"TikTok is the platform that has almost killed me"

Artist and researcher Ben Grosser talks TikTok addiction, the looming ban and alternate visions for online socialization

Ben Grosser is perhaps the last person on earth you’d expect to develop a TikTok addiction. For more than 20 years, the artist, academic and social media researcher has churned out a stream of clever, canny, provocative projects that critique and subvert the values underlying mainstream social platforms.  

You might remember Grosser’s Facebook Demetricator, a clever Google Chrome extension that removed friend, share and like counts from the Facebook interface and challenged the wisdom of quantifying our every social interaction. Or you might recall Minus, his buzzy alternative social network that grants each user only 100 posts — a commentary on both the value, and the scarcity, of our time and attention. 

But despite Grosser’s extensive work on these issues, and his hyper-awareness of the traps and contrivances that platforms use to suck us in, he’s found himself losing hours of his own time to the TikTok algorithm.

This summer, Grosser began working on a new project that arguably doubles as a cry for help. Called Stuck in the Scroll, his new “compulsive scrolling monitor” displays, in real time, whether he’s thumbing through the short-form video app. Since July 1, he’s spent nearly 293 hours on the platform: That’s 3 hours and 42 minutes per day of Kamala Harris, AI boosters and house plants.

“Part of my approach to social platforms as an artist has always been to embed myself inside them and then try to be attentive to how they make me feel,” Grosser said. “But with TikTok, I feel like I’m both studying it and also subject to it in a dangerous way.”

These are, of course, far from the only criticisms leveled at TikTok. Critics have alternatively described it as a threat to national security, a drain on mental health and a sort of pernicious cultural porn that sucks viewers in with promises of stimulation but leaves them bored and disoriented. 

This week, lawyers for the app’s parent company are in U.S. federal court fending off a looming national ban. If they fail, TikTok could disappear from American phones as soon as January — making the themes of “Stuck in the Scroll” feel particularly relevant.

But the questions Grosser raises in his art are also far more universal, probing the basic assumptions that underlie, well … just about all of online life. How have we internalized the corporate obsessions with “engagement” and “growth”? How have those values shaped the way we conduct our friendships and spend our time?

I don’t personally have the answers to these questions … but since I first interviewed Grosser in 2014, he’s been a profound influence on how I think about social media. So earlier this week, we caught up on Google Meet to chat about Stuck in the Scroll, TikTok rabbit holes, the changing tone of tech journalism and alternative visions for the future of online socialization.

I hope you enjoy our (long!, fascinating and lightly edited) conversation. You can read more about Ben’s work on his website, bengrosser.com.

Before this call, I was thinking back to some of the things we talked about when I first interviewed you a decade ago — and I was really struck by how prophetic it all was. The problem with social media metrics. The compulsion of touch screens. These are things that social media companies and lawmakers and psychologists now talk about endlessly.

I wondered if that vindication has been satisfying at all — or do you feel like a Cassandra in the wilderness? Like, nobody listened when they could have done something meaningful about it. 

Ben: Oh, what a generous question. Yeah, in some ways, it feels good that the issues I’ve been focused on and kind of screaming about for the past 12 to 13 years have not only become commonly discussed problems but have even, in some ways, led companies to feel a sense of responsibility in certain areas. I don’t think social media corporations, in particular, have done much along the lines of what I’ve cared about, but they’ve at least had to answer to some of the concerns I’ve brought forward over the years.

These conversations are now often disconnected from me or my past work, which can sometimes be frustrating. I’ll see someone say, “We need to do X, we need to do Y,” or “Here’s the issue,” and I think, “Yeah, I’ve been working on that for a long time.” This is true for anyone who researches a topic in depth and sticks with it long-term. That’s part of what makes it interesting: People come along and discover it anew as an area of concern.

It’s also been such a dramatic transition. If we think back to when you and I first had conversations, compared to now, there’s been a huge transformation in tech journalism.

In 2014, there were very few people on the tech journalism side, in my opinion, who were really focused on employing a critical lens to what the companies were doing. There was a lot of celebration of opportunity. It’s not that people weren’t noticing problems and talking about them — you’re one of the few I think of on that list from those early days. But after 2016, it became vogue for a while to critique the platforms that journalists weren’t criticizing just five minutes earlier.

I think it’s the consequences of the Trump election that woke a lot of people up. And it grew from there, of course, because in 2017 and 2018 we had the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and then Frances Haugen a few years later. 

Yeah, I suspect that the baseline assumption now — among many tech journalists, and also among many users — is that social media as a category is kind of “ruined.” Very little of it feels consistently entertaining or engaging or good anymore. Where do you hang out online, given that? And which places are you in because you enjoy them, as opposed to having to spend time there for your art and research? 

Ben: The landscape has really become unsettled over the last few years, especially with Elon’s takeover of Twitter. Not that Twitter was my only place, but it was maybe the most collective space for everyone in my circle. I still hang out on Facebook. I still have communities there that I have good dialogue with, primarily in art media and art community circles. I don’t hang out on Instagram, but I do check it. Same with Threads. I’m interested in Mastodon because it’s where a lot of my European art and media people have gathered since Twitter fell apart. 

Then there’s TikTok. In terms of spending time, in terms of what platform is consuming my life force, that’s TikTok. What’s different about TikTok for me from every other social platform I’ve used in the last 15 or 18 years is that I don’t really post to TikTok. I don’t really participate much in the ecosystem. We could talk about what leads to that, but I think that’s probably true for a lot of people.

I’m spending time on TikTok as an artist, researcher and academic who studies social media — as someone who, you know, reads widely and understands various arguments about the cultural and social effects of social media design, who tracks the political opposition and various problems of TikTok. Yet I feel like TikTok is the platform that has almost killed me. I’m there to research, but I just get sucked in.

When you say you get “sucked in” by TikTok — how long are we talking about here? 

Ben: Single sessions on TikTok can easily go for an hour or two, with the worst stints lasting about three hours. It’s almost like I get into a situation where I’m unable to stop.

This is part of what my current work focuses on — thinking about what I tend to talk about as a mythology around the prowess of the TikTok algorithm. Everyone talks and writes about how the TikTok algorithm knows us so well and it understands us better than we understand ourselves. Sure, it uses signals like all platforms to pick up on topics of interest and feed us things we might be interested in. But I don’t think it’s really any better, or particularly worse, than any other platform in this regard.

Instead, I think the under-examined component of TikTok is its interface design. It’s not just about content selection, but the algorithmic ordering of content presented in this sensuous, thumb-swiping, endlessly scrolling vertical interface. It sets up certain expectations of how many swipes you’ll need to get back to the content you’re interested in, and it plays with that and constantly shifts it on you. 

TikTok, I think, teaches us to identify within microseconds whether or not we’re interested in a piece of content, and to swipe immediately if we aren’t. It’s almost punitive, because if you stay too long on content you don’t want to see, you’re just going to see more of it. 

So how did you get from that problem, and those observations, to something like “Stuck in the Scroll”? I would admittedly not want anyone to know how long I spend doing … just about anything … on my phone or computer.

Ben: I just didn’t know what else to do. At some point I figured maybe if I made visible how insanely horrible my addiction to TikTok is, that would help. I’m in my studio now, and I have a big screen that displays Stuck on the Scroll directly across from my couch. When I pull up TikTok, the screen instantly goes red and blue and lights up. So I personally have this external visual reminder that I am on TikTok, and anybody else can also see that I’m on TikTok right now, and they can see how long it’s been since I was on TikTok.

Out of curiosity, what is your Tiktok algorithm? Like, what rabbit holes does it surface for you?  

Ben: Right now, it’s all Kamala Harris. Especially since the debate, oh my God. It’s just endless people saying the same things over and over again about Trump and Kamala.

As for the niches I end up in on TikTok, cooking is one that I welcome and try to prime. I’ve been learning a lot of Asian cooking techniques on TikTok — Korean, Chinese. AI is another one. I kind of purposefully focus on people who are very much like, “AI is amazing.” Not that AI isn’t amazing in certain ways, of course — I use it for things too. But I’m interested in that kind of uncritical cheerleading, how it’s getting talked about.

Alternatively, I have people who are hardcore Marxists. That is another rabbit hole I go down. Also house plants. I get a lot of house plant stuff right now.

House plants are a pretty universal TikTok theme, I think.

Ben: A lot of it is actually universal. I did this project in 2020 called “Not For You.” I called it an automated confusion system for TikTok. It was essentially driving my TikTok independent of me by clicking on hashtags, songs and users — just going down rabbit holes at random, trying to influence the algorithm so it wouldn’t be so tied into me.

Part of what I found, as I created new users over and over again and ran this project and watched what happened, is that the feeds were not nearly as different as they should have been. Our feeds contain a lot of the same stuff, but we just don’t think about or remember all the things we skip.

During my sabbatical last year, I spent time at different universities in Europe running workshops where we did something that probably nobody has ever done in the history of TikTok: We sat down and looked at each and every video on the feed in their entirety without skipping for about an hour. Then we discussed what we saw. What’s in the feed? How does it relate to what interests you?

The most typical response was, “You know what? Most of this I wasn’t that interested in. I was really frustrated at having to watch a whole video over and over again.” But people don’t even notice that stuff when they’re in interactive mode and they’re just swiping past a lot of the content.

That’s part of what I’m working on for a project that’ll be both an art piece and a more developed version of these workshops. I’m thinking of them as “desynchronization sessions,” where we can all get together and look at what we’re really seeing, and how we might develop practices of use that allow us to disrupt some of the effects of the interface on ourselves. Hopefully I’ll have something out about it before TikTok gets banned, if that happens.

What do you make of the TikTok ban?

Ben: It’s just hypocrisy, right? The U.S. government is completely freaked out about the idea of a foreign government having access to data from its citizens through a social media platform, and the potential to influence those citizens through the construction, design and analysis of that social platform. So they want to ban TikTok because of that. I can understand that argument, but you can’t be concerned about that with TikTok and not be concerned about it with Facebook.

The only difference is which government has control, which government has access. Our government is happy to have access and sees the potential for manipulation on Facebook and Instagram. It’s just that when it goes outside the U.S. that they become concerned.

We’ve been talking a lot about the big, mainstream social platforms, especially TikTok, but you’re also interested in creating alternative platforms and imagining new ways to socialize online. Given that those projects are often so niche and not designed to reach a lot of users — can you kind of lay out for me why you think they’re important?  

Ben: There are multiple things to think about when it comes to alternative platforms. First, the importance of alternative platforms is in making visible the potential for a different way of doing online sociality. We have largely accepted, without consideration, one person’s idea for what a social media platform should be, and we’ve just presumed that all social platforms basically have to execute on the same plan.

And you can see, when you look at all the different platforms, from Twitter to Facebook to TikTok to Instagram to Threads, they all just become each other over time. They just copy each other and turn into the same thing.

Twitter started out as text-only. Facebook started out as text-only. Instagram started out as image-only. Now they all have all kinds of media and they try to copy each other continuously, with Reels being a great example of copying from TikTok, or Stories being a great example of copying from Snapchat. So I think that’s one problem: We don’t really have any innovation in what online sociality could be, because they’re all focused on competing with each other. 

Another issue is that they’re all relentlessly focused on scale. There is no success in the funding of these companies unless they’re obsessed with scale, because the funding comes from venture capital. So they build these platforms with all the focus on how to generate growth.

This very quickly creates all kinds of difficult problems for them and for everyone else, which they then come up with technological solutions for, like algorithmic feeds. That sets up the conditions under which people seek to game the system, leading to engagement bait and influencers and various other things. They can’t seem to think of any other way to do this, though. They just keep doing the same thing over and over.

You created a social platform called Minus that works off a very different logic — users only get 100 posts for life, so there’s really no opportunity or incentive to “grow.” What has that looked like in practice? How did it change user behavior? 

Ben: The big platforms want us to forget that our lives are finite, that our time and our attention are finite. We would never spend so much time on these platforms if we couldn’t put that fact out of our minds. Minus purposefully puts it in your mind when you’re there. Your time is limited, so what are you going to do with it?

The reactions to that are pretty interesting. Some users arrive at Minus and they are so frozen by the idea of only having 100 posts that they never post anything. Other people come along, and the first thing they ask with their first post is, “How can I get more than 100? There’s no way 100 could be enough.”

But those who just kind of get into it and start posting often find that 100 is more than they realized. Because that limit puts them in the finite frame rather than the infinite frame, they don’t feel compelled to be on Minus all the time. And then the 100 becomes a more measured opportunity — measured in the sense that it’s not endless, so they can see how it fits in the rest of their life.

Minus is the rare social platform that will be happy if you use it and forget about it. That is an amazing, wonderful thing. The idea that we should always have these platforms in the forefront of our minds all the time as we walk around the world is solely to the benefit of the corporations. It’s not to the benefit of humans and connection.

That was … profound!! There were moments there when I wasn’t sure if we were still talking about an alternative social network or if we were talking about life and death.

Ben: At one point, I analyzed the first month or two of posts on Minus, and life and death are one of the most common themes. Instead of politics, instead of polarization, instead of hate speech, people talk about life, death, play. It gets them thinking differently.

I think that’s the thing we don’t think about when it comes to the big platforms: They’re so focused on growth that it gets us thinking about ourselves as something that needs to grow. We internalize that need to grow. And so we’re always thinking about how many and how much, instead of who and what.

That’s an important function of these smaller platforms: It’s not that they have to take over, it’s that they get us thinking and realizing that there are radically different ways we could be doing this. Really, when you think about it, we’ve barely scratched the surface.

Please note that Saturday’s edition may be slightly abbreviated, as I’m in Atlanta for a journalism conference. Come say hi if you’re also here!! 😎