Industrious Tiktok: A Chinese digital form?

Abstract

The global rise of Tiktok has met with responses that have emphasised the platform’s Chinese origins. In this paper we contribute to the debate by articulating the contours of an ideal-typical Chinese digital form, as we call it. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ cultural materialism and his concept of cultural form along with the growing secondary literature on Tiktok and the Chinese digital economy, we will suggest that the distinctive nature of Tiktok rests not only with the platform’s particular affordances and the nature of its algorithm and data management. Its distinctiveness also comes from the fact that Tiktok has become a medium for the kinds of small-scale industrious entrepreneurial practices that are growing across the globe as popular responses to a generalised condition of precarity on the one hand, and digital empowerment on the other. This way, a possible Chinese digital form could be understood as supported by a distinct ‘social block’ joining the Chinese state and its digital platforms with emerging forms of popular petty entrepreneurship around the globe. We show how characteristics and affordances that have facilitated this have evolved as a result of the Tiktok’s distinct Chinese developmental trajectory, and explore the implications of the affirmation of a Chinese digital form in relation to platform capitalism globally.