A Hebei factory's TikTok fantasy journey
2024-08-15
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Editor's note: A glycine factory in Hebei Province unexpectedly became popular on TikTok and was given a strange value by many foreign netizens. This article analyzes how glycine has developed into an abstract Internet culture.
Just as you might imagine, Donghua Jinlong is a factory. The things it produces are not close to real life. It produces glycine - yes, real industrial-grade glycine, which is an industrial compound used to make cosmetic raw materials, feed and food additives.This factory from Hebei established its own overseas TikTok account on December 4, 2023, probably with the purpose of exporting abroad, but it became a subculture icon in a field that it should not have been involved in.In the fanatical comment section, some netizens said that they would only buy glycine produced by Donghua Jinlong in their lifetime, and some people asked to buy peripheral products printed with the company logo - even though they didn't know what glycine was.Comments from Donghua Jinlong official account: "Fanatical"The hymn version of Donghua Jinlong GlycineLater, TikTok blogger @robbisfilm shot a mocking video in a parody style, in which he exaggeratedly praised the "excellent quality" of Donghua Jinlong Glycine and brewed food-grade glycine in a cup and drank it all in one gulp.The sophisticated editing techniques, brainwash-like repetitive loops, and highly excited state of performance completely reproduce the most popular product promotion video routine on TikTok.
Blogger @citiesbydiana took the "glycine fans" to interpret the assembly department video posted by Donghua Jinlong Company on TikTok frame by frame, and even found out the model and origin of the same machine on the assembly line.There is also a TikTok blogger who joked that only in the golden age of their parents' generation could they drink drinking water with glycine added for the "body-strengthening" effect, directly raising the status of glycine water to the level of the Coco Tree coconut juice that we Chinese have been drinking since childhood.
Donghua Jinlong Glycine as a "childhood memory" and a symbol of privilegeFaced with such crazy enthusiasm of the American people, Donghua Jinlong was not idle either. They knew that they were popular, but they might not understand why. So they followed the Internet hot topics, made some cat dancing videos, and followed the trend to send out "fan gift packs".Glycine peripheral canvas bag, very similar to the ones your grandparents would carry when they go out to play cardsDonghua Jinlong keeps up with the cat meme and unboxing trendsBloggers filmed their own reactions to unpacking products with the same enthusiasm as they did when unboxing trendy brands. The husband of blogger @harrietdur filmed his wife showing off the Jinlong fan T-shirt, baseball cap, thank-you card, and (most importantly, what fans need most) the free product brochure, but in the end they still didn’t understand what this “jinlong” was.The most important product manualThe frequency of Donghua Jinlong terriers is shocking. In a video spoofing Biden, President Biden talks about guaranteeing the "glycine freedom" of the American people in front of a background of pink hearts that are constantly being launched."Donghua Jinlong already has high-quality industrial-grade glycine at the most reasonable price"So far, Donghua Jinlong's glycine has become a collage element that constitutes Internet performance art.TikTok has invested countless manpower and material resources to develop an algorithm recommendation mechanism, but it actually pushed an advertisement for industrial-grade glycine, which most people have probably never heard of or will not buy, to countless users' mobile phones. This video, which should have been swiped away within 1 second, was given strange meaning and value by netizens, and even made the company that produced it popular. This in itself is an Internet miracle.How abstract is glycine's path to godhood?
The main content of Donghua Jinlong’s advertisement is very simple: showcasing the company’s production process and product qualifications. The classic red and yellow gradient color scheme and word art bring back memories of middle school information technology homework; the photography style also jumps back and forth between retro and avant-garde, with panoramic aerial shots of the factory, conference room scenes, and fixed shots on several assembly lines... It has a flavor of "News Broadcast"; the PPT-style video switching is skillful, full of surging emotions, accompanied by a standard mechanical male voice reciting affectionately and passionate background music; plus the company logo flashing in the upper left corner - this video looks like an overseas advertisement for an old-fashioned company.This style of painting exudes an inappropriate and weird temperament on TikTok today.There are already enough strange things on the Internet. E-girls continue to sell their own bath water on TikTok, pharmaceutical companies continue to promote retatrutide, a special weight loss treatment with unknown side effects, and middle-class white women show off their collections of colorful Stanley cups... These things may be of some use, but with the help of recommendation algorithms, community operations and brainwashing advertisements, TikTok can commercialize and package everything and sell it all over the world, even glycine used in industrial production is no exception.White women's standard StanleyWater cup and mobile phone, combined!The reactions of some netizens who pretended to yearn for glycine constituted an irony of the black box of algorithms and various marketing behaviors on how algorithms implant consumption intentions into users' minds.Most abstract secondary creation videos are based on parodying the consumer spectacle of American society. Bloggers use a variety of abstract methods, but the key point is that they imitate ordinary things in the strangest and most incredible scenes. For example, drinking glycine directly with water, praising its "deliciousness" and nutritional value.Mocking consumption may be the most understandable part of the "glycine" phenomenon. Later, many netizens would suddenly mention Donghua Jinlong when discussing serious issues such as American security and racial discrimination. Netizen @steveoris joked, "The systemic injustice faced by the black community in the United States now is all due to the government's failure to import glycine produced by Donghua Jinlong." I believe that you, like me, can't understand the logic of this sentence at all, and it doesn't make sense.And perhaps, the sense of meaninglessness produced by Donghua Jinlong is a natural narrative hook, allowing netizens to accurately convey their own emptiness and powerlessness when faced with unsolvable systemic problems. Because they are too powerless, they have to find a roundabout way to save the country, dissociating the original meaning into madness and funny - this is also considered by many to be the essence of "Internet abstract culture."The New York Times commented that some of Donghua Jinlong's secondary creation videos were tagged with the corecore hashtag, which means that the Internet emoticon culture has rapidly entered the "Dadaism" era, but readers do not understand how a glycine advertisement uploaded in 2023, representing China's advanced industrial level, is related to a weird and abstract aesthetic style."Core" is a suffix for a classic aesthetic style, such as "dreamcore" with a hazy texture, "pinkcore" based on various strange cat emoticons, and "weirdcore" made up of low-quality images that gives people a sense of confusion and alienation.Some Donghua Jinlong videos on TikTok are tagged with "corecore"Then you may ask: Everything else is easy to understand, but what does this word "corecore" that is so confusing to understand refer to?The most classic corecore video on TikTok is only 50 seconds long and is themed "wake up". At the beginning of the video, the TikTok recommendation stream that is scrolling faster and faster blurs into a residual image, replaced by a hand carefully touching the wall and a video from "The Truman Show". Images of people buried in their phones alternate with clips of Zuckerberg talking about the concept of the "metaverse", and finally freeze on a podcast clip talking about the connection between people.The corecore video "prison of your own" created by @highenquiries edits together many video clips on TikTok, suggesting that people are immersed in the convenient world created by modern technology and algorithms, just like being in the Matrix in "The Matrix", gradually unable to distinguish the boundary between reality and virtuality.Columnist Kieran Press-Reynolds traces the Internet life of "corecore". These videos, which are about one minute long, are often a series of unrelated video clips edited together in a chaotic montage, such as: the classic soundtrack of Blade Runner, speeches and interviews of intellectuals, funny dances, inexplicable laughter and silence, old movies and low-quality game clips.Corecore attempts to trigger people’s loneliness and strangeness. It is like the constantly collapsing “everything bagel” in “The Blink of an Eye”. By splicing and cutting together movies, speeches, and random video clips, it uses chaos itself to present the meaning of chaos.The Donghua Jinlong factory, which seems so far away from TikTok's overseas users, produced a rough-textured and vague video precisely because it is insensitive to the Internet and amateur in video production. When this video, which seems to be from the past, was intercepted by social networks, it became the core of the core that is meaningless enough to perfectly convey the sensory experience brought about by the meaninglessness itself.And the factory in Shijiazhuang, China, and what glycine is, may not be important to the internet — what’s important is the feeling of “sharing reality” by recognizing meaningless moments together.Editor | Caicai, roast chicken• 作为数据驱动的互联网内容科技公司，新榜提供新媒体内容营销和企业服务系列产品，助力中国企业数字化内容资产获取与管理，服务于内容产业，以内容服务产业。• 我们的客户既包括腾讯、字节跳动、阿里巴巴、中国平安、比亚迪、京东、通威、贝壳、宝洁、欧莱雅、联合利华、雅诗兰黛、迪士尼等头部品牌，也包括正在蓬勃成长的中小企业、新兴品牌和MCN机构。面向企业的内容化组织建设，新榜提供从公域流量募集分发到私域内容运营建设的各项所需。• “新媒体，找新榜”是我们的使命。凭借全面稳定的新媒体内容数据产品和企业服务能力，新榜被评为国家级高新技术企业、上海市专精特新企业、上海数字广告领军企业，曾荣获“全国内容科技创新创业大赛一等奖” 、“上海文化企业十佳”、“中国广告新媒体贡献年度大奖”等称号，拥有多个传播评估监测专利。浏览器搜索新榜官网，获取更多新媒体动向。
