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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32153 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.

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.

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.

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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