by Luise Noe
On the surface, Torey Akers’ Revolutionary Algorithms: A TikTok Manifesto (Grand Central, 2025) explores the counter-hegemonic potential of TikTok and the (fabricated) political outrage against the app on the eve of its ban, which ultimately never was. The anticlimactic eventization and political instrumentalization into which that “ban” ultimately dissolved after the book’s publication—a looming threat continually put off by 75 day increments; an alleged deal being made days before the publication of this review—does not take away, but adds to the appeal of Akers’ ideas. That is because underneath the surface, Revolutionary Algorithms is foremost a negotiation between grief and anger as affects of the 21st century. What one would expect from a book as Akers’, she already delivers: Well-researched examinations of US-China relations, the history of censorship before and on the internet, the tech-state-hanky-pankies within the military-industrial complex, COVID-19 psychologies, and questions of constructed moralities. But beyond that, Akers’ recent loss of both parents always shines through as the emotional ethos of the book. Loss becomes the governing image, not just in the anticipated loss of the app, but in the conception of technology as a trace human absence. According to Akers, our technology is haunted—by us.
Hauntings tend to point to spirits with unfinished business in the material realm. And so, our material world, genocidal and pandemic-ridden, is the backdrop for Akers’ argument. By exploring capitalism’s entanglement in contemporary misery, she reveals TikTok to be a mere scapegoat. This, however, does not result in any kind of blind techno-optimism. Rather, TikTok is a pharmakon, or as Akers describes it at the end of her introduction, neither “crypto-socialist totem nor portal to the promised land but instead […] a self-playing piano trembling with need for human music” (5). TikTok is not just a dance, hate speech, and make-up tutorial scroll of consciousness. There is actually a chance to unleash a revolutionary potential, Aker argues, while letting other activists’ voices affirm and question that throughout the book. To do so, humans need to grapple with their… well, human-ness aka mortality. Importantly, Akers does not ask to simply make peace with death. Rather, her thought requires us to feel it. In her more critical engagement with the technology that brought us TikTok she wonders, “if people invented God, and the internet in his image, to snuff grief’s hungry wick” (85). Akers’ humanism, which grounds her argument, is equally the embrace of individual grief and a directed anger at the excess of death in the world.
Revolutionary Algorithms plays with the fusion of “high” and “low” culture—“if Byung-Chul Han saw a Skibidi Toilet Camerahead” would he rejoice or cry? (67)—to conclusively capture the contemporary condition in writing: Akers style is vulnerable and polemic, serious and funny, passionate and ironic. Some argument summaries may feel hasty as a result, for example, aligning Walter Benjamin’s take on motion pictures with Socrates’ put down of the written word (48). But it makes the book into a captivating read not just for those who would want to agree with its central thesis. Even if Akers does not persuade you, her prose will make the read so worth it either way. This review is testament of it: this reviewer has no TikTok account and never had one. Regularly suspected to be a secret luddite, none of my personal disagreements with any of Akers’ points took away from my enjoyment of the book. Her great writing, her tone, imagery, and register over and over lets the reading experience resonate like a late night bar argument I would love to have with my smartest friends.
Bios:
Torey Akers is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn. She holds MFAs from Cranbrook Academy of Art and Hunter College.
Luise Noé is the creative non-fiction editor at Cream City Review. She is currently writing her dissertation about the contemporary novel in algorithmic-digital capitalism.
