Busy brains in the algorithm: TikTok’s platformed conditions for experiential gonzo expertise

This article explores how TikTok’s technological structures and features shape rhetorical invention and performances of health expertise. By illustrating how high-visibility ADHD-influencers can assemble authority through ethotic appeals and how their creative rhetorical performance is conditioned by TikTok, I develop the notion of experiential gonzo expertise to argue that a new kind of expertise is enabled and shaped by platform-specific affordances. Experiential gonzo expertise captures the rhetorical performance of an experience-based expertise that merges fact and fiction, in an environment with increased focus on the individual and declining trust in institutional expertise. The article highlights how agency emerges in the interplay between the content creators and the platform. By illustrating how TikTok shapes rhetorical performances through platform-specific affordances and exemplifying how the combined agency of TikTok and content creators constitute expertise in the rhetorical style of gonzo, the study’s findings inform broader health trends connected to human–machine interaction.