Anywhere you go in the world, you can find the same café. You know the aesthetic: hanging plants, exposed brick, raw concrete. This ubiquitous aesthetic is traceable to Instagram. As the platform grew, businesses that wanted to attract the young and hip began taking design cues from the most popular Instagram photos. Interiors began to be designed from Instagram for Instagram.

The social media platform made millennial-chic interior design accessible to the aesthetically inclined from Tokyo to Tulsa. But Instagram, if you ask a Gen Zer, is desperately unhip. The social media platform du jour is TikTok, and the things people post most frequently on TikTok are snippets of themselves dancing. Could TikTok have the same impact on choreography as Instagram did on interior design?

You can find gymnasts, cheerleaders, and professional dancers of all stripes on TikTok. These tastemakers post micro-videos of themselves performing choreography ranging from a G-rated two-step to something that should come with a warning label. The catchiest dances then seep out through various TikTok communities until they saturate youth culture as a whole. 

From there, the amateurs take over. The most successful TikTok dance videos are the ones where the dancer is clearly having a ball. What’s more, the medium revels in iteration. Professionals post half-speed videos of themselves doing difficult dances for people who want to learn, as well as tutorials breaking down the hardest moves. The dances change as they filter through the platform, as each new dancer adds their own flourish. Not every attempt is a success: In August, one TikTok user was hospitalized after attempting the so-called “WAP” dance, inspired by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s summer banger.

Part of the appeal of the Instagram aesthetic is that those white backgrounds and dusky purple succulents look good when seen on a phone. Similarly, the most popular TikTok dances (see “Renegade” and “Say So”) are designed to be viewed in a vertical camera frame. Hence, they consist primarily of arm movements easy enough to be performed while standing—or even sitting—relatively still. They might be bringing choreography to the masses, but Alvin Ailey these kids decidedly are not.

Dancing well isn’t their end goal, however. Rather, they’re using dance as a conduit to fun. And in doing so, they may make choreographed dance more accessible. If Laura Dern is getting in on the action, it’s only a matter of time before Aunt Margaret is doing the “Toosie Slide” at Sunday lunch.