It’s a strange and difficult thing to follow American politics. This ritual is even harder to partake in when you dive into the weeds of Beltway theatrics, considering the pageantry invested is real and integral to the process. Serving in Congress is also an inherently ridiculous position, like being a police officer in a Richard Scarry children’s book where little bears drive around in cars that are also shaped like little bears. These figures supposedly command some authority in that universe, but it’s difficult to imagine that the police bear is especially well-respected by the other animals careening around it in their respective hatchbacks. Both the pathos and comedy of U.S. Congress come from how insistently the geriatrics in these positions refuse to understand that they also inhabit a silly world. It’s probably for the best that they take their jobs seriously, so it’s inevitable that they wind up taking themselves seriously. While their roles are politician-shaped, the people inhabiting it are at some point just confused mummies alternatively yelling and getting yelled at. It wouldn’t look that much sillier if they were doing it while driving around in a politician-shaped car.
Even as the legislative process grinds to a miserable critical failure and cable news treats deranged culture war boogeymen as a matter of national importance, there is something inescapably abstract about Congress voting to ban TikTok in a whopping bipartisan fashion. Some of this is specific to American politics at this particular low ebb, but not nearly all of it.
These hucksters will use bloodless language like “national security” to Make Some Remarks amid the blowback that comes with taking such a draconian measure on one particular social media app while Meta remains unscathed. It wasn’t too long ago that Mark Zuckerberg was the eminent villain amongst #resistance libs for his role in harvesting data to help sway presidential elections, and this is before we get to the mountains of demonstrable proof that Facebook and Instagram have made the world infinitely dumber and crueler in a number of ways. It’s jarring when people like these incompetents are still gloating and riffing about how China is siphoning our data atop what remains of a functioning government. This is not because their language is so meaningless—it is entirely meaningless, but China made a banger of an app for those who are into mainlining their own brain degeneration. We’re also not supposed to eat at Taco Bell, but every now and again they’ll re-release the Naked Chicken Chalupa.
As all that dry legislative maundering clashes with the lurid wreckage around it, the language arrives as a taunt to those in a conniption fit about losing their adult pacifier. The white-noise womp-womp of it blends and blurs, and the response comes in the form of videos of social media addicts declaring that The Deep State wants to ban TikTok because they know it’s where the revolution will begin. First of all, slow down Katniss Everdeen. Secondly, it’s highly unlikely the revolution will kick off on a website where people post videos of themselves eating Nyquill chicken. Otherwise, there are the optics of politicians doing their best to project Being Concerned and all their handwringing about how TikTok is used to spy on us and destroy Western Civilization from within. TikTok is not a weaponized psyop that’s infecting America—it is literally just a mirror of a soulless and broken culture. This also scans as an attempt to sanitize a self-inflicted wound. Meta, Snapchat, Google, Amazon—THE FUCKING NSA—have been monitoring and selling off our information for over a decade; Congress could also pass a bill to regulate how these tech giants handle our data, but that would be communism.
The zeroing in on the China element seems almost beside the point. I’m all for excising TikTok from the collective consciousness, but only under the condition that we as a society acknowledge how the ruthless tidal pull of the free market has turned social media into a toxic net negative for humanity and ban every other app accordingly. If we’re forcibly jettisoning TikTok from our iPhones, we shouldn’t even stop at social media—we should also look into the New York Times games app. It’s a cult that seemingly no one can de-program themselves from. They make you spend all day looking at 16 words trying to figure out which ones are four birds and which four are Olympic sports.
Bro, I just joined Insta because I'm a patriot.
Hey, I love wordle but go ahead and take it...ruin everything! I'm off all apps now even though the ghost of me still lives on them due to the complexity of actually disappearing but not deleting the accounts, except Twitter. I need a 12 step program for that.