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Thanks for summarizing the article for me. I tried reading it, but it was just so Godawful long that I couldn't get through it once he started lionizing the little known foreign thinker, while criticizing the well known Anglophone for taking drugs, while engaging in endless low-grade sneering about people dancing or committing minor crimes for fun. Sometimes I get halfway through a new substack, and I just want to know the time and circumstances of the writer's last orgasm with another person.
For a while circa late 2019 to early 2020 the astrology app The Pattern was a fad among my friends. You punched in your data and it gave you a daily horoscope. Nothing deep, just a little fortune-cookie wisdom every day. I joked that this was an untapped market for Mike Bloomberg to purchase ads in! What if, close to primary days in key states, he paid The Pattern to just tell people in that state to vote for him. Or maybe more subtle, "The position of Uranus relative to Mercury indicates that you will fair better over the next four years under political leaders with real world business experience, and should avoid leaders who got where they are through political game-playing." Not too subtle, these are astrology fans we're talking to.
I think the far more dangerous use of TikTok would be similar. Think of The Mule, the greatest threat that the Foundation ever faced. His psychic powers didn't kill, they didn't cripple, they simply demoralized. They slightly depressed the enemy fighters, they took away that last 5% that wins or loses games.
Can TikTok do the same? Can it just turn down the dials on a soldier, make him less effective? I don't know. But I'm sure people are trying to figure that out right now, and I doubt any of them have my best interests at heart. Can we pitch people's moods up or down by throwing them certain pieces of content and avoiding others? It seems plausible. I can be put in a better mood by one piece of media, and in a worse mood by another. People seem to get implausibly angry and frustrated by certain meme arguments online about politics and culture war shit; could TikTok just turn all that up to 11 and cause chaos?
I'm not so sure, I kind of doubt Social Media's broader impact on the conversation, because the testimony to it always seems one sided. "Your opinions are impacted in ways you barely understand, His opinions are entirely astroturfed; come read my substack to get the real dope." Rarely have I ever seen anyone say "ACAB, but the George Floyd riots were driven by a social media mind virus." It's always the bad things that other people want that are fake and gay hailcorporate astroturf; your own causes are pure, you arrived at them through the application of pure reason in a vacuum under a Bodhi tree. The instant writer has no doubt that only a degeneracy-inducing Chinese superweapon could get people to enjoy dancing or watching pretty girls make funny drinks. Yet he doesn't stop to wonder why he is the 10 millionth fucking guy this week {including most of my own TikTok feed} to give an introductory lecture on Stoicism.
According to a Canadian army officer I know, yes. He took a course during the post-Afghanistan years that was supposed to teach “strategic thinking”. One of their case studies was a problem that the US military faced: amid high unemployment in places like Karachi, Pakistani youths with nothing better to do were being recruited by the Taliban and crossing the mountainous border regions to kill American soldiers. How to solve this?
The obvious and favored course of action was to apply airpower and bomb the heck out of suspected tunnel areas and waypoints in the mountains with B52s. Cost: on the order of $100m - $1b. However, an alternative course of action that was considered took a PSYOPS angle: buy a few hundred generators and a few thousand Xboxes and set up free gaming centers around Karachi. The theory being, by distracting the youth with video games, they would be less likely to seek adventure and meaning by joining up with the Taliban. Cost: on the order of $1m - $10m.
The leadership at the time chose the former course of action. But several years later, the latter course of action is being studied by aspiring senior officers as a brilliant example of innovative and strategic thinking that could have saved a portion of the trouble of fighting a war.
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See also the Honored Matres in Frank Herbert's Dune series, who "won half the battle" of their conflicts by promising supreme ecstasy to those who pleased them. Or Aristophanes's Lysistrata, where women bring a war to an end by refusing to put out.
I suspect that a similar dynamic is one of the West's weapons against Islamists, though the classic suicidal Muslim terrorist is apparently a young Muslim man who is ashamed of his sinning and who wants to buy a way into paradise at the cost of his (and others') lives.
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