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Social-media platforms’ attempts to break into commerce have largely flopped. Will TikTok Shop fare any better?

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again The very common, very harmful thing well-meaning parents do The real issue in the UAW strike The Senate’s deep and dirty secret

“Silicon Valley Math”

A chamoy-pickle kit for $17.98; 352 sold so far. An ab roller wheel for $24.29; 8,592 sold. A one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exerciser for 89 cents; 81 sold. Such is a sampling of the items featured on my TikTok Shop tab on Wednesday morning.

Earlier this week, TikTok Shop, a feature that allows audiences to purchase a baffling array of items through a stand-alone Shop tab and from videos on their feed, rolled out to TikTok users in the United States. Now many of the app’s livestreams are “QVC-like places where sellers are nonstop pitching products to live audiences,” as my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce recently wrote. TikTok’s latest move is an attempt to shift the app’s identity—and a sign of the company’s confidence in the loyalty of its users. Yes, we can riddle feeds with often-ludicrous product promotions, the Shop feature seems to be saying, and people will still keep coming back for more.

TikTok is the latest in a series of prominent platforms that have tried to pivot to e-commerce. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, and even Google have tried to launch shopping functions, with varying—though generally low—degrees of success. “Every advertising company tries its hand at commerce, because they think that there’s some huge prize to be had if you can actually own the transaction and know what people are purchasing,” Sucharita Kodali, a retail analyst at Forrester, told me. But though the potential gains are tantalizing, it’s hard to pull off: Instagram booted its shopping feature from the navigation bar and shut down its live-shopping feature earlier this year. Facebook similarly shut down its livestream-shopping function last year. Live-shopping services on YouTube have also struggled to gain traction.

Platforms moving to e-commerce need to build product pages and figure out details such as order fulfillment, secure checkout processes, customer service, and other logistics. That’s a lot for tech companies whose primary expertise lies in other areas. “It’s never worked for anyone else,” Kodali said. “Why would it work for [TikTok]?” (A spokesperson for TikTok told me that there are upwards of 200,000 sellers on TikTok Shop, and more than 100,000 registered creators, but declined to share more information beyond what’s posted on the company’s press site.)

American customers, by and large, don’t seem all that eager to shop on social-media apps instead of on trusted e-commerce websites. In China, where TikTok’s parent company is based, shopping via livestream is a huge trend—an estimated $500 billion in goods were reportedly sold on streams last year. But just because shopping on social media is big in China doesn’t mean it will translate to American audiences; Kodali noted that Chinese e-commerce trends do not have a track record of blowing up in the United States. And TikTok’s own norms may make commercial activity a hard sell. Caroline told me today that, although the app’s culture of authenticity may help some users sell things, “you could see shopping being a bit of an odd fit: This app was supposed to be where I watched relatable videos from everyday people, and now they’re trying to make money off of me?”

Still, Caroline told me, “people spend a tremendous amount of time on TikTok, and I don’t see them quitting en masse over TikTok Shop. I think it’s more of a question of how much users will tolerate, and how successful it’ll be in the long run.” In-app shopping, she added, is a “white whale” for social platforms.

Commerce and social media have long been intertwined: Much of social-media influencers’ role boils down to recommending products. But audiences follow these influencers because they trust them and because these people have a track record of offering useful or interesting information. On TikTok Shop, meanwhile, almost anyone can start selling things. I currently have five followers, and perhaps one dayI too could apply to set up an account to start hawking one-piece professional V-shape-face double-chin-removal exercisers. (I probably wouldn’t do that.) And some reporters have already identified safety and integrity concerns with the feature.

If other apps have failed to grow e-commerce businesses and there doesn’t seem to be a strong consumer appetite for these services in the U.S., why is TikTok trying to get into the retail game? Part of it might be a simple grasp at big numbers, combined with a healthy dose of the hubris that powers the tech world. American retail is a multitrillion-dollar industry: If tech executives are engaging in what Kodali called “Silicon Valley math”—calculating the total size of a market and estimating the percentage of it they can capture—they may extrapolate big revenues. And to large tech companies, it may seem relatively easy and worthwhile to create a checkout module and order pages if it means getting even a small slice of the retail pie. Social-media companies have a long history of foisting new products that they hope will prove good for their business on users who did not ask for them—consider the metaverse.

Tech companies have been throwing spaghetti at the proverbial wall for years, seeking out new revenue streams where they can. TikTok Shop may be another such investment: a grasp at revenue just in case it works. Social-media apps are always mimicking features from other apps. Instagram is trying to be like Twitter and Snapchat; LinkedIn is emulating TikTok; Facebook is trying to be like everyone. And TikTok seems to be the latest app trying to become Amazon.

Related:

TikTok is doing something very un-TikTok. The endless cycle of social media

Today’s News

Tropical-storm warnings are in place for millions of people in New England and Canada as Hurricane Lee approaches. In remarks from the White House, President Joe Biden expressed respect for the United Auto Workers strike and emphasized that record profits for auto companies have not been “shared fairly” with workers. Corpses are decaying under rubble in the Libyan city of Derna, where at least 10,000 people are believed to be missing due to devastating floods.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Gal Beckerman asks whether we should still read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and discusses the book’s moral complexities with Clint Smith.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Don’t Let Love Take Over Your Life

By Faith Hill

If you have a romantic partner, maybe you’ve noticed that you two spend an awful lot of time together—and that you haven’t seen other people quite as much as you’d like. Or if you’re single (and many of your friends aren’t), you might have gotten the eerie feeling that I sometimes do: that you’re in a deserted town, as if you woke one morning to find the houses all empty, the stores boarded up. Where’d everyone go?

Either way, that feeling might not just be in your head. Kaisa Kuurne, a sociologist at the University of Helsinki, told me she was “a little bit shocked” when she started mapping Finnish adults’ relationships for a 2012 study, investigating whom subjects felt close to and how they interacted day to day. Subjects who lived with a romantic partner seemed to have receded into their coupledom.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

In another fascinating addition to the annals of Sam Bankman-Fried, my friend and former colleague David Yaffe-Bellany reports in The New York Times that while on house arrest, the FTX founder crafted a set of byzantine documents explaining himself, which he gave to the crypto influencer Tiffany Fong for reasons unclear. Bankman-Fried’s apologia took the form of a 15,000-word, 70-page unpublished Twitter thread, replete with links to Alicia Keys and Rihanna music videos as well as jabs at former colleagues; another file featured a screenshot from the Christopher Nolan movie Inception. A favorite detail of mine from the article: Apparently, Bankman-Fried told Fong that his parents were installing a pickleball court for him while he was on house arrest.

— Lora

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

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Do you find yourself constantly closing your eyes and seeing marble? Do thoughts of Caesar and chariot races and a nascent republic punctuate your daily goings?

All roads lead to Rome—and apparently so do all male thoughts. Across social media, women have been encouraged to ask the men in their life how often they think about the Roman empire and to record the answer. To their surprise (recounted in videos posted all over TikTok, Instagram, and more), many men purport to think about the Roman empire quite a bit. One reveals that his iPhone background is Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii, a painting depicting a Roman legend. “Men Are Thinking About the Roman Empire All the Time” has quickly become a meme of its own. Even those who don’t cop to this behavior still sometimes do it. “Probably not a lot, why?” one confused man replies when asked, before admitting thathe thinks about the Romans three or four times a month. “The Roman empire was a very big part of history,” he says defensively.

Presumably some of this is performative, an attempt to project oneself as the sort of history bro who can mansplain Catullus. These men could surely learn something from Cullen Murphy. An Atlantic editor at large and the author of the 2007 book Are We Rome?, Murphy has spent decades thinking about the Roman empire. His work focuses on all of the analogies between ancient Rome and the modern United States, and what, if anything, the analogies portend. “The comparisons, of course, can be facile,” he wrote in a 2021 magazine story reopening the question. “Still, I am not immune to preoccupation with the Roman past.”

Over the phone this morning, he explained further: “Personally, I can’t get enough of it,” he said. “It’s just such a fascinating topic. One of the great things about having a bit of a fixation on this topic is that it makes me very easy to buy for.” We discussed why the Roman empire still matters, the appropriate amount of time we should be thinking about it, and his expansive collection of Roman artifacts.

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: I wanted to start with the obvious question, which is: How often do you think about the Roman empire personally?

Cullen Murphy: I think about the Roman empire all the time, probably three or four times a day when something comes up, whether it’s in the news or something that I see. I’m definitely in the camp of people who can’t get it out of their minds.

The thing about the history of Rome is that it goes on for such a long period of time that you can find parallels for almost anything—even contradictory parallels. It’s a huge cornucopia of examples.

Let’s start with politics. If you’re reading The New York Times or The Washington Post about political infighting and backstabbing and scandal and so on, well, Rome is just full of that stuff. Also, there’s a lot of Rome that still survives; it’s all around us. The letters of our alphabet are Roman letters. A huge proportion of the words we use come from Latin. If you go to church, the building that you’re in often has a lot of resemblance to Roman buildings. If you’re in Washington, you can’t look around the city without thinking, Oh, I see, this was modeled on Rome. And every day brings some important anniversary. Just a few days ago was the anniversary of the battle of Teutoburg Forest, one of Rome’s greatest military defeats.

Nyce: What do you think the appropriate amount of time one should spend thinking about Rome is?

Murphy: Well …

Nyce: Are you a biased source on this question?

Murphy: Yes, I’m probably not a good person to ask. Personally, I can’t get enough of it. It’s just such a fascinating topic. One of the great things about having a bit of a fixation on this topic is that it makes me very easy to buy for.

Nyce: How much Roman paraphernalia do you have?

Murphy: A lot. People in my family used to say that I was very hard to buy for. But then I gently nudged them in the direction of thinking about Rome. And so now when there’s some significant event, like a birthday, friends and family will give me a Roman coin or a little piece of Roman sculpture or a terracotta oil lamp or the small bits of lead used in slings. I’m looking at my table right now. I just had a birthday, and my wife gave me a tiny Roman bust of Eros.

Nyce: Are you surprised by how many men purport to think about the Roman empire all the time?

Murphy: I am a little bit surprised. I’m not surprised that men are more likely to think about it than women, if that reporting is true.

Over time, this subject has been presented as gendered, though it is not inherently gendered. A lot of the best recent work about Rome has to do with diverse cultures and about women. But if you look at the broad sweep of historical writing, from ancient times onwards, most of it was done by men. Most of it is about men. And much of the subject matter is about military affairs, which has also historically been something that men have gravitated to more than women.

Nyce: If someone were to dedicate themselves to the daily practice of thinking about Rome, what aspects of Rome would you suggest they be thinking about?

Murphy: I’ll mention two things. The first one has to do with a very direct lesson for American society. And it goes back to a conversation that I had with an eminent historian of Rome named Ramsay McMullen. I asked him what I thought at the time was a silly question: If you had to sum up the history of Rome in one sentence, what would it be? And he said immediately, without having to think, “Fewer have more.” He was pointing to the enormous degree of inequality in every way, whether in terms of power or money or freedom, that existed in Rome. I’ve never forgotten that answer.

The second thing has to do with the way in which people talk about the fall of Rome. The wistfulness that you sometimes hear today is along the lines of “How unfortunate that this mighty empire collapsed!” But I don’t see it that way. Very few of us would be happy living in a world that was run the way Rome was run. Here is a society where slavery was baked into the social structure. There was nothing remotely like democracy or freedom as we know it, or rights as we understand them. We are living in a world that is fortunate that it is not Rome.

Nyce: If someone is not currently thinking about Rome all the time, what would go in your thinking-about-Rome starter pack?

Murphy: The historian Tacitus wrote histories of Rome at a certain period. His writing is like a combination of All the President’s Men, by Woodward and Bernstein, and The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper. It’s just riveting, on-the-scene accounts of political warfare. Delicious to read.

Another good place to jump in is Suetonius, who wrote a book called The Twelve Caesars—mini-biographies of 12 emperors. They could have been written yesterday. They’re filled with anecdotes and sharp personality portraits and conversations.

If someone wanted to delve into Roman history from scratch, not reading original ancient sources but reading other books, it’s hard to rival Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, just because his style is so extraordinarily rich. For a much more modern take, try someone like Tom Holland; his new book, Pax, is the last volume of a trilogy. His books are beautifully written and great narrative history. For a different cup of tea, there’s Robert Harris. He has written a trilogy of novels all based on the life of Cicero. They are wonderful, wonderful books.

Nyce: Is there any part of you that thinks that our obsession with Rome is a little overblown, culturally? Or a little Eurocentric even? Have we written enough books on Rome?

Murphy: Well, sure. The world is a big place and history is a big place. And of course there are many, many other subjects that can profitably be explored. But I would say one thing: In some ways, the study of ancient times is hard to define narrowly as being simply Eurocentric, because the world that is being described is in fact a culture that we don’t know. It is as unfamiliar to an American as any existing culture in the world might be today.

Nyce: I imagine you talk about Rome with a lot of people.

Murphy: No, I think they’ve sort of stopped talking to me about it.

Nyce: Really? People avoid talking about it with you?

Murphy: No, I actually try to avoid talking about it myself. I don’t want to be a Rome bore. But sometimes I can’t help myself.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield says Washington is committed to multilateralism ahead of high-level UN General Assembly talks.