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The noise is getting to me. The loops of sound burrow into my skull and haunt my dreams, making me feel like Raskolnikov or Travis Bickle or the Joker, someone who gets pushed by society to do something. It must be stopped. They must be stopped.
I’m talking, of course, about people who watch TikToks out loud on public transit. After years of videos from phone speakers invading the subways and buses of New York City, I’ve reached my breaking point. I’ve tried all the normal strategies: putting on my own headphones and cranking the volume, staring down the offenders. I’ve considered asking the perpetrators to stop. Earlier this year, that approach earned someone two stabs to the chest.
It’s not like I demand silence. I’ve lived in NYC for five years, and while garbage trucks and shouts and subwoofers aren’t my sounds of choice, it’s true what they say: The background chaos is constant enough that it resembles ambience after a while. Even when it doesn’t, the base-level sound of people living around you is something every city resident eventually accepts. You have to have some grace when the neighbors in your building throw parties and play loud music if you want your own chance to throw a party and play loud music. You can’t get too mad when someone’s yelling and crying outside your window at 3 a.m., because who hasn’t been there before? But the tune of TikTok in public isn’t one of the necessary sounds of the everyday. It is profoundly, deliberately antisocial: not an invitation to engage with someone else, but the sound of someone else’s uniquely tailored algorithm breaching containment.
So I decided to fight fire with fire. I spent a week forgoing headphones and indulging my worst self by actively watching videos out loud on buses and subways. As I discovered, the unfortunate truth is that a decent way to buck the annoyance of someone else watching TikTok out loud is to do the same thing yourself. Beat their selfishness with your own selfishness. But there are always disadvantages to a hostile arms race.
The embarrassing thing is that once I decided to start this experiment, I took the first well-behaved bus I had been on in years. As if out of spite, no one on the Ridgewood-bound B38 played anything obnoxious out loud. It struck me that no matter how mad I had let myself get at the perceived disintegration of public decency, the majority on the bus was, in fact, a silent one.
I tried to violate the quiet, but after a half-scroll through TikTok, I switched to the comparative quiet of X. Being the first to feed openly, as I’ve taken to calling it, requires a willingness to violate social convention that I just couldn’t summon. I got off at my weekly writers group feeling guilty, like I’d been mad as hell at my fellow man for no reason. Was I making it all up?
The next morning’s Manhattan-bound C train proved I’ve never been more wrong.
Noise is a historically politicized issue, and people online love to use it as a proxy for greater culture-war conflict, be it generational or racial or cultural. (A few years ago, the discourse suffered through a one-two punch of rage-bait articles: “Why Do Rich People Love Quiet?” in the Atlantic and “Silence Is OK, Actually” in the National Review.) But the truth is, if you spend time on the C train, you will hear people of every age, culture, and background play vertical videos. Being obnoxious isn’t limited to any particular social group.
But the lack of a unifying factor makes it harder to pinpoint the exact cause of the issue: What actually makes someone decide to be a jerk and watch videos out loud, even when no one else is doing it? Is it simply the lack of headphones? After all, iPhones haven’t come with free earbuds in half a decade. Is it a lack of care? A difference in expectations over the use of public space? Or is it just that feeds are so addictive that people have to have a fix, even when they lack the proper resources? Maybe playing videos out loud in an enclosed space is the same as pulling on a vape—your body automatically reaches for a hit before you’ve even realized what you’re doing.
When I got on the C train, another man, older and in construction gear, was already scrolling out loud, so I leaned against the opposite side doors and joined in. This time, instead of the self-consciousness that came from being rude alone, I felt the freedom of righteous spite. A few people made eye contact with me with a familiar size-’em-up glare, trying to figure out if I was unwell, dangerous, or just plain rude. I felt like I was daring them to say something so I could respond, “Why don’t you ask him to stop if it bothers you so much?” But no one said anything to me. I got off before he did.
Later, I took the G train north to band practice and sat across from a tourist couple with a bike between them, watching a series of cartoonishly sound-effected French-language comedy videos and laughing uproariously the whole time. Instead of glaring at them, I just joined in with my own feed, guitar between manspread legs and volume up loud. I was too in my own head about the process of absorbing and transmitting spite to even focus on the videos I scrolled past. Nonetheless, every new audio my feed presented felt like a smirk in the direction of that French couple. Not that they noticed.
To listen through my phone’s inefficient speaker on loud public transit, I have to turn the volume up all the way and hold it VR-headset-level close, which deepened the immersion. As I watched my slate of curated videos (a woman monologuing about birds, a middle-aged man inventing new catchphrases, a jazz guitar transcription, a Homer Simpson fan cam, and at least two stultifyingly hot anime cosplayers), I felt myself getting drawn in just as I would if I was scrolling in bed. When I reached my stop, I was so sucked into the quicksand of my For You page that I almost forgot about my journey and destination entirely, to say nothing of the people in the space around me. These feeds are so perfectly constructed that they feel like they are already embedded into our brains, which makes it difficult to recognize the fact that someone else can see (and hear) them, too.
On my next trip, I ended up seated next to a young man with the accent of a native New Yorker on a packed Friday night train. As our train was held at the station, he started scrolling through TikTok, so I took it as a cue to do exactly the same. Most of the time, I can melt into my own content, but the two of us were wedged so close to each other in the narrow blue-booth A-train two seat that each time the one scrolled to a new video, the other heard it.
Whenever the train went underground, our feeds stopped briefly, giving us time to quietly side-eye each other until we reached the next station and the next video began to autoplay. I think he knew I was doing this to make a point, but neither of us were going to say anything. We would let the TikToks talk. We were in a synchronized duel, Feed vs. Feed, his A.I.-narrated cave-diving video against my A.I.-narrated serial-killer video in a fight for dominance. And I was determined to win, for once in my life, against someone whom I perceived as a bigger jerk than me. (Our fellow traingoers, I’m sure, would be hard-pressed to choose.)
The train pulled in at West 4th and my compatriot hip-checked me on his way out, leaving me the lone, loud victor in the car. Not that I could really enjoy the quiet. The unfortunate truth about playing TikToks out loud—and social violation in general—is that responding by participating yourself is satisfying, addictive, and sometimes even a way you get to win. But it isn’t constructive. And by the end, it left me alone on a train, the only one getting glares, without a chance to explain that I wasn’t being an asshole in isolation, but in response.
I wish that this whole experience made me more accepting or more able to ignore this kind of stuff. It hasn’t. I still get annoyed when I hear feeds in public, and I believe that the initial decision to violate the social contract requires an exceptional lack of social grace.
But while the initial decision to be a jerk comes from within, the specific obnoxiousness of this phenomenon is a direct reflection of the hyperpersonalized algorithms that these massive companies feed us. Each time someone scrolls out loud, it is uniquely annoying—not just because I have to hear their hyperspecific personalized feed, but because they jeopardize my chance to listen to my own hyperspecific personalized feed. Maybe things would be different if there were less difference. I might not have tried to TikTok battle that guy if he was watching the same serial-killer video as me. I could have just watched over his shoulder.
After my nemesis left the train, I kept scrolling out loud until a woman with glasses gave me a real teacher-y stink eye. I closed out of TikTok. Maybe it was time to look for noise-canceling headphones.
