Everything Familiar: A Liturgy of the Feed:

You are plucked from your everyday life—your walk around the block—and are placed on the apex of a mountain. The sun pulls your face into a grimace that sharpens your headache. Below you: prehistoric pines, a lake like a slit of bruised sky, a single goat bleats. The air smells like nothing.

You take a picture. Turn up the saturation. Check your messages. Scroll. You think about the quiet dystopia of it; your phone shows you more faces in an hour than your life ever could. Strangers you’ll never meet, passing under your thumb. You try to guess which face the machine will feed you next.

A thin, itchy dissatisfaction settles in. You imagine your phone dying up here—how that might feel like relief. An hour slips by. An hour, cleanly divisible into quarters. At the half-hour, you’ll really look around. You’ll read. You’ll walk. At quarter-to, you’ll write the poem. But time slides past you.

You think what a good place this is to scroll.

Like reading a book on the beach under a new sun.

Even leaving the quiet of the mountaintop, the algorithm follows. On the top deck of a bus, the sounds never stop. The same words keep coming—half-whispered, clipped, repeated. Tiny screens flicker at the edges of your vision. We watch. We hear. We wait. Addison Rae’s scrunched nose. The toothless smile. The straw stirring a blueberry matcha. Ice bumping against plastic. Each gesture copied again and again, until it hardens into rule rather than choice. Someone nearby murmurs a phrase that has been everywhere online. Suddenly, it belongs to the room. Suddenly, everyone moves with the same face, the same voice. All of us fold into one. The ritual is exact. People shift together. There is no one left to notice.

And on TikTok, we all start to sound the same. Rising intonation, staccato bursts, elongated vowels. Certain catchphrases repeat across videos. It is an eerie, empty chanting. The algorithm rewards these references to the zeitgeist—the timing, the phrasing itself. Content that strays, or risks moderation, can be taken down, so using “safe language” guarantees circulation. The mimicry spins on, unbroken and performative, a rhythm we are drawn into whether we like it or not. Creators adopt a viral cadence to be seen, to gain reach. Even the most inherently unrelatable—the rich, the famous—become accessible through this shared “relatable” language. And the internet adores the relatable. Individuality is secondary, and language flattens: the more a phrase or tone conforms, the more it circulates. 

You cannot scroll away from these sounds, though they irritate you. Every other person spills their concealer, sighs, widens their eyes, tilts their head, whispers “POV: I’m literally dead,” rolls their eyes, drags out “sooo tired,” flicks their hair, taps the counter, or tells you how exhausted they are. The room hums with sameness.

This algorithm wants us dumb. Wants our attention short and unthinking. Wants us drooling at our screens, eyes glazed, fingers indented. The platform rewards fast loops, outrageous opening lines, dopamine hits. Sayings like “I’m just a girl…” dodge complexity or any attempt at critical thought. And while I doubt an algorithm as sophisticated as TikTok’s is fooled by the bizarre self-censoring of words like “unalived” and “dollar tripper,” the strategy has taken root. Words are made taboo, treated as forbidden, and we are left with flimsy stand-ins. Like trying to swallow a stiff, bitter drink through a straw. Suddenly, these phrases have become linguistically chronic. As far as I know, strippers and death have been part of life for a millenia, yet suddenly the words are verboten. Self-censorship has become instinctive, a survival skill necessary for climbing the ladder of virality.

In shying away from difficult words and ideas, language itself becomes brittle. Nuance is lost; our thoughts follow suit, trained to skim, and the algorithm shapes attention and cognition even offline. How are we supposed to connect when we cannot even speak of grittier, real things? Desire, grief, injustice, mortality—all reduced to a code. Interaction becomes over-sanitized, authentic expression fragile, almost impossible. This language leaves a residue of isolation, our words—and the connections they might build—constantly evaporating.

The flattening is not limited to language—it extends to critique itself. Literary, musical, and cultural criticism is under threat; anyone pointing out flaws risks being demonized. ChatGPT will always tell you your essay is “amazing!” Online, we outsource judgment to comments or algorithms before forming our own opinions. The platform rewards comfort and relatability over risk, subtlety, or dissent. Over time, even offline, our thinking leans toward the superficial. Critical reasoning becomes fragile, exercised less and less because nuance and dissent carry social and algorithmic penalties. The algorithm shapes not just what we say, but how we speak, how we gesture, and even how we affect—subtlety is policed, individuality discouraged. Recognition replaces understanding, and conversations feel like a rehearsed performance rather than naturally flowing dialogue. Creativity and critique alike are muted; cultural production repeats itself, novelty punished. Repetition is rewarded. Even at a high vantage point, whether on a mountaintop or the top deck of a bus, the algorithm follows. Offline, spaces feel curated. Artificial. Reflective of the monoculture it enforced online.

Yet, TikTok is less a culture and more a continuous advert. Every scroll is a signal: what we have, what we should want, what we are expected to consume. Unboxing videos, ASMR finger-taps, gifted products, chicken-wine memes, affiliate links—all point to consumption. Gestures become shorthand for brands, lifestyle, desire: the hand hovering behind the product, the painfully ugly headband pushed onto the crown of any makeup-wearer’s face. We are passive participants in our conditioning. Swiping while brushing our teeth. While we should be getting our nine hours. Our attention is the commodity. The algorithm cashes it in for visibility. Offline, these phrases and somewhat unnatural facial expressions spill over, turning ordinary movements into echoes of commercial performance. We exist in an echo chamber. TikTok functions as a landscape for all our material desires; a record of what we have consumed and a prescription for what we might next.

This echoes a broader culture of regurgitation. We use ChatGPT and generative AI, endlessly recycling existing art, literature, and ideas. Plots and images are repurposed, rebuffed, and served back to us. We watch the same films remade, animated, stretched across six episodes with real actors, and biopics following scripts we already know. Every twist, every climax, every chance for revelation is all too familiar. Even creativity has been flattened, and yet we consume it compulsively, as if novelty can be outsourced. This same impulse drives viral TikTok: cadence, phrasing, a scrunched face—copied because it works, recognized, rewarded. And we are all lonely, trying desperately not to be. We look for any way we can forge connections. There is a pane of glass between us, and we are miming to each other. When this culture of regurgitation seeps into real life, conversation and experience echo what we have already seen, read, or scrolled past; originality becomes performative rather than lived. It is also a craving for nostalgia—a desire to re-experience what is already known in a society where nothing is new.

Content becomes ritual. Loot hauls, with cardboard as altar, product as relic—each movement precise. A video of someone slicing a cucumber goes viral; suddenly, everyone is slurping their forkfuls and slicing their hands on mandolins. Videos of these dramatic cucumber injuries then become their own microcosm, set to the same viral sounds. Now, everyone on TikTok mimics this repulsive slurping noise while eating. It appears everywhere and feels entirely inorganic. I trace it back to the cucumber guy, who begins each video with the same monotone repetition: “Sometimes you just have to eat a whole cucumber.” It is such an odd thing to do that it could be unconscious—but it is the same everywhere: a scrunched nose, the same raised eyebrow, endlessly repeated. Catchphrases tumble one after another. The algorithm does not reward invention; TikTok-isms migrate offline. The sham multiplies: we talk about what we “read somewhere,” not what we saw in a thirty-second video. We scroll on the train, attend yoga classes, drink natural wine with friends, and it all feels strangely hollow.

Influencers are apostles. Exaggerated. Gushing. Every turn of phrase draws a devoted following. Disciples echo every word. Every tilt of the head. As if performing liturgy. It is devotion not to thought but to the imitation of an ideal. Even the most banal acts—slurping a forkful, swirling an iced drink—take on significance they would never have offline. Framed. Magnified. Unboxing videos, ASMR taps, the hand hovering behind a product, the pushed-on headband—these become instructions for wanting. The algorithm rewards precision. We reward the creator with admiration. Attention. Belonging. Offline, it feels hollow. Movements repeated, expressions copied, sounds echoed for effect rather than meaning. We scroll. We mimic. We consume. Originality is forgotten. Nostalgia becomes craving. Everything familiar is a signpost to what we are meant to want next.

Perhaps we are not just consuming content but being consumed by it. Our actions, our words, even our attention are quietly folded into a movement not of our making. In the end, the question isn’t what we consume online or mimic, but whether anything we do offline still feels entirely ours.

And back on that mountain. The pine is taller. The goat bleating once, solitary. The sun too bright. And you scroll. And you scroll. And still, the algorithm follows—everywhere you go.

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Cover image: Kim Dong-kyu, ART X SMART Project, 2013. Reworking Caspar David Friedrich