look me in the eyes right fucking now

The video is composed of 'eye contact challenge' tiktoks. Social Media platforms are under regulatory pressure to censor explicit content, and so creators have to try to find ways around this - creating a video that won't get tagged by the machine looking at it, but could still produce some kind of response in a warm-blooded human. These different ways of circumventing machinic intervention spawn their own trends, creating a weird feedback loop of virality. The smartphone itself becomes infrastructure for this kind of engagement. Held in one hand, demanding sustained visual attention while leaving the body otherwise unoccupied, the device's material form creates ideal conditions for masturbatory viewing - a fact algorithms exploit by privileging content that generates passive engagement

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