The idea that you can never truly know someone as revised for 2022 should be amended to add that you can never truly know someone the way their TikTok algorithm knows them.
In those early just-downloaded days, my TikTok feed consisted almost exclusively of current dance trend videos, looking and sounding identical, save for the occasional variations in outfits and backdrops. Songs like MKTO’s Classic, CKay’s Love Nwantiti, the Justin Bieber/Kid LAROI collab Stay, plus the only lyricless earworm I know of, The Magic Bomb by Hoàng Read, all lived in my head without invitation, in the space music I actually enjoy once occupied. Hours of swiping through this ad infinitum sameness was dull and discouraging.
Then, like a frustratingly delayed high, the algorithm kicked in. TikTok delivered, unasked for, the kind of content I neither knew I wanted nor knew existed: an introduction to the app’s dedicated sector for Chinese household technology. A fresh new addiction — in the form of streamlined plastic pastel shapes that whirred and hummed reassuringly in the hands of the organised and efficient user.
TikTok is owned by Beijing-based tech firm ByteDance, though ironically, the app is banned in China (social media addicts and influencers in that country use Douyin, an app designed by the same company and operating on similar principles but with stricter controls and blocks on international content). This might explain why these videos are so plentiful, but not why they were delivered to me with instant success.
Combining a distinct ASMR unboxing element (the knife-slicing of cello tape, the staccato rip of corrugated cardboard ) with cleaning demonstrations so slick that even the “mess” is orderly and manufactured, this content corner focuses on for-purchase items that promise to make cooking, cleaning, and maintaining a social-media-perfect (even in hi-res) home easy — thanks to dozens of indispensable small plastic machines. Deliveries of these cheaply made items ordered in huge batches is part of the content narrative. Dozens of boxes arrive at a flat, the resident (female at least in 95% of the videos) begins unboxing the mountain of items while providing quick demonstrations of what each battery-powered, USB-charged tool can do — the implication being that these small and inexpensive products can disproportionately improve your messy life.
There’s a kitchen device shaped like a capsule pill that, when submerged in water along with fresh fruits and vegetables, cleanses them via “high energy ion purification.” There’s a tiny vacuum designed to clean and defuzz your duvet cover and only your duvet cover. There’s a hand-held steamer for your drapes and a separate one for your clothing. A mini-fridge sits on your vanity keeping creams and cosmetics fresh. Self-stirring tea mugs blend sugar with matcha and hot water, sparing tired wrists. Toothpaste dispensers pump neat mint blobs onto brushes. Little collapsible washing machines do loads of dirty socks and panties. Trash cans are fitted with a mechanised function that seals full bags of unsightly refuse and lines the bin with fresh ones. Each video is a tiny parade of modern conveniences.
Do these tools make individual tasks easier? Sure. Are they environmentally conscious? Unlikely. Do they exist in a serpent-eating-its-own-tale cycle of buying thing A to service thing B to service thing C ad infinitum? Absolutely. It’s a continuation of the effort to make domestic work look slick and appealing and modern while it remains what it’s always been, unpaid and the domain of women repackaged as a fake girl boss empire of productivity and efficiency and you-can-have/do-it-all-ness that makes the working woman’s world appear like hardly any work at all — the first product bears the load and the next product bears the load of that one. And so on. There’s always another thing to buy further down the chain, but no buy-your-way-out exit from this unpaid job. In the end, you bear the burden of owning so many of these products.
So here we are: caught in the trap of having things and needing more things to maintain the things we already have. These modern conveniences fast become inconvenient when they break or their batteries die or the things you buy to store and maintain them begin to take up more and more space in both your physical and psychological life. And yet… the videos designed to sell them are compelling and soothing to a degree that borders on hypnotic.
“Please,” says my index finger, swiping up and up and ever further up in search of more of this content, “don’t stop.”
I don’t actually want any of the items on display in these videos. I like analog things that I can at least attempt to repair if or when they break. But there’s an undeniable draw to the gleaming surfaces of what, compared to my own flat, looks like a home from the future. Dust-free, dirt-free, hair-free apartments in which every item has its own designated storage space and it is placed there with a satisfying shhhck! as a drawer or lid or door is slid into place and disorganisation disappears. I love to watch these products fulfil their purpose on screen. I follow every account I can find that shares this kind of content — despite a repetitiveness identical to the dance trend videos and without an answer to the question “But why?”
Here’s how TikTok works to deliver to our screens the content that appeals most to us: Contrary to what we might think, it’s not entirely about likes, comments, and followers. According to a 2021 investigation by The Wall Street Journal, the engagement metric the app is most interested in is the length of time we spend viewing each video. These household technology videos tend to be long but feel short — typically ten to twelve gadgets are unboxed and put to use in each quick-cut clip. Often they feature the same products over and over with something new appearing only occasionally (the battery operated double fan shaped like headphones and worn around the neck as a personal cooling device, the tennis racket-style electrified insect swatter, a tiny blender/cup for making and drinking smoothies, a surprising selection of devices that do double duty as phone chargers), another content creation strategy designed to keep the viewer engaged. Keep watching, keep watching, keep watching: for the chance to see something new.
Novelty is another big draw. The innovative designs used in the construction of many of the items is still unseen in most of Europe or North America where square footage is still more plentiful (though try arguing that with anyone currently trying to find a flat in Paris or New York or London). The way the mini washing machine folds flat to fit inside a drawer or the foot spa collapses to slide underneath a cupboard would have designers at Ikea awestruck. I once saw a wall-to-wall window system that folded outwards from the apartment into a glass-floored balcony.
As I sit soaking in my decades-old Berlin bath, not a modcon in sight save for my phone, no ionising capsule mitigating the effects of the city’s hard water on my skin, it’s pleasant and anaesthetising to watch these actors move through their fictional domestic lives with speed and efficiency, always striving for perfection in their tech-forward kitchens, bedrooms, and bathrooms. There is a comfort in inhabiting, even temporarily, a space where the biggest mess can be put in order in under five minutes. So I keep watching.
I've encountered one of these videos, I did not realize it's a whole genre.