TikTok users spend an average of 95 minutes per day on the app. ByteDance reported over 110 billion dollars in revenue in 2023. Each scroll trains the algorithm to map desire into a commodity form that can be sold to advertisers. The screen is not a window; it is a point of production.
The prevailing liberal narrative frames TikTok as a platform for "self-expression" or "community discovery." This is ideology at its most efficient: the belief that one chooses what one sees. In truth, the For You Page is not a mirror held up to the user's authentic interests. It is a machine for the real subsumption of affect under capital — the transformation of spontaneous human curiosity into a commodity that generates advertising revenue. TikTok does not reflect desire; it produces it.
The Algorithm Is Not a Tool—It Is a Production Line
Classical advertising sold audiences to sponsors. A television program attracted viewers, and advertisers paid for access to that demographic. The product was the audience's attention as a mass phenomenon. TikTok represents a qualitative intensification of this process. The algorithm analyzes not just what you watch, but how you watch: dwell time, replays, swipe speed, sound engagement, even the position of your finger on the screen. Each data point is a raw material fed into a production process whose output is a perfectly calibrated desire—a desire that can be instantaneously commodified as an ad placement.
This is the fetishism of the commodity in its algorithmic form. The user believes the content they see is a natural expression of their inner self. In reality, that self is an artifact of capital's need to render human consciousness as a predictable revenue stream. As Adorno might have put it: the algorithm is the industry that has become total. It no longer merely mediates desire—it manufactures the subject capable of having that desire.
Creator Labor: The Unwaged Production of Value
Every dance trend, every recipe hack, every political hot take posted to TikTok is unwaged labor. The creator—whether a teenager in their bedroom or a professional influencer—produces the cultural raw material from which ByteDance extracts value. The platform provides no wages for the billions of hours of content that constitute its inventory. Instead, it offers the illusion of "exposure" and the dream of viral success, which functions as an ideological veil over the extraction of surplus value.
This is the culture industry updated for the gig economy. The old model sold records and movie tickets. The new model sells the user as a product to advertisers, but only after the user has been trained to produce the content that keeps other users scrolling. The creator is both worker and commodity: they produce the content, and their very subjectivity is packaged for sale. When ByteDance reports $110 billion in revenue, that figure represents the surplus value extracted from millions of unwaged content producers whose labor time has been rendered invisible by the interface's gamified design.
The Attention Commodity After Dallas Smythe
Dallas Smythe's concept of the "audience commodity" must be updated for algorithmic capitalism. Smythe argued that broadcast media produced audiences as commodities—bundles of attention sold to advertisers. TikTok does not bundle; it atomizes. Each user is a unique psychographic profile, a vector of desires mapped to the granularity of individual neuron firings. The commodity is no longer "the 18–35 demographic" but the specific, measurable shape of your desire at 2:47 PM on a Tuesday.
This is not merely a quantitative intensification but a qualitative transformation. Under broadcast capitalism, the audience commodity was a collective product sold in bulk. Under algorithmic capitalism, the commodity is the user's very interiority—their taste, their boredom, their yearning. The algorithm does not wait for desire to arise spontaneously; it induces desire through the infinite scroll's mechanized promise that the next video might finally satisfy. But satisfaction is structurally impossible, because the scroll's purpose is not to deliver fulfillment but to generate more data, more attention, more value.
Counter-Argument: Authenticity as Raw Material
The liberal response is genuine: TikTok enables authentic self-expression and community building for marginalized groups. Black creators have used the platform to amplify voices historically silenced. Queer youth find solidarity. These are real, not cynical, developments. To dismiss them is to miss how capitalism incorporates resistance.
But this authenticity is not subversive of the commodity form; it is the commodity form's most productive resource. When a Black teen's dance goes viral, the cultural value of that expression is extracted, remixed, and sold back to users as a trending sound. When queer creators build community, their affective labor is datafied and fed into the advertisement engine that targets Pride Month campaigns. Authenticity is the raw material that capital processes into commodity form. The platform does not oppose community; it commodifies community. The relationship is not one of theft but of real subsumption: capital's penetration into the very texture of social life until the distinction between the authentic and the commodified collapses.
The Infinite Scroll as Capital's Interface
The infinite scroll is not a design choice. It is capital's infinite appetite for attention rendered as interface. The scroll's hypnotic rhythm—pull down, new content, dopamine spike, repeat—is the phenomenological experience of being reduced to a commodity. Each swipe is a micro-transaction in which the user sells a fragment of their living labor time to ByteDance. The platform's revenue is grounded in the thousands of tiny decisions to keep scrolling—decisions that feel like freedom but are the very mechanism of unfreedom.
To break the scroll is to break the circuit of commodity production. It is to recognize that the desire the algorithm produces is not one's own. This recognition is the beginning of class consciousness in the age of algorithmic capitalism: the understanding that one's innermost self has been colonized, that one's desires are not one's own but capital's product. The For You Page is not your friend. It is a factory.
The struggle against algorithmic capture is a struggle against the real subsumption of affect. It is a fight for the right to want what one actually wants—a right that capitalism can never grant, because its survival depends on producing wants that serve its own reproduction. The infinite scroll is the image of capital's eternity: a horizon that recedes, a promise that never fulfills, a machine that produces desire as its own commodity.
