TikTok has changed Hollywood. It will never come back.

The new technology manager was confident that people would continue to click on their videos.

“It’s really programmed to be addictive,” he said, emphasizing how consuming content on his company’s platform gets you “addicted.” While many companies were trying to master this new era of binge watching, executives believed no one else had figured out the secret sauce. “I don’t know yet if our specific competitor has really emerged,” he said.

That executive was Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, and he made the comments in 2013, while speaking to NPR Market just as Orange is the new black posted on the service. TikTok was three years away from launch.

You might think these remarks apply to the viral video app, which over the past five years has become a sort of Pringles Potato Chip of digital viewing: once you get going, you can’t stop. What Netflix once did to Hollywood – using algorithms to make video irresistible – TikTok has done to Netflix. Probably permanently.

The future of TikTok in the United States remains murky. After brief darkness Saturday night, it was back Sunday morning when the company hinted at an executive order that new President Donald Trump would sign to delay the ban. Its long-term fate is unclear given the Supreme Court’s unanimous support for a congressional law forcing owner ByteDance to sell to a non-Chinese company.

But don’t get distracted by the Washington soap opera. Whether TikTok lasts for years or takes on the big honeycomb challenge in the sky, he’s already won a traditional entertainment game that he didn’t realize he was playing until it was too late.

Netflix-style streaming once seemed like the great innovator, creating a whole new model of immersive viewing that made you forget about the outside world with its eight-hour arcs. But what technology gives, technology takes away. Binge-watching turned out to be just one link in a longer chain. And TikTok was the strongest that followed. Forget eight o’clock arcs; you could now watch 80 videos in an hour. And they all seemed to be scratching exactly what itched.

For all its novelty, the app continued a television trend that had made video storytelling a participatory sport dating back to the 1980s, when shows like Hill Street Blues And Twin WoodpeckerIts created addictive immersive experiences in a way rarely offered on television before. This trend has intensified with series like The Sopranos And Survivor in the early 2000s, which gave way to the streaming culture of the 2010s. Each time, providers made their content harder to turn off, with content and increasingly technology combining to make viewing is as much a constraint as a leisure choice.

TikTok followed this tradition, one broccoli haircut and Khaby Lame’s sass at a time. When you finished one video, you had to watch another, the algorithm knowing how to hook us like David Chase once knew how to hook us.

What has changed, of course, is what was causing the collision. While storytelling in the Hollywood era was long, polished, and centralized, storytelling in the TikTok era was the opposite: short, shaggy, and mostly decentralized. If The Sopranos And The Ravenn five-course dinners, a delicious treat to savor, arriving once a season, TikTok was a McDonald’s burger, there for us to eat and crave another whenever we wanted.

And McDonald’s always wins.

Part of the reason is financial. TikTok has double the number of subscribers as Netflix in the United States (around 170 million) because its content base can be built more cheaply. Professional shows are expensive. Relying on everyone to submit their videos is not.

But the most important factor is cultural. When you can create the videos you watch, you will naturally be more invested. TikTok videos were made by people like us, who, unlike the celebrity era, were Really just like us. And sometimes, if we deign to post, it’s actually us. (For TikTok’s impact on creator culture, check out this excellent essay.)

The idea of ​​watching shorter also quickly became a no-brainer — yes, for younger people who don’t have the muscle memory to dive deep into an eight-hour series, but for the rest of us, too. There is strong evidence that TikTok has changed our biology. A study using an fMRI test to measure brain activity found that heavy use of the app – with its funny videos that always seem to be followed by another one we want – actually activated parts of the brain associated with attention span and then reduced it in turn. . TikTok hasn’t just shaken up the model. It literally reprogrammed our minds.

Most of Hollywood has either remained oblivious to this assault or been rendered powerless, at most using TikTok to try to market its content, which is a bit like trying to advertise your horse and buggy service on the side of a Model T. (Quibi, for all its mistakes, got one thing right: it cleverly attempted to integrate the ethos of TikTok into mainstream Hollywood, combining the values ​​of storytelling in series with the possibility of clicking in short form It turns out that’s a recipe for incompatibility. But Jeffrey Katzenberg was right to identify the problem.)

Of course, none of this means that there won’t be good TV series to keep us interested in years to come. But the prominence of traditional series-based television in both the economic and cultural worlds – the idea that the product of a writers’ room and a week’s shoot is our preferred vision on a digital screen – is becoming more and more marginal by the day. .

Then again, TikTok isn’t the end all be all, either. More links will be added, and I’m not talking about Meta, Substack and YouTube’s current attempts to imitate TikTok (although in the short term they will satisfy the same desires). I mean more fundamental changes. It’s highly likely that video will become more customizable, building on TikTok’s legacy of making creators out of us all; why watch when you can dance?

Hollywood stories in such a world will exist, but in malleable ways. Online video won’t be our smoothest move from Blinding Lights, but AI-driven personalized stories, where we can choose to sculpt the script’s (or creator’s) plot that spins the way we want, as smart companies in Hollywood and Silicon Valley decide to give it away. this for us. This will create its own form of cognitive impatience, making us eager to watch someone else’s version of a story. At least TikTok has allowed many of us to watch the same 20-second bites. In the new world, no two tooth marks will be alike.

The future of entertainment is perpetually uncertain, and anyone who claims to have the answers is lying. But anyone who downplays what TikTok has done to the company and to our brains isn’t telling the truth either. Video consumption no longer looks like it did five years ago, just as video consumption in 2030 will itself be unrecognizable to ourselves. No act of Hollywood or Congress can defeat the algorithm.