The New Yorker:

How the viral TikToks of a Chinese glycine factory elucidate our increasingly chaotic digital environment.

By Kyle Chayka

Last December, a factory in the Chinese province of Hebei called Donghua Jinlong posted a marketing video to TikTok showing aerial clips of its campus set to a jaunty tune. A caption proudly declared, in English, “Since 1979, Glycine comes from here.” Glycine is a niche industrial product, used as an additive in certain packaged foods and in chemical processes like pesticide production. It is, in other words, an unlikely candidate for a social-media campaign, yet the factory’s account kept giving the molecule the star treatment, like it was some sort of chemical influencer. The videos became more complex and ambitious. They featured bouncing animated text, A.I.-generated voice-overs, and so-called retention-editing tactics such as blurred transitions between clips. “A bunch of food grade glycine is being packed up feel free to inquire,” one post announced, solicitously. I stumbled upon the Donghua Jinlong videos in my TikTok feed late one night in March. The encounter felt a little bit like watching after-hours paid programming on TV: first bizarre, then vaguely amusing, then addictively hilarious. I almost wanted to place an order.

In the past few months, Donghua Jinlong’s videos have spiralled into an online joke. A TikTok from early March, explaining the uses of industrial-grade glycine and boasting of the company’s thirty-one patents, collected more than three hundred thousand views and many hundreds of ironically enthusiastic responses. Some commenters begged for a line of official Donghua Jinlong T-shirts. TikTok users began promoting Donghua Jinlong’s products of their own accord. One woman with only a few hundred followers posted a faux personality test asking, “Which glycine are you?”; it got more than two hundred and seventy thousand views. Another account, @gangstasportivik, posted factory footage overlaid with videos of the minor celebrity actor and “Red Scare” podcaster Dasha Nekrasova, with an A.I.-generated voice-over in Nekrasova’s reedy timbre extolling Donghua Jinlong’s glycine. Others recorded personal testimonials about how glycine sustained their American childhoods. Appreciative comments spilled over into different Chinese factories’ TikTok accounts. Donghua Jinlong, for its part, told the Washington Post that “going viral in America” was never the intention; a representative for the company confessed that she was more puzzled than proud of the ad campaign’s runaway success.

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