Is TarotTok Repackaging Patriarchal Messaging?

Words: Charlotte Rickards

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“If you’re watching this, it’s meant for you; no hashtags, no captions.” A couple of tarot cards slide between the manicured fingers of a TikTok Tarot reader. Then, flack, flack, flack, the cards hit the table. “Three, three, three, on the timer,” she says. Anticipation lingers.  

A card flies out of the deck. It’s picked up and flipped toward the camera: it’s The Fool, upside down. “Someone”, she notes, “is reminiscing on past times with you.” Six minutes pass and you’re still watching; you barely notice. You’re on your own in your bedroom, gazing into the blue pixelated glows of an iPhone screen, along with the 1.4 million others who watched that same video.

This is the strange, lonely subculture of TarotTok — where algorithmically-led tarot readings are currently raking in two billion TikTok views. Where a reader can set up whatever fantasy they think you will stay for. Yes, your person misses you. Yes, you will enter into a ‘state of abundance.” However you gaze into your phone, it will gaze back at you. 
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

TarotTok encourages a kind of passive victimhood, where things just ‘happen’ to you. It’s a kind of digital learned helplessness. Its algorithmic bent means it’s actually preferable for you to remain addicted to these fallacies and not resolve them though — because if you do, that’s when you’ll stop watching. 

But doesn’t this all sound a bit familiar? Suspending your rational thinking and relying instead on the guidance of an external authority? The idea of following your ‘spirit guide’ turns awry when you consider the people who are really guiding this app — ByteDance, a male-founded multi-conglomerate company with a gender pay gap issue — who owns TikTok and a document called TikTok Algo 101, that statistically bets that your retention rate will be higher with these delusion-feeding videos. 

TarotTok is part of this attention economy — conjuring fixed, predicted futures (especially with a female-heavy audience) that by its nature, cannot exist. It also encourages us to outsource our own critical thinking skills and introspection to a third-party company who are in the business of selling ads right back to us. 

TikTok isn’t the first powerful tech company interested in making algorithmic predictions on relationship statuses in order to sell us stuff. In 2018, Facebook filed a patent application, which discussed the potential to predict whether a user was in a romantic relationship using information such as how many times you visit another user’s page, the number of people in your profile picture, and the percentage of your friends of a different gender.

“TarotTok encourages a kind of passive victimhood, where things just ‘happen’ to you.”

Google predicts your relationship status to personalise your ads (you can find it in ‘My Ad Centre’ if you have a Google account) which justifies this on the basis that: ‘ads for dating apps might be a great match when you’re single, but not when you’re married’. But why should we allow Google to make the default assumption for us that a single person might want to date and receive targeted ads? Considering also the latest Bumble ad campaign flop — appearing to mock celibacy — it’s uncontroversial to say that such algorithmic-predictions encourage us to conform to patriarchal norms and thinking. 

‘You are seeing this for a reason, you can check below, there’s no hashtags’ implores another Tarot reader on the app, suggesting I should check the empty caption box as ‘proof’ of their predictive powers over my interiority. 

This specific kind of algorithmically-invoked spiritualism ‘grips people in a way that other hooks may not,’ explains Dr Kelley Cotter, Assistant Professor at Pennsylvania State University, whose work focuses on the social and ethical dimensions of algorithms in society. 

It’s part of a growing phenomenon she has termed ‘algorithmic conspirituality’, which ‘refers to when social media users interpret algorithmic recommendations as a kind of divine intervention, that content has reached them for a cosmically significant reason, thus prompting revelatory self-insight. It also refers to a kind of hook that content creators sometimes use (with a variety of intentions) that explicitly invites this kind of interpretation.’ 

The deeply powerful effect of this hook, Cotter says, is because it ‘suggests the possibility that all the forces of nature (and, yes, technology) have conspired to ensure I see this particular message and for that reason, I need to pay attention.’ I can see in the comments that to many of these videos, hundreds of them are validating this causal link, clogged with people writing to ‘claim’ this message. 

It’s a far cry from how tarot card readings have been interpreted before TikTok, where a certain lack of fixed predictions, and playfulness took hold. Think of Ithell Colquhoun’s Tarot Deck, made in 1977, formed of mesmeric abstract swirls, which Jennifer Higgie writes in her book, The Other Side, “were not about prediction but were 'portals for contemplation.’”

Especially in this time, the 1970s and 1980s, was the emergence of several tarot decks created by women who were looking for new ways outside of patriarchal logic, including Vicki Noble and Karen Vogel’s goddess inspired motherpiece deck, or Ffiona Morgan’s Daughters of the Moon deck. Most famously there was Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden, her Giardino dei Tarochi in 1974, with wandering paths and 22 enormous biomorphic figures, designed to get lost in and touch. Perhaps in these historic versions of the tarot lies a solution that does not discredit tarot, but does throw TikTok’s version of it into sharp relief: go, wander, and touch some grass.