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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.

China is the new red scare, replacing the USSR. Every generation has one it seems. Before that it was ever-present threat of Islamic terrorism, which unlike the threat of China was not entirely unfounded. Remember all that hype about Huawei spying electronics a couple years ago, which vanished from the headlines after Covid came. Or about Trump wanting to ban TikTok, which predictably went nowhere . Whenever politicians want to boost sagging approval numbers or project decisiveness , pointing fingers at China is a surefire bet.

Before that it was ever-present threat of Islamic terrorism, which unlike the threat of China was not entirely unfounded

?

China is far stronger than Islamic terrorists. They probably have enough deliverable nuclear weapons to cripple the US. Huge economy, huge scientific potential, huge military, poised to take the island our high-tech industry depends upon... What could be more threatening than China? The Soviets never had an economy like China's, never had a functional ideology or numerical superiority.

Islamic terrorism is a real thing. China is mostly sable rattling. It can do more, but chooses not to.

But we're talking about 'threat' here. I can be threatened by someone doing nothing. The US is threatened by China doing its 'sabre rattling' when that sabre rattling is building a giant fleet and powerful military. Hitler didn't do anything substantive in foreign policy but what could loosely and broadly be described as 'sabre rattling' from 33 to Anschluss but he threatened a lot of people in that time by making Germany much stronger.

Hitler was way worse , and this is not just based on hindsight but the ideology he espoused. he wanted a 4th Reich that would last 1000 years. this was in 1934. He knew what he wanted and wasted little time to try to achieve it. china has not done much in almost half a century. China is mostly a technocratic state that wants to realize some ill-defined Marxist utopia in some perpetually indefinite future, not a militaristic one like Nazi Germany. Realizing this goal means China cannot act too rash. One of the fundamental assumptions of Marxism is that capitalistic states will collapse due to contractions inherent in capitalism, so there is no need to invade or conquer them.

contractions inherent in capitalism

I think that's a radical feminist argument, actually.

I mostly agree with you, although I am not sure how many CCP people even believe in the Marxist millennium. Their Marxism seems largely in service of their technocracy: non-communist societies are full of contradictions, but these can be resolved through giving power enlightened and benevolent experts. German social democracy without the "democracy" part. Fundamentally, it's actually a very similar ideology to many Western politicians, except that the latter at least officially believe that competitive democracy is an essential form of accountability, whereas the CCP believes in internal party and heavily pre-selected democracy.

That China hasn't done much yet could be either due to their desires or their capabilities. If it's desires we have no problem, they're pacific. But if it's capabilities, then we have a threat. Once they feel like a campaign is winnable, then they'll launch it.

If you build a powerful military, you presumably have some reason to use it. The US does feel threatened by China doing that, that's what the whole pivot to Asia was about, that's why they're scrambling to build up the navy again, develop high-end firepower. The Pentagon describes China as the 'pacing threat' they need to keep ahead of. It very much seems to be a question of capabilities. Fifty years ago, China was willing and capable to push back the US from its immediate land neighbors in Korea and Vietnam. Why would they not want to push the US further back now that they're stronger? They find the US threatening, partially from an ideological/political perspective (since the US harasses and sabotages non-democracies routinely) and they want Taiwan deeply.

In addition to Taiwan and various small islands, China has many strategic interests all around the world. They're now a very large economy, they have interests everywhere, citizens they want to protect, resources they want to secure, markets they want to dominate. The US has a bunch of naval bases everywhere for similar reasons, as did the British. China is building bases where they can for those reasons.

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