TikTok Goes the Clock

The App Wars Get Real

I’m finally OK with losing my TikTok. I’m not an influencer on it, not even close, but I enjoy it. It has sucked a few mornings out of my life (bad) and it has brought me laughter and insight, even learning (good). I’m not looking forward to losing TikTok, but here is why and how I am willing to let it go.

First off, to the end of this story: there is proposed legislation towards TikTok’s removal. That legislation must be targeted towards this app and this situation for it to be succesful and not some terrible mistake.

We as Americans have to be extremely careful not to allow our legislators to push through some blanket law that is not specifically targeted. Although it is nice to see the two parties united, it’s not like I trust them to choose the best path. I trust them to lean towards the path of least resistance, and less interrupted vacation. The political class of both parties love their vacations. They need to push forward on this one time issue of an app with clear and persistent ties to a hostile government. The amorphous language of any or all technology that is un-American is lazy and won’t serve the American people because it could mean the takedown of other apps without consideration, without a referendum (that’s for sure) or a mandate of we the people.

Now that this part about the tricky legislative path foward is clear, TikTok, in my simpleton’s opinion, does have to go. Because CEO Shou Chew simply wouldn’t or couldn’t address the Uyghur genocide issue, the issue to remove the company from our mobile phones is clear. This doesn’t mean I’m not depressed about it.

The comment by a co-owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, Chamath Palihapitiya, who said “Nobody cares about the Uyghurs” still rings in my ears.

I see very few parents dragging NBA products out of their children’s hands in order to stand in solidarity with a people being run through concentration camps. Yet, the NBA doesn’t have the same level of direct contact and influence as an app does — at least not at the subtlest of levels of eye to screen contact. Oh wait, it does — But on Google play their app only has 10M downloads. Only.

To have the Chinese Communist Government in control of an app that 150 million Americans use is not smart. To have Xi Jingping, who mercilessly suppresses his own people and minority groups from the Uyghurs to the Tibetans, to people I can’t name, well, this is not a smart move for us, at least not at this moment.

This might have gone better if China wasn’t trying to convert Russia into a vassal state, one that will do its bidding on Taiwan. Right now, meaning just a few days ago, Russia’s notorious war criminal Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi met and toasted each other. They have enough hungry, tortured and brilliant minds set to hack to the task of information warfare. TikTok is somewhat a casualty in this war, and just like Ukraine did not ask to be invaded, TikTok is part of this conflagration of autocratic wills.

Russia needs the support of a big economic player like China in the invasion of Ukraine, and China maybe enjoys the idea of having more influence throughout the European continent. Russia needs this to solidify its existing position and to keep up its expansion both in Europe and in other areas such as the entire continent of Africa. So, as much as most Americans hate to hear about Ukraine because its boring to our ADHD minds, and pundits often tell us its not our business, this whole “Europe thing” has to be taken into consideration. Will they still use TikTok in Ukraine? That I realize, is a very good question.

You may start to engage is some what-about’s. What about our own surveillance? What about our own imperial expansions? I’m not deaf to those, but our ills and even our gross imperfections do not mean we pave a road for others to increase those ills or take over the reigns of our struggles.

Neither of these authoritarian leaders Xi and V, are ripe to be pinned up as saviors or even acceptable foils that could teach our spoiled and squabbling legislators what to do. The biggest insight they can provide us is that term limits work. The next biggest insight they can provide us is that censorship is a slippery slope.

Isn’t getting rid of TikTok censorship? Maybe its protectionism, maybe its censorship. I know I would rather have this one app censored and all of us move onto other apps, than for us to provide the CCP with personal, biometric data they can weaponize. Do I think that kind of subtle information collection and weaponization is happening regularly? It happens with Washington regularly, so yes. I think this is a veiled competition where the US internal security is worried that China is spying on us maybe better than they are. This is not a perfect world.

We have not been on our watchful game as a citizenry. We have nobody in power talking about digital hygiene because that too cuts into vacation time and budgets. Don’t get me started on our national budget. Don’t get me started on the billionaire kids who don’t care because yes, they will always have TikTok if they want it. Does this give me pause? I would be out of my mind if it didn’t.

That all being said, I think Electronic Frontier Foundation and Global Voices, co-founded by Rebecca MacKinnon, author of Consent of the Networked, deserve some of our attention. I would say that Pen America also deserves more attention, because they are protecting the writers of books and looking deeply into areas of censorship in our country. As far as I can tell, not all these sources agree with me and I’m OK with that.

As a child of people who fled Yugoslavia back in the 1960s, I have my sensitivities. I have my perspective. The important thing is that these information wars are discussed openly and sometimes away from the major media pundits. Their interest as paid pundits is their own profit, and in maintaining relationships with the legislators that are mostly in their own elite class, their own bubble and world. Is free speech impacted by free association? Well, let’s get into that. Let’s ask ourselves that the next time we want to ban people and gatherings? Will we? We probably won’t because too much money has gone into the pool of polarizing our society. We don’t want this to have anything to do with drag shows, but it does. Free speech is in peril. I see it. But let’s take this one issue at a time since few of us are trying to reverse the money in politics. In fact, we like to see the shiny bill-bills flash their yachts to us. We love to watch the nepo-babies. We love to eat up our own lives with screentime.

Pundits and politicians go along with PACs and that is polarizing, for profit. >>Plosives party<<<fun. fun!

Many years ago it was admitted that information warfare is a real and pertinent form of munitions in all wars. I could be wrong, but I believe it has been since World War I, our first war of the industrial era, that this has been a thing. Since that time information war has only become more subtle. As our information systems have become more deeply entrenched into our bodies and lives we haven’t really had or taken the time to consider our rights in these realms. In fact, we have been led by a bunch of people who generally pride themselves on not knowing how to use their email or social media. It’s like choosing a surgeon who has never cut into a finger to lead your heart surgery.

Every sound and light, everything on the television commercials to the ad spots on our favorite apps can be used to influence us in ways that only our brains register. We don’t talk about this enough.

We don’t mention neuromarketing. It’s a thing. It has been a thing. (Clutch your digital pearls now.) We don’t keep up because it’s hard to keep up.

Truly, this is part of the Future Shock, predicted years ago in a 1970s best-selling book. These are shocking times! Yet, maybe we don’t understand the truest source of these shocks.

Maybe if we did understand our wired world we would pull away from certain circuits not as luddites but as people carefully adapating society. Maybe then we would find middle grounds, and have open, free speech so clearer issues like the clear and present dangers of the CCP wouldn’t be so murky.

Maybe from this lens those who advocate for TikTok remaining in the US would have me assured there is nothing to fear. I’m not convinced at this time, not because I believe TikTok is the devil, but because we’ve been dragging our collective feet on understanding this information age. We’ve been busy squabbling, just like those people on big media outlets.

We don’t assure ourselves enough rights in these areas of information and free speech. We should demand more from our government. We should demand more clarity, more data protection, and we should be asking more about how and why our own government agencies are keeping these data stored. Do you worry about ChatGPT? Imagine what is being developed behind closed doors. Or don’t. You, like me are probably not as rich as our politicians. You don’t have discretionary time like they do. Time is money and as the wages have remained stagnant, so has our ability to match the abuses of our governing elites. It’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation. Yes, we could all do better.

The intersection between information and war is both old and new; and it has incredible complexity right now. This is something beyond gossip and messages at some royal court. This is beyond propaganda posters and broadcasts, since at this point information warfare is also about neurological triggers. This is about the food we feed our brains in the form of information.

Do I trust the CCP to run TikTok? No. Do I trust them to run Smithfield, our largest pork producer? No. Will anyone else get on the Smithfield ban? I doubt it. How about the relationship between the NBA and China? It hasn’t exactly resulted in massive outcry.

So, I’ll take what I can get and I’ll advocate that we let go of TikTok because that part is easier now than it will be in a few years. Users will migrate to something new, and likely it won’t be to their grandparents social media of Facebook or back onto Instagram. Meta is no saint here. In fact, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is probably thrilled by TikTok being taken to task, since it is in many ways a superior product, one whose content delivery is generally way smarter. BookTok has no equivalent on Meta.

A ban will not eliminate TikTok in the US, but it will push many of its users to VPNs. The good expression of that is we will clumsily move towards our own security and digital autonomy through the expanded use of these VPNs. The bad news is that legislators may choose to criminalize those in the US who maintain their ties to the app. This is the danger zone.

Danger is that we criminalize the user, and knowing how things are going in response to education and freedom or to bodily autonomy, we have plenty of people who would rather incarcerate than engage the user. Education towards our best interest takes actual initiative whereas criminalization is our favorite and for some, very lucrative route.

There you have it. One artist’s view of it all. One little technologist’s blip of an opinion. Take it or leave it, with all the flaws. Just remember not all social media is bad. Hating on technology and all social media together in one big lump is to be guided by a type of blinding nostalgia. Nostalgia is nice but too much of it kills.

It might be my own nostalgic leanings that inform my opinion, the one of hearing how my deaf uncle couldn’t get an education because my grandparents wouldn’t join the party, wouldn’t denounce their religion for Tito. Maybe it is my nostalgia that makes me believe that fascism is something that both the Left and the Right are capable of pushing on its people. Take what I’ve said and do your own thinking, and may it be a critical storm. May it light up town halls and may it ignite in each of us a sense that we are not the same people we were a few generations ago. We are digital beings, networked beings. We must educate ourselves because our governments will not and can not do this for us.

We need to be awake for the next few decades because the app wars are just getting started.