Chica mala

TikTok. Knock on your life and you can't not open. It is the social network with the highest growth rate in Italy and in the world. You are followers of influencers who reveal the secret to increasing your followers and becoming an influencer too. The game is to let others follow you, the winner is whoever attracts the most people behind him, posting videos of a few seconds: you doing something with background music. TikTok works in reverse, if you follow someone it means that you have been captured by those who play to accumulate hearts.

TikTok. You must be 13 or older to enter, but there is no control. Everyone can look at you, unless you have made your profile private, very few do it and above all the little ones do not activate any kind of precaution and protection: they play to end up on everyone's lips like a Chanel lipstick. If you are lucky mom and dad activate the Family Filter to defend yourself from dangerous friendships and define the time you can dedicate every day to your favorite app, once that is finished, TikTok slams the door in your face and you have to wait for tomorrow, but if you are used to it in life to get by on your own, you'll have to do it on the web as well.

Who invented it and knows how it really works, does not let their children play with us. Whoever is okay with age, despicably defines from the top of his adolescence as Chica Mala (bad girl). little intruders who come to break up with their baby things.

TikTok. It's an instantly programmed and updated algorithm to hypnotize you and create addiction, systematic repetition of stimuli to generate a response and arouse a need you didn't know you had. You are like an animal in a laboratory, controlled by a machine that sends you notifications, suggestions and advice. All personalized only and only for you by someone who does not exist but knows you better than those who love you and decide the next videos that will be uploaded to your page. The recommendations seem to be the opposite of mom and dad: do not be good, choose the bad, the good is trivial. It is total absorption so that everything around you disappears and your finger can not help but continue to scroll the screen. You put away your cell phone but you immediately take it back in your hand without knowing why. He says he promotes free expression, the triumph of imagination and creativity, risks being homologation, obsessive repetition of every little movement made by a model, because doing it better means doing it the same and only the best can do it identical.

TikTok. You are obsessed with the number of comments and likes you managed to scrape together. There is no need to keep track, an app does it for you, it's called tiktok counter and checks the number of your followers in realtime. For some it's just money. Much money. A mountain of money. For some it becomes the only reason for living. You suck or you are the king. And you'd be willing to do anything for an extra heart. TikTok works because it's fast, easy, fun. For a few seconds that end up online, there are hours of preparation and filming, taking care of the smallest details of outfits and hairstyles, nights spent editing the video with filters and apps. Frame-by-frame tutorials give you tips to increase your chances of being seen. You can put yourself in slow motion, make the voice metallic, lip sync with the song you pretend you have to sing. Insert the beauty filter, the eletric blue, purple sky or a thousand other things. Every second counts and everything must be perfect. You must be perfect.

TikTok. You are the product and brand you are about to put online, anxiously awaiting the judgment of other tiktokers: a few minutes to go viral and trendy and end up on the screen and in the eyes of the world or disappear among billions of other videos in total insignificance. The important thing is to have defined what your goals are: reach 10k likes or 20k followers in a week. Enter the trends. k stands for thousands, even in the future they use the decimal system. TikTok rocks.

It has been downloaded 2 billion times, it has 800 million active users worldwide in 155 countries, 90% of them spend it every day watching an average of more than a billion videos. Everyone likes it because it is full of useless, stupid, funny things. Like the challenges. Eat a chili or capsule of laundry detergent. Stand in a circle with your friends upside down, throw a random object and see who falls in the head. Or share our most important and special moments, the birth of your first child as the last holiday. It seems nonsense. But here the little things that make our life light and those that make sense of it are worth the same. As in real life. We need to exist as to laugh.

TikTok. Have fun and good luck. If you are not a chica mala looking for her identity, she will not hurt you, you will just spend a lot of time there, as big as the mountain of money someone is making thanks to your clicks. If not, put off the princess dress and take out the warrior one, hold the crown tight while I put on the armor. It is a struggle for survival. You will hurt yourself and you will hurt someone. One less heart for you, one more heart for me.


Marco Grossetti
NP February 2021