#91: Clean Girl Aesthetic
... fresh as fuck, I put it on, no help, I did this shit
Hello.
This is Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. In the past two weeks, butter has been smeared, swooped and spread across all manner of surfaces, the New York Times reports. Learn more about butter boards here. Or learn more about:
🧼 Clean Girl Aesthetic
🧹 Cleaning the Feeds
🏎️ Accelerationism
🧼 Clean Girl Aesthetic
The Clean Girl Aesthetic (minimalist, no-makeup makeup, cool, calm, collected, comfortable) was a thing on TikTok widely discussed in media articles throughout spring and summer 2022. Bustle: What’s The “Clean Girl” Aesthetic Taking Over Fashion TikTok? InStyle: How to Channel the Clean Girl Aesthetic. Then it was righteously criticized. i-D: The problem with TikTok's 'clean girl' aesthetic. Plus Bustle, Yahoo. Then it seemed to be gone.
And then it came back. But different. I noticed a bunch of videos after Berlin based creator and stylist Chez.Amelie asked for dirty rooms and worst drunk selfies using #cleangirlaesthetic. She used a sound by creator ojc.oli that has gone sort of viral since its release end of August with 280K videos using the mashup of the songs NOSTYLIST by Destroy Lonely and Crimewave by Crystal Castles including the lyrics: Bitch, I wake up, no stylist / Fresh as fuck, I put it on, no help, I did this shit.
Bro made a new slideshow sound, someone commented. And indeed there are quite a few slideshows documenting young woman’s lives – unfiltered, yet curated. And not always very clean. I see self empowerment, sovereignty and solidarity here. A refreshing spin on the cultural wheel of fortune. Or the end of a hype cycle in a capitalist exploitation logic. I am all eager to see the next iteration of yet another ✨ aesthetic ✨. As long as the soundtrack is as good as this one.
Cleaning the Feeds
TikTok is continuing its PR offensive to convince the world that it takes its content moderator responsibilities seriously, as the ByteDance-owned social video platform published its latest Community Guidelines Enforcement Report (Techcrunch).
The report - as always - got media coverage even though its findings remain superficial. TikTok took down more than 113 million videos between April and June of this year (The Verge) compared to 102 million during the first quarter of the year (Digiday). TikTok reports that it removed 33.6 million fake accounts for the quarter, representing a 61% increase on the 20.8 million accounts it removed in the previous quarter (Techcrunch). The message here: We are doing more than before.
But what exactly, including case studies, examples, hashtags, campaigns or any kind of qualitative data is missing. Instead you get sentences like this one: “We continue to evolve and adapt our safeguards by investing in automated defenses to detect, block, and remove inauthentic accounts and engagement, and by improving our response speed and efficiency to evolving threats.”
The bare numbers without contextual information simulates a knowledge transfer. TikTok removed 10,290 videos from Ukraine every day in Q2 2022. But how many did it remove in Russia during the same period of time. What kind of community guideline breaches happened? Did TikTok delete videos showing war? Is that necessarily a good thing if they document war crimes?
After all – checking the numbers provided you can get a rough idea of how many TikTok videos are uploaded every minute. The report says: “Total videos removed represent about 1% of all videos uploaded to TikTok”. That means that there have been more than 11 billion videos that were uploaded in three months, right?! I am really bad at math. Correct me if i am wrong. My calculator says that there are more than 87,000 TikTok videos uploaded globally each minute or 1464 each second.
Accelerationism
Faster. Life is short. TikTok will now let you watch videos at 2x playback speed, tweets Matt Navarra. Here is another observation: “lately, there’s been a winning formula for viral sounds on TikTok: Take a catchy pop song, and make it even catchier by ramping up the tempo and pitch by around 130%-150%” (Refinery29).
“We no longer just want the best songs; we want the best bits of the best songs — made even ‘better’ through auditory enhancements.” An idea as old as sampling. Compression. A fulfilling now. "Why was there time? Why always this idiotic succession and no roaring, filling at the same time?” asks the protagonist of Herman Hesse’s book “Klingsor’s last summer” – written in 1919.
Faster! I am surprised that no one has yet accused TikTok of trying a subversive accelerationism attack orchestrated from Mainland China to abolish western systems and their class structures through speeding up capitalist growth and technological change to create further radical social change. Well. Maybe increasing playback speed rather points to longer videos as seen on WhatsApp, podcasts or YouTube.
What else?
Ever since asking “Is TikTok boring now” in #80 i am all eager to hear more takes on that. Russell Brandom has an entire theory that he describes for The Verge: How platforms turn boring. “I call it the Bootleg Ratio: the delicate balance between A) content created by users specifically for the platform and B) semi-anonymous clout-chasing accounts drafting off the audience. Any platform will have both, but as B starts to overtake A, users will have less and less reason to visit and creators will have less and less reason to post.” TikTok is changing, Brandom concludes. Sure. But is it yet a) a bit b) really or c) totally boring now?! And is the photo mode killing your FYP as well?
TikTok Increases Length Of Video Descriptions. Does anyone remember the 2017 debate if Instagram Captions {Are} the New Personal Blog? That was 5 years ago. And now? TikTok is expanding the length of descriptions from 300 characters to 2,200 characters. SearchEngine Journal emphasizes the core part: Let’s not forget that Google indexes TikTok videos. Writing detailed descriptions can make videos more discoverable in traditional search engines and TikTok. A16z has more on the concept of video search here.
In June Rest of the world had a report on Migrant TikTok, now Al Jazeera has one too: Authorities from Colombia and Panama have yet to publicly comment on the growing popularity of refugee and migrant TikTok videos or on concerns around misinformation being spread on the platform.
The 2022 Italian general election is over. Italian politicians have turned to TikTok for votes (NYT). Former premiers Silvio Berlusconi (leader of Forza Italia) and Matteo Renzi (leader of Italia Viva) were among those who joined the channel in the past weeks (The Local). And of course Giorgia Meloni – expected to become the next Prime Minister of Italy – used TikTok as well. Bella Ciao.
