I spend the holidays watching cabin builders on TikTok – I still can

Wooded area. A roaring fire. A little snow. This is my happy place. Except, it’s not through my window; is active TikTok.

For months, I’ve “taught” TikTok to provide me with this content: people, usually friends, building shelters by hand in the desert. Most of them are ultra-fast timelapses that start with a hole in the ground, an ax and a pile of wood. Once I looked at a boy Build a hobbit hole that looks like an entrance Dune sand worm. i got off the cabin in the woods Via TikTok open-cast-cooking TikTok and I never want to leave. Of course I have to.

No one knows what will happen to TikTok in the next few weeks. Back in April, US President Joe Biden signed it a bill The law ordered ByteDance, the app’s owner, to sell TikTok’s US operations to a company outside of China by January 19 or face being blocked. TikTok sued, and as of now, the Supreme Court plans to do so listen to the work on Jan. 10 and will potentially rule on whether the law should violates free speech rights before the deadline.

So now and then, I’ll watch all the cabin building TikToks I can.

Let’s be real, I would do it anyway. Disconnecting from social media is practically a holiday tradition, and with 11 days left in 2024, watching TikToks — or scrolling through Bluesky or scrolling through Instagram, if those are more your jam — is the best way to reset your brain. But TikTok gives rules for this. Sub-genres on the platform, like the animal-supporting TikTok or the furniture-repairing TikTok, remain one of the most effective forms of mind-numbing around.

Even if TikTok takes over, there’s no guarantee that my FYP will continue to provide jungle survival content. While it’s still largely a platform for pop-culture foodies and lip-sync videos, a growing number of Americans are using TikTok as a new resource. As of 2020, the share of adults who regularly receive news from the platform has increased from 3 percent to 17 percent, According to the Pew Research Center. “No other social media platform we studied saw faster growth in news coverage,” the study authors wrote.