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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.
I suppose the evidence would be that we have strong evidence that TikTok is willing to censor/promote/bury certain topics, as that's far more plausible than TikTokkers just not caring about Hong Kong compared to other platforms and causes. We also know that TikTokkers are more antisemitic than other platforms. Correlation does not equal causation (it's possible that anti-semites just prefer TikTok over Instagram for other reasons), hence why I said weak evidence.
To quote Nate Silver,
But does China care about that patch of middle eastern desert and who controls it, like at all?
Oh they do, and they care a LOT.
Here are the countries that explicitly avoided signing up for any Belt-and-road deals. That list of QUAD countries (US-Aus-Japan-India) and Israel.
Israel and Israel-Saudi relations are the center of how the next generation of trade routes to the west pan out. On one hand you have the West-Israel-Saudi-India corridor. West friendly nations with a poor endpoint in India, but all of Israelis, Saudis & Indians are economically ascendant. On the other hand, you have the Belt-and-road initiative that goes China-Pakistan-Iran-Iraq-Turkey-West.
The Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor looks comically unrealistic, but if Israel becomes a no-go zone and Saudis pull out then the competitor wins by default. If the Houthis can keep the Suez Canal unstable, then China suddenly finds itself in control of how the next generation of trade routes pan out. If Hamas loses, then Saudi-Israel relations normalize, Houthis become irrelevant and now China is left holding the worst option with B&R.
Is Iran-Iraq-Turkey corridor having any chance to win with sea route around Africa?
The sea route around Africa is already being used because of Suez instability.....and it is already a massive pain in the ass. Shipping companies to the US are preferring to go through the Pacific and Panama rather than go through Africa. Africa is a lot bigger than the maps indicate, and re-entering the mediterrainean from the south-west for European shipping is prohibilively expensive.
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