The latest status symbol? Your home screen.

Hello from The Goods' resident internet culture reporter, [Rebecca Jennings](! On Tuesdays, I'm using this space to update you all on what's been going on in the world of TikTok. Is there something you want to see more of? Less of? Different of? Email me at rebecca.jennings@vox.com. There was a time not so long ago when buying an Apple product meant buying into a very specific aesthetic, one designed by men in glass-walled offices who liked to think of themselves as high-minded futurists. Their vision for that future was almost always the same: sleek, minimalist, and above all, simple. But according to my TikTok feed over the past weekend, iPhones are now bastions of complex personal micro-identities. “How to make your iPhone home screen aesthetic AF!” begins a [video tutorial]( with 3 million “Likes.” On Twitter, users boast screenshots of their own creations, from [Studio Ghibli](to [cottagecore](, [Mean Girls](to [“Katy Perry in the ‘Never Really Over’ video](,” and[“dirtbag Shia LaBeouf”]( (a personal favorite). To do so, they’re using customizable widgets with Apple’s refreshed “Shortcuts” app as well as other downloadable tools like Widgetsmith (The Verge has a [good explainer]( on how to wield them). Used particularly artfully, the effects can turn the home screen of your phone into an ode to [Animal Crossing]( or what [BTS would look like]( in a late ’90s teen magazine — far removed from the traditional grid of rounded-edge squares with company logos. It’s not that suddenly a bunch of kids discovered a way to jailbreak the Apple system, it’s because up until a few days ago, Apple didn’t really allow for anything like this. The latest software update, iOS 14, which was announced back in June and became available to download on September 16, offers something that until now the company has been staunchly resistant to: personalization. “Simple design is dead. Welcome to Apple’s era of customization,” declared a [Fast Company headline]( from earlier this summer. Perhaps we can expand that to the rest of the internet: On Instagram, users are no longer restricted by the handful of color correction or face warping filters built by the brand itself — [as of 2019](, anyone can add their own augmented reality (AR) filters to the app’s database. Meanwhile, TikTok has succeeded because it allows users to share sounds and build off of each others’ videos in a way no social media platform has ever done before. You can even make the case that by doubling the maximum characters from 140 to 280 in 2017, Twitter encouraged its users to get a little weirder on their timelines. All of these little changes are giving us greater control over what our digital lives look like, however superficially. (Privacy protections, for example, remain fully in the hands of the corporation.) It’s a delightful pivot toward the mid-2000s digital golden age of custom Buddy AIM profiles and designing your Myspace layout while accidentally learning to code in the process. Early social media platforms and blogs, for the most part, intended for users to express themselves with their tools: Tumblr and WordPress allowed people to tinker with the code to alter their appearance in infinite ways, for example, as opposed to Facebook, which restricted users to a sober palate of medium blue and sans-serif fonts. Though there’s been some debate around who should be bothered to make their home screen adorable (one [rather controversial tweet read]( “im not customizing my home screen i am 24 years old”), I decided that it would make a perfect side activity while I half-watch 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days season two. So last night, I spent 20 minutes watching TikTok tutorials and customizing my home screen to look vaguely autumncore, with deep greens, oranges, and heavily Tumblr-ized images of old books. Is this a fully pointless way to spend 20 minutes that were already being spent utterly pointlessly? Yes. Will I spend another 20 minutes changing my home screen aesthetic to “December in a Prague Christmas market” in roughly one month? Yes! TikTok in the news 🗞️ - Great news for this newsletter: TikTok is officially not going away! (Was it ever actually going to? I’m not convinced.) But either way, Trump [gave his “blessing”]( to a deal between TikTok, Oracle, and Walmart to create a new company called TikTok Global, to be headquartered in the US. - But there are still all sorts of [questions that remain](, even about the deal itself. Though Trump has portrayed the deal as an outright sale, ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, will still retain an [80 percent stake](. Then later on Monday [Oracle claimed]( ByteDance would have no ownership whatsoever? I have no idea what’s going on and this will probably have changed by the time you read this! - Yet as Shira Ovide at the New York Times [points out,]( there’s a bigger problem here: This could have been a really great moment to interrogate tech companies’ influence on the American public and the government’s responsibility to intervene. Instead, we basically learned … nothing. - There is a firefighter on TikTok debunking conspiracies about the West Coast fires. [He is also very hot](. - Speaking of hot people on TikTok, [OnlyFans stars are using it]( to grow their audiences and make even more money on the app. - Former Goods reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany [wrote about Mooptopia](, the queen of alt TikTok. I love this part: “‘TikTok is so focused on goofiness, and all of the other platforms aren’t,’ Pomerantz told me. ‘That’s interesting for girls. There’s a lot more freedom around what you can get away with.’ Girls have an inclination to worship other girls, which has led entire fandoms to pop up around even nonsensical videos such as Mooptopia’s.” One last thing 💖 I’m obsessed with this POV meme where the mean popular girl forgets her gym clothes and sweet-talks her way out of class. It started in [Korean](, and now there are versions in [English](, [French](, and [Spanish]( (and every one of them rhymes!). I never want it to end! Manage your [email preferences](, or [unsubscribe]( to stop receiving emails from Vox Media. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved.