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How the Chinese are really using TikTok to destroy us

Over at New York, John Herrman describes the TikTokification of everything—except worse:

You’re stuck in line at the grocery store, so you check your phone. Your brain shuts off, and your thumb takes over. Soon, a tall video plays. A man is tricking a baboon with some sleight of hand. He makes a lighter disappear and the baboon makes a weird expression. Laughter. The video starts again. The baboon is confused, and so are you. Who made this video? Nobody you’ve ever seen before. Why are you watching it? Because the app showed it to you....To the right, you see a vertical row of icons: hearts, a voice bubble, and a paper airplane that suggests you send the video to someone else (who? where?). Lots of big numbers. You swipe down. A thunking scroll produces another video, then another, then another.

We all know where this is going, don't we? Mike Judge showed us a couple of decades ago:

10 thoughts on “How the Chinese are really using TikTok to destroy us

  1. erick

    At the time I thought it was a funny, over the top parody. More and more it looks restrained compared to reality.

  2. D_Ohrk_E1

    Jordan Klepper's interviews with MAGA folks is evidence that the Idiocracy has already established a foothold in this country.

  3. Martin Stett

    There's a scene in 1956's "The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit" where Gregory Peck comes into the living room, sees the kids watching an idiotic sitcom and tells them it's bedtime and stop watching this junk. They leave and he looks at the TV . . . and starts watching that junk.

  4. different_name

    We built a zero-marginal-cost instant worldwide communication medium, and everyone seems desperate to turn it back in to TV.

    I'm about the last person to sneer at mindless entertainment, and the first to remind people getting their snoot up about Shakespeare's fart jokes. I just reject trading amusement for information about my qualia. The net is so much bigger and more interesting than that, I find it disappointing that that's all some people want.

    But that's humanity writ large, not any one entertainment/surveillance network.

  5. Joseph Harbin

    We're beginning to see the real reason why TikTok must be banned.

    The old crystal meth that once represented the best of American innovation (IG, FB, Twitter, YouTube, and that dinosaur known as legacy TV) just can't compete with the new crystal meth made in China. That stuff's so good you can never get enough.

    The Chinese are spanking the Americans so bad it's silly. We can't let that happen. Ban TikTok and ban it NOW!

  6. Doctor Jay

    So. It is possible to use the accelerometer and compass in a smart phone to tell when it is in a vehicle, how fast that vehicle is going, and when it makes turns.

    If you record this data and analyze it, it is very easy to pin down the location of that phone, even with location services "turned off".

    This is just one example of how powerful large data is. Remember how in The Dark Knight Batman turned everyone's cell phone into a surveillance network that was super bad and he let Morgan Freeman destroy it after he found The Joker?

    TikTok is at least that bad. It can probably already pinpoint the location in time of a very large fraction of the population. It seems clear to me that it could conceivably gather data about individuals who do not have the app on their phones, simply because they are around and talk to people who do.

    I mean, yeah, it's always fun to mock the mindlessness of consumer entertainment. The threat is a lot more serious than that, though.

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