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The proposed ban on TikTok annoys me although I have never used it. Since I live in the United States, the CCP cannot do anything to me anyway so why should I care if they spy on me? If anything, I should be at least somewhat more concerned about the NSA spying on me because unlike the CCP, the US government can actually do something to me. There is not even any valid national security justification. Banning people who work at nuclear power plants and the military from using TikTok at work would be enough to satisfy national security concerns. I find it hard to understand how the idea of a blanket national ban on TikTok even became popular enough to go to Congress. To me it just seems like an infringement of free speech and free association. If I want to use TikTok while knowing that the CCP is collecting my data, so what? The CCP is a horrific government according to my value system, but Americans help them a lot more already by buying their manufactured goods than by using TikTok. It is hard for me to understand this proposed ban as anything other than a symbolic gesture, a sign of the sometimes understated unity that exists between mainstream Democrats on the one hand and conservatives (Trumpists included) on the other when it comes to near everything other than culture war issues, a lashing out against all possible enemies of the Wolfowitz doctrine that would properly be seen as silly soft authoritarianism if it issued from Russia or China. Should we not be better than Russia and China, though?
There is also the other angle of "won't somebody please think of the children?" But the moral fracas around the damage that social media is supposedly doing to children seems to me to have all the signs of a moral panic. Not because social media is not doing any damage to children, but because it is a slippery slope argument. There are plenty of great novels and works of poetry in libraries that also would do damage to a sensitive child, and certainly there are plenty of peer groups that a child might be exposed to which would need to have no recourse to electronic communications to also do damage to that sensitive child, but the authentic liberal response is not censorship. There is something that I find unpleasant about the whole idea of viewing information or an information medium as inherently damaging. But then, I am a liberal. The way I see it, by all means if you find the CCP to be morally objectionable then do not buy their goods or use their services, but is this a restriction that the United States government should impose?
I think this is a pretty weak argument. The reality is that kids just don't engage with novels and poetry at any meaningful scale. Especially not now, but, in my opinion, not really ever--most people just aren't interested in that. On the other hand, while I have no evidence at hand, I would bet that multiple millions of American children spend more time on TikTok than on any other single activity, including sleep.
Kids being demoralized by the tens of millions by reading Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers is a bridge we can cross when or if we ever come to it. TikTok is the bridge we're facing right now, thus it seems perfectly sensible to me to dicsuss TikTok and not novels.
I find this to be supremely amusing, because in the country I grew up, this was in fact a mandatory reading in every single high school, as set by the Ministry of Education, which fixes the syllabus across the entire country.
I won't say that everyone actually reads the whole thing (I gave up halfway through, and skipped to the end to enjoy reading about how he offs himself, which was a consolation to me for suffering the first half), but the national equivalent of the SAT exam very much assumes your familiarity with this work. For example, in 2018, half a million of high schoolers were expected to read a fragment in which Werther recounts his meeting with Albert, during which he broke the first rule of gun safety (by putting it against his own head), and, based on this, and your knowledge of relations between Werther and Albert, write an essay describing potential causes of lack of mutual understanding between people.
Thanks for reminding me about it -- now, half a life later, I actually I want to reread it, to see if added life experience will change my perception of the work.
This isn't relegated to your country or a ministry of truth. Every student has had an educator they were convinced was going through life just to make his/her students as corrupt and miserable as said teacher was. And the students were generally correct.
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