Why would we want to be online forever?

The future of media is built on bets made by analysing a broken period in our history. Why would we do that?

Well, now the data is in: TikTok is getting old. Almost half of users are over 30-years-old.

Here’s Ryan with the scoop:

According to Pew, there are actually less young people on TikTok right now than there were on Instagram in 2014. Almost 40% of TikTok users are in their 30s and 40s. In 2014, that same age group (which we are trying not to refer to as middle-aged) accounted for only about 20% of Instagram users. Even crazier, according to Pew's survey, people aged 35-49 are more likely to actually upload videos than people aged 18-34. And, perhaps most damning of all, TikTok’s 30-49 demographic is actually growing faster than the 18-34 cohort.

Yes, a platform responsible for turning trend cycles into spasmodic speedruns is also at the centre of accelerating its own life.

That TikTok is now closer than ever to becoming a majority Millennial+ product should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent the last 12-24 months on it, and yet it is nice to see the writing on the wall.

But… what now? Panic? How will the rising stars of our media industry know what is coming next?

The assumption that the next stages of youth media will always be online, on the internet, or on the app, has always been flawed.

The reality is that the free and forever internet we were promised is already in rapid decline and young people know it.

Governments are looking for more oversight, platforms are scared shitless of losing even a few million from their billion-dollar budgets, and quality is washed out in a world where everyone’s a creator and the barrier to entry doesn’t exist.

Uploading any sort of content to the internet now puts you in a market alongside 12 year olds on their phones and highly-paid, robotic teams of creatives at agencies who are churning out purely what the data says works. To hell with, I don’t know, individuality.

Yesterday I saw someone posting their “playbook” for making powerful online content. It involved ripping a video that was already doing well, pushing it through software that determined just why it worked, building a basic framework off of that, and then publishing. Yes, it is a system that scales. Yes, you could probably make a bunch of money. No, I don’t think it makes the world any better.

And yet…

Despite everything I have listed above, most of it close to common knowledge, there is an insistence that online is the way forward, that digital media is where big bets are made, and that young people (forever) will be addicted to their phones and obsessed with the latest 2-year cycle from an app out of China or India or Australia or South America or Africa.

But we make most of our assumptions using a very small period of time. Let’s say the last 15 years can be defined as the “social media internet”.

Many of the beliefs and strategies blasted out about how things will look in the future are based on the way Millennials (and everyone else, to be fair) slammed their skulls against computer screens and opened their brains and hearts to the internet with no need for privacy or consideration of what it could mean. I don’t need to tell you this is not a way to live.

What is the future of media? Of content? That’s a complicated question. But increasingly I believe in a world where Print Is Back, for example. And that’s just one point.

I don’t think we’ll ever return to the mass syndication days of four-foot kids with flat caps yelling out EXTRA! at the train station, but I do think the generations to come will be understandably sceptical of the internet and everything on it. Sometimes, it won’t matter if what’s online is even good, or fair, or made in the right way.

The problem will no longer be the content. And it won’t be the people making it. The problem will be the manufacturer.

And what do you do when the manufacturer, the host of all of our slush, is as much idealogical as it is technical? That is a hard thing to change. The easier option, as with most cases, will be to just move on. Let it be. Treat it how we treat most dangerous but incredibly useful parts of our society. Driving a car is fun and convenient. We don’t even think about how fast we’re going.

Anyway, no big news here. Only the observation that every groundbreaking app or platform on the internet over the last 20 years has had a natural cycle. Some of them have gone through it quickly, others at a slower pace.

The general human response eventually always ends at: what else you got?

I can’t see how any generation of young people will be different.

But there is one thing I think will matter again: the death of print has been vastly overestimated, particularly as the internet becomes increasingly full of rubes and lies and government oversight.

If you picture a world where people are as skeptical as that, it doesn’t even sound all that bad.