Thanatos on TikTok: Derivatives, Depression, and the Death Drive

This exhaustion is vivified by certain micro-trends emerging on TikTok in contrast to the previously ascendant aspirational ones. Whereas previously-dominant modes of viral content saw influencers attempting to position themselves as “That Girl” — a sleek, toned object of admiration and envy who exercises mastery over her time, efficiency in all that she does, and idealizes the performance of consumer choice as the highest form of freedom — the emergent trend in TikTok content is one towards the jouissance of ceasing effort. Resonating with a widespread sense of burnout, it is arguably more strategic for influencers to position themselves as relatable than aspirational. One increasingly popular content category embodying this shift could be glossed as “rot” videos. In these short pieces of media, influencers revel in the ease of self-described “rotting”: “vegging out”; sporting sweatpants; binging TV shows and junk food; skipping Pilates; and all other manners of rejoinder to the tightly-calculated efficiencies of the optimized, idealized socially-mediated self that previously dominated the algorithmic feed. 

 The interests and desires cultivated in the cybernetic loops of influence are, like any desire stoked by advertising, intensely unoriginal. We are now living in the era of the “derivative” argues sociologist Max Haiven, playing with the term’s dual meaning. On the one hand, “derivative” names the asset pricing technique that makes it possible to bet on the future from the standpoint of the present — “the signature technology of post-Bretton Woods financialization” (2023, p. 45); on the other, it invokes a pejorative, referring to a kind of imitation or unoriginality that Haiven argues is endemic today’s culture, from contemporary art to online content creation. Haiven writes: 

“Today, millions of individuals compete to invest time, skill, and virtuosity in producing content from digital culture industry platforms including Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok in hopes of gaining revenue or attention. The vast majority of this content is profoundly “derivative,” characterized by endless chains of imitation, pastiche, and mimicry where small differences can be leveraged into considerable fortunes, partly for the creator, mostly for the platform” (p. 46). 

Nowhere does this truth inhere more profoundly than on TikTok. Perhaps more so than any other contemporary social media platform, TikTok is derivative by design. Its user interface includes built-in controls for remixing or “stitching” others’ videos; users are encouraged to learn viral dances or create their own visuals in line with existing, catchy audio clips. The app’s notoriously opaque algorithm is thought to reward the use of already-viral audio, boosting the visibility of content that includes certain high-performing tracks. 

The logic of targeted advertising is undeniably derivative in the cultural sense, too, reinforcing previously-revealed preferences and recommending more of the same — doubling down on the derivative nature of one’s own desire in a recursive loop. As advertisers pay for the eyeballs of users who are already demonstrably receptive to their content, viewers are increasingly fixed within their niches and algorithmically served more of the same. In this sense, TikTok begins to resemble the logic of the factory line under Fordism: refining a single, repeatable gesture and perfecting its efficiency over time to maximize value. 

Unlike the factory line, however, TikTok operates on the effacement of boundaries between production and consumption, expanding — like all social media platforms in the “attention economy” — its capacity to generate value from multiple manners of engagement. On the face of things, watching TikToks (and, indeed, according to many, making TikToks) constitutes a recreational activity; the opacity of value flows in the attention economy’s “deterritorialized factory” make it increasingly difficult to distinguish labor from leisure. Alvin Toffler introduced the figure of the “prosumer,” describing the “progressive blurring of the line that separates producer from consumer,” in 1980 — celebrating, with its arrival, an exciting new era of autonomous production and economic democracy (p. 286, qtd. in Fuchs, 2014). Toffler’s lofty promises of newfound flexibility and autonomy, however, proved part and parcel of the “new spirit of capitalism.” As Christian Fuchs has noted, the blurring of these once-distinct categories via the elaboration of social media economies has been more effective in “outsourcing work to users and consumers, who work without payment” than in improving working conditions (2014, p. 106). Thus, the creativity of the “Internet prosumer” is the very vector of their exploitation. 

While Fuchs’ insight certainly holds true in terms of spectatorial labor on social media, it is even more profoundly telling when applied to the relatively under-theorized figure of the influencer. Users produce value for platforms somewhat passively; “amateurs” (non-influencers) are valuable to platforms less for their production of “user-generated content” (UGC) than for the trails of personal data and revealed preferences they leave in their wake. In terms of social media business models, the affordance for amateur users to create and share content is basically a vestige that obscures these users’ real utility to the platform as data-sources.

Influencers (sometimes tellingly referred to as “content creators”) have, on the other hand, formalized and industrialized the process of generating UGC such that it becomes a heightened form of “prosumerism” wherein their very subjectivity is brought to market — not just tracked by, but literally produced for, the all-pervading forces of online capital as they labor on the “interfaces of value creation and value extraction, mediated by expression’s machinic conversion into information” (Beller, 2021, p. 225). Working double, the TikTok influencer must also be an engaged viewer, keeping up with ever-changing trends. Constantly building firsthand knowledge of what is successful on the platform, influencers must learn to be the right kind of derivative — to be properly mimetic; to wager on the correct trends — to satisfy the opaque and ever-changing algorithm. Their labor thus encompasses, but goes beyond, spectatorship; they are viewers and then some.

As such, influencers face different kinds of exposure than viewers — both colloquially in terms of vying for visibility and making themselves seen, and economically, in the sense that their position is a vulnerable one. Laboring in paradoxical isolation, influencers are essentially placing puts and calls on their own capacities to shape the social world around them — wagering nothing short of their subjectivity.

So, what happens when the demands placed upon influencers under these derivative conditions become insurmountable — physically and psychically unfulfillable? No market can experience perpetual, exclusive growth; even the most seasoned of traders are liable to sometimes lose. Authoring derivatives on spectatorial attention, the influencer is no exception. Unsurprisingly, then, mental health challenges are increasingly visible in influencer culture. In addition, the intensified isolation and uptick in fatigue following the period of exclusively digitally-mediated sociality brought about by the coronavirus pandemic seemed to have lasting effects on the collective psyche, amplifying the existing psychological consequences of the attention economy. As a result, a widespread sense of exhaustion, “burnout,” or “screen fatigue” is becoming palpable. 

Enter the Rot Influencer. 

How is the present condition of totalizing work to be combatted today? I propose to look towards “rot” as an emergent content genre that engenders a kind of productive refusal. Influencers’ exaggerated performance of burnout resonates with Franco Berardi’s most recent book, The Third Unconscious, in which the theorist of Italian Autonomia argues that what we need is no longer a liberatory approach to personal desire — for this is precisely what was reterritorialized in the trajectory from May ’68 to neoliberalism — but a perspective oriented towards degrowth. Taking stock of the contemporary stack of crises, Berardi writes:

“How do we get out of this situation? My intuition tells me that depression is the therapy for depression. We should go the homeopathic way. The depressed persona today is the one who understands reality best and does not experience a desire or see a future in his or her own life. It is the only person who can tell the truth to him or herself. We should validate this position and see it as a starting point in political terms.” (2022, p. 4)

Berardi’s call for a “homeopathic depression” is interestingly allied with the contemporary Freudian psychoanalyst Josh Cohen’s work on the death drive, which situates the capitulation to this (often misunderstood) impulse as an explicitly political anti-work praxis. “Sigmund Freud’s postulation of a ‘death drive’ in 1920, perhaps the most controversial of his concepts, offers us a kind of psychic recoding of the law of inertia,” writes Cohen. By his reading of Freud’s 1929 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “the death drive is associated with a desire for total quiescence” which “signals a more basic truth: that human beings are resistant to activity, that they cannot start anything, including life itself, without at some point having to stop it.” (2018, p. xiv).

This stopping, of course, extends to the cessation of work. Cohen outlines a number of case studies from clients of his clinical practice who come to him to express their mounting sense of fatigue, exhaustion, or burnout — oftentimes believing these symptoms are personal problems to be overcome. But rather than treating them as individual shortcomings, Cohen reads these symptoms as collateral damage of a culture that rebukes idleness in all its forms; that is, a culture in which the death drive is verboten. He thus celebrates “the scandalous courage of the slob” who “embraces the inertial state” — one could easily think here of rotting influencers, stoned on the couch in fuzzy sweatpants — “and rejects openly the diligence and responsibility that confer full social legitimacy in a culture defined by work and productivity” (p. 76). Put otherwise, in the words of Byung-Chul Han, “The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible” (n.p.). Perhaps it is through the embrace of depressive subjectivity that new lines of struggle can be traced against the productivization of desire.

Yet even the performance of something so apparently passive as “rotting” is the product of a great deal of work. Do these videos thus act, as they seem to tell us they do, as some kind of refusal against capitalism’s constant demands? Or are they simply further entrenching the attention economy and earning upside for the platform as they rhetorically reject the exhausting status quo?

Valorizing (or at least de-pathologizing) the depression, burnout, and even slobbery that constitute “rotting,” as witnessed in recent TikTok content, may thus be the first steep towards building more widespread solidarity against the fetishization of constant productivity that keeps the decentralized factory chugging along. “To stop in the intransitive sense — to say no not to doing this or that but to doing anything, to just stop — is an assertion of autonomy,” writes Cohen. Embracing the death drive, by doing nothing, we are doing something: consciously or not, carrying out an “act of resistance against the tyranny of action” (p. 218).

Works Cited

Beller, J. (2021). The world computer: derivative conditions of racial capitalism. Duke  University Press. 

Cohen, J. (2018). Not working: why we have to stop. Granta. 

Fuchs, C. (2014). Social Media: A Critical Introduction. SAGE Publications Ltd. https://doi.org/ 10.4135/9781446270066 

Haiven, M. (2023). From Financialization to Derivative Fascisms. Social Text, 41(2), 45–73.  https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-10383207 

Han, B.-C. (2015). The burnout society. Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press. Lovink, G. (2022, May 12). Mental Long Covid and the Techno-Social Unconscious: A  Conversation with Franco “Bifo” Berardi. E-Flux Journal. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/ 468343/mental-long-covid-and-the-techno-social-unconscious-a-conversation-with franco-bifo-berardi