The TikTok Outlaws

The streets of my town have been overrun by a new species of desperado: The TikTok Outlaw.

He is thirteen years old, weighs perhaps 115 pounds, and rides an electric bicycle with the serene confidence of a Hell’s Angel who has recently discovered that nobody can touch him.

I encounter these young road warriors everywhere. They drift into traffic at twenty miles an hour, wobbling in front of cars as though the double yellow line were merely a suggestion left over from a more uptight civilization. Sometimes they turn their heads toward the trapped motorist behind them and flash a triumphant grin.

The message is unmistakable:

We own you.

And, maddeningly, they’re partly right.

The genius of the TikTok Outlaw is that he has discovered weaponized vulnerability. He is tiny. I am driving several thousand pounds of steel. Under ordinary circumstances, this arrangement should make him cautious.

Instead, it makes me cautious.

He knows I will brake.

He knows I will swerve.

He knows that I possess insurance, a driver’s license, a conscience, a mortgage, a family, and an overwhelming desire not to spend the remainder of my life explaining why a seventh-grader became permanently embedded in the grille of my car.

He possesses an e-bike.

Advantage: seventh-grader.

The more sophisticated TikTok Outlaws have apparently developed operational security. Some leave their phones behind so parents can’t track their whereabouts. When injuries occur, according to reports I’ve encountered, some have even tried using false names to keep Mom and Dad from discovering that the afternoon bicycle ride somehow concluded in an emergency room.

This is no longer Leave It to Beaver.

Wally isn’t asking permission to ride over to Lumpy Rutherford’s house.

He’s establishing an alias.

The police, meanwhile, face an unenviable problem. They can monitor social media for planned meetups in which groups of young riders converge on streets and intersections. A dozen e-bikes arrive. Traffic stops. Motorists fume. Phones emerge.

And that’s the essential ingredient.

The TikTok Outlaw doesn’t merely want to cause chaos.

He wants content.

Without the camera, blocking an intersection is adolescent stupidity. With the camera, it becomes a production.

The riders are the stars.

The motorists are unpaid extras.

The police are villains.

And the street itself has become a soundstage for the next twenty-second installment of Kids Giving It to the Man.

This is what distinguishes the TikTok Outlaw from the juvenile delinquent of previous generations. Teenagers have always possessed an impressive capacity for idiocy. That isn’t new. Adolescence has never been famous for its risk-management department.

What’s new is the audience.

The idiot of 1978 could impress six friends.

The idiot of 2026 can fantasize about impressing six million strangers.

Social media has industrialized adolescent exhibitionism.

Now public outrage isn’t necessarily punishment. It’s production value. An angry driver leaning on his horn improves the clip. A police officer arriving improves it further. A confrontation is better still.

The more furious civilization becomes, the better the footage.

Naturally, the police can intervene. They can issue citations, confiscate illegal vehicles where the law permits, contact parents, patrol gathering places, and disrupt planned meetups.

But enforcement begins to resemble a man standing beneath Niagara Falls with a roll of Bounty.

The numbers are too large.

Another group appears.

Another intersection becomes a stage.

Another phone goes up.

Meanwhile, ordinary motorists crawl through the spectacle with clenched jaws, aware of the exquisite asymmetry governing the encounter.

We must behave responsibly.

They don’t.

That’s their power.

Civilization depends upon millions of people voluntarily agreeing to certain boring propositions: red means stop, sidewalks are for pedestrians, roads have lanes, and deliberately terrifying strangers isn’t an acceptable recreational activity.

The TikTok Outlaw discovers that these rules can be exploited precisely because most people still obey them.

He swerves.

You brake.

He laughs.

You grip the steering wheel.

He has discovered one of the darker secrets of civilized life:

The person with the least regard for consequences can temporarily become the person with the most power.

Perhaps most of these kids will eventually grow out of it. Their frontal lobes will finish construction. Jobs, families, insurance premiums, and the accumulated humiliations of adulthood will perform their ancient civilizing work.

One day, perhaps, today’s TikTok Outlaw will be forty-five years old, driving home after a long day at work.

Then a thirteen-year-old on an electric bicycle will drift directly in front of his car, turn around, and grin.

And somewhere deep inside the middle-aged driver’s soul, an ancient debt will finally come due.