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TikTok is a Chinese Superweapon
Basic argument of the article is simple:
Social media addiction has clear psychological and societal downsides. It can shrink and monopolize our attention, make us more anxious and lead to damaging fads like stupid "challenges" that kids do.
TikTok is very good at this due to its ability to adapt to the user and the short attention span videos require.
China is aware of this and has demanded that Bytedance moderate TikTok moderate TikTok for China (so as to encourage people to wish to be things like engineers instead of influencers) and banning it for Chinese kids, while allowing it to run rampant in the West.
This is sort of a practical proof of the degeneracy and internal contradictions of Western capitalism and a deliberate attack.
An interesting look at how the Chinese view the West through the eyes of a powerful Chinese policy-maker:
The bolded is especially relevant to the final solution to what the author (speculatively) considers an attack by a civilizational competitor:
The article first concedes that China is right that the market will drive us to the bottom of short-attention-span content and degeneracy, but then its solution is the platitude of "parental responsibility" in the face of an unprecedented technological challenge.
We've never dealt with this problem before. The idea that individual parents are going to figure this out when they're in competition with some of the most sophisticated companies in the world who've totally saturated the web with their influence seems patently absurd to me.
Especially in a system where the state is usurping more and more responsibility for child welfare. But, when it comes time to regulate tech companies, the state is powerless?
This sort of learned helplessness is common in the West, even when China is providing a counter-example of what can be done (i.e. regulation, which the author writes off because people will just make a new site*). But the argument is: in an ideologically fractured world the state has no right to impose its preferences in terms of the good life on citizens who may disagree. Now, it may be that the West is too far down the anomie and moral anarchy road to change course. But then the question is whether this is palatable to anyone else who is shopping for a civilizational model?
Especially since there's a strong argument that it is precisely this sort of liberal-influenced learned helplessness that leads to the very fracture of core values that could help mitigate such crises. I would bet that a 1950s America would have more social cohesion to push back against some of these things, but that's due to a shared culture that has been destroyed by...well, take your pick: neoliberalism, secularization, individualism, mass immigration, therapy and the breakdown of homogeneity, racial animus.
So it may be true that liberals - once their culture has become sufficiently fractured - cannot solve this problem (due to the ideology's resistance to compelling certain choices). But that may be an argument to never become liberal in the first place.
* If only someone had applied this insight to the drug war.
People have been claiming that Western liberal democracy will inevitably lad to degeneracy and collapse for more than a century. It never happened. So we are supposed to think this time will be different because of Tiktok?
I mean, degeneracy and collapse is a common feature of almost every empire for which we have historical records.
Presumably there's many more that experienced the same decline yet didn't leave a record.
Why do we suppose ourselves to be the exception?
Every past civilization has by definition collapsed, but what is "degeneracy" and what does it have to do with those collapses? Major civilizational collapses have been caused, at least in part, by at least the following set of different factors: Foreign invasion, climate change, natural disaster, disease, religious conflict, over-spending on public works, failure to maintain physical infrastructure, rebellion, civil war and other internal power struggles, changes in technology, changes to the surrounding economic situation, and resource depletion. And these causes may overlap, or cause one another. So, what counts as degeneracy and what is the evidence that it's related to collapse?
If I were to be broad, it's basically the social/material weaknesses that are exploited by or vulnerable to outside forces and hollow out the wealth and power of the nation if they are not repaired/corrected.
That is, the features and factors that allowed a civilization to rise to prominence can be acknowledged as a core part of that civilization's success. "Degeneration" occurs when those features or factors are allowed to slip away without efforts to preserve them. And if a civilization depended on those factors to maintain their success, then seems almost definitional that losing them will lead to some sort of collapse.
Lot of arguments to be had about what the features/factors of civilizational success are, but it's probably possible to measure the factors and determine if they are degenerating relative to the past.
Take a simple example: what do you think would happen to Saudi Arabia if it lost it's ability to extract and process crude oil?
Would you say that the availability of crude oil within it's borders is a big reason for Saudi Arabia's success in the last hundred years?
If so, would it be fair to say, then, that if Saudi Arabia were to allow it's oil reserves to be depleted without investing in some other means of supporting it's economy, it would be 'degenerating?' It would certainly be 'degeneracy' if Saudi Arabia started setting it's oil fields and extraction equipment on fire for no good reason, no? Or, at least, they would call it such.
I like them as an example since quite a many civilizations have risen and fallen in that general geographical area. No reason to think they'll escape it.
That all seems reasonable, but it sounds then like "degeneracy" is simply any cause of a collapse, or perhaps just a description of collapse/decline. So what's special about TikTok, or any of the other things that are normally referred to as "degeneracy"? How do we use this concept? Is there a prediction beyond "if a civilization loses the things that made it successful, it will no longer be successful?" Is that even true, or do the needs of a civilization change as it develops?
To give an example in a different direction, consider the Bagan Empire of the 9th to 12th century in what is now Myanmar (formerly Burma). This society had a system of state-supported religion, where kings built temples and supported monks working in them with land and precious metal. They derived their public legitimacy from this support, as well as it providing widespread employment. But over time, since the Buddhist monks were immune to taxes, they accumulated more and more of the wealth of the country. Adhering to their ancient traditions contributed to their downfall!
edit: there's a choice quote to this extent around 1:29:50 into the linked episode.
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I didn't say otherwise. The initial claim was not, "like all societies, the West will someday collapse." The claim was that said collapse is relatively imminent, specifically because the basic premise of liberal democracy renders it vulnerable thereto. That is the claim that has been made repeatedly.
The problem with the collapse debate is it inevitably involves moving goalposts as to what is defined as collapse. It's hard to agree on what is means for a society to have collapsed. Is it conquered, split, dissolved, or morph into something unrecognizable from its original state?
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At a bare minimum, the birthrates have collapsed... indeed to below replacement. A naive projection of this trend would mean some kind of decline is inevitable because of this, alone.
It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.
Material conditions have improved, but a lot of basic stats regarding human happiness have declined, and unless people start having more kids or we crack the aging problem, in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Tiktok is a source of this issue but more like a warning sign. Such an app wouldn't, one would argue, be able to take such strong root in a healthy culture.
But wealth and freedom are distinct from liberal democracy. India was a liberal democracy in the 1950s, despite being dirt-poor. Hong Kong and Singapore have a lot of wealth and freedom (and the concomitant shortage of children) today, without being liberal democracies (especially HK). China is heading in the same direction, despite the end of the One Child Policy.
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50 years? Probably optimistic. The problem is pressing now with Boomers - the largest generation - retiring. The amount of healthcare money eaten up by the old is disproportionate and there isn't an equally large generation behind them to balance them out.
Canada already has a healthcare crunch and privatization or not is the topic of the day. It's probably only going to get worse from here. I heard some alarming population estimates for Japan in 2050, let alone 2070.
There's some hope that robotics and automation are going to stave off the impact. Life extension/anti-aging tech will probably be too late for the most part.
If we get AGI then no point in trying to predict the world after that.
But more to the point, Gen Z is the smallest generation (in the west) yet. Even if they started popping out kids like particularly horny rabbits there will be a protracted squeeze waiting on those kids to become productive citizens. And they don't seem to be having kids. So that's whence my 'fifty years' vague estimate comes from.
Will we even have enough people with the capacity to keep an increasingly advanced civilization functional?
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How does this square with the fact that China's TFR is only ~80% of the Untied States' TFR? If birth rate collapse = national collapse seems authoritarian China is ahead of liberal democratic United States on that front.
One-Child-Policy compounded with rapid urbanization?
The Chinese made policy choices that cratered their birthrates before they began to crater globally.
Yes?
One nation being on course for collapse doesn't preclude it happening to others. The argument is that this is a general trend of all nations, and that empires are not excluded from this.
Indeed, if the West is still overly dependent on Chinese labor when that happens, the ripple effect will accelerate issues over here.
(This is basically Peter Zeihan's thesis, incidentally)
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That's why God created immigration
Is this intended as satire or did you just admit that the GOP's "uncharitable strawman" of people like you is actually 100% accurate?
I'm not sure what you mean by "people like you," unless you mean people who occasionally pick up a book or a newspaper, and so are aware that a common response to demographic concerns is to increase immigration, as Canada is doing, and are aware that immigration is why the long term outlook for the US re geopolitical power is much rosier than that of most peer countries. Because that was what I was referring to.
And, I fear it is you who is confirming the "uncharitable strawman" of "people like you", because we are talking about the future of liberal democracy, or of the United States, not the future of the white race, which I take it is what you are referring to. Here is a new flash for you: People who are obsessed with declining white population numbers and the like imagine that people who support immigration are equally obsessed with the fate of the white race, but the truth is that most people don't care. They don't care what race their coworker is, or what race the person in the voting booth next to them is. Let's suppose that 300 years from now, due to immigration, the US is only ten percent white. Or five percent. Or one percent. Who cares?
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What will that imply for the countries that the immigrants are drawn from?
Given the higher productivity levels in the west, they can just pay the poorer countries a fee for every immigrant the West takes, and still leave everyone better off.
The west's ideology got to you. I know with all the controversies around your comments people where telling you to come back to your country. I say better stay with us, and don't ruin it.
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Brain drain that further reduces them relative to the US.
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The loss of the most successful and mobile members of their middle class.
But I doubt it poses a great internal political impediment to the host nation; in Canada this is seen as a virtuous act and, tbh, I can see why the importing of a few hundred thousand Indians every couple of years (iirc they make up around 20% of migrants) doesn't rank highly in the Canadian mind as a moral outrage.
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There are many reasons why the US may be an exception to this trend of empires rising and falling.
The US is much more dominant, head and shoulders above the rest relative to past empires. The closest competitor to the US is China, which does not really have imperialistic ambitions. What could conceivably replace the US? Nothing. Supposed degeneracy may mean loss of economic growth, but not being displaced or conquered.
There was a time when the US didn't either. Some Americans must be rolling in their grave at the postwar empire subsidizing Europe for 80 years.
China does seem like a downgrade from the USSR in terms of imperialism. So this would require for China to create a bloc , which it has slightly hinted at and has been much less successful compared to the USSR. Ironically, China being a communist country probably works to the US advantage. Historically, conflicts have always arose from imperialism, the takeover of land for economic reason. The US acting as a 'world police' does not even meet this criteria.
Partly it's due to old conceptions of what China is and specific Russian geographic weaknesses driving incentives. But part of it is that the US bribed China into the global trade system precisely to weaken the USSR and communism. Why would it need to fight when it can get everything it needs to industrialize without that? Especially when surrounded by US allies... This also calmed other previously martial powers like Japan (who were also isolationist and showed no signs of wanting an empire...until they did)
However, the situation is changing: the US is being more hostile to China specifically and, arguably, the global trade system in general and China imports huge amounts of food and fuel from very far away in order to maintain its newfound wealth. It's no longer the Middle Ages; technologically advanced nations require way more inputs and thus economic interconnections to compete.
These are the pressures that create navies and imperial incentives. I don't think it'll be some mass annexation of another nation into a formal empire nowadays but more than one way to skin a cat.
For a small-scale example: arguably China claiming the South China Sea and building artificial islands is a prelude.
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Barbarism?
Or more likely whatever successor entity(s) coalesce in the aftermath... which is pretty much how it went with Rome.
Imagine the collapse looks a lot less like the world stage completely upending, and more likely that the U.S. fractures into a handful of entities composed of various states who have similar interests and maybe they do some warring against each other or politely agree to leave each other's interests alone and dealing with the rest of the world on their own terms.
At which point the American continent is probably still secure from invasion and takeover by a hostile power, but can't project force around the globe.
And this is why Afghanistan is now being ruled as a distant colony of the empire after successful subjugation of the native population.
It seems facially evident that the U.S. empire isn't going to be able to maintain an ongoing presence around the globe capable of suppressing every regional dispute through military superiority if only because of our disfavorable demographics.
I'm going to read a book on the topic and see if I find this version convincing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_the_World_Is_Just_the_Beginning
But Rome was literally surrounded by hostile entitles, like the Goths. Rome's demise was hastened by competing groups. Rome was also fractured by the rise of Christianity, but the US does not have such a similar schism. The left-right divide is not like this.
I think a breakup is more plausible, but though still unlikely
In that there is not literal inquisitions going on to root out ideological heretics, perhaps not.
Do you think that the mental firmware that most people in the population are running is substantially different from that which was in play during the decline of Rome?
And a breakup would almost certainly mean the collapse of the 'empire,' is my point.
It's the inverse of your point about Rome being surrounded by enemies. The U.S. can easily afford to defend it's own borders... but it remains exceedingly expensive for it to project power overseas far from it's population centers if the host country doesn't welcome them.
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