Amusing Ourselves To Sleep
@ayoships on what TikTok is really running on your phone:
I reverse engineered TikTok to figure out exactly what makes their algorithm so addicting and I discovered that they have over 25 AI models running on your phone to figure out exactly what'll keep you scrolling.One reads your gyroscope and motion sensors to tell if you're walking, lying down, or in a car.
This goes out with every request for a new batch of videos, along with your battery percentage, whether you're charging your phone, your screen brightness, whether you're on mute, and over fifty other variables.
Even a message you type but change your mind on sending is still collected by TikTok.
If you keep skipping anyway, TikTok marks you as having lost focus and as a last resort, push a live video into your feed.
One model's job is to even tell if you've dozed off based on how long you haven't touched the screen and whether you're lying down.
There's even one that can predict when you'll open the app next so that TikTok can start in the background and be ready for you.
This is an early, crude version of the amusement economy.
Not a feed. A plaything that reads the room. Your posture, your battery, your heart rate, the text you nearly sent.
Then it rebuilds itself to fit.
It knows when you've nodded off.
And it's already warming up for when you wake.