Venkatesh Rao at Ribbonfarm:

Tik-tok strikes me as a curiously appropriate social medium for these tenuous times. The things that spread on and out of Tik-tok seem culturally energized, but unvectored, and ultimately self-contained in a way that makes it hard to call them trends, let alone cohering into bundles worth labeling torrents.

They are fleeting moods at best. They seem to correspond to a kind of dreamy undecidedness in historical processes. The world is asleep, but actively dreaming. Often fever-dreaming. But the body politic of the world is in the rigor mortis of REM sleep. It cannot act to unleash the built-up energy.

The essential immobilized dreaminess is why I call this psychohistorical tenuousness. Psychohistorical tenuousness is world history dreaming about being, without progressing to becoming. All adjacent possible, no actuality.