Shredder culture

TikTok is for shredders.

A sentence that would have been pure gibberish just a few years ago.

To dissect: TikTok, as you may know, is the world’s fastest-growing social media platform. It currently has around 1.6 billion users worldwide and is projected to reach 1.9 billion by 2029. The platform is especially popular among younger audiences—roughly 25% of users are under 20, and another 35% are between 25 and 34. By country, TikTok’s largest user base is in Indonesia, followed by the United States and Brazil.

That youth appeal is significant. Cultural trends—in music, fashion, food, and beyond—have always been driven by the young. So TikTok’s cultural influence far exceeds its raw usage numbers. 

Increasingly, it’s not just shaping taste but shaping thought. In the U.S., 43% of adults under 30 now regularly get their news from TikTok, up from just 9% in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. 

The trend shows no sign of slowing. In 2024, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the world, with 825 million downloads, and more than 4.3 billion cumulative installs. The average U.S. user spends nearly an hour a day on the app.

So what makes TikTok so influential? At its core, it’s a smartphone app for creating, sharing, and watching short-form videos. According to the NIH, TikTok’s algorithm—known as “For You”—is one of the most advanced ever built. It maximizes the user’s internal states of enjoyment, concentration, and time distortion (the so-called "flow experience"), leading to addictive behavior. In effect, people who consume culture and information primarily through TikTok develop the focus and attention span of gamblers. They’re lulled into a trance: catatonic, reactive, and endlessly scrolling.

I have nothing against trance states. Some of the best art is hypnotic.

The difference with TikTok is that the trance comes from the algorithm, not the content. Because it’s a conveyor belt of endlessly replenishing short videos, it’s the platform itself that mesmerizes, not the creativity on it. TikTok diminishes the meaning and impact of individual pieces of content. It’s not like listening to The Doors’ twelve-minute song 'The End', or a meditative Indian raga—it’s more like the cultural equivalent of speed-dating, on speed. You psychologically buy into it not because of what you’re seeing, but because of what you might see next. 

Getting to know any creative work with depth and craft—like getting to know a person—takes time and attention. TikTok is engineered for quick impressions.

Which brings us back to that opening sentence: TikTok is for shredders.

In rock music, “shredding” refers to playing a flurry of notes very fast on guitar—technically dazzling, but often emotionally empty. Many guitarists can shred; few great ones do. The truly greats—Hendrix, Clapton, Page, Gilmour—understood that technique is no substitute for musicality.

TikTok, and short-form social media in general, is made for shredders. It rewards speed, spectacle, and surface over substance.

It’s true that the importance of music as an art form (even as a commercial product) has been in decline for years. The craft of songwriting reached its apogee in the mid 1970s. Since then, chordal progressions have become less complex in favour of grooves, and lyrics are added as an afterthought. (Admittedly I'm not a fan of hip-hop, but I don't think I'm out of line in saying groove and rhyme take precedence over substance.) The days of poet-troubadours like Bob Dylan, and The Who's epic rock operas are long gone. 

Platforms like TikTok, that considerably shorten attention spans, advance these trends immeasurably. 

TikTok is so pervasive it may not just reflect culture—it may redefine it. When speed becomes the measure of value, and attention the only currency, stimulation takes precedence over meaningful connection. 

As I posted recently, one danger is that we’ll stop making art altogether (except as a personal hobby) because AI will take over. But there is the added possibility that we’ll forget what art is actually for. 

It is said that great artists need great (read: receptive, attentive) audiences. 

TikTok is for shredders, but real culture has always belonged to those who linger, who listen, who take time to allow art to penetrate the soul.