TikTok, the world’s sixth-most popular social media platform, has spiked in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic. But though it is populated mainly by young people sharing silly home-cooked music videos, the Chinese-owned app has become a political football, as the governments of India and the US, under then-President Trump, attempted to ban it in 2020, accusing the platform of aiding Chinese geopolitical interests.

But TikTok deserves a different kind of attention than its relation to global trade wars. TikTok has managed to incite in its users an enthusiasm for the emancipatory and even revolutionary potential of digital communication, similar to that associated with the internet’s early years. TikTok is a corporate product generating multibillion-dollar revenues for its owners, it’s true. But it’s worth exploring what exactly the app means to its users.

After first downloading the app, I couldn’t get off it for hours, fascinated with the energy, wit, and daring of its users. The continuously repeated sounds and dances, occasionally intercepted by political messages, also struck me with a weird familiarity. TikTok reminded me of the Blue Blouse, a Soviet agitprop theatre movement that existed from 1923 to the beginning of the 1930s; it grew out of “living newspaper” performances (whose actors usually wore blue blouses, hence the name) into a nationwide creative platform of seven thousand groups all over the country.