For the longest time, I kept myself from joining TikTok. Social media, I figured, was already kind of a problem for me. I was heavily hooked on Instagram, reaching for my phone and clicking into the app as soon as I woke up in the morning, and then continuing to scroll my feed and swipe through stories and check my D.M.s many times through the day in a kind of fugue state, even though, rationally, I knew that seeing everyone else’s seemingly perfect, fulfilled, and happy lives often made me feel like shit about myself. X, too, was something of an issue. As a longtime tweeter, I kept doggedly logging into the app even after Elon Musk bought it, despite its proliferation of racist, pornographic, and conspiratorial posts. So strong was the hold that these platforms exerted on my time and habits that the only way for me to refrain from using them was to fully deactivate them, which I’d occasionally resort to doing. (If I simply deleted the apps from my phone, I would find myself—shamefacedly, self-loathingly—downloading them again almost immediately.) My brain, dependent on the instant gratification of likes and replies, reliant on the numbing comfort of scrolling and clicking, and terrified of the prospect of being alone with its own thoughts, was plenty full of poison without another social-media platform being added to the mix.

My trepidation about TikTok, it seemed, had some grounding in reality. Certainly, in the past several years, the app has been blamed for any number of contemporary social ills. It’s been variously associated with phone addiction, disinformation, and zombie-like hyper-superficiality. (In a recent episode of the new HBO comedy “I Love L.A.,” the real-life TikTok influencer Quenlin Blackwell spoofs herself as a shallow content creator obsessed with maximizing her empty TikTok fame.) The app, with its busy, nonsensical, and meme-heavy for-you feed, often soundtracked with harebrained audio effects and cartoonishly sped-up music snippets or narration, seems especially geared toward attracting young people, which has sparked worry about the platform’s potential negative impact on kids’ mental health. “When I started this project, one girl told me, half of my friends have an eating disorder from TikTok and the other half are lying,” the documentarian Lauren Greenfield said, when I spoke with her last year about “Social Studies,” her recent series about teens and social media.

Still, I knew that TikTok’s utter centrality to contemporary American life could not be denied. The number of TikTok users in the U.S., at last official count, was a mind-boggling hundred and seventy million, and TikTok Shop, the in-app online marketplace that launched in the States in the fall of 2023, has been growing in this country at a dizzying clip, already rivalling long-established online-commerce companies like Etsy and eBay. (Between January and October of this year, marketplace sales reached ten billion dollars in the States, compared with just half that sum during the same period in 2024—and this despite Donald Trump’s tariffs.) As a critic, I, too, realized that TikTok was a breeding ground not just for memes and trends that animate popular culture, like the senseless if oddly amusing “six seven” or the frankly disgusting Dubai chocolate, but also for celebrities who go on to surpass the confines of the platform. (Addison Rae, for instance, who rose to prominence, as a teen, performing in dance videos on the app, and then turned to a pop-singing career, was recently nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist and selected as the Guardian’s artist of the year.) In short, I began to feel that I owed it to myself, my readers, and maybe even my nation, to take the plunge into the choppy waters of TikTok. And when the opportunity arose to attend the first-ever TikTok Awards ceremony, in Hollywood, I knew that the time was now.

To have some reinforcement on my maiden voyage, I invited my friend Hannah to join me. Though she’s an adult and even a parent, Hannah, whom you might know as a food critic for this publication, surprised me by confessing that she was “genuinely a huge fan” of TikTok, though she hastened to provide a caveat. “I think it’s awful and a scourge on the earth,” she said, adding that she’s lost endless precious hours to mindless scrolling on the app, and that she occasionally must disable it when she begins to hear its most popular sound clips echoing in her head, “A Beautiful Mind”-style. Still, she explained, she appreciates TikTok for the unfamiliar corners of human experience that it reveals to her. Unlike Instagram, which leads her to compare and despair with people she knows, TikTok “doesn’t make me hate myself,” she told me, brightly. She watches court footage from murder cases, or “get ready with me” videos made by moms of eight in the Midwest, or odd challenges like “the candy salad trauma dump,” in which people name a trauma they’ve experienced as they chuck Sour Patch Kids or Skittles into a bowl. “It’s all weird strangers who fascinate me,” she said.

A couple of days before the ceremony, I created a TikTok account in preparation and began to scroll it trepidatiously. Hannah had praised the platform’s algorithm as extremely sensitive to her preferences (“I find that it really takes care of me,” she told me), but I knew that it would take time for the app to recognize my innermost needs, whatever those even were. (Cats? Plastic surgery before-and-afters? Celebrity-gossip blind items?) And so what I got was a little of everything: a video sharing tips on how to “level up your femininity” (“wear perfume everywhere”; “treat your hair like gold”); a prank in which a guy tries to direct confused drivers to a “gay parking lot”; a recording of a 911 call reporting a double murder; a treacly “Christmastime in New York” video that looked like, and in fact was (I think?), A.I. I also kept in mind the words of my teen-age daughter, who gave me some begrudging but useful advice before I got on the plane to Los Angeles. “On Instagram, some people might still want to connect with people they know,” she said. “On TikTok, everyone is out for themselves, creating content.” In other words, I was not here to make friends.

I shouldn’t have worried. Heading into the Palladium, the venue on Sunset Boulevard where the event was taking place, we saw many of the nominees and some of the event’s presenters congregating near the press pit, and I realized that I was truly a stranger in a strange land. Who the hell were these people? The vibe felt a bit like that of a small-town prom: revellers were hobnobbing in sequinned evening wear, inventive jewelry, elaborately coiffed hairdos, and heavy makeup. Some—the class clowns?—were even in costume. A performer at the event named Mr. Fantasy (1.1 million followers), with a coal-black bobbed wig, Elton John sunglasses, and a modish pink suit, delivered Austin Powers-style sound bites in an exaggerated British accent on the step-and-repeat. (Later, I learned that he is rumored to be the alter ego of the “Riverdale” actor K. J. Apa.) Jools Lebron (2.3 million followers), a presenter known for her viral 2024 TikTok catchphrase “very demure, very mindful,” who was dressed in a low-cut sparkly gown, cooled herself off with a handheld fan; Chris Finck (1.8 million followers), a creator nominated for his skydiving videos, jumped up and down for the cameras, as if to take flight, while wearing his wingsuit gear.

This was, in other words, no Vanity Fair Oscars party. No one was going for quiet luxury or refined elegance; no one was trying to pretend that they hadn’t made a big effort, or that they weren’t incredibly excited to be there, or that they weren’t constantly capturing both themselves and everyone else around them on their phones, presumably for their TikToks feeds, creating a kind of snake-eating-its-own-tail situation. And, if there was something undeniably depressing about the frankness of this constant surveillance (not to mention the expectation that everything in the world could be converted into shareable content), it also felt weirdly refreshing. Wasn’t this just an honest, if amplified, reflection of what life in public was now like?

This sense crystallized for me as soon as the show began, and the audience was informed that an electrical issue in the venue had caused the screens onstage to blow out. This meant that the live ceremony, almost unbelievably, would proceed with audio only. The event had fourteen awards categories, among them Rising Star of the Year, for rookie TikTokers; the Okay Slay award, for beauty creators; and the I Was Today Years Old award, for education creators. Each time a presenter announced the nominees for a certain category, only the disembodied soundtrack of their TikTok clips would play, with no visuals. At first, I was surprised that the show would take place under these bare-bones circumstances, but then, Hannah pulled out her phone and showed me the TikTok live stream of the event, in which the clips were spliced in, intact. The electrical fiasco, in other words, didn’t matter that much. Or, rather, it mattered to the IRL experience, but that was marginal compared with the much more signal event taking place on everyone’s devices, where the heads of much of the audience were buried, anyway.

Still, I had to admit that there was something sweet and even life-affirming about the seams-showing nature of the whole thing. The TikTok creators I talked to, unlike traditional big-time celebrities, weren’t yet polished to a high sheen, or detached from everyday realities. It wasn’t that long ago that many of them were so-called nobodies from nowhere, average Joes and Jills from diverse backgrounds just trying to eke out a living, and now they seemed truly sincere in their belief in TikTok’s bounty, which had enabled them to provide for themselves and their families through brand deals and affiliate marketing, follower donations and paywalls, per-view rewards and off-platforms opportunities.

In the course of the evening, I heard the sentence “TikTok changed my life” repeated again and again. One creator, a young man named Santiago Albarrán, from Houston (3.3 million followers), told me that, thanks to his TikTok ascent, he’s been able to open a clothing line, establish a candy company for his family, and give back to the Hispanic community. When I approached Albarrán, he was filming his friend and fellow-creator Pablo Zolezzi (2.9 million followers), as he did a funky little dance on the Palladium’s deep-pink carpet. The two, who were both wearing sharp, handsome suits, made their name on TikTok by posting comedic bits, sometimes in collaboration with each other. (Zolezzi broke through with a video in which he made a funny hot-guy “Chad” face; in Albarrán’s first viral video, he wore a neon-colored wig and danced in a parking lot with a couple of friends.) “It’s ridiculous how much it’s put us on the map,” Zolezzi said. “We’ve been able to escape the nine-to-five.” He, too, has been given off-platform breaks through TikTok. He now owns a gourmet-cookie brand and has been able to invest in real estate. “All with TikTok, everything,” Albarrán said.

At a point in the country’s history in which the possibility of making a living wage, much less achieving the American Dream, seems ever dimmer, TikTok might appear to be a potential solution—an online frontier beckoning to those who are daring and persistent enough to conquer it. And yet, as Adorno and Horkheimer once reminded us, “fortune will not smile on all,” and, in any case, even those who have tasted the fruits of this dream factory can never stop grinding. One of the nominees for the “TikTok LIVE Creator of the Year” award, the singer Jourdan Blue (835,000 followers), told me that his performances, which he live-streams on the app, have enabled him not just to provide for himself but also to achieve professional goals like funding a music video though fan donations. (Followers can send contributions to streamers via gift emojis; TikTok takes a cut of the proceeds.) I wondered how many people watched his lives. “Right now, I have about nine hundred viewers,” he responded. A live stream was, in fact, taking place as we spoke. “All of these are pennies,” he said. He pointed at this phone, to show me the gift emoji a follower had just sent him. “Here’s a rose, because I like you.” ♦