Addicted to your smartphone? Put on Keir Starmer’s TikTok

Keir Starmer’s entry this week into the Brave New World of ‘SFVF’ (short-form video fuckery), with his very own TikTok account, has prompted a predictable burst dam of contempt, scornful laughter and dismay.

Most of the comments on the UK prime minister’s new page are either straightforwardly abusive or – perhaps more damagingly – concerned that expressing an honest opinion could land the commenter in jail. Even more telling, his follower count remains mired in the low thousands. He can’t, it seems, even attract a decent hate mob.

So, let me interject a note of gratitude. I think Starmer’s efforts in this arena might prove a very useful satori, a benign jolt, delivering us from the waking dreamworld that this medium induces.

I can’t be alone in finding my mental immune system inadequate and ill-prepared for the hypnotic power of TikTok’s short films, which unspool endlessly like digital Jacob’s Ladders on my screen, as soon as the one I actually chose to watch comes to an end.

I never actively go on TikTok, but there is some mechanism on X whereby the same coiling tendrils cross the inter-platform blood-brain barrier and come into play anyway, dragging one down into hell regardless. Dozens of videos can then pass before one’s eyes, leaving one swaying helplessly like Mowgli staring into the spiralling eyeballs of Kaa the snake, while the other end tightens around his legs.

If one is foolish enough to have allowed the app into the bedroom, where darkness and fatigue further disable one’s defences, hours can pass in this docile state before something like Harry Palmer’s needle-prick in The Ipcress File snaps us back into alert, conscious reality.

Gradually, one then traces one’s way back out of the Labyrinth, ascending back through the layers of delusion, like a low-budget remake of Inception, before blinking disbelieving back into the light. Empires have risen and died in the meantime. Children have left home. Our tea has gone cold.

And almost invariably, this jolt, this prick will have to have appeared on the screen. And Keir Starmer, let me say not for the first time but with unusually generous intent, you are a prick.

Indeed, in this regard, the PM’s social-media posts might provide the greatest boost to national productivity since he took office – admittedly a bar so low even Kaa couldn’t slither under it, but still.

Assuming this was not his intention, however, I will also add a couple of words of sympathy and consolation. We are almost exactly the same age, you and I, Keir. You have just two years on me but at this remove from the early 1970s, when you maybe got the jump on me with Bowie’s ‘Starman’ and Oxford high-waister bags, I think we’re as good as even. So, let me just say, I understand the problem. TikTok is not made for the likes of us.

It is, like incomprehensible fashions and bewilderingly loud music in bars, just one of those myriad means whereby the young humanely cull and perform a ritual expulsion of their elders – a necessary part of their mental hygiene. It’s okay. Don’t cling. Detach. Accept. Pain is inevitable. TikTok is a choice.

Like politicians, older comedians are also struggling to adapt to the new formats. We’ve seen young acts create ‘content’ on social media. We see their bright, fresh, spontaneous eruptions of excess energy, élan and esprit, and we’ve enjoyed it. And crucially, we know TikTok engagement drives ticket sales.

Yet many of us who instinctively understood ourselves for the first time standing on a stage in a back room of a pub with a microphone in our hands don’t quite grasp how you interview yourself with different wigs on, or teach your dog to drive. And so instead we use TikTok as a delivery system for clips of us doing what we’ve always done, only in shorter form. It’s fine. It works. It doesn’t really fit the format. It doesn’t grasp McLuhan’s dictum. But at least you, the punter, can see what we comedians do before you come to see us live.

I don’t know what the equivalent is for you, Keir. But the sense one gets watching your dull satisfaction at arriving in an office and placing some folders in an inbox, mouthing platitudes or shaking hands with a beleaguered foreign ally, reinforces an all-too persuasive suspicion that you don’t know either. And that’s not a good look. Try to spark joy at least.

Social-media posts must, above all else, have bite. They cannot be like the print-out tucked inside Christmas cards by well-meaning but pompous and complacent middle-class families in the days before Facebook, which detailed their offspring’s challenges, accomplishments and humble-brags of the previous 12 months. These just make people hate you more, even if they like Zelensky.

So – pith, zip, punch. Brevity, as Polonius miraculously understood, is the soul of socials. Otherwise, you are just going to play a variation on the old saw, that ‘The Left Can’t Meme’.

It’s called TikTok for a reason. Tick, tock… the most archetypal expression of time running out. And that is something you of all people must surely understand by now.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.