Is TikTok banned or not?
Just get this over with.
Last week, as cliché as it is, I rewatched Idiocracy to see into the future, or at least remind myself of how the last Trump presidency will be similar to this one. It was a strange and oddly dispiriting event. I wouldn’t say I saw the future so much as I saw the present lengthening into incomprehensibility in high resolution, one legislative bungle at a time. While I can talk at length about how the American government is a diseased and depraved organization with a capacity for wrecking pretty much anything that is associated with it, instead, this edition of This Is A Newsletter! will focus on how we may have Tik’d our last Tok. Or not?
There is the macro-scale stuff to all this, like Big Tech’s ongoing fash turn and the reasons behind it, or how Zuck will benefit from this “ban” so he doesn’t really have to do anything about his own platform’s sprawling dereliction and increasing unworkability. There are also the “national security” reasons for all this, namely how the app has been influential in generating pro-Palestine sentiment among younger Americans. (Maybe the ADL will nominate all of Gen-Z for the 2025 Antisemite of the Year Award; meanwhile, Israel is dancing, dancing, they say they will never die, but we won’t be able to see it if TikTok is banned.) There is also the typical loser aura coming from Democratic leadership as this self-imposed mess resulted in a “ban” right before Trump’s inauguration, which Mango Mussolini could reverse immediately and thus further advance the Zoomerwaffen.
This could be the Gen-Z’s 9/11, or Y2K for people with ADHD. I don’t use the app because I’d rather get my daily brainrot from other sources. TikTok always struck me as an antisocial and superficial hub for low-talent narcissists chasing trends and blurting lame slang and using the same viral audio clips to produce try-hard and uninteresting content that will wash away within hours. Regardless of my disinclination towards the app, the TikTok “ban” feels like it’s on a continuum of what Ed Zitron describes as the Rot Economy, which aims not so much to serve customers but to idly torment them. It is the dreaded promise of America to offer anything you could want but nothing you would ever need, so it is weird that in a country where it is easier to buy a handgun than insulin, it has become a legislative imperative to ban an app where I can watch a video of an orangutan drive a golf cart. Now we will never know what became of that Lexus minivan.
Every day, my brain feels like I’m waking up from a nap I don’t remember taking. The Supreme Court voted unanimously to uphold the TikTok ban. TikTok announced they will go dark until they receive clarity from the federal government. Now they have restored service in the U.S. after receiving reassurance from Trump, who announced this decision at a victory rally, even though he initially pushed for the ban.
All of this over fucking TikTok—get it together!
Now all these internet-addled brainfried fiends are urging everyone to get on these luridly janky alternatives like Shein or this app called RedNote, which sounds like a horror movie that would stream on Tubi. Hard pass on all of this. We’re not all jonesing for the fix; I don’t need another app where I can mainline 300 videos in five minutes.
Stepping back from the politics and context, we’ve come (or fallen) a long way if there’s this much outrage over an app. Zoomers have convinced themselves that TikTok is the source for the next revolution, but a real revolutionary would’ve expressed their frustration with the system by sucker-punching an old lady or stealing deodorant from Walgreens. So in a context that’s much duller and not much less doomed, all that unpleasant free-speech discourse has been rattling in my head all week. People feel so entitled to constant entertainment and distraction that they view it as an infringement on their basic human rights if the conveyor belt is shut off.
Whatever happens with the “ban,” Congress should realize that American Instagram shares a lot of commonalities with Chinese TikTok—except for some reason, Instagram has Red Dye 3. My advice is if you were born before 2005, delete everything off your smartphone and make that a trend. Or, we should ban all social media, and after six months, if the world has been on its best behavior—minding their P’s and Q’s and spending their newfound free time analyzing Ulysses—maybe we can bring a few of the good ones back.
I cancelled the account I had with them. They only want videos for content, not static stuff, and I couldn't make what they wanted.
Americans flocking to RedBook is pretty funny.