Kyle Chaykaon the unlikely social-media allure of obscure industrial products. Some of my favorite writingsubjects have come from my adolescent habit of wandering strange corners of the Internet late at night, which is always the best time to find the weirdest stuff. For this column, it was TikTok videos that seemed like a straightforward attempt for a Chinese factory to advertise its industrial-chemical wares. The videos were totally irrelevant to my life—I had no need for bulk glycine—but I kept watching them regardless, and recognized some kernel of absurdist Internet humor. They stuck in my brain untilI had to write about them. It’s a mixed blessing to be early to a meme. On one hand, you get to see what everyone else will be laughing at in a few days’ or weeks’ time. On the other hand, you’ve been identified as an Internet sicko with a suspiciously high tolerance for the inane. The algorithmic feed of TikTok sometimes takes on a feeling of extreme geography. The search function is bad and there’s little sense of monolithic experience. So when you stumble into a self-contained realm of content—Chinese factories, expats in Denmark, wood-soup A.S.M.R.—you have to bookmark and comment on the posts in order to find them again. Like Hansel and Gretel, we intrepid explorers follow the bread crumbs back to civilization. | 
