Introducing: The Interface - What goes on in TikTok's Farlands?

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1:07Hello and welcome to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Nicky Wolfe, one of the co-hosts of The Interface, the BBC's fiercely informed, fast and funny take on how technology is changing everything. Each week, we unpack the tech news stories that matter, whether they shook a government, broke the internet or quietly tipped the balance of power. Find us wherever you find your BBC podcasts.

1:58I'm Karen Howe. And I'm Nikki Wolf. Today on The Interface, we'll be diving into the horrifying world of the TikTok farlands. We'll be looking at what you can find there, but also what it means for internet culture. And we'll also be looking at how AI detection tools are changing our writing.

2:21Tom, nice background. Where are you? I'm in Barcelona. I'm going to a music festival called Primavera. Nice. And then Karen, you're sick. Again. We're still doing the pod though. That's how loyal we are to our audience. That is dedication. Tech waits for no one. And especially this week because we've got, I think it's a particularly crazy story. So over the past couple of weeks, I have gotten completely obsessed with something called the TikTok Farlands. And I found out about this, like I reached out to Nikki, I had to get him involved right off the bat. This is, I think, simultaneously one of the most unsettling but also like hopeful and optimistic things that I've seen on the internet in a really long time.

3:13Yeah, it's the whole package. It's like kind of, you know, a perfect summation of what the internet is and what it's like. So here's the idea. There's a hidden part of the TikTok algorithm that, It won't show you normally these videos that aren't coming up in people's feeds organically. And what people are saying is, if you want to see this stuff, you have to find your way to it with more intentionality. You have to seek it out. And apparently, the best way to get there is people will comment like a string of random letters and numbers, like this secret code word. and you put that into the search bar and it brings up this hidden genre of videos that I think is simultaneously, like this stuff is kind of horrifying and scary and uncanny, but also the story and what's happening around it, I think is one of the most positive things I've seen on the internet in a while.

4:16And it's people kind of taking control of social media to use it for their own community building and self-expression. Yeah, in a way that goes beyond what the app is designed for. And I found out about this from a freelance reporter and self-described meme researcher. His name is Aiden Walker. And I got him on the phone to talk about what's going on here and what this says about the state of the internet. So my first question for him is simple. what is the TikTok Far Lands? You could say trend, you could say phenomenon, but it's this space at the edge of TikTok. The word comes from this space at the edge of Minecraft where you'd go out far enough into the world that the computer no longer knew how to render the land correctly.

5:03And it's kind of the same concept with like the TikTok algorithm that if you spoof it, if you trick it, if you scroll long enough, it's kind of like if you scroll for 14 hours, you're going to end up in this place where you are seeing things that you are maybe not supposed to see. So once you get there, you're going to find videos that the algorithm would probably never have recommended to you unless you're some kind of sicko or some kind of avant-garde freak. It's kind of like hipstery in a way that you've transcended what most normies see. And a lot of the content that is in the far lands in practice, it kind of breaks down into kind of two categories for me.

5:40It's like the very, very niche brain rot, which is like i'd say it's like conceptual art in a way it's like these video edits that don't make sense that maybe are funny maybe are not are just kind of like vivid and crazy and odd or it's kind of like creepypasta content uh which is this internet tradition of kind of like folkloric horror of kind of just jump scare content of monsters pretty much that you've reached the edge of the map and as my friend etymology nerd says here there be monsters You know, you're out past the known area and you're in the zone that only the initiated know. And there's some like deep, crazy stuff out there.

6:20Can you describe some of this stuff? Like you say, brain rot, like for people who aren't on TikTok, what are we looking at? And also like horror, like are there some examples you can think of? It's these participatory, collaborative horror stories that people wrote online 10, 20 years ago. there'd be kind of spooky scary images of different types of ghouls or like different just uncanny creatures one of my favorite farlands posts is it's like a bunch of like invisible diaphanous beings walking across the screen and there's like a spooky like owl sounding soundtrack on top of it sometimes it's like jump scare content and what's interesting to me like being terminally online is a lot of these are like little ghouls or monsters that were being talked about in like 2015, you know, on like text-based forums.

7:05And now they're in the TikTok farlands. And so it's a lot of that sort of off-putting shock horror type stuff that has always been there on the internet. And I think for people who grew up on it, it was like, here's this, you know, a little illicit thing that's going to spook my friends out, like the digital equivalent of the, you know, going in the mirror and saying Bloody Mary three times. So what's this whole thing where you need a secret code to get there? Yeah, so I was seeing that in the comments of a lot of the Far Lands videos that I was looking at. And people would just leave these codes of random letters and numbers, which to TikTok probably means nothing.

7:43I mean, nobody's like searching that. But you put it into the search bar of the platform, and you'll find a bunch of videos that are tagged with that code. So it's kind of like a little secret backdoor. Like I was calling it a digital speakeasy that you know this code, you put it into the totally normal seeming social media. media platform. And then you're going to access this weird layer of like the scary ghouls or the crazy brain rot that other people are getting. Not everybody is finding the far lands through the secret codes. A lot of people are getting it on the FYP algorithmically recommended.

8:15But the fact that like the codes, yeah, on the for you page, but the fact the codes exist, I think shows this desire people have to like gatekeep things on TikTok because like the point And gatekeeping then is to selectively open the gate for the worthy. And so people love to kind of broker the relationship with the platform on like a human to human basis. And so I think the far lands and the codes are kind of symptomatic of people wanting to use the platforms to do something differently. But then ultimately, TikTok is happy the longer people spend on TikTok. And TikTok doesn't care if it's a horrendous creepypasta character or a lie on the internet or an influencer's day in the life video.

8:54someone sitting down and watching that. Does it feel like people are pushing up against the walls of the machine here to make TikTok do their bidding in a way? I think that is what's happening to some extent because it's kind of an inevitable human thing. The second you tell a kid not to do something or you make a rule, people are going to try to find a way to game it or break it. Yeah. And I think it also shows the way that people want to feel like they own some of their experience on social media. I think there's like this stereotype of the passive scroll, which definitely is a big piece of a lot of people's, you know, consumptive life online.

9:32But folks aren't just, you know, going past every video, you know, soaking in the information they don't even remember an hour later what they saw. I think people want to like be in community online and they want to feel like they're building something with other people online. And so I think it's like people trying to reach out to each other across this medium that if you're using it totally the way it's supposed to be used, it's a slot machine built to sell team. It just wants you to stay there and then maybe click a shop link. But people find a way to use it to do all this other stuff, including scare each other with creepy pastas, but also create these little spaces outside of the platform.

10:05And I always wonder if those same kinds of tools or techniques or attitudes might someday be turned towards something more substantive than just like, let's scare each other or even do crazy cool video art. Let's maybe use it in some political way or some really way that would be subversive to the platform. because people seem to have that year in it. But I do think maybe the seed is there for something that's a little more full-flung because there's a lot of like Luddite stuff about like touch grass, like put down your phone, you know, disconnect to reconnect. And that current is like very strong, I think with all generations.

10:39But then I also think there's always been like, even in the terminally online spaces, this desire, like what if we used this to do something more interesting than just, you know, sit and passively consume. And my view is that like, any like effective resistance to maybe the evil project of tech if you see it that way is a combination of the two you know it's not just quitting it's also like reaching past it and making the internet into a thing that helps people rather than serves ads you know like it's i think i had a comparison where i said finding out that you know the ostensible purpose of the machine that connects everybody on earth's brain to everybody else's brain if the purpose of it is to sell ads, that's like finding out the purpose of the pyramids of Giza was to sell fishing equipment.

11:25Like there has to be like some higher purpose to the internet. And I think when people reach past what the platforms kind of serve you, they're kind of reaching for that higher purpose. I have so many questions after seeing this video, because the first thing that I want to know, I mean, Farlands is such a brilliant name. I want to know who even came up with that term. But also, what are the types of videos that are populating the Farlands and how do they get there? Like, are people producing content specifically to land in the Farlands? Or are they just producing bad content? And then it gets damned to the Farlands.

11:58But now there's an entire community regrouping and reclaiming the Farlands. Like, what's actually going on? So people are making videos specifically to go in this genre, to go in this place, the TikTok Farlands, because people are really excited about it. But then also there's this whole idea that there's like you have to go deeper and deeper, right? You can find the stuff on the surface, which is these popular TikTok Farlands accounts. But the real stuff is something you'd see from an account with only 10 followers, a video that no one else has seen before that is truly freaky and uncanny, which is not a totally new thing on TikTok.

12:38Like years ago, people would talk about deep talk, which was kind of just weird, maybe actually bad videos that the algorithm wasn't serving up to people. But why don't I show you a couple of these as an example so we can get a flavor from what we're talking about here. So this one here, it's by a guy. I talked to his name is Smoorlater. Smoorlater. There's probably some really obvious way to pronounce this I'm not seeing. But he's sitting in a car, but the video keeps glitching. There's this eerie music if you go watch it. It's cutting to kind of distorted, you know, images and videos where it feels like it's not rendering properly or it's all like...

13:19Sort of an evil clown face keeps like very briefly appearing. Yeah. Like a lot of mouths and teeth go into a lot of this content. He's kind of subverting the genre of food review videos, right? It's a big thing on TikTok that there will be a guy who goes to a restaurant. He's sitting in his car eating it, talking into his camera about the food. So it's like... It's making it grotesque. Yeah, and then a lot of it is around like images of faces that just don't look right. That I think, you know, I'm showing us, we're looking at some of the tamer videos here, but some of these are, I think, actually really disturbing.

13:55Quite stubbing, yeah. Here's another one. A lot of this is kind of AI-generated images or AI-edited images. They keep cutting back and forth with clips of this Twitch streamer, this guy named iShowSpeed, and there's this version of like an edited image of iShow Speed that's become like a staple of the Far Lands. They call it iShow Eyes where it's this guy, iShow Speed, and his eyes are all like weird and messed up in this kind of uncanny way. Yeah, it's very kind of liquid. The colors are very neon and then it cuts to these black four figures almost so quickly that you can't see them. It's very like, it's like the design of a lot of these is just like a little shiver down the spine.

14:41You know, it's that kind of, that's the aim of it. I feel like all of these are kind of a similar aesthetic. Like, is that, is this the Far Lands aesthetic? Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, so there's a very distinct Far Lands aesthetic for sure. And a lot of it is using, this guy Lucas Wilm that I talked to said, he's using a technique that's called data moshing, where you take a video or an image and then you go in essentially using a computer program or like editing like the code of the file itself in order to make the JPEG or the video look kind of distorted, which is interesting, right? It's this whole thing where people are, you know, messing with the TikTok algorithm to make it do what they want.

15:31And then the content itself is like, messed up corrupted digital files. So I don't even know. I talked to some of these guys who were doing it. They weren't like necessarily doing this consciously, but even the content itself is like a comment on technology, which maybe we're getting a little too like academic art criticism here. I mean, this is so weird because the videos that you're showing right now, they are extremely popular, like 13 ,500 likes on this one. Some of these have millions of views, yeah. Yeah, so what is, I mean, I thought Far Lands was defined by people, very few people being able to access it.

16:12But is it actually just defined by the aesthetic, the non-mainstream aesthetic? Is that because it's now no longer far? Like people have discovered it and it's kind of already mainstream? What exactly is going on there is hard to say. It could be that this thing has broken containment and it has become mainstream. And it has. I talked to one of these guys. He's like 19 years old, right? I feel like I'm, you know, a retiree talking to this kid. And I'm like, you know, I work for the BBC. Like, is the fact that I am about to talk about this in the mainstream media, am I ruining it now? Like, is this like they used to talk about the hug of death on Reddit that you'd find some little beautiful thing and you put it on the front page of Reddit and then it would crash the server because too many people would look at it.

16:58And he was like, dude, it's already like this trend has like come and gone. You heard about it, by the time you heard about it, it's already over. But it's almost like, you know, people in, you know, people putting their graffiti on the subway car in New York in the 80s, right? Where it's like the subway car is not a vehicle for art, but people are co-opting the system and making it their own to use it for their own purposes. So it kind of is just this very human thing that's how the internet always has been. Yeah, I think graffiti is a really good example because it's about putting something in a public space that only a private group of people appreciate.

17:39The aesthetic of these videos reminds me of this other thing that's been happening with generated art, where there's this kind of creepy, goalish woman that will sometimes appear when people have spent too much time. What they do is they'll generate the art and then they'll pop it back into an AI generator and be like, make it more this or make it less that or whatever. And they'll just do it in this crazy cycle all the way down the rabbit hole until suddenly this particular artifact appears, this freaky, messed up face of a woman. I mean, that could absolutely be a Far Lands. Yes. So this is Loa.

18:18And yeah, she has a name. And so there's this whole genre of mythology, I guess, that has spun out of this artifact. But the moment I saw the Farland Studios, which I've literally never seen before, I was like, oh, it reminds me exactly of Loeb. You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service.

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20:03This is the Sentry Safe on a history of the United States and 100 objects. Find it in the 99 % Invisible Feed wherever you get your podcasts. The thing that excites me as much as the phenomenon of the content itself is this has all happened before. This is an evolution of a genre that's as old as the internet itself. And this concept of creepypasta goes back to places like 4chan and something awful. These are like old internet forums that had a certain series of criteria that made them really fertile breeding ground for trolling and a lot of kind of horrible stuff, but also this really new and collaborative, creative process that was, I found, fantastic.

20:57And the aesthetic is exactly the same. Like it's very, very, whether it's intentional or not, kind of pays homage to... The old internet forum. The old internet forums. So the point is that these kind of memes and these kind of stories and aesthetics don't necessarily just stay on the internets stay in the places where they're made uh you may have heard that last week there was a huge um horror movie that got released and it's been really really well received and and it's called the back rooms and it's based on a meme that started on 4chan and other of these kind of horror memes that's sort of this officey office space um kind of unsettling vibe and that evolved into this massive hollywood uh movie another of these spaces from back in the day was called something awful.

21:49It was a sort of comedy forum and a similar anarchic vibe. And one of the things that came out of it, you may have heard of, is this thing called Slenderman. Now, Slenderman, if you've heard of Slenderman, you've probably heard because there was a really horrible attempted murder at a school in Wisconsin where these girls who believed that this monster was giving them instructions attempted to stab another of their classmates really horrible massive news caused this mass panic about this monster you know was internet trolls were they trying to make people kill people uh in that way that kind of media does when it doesn't quite understand the culture but when that when the stabbing happened the the artists who had collaborated to make slender man thought they had summoned a real monster into being somehow they were really really shaken by it that they had put this thing out into the world that had become bigger than the sum of its parts that they had collaborated to to create something that had taken on a life of its own and was doing things you know out in the world that nobody and no individual was in kind of control of i i thought that was really really interesting when I was back and covering that.

23:11But it was part of a new phenomenon from the internet of this kind of evolutionary collaborative art. And that's what the Far Lands really reminded me of. So given that, what you were saying, Nikki, like, has there been impact, either negative impact or positive impact that has come out of Far Lands? So Far Lands, while it's kind of going mainstream now, as Tom was saying, it's still kind of early in that process. Like there are some recurring themes that I think we can probably expect to see go wider and maybe take on this kind of life. But it's in that kind of primordial soup phase of art kind of collaboration.

24:03But the thing that is different is that there's something in this that's also a rebellion against the concept of algorithmic generation itself. You mean like algorithmic curation? Algorithmic curation, exactly. The fact that you're to share and be in the know of some of these kind of codes and numbers. And now that it's kind of gone mainstream and that's no longer the case, and if that rebellion is over, what happens next? What happens to the people who have gone into it as creators with this kind of sensibility and aesthetic? where do they take their art creation next? And is there a way for it to stay as kind of energizing as it is?

24:44What it says is that the internet is still human, right? It's shifted where it used to be just this totally independent rebel thing, but now it's this big corporate machine. But even for all the power that the tech companies do have over our lives, It doesn't work if there aren't people going onto it to express themselves and build community. And even within this system, people are finding a way to make it work for themselves and make it show them what they want to see and make it show other people the art that they're making. Because I think a lot of this stuff is art. And this system, despite the efforts of, you know, money, powerful forces to control it is still at its core a very human thing.

25:33I love that. Makes me actually want to go on the internet again, guys. Yeah, seriously. Maybe you should make a TikTok account, Karen. I kind of want to, what's the name of the AI monster? Loab. Yeah, Loab. Can we call Loab into, can we summon? I don't know if I want to call her. She seems bad. Yeah, I mean. Loab is actually me. I'm at the end of the AI generation. It makes so much sense. At the end of the generator. Karen is a monster that was created by AI. And now she's escaped containment. To scare you after you spent way too much time. Let's talk about something else. Yeah. Speaking of AI and creepy, creepy stuff.

26:20We received this really interesting comment from a listener to one of our episodes. This is from Grace, where she was talking about how she works with economically disadvantaged students from across the world, supporting them to access higher education internationally. And she started noticing this phenomenon where students would work on, they'd write an essay for an application to an institution that was wholly their own, you know, no AI assistance, no AI generation whatsoever. And then because they were worried that their own writing would somehow get picked up as AI through potential automated detection tools, they were pasting them into these AI detection software themselves to then tweak their language to make it seem less AI.

27:12But in the process, the changes were actually really bizarre. Like it wouldn't actually make the essay sound better or make it sound more human. It would just evade the AI detection software and introduce all of these new artifacts that were just actually not good writing. and she wrote to us saying, you know, like she's tried to explain to these students, you don't have to do this. It's not necessary, but they just can't get over this fear that because AI detection software is being used more and more and all around us and they have a higher chance of getting flagged as English as a second language speakers, they just insist on going through this process and actually degrading and devaluing their own writing even more.

28:02They're making their own writing worse. That's so depressing. Yeah. So this gets to like a really interesting question, which has been coming up a lot recently because there's this new AI detection software called Pangram that has become really, really popular. And recently there's been a spate of headlines about people being accused of having their writing being partly AI-generated or even all of it AI-generated because of people pasting that writing into Pangram and Pangram then assessing it and determining that, yes, there is some level of AI generation in it. So we talked about the Pope last week and his encyclical that I loved.