achieved breakthroughs like GPT-3 (which temporarily gave tech Twitter a tantric orgasm).When people say that TikTok’s algorithms are key to its success, many picture some magical block of code as being the secret sauce of the company. The contemporary postmodernist Russian writer Viktor Pelevin has said that the protagonist of all modern cinema is a briefcase full of money. From the briefcase of radioactive material (I think that’s what it was?) in Kiss Me Deadly to the briefcase of similarly glowing who knows what (Marcellus Wallace’s soul?) in Pulp Fiction, from the Genesis equation in The Formula to the secret financial process in David Mamet’s The Spanish Prisoner, we’ve long been obsessed in cinema with the magical McGuffin. In recent weeks, discussion of TikTok’s algorithm has elevated it into something similar, akin to one of those mystical archaeological artifacts in one of the Indiana Jones films, like the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy Grail, or the lingam Shivling.But most experts in the field doubt that TikTok has made some hitherto unknown advance in machine learning recommendations algorithms. In fact, most of them would say that TikTok is likely building off of the same standard approaches to the problem that others are.But recall that the effectiveness of a machine learning algorithm isn’t a function of the algorithm alone but of the algorithm after trained on some dataset. GPT-3 may not be novel, but trained on an enormous volume of data, and with a massive number of parameters, its output is often astonishing.Likewise, the TikTok FYP algorithm, trained on its dataset, is remarkably accurate and efficient at matching videos with those who will find them entertaining (and, just as importantly, at suppressing the distribution of videos to those who won’t find them entertaining).For some domains, like text, good training data is readily available in large volumes. For example, to train an AI model like GPT-3, you can turn to the vast corpus of text already available on the internet, in books, and so on. If you want to train a visual AI, you can turn to the vast supply of photos online and in various databases. The training is still expensive, but at least copious training data is readily at hand.But for TikTok (or Douyin, its Chinese clone), who needed an algorithm that would excel at recommending short videos to viewers, no such massive publicly available training dataset existed. Where could you find short videos of memes, kids dancing and lip synching, pets looking adorable, influencers pushing brands, soldiers running through obstacle courses, kids impersonating brands, and on and on? Even if you had such videos, where could you find comparable data on how the general population felt about such videos? Outside of Musical.ly’s dataset, which consisted mostly of teen girls in the U.S. lip synching to each other, such data didn’t exist.In a unique sort of chicken and egg problem, the very types of video that TikTok’s algorithm needed to train on weren’t easy to create without the app’s camera tools and filters, licensed music clips, etc.This, then, is the magic of the design of TikTok: it is a closed loop of feedback which inspires and enables the creation and viewing of videos on which its algorithm can be trained.For its algorithm to become as effective as it has, TikTok became its own source of training data.To understand how TikTok’s created such a potent flywheel of learning, we need to delve into its design.The dominant school of thought when it comes to UI design in tech, at least that I’ve grown up with the past two decades, has centered around removing friction for users in accomplishing whatever it is they’re trying to do while delighting them in the process. The goal has been design that is elegant, in every sense of the word: intuitive, ingenious, even stylish. Perhaps no company has more embodied this school of design than Apple. At its best, Apple makes hardware and software that is pleasingly elegant—“it just works”—but also sexy in a way that makes its users feel tasteful. Apple’s infamous controlling style—no replaceable batteries for its phones and laptops, the current debate over its App Store rules—put the company squarely in the camp of what Scott in Seeing Like a State refers to as high modernism. Is there any reason to show a video of how the new MacBook Pro body is crafted from one solid block of aluminum (besides the fact that Jony Ive cooing “a-loo-MIN-eee-um” is ASMR to Apple fans) when unveiling it at an Apple keynote? How about because it’s sexy AF to see industrial lasers carving that unibody out of a solid chunk of aluminum? And later, when you’re cranking out an email at a coffee shop on said laptop, some residual memory of that video in your unconscious will give you just the slightest hit of dopamine?There’s a reason this user-centric design model has been so dominant for so long, especially in consumer tech. First, it works. Apple’s market cap was, at last check, over 2 trillion dollars. Remember when fake Sean Parker said a billion dollars was cool? That was just a decade ago and a billion dollars is no longer S-Tier. The wealth meta moves fast. Furthermore, we live in the era of massive network effects, where tech giants who apply Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory and acquire a massive base of users can exert unbelievable leverage on the markets they participate in. One of the best ways to do that is to design products and services that do what users want better than your competitors.This school of design has been so dominant for so long that I’ve almost managed to forget some of the brutal software design that used to the norm in a bygone era.Not to be confused with brutalist design, which can be quite beautiful in its own respect, like its architectural cousins.But what if the key to serving your users best depends in large part upon training a machine learning algorithm? What if that ML algorithm needs a massive training dataset? In an age when machine learning is in its ascendancy, this is increasingly a critical design objective.More and more, when considering how to design an app, you have to consider how best to help an algorithm “see.” To serve your users best, first serve the algorithm.TikTok fascinates me because it is an example of a modern app whose design, whether by accident or, uhh, design, is optimized to feed its algorithm as much useful signal as possible. It is an exemplar of what I call algorithm-friendly design.I thought about calling it algorithm-centric design but felt it went too far. Ultimately, a design that helps an algorithm see is still doing so in service of providing the user with the best possible experience. This might still be considered just a variant of user-centric design, but for those teams working on products with a heavy machine learning algorithm component, it may be useful to acknowledge explicitly. After all, when a product manager, designer, and engineer meet to design an app, the algorithm isn't in attendance. Yet its training needs must be represented.James Scott speaks of “seeing like a state,” of massive shifts in fields like urban design that made quantities like plots of land and their respective owners “legible” to tax collectors. TikTok’s design makes its videos, users, and user preferences legible to its For You Page algorithm. The app design fulfills one of its primary responsibilities: “seeing like an algorithm.”Let’s take a closer look. TikTok opens into the For You Page and goes right into a video. This is what it looks like. This is, as of right now, the most popular TikTok ever. By the time I publish this post, its 34.1M likes will likely be outdated. You can read the story of how this TikTok even came to be and it will still feel like a cultural conundrum wrapped in a riddle stuffed in a paradox, and you love to see it. I showed this to my niece, we looped it a few dozen times, then we started chanting “M to the B, M to the B” and laughing our asses off and it was one of the only times in this pandemic I’ve truly felt anything other than despair.The entire screen is filled with one video. Just one. It is displayed fullscreen, in vertical orientation. This is not a scrolling feed. It’s paginated, effectively. The video autoplays almost immediately (and the next few videos are loaded in the background so that they, too, can play quickly when it’s their turn on stage).This design puts the user to an immediate question: how do you feel about this short video and this short video alone?Everything you do from the moment the video begins playing is signal as to your sentiment towards that video. Do you swipe up to the next video before it has even finished playing? An implicit (though borderline explicit) signal of disinterest. Did you watch it more than once, letting it loop a few times? Seems that something about it appealed to you. Did you share the video through the built-in share pane? Another strong indicator of positive sentiment. If you tap the bottom right spinning LP icon and watch more videos with that same soundtrack, that is additional signal as to your tastes. Often the music cue is synonymous with a meme, and now TikTok has another axis on which to recommend videos for you. Did you tap into the video creator’s profile page? Did you watch other videos of theirs, and did you then follow them? In addition to enjoying the video, perhaps you appreciate them in particular.But let’s step back even earlier, before you’re even watching the video, and understand how the TikTok algorithm “sees” the video itself. Before the video is even sent down to your phone by the FYP algorithm, some human on TikTok’s operations team has already watched the video and added lots of relevant tags or labels. Is the video about dancing? Lip synching? Video games? A kitten? A chipmunk? Is it comedic? Is the subject a male or female? What age, roughly? Is it a group video? Where is it set? What filters or visual effects are used? If there’s food involved, what kind? And so on. All of these labels become features that the algorithm can now see.Vision AI also does a pass on the video, and to the extent it can, contributes what it sees. Some of TikTok’s camera filters are designed to track human faces or hands or gestures so vision AI is often invoked even earlier, at the point of creation.The algorithm can also see what TikTok already knows about you. What types of videos have you enjoyed in the past? What demographic or psychographic information is known about you? Where are you watching the video? What type of device do you have? And so on. Beyond that, what other users are similar to you?Let's jump back to the moment you watch that video on your phone in TikTok. The FYP algorithm can now close all the feedback loops. It takes every one of the actions you take on the video and can guess how you, with all your tastes, feels about this video, with all its attributes.None of these individual steps sounds like rocket science, especially to anyone who works on any algorithmic social feed today.In my previous piece I noted that TikTok doesn’t really have a strong social graph. One of the reasons the app is as effective as it is is that it doesn’t try to pretend to be what it isn’t. That is, people already have a gazillion other social graphs and ways to share with people they know. Rather than force people to do so within the TikTok app, they make it dead simple to download videos or share them through those external channels. What TikTok keeps, however, is the signal that you chose to share that video. That data feeds their algorithm and their algorithm alone. Since the videos are watermarked, they also get a nice hit of free publicity from the share. In fact, TikTok has published a blog post describing essentially how their FYP algorithm works, and I doubt anyone in tech will find the description anything but obvious. But contrast what TikTok's FYP algorithm sees with what a comparable recommendation algorithm sees on most other social networking feeds.The default UI of our largest social networks today is the infinite vertically scrolling feed (I could have easily used a screenshot of Facebook above, for example). Instead of serving you one story at a time, these apps display multiple items on screen at once. As you scroll up and past many stories, the algorithm can’t “see” which story your eyes rest on. Even if it could, if the user doesn’t press any of the feedback buttons like the Like button, is their sentiment towards that story positive or negative? The signal of user sentiment isn’t clean.If you subscribe to the idea that UI's should remove friction, the infinite scrolling feed is ideal. It offers a sense of uninhibited control of the pace of consumption. The simulated physics that result from flicking a feed with your thumb and seeing it scroll up like the drum of the Big Wheel from the Price is Right Showcase Showdown with the exact rotational velocity implied by the speed of your initial gesture, seeing that software wheel gradually slow down exactly as it would if encountering constant physical friction, it’s one of the most delightful user interactions of the touchscreen era. You can scroll past a half dozen tweets or Facebook feed items in no time. Wheeeeeeee! A paginated design, in which you could only see one story at a time, where each flick of the finger would only advance the feed one item at a time, would be a literal and metaphoric drag.On the other hand, maybe you wouldn’t mind reading one tweet at a time if they were better targeted, and maybe they would be better targeted if Twitter knew more about which types of tweets really interest you. And maybe Twitter would know more about what really interested you if you had to give explicit and implicit positive or negative signals on every tweet.Even on a story a user does engage with, judging sentiment is a challenge. Most apps only have positive feedback mechanisms, most typically some form of a like button. Since apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built around social graphs, it’s obvious why they might opt not to offer dislike buttons.But, as Stephen King wrote in On Writing, "If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway."By relying on a long scrolling feed with mostly explicit positive feedback mechanisms, social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have made a tradeoff in favor of lower friction scanning for users at the expense of a more accurate read on negative signal.You see another variant of this tradeoff at longstanding companies with the same founding CEO. That person tends to surround themselves with a C-Suite that follows their lead, works well with them. The danger of being surrounded by yes-men is not having anyone to challenge the blindspots in your thinking. It's always worth asking who the people are who are powerful enough to actually change the minds of people like Bezos, Cook, Zuckerberg, Musk. Often the answer is no one, so their blindspots become the blindspots of the company.Networks that are built around interest graphs, like Reddit, do tend to incorporate down voting mechanisms because their prime directive to keep users from churning is to serve them the most interesting content. That means weeding out uninteresting content as much as it does surfacing appealing content.TikTok doesn’t have an explicit downvote button, but by serving you just one video at a time, they can infer your lack of interest in any single video based on whether you churn out of that video quickly A quick swipe up before a video has completed is like swiping left on Tinder. The best TikTokers have an intuitive sense of the narrative pace that is appropriate for that platform. How long can you drag out the punching or payoff without losing the viewer, how do you have a set up that keeps the user involved. Using a music cue that has already been co-opted into a meme helps because the bass drop or musical payoff foreshadows when the punchline of the video will drop; a viewer knows how much longer before they reach the payoff. Also viewers may stick around just for the pleasure of hearing that musical resolution. and by which positive actions you don’t take.If you click into a text post by someone on Facebook but don’t comment or like the post, how can Facebook judge your sentiment toward that post? Maybe you thought about disagreeing violently in comments, but the person is a coworker or friend of a friend and you decided the better of it. That negative sentiment is difficult to capture; the algorithm can’t “see” your feelings.Most social networks have explicit reporting features for reporting offensive and/or abusive content, but those features are buried and most users don’t resort to them. By the time someone does use a feature like that, you’ve usually already made a grave mistake far upstream and it’s too late to salvage most of the damage that’s been done.It’s the content that’s boring or causes mild displeasure that is the slow killer. In my previous post, I noted that content derived from a social graph can drift away from a user’s true interests because of the mismatch between your own interests and those of people you know. The switch from a chronological to algorithmic feed is often the default defensive move against such drift. But if the algorithm isn’t "seeing" signals of a user’s growing disinterest, if only positive engagement is visible, some amount of divergence is unavoidable. You might see that a user is slowly losing interest, not liking as many items, not opening your app as often, but precisely which stories are driving them away may be unclear. By the time they're starting to exhibit those signs of churn, it's often too late to reverse the bleeding.Algorithm-friendly design need not be user-hostile. It simply takes a different approach as to how to best serve the user’s interests. Pagination may insert some level of friction to the user, but in doing so, it may provide the algorithm with cleaner signal that safeguards the quality of the feed in the long run.Minimizing friction is merely one means to a great user experience. The goal of any design is not to minimize friction, it’s to help the user achieve some end. Reducing friction is often consistent with that end, but not always. You might say that the quote tweet reduces the friction of manually copying someone else’s tweet, but reducing friction to organizing a mob to pile on someone might not be a core mechanic you want to encourage if your goal is civil public discourse. Some forms of friction are good.You'll hear many power Twitter users counseling others to make use of muting and blocking early and often.Some users even make liberal use of soft blocking to surreptitiously remove followers. Users proudly tweet screenshots of words they've muted as a sign of their displeasure with some popular topic of discussion (or their intellectual superiority to said topic). Non sports fans tweet about "sportsball," others tweet "I'll bite, what's X?" where X is something everyone is discussing. Some people have gone so far as to unfollow everyone and start their following from scratch again.At some point, and likely because it A/B tested well, Twitter started showing users tweets that people they followed had liked, even from people that user didn't follow themselves. This does occasionally show me tweets of interest, but what it also does is increase, on an absolute basis, the number of tweets I have no interest in and have to scroll past. I'm a broken record on this: no two people have the exact same interests. The launch of this feature has me really considering unfollowing everyone and starting from scratch, but I also worry about hurting people's feelings, because I'm a softie. If Twitter were structured differently this wouldn't be an issue.I sometimes think about adopting some or all of these strategies myself, but for Twitter, the necessity of these is itself a failure of the service. If the algorithm were smarter about what interested you, it should take care of muting topics or blocking people on your behalf, without you having to do that work yourself. As I wrote last time, that you have to follow people at all on Twitter to get interesting content is, one could argue, a design flaw for what could be a powerful interest graph.Not only does TikTok capture very clean signals of sentiment from its users, it also gathers a tremendous volume of them per session. Videos on TikTok are so short that even in a brief session, TikTok can gather a lot of feedback on your tastes. The process is relatively painless, too. At worst, a few videos might bore you, but swiping them away makes for relatively painless work, and since the algorithm listens closely to your feedback, you may even enjoy dismissing videos knowing that the app will register your displeasure and act on it.Short video happens to be a category quite suited to this type of machine learning-driven recommendation. By no means would I imply that it would work for every type of category. Music works well. It is short in duration so the sampling cost is low, and the repeat consumption value is high. Musical similarities tend to be mathematically detectable. My Spotify Radio recommendations are solid. On the other hand, algorithmic movie recommendations have never really felt magical to me. Movies are very long, the sampling cost is very high. The corpus is small, and only soemthing like 500 or so movies come out each year, of which most people only see a handful. This entire subject is worth a separate post.By the way, TikTok isn’t the only app with an interface that is optimized for the task of matching, with an interface that shows you one entity at a time so as to be more clear on how you feel. Before TikTok, we had a whole category in which the one-item-at-a-time audition-style UI was dominant.There’s a reason swipe right and swipe left have become shorthand slang for signaling approval and disapproval, generally. Tinder came up with what feels like a design primitive on a touchscreen UI for binary voting.In this software era, true competitive advantages, or moats, are increasingly illusory. Most software features or UI designs can be copied easily by an incumbent or competitor overnight. All you will have done is test the impact of the design for them.On one of my trips to China, I was at a dinner with a large group of Chinese entrepreneurs, and I mentioned the hubbub over Instagram copying Stories from Snapchat. One of the chief product officers of one of China’s top companies laughed and remarked, “In China, if your competitor doesn’t copy one of your successful features inside of two weeks, they must be incompetent.” In many ways, the Chinese tech scene is the true Darwinian marketplace of ideas that Silicon Valley thinks of itself as. This bodes poorly for the relative output of Silicon Valley because the rate of idea spread and mutation occurs more quickly in China. Silicon Valley is often said to have taken over as the geographic center of technology innovation from Boston’s Route 128 in part because Silicon Valley’s more open labor markets allowed ideas to move freely among companies. China has taken that playbook and pushed it even further. Surviving the competitive landscape of the Chinese tech scene is like trying to climb out of that pit in The Dark Knight Rises. Terrifying. But if you can create a flywheel, like TikTok’s, it becomes much harder for a competitor like Reels or Triller to catch up. Triller may pay some influencers from TikTok to come over and make videos there, Reels might try to draft off of existing Instagram traffic, but what makes TikTok work is the entire positive feedback loop connecting creators, videos, and viewers via the FYP algorithm.In tech, an industry that epitomizes Brian Arthur’s Increasing Returns and Path Dependence in the Economy perhaps more than any other, the first competitor to achieve product-market fit can run away from the pack. If more and more markets feel like they are winner-take-all, or winners-take-all, that is because in an increasingly interconnected world, they are.Bytedance is often described as the algorithm company, and TikTok has been described over the past few weeks as powered by just such algorithmic black magic. Many have gone so far as to say that TikTok wouldn’t be worth purchasing if the algorithm weren’t included.That’s a mistake, in my opinion. Yes, retraining the FYP recommendations algorithm might take so long that some users would churn. I don’t mean to trivialize that task. But the actual magic is how every element of TikTok's design and processes connect with each other to create a dataset with which the algorithm trains itself into peak performance. No single step in that loop is beyond the capabilities of any of the many U.S. suitors. All that’s needed is an understanding of how the flywheel works and a commitment to keep every element and process in it functioning.All around me, I encounter products or services that seem to have hit a ceiling in the quality of their algorithmic recommendations: Yelp, OpenTable, Amazon, Google, Netflix, and on and on. Don't get me wrong, some of them are at rest in a good place. But I can't help but feel there is another leap to be made in some of these, and that perhaps more algorithm-friendly design might be one of the possible solutions.To recap, in part one of my series on TikTok, I discussed how the algorithm acts as an matching mechanism that makes TikTok such a scalable entertainment network. In comparison, social networks have to approximate an interest graph using a social graph, with all the problems that come with that. In this second piece on TikTok, I’ve focused on how its design helps its machine learning FYP algorithm “see” what it needs to see to do its job so effectively. An algorithm-friendly design ethos may become a model of how other companies in other verticals might achieve an edge in the age of machine learning.But there’s one final reason I find TikTok such a fascinating and anomalous case study. It has to do less with software and algorithms and more with something that the cultural determinist in me will never tire of studying: the network effects of creativity. That will be the subject of my third and final part of this series on TikTok. I often describe myself as a cultural determinist, more as a way to differentiate myself from people with other dominant worldviews, though I am not a strict adherent. It’s more that in many situations when people ascribe causal power to something other than culture, I’m immediately suspicious.The 2010’s were a fascinating time to follow the consumer tech industry in China. Though I left Hulu in 2011, I still kept in touch with a lot of the team from our satellite Hulu Beijing office, many of whom scattered out to various Chinese tech companies throughout the past decade. On my last visit to the Hulu Beijing office in 2011, I was skeptical any of the new tech companies out of China would ever crack the U.S. market. It wasn’t just that the U.S. had strong incumbents, or that the Chinese tech companies were still in their infancy. My default hypothesis was that what I call the veil of cultural ignorance was too impenetrable a barrier. That companies from non-WEIRD countries (Joseph Henrich shorthand for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) would struggle to ship into WEIRD cultures. I was even skeptical of the reverse, of U.S. companies competing in China or India. The further the cultural distance between two countries, the more challenging it would be for companies in one to compete in the other. The path towards overcoming that seemed to lie in hiring a local leadership team, or sending someone over from the U.S. who understood the culture of that country inside-out.For the most part, that has held true. China has struggled, for the most part, to make real inroads in the U.S. WeChat tried to make inroads in the U.S. but only really managed to capture Chinese-Americans who used the app to communicate with friends, family, and business colleagues in China.In the other direction, the U.S. hasn’t made a huge dent in China. Obviously, the Great Firewall played a huge role in keeping a lot of U.S. companies out of the Chinese market, but in the few cases where a U.S. company got a crack at the Chinese market, like Uber China, the results were mixed.For this reason, I’ve been fascinated with TikTok. Here in 2020, TikTok is, for many, including myself, the most entertaining short video app going. The U.S. government is considering banning the app as a national security risk, and while that’s the topic du jour for just about everyone right now, I’m much more interested in tracing how it got a foothold in markets outside of China, especially the U.S. with its powerful incumbents.They say you learn the most from failure, and in the same way I learn the most about my mental models from the exceptions. How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai managed to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?The answer, I believe, has significant implications for the future of cross-border tech competition, as well as for understanding how product developers achieve product-market-fit. The rise of TikTok updated my thinking. It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.TikTok's story begins in 2014, in Shanghai. Alex Zhu and Luyu “Louis” Yang had launched an educational short-form video app that hadn’t gotten any traction. They decided to pivot to lip-synch music videos, launching Musical.ly in the U.S. and China. Ironically, the app got more traction across the Pacific Ocean, so they killed their efforts in their home country of China and focused their efforts on their American market.The early user base consisted mostly of American teenage girls. Finally, an app offered users the chance to lip synch to the official version of popular songs and have those videos distributed to an audience for social feedback. That the app got any traction at all was progress. However, it presented Alex, Louis, and their team with a problem. American teen girls were not exactly an audience Alex and Louis really understood.To be fair, most American parents would argue they don't understand their teenage daughters either.During this era where China and the U.S. tech scenes have overlapped, the Chinese market has been largely impenetrable to the U.S. tech companies because of the Great Firewall, both the software instance and the outright bans from the CCP. But in the reverse direction, America has been almost as impenetrable to Chinese companies because of what might be thought of as America’s cultural firewall. Outside of DJI in dronesI'd argue one reason DJI had success in America was that drone control interfaces borrow heavily from standard flight control interfaces and are not culturally specific. Thus DJI could lean on its hardware prowess which was formidable., I can’t think of any Chinese app making real inroads in the U.S. prior to Musical.ly. To build on its early traction, Musical.ly would have to overcome this cultural barrier.It’s been said that if you ask your customers what they want, they’ll ask for a faster horse (attributed to Henry Ford, though that may not be true). Frankly, that’s always been half horses***, and not just because horses are involved. First of all, what if your customers are horse jockeys?Secondly, while you can’t listen to your customers exclusively, paying attention to them is a dependable way to build a solid SaaS business, and even in the consumer space it provides useful signal. As I’ve written about before, customers may tell you they want a faster horse, and what you should hear is not that you should be injecting your horses with steroids but that your customers find their current mode of transportation, the aforementioned horse, to be too slow a means of getting around. Alex and Louis listened to Musical.ly’s early adopters. The app made feedback channels easy to find, and the American teenage girls using the app every day were more than willing to speak up about what they wanted to ease their video creation. They sent a ton of product requests, helping to inform a product roadmap for the Musical.ly team. That, combined with some clever growth hacks, like allowing watermarked videos to easily be downloaded and distributed via other networks like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, helped them achieve hockey-stick inflection among their target market.Still, Musical.ly ran into its invisible asymptote eventually. There are only so many teenage girls in the U.S. When they saturated that market, usage and growth flatlined. It was then that a suitor they had rebuffed previously, the Chinese technology company Bytedance, suddenly looked more attractive, like Professor Bhaer to Jo March at the end of Little Women. In a bit of dramatic irony, Bytedance had cloned Musical.ly in China with an app called Douyin, one that had taken off in China, and now Bytedance was buying the app that inspired it, Musical.ly, an app conceived and built in China but that had failed in China and instead gotten traction in the U.S. After the purchase, Bytedance rebranded Musical.ly as TikTok. Still, if that’s all they had done, it’s not clear why the app would’ve broken out of its stalled growth to the stunning extent it has under its new owner. After all, Bytedance paid just $1B for an app that’s rumored to sell now, if the U.S. government approves the transaction, for anywhere from $30 to $70B.Bytedance did two things in particular to jumpstart TikTok’s growth. First, it opened up its wallet and started spending on user acquisition in the U.S. the way wealthy Chinese used to spend on American real estate (no, I’m not still bitter at all the Chinese all-cash offers that trounced me repeatedly when condo-hunting six years ago). TikTok was rumored to have been spending a staggering eight or nine figures a month on advertising. The ubiquity of TikTok ads lent the theory credence. I saw TikTok ads everywhere, on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and in mobile gamesTikTok ads are bizarre. The video ads I see for the app in mobile games convey nothing about what the app is or does. One ad I've seen dozens of times has an old lady doing lunges in her living room, another has a kid blow drying his hair, and as he does, his hair changes colors. I feel like the ads could do a better job of selling the app, but what do I know?. If Bytedance could have purchased ads on the back of my eyelids at sub $20 CPMs I don’t doubt they would have done so.It didn’t look like a wise investment at first. Rumors abounded that the 30-day retention of all those new users poured into the top of its funnel was sub 10%. They seemed to be lighting ad dollars on fire.Ultimately, the ROI on that spend would turn the corner, but only because of the second element of their assault on the US market, the most important piece of technology Bytedance introduced to TikTok: the updated For You Page feed algorithm.Bytedance has an absurd proportion of their software engineers focused on their algorithms, more than half at last check. It is known as the algorithm company, first for its breakout algorithmic “news” app Toutiao, then for its Musical.ly clone Douyin, and now for TikTok.Prior to TikTok, I would’ve said YouTube had the strongest exploit algorithm in video,The exploit versus explore conundrum is sort of a classic of algorithmic design, usually mentioned in relation to the multi-armed bandit problem. For the purposes of this discussion, think of it simply as the problem of choosing which videos to show you. An exploit algorithm will give you more of what you like, while an explore algorithm tries to broaden your exposure to more than just what you’ve shown you like. YouTube is often described as an exploit algorithm because it tends to really push more of what you like, and then before you know it, you’re looking at some alt-right video that’s trying to redpill you. but in comparison to TikTok, YouTube’s algorithm feels primitive (the top creators on YouTube have long ago figured out how to game YouTube’s algorithm’s heavy dependence on click-through rates and watch time, one reason so many YouTube videos are lengthening over time, much to my dismay).Before Bytedance bought Musical.ly and rebranded it TikTok, its Musical.ly clone called Douyin was already a sensation in the Chinese market thanks in large part to its effective algorithm. A few years ago, on a visit to Beijing, I caught up with a bunch of former colleagues from Hulu Beijing, and all of them showed me their Douyin feeds. They described the app as frighteningly addictive and the algorithm as eerily perceptive. More than one of them said they had to delete the app off their phone for months at a time because they were losing an hour or two every night just lying in bed watching videos.That same trip, I had coffee with an ex-Hulu developer who now was now a senior exec in the Bytedance engineering organization. Of course, he was tight-lipped about how their algorithm worked, but the scale of their infrastructure dedicated to their algorithms was clear. On my way in and out of this office, just one of several Bytedance spaces all across the city, I gawked at hundreds of workers sitting side by side in row after row in the open floorplan. It resembled what I’d seen at tech giants like Facebook in the U.S., but even denser.The mood was giddy. I could tell he was doing well. He took me and my friends to a Luckin Coffee in their office basement and told us to order drinks off an app on his phone. I reached in my pocket for some RMB to pay for the drinks and he put his hand on my arm to stop me. “Don’t worry, I can afford this,” he said, laughing. He didn’t mean it in a boasting manner, he seemed almost sheepish about how well they were doing. Afterwards, as we waited outside the office in their parking lot, he walked past and asked me if I needed a ride. No, I said, I’d be taking the subway. A Tesla Model X pulled up, the valet hopped out, and he jumped in and drove off.It’s rumored that Bytedance examines more features of videos than other companies. If you like a video featuring video game captures, that is noted. If you like videos featuring puppies, that is noted. Every Douyin feed I examined was distinctive. My friends all noted that after spending only a short amount of time in the app, it had locked onto their palate.That, more than anything else, was the critical upgrade Bytedance applied to Musical.ly to turn it into TikTok. Friends at Bytedance claimed, with some pride, that after they plugged Musical.ly, now TikTok, into Bytedance’s back-end algorithm, they doubled the time spent in the app. I was skeptical until I asked some friends who had some data on the before and after. The step change in the graph was anything but subtle.At the time Musical.ly got renamed TikTok, it was still dominated by teen girls doing lip synch videos. Many U.S. teens at the time described TikTok as “cringey,” usually a kiss of death for networks looking to expand among youths, fickle as they are about what’s cool. Scrolling the app at the time felt like eavesdropping on the theater kids clique from high school. Entertaining, but hardly a mainstream entertainment staple.That’s where the one-two combination of Bytedance’s enormous marketing spend and the power of TikTok’s algorithm came to the rescue. To help a network break out from its early adopter group, you need both to bring lots of new people/subcultures into the app—that’s where the massive marketing spend helps—but also ways to help these disparate groups to 1) find each other quickly and 2) branch off into their own spaces.More than any other feed algorithm I can recall, Bytedance’s short video algorithm fulfilled these two requirements. It is a rapid, hyper-efficient matchmaker. Merely by watching some videos, and without having to follow or friend anyone, you can quickly train TikTok on what you like. In the two sided entertainment network that is TikTok, the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight. The algorithm allows this to happen without an explicit follower graph.Just as importantly, by personalizing everyone’s FYP feeds, TikTok helped to keep these distinct subcultures, with their different tastes, separated. One person’s cringe is another person’s pleasure, but figuring out which is which is no small feat.TikTok’s algorithm is the Sorting Hat from the Harry Potter universe. Just as that magical hat sorts students at Hogwarts into the Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin houses, TikTok’s algorithm sorts its users into dozens and dozens of subculturesThe Sorting Hat is perhaps the most curious plot device from the Harry Potter universe. Is it a metaphor for genetic determinism? Did Draco have any hope of not being a Slytherin? By sorting Draco into that house, did it shape his destiny? Is the hat a metaphor for the U.S. college admissions system, with all its known biases? Is Harry Potter, sorted into Gryffindor, a legacy admit?. Not two FYP feeds are alike. For all the naive and idealistic dreams of the so-called “marketplace of ideas,” the first generation of large social networks has proven mostly unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with the resulting culture wars. Until they have some real substantial ideas and incentives to take on the costly task of mediating between strangers who disagree with each other, they’re better off sorting those people apart. The only types of people who enjoy being thrown into a gladiatorial online arena together with those they disagree with seem to be trolls, who benefit asymmetrically from the resultant violence.Consider Twitter's content moderation problems. How much of that results from throwing liberals and conservatives together in a timeline together? Twitter employees speak often about wanting to improve public discourse, but they’d be much better off (and society, too) keeping the Slytherins and Gryffindors apart until they have some real substantive ideas to solve the problem of low trust conversation.The same can be said of NextDoor and their problem of racist reporting of minorities just walking down the sidewalk. They’d be better off just removing that feature. At some point, NextDoor needs to face the fact that they aren’t going to solve racism. Tweak that feature all you want, put up all the hoops for users to jump through to file such a report, but adverse selection ensures that those most motivated to jump through them are the racist ones.After some time, new subcultures did indeed emerge on TikTok. No longer was it just teenage girls lip-synching. There are so many subcultures on TikTok I can barely track them because I only ever see a portion of them in my personalized FYP. This broadened TikTok’s appeal and total addressable market. Douyin had followed that path in China, so Bytedance at least had some precedent for committing to such an expensive bet, but I wasn’t certain if it would work in the U.S., a much more competitive media and entertainment market.Within a larger social network, even subcultures need some minimum viable scale, and though Bytedance paid dearly to fill the top of the funnel, its algorithm eventually helped assemble many subcultures surpassing that minimum viable scale. More notably, it did so with amazing speed.Think of how most other social networks have scaled. The usual path is organic. Users are encouraged to follow and friend each other to assemble their own graph one connection at a time. The challenge with that is that it’s almost always a really slow build, and you have to provide some reason for people to hang around and build that graph, often encapsulated by the aphorism “come for the tool, stay for the network.” Today, it’s not as easy to build the “tool” part when so much of that landscape has already been mined and when scaled networks have learned to copy any tool achieving any level of traction.In the West, Facebook is the master of the fast follow. They struggle to launch new social graphs of their own invention, but if they spot any competing social network achieve any level of traction, they will lock down and ship a clone with blinding speed. Good artists borrow, great artists steal, the best artists steal the most quickly? Facebook as a competitor reminds me of that class of zombies in movies that stagger around drunk most of the time, but the moment they spot a target, they sprint at it like a pack of cheetahs. The type you see in 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. Terrifying.Some people still think that a new social network will be built around a new content format, but it’s almost impossible to think of a format that couldn’t be copied in two to three months by a compact Facebook team put in lockdown with catered dinners. Yes, a new content format might create a new proof of work, as I wrote about in Status as a Service, but just as critical is building the right structures to distribute such content to the right audience to close the social feedback loop. What’s the last new social network to achieve scale in recent years? You probably can’t think of any, and that’s because there really aren’t any. Even Facebook hasn’t been able to launch any really new successful social products, and a lot of that is because they also seem fixated on building these things around some content format gimmick.Recall the three purposes which I used to distinguish among networks in Status as a Service: social capital (status), entertainment, and utility. In another post soon I promise to explain why I classify networks along these three axes, but for now, just know that while almost all networks serve some mix of the three, most lean heavily towards one of those three purposes.A network like Venmo or Uber, for example, is mostly about utility: I need to pay someone money, or I need to travel from here to there. A network like YouTube is more about entertainment. Amuse me. And some networks, what most people refer to when they use the generic term “social network,” are more focused on social capital. Soho House, for example.TikTok is less a pure social network, the type focused on social capital, than an entertainment network. I don’t socialize with people on TikTok, I barely know any of them. It consists of a network of people connected to each other, but they are connected for a distinct reason, for creators to reach viewers with their short videos.Bytedance hasn't been successful in building out a social network to compete with WeChat, though it's not for lack of trying. I think they have a variety of options for doing so, but as with many companies that didn't begin as social first, it's not in their DNA. Facebook is underrated for its ability to build functional social plumbing at scale, that is a rare design skill. Companies as diverse as Amazon and Netflix have tried building social features and then later abandoned them. I suspect they tried when they didn't have enough users to create breakaway social scale, but it's difficult to imagine them pulling that off without more social DNA. But having a social-first DNA also means that Facebook isn't great at building non-social offerings. Their video or watch tab remains a bizarre and unfocused mess.One can debate the semantics of what constitutes a social network forever, but what matters here is realizing that another way to describe an entertainment network is as an interest network. TikTok takes content from one group of people and match it to other people who would enjoy that content. It is trying to figure out what hundreds of millions of viewers around the world are interested in. When you frame TikTok's algorithm that way, its enormous unrealized potential snaps into focus.The idea of using a social graph to build out an interest-based network has always been a sort of approximation, a hack. You follow some people in an app, and it serves you some subset of the content from those people under the assumption that you’ll find much of what they post of interest to you. It worked in college for Facebook because a bunch of hormonal college students are really interested in each other. It worked in Twitter, eventually, though it took a while. Twitter's unidirectional follow graph allowed people to pick and choose who to follow with more flexibility than Facebook's initial bi-directional friend model, but Twitter didn't provide enough feedback mechanisms early on to help train its users on what to tweet. The early days were filled with a lot of status updates of the variety people cite when criticizing social media: "nobody cares what you ate for lunch."I talk about Twitter's slow path to product market fit in Status as a ServiceBut what if there was a way to build an interest graph for you without you having to follow anyone? What if you could skip the long and painstaking intermediate step of assembling a social graph and just jump directly to the interest graph? And what if that could be done really quickly and cheaply at scale, across millions of users? And what if the algorithm that pulled this off could also adjust to your evolving tastes in near real-time, without you having to actively tune it?The problem with approximating an interest graph with a social graph is that social graphs have negative network effects that kick in at scale. Take a social network like Twitter: the one-way follow graph structure is well-suited to interest graph construction, but the problem is that you’re rarely interested in everything from any single person you follow. You may enjoy Gruber’s thoughts on Apple but not his Yankees tweets. Or my tweets on tech but not on film. And so on. You can try to use Twitter Lists, or mute or block certain people or topics, but it’s all a big hassle that few have the energy or will to tackle.Think of what happened to Facebook when it’s users went from having their classmates as friends to hundreds and often thousands of people as friends, including coworkers, parents, and that random person you met at the open bar at a wedding reception and felt obligated to accept a friend request from even though their jokes didn’t seem as funny the next morning in the cold light of sobriety. Some have termed it context collapse, but by any name, it’s an annoyance everyone understands. It manifests itself in the declining visit and posting frequency on Facebook across many cohorts.Think of Snapchat’s struggles to differentiate between its utility— as a way to communicate among friends—and its entertainment function as a place famous people broadcast content to their fans. In a controversial redesign, Snapchat cleaved the broadcast content from influencers into the righthand Discover tab, leaving your conversations with friends in the left Chat pane. Look, the redesign seemed to say, Kylie Jenner is not your friend.TikTok doesn’t bump into the negative network effects of using a social graph at scale because it doesn't really have one. It is more of a pure interest graph, one derived from its short video content, and the beauty is its algorithm is so efficient that its interest graph can be assembled without imposing much of a burden on the user at all. It is passive personalization, learning through consumption. Because the videos are so short, the volume of training data a user provides per unit of time is high. Because the videos are entertaining, this training process feels effortless, even enjoyable, for the user.I like to say that “when you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.” Think of all the countless hours product managers, designers and engineers have dedicated to growth-hacking social onboarding—goading people into adding friends and following people, urging them to grant access to their phone contact lists—all in an attempt to carry them past the dead zone to the minimum viable graph size necessary to provide them with a healthy, robust feed. (sidenote: Every social product manager has heard the story of Facebook and Twitter’s keystone metrics for minimum viable friend or follow graph size countless times.) Think of how many damn interest bubble UI’s you’ve had to sit through before you could start using some new social product: what subjects interest you? who are your favorite musicians? what types of movies do you enjoy?The last time I tried to use Twitter’s new user onboarding flow, it recommended I follow, among other accounts, that of Donald Trump. There are countless ways they could onboard people more efficiently to provide them with a great experience immediately, but that is not one of them.TikTok came along and bypassed all of that. In a two-sided entertainment marketplace, they provide creators on one side with unmatched video creation tools coupled with potential super-scaled distribution, and viewers on the other side with an endless stream of entertainment that gets more personalized with time. In doing so, TikTok, with a product team and infrastructure mostly located in China, came out of left field and became a player in the attention marketplace on the same playing fields around the world as giants like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, and Netflix. Not quite a Cinderella story...maybe a Mulan story?TikTok didn't just break out in America. It became unbelievably popular in India and in the Middle East, more countries whose cultures and language were foreign to the Chinese Bytedance product teams. Imagine an algorithm so clever it enables its builders to treat another market and culture as a complete black box. What do people in that country like? No, even better, what does each individual person in each of those foreign countries like? You don't have to figure it out. The algorithm will handle that. The algorithm knows.I don’t think the Chinese product teams I’ve met in recent years in China are much further ahead than the ones I met in 2011 when it comes to understanding foreign cultures like America. But what the Bytedance algorithm did was it abstracted that problem away.One of the concerns about CCP ties with Bytedance is that they might use it as a propaganda tool against the U.S. I tend to think that problem is overrated because my sense is that many in China still don't understand the nuances of American culture, just as America doesn't understand theirs (though I speak Mandarin, some of the memes on Douyin fly way over my head). However, perhaps an algorithm that abstracts culture into a series of stimuli responses makes it more dangerous?Now imagine that level of hyper efficient interest matching applied to other opportunities and markets. Personalized TV of the future? Check. Education? I already find a lot of education videos in my TikTok feed, on everything from cooking to magic to iPhone hacks. Scale that up and Alex and Louis might finally realize their dream of a short video education app that they set out to build before Musical.ly. Shopping? A slam dunk, Douyin and Toutiao already enable a ton of commerce in China. Job marketplace? A bit of a stretch, but not impossible. If Microsoft buys TikTok, I’d certainly give the TikTok team a crack at improving my LinkedIn feed, which, to be clear, is horrifying. What about personalized reading, from books to newsletters to blogs? Music? Podcasts? Yes, yes, yes please. Dating? The world could absolutely use an alternative to the high GINI co-efficient, high inequality dating marketplace that is Tinder. Douyin already visualizes much of this future for us with its much broader diversity of videos and revenue models. In China, video e-commerce is light years ahead of where it is in the U.S. (for a variety of reasons, but none that aren’t surmountable; a topic, again, for another piece). Whereas TikTok can still feel, to me, like a pure entertainment time-killer, Douyin, which I track on a separate phone I keep just to run Chinese apps for research purposes, feels like much more than that. It feels like a realization of short video as a broad use case platform.There’s a reason that many people in the U.S. today describe social media as work. And why many, like me, have come to find TikTok a much more fun app to spend time in. Apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are built on social graphs, and as such, they amplify the scale, ubiquity, and reach of our performative social burden. They struggle to separate their social functions from their entertainment and utility functions, injecting an aspect of social artifice where it never used to exist.Facebook has struggled with its transition to utility, which would’ve offered it a path towards becoming more of a societal operating system the way WeChat is in China. To be fair, the competition for many of those functions is much stiffer in the U.S. In payments, for example, Facebook must compete with credit cards, which work fine and which most people default to in the U.S., whereas in China AliPay and WeChat Pay were competing with a cash-dominant culture. Still, in the U.S., Facebook has yet to make any real inroads in significant utility use cases like commerce.I speak so often about how much video as a medium is underrated by tech elites. In an alternate history of Facebook, they would've made a harder shift to becoming a video-only app, moving up the ladder from text to photos to videos, and maybe they would've become TikTok before TikTok. If they had, I think their time spent figures would be even higher today. For as quickly as Facebook moved to disrupt itself in the past, there's a limit to how far they're willing to go. I plan to compare the Chinese and U.S. tech ecosystems in a future post, and one of the broadest and most important takeaways is that China leapfrogged the U.S. in the shift to video, among many other things. This doesn't mean the U.S. won't then leapfrog China the next time around, but for now, the U.S. is the trailing frog in several categories.Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps.Twitter has never seemed to know what it is. Ask ten different Twitter employees, you’ll hear ten different answers. Perhaps that’s why the dominant product philosophy of the company seems to be a sort of constant paralysis broken up by the occasional crisis mitigation. One reason I’ve long wished Twitter had just become a open protocol and let the developer community go to town is that Twitter moves. At. A. Snail's. Pace.The shame of it is that Twitter had a head start on an interest graph, largely through the work of its users, who gave signal on what they cared about through the graphs they assembled. That could have been a foundation to all sorts of new markets for them. They could’ve even been an interest-based social network, but instead users have mostly extracted that value themselves by pinging each other through the woefully neglected DM product.Of course, Twitter also once purchased Vine and then let it wither on the, uh vine. Of all the tech companies that could purchase TikTok, maybe Twitter is the one that least deserves it. At a minimum, they should be required to submit a book report showing they understand what it is they're buying.A few other tech companies are worth mentioning here. YouTube is a massive video network, but honestly they may have shipped even less than Twitter over the years. That they don’t have any video creation tools of note (do they have any?!) and allowed TikTok to come in and steal the short video space is both shocking and not.Amazon launched a short video commerce app some time ago. It came and went so quickly I didn’t even have time to try it. Though Amazon is good at many things, they just don’t have the DNA to build something like TikTok. That they have failed to realize the short video commerce vision that China led the way on is a shocking miss on their part.Apple owns the actual camera that so many of these videos are shot on, but they've never understood social.iMessages could be a social networking colossus if Apple had the social DNA, but every day other messaging apps pull further away in functionality and design. But I guess they're finally adding threading in iMessages with the next iOS release? Haha. At least they'll continue to improve the camera hardware with every successive iPhone release. None of this is to say TikTok is anywhere near the market value of any of these aforementioned American tech giants. If you still think of it as a novelty meme short video app, you're not far from the truth.Are there flaws with TikTok? Of course. It’s far from perfect. The algorithm can be too clingy. Sometimes I like one video from some meme and the next day TikTok serves me too many follow-up videos from the same meme. But the great thing about a hyper-responsive algorithm is that you can tune it quickly, almost like priming GPT-3 to get the results you want. Often all it takes to inject some new subculture into your TikTok feed is to find some video from it (you can easily find them on YouTube or via friends whose feeds are different from your own) and like it. Another problem for TikTok is that a lot of other use cases are being jammed into what was designed to be a portrait mode lip synch video app. Vertical video is good for the human figure, for dance and makeup videos, but not ideal for other types of communication and storytelling (I still hate when basketball and football highlight clips can’t show more of the horizontal playing field, and that goes for both IG and TikTok; in many highlights of Steph Curry hitting a long 3 you can’t see him, or the basket, only one of the two, lol). Stepping up a level, the list of opportunities Bytedance and TikTok have yet to capitalize on in the U.S. is long, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they miss many of them even if they stave off a ban from the U.S. government. Much of it would require new form factors, and it’s unclear how strong the TikTok product team would be, especially if divested out of Bytedance. Under Microsoft, a company with a fairly shaky history in the consumer market, it's unclear that their full potential would be realized.Still, none of that product work is rocket science. Much of it seems clear in my head. More importantly, TikTok, if armed with the Bytedance algorithm as part of a divestment, has a generalized interest-matching algorithm that can allow it to tackle U.S. tech giants not head on but from an oblique angle. To see it as merely a novelty meme video app for kids is to miss what its much greater disruptive potential. That an app launched out of China could come to the U.S. and sprint into cultural relevance in this attention marketplace should be a wake-up call to complacent U.S. tech companies. Given how many of those companies rely on intuiting user interests to sell them things or to show them ads, a company like TikTok which found a shortcut to assembling such an interest graph should raise all sorts of alarm bells.It surprises me that more U.S. tech companies aren’t taking a harder run at trying to acquire TikTok if the rumored CFIUS hammer stops short of an outright ban. I can’t think of any of them that shouldn’t be bidding for what is a once-in-a-generation forced fire sale asset. I’ve seen prices like $30B tossed around online. If that’s true, it’s an absolute bargain. I’d easily pay twice that without a second thought.I could cycle through my long list of nits, but ultimately they are all easily solvable with the right product vision and execution. TikTok has figured out the hardest piece, the algorithm. With it, a massive team made up mostly by people who’ve never left China, and many who never will, grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets they’d never experienced firsthand. To a cultural determinist like myself, that feels like black magic.On that same trip to China in 2018 when I visited Bytedance, an ex-colleague of mine from Hulu organized a visit for me to Newsdog. It was a news app for the Indian market built by a startup headquartered in Beijing. As I exited the elevator into their lobby, I was greeted by a giant mural of Jeff Bezos’ famous saying “It’s Always Day One” on the opposite wall. A friend of a friend was the CEO there, and he sat me down in a conference room to walk me through their app. They had raised $50M from Tencent just a few months earlier that year, and they were the number one news app in India at the time.He opened the app on his phone and handed it to me. Similar to Toutiao in China, there were different topic areas in a scrollbar across the top, with a vertical feed of stories beneath each. All of these were stories selected algorithmically, as is the style of Toutiao and so many apps in China.I looked through the stories, all in Hindi (and yes, one feed that contained the thirst trap photos of attractive Indian girls in rather suggestive outfits standing under things like waterfalls; some parts of culture are universal). Then I looked up from the app and through the glass walls of the conference room at an office filled with about 40 Chinese engineers, mostly male, tapping away on their computers. Then I looked back down at page after page of Hindi stories in the app.“Wait,” I asked. “Do you have people in this office or at the company who know how to read Hindi?”He looked at me with a smile.“No,” he said. “None of us can read any of it.”NEXT POST: Part II of my thoughts on TikTok, on how the app design is informed by its algorithm and vice versa in a virtuous circle. Now that everyone is spending many of their waking hours in Zoom, a lot of people are laughing at, and then asking me about, my Zoom setup. It’s actually not all that elaborate. I know many people with much more elaborate setups. Still, for a simple upgrade to the mic and camera that come with your laptop, here are the two pieces of gear I use.For a microphone, I use a Blue Yeti USB mic. I bought mine years and years ago now, during one of Amazon's Black Friday deals, or maybe it was a Prime Day sale, some window where they were discounted heavily (they retail now for $130). I had grand visions of using at the time, but then I put it on a shelf and didn't even remember I owned one until I did Ben Thompson's Stratechery Daily Podcast last week.From a setup perspective, the mic is nearly plug-and-play as it comes with a USB-A cable (you'll need an adapter if your laptop only has USB-C ports, like my Macbook Pro). After you've plugged it in, on a Mac you need to go into System Preferences and then Sound and select it in the dropdown box in the Input tab. If you want to plug headphones into your mic, as I do, to listen to your Zoom call, go into the Output menu also to select the mic.Audio quality is one of those subtle things that makes a world of difference to the quality of a video chat. If you'll be doing a lot of Zooms moving forward, this is a sound investment (pun intended, obvi). There is such a thing as audio fatigue, at least for me; the better the audio, the more pleasant a Zoom is, and the longer I can tolerate it.The Blue Yeti looks vintage and professional and feels hefty; you'll fancy yourself a radio DJ. Every time I'm planted in front of it, I'm tempted to read a dedication: "This is The Glory of Love by Peter Cetera, and it goes out to Shannon in Ridgewood. Shannon, Tyler wants you to know that even in this pandemic when you two are apart, he scrolls through your photos on his phone to remind himself of the glory of your love." It has a hardware mute button which I use quite often. For large group Zooms I recommend everyone mute themselves and press the spacebar when they want to talk. This keeps background chatter to a minimum. However, if you don't want to fuss with the spacebar, a mute button on the mic comes in handy.The next upgrade I recommend, though I'd still rank it behind a microphone upgrade, is to spring for a separate webcam. Most laptop cameras, especially those on Mac laptops, aren't that high quality. The one I use is the Logitech C920S HD Pro Webcam. On Amazon you have to press the Privacy Model option button to get the C920S; the original model is the C920. Either works; the privacy model comes with a clip-on plastic cover, but if can only find the C920 right now you can easily rig up a makeshift shutter cover.I don't find the upgrade as stark as the improvement in sound quality from the microphone upgrade, but it's definitely noticeable, especially in more varied lighting conditions. Since it can stand on its own or clip to another surface like your laptop cover, you can position it for the most flattering camera angle on your face (a camera that looks down on your face is generally more flattering than a camera that looks up on your face and accentuates your chin(s)).As I'm writing this, the C920S is out of stock on Amazon. I assume a lot of people snagged one as they realized how many Zoom calls they'd be on during shelter in place. Other stores likely have faster shipping times now anyway given that Amazon is prioritizing essential shipments during this pandemic surge in their order volume.Out of curiosity, I checked Wirecutter, and the Blue Yeti USB Mic and Logitech 920S happen to be their recommendations for USB microphone and webcam also. NOTE: I'm going to start cross-posting individual stories sent out in my newsletter over here on my blog. The versions here may contain additional side notes, and often as I bring them over I'll do some light word-smithing or additional copy-editing because I can never stop editing my own copy. If you want to be the first to read things I publish, your best bet is to sign up for my newsletter, but if you're more about reading the most finished form of what I write, it will always be here.In economics, a Veblen good is one for whom demand increases as the price increases. Luxury goods like Birkin bags are often cited as examples of these exceptional goods that violate the conventional relationship between price and demand.Social media has created what I think of as Veblen values. That is, values we tend to clutch more tightly and defend more vigorously the more expensive they are to hold.This isn’t odd in itself; we tend to think of those values we pay for dearly as among the most precious we hold. Freedom. Equality. And so on.However, social media has opened an exploit on this concept. Others can cause us to rate some values more highly than we might otherwise just by raising the cost to us of holding them.A troll might mock you as a snowflake on social media for something you posted, and the next thing you know you’re in an online back alley engaged in a knife fight to defend a view that, before the fracas, you cared about but not that passionately.Perhaps trolling is just a condition in which there are asymmetric emotional costs to engaging in a debate. Since it’s relatively cheap for a troll to push buttons while the emotional cost to the one whose buttons are pushed is high, the incentive and all the positive optionality is in favor of the attacker.Sometimes these are values we do hold dearly. The trick, then, is to match your emotional energy expenditures to the strength of your values prior to factoring in the costs from all the trolls attacking you for it. Easier said than done, especially in the West where major social networks have tended to be fairly lax in moderation, and where, not surprisingly, many describe time online as exhausting and precarious. Part of this is the performative structure of social media, as I’ve written about before, but some of it is just the emotional attrition of endless border skirmishes.As with email, I recommend applying aggressive personal spam filters on social media. That saying that one should “feed a cold, starve a fever”? There’s a reason we say “don’t feed the trolls.” One person's filter bubble is another person's emotional quarantine. “Si vis pacem para bellum”translated “If you want peace, prepare for war”I hadn’t planned on seeing John Wick 3 - Parabellum, but out for a walk in Stockholm in May, I got caught in a sudden downpour without an umbrella. I was in Sweden for the first time thanks to an invitation from the Spotify product team and had decided to spend some of my downtime seeing the city. Sweden, by the way, is the country with the second highest unicorns per capita. Fascinating, and a topic for another day. I sprinted out of the rain and into the nearest building, which happened to be a movie theater. Checking Dark Sky on my phone, the rain didn’t look to let up for another hour or two, so I scanned the theater listings and found a film in English. John Wick 3: Parabellum it was. Like many I enjoyed the first John Wick movie for its lean and elegant plot and balletic fight choreography. Keanu Reeves was inspired casting given his unfussy acting style. However, I thought the sequel was unnecessary. I wasn’t expecting much from yet another entry, the third, but I rarely regret spending two hours in a darkened theater. Watching an American film in the company of a Swedish audience also promised to be a form of cultural field work, and on that front, I felt fortunate the house was packed with locals.John Wick 3 - Parabellum begins directly after the events of the previous film, and at first, all seemed familiar. But after having spent two films worth of time in this universe already, sometime midway through the third film, it dawned on me. The rules of this film franchise mapped with uncanny precision to something that everyone had been complaining about to me for years now: cancel culture.With that, the films took on heightened resonance. Here I present my theory of John Wick Universe as an allegory of cancel culture.[SPOILER ALERT: Here is where I must warn people who haven’t seen the films that I will reveal key plot points to the three Wick films below. I don’t feel like the charms of this film series lie in the plot details—what happens isn’t surprising in the least to even the most casual of action film fans—but I disagree with those who say spoiler culture has ruined film criticism. Instead I’m happy to let my readers choose their own acceptable quota of narrative novelty. If you prefer not to learn the plots of the John Wick films, stop reading here.]Wick’s character motivation can be described thus: my name is John Wick. You stole my car. You killed my dog. Prepare to die.Reeves plays Wick from cinema’s storied tradition of zen-like hit men, almost placid in their mastery of their craft, which, in his case, is the violent dispatch of other humans from the realm of the living. This is Alain Delon in Le Samourai, Robert De Niro in Heat, Jean Reno as Victor "The Cleaner" in La Femme Nikita. Less sexual than Bond, not quite as overtly cruel as Matz and Jacamon’s Killer. These hit men have a heart, but their highest order bit is the code by which they live. Whether personal or business, there's little difference, the job is killing.And kill he does. In John Wick 3: Parabellum the signature choreography of death remains, a style which can only be described as baroque. Not John Wick for a single gunshot to the head when he can first maim with a few amuse bouche bullets to the torso and limbs. Why engage in a simple fist fight when one can hold a confrontation in a store filled with display cases lined with all manner of knives (in case of emergency, break glass with the skull of your combatant). Why simply perforate assailants with automatic weapons when they can be simultaneously be relieved of their genitals by an attack dog? It wasn’t until Michael Bay’s terrible 6 Underground on Netflix that I saw a film with more cartoonish violence this year.For some, this is entertainment enough. I’ll never hesitate to offer my opinions on any piece of entertainment, but I do not begrudge anyone their pleasures. Certainly, the crowd of Swedes who laughed and cheered at the escalating violence seemed more than entertained. For me, however, films are even more compelling when they speak to the world outside the edges of the screen. I'm nothing if not a sucker for subtext. What fascinated me about John Wick was how its absurdist universe acted as a wry commentary on cancel culture.Do I think this subtext was intentional? Doubtful. Some filmmakers reward subtextual readings more than others. Still, the advantage of making a film with such a lean universe design is its semiotic flexibility.John Wick’s real name, we learn, is Jardani Jovonovich, a Belarussian gypsy raised as an assassin. Wick is nicknamed Baba Yaga, the Boogeyman, for he is the master of assassination. Who are most gifted in using social media to sow chaos and division in the world, especially the United States, than the Russians? Having lost the Cold War they’ve come back in a more fluid and confounding form.When the first film begins, Wick has left that world of violence behind for a peaceful domestic life with his wife Helen. But she dies from an illness, though not before leaving him a beagle to keep him company. The dog, along with Wick’s car, a 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1, are recognizable to anyone as the two iconic totems of an American’s most sacred values.When a group of Russian gangsters try to buy his car and Wick refuses, they break into his home, steal the car, and kill the dog. In Pulp Fiction, John Travolta complains to Eric Stoltz that some vandals keyed his car. Stoltz commiserates. “They should be fuckin’ killed, man. No trial, no jury, straight to execution,” he says.“What’s more chicken-shit than fuckin’ with a man’s automobile?” says Travolta. “Don’t fuck with another man’s vehicle.”“You don’t do it,” agrees Stoltz. In America, the car is the symbol of a man’s property and an expression of his individual freedom. The dog is the symbol of unconditional loyalty, man’s faithful companion as he rules over his domain.In a social media context, we can think of Wick’s dog and his car as representing those beliefs we hold sacred. When Wick loses his car and his dog, he is every one of us who sees one of the values we consider intrinsic to our personal identity impugned by some stranger on social media. That the perpetrators are Russian is nothing if not reminiscent of Russian agents sowing discord in American society in the run up to the 2016 Presidential election.It turns out John used to work for the father of the leader of the gangsters who stole his car and killed his dog. That father, Viggo, upon learning what his son Iosef has done, calls Wick and begs him to let it go. Don’t feed the trolls, we are told time and again. But we, like Wick, cannot. His permanent sabbatical from assassination has come to an end.As on social media, violence begets violence. Since Wick refuses to let the matter go, Viggo, to protect his son, sends a preemptive hit squad to assassinate Wick at his home. We never fight a single target on social media because the public broadcast nature of social media always rallies others to the cause. The first John Wick film proceeds from there as a series of attacks and counterattacks until Wick emerges, alive, bloodied, with a new dog, a pit bull he frees from an animal clinic. Viggo, Iosef, and what seems like a hundred or so henchmen are dead. The new dog symbolizes a brief moment of peace for Wick, just as we sometimes emerge from our skirmishes online feeling as if we have the moral high ground, our honor once again intact.John Wick 2 begins with him retrieving his car from a chop shop owned by Viggo's brother, which requires Wick to kill not only Viggo’s brother but his fellow goons. The car takes serious damage in the firefight, much like the beating we take defending ourselves online, but Wick eventually emerges with his car and new dog and then returns home to bury his weapons cache. He thinks he is out of the game once again.As anyone who has participated in culture wars knows, any victory is temporary and pyrrhic. Out of the blue, Santino D’Antonio visits Wick at his home and calls in a marker, represented in the films by a medallion with a drop of blood from the debtor. Santino needs Wick to become an assassin again, just as various friends online call on us to take their side in various online battles.John refuses. He wants out. The marker is the marker, though. If you won’t defend your values, then can you say you really have any? Santino reminds John of this in a not-so-subtle way: he blows up Wick’s house with a grenade launcher.This brings us to The Continental, the unique hotel chain at the heart of the John Wick universe. Their Manhattan branch is run by Winston (Ian McShane) and staffed by the always courteous and professional concierge Charon (Lance Reddick). Now homeless, Wick retreats to the Continental for refuge. The entire Continental hotel chain lives under the aegis of the High Table, like one of the W Hotels in the former Starwood and now Marriott network. The Continental hotel chain stands in for our social media platforms. Like them, The Continental claims neutrality—no killing is allowed on Continental grounds—yet they happily arm assassins with all manners of weapons, like Twitter arming people with the quote tweet, the AK-47 of social media. They even employ a weapons sommelier. The Continental sets all sorts of very specific policies that seem to be in conflict with each other; do they want civility or violence? Visitors to the Continental, like Wick, vacillate between wanting them to enforce rules and wondering who put them in charge in the first place. In other words, a mirror of the tension between users and the social networks that dominate the modern internet.At any rate, Winston reminds Wick he must honor the marker from Santino, because them’s the rules. These markers are like metaphors for engagement, the debt we pay social networks for the privilege of their services and distribution. Social media platforms do not want violence on their grounds, yet they live through user engagement. The only way to not have any markers on your ledger is to never accrue a debt in the first place, but Wick was raised in the golden age of social networks, where it was near impossible to avoid being active on them. Bowing to the marker, Wick accedes to Santino’s request to assassinate his sister so Santino can assume her spot on the High Table council.Wick carries out the mission, with great reluctance, only to have Santino turn around and put a $7 million contract on Wick for murdering his sister. This is akin to battling your enemies on social media platforms, creating the engagement that platforms thrive off of, only to have them turn around and lock your account for having done so. Many a person I know has complained about just such a betrayal. Pour one out for David Simon and his periodic bans on Twitter for eviscerating his opponents in a blaze of profanity. Wick, as is his style, comes after Santino, who retreats to the safety of the Continental, where no violence is allowed. But Wick has been betrayed, and personal values now take precedence over the platform rules of The Continental. He pursues Santino onto hotel grounds and guns him down in front of Winston. As penalty for conducting assassin business on Continental grounds, the High Table doubles the bounty on Wick to $14 million and broadcasts it globally. As the second film ends, Winston informs Wick of the bounty and gives him an hour head start to run. He sets off with his pit bull through Central Park as cell phones start ringing throughout the park. Wick has been true to his beliefs, as symbolized by the dog by his side, but the outrage mob is about to be set loose on him.John Wick 3: Parabellum picks up from there. Wick is on the run through the rain of Manhattan, glancing at his watch as the seconds tick down to the global bounty becoming official.In the Wick universe, official High Table business is processed through a central office by dozens of men and women dressed like old school phone switch operators, all of whom go about their jobs with an almost cheerful professionalism. Anyone who has ever received an impassive automatic reply from a social media customer service department after reporting some vicious attack can empathize with the almost comical formality of the Kafkaesque institution in the face of what feels like emotional terrorism.That the bounty is put out by the High Table feels appropriate. It’s because of the algorithmic distribution of social media platforms that the asymmetric attack of the bloodthirsty mob achieves modern levels of scale and precision. The High Table seems elusive, at times arbitrary, just like the moderation policies of social networks. Winston at time seems friendly to John, yet he also stands by as the mob prepares to set upon Wick. Many users of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and so on can relate to this love-hate relationship with those platforms.As soon as Wick’s bounty goes global, seemingly every next person on the street comes sets upon him with the nearest weapon at hand. Anyone who has been attacked by an online mob, or even mildly harassed, is familiar with this uniquely modern sensation of being set upon by complete strangers. The Wick films give online mobs physical form. These random assassins are the Twitter eggs with usernames like pepe298174.Even more perfect, strangers attack John Wick only after glancing at their phones and receiving word of the bounty. How do outrage mobs coalesce in the online world? From people staring at social media on their phones and locating the next target to be cancelled. The High Table’s bounty system, with its mobile notifications, is nothing less than a formalization of the mechanisms by which social networks enable cancel culture. Wick dispatches one attacker after the other with every weapon at hand, whether axe or handgun or, in the first case, a hardcover book (when you absolutely, positively, have to snap a man’s neck using a book lodged in his jaw, a flimsy paperback or e-book just will not do).I’ve talked to liberals who’ve been set upon by the alt-right. Women who’ve been attacked by gamers. Creatives who are set upon by outraged fans. Conservatives who feel swarmed by SJW’s. Everyone feels unjustly attacked by faceless mobs, everyone is aggrieved. Everyone feels they are standing up for their truth and their principles, like John Wick, while mindless strangers attack from all sides. John Wick is the avatar of the modern social media user, the "righteous man beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men."Just before the bounty goes live, Wick stops by one of those doctors in the movies that caters to assassins and mobsters, the ones with fantastic service, always willing to provide bullet removal surgery on demand to walk-ins. Wick is bleeding from a shoulder wound inflicted by an overzealous assassin who tried to take John out before the bounty went official. Wick begs the doctor to patch him up, and he does, even pointing John to some medicine for the pain. But before Wick leaves, the doctor asks John to shoot him twice, to make it seem as if Wick coerced him into helping him. The doctor knows it is near impossible to stay neutral in the culture wars; if you’re not on one side you’re on the other. Ask Maggie Haberman.John calls in a marker from a woman known as the Director (Anjelica Huston). She runs a ballet theater called the Ruska Roma that doubles as some sort of training ground for assassins; it’s implied that Wick learned his trade there. Once again, the blind loyalty to this marker system perpetuates a cycle of violence. Huston would rather not be involved, admonishing Wick, “You honor me by bringing death to my front door.”Wick retorts in Russian, “I am a child of the Belarus. An orphan of your tribe. You are bound to help me.” He explicitly evokes the tribalism inherent in humans, the us vs. them impulse that social media amplifies. And then, in English, “You are bound, and I am owed.” The particular power of tribalism is the near impossibility of being neutral; to not pick any side is to be against everyone. The Director succumbs. The face you make when your friend tags you into his or her online battle and you just want to watch YouTubeAs she walks him through the backstage training area of the theater, where other young assassins are in training, she says, “You know when my pupils first come here, they wish for one thing. A life free of suffering. I try to dissuade them from these childish notions but as you know, art is pain. Life is suffering.” As she says this, a ballerina pulls a toenail off. Social media is suffering, she is saying, but Wick is already in too deep.She walks him past a bunch of men wrestling on the ground, future John Wicks in training.She continues, “Somehow, you managed to get out. But here you are, back where you began. All of this, for what? For a dog?”“It wasn’t just a dog,” he replies.“The High Table wants your life. How can you fight the wind? How can you smash the mountains? How can you bury the ocean? How can you escape from the light? Of course you can go to the dark. But they’re in the dark, too.”Huston is saying that the only way to avoid the darkness of social media is to avoid it, but, as he says, it wasn’t just a dog. She points him to the path out of the outrage cycle, nothing that it’s not a game you can win (How can you fight the wind? That is, there’s always another faceless troll.), but for Wick it’s a matter of honor.She cashes in his marker, acceding to his request for safe passage to Casablanca.Enter Taylor Mason. Err, sorry, the Adjudicator, played by Asia Kate Dillon. Employed by the High Table, she informs both Winston of the NY Continental and another character nicknamed the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne) that they must abdicate their positions in seven days for having aided Wick in killing Santino (in John Wick 2). If you’re a liberal, the Adjudicator is like the conservative government officials who’ve continually accused social media platforms of an anti-conservative bias, or the both-sides-ism of the media. If you’re a conservative, the Adjudicator is some metaphor for the liberal media, punishing social media platforms for anything other than absolute conformity to liberal narratives. Sometimes, when Twitter works itself into a rage at another NYTimes headline that isn’t tough enough on Trump, I think of the Adjudicator as the public, holding the newspaper to account for its failure to answer to the collective public High Table.In Casablanca, Wick calls on another friend, Sofia (the ageless Halle Berry making a nice pair with the ageless Keanu), with whom he cashes in yet another marker. She, like The Director earlier, is not happy to be pulled into Wick’s personal battles. Sofia runs another branch of the Continental, so essentially Wick has fled one tech platform for another that feels obligated to shelter him. He may be excommunicado from the NY Continental, but he once came to Sofia’s aid, and she owes him.“You do realize that I’m management now, right? I’m not service anymore, John, so I don’t go around shooting people in the head,” Sofia notes. She’s essentially a tech platform executive now, trying to avoid getting pulled into social media battles.“Look, I made a deal when I agreed to run this hotel, and that deal said I had to follow the rules of the High Table,” she says. “If I make one mistake, one enemy, maybe somebody goes looking for my daughter.”Sofia faces the risk of being doxxed and having some nutjobs go after her children. Years ago, John helped get Sofia’s daughter out of this dangerous world, and Sofia doesn’t know where she’s been shepherded. She doesn’t want to know because she knows it would put her daughter back in harm’s way.“Because sometimes you have to kill what you love.” Sofia speaks for all those who keep their opinions to themselves online because the cost of being cancelled just isn’t worth the cost of being attacked by the mob. If she stays in the game, she will be pulled into vicious battles she wishes no part of. But in removing herself from social media, she loses out on some of the benefits they offer, like the chance to communicate with family and friends, in her case her daughter. Long ago she chose exit.Meanwhile, in Manhattan, the Adjudicator visits a sushi stand and calls on the chef and his crew to help enforce penalties against Wick and all who aided him. The chef, named Zero, agrees. He is, like seemingly everyone in this world, an assassin, just as social media turned all of us into soldiers in the culture wars. Zero and his team seem willing to serve the High Table no matter what they demand; like most people, the lure of participating in an online mob is a form of universal human bloodlust. They can also stand in for platform moderators, trying to implement social network speech policies as best as they can.First they visit the Director at the Ruska Roma. The Adjudicator confronts her over helping Wick despite his excommunication. Huston defends herself. “He had a ticket.”The Adjudicator will hear nothing of it. “But a ticket does not stand above the Table.”Zero runs a blade through the Director's clasped hands as penalty.Time and again, the John Wick mythology points to the seeming futility of the defending one’s values on social media. The price of picking a side is always to suffer egregious violence from the other side with seemingly no real winners, or to be have one's hands slapped by the platforms (or in this case, pierced with a sword).Sofia takes Wick to meet her former boss Berrada, as he requests. Berrada runs a mint to manufacture the gold coins and markers that the assassin world operate on. “Now this coin, of course, it does not represent monetary value. It represents the commerce of relationships, a social contract in which you agree to partake. Order and rules. You have broken the rules. The High Table has marked you for death.” Berrada describes both the way in which platforms turned our relationships into business arrangements (“commerce” and “contract”), the artificiality of their power—the order and rules are ones the platforms made up—and their power to deplatform or ban anyone who sign the user agreements.Berrada asks Wick if he knows the etymology of the word assassin.Berrada explains: “But others contend it comes from asasiyyun. Meaning ‘men who are faithful and who abide by their beliefs.’” The Wick Universe, populated with assassins murdering each other in an endless cycle of retribution, is a proxy for the users on social media who cannot stand by idly while others infringe upon their beliefs.Wick asks Berrada how to find the Elder, the one who sits above the High Table. Berrada directs him to wander into the desert and hope that the Elder finds him.Before Sofia and John can leave, however, Berrada demands something from Sofia in exchange for the favor. In face, he says he will keep one of Sofia’s two dogs, who accompany her everywhere. Again, the dog symbolizes a person’s most sacred values. On social media, we are always being forced by tribal battles to give up some of our values in order to stay out of harm’s way. This time, Sofia refuses.Berrada shoots one of the dogs, but it is wearing a bulletproof vest (hey yo social media wars are vicious you can never be too cautious). Sofia huddles over her dog, then draws a handgun hidden under its vest.John sees what she is doing and urges her, “No.”But it’s too late. The thing about social media is that it takes just one savage troll to put us on tilt. Sofia shoots Berrada in the leg, and just like that she’s back in the culture wars.After she and her dogs and John kill off Berrada’s nearby henchmen, she walks over to Berrada and considers shooting him in the head. “Sofia, don’t,” urges John.She shoots him in the knee instead. “He shot my dog.”“I get it,” he replies, in the funniest line in the film. Anyone who has dealt with an online mob empathizes with friends when they fall under attack and go berserk in response. When you know you should just mute and block and walk away, but damn, that SOB shot your dogSofia, John, and the dogs fight their way out of the facility, killing several dozen men along the way in the most elaborately violent ways possible, evoking the almost casual cruelty of online warfare. They steal a car and drive out to the desert where Sofia abandons John to his search for the Elder. He wanders through the desert in his suit, without any water, a user de-platformed.In Manhattan, the Adjudicator and her sushi chef moderators visit the Bowery King and make him pay penance for the seven bullets he gave John Wick with seven knife cuts to the chest.In the desert, John collapses from exhaustion but is saved and brought to the Elder. John asks him for a chance to reverse his excommunication. The Elder offers him a deal: Wick must assassinate Winston, head of the Manhattan Continental hotel, and then serve the rest of his days under the High Table doing what he does best, assassinating people.This is the Faustian bargain for being on these social media platforms. Drive engagement for them and play by their rules, whatever those are, or be excommunicated from them. John either stays an assassin, suffering a lifetime of fighting other people on social media, or he can remove himself from the platforms entirely. “I will serve. I will be of service,” John says. To prove his fealty, he cuts off his wedding ring finger. We’ve all seen people lash back at trolls only to be banned themselves. The loss of Wick’s ring finger represents those values we compromise when playing by social media platform’s arbitrary moderation rules. Who among us hasn’t emerged from some online tussle feeling like we lost a finger ourselves, gave up some part of our humanity?Back in Manhattan, John has to fight his way past Zero and his henchmen to reach the Continental. Just as Zero is about to kill him, John puts his hand on the front steps of the Continental. Charon appears and tells Zero to lower his weapon. Again, the platform rules are the rules: no assassination on hotel grounds.Inside, John and Zero sit in the lobby together and have a chat. Zero fanboys over having met the legendary John Wick, even while noting he’s more of a cat person. Nothing epitomizes the often arbitrary tribal battles online better than the fight between cat and dog people.Many people have described the feeling of meeting someone in real life who they despise online and finding they get along better than they would’ve imagined. While it’s not always the case, the disembodied world of social media tends to amplify divisions. The John Wick films portray this multiple times; in every film, John has a moment where he and someone trying to assassinate him stop to share a cordial drink on Continental grounds before resuming their fight to the death a short while later.Wick gets his meeting with Winston, who tells John that killing him will not honor his wife’s memory but simply return him to a state of subservience to the High Table. The Adjudicator joins them and asks if Winston will step down (reminiscent of the calls for CEOs like Zuckerberg and Dorsey to step down from their posts) and whether John will kill Winston. Both of them refuse, so the Adjudicator calls the home office and has the Manhattan branch of the Continental deconsecrated. Blame me all you want for running this platform, but it’s just human nature John. I can’t fix that!Of course, this now means that assassination can be carried out on hotel grounds, but also that John can now partake in hotel services, namely a visit to the gun sommelier. “Let’s see, I’m going to need the ability to tag some mofos, and also to quote tweet their asses”What ensues is what film critics love to refer to as an “orgy of violence,” (has there every been an “orgy of peace”?) though in this case, as the carnage is accompanied by Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, perhaps a symphony of violence is more fitting (again, why never a “concerto of violence”?). Charon, hotel staff, and John move about the hotel fighting off an army of High Table forces clad in such heavy armor that they seem impervious to bullets, almost like an army of online bots swarming their target.The whole time, Winston hides in a secure vault, sipping a martini, emblematic, in many people's minds, of social media execs working from their cushy offices while users rip each other to shreds on their platforms.John survives, as usual, dispatching everyone who comes after him. The Adjudicator calls Winston and asks for a parley on the rooftop of the Continental, where John eventually arrives. Winston asks the Adjudicator for forgiveness and offers his ongoing loyalty to the High Table. The Adjudicator agrees to reconsecrate the Continental and restore Winston as manager, but then she turns to John and asks Winston what is to be done of the titular assassin. Winston replies by shooting Wick repeatedly in the chest and knocking him off the roof of the Continental, where he falls several stories to the alley below, bouncing off a few fire escape railings and awnings in the process. Ah, those platforms, they're always liable to turn on you.Wick is not dead, as you’d expect. The Adjudicator, on the way out of the hotel, peeks in the alley, where Wick’s body is nowhere to be found. He has, we discover, been brought to the Bowery King, now maimed by all those knife wounds ordered by the Adjudicator.What outlook does John Wick offer us on the state of the online discourse moving forward? Is there any hope for relief? The end of the film isn’t optimistic.Laurence Fishburne says to Wick, lying there in a bloody heap on the ground: “So, let me ask you John, how do you feel? Because I am really pissed off. You pissed, John? Hmm? Are you?”John Wick strains to lift his bloodied head off the ground to look Fishburne in the eyes. “Yeah.”

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