Tell Me Things Are Going to Be Okay
Rebecca Ackermann
I joined Twitter in 2009 for one reason only: to make a joke account for posting Google ads from my inbox. These were the early Gmail days, when teeny, hyperlinked text with awkward enticements like “Find Best Mate Fast!” and “Cold? Fifty Ways to Improve Circulation FREE” materialized at the top of the page. I loved imagining how these goofy offers of self-improvement were spun from secrets buried in my correspondence. Did the robot know I’d just had a horrible breakup? Had I complained of my freezing extremities at the office job I’d just quit? These hints of a ghost in the machine made me feel more known, and like I was on the path to better choices. They pulled me out of self-pity and back to an optimistic youth filled with Magic Eight Balls and scribbled games of MASH on lined notebook paper, when potential futures could be constructed from an auspicious combination of words. I gleefully tweeted out the best ads Gmail served me and felt comforted by their clumsy insights. But as we all know, those ads grew up to be much smarter, darker, and decidedly less “aww” than “augghghghhhhAHHHHHH.” In 2011, I changed my Twitter handle to my own name and away we sped into our technocratic future.
Like many others, I joined TikTok in the desperate depths of the pandemic, lured by mood-lifting cute dogs and funny dances. I journeyed through ADHD TikTok, parenting TikTok, and paint-mixing TikTok (more fun than it sounds), when Season 2 of lockdown hit in August. I was done with pandemic hobbies and fed up with my bedroom/office/studio/preschool. I’d quit my dream job and was ready to focus on the road ahead — a blurry vision of kids’ vaccines, freelancing freedom, in-person parties, and real shoes.
That’s when I found Tarot TikTok — or did it find me? On this side of the app, creators pull regular tarot card readings for “the collective,” recording multiple videos with distinct messages. Whereas other TikTok videos are littered with keyword captions and hashtags of popular phrases to game the app’s ranking system, tarot TikToks are spare. The creators trust Spirit and The Algorithm (unseen entities invoked almost synonymously) to guide the right message to the right audience without tricks. “No captions, no hashtags, no coincidences,” one of my favorite tarot creators, @cocomocoe, chants at the start of her readings. The ghost in the machine is the point.
I received a couple tarot TikToks a week at first and inhaled them like a drug I didn’t know I needed. I watched them over and over, sometimes closing my eyes to focus on the magic of the words. My favorite creators — including @kandace, who wears a shirt with the word BLESSED in a rainbow gradient — use a bewitching tone, ASMR-like in its silky reassurance. Some perform the Reiki technique “plucking” to remove bad energy. One woman with gorgeous long red hair, @courtenybarker0, sings popular songs that relate to the cards she’s drawn. All of them make intoxicating eye contact and speak with the intimacy of a close friend: @tarotbyjonny opens with “Hey bitch,” @jeminijesus coos “Hello, beautiful people.”
As the world continued to rattle with natural and man-made disasters and I moved through my own personal shifts, these creators felt like a care team I could call on with the tap of an app icon. When I hadn’t seen my real friends and family in months, the creators told me that I was on the right path, that I’d been working hard, and rest and reward were around the corner. Were they channeling a higher power to deliver insights about my future? Or was I just staring at my phone? It didn’t matter when @courtneybarker0 told me “I love you, you’ve got this, keep going.”
The more I watched and liked and shared the tarot TikToks, the more tarot TikToks appeared on my For You Page. (That is, of course, how the actual algorithm works.) Suddenly my feed overflowed with tarot and spiritual creators, telling me I would see money, success, happiness in the next 48 hours... again and again for weeks. There’s no way of knowing if The Algorithm chose to engulf me for a reason, or if tarot was becoming a hot trend for savvy creators to capitalize on the unbearable agony of not knowing what comes next. I may never learn the answer, but I did see a TikTok where @cocomocoe revealed she used to work at a media company.
As I figured out my new routines and those kids’ vaccines became more real, the sheen of tarot TikTok dulled for me. The Algorithm, all-knowing that it is, started sending me other videos instead (like the pug who only has bones on good days). I realized that I had been lured in once again by technology masquerading as meaning, looking for certainty where there can’t be any. The truth is that these apps may know more about me than I’d like to admit, but artificial intelligence is not very good at projecting the future — mostly because humans are historically bad at it, and an AI is just a bunch of humans in a robot suit. I’m not convinced the stars know either, but I certainly found comfort in them for a while.
Who could have predicted the past two years? Who knows what 2022 holds for each of us or for our exhausted world? It’s draining to feel unsteady all the time, but maybe that feeling is more real than the fantasy that there’s any other way forward. As for me, I’ve stumbled onto Psychic TikTok, so give me a few months and I’ll let you know what I discover.