For those unfamiliar with the history behind it, the opening of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new Netflix-bound film adaptation of “Tick Tick Boom” offers an overview (complete with a tongue-in-cheek disclaimer that lets the audience put their chosen amount of stress on the “semi” in “semiautobiographical”). Just a few years before his tragic and wholly unexpected passing (on the eve of the premiere of his seismic musical “Rent”), he channeled his anxieties into a show about struggling to write a generation-shifting piece of theater. Another young influencer muses that “I don’t know what it’s like to live in a world where I’m not being perceived, always.” But a deeper exploration about how those realities change their self-perception, or how it might shape their futures, remains outside of the film’s scope.It’s been over 30 years since Jonathan Larson’s first performance of “ Tick Tick Boom” a work he categorized as a rock monologue. Drury, a data privacy lawyer who speaks at length in the documentary about, among other things, TikTok’s failures to protect minors from child predators. “I kind of have to live with fact that there’s gonna be people that are profiting off my data and I have no real recourse for that,” says one teenage user - the son of Scott R. Its Gen Z subjects give chewy, sometimes slightly depressing soundbites about their ambivalence around social media. Much is made of TikTok being the first Chinese social media app to blow up in a tech landscape previously dominated by American companies, for example - but less clear is what this means for individuals who have no particular stake in the pissing contest between Mark Zuckerberg and Zhang Yiming, the Chinese founder of TikTok parent company ByteDance. That the film never seems to stay on one topic too long seems wryly appropriate for its subject after all, no TikTok video lasts more than a few minutes either.īut TikTok, Boom.‘s ambition of covering seemingly everything to do with TikTok in 90 minutes means that it rarely has time to dig beyond basic concepts. When one influencer vents, “‘The algorithm’ - what does that even mean?” the film cuts to a tech developer describing it as a sort of digital Sorting Hat, emphasizing the point with a clip from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Often, it mimics the organic flow of a conversation. Kantayya’s careful construction keeps the deluge of information from overwhelming the viewer. The For You Page is a groundbreaking feature that makes TikTok terrifyingly good at tailoring itself to a user’s specific tastes what shady things it does with the information it gathers isn’t necessarily all that different from what every other social media site does with it, as documented in other projects like The Social Dilemma or Kantayya’s own Coded Bias. It’s what one creator calls a “blow-up-overnight kind of place” that can mint new stars overnight, and at the same time a restrictive space with internal policies that can silence the already marginalized. So for one content creator, TikTok might represent a “gold rush” of sponsorship opportunities, while for another, it might feel like a burden she can’t escape because it’s how she supports herself and her family. a sense of trustworthiness - it’s more interesting to process a sincere exploration than a pointed screed. Instead, she takes the time to engage with a diverse array of voices and viewpoints, and consider the platform from all angles. does not shy away from criticism of the platform, Kantayya seems no more interested in unilaterally condemning it than praising it. The film’s wide view makes for a more complete portrait of TikTok than a more narrowly focused one might have offered, and possibly a more nuanced one. Woven around their stories are shorter appearances from other content creators (including one on Douyin, TikTok’s Chinese counterpart) - plus interviews with experts like New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz and tech ethicist David Ryan Polgar, who provide larger context about TikTok’s history, its data-collecting algorithm, its effect on young people, its role in the cultural tug-of-war between the U.S.
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