Repeat After Me

In the face of overlapping crises – war, political uncertainty, financial insecurity, social atomisation, and the slow fraying of community – might there be a cure-all remedy for hardship? Across TikTok, an endless stream of content creators offer up their own antidotes to troubling times, presenting step-by-step guides for abundance, self-optimisation and spiritual awakening, forever promising greater personal sovereignty to the unmoored. The proposal is a seductive one: a better, richer, more aligned version of the self, realised through the right practice, the right mindset, and the right willingness to reject mainstream thinking.

Further down the rabbit hole, though, languages of belonging are soon displaced by decidedly exclusionary principles; not everyone, it seems, is destined for the top, whilst only the chosen few will achieve higher states of consciousness. As CEOs of our own lives, every success – as well as every failure – sits squarely on individual shoulders: to be exceptional is to focus on the self alone, even if it means disengaging with the world beyond the screen. From this vantage point, collective forms of responsibility are a mere distraction on the path toward ascension – with all of its isolating consequences.

For their latest video work, Jakob Ganslmeier & Ana Zibelnik mine and reconfigure a spectrum of TikTok self-help content, evoking the dopamine-driven cacophony of the endless scroll. Across this landscape, technology and self-optimisation ideologies form a heady symbiosis; AI-generated material replicates the affective power of the manmade, whilst the algorithm amplifies only the most extreme visions of reality. The same gentle voices that once beckoned us in grow louder, harsher, uncompromising, preying further on our deepest vulnerabilities.

Probing at the seemingly apolitical culture of self-optimisation – with its purported distrust for ‘establishment’ thinking – Ganslmeier & Zibelnik unearth an extreme brand of hyper-individualism that threads common logic through the mantras of the TikTok spiritual healer, the tech startup boss, and even the contemporary fascist politician. Here, the prospect of societal collapse is leveraged in the service of survivalist worldviews, where only the strongest will weather the impending storm. Unravelling the mechanics of a rightward turn, Ganslmeier & Zibelnik study the relationship between the disparate voices that sustain it. Their research asks: who benefits from holding our attention – and what is it we overlook when only looking inwards?

George H. King