When Britney appears in her red latex jumpsuit, do you see her wearing a headset? Picture the music video for Britney Spears’ song Oops!.I Did It Again. That brings us to an example of a new Mandela Effect, which it seems came to our collective attention this month. They quickly make the point that if we do not even know the spelling of JCPenney (there’s that second E) or Double Stuf Oreos (same stuff, sans homogeneous digraph) then for all we know, a goose did score Blade Runner 2049. Then, they present a duo or trio of Mandela Effects - never more, there isn’t time - and express gleeful dismay that we do not know our own reality. Many videos begin: “For those of you who don’t know, this is Nelson Mandela. Typically, in these videos, a narrator speaks over a TikTok sound called Blade Runner 2049 by a creator named Synthwave Goose (whether this piece of music was made as an aspirational score is a mystery, it doesn’t matter, it sounds like watching Stranger Things while Lizzo practices flute in an adjacent room). There’s at least another 102 million tagged with variations of the name. There are, at the time of writing, 444.3 million views on videos with the hashtag #mandelaeffect on TikTok. But the newest ones, discovered recently, feel like a true “side” of TikTok: an active remembering of a generational misremembering. Mandela Effects from the last decade include the revelation that the surname of the beloved children’s bear family the Berenstain Bears is not spelled Berenstein, or that Rich Uncle Pennybags, aka the Monopoly Man, does not wear a monocle. The Mandela Effect is not a new concept, it was coined by a blogger named Fiona Broome more than a decade ago when she learned that many other people shared her erroneous belief that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the 1980s (he died in 2013). One of the most alarmist and entertaining sides of TikTok is Mandela Effect TikTok. The brain straws up serotonin when a TikTok, as they say on TikTok, “unlocks a memory.” It’s the best thing in the world to remember things together.Īnd just as potent is forgetting things together. Like Sky Dancers toys, anti-Barney playground dogma, stinginess with Hubba Bubba Bubble Tape gum and the intricacies of Hide and Seek (the Imogen Heap song, not the game). One of my favorite parts of being on TikTok is sharing videos that capture shared memories with my siblings. Without posturing or naming, without even self-reflecting, you are greeted with interests and instincts you would not otherwise organize for your own pleasure. The involuntary aspect of landing on a side makes identification with that side euphoric. A “side” is a repetition, a path, a belonging, like a shared memory. The sides illuminate that you find carpet cleaning soothing, that you have a parent who does not believe in therapy, that you like tiny frogs, your preschool was maybe a cult, or that you miss the clicky clicks of old cell phone keys. The sides of TikTok you land on reveal if you’re gay, or anti-racist, or from Massachusetts, if you have avoidant attachment style, or would shave your head. Within a few hours of scrolling, maybe once you’ve scrolled the height of the last office building you entered, TikTok will suggest you to you, and as you confirm your own biases, your scroll molds into a set of sides. TikTok has sides, and like all of us, it has good sides and bad sides: replicated specificities that we and others experience as moral or immoral.
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