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Sex, Death, and Pathetic Ambition: Owen Williams on the TikTok Underworld

In the wake of his mother’s suicide, the Ballard-inspired writer found a way of grieving through the doomscroll.

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In the early 1960s, J.G. Ballard found himself surrounded by pornographic violence. Immersed in a cultural wash that included the Vietnam war, the assassination of John F. Kennedy on live TV, mass-media manipulation, celebrity car crashes, and a pervasive air of perverse cruelty, he wrote his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition as an exercise in trying to arrange these Kaleidoscopic events into some sort of order. Underlying all that was a more profound personal catastrophe: the loss of his first wife, Mary. She died suddenly of viral pneumonia at the age of 34, leaving Ballard to raise their three young children alone. He later explained that The Atrocity Exhibition was also partly motivated by a desire to reconcile her death. 

“I felt that a crime had been committed by nature against this young woman—and her children—and I was searching desperately for an explanation,” he told Hari Kunzru in 2007. “To some extent The Atrocity Exhibition is an attempt to explain all the terrible violence that I saw around me in the early 60s. It wasn’t just the Kennedy assassination […] I think I was trying to look for a kind of new logic that would explain all these events.”

In his first book Atrocity Exhibitions: Grieving in the TikTok Underworld, Owen Williams applies a similar approach to the social-media landscape. Dragging Ballard’s interrogation of death, spectacle, and eroticism into the digital age, the Welsh writer and musician (most known for being the lead singer of The Tubs and a founding member of Joanna Gruesome) surveys the most extreme corners of the internet like a critic wandering an art gallery. His findings are rendered like a 5G-borne Bosch painting—“a blend of end-of-the-pier campness, extreme sport, melancholy, paedophilia and neo-Sadean paganism,” where trauma grifters run amok and Bonnie Blue appears as “the female Marquis de Sade.” Amongst it all, though, there is a strange beauty to be found. 

In 2014, Williams lost his mother, the folk musician Charlotte Greig, to suicide following her cancer diagnosis. In the years since, he has attempted to process it through songwriting (a black and white press shot of her breastfeeding him in a graveyard serves as the cover art for The Tubs’ 2025 album, Cotton Crown), a novel that never got picked up (one dimension of Atrocity Exhibitions is about trying and failing to “hawk your big tragedy”), and now, a bejeweled book about TikTok—perhaps the most extreme example of how profound forces like grief now appear side-by-side with the inane (he learned about the nature of his mother’s death in a WalesOnline article, below a report of The One Show’s Alex Jones being spotted in a Llanelli pie shop).

Here, we speak to Owen about grief, shame, AI slop, finding joy in the doomscroll, whether the internet is “artificially creating” a generation of pedophiles, and more.

VICE: The book is split into five chapters, or “Rooms”: loneliness, art, sex, wellness, and grief. There’s a lot of themes you could have focused on. Why choose those? Owen Williams: Well, I was organizing [the book] around essays that I had in mind already. I had some autobiographical writing that seemed to fall into those five themes, so I kind of worked backwards from there. And I kept finding myself writing about TikTok and my mother. At first I was writing about them separately and I didn’t really have any notion of combining them, but for some weird reason they started bleeding into one another. The TikTok stuff was a bit scattershot—any mad shit that would pop up, I’d write something about. Then the themes were dictated by the more substantive writing about my mum. So it was a case of training the algorithm to send me the more extreme stuff [on TikTok] that fell into each theme.

What was it about TikTok that drew you in?Because I had no real desire to be on TikTok, and I knew it was something for people younger than me, it felt like a bit of a fish-out-of-water thing. I was very influenced by John Waters and “low culture”—the idea of being attracted to the seedy and deranged. And I didn’t want to write something where it felt like I had any authority on it. I wanted it to be very much like, I’m a millennial who’s just kind of wandering in and seeing what’s what, and maybe using some of the more highbrow stuff that I like to create a bit of a lens to look at it through. 

Then the stuff about my mother came in, which felt like such a ridiculous jarring contrast. Writing about something like my mum killing herself is very “highbrow,” in a way, but I wanted to find a way of making it less like a profound memoir, and TikTok being one of the least profound things ever, it was a way of experimenting a bit.

I suppose they’re all connected by a sense of shame, in a way.You often see people on TikTok being in this place of shame about being on TikTok. There’s a lot of styles of TikTok that are very anti-TikTok. In the music section, there are all these bands that keep going on about how they can’t get a deal because they haven’t........

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