Normally, this newsletter will be about how particular corporate actors manufacture futures, but I thought I’d begin instead by talking about a hot topic du jour: the banning of TikTok in the US, Canada, the UK, and other countries around the world. I was talking earlier this week with a friend of mine, Cole Velders, who studies TikTok, and we agreed that this narrative, at the end of the day, is about empire, both declining and rising. So, I thought I’d write about something much bigger: global geopolitical futures!
There’s no getting around it: we’re in a new Cold War. Or so we’re told. As China has rapidly expanded its economy in recent decades, the West, and the US in particular, have coalesced around this narrative that the country is not just an existential threat but a military, security, and cultural threat. I’ve done it myself.
Either way, it’s easy enough to understand the attention on TikTok within this vacuum. During the hotly-anticipated five-hour Congressional hearing yesterday, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew got it from all sides, as Democrats and Republicans alike wanted to know if the app is spying on Americans on behalf of the Communist Party of China (CCP). This framing is, I think we can say, opportunistic political posturing — China is positioned as the boogeyman, and the US looks like it’s being tough on them.
Of course, many things can be true at the same time, and unfortunately, legitimate concerns about a platform like TikTok get conflated with, and buried by, political strategy.
First, let’s be clear about the data extraction of a company like TikTok. Like most platforms, it collects data on its users to group them into what I’d call “populations” (borrowing from Kris Cohen), clusters of like-minded users that can be more easily targeted with content and ads. From what we currently know, TikTok doesn’t do anything with user data that Facebook/Meta, Google, Snapchat, or any other American platform does. They largely collect the same data, and in most cases, as a newer player in the industry, they have less than these more established companies that have longer histories with their users. The “fear,” such as it is, is that TikTok will, whether by choice or if they are forced, share this data with the CCP, who can (theoretically) weaponize this data for espionage. By all accounts, however, China has many other, more effective ways to collect and take action on American data, going back years, and it’s unclear (and, I’d contend, unlikely) that what TikTok gathers would be any different.
Second, another major line of questioning at the hearing was on child safety, content moderation, and protecting users. This is another crucial question for social platforms across the board, and every single one of them has largely failed on this score, and so TikTok is far from alone in its struggle. Which isn’t to say that they shouldn’t be made to answer questions about it on individual and collective levels, but when these issues are enveloped within the China fear-mongering campaign, it becomes confused and bound up in irrelevant questioning, like the idea that the CCP “controls” TikTok’s algorithm.
In the end, it’s a lot of hubbub over unprovable claims and dangerous potentialities, largely coming down to legislators’ worry that the app can be or will be used to promote CCP propaganda (as TikTok’s “sister app” in China, Douyin, arguably does). Some have argued that Chew didn’t do a good enough job of explaining that this isn’t happening, and how things like Project Texas, whereby TikTok proposes to store all US user data within the US (based on a partnership with the US-based Oracle), would address their core problem. This is fair, but these hearings are fundamentally theatre, anyway — the legislators had made up their mind.
The same thing is being debated in Canada. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said to CNN, “We’ve consistently seen that the Chinese government use whatever tools it can to get information, get data that is going to be advantageous to its aims around the world. And we’ve also seen that Chinese owned or Chinese directed companies are very much answerable to the Communist Party of China.”
Putting aside the obvious point that American and Canadian governments and companies do the exact same thing, it reinforces the feeling that what’s really going on here is that TikTok broke social media as we had come to understand it in the Web 2.0 era, and as Silicon Valley firms have desperately struggled to keep up, often by directly copying whatever TikTok does, it fits nicely—squarely—within the larger story about China overtaking the West. So it becomes a way to blame China for all our problems — as one legislator put it, TikTok is a “cancer, like fentanyl, another China export, that causes addiction and death.” TikTok, fentanyl, Covid-19 — everything wrong with us is because of them.
This is all happening with the backdrop of the US and China in a race for technological progress, and the US feels like it is losing. In most cases, it is! Legislators also repeated a common line, that this isn’t about industry problems (as Chew insisted), it’s about TikTok problems. Nice try, but the call is coming from inside the house.
My take? It seems hugely unlikely that a total “ban” is in TikTok’s future, and the idea floated of having an American company like Google or Meta buy it would, at the very least, face incredible antitrust challenges (moreover, China did Chou no favours by announcing, hours before his hearing, that the country would oppose a sale of the company to a US entity).
Instead, likely the only way out is to completely separate TikTok from ByteDance and Douyin in some way — the general public, let alone those in Congress, have a hard time understanding the difference between them, and it only inflates the sense that it’s all one machine operating under the CCP. A true divestiture would be wildly complex, however, and would not guarantee a change in operations, and TikTok is arguing that a better path will include “transparent, US-based protection of US user data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, vetting and verification, which we are already implementing.” In the current ~political climate~, that might not be enough.
Ephemera
In the vicinity of the TikTok debate, Chris Stokel-Walker, author of TikTok Boom: China's Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media, wrote for Buzzfeed News about his refusal to send leaked documents to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that outlined TikTok’s strategy for separating itself from China, in part because they would be misconstrued. A good take on how even the most critical of investigative journalists covering the company has found no evidence of what the US government is claiming to be unquestionably true.
Great episode of the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, hosted by Paris Marx, with guest Jacob Silverman, discussing the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the turn against venture capital.
Letterboxd user jacob generously created a list of every movie referenced on the television series The O.C.
Movie Recommendation: In my Film & Labour course last night, I showed the Swedish/Polish 2020 film Sweat. For my money, this is the best movie to date about influencers and the job of being a social media star. Most depictions of this world are incredibly simplistic, pathologizing, or mocking — this isn’t real work, or can you believe that this is what we’ve come to? Sweat, on the other hand, is a careful character study of a single fitness influencer, and we come to know her through her many selves, performances, and relationships, with her audience, family, and self. In a way, it’s about the “dark side” of this work, and the dangers that can arise from courting intimacy online and parasociality, but it’s also a nuanced portrayal of one person’s experience in this world and how social relations become blurred and ruptured as a result.
It’s now the end of March, so I feel comfortable landing on my favourite movies of 2022. One can never see it all, so naturally, the incomplete list of what I ought to watch: Fire of Love, Il Buco, Both Sides of the Blade, Flux Gourmet, Limbo, Vikram, The Woman King, Confess Fletch, The Munsters, No Bears, Catherine Called Birdy, Pacifiction…
Benediction (Terence Davies, UK)
The Novelist’s Film (Hong Sang-soo, South Korea)
Crimes of the Future (David Cronenberg, Canada/Greece/UK)
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Laura Poitras, USA)
TÁR (Todd Field, USA)
Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, South Korea)
The Fabelmans (Steven Spielberg, USA)
Return to Seoul (Davy Chou, South Korea/France/etc)
Queens of the Qing Dynasty (Ashley McKenzie, Canada)
The Banshees of Inisherin (Martin McDonagh, UK/Ireland)
Other good stuff: Avatar: The Way of Water, RRR, Jackass Forever, Murina, Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, The Northman, Saint Omer, Nope, Inu-Oh, Top Gun: Maverick.