Thomas Germain

Does it feel like people are pushing up against the walls of the machine here to make TikTok do their bidding in a way?

So people are making videos specifically to go in this genre, to go in this place, the TikTok Farlands, because people are really excited about it.

But then also there's this whole idea that there's like, you have to go deeper and deeper, right?

You can find the stuff on the surface, which is these popular TikTok Farlands accounts, but the real stuff is...

is something you'd see from an account with only 10 followers, a video that no one else has seen before that is truly freaky and uncanny, which is not a totally new thing on TikTok.

Like years ago, people would talk about deep talk, which was kind of just weird, maybe actually bad videos that the algorithm wasn't serving up to people.

But why don't I show you a couple of these as an example, so we get a flavor for what we're talking about here.

So this one here, it's by a guy.

I talked to his name is Smorelater.

There's probably some really obvious way to pronounce this.

I'm not seeing.

But he's sitting in a car, but the video keeps glitching.

Yeah.

There's this eerie music if you go watch it.

It's cutting to kind of distorted, you know, images and videos where it feels like it's not rendering properly.

He's kind of subverting the genre of food review videos, right?

It's a big thing on TikTok that there will be a guy who goes to a restaurant, he's sitting in his car, eating it, talking into his camera about the food.

So it's like... It's making it grotesque.

Yeah, and then a lot of it is around like images of faces that just don't look right.

That I think, you know, I'm showing us, we're looking at some of the tamer videos here, but some of these are, I think, actually really disturbing.