For the longest time, I kept myself from joining TikTok. Social media, I figured, was already kind of a problem for me. I was heavily hooked on Instagram, reaching for my phone and clicking into the app as soon as I woke up in the morning, and then continuing to scroll my feed and swipe through stories and check my D.M.s many times through the day in a kind of fugue state, even though, rationally, I knew that seeing everyone else’s seemingly perfect, fulfilled, and happy lives often made me feel like shit about myself. X, too, was something of an issue. As a longtime tweeter, I kept doggedly logging into the app even after Elon Musk bought it, despite its proliferation of racist, pornographic, and conspiratorial posts. So strong was the hold that these platforms exerted on my time and habits that the only way for me to refrain from using them was to fully deactivate them, which I’d occasionally resort to doing. (If I simply deleted the apps from my phone, I would find myself—shamefacedly, self-loathingly—downloading them again almost immediately.) My brain, dependent on the instant gratification of likes and replies, reliant on the numbing comfort of scrolling and clicking, and terrified of the prospect of being alone with its own thoughts, was plenty full of poison without another social-media platform being added to the mix.

My trepidation about TikTok, it seemed, had some grounding in reality. Certainly, in the past several years, the app has been blamed for any number of contemporary social ills. It’s been variously associated with phone addiction, disinformation, and zombie-like hyper-superficiality. (In a recent episode of the new HBO comedy “I Love L.A.,” the real-life TikTok influencer Quenlin Blackwell spoofs herself as a shallow content creator obsessed with maximizing her empty TikTok fame.) The app, with its busy, nonsensical, and meme-heavy for-you feed, often soundtracked with harebrained audio effects and cartoonishly sped-up music snippets or narration, seems especially geared toward attracting young people, which has sparked worry about the platform’s potential negative impact on kids’ mental health. “When I started this project, one girl told me, half of my friends have an eating disorder from TikTok and the other half are lying,” the documentarian Lauren Greenfield said, when I spoke with her last year about “Social Studies,” her recent series about teens and social media.

Still, I knew that TikTok’s utter centrality to contemporary American life could not be denied. The number of TikTok users in the U.S., at last official count, was a mind-boggling hundred and seventy million, and TikTok Shop, the in-app online marketplace that launched in the States in the fall of 2023, has been growing in this country at a dizzying clip, already rivalling long-established online-commerce companies like Etsy and eBay. (Between January and October of this year, marketplace sales reached ten billion dollars in the States, compared with just half that sum during the same period in 2024—and this despite .) As a critic, I, too, realized that TikTok was a breeding ground not just for memes and trends that animate popular culture, like the senseless if oddly amusing “” or the frankly disgusting , but also for celebrities who go on to surpass the confines of the platform. (, for instance, who rose to prominence, as a teen, performing in dance videos on the app, and then turned to a pop-singing career, was recently nominated for the Grammy for Best New Artist and selected as the artist of the year.) In short, I began to feel that I owed it to myself, my readers, and maybe even my nation, to take the plunge into the choppy waters of TikTok. And when the opportunity arose to attend the first-ever TikTok Awards ceremony, in Hollywood, I knew that the time was now.