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Notes -
The TikTok Ban, Male Role Models, the New Punk, and the Right to be Cool in American Society
TLDR: We're increasingly seeing an urge to regulate media consumption, social media moderation, and public speech along the lines of an ersatz "equal time" doctrine, in which users must both view and affirm one's viewpoints. People don't just want the right to free speech, they want the right to be cool, to speak and be heard and enjoyed and honored.
A theme running through a few different recent threads on here is an urge by different societal movements to seize the mantle of “cool,” to be hip, to be fun, to be interesting.
The people trying to ban TikTok have cited over and over the differential between Israeli and Palestinian content.
The underlying assumption by Pro-Israeli voices is that it is impossible for Pro-Israeli content to simply be unpopular. It is impossible that the Israelis are simply bad at memes. There is no actual evidence of bias produced, no evidence of suppression of Israeli creators or boosting of Hamas hashtags, the assumption is that this bias must exist in order for consumers to make the choices they made.
Meanwhile the primary effort I see in the Anti-Anti-Semitism space is the #StandUpToJewishHate campaign, which is so confusingly bad I literally think it is its opposite every time I see it. I see the ads, and I read it naturally as Stand Up to Hatred (by) Jews rather than Stand Up To Hatred (of) Jews. ADL content is lame, bad, boring. Pro-Palestinian content is simply better and put together by better creators.
Just accept not being cool! Did you know: what only number one hit in the 1960s was explicitly about the Vietnam war? Ballad of the Green Berets. Go figure. You want to compete with better memes, produce your own. While we associate the 1960s music scene with the antiwar movement, there were significant patriotic songs produced too. Fighting Side of Me, Okie from Muskogee, the patriotic hits of the era were huge. You compete with memes with better memes. Banning tiktok will not save Israel.
We see the same dynamic with astroturfed “Positive” male role models. Male role models who are nothing interesting, simply because TPTB don’t like the ones that are actually current and good. We see the same dynamic with everyone claiming to be the new punk. This poem circulated on twitter as the worst poem ever written and I tend to agree, but the sheer weirdness of the idea that being a revolutionary is congruent with following public health theater and taking antidepressants just floors me. Everyone wants to be cool and rebellious and also in power and also secretly the choice of the grill pilled normies and the proletariat and the artists and the one true source of loving families that produce children. They want to be James Dean and Mr. and Mrs. Cleaver. They want to be both the enemies in the culture war at the same time.
This comes back to the debate about freedom of speech vs freedom of reach, right? How do you create the right to equal time in a world where people are picking among free choices with their eyeballs? How far does this go? If people buy books that are on one end of a conflict, must publishers and libraries fart out books for the other side? It was possible in a more centralized era for governments to force limited broadcast stations to cover sides evenly, but in the era of consumer choice, even if you force content creators to put out pro-Israel movies Netflix and Youtube customers don’t have to click on them. You can’t force eyeballs onto content anymore. To what extent is the effort to force advertising into these platforms in part an effort to force content consumers to get exposed to these messages whether they like it or not? Once people can choose their own content, they might not pick your content, and that can’t be allowed.
The popularity of pro-Palestine content on TikTok is primarily due to the fact that Anglo media is increasingly internationalized. Previous generations of social media content saw very little overlap between culturally distinct communities; sometimes American memes would filter down, but memes from the periphery almost never flowed up to the Anglo metropole. With the third generation of social media and TikTok/Reels that has changed, core Anglo users now often see algorithmically successful content from the Spanish, continental European, Arab and South and Southeast Asian spheres if it goes very viral. Some domains like beauty and fashion (where content is primarily visual) are even more diverse.
The Muslim world is almost a quarter of the world’s population. It’s increasingly middle or upper income, increasingly online, increasingly Anglophone. Many influencers who do well in the West are partly or wholly or Arab descent. Major nations like Indonesia and Malaysia are now pretty much full on social media, and their most viral content often makes it to the West, it’s not siloed. The only thing that unites plebs across the entire Muslim world is contempt for Israel. The degree of hostility usually varies, but because many global Muslims have a simp complex around Arabs (eg replacing local dress with hijab and niqab, or thawb for scholars) there is a special race to prove just how pro-Palestinian you are for peripheral (eg. Malay, black African, Bangladeshi) Muslims groups far from the Arabian peninsula. Witness that Malaysia is for example much more anti-Zionist than Saudi Arabia or the UAE, even though Israel and Palestine are on the other side of the world and are inhabited by people ethnically and culturally very distinct from Southeast Asia(ns). But if you speak to Muslim Malays, they see it as their big and noble duty to the Muslim world to be anti-Israel, serving in this sense a function like a crusade.
Helped along by a rapidly growing and ever more powerful Muslim population in the West, plus some good memes, the Palestine complex seamlessly inserted itself into the generic DEI memeplex that already dominates on these apps. This has been a long time coming and has been obviously on its way since at least 2009, maybe earlier. 18 million Jews, as funny as they may be, can’t out-meme two billion Muslims, especially in the current DEI climate in the Anglosphere. The cultural and commercial energy is with them.
It’s interesting to look at this in the wider context of Zionism, because of course the greatest mistake the Zionists made was believing that the Holy Land could be held by the Jews easily and forever onward. But you have to understand that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many bourgeois Jews and gentiles in Europe considered the Muslim world to be a largely passive, defeated people. By the end of World War 1 pretty much every single Muslim country in the entire world was subordinate - whether under colonial rule or indirect suzerainty - to a European empire of one kind or another (the UK, France, Soviet Union) all led by non-Muslims. The young elite of the Muslim world were secularizing, Europeanizing, going to private schools run by French missionaries, urbanization seemed to see declines in religiosity. Many early Zionists, especially on the Anglo-French side, expected that Europeans would rule over the Arab world, including the Levant, forever. After all, the Ottoman Empire was over, the region was largely scarcely populated, local rulers were most fine with serving European foreign policy. Revolts were regular but mostly easily put down by modest European forces. Neither Arab nationalism nor Islamism were yet major forces to threaten Israeli dominance of Judea and Samaria. Israel had a bright future as an informal outpost of empire surrounded by the statelets of various other client peoples.
They did not predict how much the world would change, and now it seems hopelessly naive to imagine it would not. In hindsight it was very stupid to pick a fight with that many people.
To be fair, at the time nearly everywhere on earth was under the thumb of a European empire(or the USA or Japan). South Africa made the same mistake because the continued dominance of Europeans over the black and brown masses seemed as obvious as day and night to everyone at the time.
Except Jews have a local majority, and, significantly, are winning. Perhaps not in the court of public opinion, but Israel is essentially getting what it wants.
I'm still trying to figure out what changed.
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