On American Hegemony, the Clock is Tik-Toking
This is not an essay about the global decline of American influence — that started years ago — but rather the decline of America’s perception of its global influence. Which, when you are a self-made country, is the same thing.
I think the most interesting part of the current consideration of an outright ban of TikTok, if it does not sell itself to a U.S. holder, is the app’s unquestioned domination of the young American zeitgeist. America is faced with a foreign company that is doing an absolutely wonderful job at hoovering up eyeballs. And thus the proposed quasi-nationalization of a foreign invention — something we frown upon abroad — is based upon the idea that this technology is so dangerous because it is so popular. And no mere illicit site we’re talking about, dangerous only to the fringes of society and certain politicians; Tiktok is more mainstream than McDonald’s, more ubiquitous than iPhones, more incendiary and intellectually dulling than Twitter and Instagram combined, but the real reason we are worried about it is that it is not ours. We have lost the lead in making a more potent drug.
The drug allusion is not a polemic one. This whole situation calls to mind another incident where a country attempted to ban a product because it was too irresistible to its citizens: China on British opium imports. The resulting wars led to a stunted China, an ascendant Britain and a healthy opium trade — which is not to say the U.S. will be unsuccessful in its attempt to rein in TikTok or that China will use its military to ensure continued American access to the content pipe. But for the first time I can think of since the 1800s, American is attempting to cut off a luxury import from another country for the reason that its citizens like it too much, skipping the usual preliminary destruction-by-tariff. Logically so: how can you enforce an import tax on something hosting mostly American content?
There are some interesting fears swirling around about TikTok’s real intentions. Certainly the most hilarious is that the app was designed to be so addictive that it would be downloaded to government phones where it could mine for data, something that could be done with a halfway decent solitaire app. Nor do I believe, as some House Republicans do, that it is inherently designed to be a vehicle for Chinese propaganda — certainly the most likely conspiracy theory, but I doubt the Chinese government can cook up anything more noxious than what we ourselves produce, like the tendency for TikTok stories to begin with that hateful, all-purpose and all-indemnifying attribution, “Someone said…”
The most impressive, if it were true, would be TikTok’s servers being used to (legally) siphon power away from European defense industries currently fueling the Western side of the Ukraine-Russian conflict. That last one would be so brilliantly long a con that I imagine it unfolding to the soundtrack of The Sting, but I think that is thinking further ahead than China has been demonstrated to think. They have simply created a means of allowing a civilization to mass-produce content, governed it heavily at home and let it go wild abroad, and they are probably delighted it worked so well; but the thing is that if citizens could just ignore the application, we would have no fears on the subject and that lacks the failsafe-ness of a tool of geopolitical struggle. Still, the theory about denying arms manufacturers power for cat videos is an attractive parable.
The wrong thing to do, I think, is try to reclaim the crown with good old-fashioned restrictions and subsidies to local industries to make something even more addictive (as much as Facebook and Twitter would prefer that route). True, the immediate costs are likely low: I cannot imagine a situation in which young voters sour on Biden and Democrats over doing so, hold the grudge for a year and then vote (or not vote) accordingly for pro-socials Republican candidates, although it would make a funny dystopian film starring Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
But I cannot imagine a situation, either, in which a U.S. company takes over TikTok and any the real problems of social media actually go away. I think the unease surrounding the app is a whisper of a much deeper, unsettling worry; more nuanced than a simple worry than that for the first time in quite a few generations, another country is culturally superior. What makes it sting is that it is in an art we invented; it would be like creating writing only to find your mildly antagonistic neighbors are far better at novel writing. To control it within the boundaries of traditional Western thought, we may have to regulate some industries that want very much not to be controlled. The thing likely to push us into doing so is at hand, though: it is clear we are not the only ones who can legally play the social media game so well.
And I’ll admit, the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, Explosives and Social Media has a nice ring to it.
This is the Devouring Monster Invented by Technocracy, Windsor McCay
