Backup Account will always be brief—not 280 characters brief, but brief as in each edition will focus on one TikTok only. Paid subscribers thank you for your support, new perks below. Follow me on IG or TT for antics.
Banning TikTok in America would be like shutting down the country's biggest Pride Parade, LGBTQ+IA Center, and nightclub simultaneously. But this Gen Z-associated app might ironically only be mourned by Millenials.
This week’s TikTok reveals something you might have already known, the new internet generation doesn’t care much if you have its data:
→ → Watch this week’s TikTok (watch via TikTok):
When I first saw this TikTok, I had a really visceral negative reaction to it. You see, Millennials had to learn the hard way that they had been duped by Silicon Valley. We were born into a world where at first social media felt like a happy accident. It wasn’t, duh. The transparency of the companies building social media apps and getting young people hooked to a lifetime of using them was completely unregulated.
It wasn’t until I started to become a serious 20-something club party promoter that I had to face the music. In the early 2000s Facebook started to squeeze cash out of small promoters, musicians, and clubs. They had pied-pipered us and our audiences into their blue and white cave using a flute playing the sweet notes of a bygone era: the “free net”. Then suddenly, almost overnight, they forced our credit cards into our hands. We now had to pay to reach the audiences we had brought into the building to begin with.
For the last two decades, Millennials have been unpacking this bait and switch as every platform monetized itself against us - its laborers. Sometimes they sold us out in secret but mostly we normalized the lie of “a revolutionary free place to share with friends.”
On the other hand, Gen Z was born into a corrupted and greedy net. They don’t have concerns about data privacy because they have never experienced it. So that brings me back to my visceral reaction to Starmaxxiverse’s TikTok.
“I’m gonna need you to start posting” - @starmaxxiverse
Nowadays, Millennials look at creating content as a form of forced labor. We were never prepared for our likeness to be sold or our communities to be monetarily gatekept from us. But this creator, Starmaxxiverse, is coming from an entirely new headspace. They’re saying that being seen is being perceived. The more queers creating and posting, the less the algorithm can ignore us.
Gen Z doesn’t expect to get paid much for this content and frankly, that isn’t always the goal. Going viral is easier than ever but they know it usually has no staying power. So instead, this generation of creators is finding joy in changing their world, not just hyping their egos. Algorithms are run off of content and the calculation of it. If queers are filling their feed with their “uniqueness, nerve and talent” then the robots have no choice but to say “shantay you stay”. Starmaxxiverse’s call to arms suggests that if you aren’t creating content as a queer person, you’re creating a greater void. It feels incredibly empowering to me as I unpack what to do with the void the Internet handed me as a Millenial.
I love an “I told you so.” I said it months ago when I started Backup Account I wanted to archive the TikTok greatness before it went poof. I said this would be the last year, something is next, like it always is.
But hear me out… We are closer than ever to having queer-run and queer-owned social media space. But in the meantime, let's celebrate the good and bad of the TikTok we have now. If you’re hung up on these hearings then just call a spade a spade and move on, or better yet - get posting.