\Now hold that thought for a moment. It’s trickier to find consensus on this one. To me, TikTok is a medley of weirdly transfixing water-balloon videos, monarch butterfly activists, air-fried ice cream sandwich recipes, and Bo Burnham mashups. Come on, Jeffrey, you can do it/Pave the way, put your back into it!

But your TikTok is surely something radically different. Because that’s how the algorithm wants it. “The algorithm.” You hear those two words a lot when TikTok is the topic of conversation. It’s the mysterious, all-seeing recommendation engine that powers the platform. It instantly digests every pause, click, swipe, and share to serve up the ultimate brain candy buffet—unlimited helpings of 15-second, 30-second, or, sometimes but rarely, three-minute videos that have a way of gluing users to their phones for hours at a time. The algorithm is damn good at what it does.

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