So I hesitated engaging with TikTok for a long time because while I enjoyed the app, this an obvious outcome that was coming eventually. The Chinese Communist Party, which is the government in power under the brutal tyrant Xi Jinping, was never ever going to let ByteDance be sold to an American business when the app was the greatest covert data collection tool for clocking their enemies of all of time. It just wasn’t going to last, and Rednote will go next now that there is established precedent by law that you can shut down a non-American owned media platform. This is definitley a blow for Free Speech, though a complicated one.

I feel bad for creators and the people who made good businesses on the platform. This sucks and is bullshit. Is the US government going to go after Alibaba? Or Amazon, which basically allows China to flood the market with cheap consumer product goods that literally do push out American businessess with what are clearly anti-competitive practices? It also serves a series of techno-feudal oligarchs who are clearly done acting like capitalists and just want to rule their digital kingdoms without worry. This is wonderful for Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

This was also about the Biden administration/campaign not liking the fact that they couldn’t stand beside an ongoing human atrocity in Palestine and couldn’t get away with it during a campaign no matter how diverse the candidate. We have data showing that supporting the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli government actually killed Harris’ chances to beat Trump, like every serious progressive warned her it would.

Sure, this is also about data collection, but it is also about US businesses not liking the fact they had to compete with honesty. The Chinese got smart to us/The American marketplace: “The Americans overcharge their own people by making themselves both merchant and middle-man. We’ll become the merchants and sell Shein/L’Oreal/whatever brand before it is branded at actual unit prices.” Several people are being served by this ban for reasons that have nothing to do with national security.

But it also does have to do with national security. This is incredibly complicated both in reason and reaction. It’s pretty startling how many young people, angry about this, are trying to cheerlead a country that literally has a million-plus Muslims in concentration camps and continues to oppress any democractic dissent in places like Hong Kong and Tibet while also openly planning the invasion of Taiwan, which wants to remain free and independent. Yes, the US government are no better morally or ethically in many cases, but in some pretty important ones we are and remain. Things are really, really bad in China–incredibly bad. For all their talk about growth and eduction and becoming the world’s biggest economic in 2030, there’s no admittance yet that won’t be happening. They literally don’t have the people, who they continue to oppress and subjugate within a country that touts its few achievements while covering up many, many failures. At least Americans are allowed to see their illusions crumble fully, out and in the open.

Bodies. They don’t have the bodies like we do to sustain their government and form of market economy, which is brutal. I don’t know how to communicate this idea any clearer other than that. They lied about the impact of their One Child policy (which allowed the deaths of tens of millions of little girls), and they don’t have the people to replace the people that are aging out and dying. This is a numbers problem they can’t beat.

Throwing your hat in there is no better. Sorry, but there’s no “better” in this case.

My favorite sutra is the one about the king who built this lavish palace for his children before he saw how overbuilt, dangerous, and over-ingulgent it had became. It literally caught on fire but people were still so enamoured with the house they just moved the party to another room. The only way the king was able to get his children out of the burning house was to build them gleaming chariots that would allow them to roam the whole world instead of consigning themselves to flimsy content silo–I mean, palaces.

Going from TikTok to another Chinese-owned app is basically moving rooms in the burning palace. It’s arguably that Facebook is also a burning palace. So what do we do?

I think social media should be a chariot. What that means and where that chariot goes? I have to think more on. But before we all jump and get angry and simply move platforms, maybe we consider what we’ll be doing once we get there?

And that’s not me saying “stay here” or “go there” or “man, leave”, but if we are live in Hell, we might as well try to build some gardens to ride our carts around in.