In each one, a person would look into the camera as if it were a mirror, and then, just as the song’s beat dropped, the camera would cut to a shot of the person’s doppelgänger. Marcella was lying on her bed looking at TikTok on a Thursday evening when she began seeing video after video set to a clip of the song “Pretty Boy Swag,” by Soulja Boy. Videos become memes that you can imitate, or riff on, rapidly multiplying much the way the Ice Bucket Challenge proliferated on Facebook five years ago. Another tap calls up a suite of editing tools, including a timer that makes it easy to film yourself. When you watch a video on TikTok, you can tap a button on the screen to respond with your own video, scored to the same soundtrack. It showed her more absurd comic sketches and supercuts of people painting murals, and fewer videos in which girls made fun of other girls for their looks. She watched the ones she liked a few times before moving on, and double-tapped her favorites, to “like” them. She opened TikTok, and it began showing her an endless scroll of videos, most of them fifteen seconds or less. They were strange and hilarious and reminded her of Vine, the discontinued platform that teen-agers once used for uploading anarchic six-second videos that played on a loop. She downloaded TikTok last fall, after seeing TikTok videos that had been posted on YouTube and Instagram. Marcella is eighteen and lives in a Texas suburb so quiet that it sometimes seems like a ghost town.
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