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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32152 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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TikTok is a Chinese Superweapon

Basic argument of the article is simple:

  1. 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.

  2. TikTok is very good at this due to its ability to adapt to the user and the short attention span videos require.

  3. 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.

  4. 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:

Wang writes:

“Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification… Commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems. These problems, in turn, can increase the pressure on the political and administrative system.”

Thus, by turning everything into a product, Western capitalism devours every aspect of American culture, including the traditions that bind it together as a nation, leading to atomization and polarization. The commodification also devours meaning and purpose, and to plug the expanding spiritual hole that this leaves, Americans turn to momentary pleasures—drugs, fast food, and amusements—driving the nation further into decadence and decay.

For Wang, then, the US’s unprecedented technological progress is leading it into a chasm. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang writes in his book, “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.” Though these words are 30 years old, they could easily have been talking about social media addiction.

Wang theorized that the conflict between the US’s economic system and its value system made it fundamentally unstable and destined for ever more commodification, nihilism, and decadence, until it finally collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. To prevent China’s own technological advancement leading it down the same perilous path, Wang proposed an extreme solution: neo-authoritarianism. In his 1988 essay, “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture,” Wang wrote that the only way a nation can avoid the US’s problems is by instilling “core values”—a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future

The bolded is especially relevant to the final solution to what the author (speculatively) considers an attack by a civilizational competitor:

That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed.)

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.

Gurwinder is just a self-help guru, and the post is an agglomeration of unrelated, poorly-justified ideas towards a conclusion. Not that tiktok isn't bad.

Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product [...] Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos [...] tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info.

Popular twitter, facebook, and instagram posts are just as much 'junk info', though. A MrBeast or Ryan Trahan video are just as 'mesmerizing' and non-'constructive' as big tiktoks. Instagram or twitter photos of hot girls aren't any better than lipsyncing. And if the content isn't observably worse, that a 'recommendation algorithm is the core product' probably doesn't matter.

This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery [...] can cause mass psychogenic illness: [...] otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics.

'hypnotic'? 'imprint on your brain'? Something neurological or manipulative is implied, but it doesn't seem to mean anything. And 'self-harm and eating disorders, sex reassignment surgery, and tourettes' are both very small parts of tiktok, and also present on twitter, reddit, and facebook, with no evidence provided tiktok is any better at promoting them than other platforms.

A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges,” where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it’ll make them TikTok-famous. [...] One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge,” in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.

Again, the idea that 'dangerous challenges' happened on other social media platforms was big long before tiktok. random example. No evidence provided tiktok is worse. The simplest explanation is - people have been doing stupid things since before social media, and continued doing them on social media.

There’s a substantial body of research showing a strong association between smartphone addiction, shrinkage of the brain’s gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse control (the last of which increases the addiction).

I'm pretty sure this research should've been swept away by the replication crisis, but addressing that would make this post way too long. I'll just note that the study linked doesn't mention tiktok, and is about general smartphone use. Gurwinder then idly speculates about why tiktok would be worse about other apps:

In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive, uninteractive experience of all major platforms.

Tiktok clips are shorter than youtube videos, but longer in 'time spent per thing' than tweets, many facebook posts, or instagram or snapchat images, so the attention span argument doesn't really hold. The 'reliance on machine learning rather than user input' is just confused - machine learning operates on user input, of which 'watch time' is one, and machine learning based on 'like' counts isn't obviously better than based on watch time.

If it’s the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as “TikTok brain.”

"Social media makes you stupid" is a widespread belief on many social media platforms, and vaguely connecting an intuition about "atrophy of mental faculties" to a study just doesn't work.

So, all of his arguments for why tiktok is worse than other social media platforms are just wrong. This makes 'china is subverting us with tiktok' hollow. More briefly on the china side - china's tiktok-for-adults is, as of a week ago, just as degenerate as US tiktok, with lots of fake stories and sexy girls. China's regulation for chinese, but not american, minors is very simply explained by a conflict between a growth/profit-seeking business and regulators - chinese regulators aren't even considering american kids, and american regulators aren't interested. I'll stop there because this is already annoyingly long.

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