Share This To Ten People Or Be Cursed Forever:How Chain Mail Took Over TikTok

Words: Ella Glossop

Make it stand out

The idea of the chain email – or chain mail – is a firmly 2000s phenomenon in our cultural memories. Every millennial will remember them: "WARNING! This is not a joke!” – it would be written in red Comic Sans, all caps – “Carry on reading or you’ll die/never find love/fall off a high bridge somewhere”.  Unless, of course, you forwarded it on.  

Like much of the early Internet, this was very camp. The emails would often contain elaborate horror stories with characters called things like “Little Johnny” and bells chiming at midnight. The threat would be aggravated with a row of pixelated dagger emoticons, or the image of a skull formed from punctuation marks. The online world was in its adolescence and this was its awkward phase: Angst-ridden MSN statuses in glittery text, gaudy duo-toned photo edits, I can has cheezburger cat, Tumblr accounts. These overly-sinister death threats landing in our bubblegum-pink Hotmail inboxes were just part of the growing pains of the internet’s puberty.

Which makes it all the more jarring that I – a now 26-year-old woman – cannot simply scroll past a “use this sound to prevent bad luck” TikTok. To my horror, I will “interact” to manifest ten years of good luck, I will “repost” if it means someone called Mary won’t appear with a knife at midnight. I have always dealt with obsessive thoughts, but nothing has been more humbling than being at the mercy of TikTok threats.

Chain mail has only got more ubiquitous as the internet evolves. Unlike its email iterations, you can no longer see the subject line before you click. No one needs your personal contact details for it to appear on your FYP. More engagement means more and more pop up, and very quickly TikTok becomes a minefield. Alongside the “sound claimed” and “I affirm” comments, these videos are flooded with distressed comments from people who don’t want to engage, but feel compelled to. There are multiple threads on Reddit’s OCD communities of people whose lives have become completely controlled by this content. “Logically, OBVIOUSLY it’s not possible that it will affect your life at all. But I frenzy and think about all the possible outcomes of not interacting,” writes one user. “This makes me feel exactly like the OCD does.” When the internet’s currency is attention and engagement, preying on people’s anxieties and compulsions is a more effective strategy than ever.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___

What’s changed is the way this content is viewed: Naively forwarding on a Comic Sans email to a small group of friends in the 2000s was unserious and ironic. Doing so in 2024, in the era of Elon Musk and AI, is humourless and humiliating. For me, this means that every threat I scroll past triggers a personal PR exercise: I will follow each step, as instructed – save the video to drafts, repost with audio, comment twice, send it to five friends. Immediately, I will then undo each step - deleting every trace of evidence that I’d ever fall for such folly before anyone sees. Each ordeal is mired in a small identity crisis: On one side I am a self-respecting, rational thinker – on the other, I am typing a phrase like “I affirm” on a TikTok video under the table at the pub.

“When the internet’s currency is attention and engagement, preying on people’s anxieties and compulsions is a more effective strategy than ever.”

Across all its forms, the messaging of this chain mail content is remarkably similar. But although the format was popularised in the 90s and 2000s with the arrival of email, chain messages have existed long before the internet. According to research by archivist Daniel VanArsenal, there was a boom of “good luck letters” in the first world war, which said things like “DO NOT BREAK THE CHAIN, for whoever does will have BAD LUCK. Do it within twenty four hours.” Another letter was published in a magazine in 1977: “One woman was in a car accident when she broke the chain. Another woman was sued for divorce,” it says. “Send your five letters today!” 

People have always been susceptible to seeking luck and good “omens” – many superstitions are rooted in traditional folklore. Like everything, the internet simply turbo-charges this part of human nature. On TikTok, these “chain” videos form part of a wider trend towards “manifesting”- a way to channel good in our lives. On TikTok, the hashtag now has over 20 billion views. In 2022, “lucky girl syndrome” took off, the idea that positive thinking would make our lives materially better. 

Research shows that Gen Z is less religious than any other generation, with the Public Religion Research Institute finding that today nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 to 29 were religiously unaffiliated, three times the rate in over 65s. But non-religious forms of spirituality appear to be on the rise: it’s a generation with some of the highest rates of mental health issues and anxiety, and with some of the most uncertain futures – a climate crisis and housing shortage to name a few. Is it any surprise that people are turning to crystals and tarot cards to ward off bad “vibes”?

All this is somewhat comforting to me, as I battle with what is – at its core – a crisis of crippling cringe. To me, modern-day chain mail is still inextricably linked to the early internet – and engaging with it is the equivalent of posting a big “LIKE FOR LIKE :3” post on Facebook in earnest. But in many ways, those emails paved the way for a lot of the internet culture we know today - they were, after all, some of the first examples of “viral” content.