So, let’s get one thing out of the way: I don’t like TikTok. I think it is dumb. My friends send me TikToks and sometimes and I watch them and sometimes I don’t. I have some friends I can trust to send me good ones, but often I’m just like, “no, thanks,” because from what I have seen of TikTok it is just a repository of us at our most banal.
I am ALSO aware this puts me in a long, millennia old line of curmudgeons who just don’t like and don’t appreciate new mediums. I get it. The problem is probably not TikTok. The problem is me.
Let’s look at this historically, shall we?
Plato thought writing would make us all dumber.
He wrote in The Phaedrus,
And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
In other words, if you write it down, you won’t remember it, and then you will not be as wise.
The written word, he argued, was static. It had no soul. It couldn’t respond to the world around it.
He said,
You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever.
We don’t think about it now, but writing is a technology. And there was a time when it was a burgeoning technology. And Plato was not having it. Plato was one of the original man-yelling-at-cloud guys. He’s the OG get-off-my-lawn guy. He’s so mad at changing technology and these young whippersnappers with their heads down in their scrolls that he is angry about writing.
Like, you have to be pretty technophobic to be scared of writing. But nobody ever accused Plato of being a modern guy.
In the 18th century there was a moral panic about novels. Yes, in the 1700s there were all these women sitting around reading novels and the patriarchy was freaking the eff right out about it. Women…just sitting…enjoying LEISURE time? I mean, they weren’t doing housework, they weren’t taking care of kids, they weren’t improving themselves or their husbands lives…they were just…reading! What kind of message does that send?? What kinds of IDEAS would they get?
And that’s really the heart of the issue, over and over again. Ideas. Who gets to have ideas? Where do they come from? Who gets to share them and how do they spread? This is why there is often a connection between things like media and a moral panic. Because they feed off of each other. We panic about something, and the media makes it 1000X worse. But sometimes, the media itself is what we are panicking about.
There’s been a lot to panic about in our past. The printing press, the gramophone, the telegraph…these are all ways ideas can be spread that somebody freaked out about.
So, in some ways the surprising part isn’t that some people are freaked out about TikTok – the surprising part is that it took this long.
Let’s consider what the House Bill that was passed does.
According to Bobby Allyn, of NPR,
The bill gives ByteDance six months to find a buyer for TikTok.
If the company cannot sell the app in that time, it will become illegal for app stores and web-hosting companies to offer TikTok, as long as it remains under the control of a “foreign adversary.”
That, in turn, would force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from app stores. It would also require internet service providers to make TikTok inaccessible on internet browsers in the U.S.
There is no way to make TikTok disappear for the 170 million Americans who have already downloaded it. But removing TikTok from app stores would mean that users would not be able to download any further software updates. And experts say without the ability to update regularly, the app would become slow, glitchy, buggy and rife with other problems to the point where using it at all would be just about impossible.
In other words, TikTok would die a slow, gradual death, rather than a swift demise.
In the short term, users will likely not notice any changes. The app will work as it always does for the millions of Americans who enjoy it.
And even if the Senate passes a companion bill, and Biden signs it into law, there is a six-month deadline to sell, which could be prolonged by court challenges.
In the event that TikTok does become illegal in the U.S., it would be tricky to access the app, but there will be workarounds.
People could turn to virtual private networks, or VPNs, to shield their location and get past restrictions. The technique is popular in places like Russia and China, where governments have prohibited many popular internet apps and services.
Okay – so it seems like the goal is to phase out TikTok. But why?
According to David McHabe and Sapna Maheshwari of the New York Times,
Many are worried that the Chinese government could demand the personal data of Americans from ByteDance and that, under Chinese law, ByteDance would have to comply.
Lawmakers including Representative Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who co-led the bill, and Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, also say China could use TikTok’s powerful algorithm to feed its users political propaganda. Christopher A. Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, have flagged the concerns in the last year.
All right – so politicians want to ban TikTok because of its connections to the Chinese government, specifically the Chinese Communist party, because they are afraid of information being shared.
Okay, fine, ostensibly that all sounds, I dunno, at least logical? I mean, it’s ridiculous to think there’s any privacy online to begin with and that banning TikTok is going to make any difference whatsoever, but, you know, rock on with your bad self, I guess.
I’m going to ask us, for just a minute, to engage our sociological imaginations. Yes, it is possible that there is a bi-partisan effort to ban TikTok because we’re afraid of the Commies. It’s a little Red Scare-ish, but it is not out of the realm of possibilities. But maybe let’s contextualize a few things.
TikTok is primarily used by young people. That’s “young” kind of writ-large. Plenty of people age 45 and younger use TikTok. Millennials have certainly adopted it, and we have to acknowledge that millennials all have aching backs at this point, can’t drink more than three beers or two glasses of wine, and are pissed off about the housing market. But the primary audience of TikTok is Gen Z, and even younger. TikTok is for young adults and teenagers. You would think that would mean politicians would care less about it, because young people don’t vote historically, but in the last 4-8 years there have been some concerning new trends – if you are a traditional, institutional politician. Young people are voting more. And the thing is – they are MAD.
The world is burning and young people are pissed about it. TikTok, then, takes on a new relevance. Because it is where most young people get their news. TikTok, like IG and FB before it, has taken over as the news aggregator for people below the age of 40. And the thing about TikTok is, just like its audience, it skews progressive. TikTok could, conceivably, sway an election.
Conservative politicians have every reason to hate TikTok, because it is a place where young, progressive teens and adults go to share their young, progressive views.
And the thing about these young people is that they are radicalizing. Not all of them. And I don’t know that it will translate into action. But ideologically – these are not my mother’s college students.
These kids are not buying it. American Dream? It’s a farce. Capitalism? It’s a scam. All those things that are pretty much the heart of the American identity throughout the 20th century are being rejected by many of the up-and-coming voters.
These narratives get bolstered and repeated in places like TikTok and reddit. The students that are graduating from high school and college now do not believe that working for 70 hours a week for less than $50k a year for the CHANCE to work your way into a position that will not guarantee a possibility of a well-funded retirement is, quite frankly, worth breaking their minds and bodies over and they’re just not putting up with it. These attitudes find a home on TikTok.
Now, TikTok is not always a bastion of Progressivism. You’ve probably heard of the account LibsofTikTok, which recently caused a lot of controversy, but was a TikTok account that mostly focused on humiliating the LGBTQ+ community. The person behind the account, Chaya Raichik, found support from public figures like Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. So there are different views on the platform, to be sure. But TikTok does skew left. It’s just a matter of who the audience is.
So does it sound conspiratorial to say that politicians would want to shut down a platform where young people are consistently questioning the assumptions at the heart of both political parties, especially the conservative one? Yeah, probably.
Have we spent multiple episodes talking about how the political parties are dishonest and working against the voters best interests in ways that to a rational person sound conspiratorial but are actually pretty verifiable and observable?
I hope that much is clear at this point.
But that’s only half the story.
As I said, this is a bipartisan effort. It actually makes some sense for conservatives to be anti-TikTok. TikTok stirs up anti-conservative sentiment in a population that is prone to be progressive, anyway. Of course conservatives are happy to see it fizzle out.
But what about Dems? Why would Dems want to see this shut down? You would think this would be a no-brainer for Dems. If TikTok stirs up progressive sentiment, you would think the more progressive party would want that going loud and strong to whip up young voters. I mean, one of the reasons Obama’s campaign was so successful was because he was one of the first candidates to effectively mobilize an online effort. If there is a way for Democrats to have their thumb on the pulse of young voters, why on earth would they want to see that disappear?
Well, that is dependent on just how exactly “progressive” the party is.
I guess you have to ask yourself – how left leaning ARE those Democrats in office?
Yes, you have some wild cards. AOC and Sanders do seem to have lefty bona fides sometimes.
But are elected Democrats really progressive, let alone subversive, in any way?
Is this a crowd that questions the American Dream? Is this a group that sees capitalism as a problem?
Or is this a group that is firmly entrenched in hegemonic and institutional systems, continues to benefit from those systems that conservatism has propped up for decades, and requires hegemony to keep going?
Let’s look at the most obvious example: Democratic support for Israel.
The truth is, American support for Israel is waning. Fast and hard.
Young people aren’t buying the “Israel above all others” narrative that has been shoved down our throats for the last 80 years.
This is problematic because the Democrats that are in Congress, and have been for decades, are firmly entrenched in the “we will support Israel no matter what” paradigm – regardless of what Israel does or who disagrees with them.
Enter TikTok.
There is a lot of anti-Israel sentiment on TikTok these days. Nikki Haley said, “For every 30 minutes that someone watches TikTok every day they become 17% more antisemitic, more pro-Hamas based on doing that.” Politicians are REALLY worried about what people watch on TikTok. They are seriously concerned about the anti-Israel content we are getting there.
Dems have to be worried about that, too. BECAUSE, that is the issue Biden is weakest on.
There are basically three fronts you can attack Biden on, right now: the economy, his age, and Israel.
If you attack him on the economy, Dems can counter. Because ON PAPER American is doing well. Markets are okay, unemployment is down, inflation is improving – all signs point to go. If you ask an economist Bidenomics is working. If you ask an hourly worker you might now get such a rosy picture, especially if they are part of the statistical make-up of the unemployment stats that include those people that are not only employed, but working multiple jobs just to make rent.
Look, I know I tow the progressive line a lot, but let’s be real – we have a lot to hold the so-called left accountable for. I mean, I’ve talked before about the gun issue, but the economy is a bi-partisan problem, too. Capitalism is coming for you from the left and the right.
The other two issues people are attacking Biden on are a little hairier.
One reason people are going after him is his age.
Let’s not kid around, Biden is old. And on the one hand, I am very reticent to entertain any arguments that smack of agism. I don’t like to discount somebody just because they are either old or young. I think there is value in fresh perspectives AND experience.
But there comes a time when we have to say, is he physically cut out for the job?
I know he’s healthy. Hell, probably healthier than I am. But this is literally the most stressful job in the world. Is an 81 year old body equipped to deal with that?
But, that is a bipartisan question, too. And, it makes me laugh that those on the right have the gall to attack Biden’s age. BECAUSE TRUMP IS ONLY FOUR YEARS YOUNGER.
Now, if Biden were 20 and Trump were 16, I’d say that was a big difference. But since Biden is 81 and Trump is 77, the difference seems pretty negligible. I don’t know that the right has a leg to stand on.
How, you might ask, does this relate to our discussion on TikTok?
Because the third issue Biden is weak on, is another issue that the GOP shouldn’t, and can’t, really attack Biden on because the difference is negligible.
Biden has a very unpopular position on Israel. And by that I mean, he supports Israel unflaggingly.
That’s not a popular position – it’s especially not a popular position on TikTok.
This is Biden’s weakest policy position.
But Republicans can’t attack Biden on Gaza or Israel because they are SO much worse. They can’t bring attention to Biden’s problematic position on Israel without pointing out that they are that, only on roids.
So, what to do?
Stop genociding?
No, no, no!
Eliminate the platform where people are talking about it!
Once again – this probably sounds conspiratorial. But I legit just told you that our two major political parties support genocide, so you decide what’s what.
Now – I want to make something VERY clear, here.
This is not meant to be a critique of Judaism.
Judaism is a rich spiritual tradition that has a positive and powerful legacy.
I absolutely love what Judaism brings to the world. Just like I love what so much of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism bring to the world.
Judaism is sacred, holy, and all in all, a very positive and wonderful thing.
Netenyahu’s government is not.
And it’s important to think of these things as different.
As a dear friend and mentor said, a government is not its people. A government may WANT to be its people, but ultimately it is not. It may try to represent its people, but it can never BE its people. So, I can criticize Putin and the Russian government all day long (but only because I am safe in America and not in Russia), but it doesn’t mean I hate Russians. I am fiercely critical of American politics and American government – but I don’t hate all Americans.
You can have concerns about Israel’s actions on the global stage without condemning an entire religion.
I say all of this to clarify why TikTok might be a point of interest for American politicians:
TikTok is where many young people are going to work out their concerns about international politics. And right now, that means a lot of talk about Gaza, Palestine, and Israel. And, for the most part, younger people are coming to very different conclusions than older generations.
Both parties, however, seem to agree on the Israel question, at least in action, even if they say different things. So, if they aren’t going to address their constituent’s concerns, maybe the best bet is to remove the space in which these young people are trying to work things out.
Now, if you will allow me to be ageist for just a minute…
Most of our American politicians are old and haven’t bought their own groceries in years. That’s not too much of a stretch. And we all have older people in our lives. Some of them are grumpy and irrelevant. Some of them are amazingly grounded with fantastic insights and wisdom to share that makes the world clearer and more profound, all at once.
And I can tell you what the difference is.
The way to remain relevant when you get old is to allow yourself to respond to the world – to acknowledge that the world is changing, and to change with it, when you can. Now, I’m not saying not to be true to yourself, but if you want to stay a person who matters and is operational in the world, you have to function in the world AS IT IS. The fastest way to become IRRELEVANT is to dig your heels in and demand that nothing change and the world has to bend to YOUR will and cater to your way of life. If you refuse to make any changes, refuse accept an evolving society, and demand that everything be just the way you like it all the time and throw a fit when your desires aren’t the center of everything, the world is going to drop you like a bad habit.
THAT IS 100% WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN TO OUR POLITICAL PARTIES.
We’ve got a bunch of old people, who are refusing to address the concerns of the young, and instead of making any changes to policy to think forward, are just censoring social media.
Yes, this is going to go very well.
Like I say – I don’t like TikTok. But I recognize it for what it is. And I also recognize the fact that my dislike of TikTok is MY problem…not my students.
What are we even doing here, folks?
Music in this episode is “Fearless First” by Kevin MacLeod at https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/3742-fearless-first.
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