Has the internet made us all insane — literally? This has been a major theme of Pirate Wires, and a central question of my work, since I first launched the company. From campfire stories to print to the televised debates of Nixon and Kennedy, we are shaped by the mediums through which we communicate. So how, I’ve found myself wondering, has a third of our country been shaped by TikTok? Well, to begin with: young people across the country now genuinely seem to believe they have dissociative identity disorder (in other words, multiple personalities).

Welcome to DIDTok, a cartoonish hellscape content genre (community?) perfectly in keeping with the Clown World laws that govern our culture. It is funny and horrifying and unfortunately sort of important. Fml.

River Page reports.

-Solana

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In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourself — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology.

- Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media 

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Readers who have heard of DIDTok — short for Dissociative Identity Disorder TikTok — were probably introduced to it as I was, through gawking reposts, jokes about “alters,” sherlocking about the legitimacy of DIDTokers diagnoses and DID itself, and, more generally, broad proclamations that the “kids aren’t alright.” Of course, the kids aren’t alright. They’re faking a contrived Jekyll and Hyde disorder, which is all quite funny. Watch a few videos of blue-haired enbys introducing the menagerie of characters they claim live inside them and perhaps you, like myself, will find yourself shaking your head and whispering in Caitlyn Jenner’s smooth midwestern baritone: “Just another example of the woke world going crazy.” 

And it is. But I won’t bother opining about wokeness, as others already have. Likewise, the following paragraphs will inadvertently demonstrate the case that most or all DIDTokers are faking it, so I won’t patronize the reader by pointing out the obvious. All the well-deserved sneering and head shaking over DIDTok hasn’t taught us much about this unique internet subculture nor its denizens, who I have come to see as the cyborgian apotheoses of mass media consumerism. An anthropological approach is warranted — let’s dig in.

DIDTok’s internal language and culture is highly developed and insular, moreso than any I’m familiar with. Many conversations within the community are indecipherable to outsiders, including this writer, who had to create and reference a notebook dictionary just to keep up. In my research, I found that the DID culture originated in internet forums and had a presence, unsurprisingly, on Tumblr. But unlike similar subcultures such as furries, gender goblins, asexuals, people who lie about being autistic, and so forth, it didn’t really take off until the widespread adoption of TikTok. Why was TikTok conducive to a boom in this subculture in a way that other platforms weren’t?

Let’s start with the basics. In terms of psychiatry, Dissociative Identity Disorder is a rare mental disorder in which a person develops multiple distinct personalities. Although it’s recognized in the DSM, the diagnosis is controversial, with a history of fabrication case studies, and no standardized method of diagnosis. Psychiatrists skeptical of the disorder are part of a larger group DIDTok calls “fakeclaimers,” a broad term for anyone online who disputes the legitimacy of a person’s DID — or the very existence of the condition itself. The “fakeclaimers” themselves are another online community, centered around forums like r/fakedisordercringe. The intensity of the perceived attacks by fakeclaimers is such that one DIDToker, identifying as Vermin (He/It) in this particular video, said “I’m gonna have our boyfriend help block Reddit on our phone.”

The mix of singular and plural pronouns is not a typo. In the DIDTok cosmology, the world is divided into systems (DIDTokers) and singlets (the rest of us). Out of this cosmology, a new linguistic invention: “Systems” use plural pronouns when referring to the many alters they believe inhabit their mind, and singular ones when speaking as a particular alter. Therefore in the scenario above, “Vermin” is “fronting,” so the singular “I’m” is used. However, since the boyfriend is dating the “system,” he is referred to with the plural-possessive “our.”

The individual “alters” or “headmates” who make up a “system” are often introduced in quick succession through a roll call. This format is particularly well-suited to TikTok. From the viewing side, the flash of characters wearing different costumes and sometimes speaking in different voices is quick, and succinct. From the creator’s side, TikTok makes this type of content simple to produce. Instead of having to download 3rd-party software like Adobe Premiere to combine multiple five-second videos, like you’d need to if you were creating a video for YouTube, TikTok streamlines the process. All creators have to do is press the record button, introduce an “alter,” release the button, change outfits, and then hold down the record button again.

These speedy “roll calls” are also well-suited to the fairly shallow characters they introduce, many of whom are obvious anime stock characters: the tomboy, the immature loli-girl clutching a stuffed animal, the bookish androgyne, the protective older sibling, the brooding young man. Fanfiction’s influence on the subculture isn’t subtle, either. Some DIDtoker’s even have “fictives,” or “headmates” of fictional origin. As one DIDToker said, speaking in a British accent through a homemade gas mask constructed from crushed-up Monster energy drink cans: 

Being a fictive is freaking wild because I literally went from being kidnapped by a horrible media organization for entertaining an audience to: I live in Victorian London (inner world) in a house with Kenny from South Park and Eeevee from Pokemon where I am a single father to them and we have a swimming pool. And sometimes I help a trans girl with her daddy issues.

Often, “headmates” — “fictive” or otherwise — engage with one another on video, with the camera cutting back and forth between the two characters. Sometimes the audio is original, sometimes not. This style was an important part of Vine comedy back in the day, and is particularly suited to short videos. As with “roll calls,” TikTok’s stop/go recording is conducive to this genre of content, and this genre of content, which proceeds DIDTok, is particularly suited to the subculture. As DIDTokers “switch” alters, they are literally hitting a button to turn “headmates” off and on throughout the production of the video, adding a kinetic component to the delusion/performance of multiple personalities which lies at the heart of DIDTok — and a subconscious reinforcing mechanism, I suspect. Here, the alters become cyborgs, supposed individuals created by a lifetime of endless mass media consumption, switched on and off with the touch of a button in a Chinese spy app.

Ask a DIDToker and she will insist the alters still live when the phone is off — like a tree who begs you to believe that it made a sound when it fell in the empty forest. Having come of age at a time when the last vestiges of the written word have been supplanted by a scrolling barrage of image and sound, she is probably not familiar with the writings of the Anglican philosopher-priest George Berkely, but she proves one needn’t have read his Latin motto to understand it. Esse est percipi. The DIDToker acknowledges it every time she presses record again, and dutifully informs her followers the names and pronouns of the alter speaking today. She knows Berkley’s motto more than anyone. She and the button have taken it to its maximalist position, together. Esse est percipi. To be is to be perceived. 

Of course, DIDTokers would deny that the performance of multiple personalities is a performance at all, and they’d certainly deny that performance is at the heart of the subculture. The heart, in their reckoning, is trauma. The exact nature of the trauma is often left unsaid, but it’s used as the go-to explanation for the inconsistencies, obvious performances, and deviations from traditionally understood DID symptoms that characterize the DIDTok subculture.

For example, last year, when responding to a comment which read “If your trauma is from when you were like eight, why are all your alters from popular 2020 mcyt [MineCraft/ YouTube]? Genuine question,” one DIDToker (fronting as “Tommy”) didn’t dispute the video-game streamer origins of her alters. Instead she explained that trauma was to blame in an unconvincing fake — or to use the DIDTokian term “made” — British accent modeled after Minecraft streamer TommyInnit. Once someone gets DID at a young age, they continue to develop more alters as a way of coping with new traumas throughout life, “Tommy” explains. In her case, she watched a lot of Minecraft streamers during quarantine and initially “formed” one streamer — Technoblade — as a “factive” (as opposed to “fictive”) alter to cope with trauma from “something that happened when she was 18.” Recently, she says the alter Technoblade became the “host” — a sort of main character — and after experiencing some unspecified trauma, the alter Technoblade “split” or developed his own alters, all of whom are based on other streamers in the real-life Technoblade’s orbit. “Because that’s what’s comforting to Technoblade.” Comforting, of course, to the altar Technoblade. The real-life Technoblade died of metastatic sarcoma on June 30th, 2022, three months before this TikTok was made. He was 23.

How does one interpret the sight of a young lady appropriating for herself the identity of a tragically deceased young YouTuber and the identities of his entire social circle? The unsavory meeting of fan fiction and niche internet celebrity? Callous puppetry of the dead? Attention seeking? Perhaps it’s all of them. But more so, this scene epitomizes the crisis of individuality at the center of DIDTok, just not in the way DIDTokers claim.

DIDTokers are not the byproducts of trauma, they are bellwethers. What I witnessed on DIDTikTok was not a lack of individuality per se, but rather a complete melding of the individual with mass media. With the exception of those we know in real life or interact with directly and regularly online, we implicitly view the people we see on our screens not as individuals, but as characters, particularly when we see them in video format. We know that streamers, musicians, reality TV stars, politicians, podcasters, journalists, and even random people on TikTok are not actors in a TV show. But we watch them as if they were, keeping a close eye for plot and character development, identifying heroes and villains, rooting for some and wishing that others would be written off the show. Of course, this is partially because of the existence of actual fictional media, but it’s more than that. For 99.9 percent of human history, we only saw — and heard — people who were living and breathing in close proximity to us. We could touch them, smell them, make eye contact with them, and speak directly to them. When we perceive people through sight and hearing alone, particularly in recordings, understanding them as fully autonomous individuals is a conscious effort.

It should not be surprising that some among a generation that consumes media not in front of a TV with friends and family, but alone, with headphones plugged into a phone, for hours a day, for literally their entire lives, would come to express the complexities of their individual selves through a series of less complex characters, then rationalize that to themselves and others as dissociative identity disorder. Characters must perform, of course, and TikTok gives them the ability to do that, plus an audience, at the touch of a button. Esse est percipi. They’ll press it every time.

-River Page