The TikTok Mouse and the Elephant in The Room

We’ve reached a point, here in the fast-moving eddies of the digital era, where snapshots of a given point in the space-time continuum are nearly impossible to capture. Time doesn’t present itself as an orderly sequence of discrete blips, like the ellipses that follow a stray thought, but instead as a continuous, relentless stream. Time is fluid, it’s liquid, and it gives the impression of having accelerated enough to generate a surplus of hydroelectric power.

Then again, maybe time is entirely passive, and the Martin Amis’s quote from his novel Money is more accurate: “Sometimes I feel that life is passing me by, not slowly either, but with ropes of steam and spark-spattered wheels and a hoarse roar of power or terror. It's passing, yet I'm the one who's doing all the moving. I'm not the station, I'm not the stop: I'm the train. I'm the train.”

So, if Amis is right, time is like a spectral tunnel, and we are the ones rushing through it. Many of us take no time, or very little of it, to consider what’s happening in this moment, perhaps because we’ve come to accept that this insignificant moment will be succeeded by the one the follows it, and that one by its successor. In the digital age, afflicted by the fear of missing out (FOMO), we rush from door to door, just to say we’ve been there. It seems there’s no point to the frenzy other than to document the frenzy itself.

Maybe we do sense that we’re somehow accelerating through time, propelled by our own technological excretions in the digital era. If so, does anything we say or write today — anything at all — retain meaning much beyond the moment of consumption? Will anybody care tomorrow about what we say or write today? Is there any point, or any purpose, to anything we do, now that nearly all relevant media has become digital and our lives are spent distractedly drowning in growing pools of data? Is the point merely the commerical production and consumption of “content”? Do we aspire to nothing more than generating, consuming, and ostensibly documenting the otherwise meaningless flow?

I ask these questions for a at least a couple reasons, and neither involves idle or self-indulgent speculation. I’m concerned about ethical and social structures, which are steadily dissolving in the digital stream’s acidic waters.

Progression Amid Regression

We’ve unleashed a wave of technology, which we leverage a propulsive force to move us forward economically and materially, but I get the distinct feeling that we’re stagnating or regressing ethically and socially. Much of social media has become a misnomer. What passes for social media seems, in a pragmatic sense, has thrown off its cloak and revealed itself as the opposite: anti-social media.

Rather than bringing people together, social media’s algorithms and tribal conventions seem designed to pull apart, to spark conflagrations and foment antagonisms that have transmogrified too many of us into our worst selves. Some have gone from Jekyll to Hyde, but the transmutation wasn’t induced by a drug, at least not in the literal sense; the change was effected instead by tapping a screen or a keyboard and passively invoking algorithmic spirits.

I want to stop here and take us in a different direction, but not before I give you something else to consider.

In interviews, the author JG Ballard occasionally referred to a modern society as a stage set that could be assembled or disassembled at any time. Here’s an excerpt from an interview where he elaborates on the concept: “I think most people realize that for all it's complexity contemporary society is an artificial construct that can be moved offstage at a moment's notice, as people find at times of war, as I found during the Second World War as a child in Shanghai. You know, reality is just a stage set that can be pushed aside, and a very different set of rules can then apply.”

Ballard appears to suggest that any contemporary social order, which its denizens understandably perceive to be solid and permanent, is actually frail and tenuous. People who had lived before and during major upheavals in history never would have imagined that their lives would be so profoundly reordered or shattered by the forces of historic events. Behind those forces, of course, were people: the protagonists, the antagonists, and the innocents.

Most of us like to imagine optimistic scenarios, but runaway optimism comes with potentially disastrous blindspots. We might benefit, in these times, from imagining pessimistic scenarios, if only so we can take measures to mitigate or prevent their realization.

Tick-Tock for TikTok

Yet, here I am — shifting from the big-G general to the small-p particular — about to discuss the fate of TikTok, which, in the grand scheme of things, doesn’t matter much at all; if it does come to matter in the long arc of history, it will be because it had a small role in a larger drama.

Even then, a certain irony is not lost on me. I realize I’m on a fool’s errand to even broach the topic of TikTok’s ultimate dispensation. We can’t know how this story will be resolved. That’s because all the principal actors in the drama, if we can dignity the saga with that descriptor, will play do their bidding behind closed doors. We’ll know when they’re ready to tell us.

What that means, for would-be pundits such as yours truly, is that the challenge of addressing the TikTok affair is manifold.

First, any point of reference I might use to begin the discussion is in imminent danger of dissolution, washed way by an impending march subsequent events. More than at any time in history, what’s reported as news today — or at any point in the day — is subject to irrelevance and obliteration by succeeding reports or rumor, as new or contradictory information or hearsay emerges from named or unnamed sources, familiar or unfamiliar with the situation.

Second, I don’t really care about TikTok, per se — I am not a TikTok user today and I see nothing there that interests me. Yet some people who consume TikTok’s content or detritus — you be the judge as to which noun applies — remain entranced, spellbound for hours on end, by its meretricious charms. If I were to subject myself to such self-abasement, I’d feel like the person who walked out of a movie theater after suffering through a bad film and forever regretted the loss of two hours that could never be reclaimed.

I feel the same about most other social media. Yes, I understand that people use social media for self-promotion, but that’s precisely why I prefer to steer clear of it. The marquee social-media sites are like panopticons of exploitation: the site’s owners exploit the users, and the users exploit each other.

Back, Forth, or Sideways

Still, social media is big business these days, especially as much-hyped AI enters the frame of reference. Moreover, TikTok is not only a major social-media presence, but also at the forefront of geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. I’d prefer to disregard the frenzy surrounding TikTok, but if I did, I suspect I’d be missing the significance of an elaborate puzzle by fixating on a single jagged piece of the mosaic.

Will TikTok’s U.S. presence be sold? Maybe. Will Elon Musk get ownership of TikTok’s U.S. entity? Maybe. Those are probably not the answers you wanted, but that’s all I feel prepared to offer. The real game, the one that matters more, is played at a higher level.

What nobody has thought to ask, all through this showdown between the U.S. government and TikTok, which is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, is how China might respond if the U.S. were successful in forcing ByteDance to reluctantly part with TikTok’s U.S. business. It’s astounding to me that more people haven’t considered China’s potential reprisals.

When you’re the aggressor, as the U.S. in its trade battle against China (and seemingly against the rest of the world, for that matter), you should, before you make your first move, be reasonably confident that anything you do will confer an incontrovertible advantage in any escalated conflict that is likely to ensue. That means, before you even make your move, you ought to consider the implications of the opening salvo. Your adversary is not likely to be a passive recipient of your aggression.

Newtonian physics can apply in geopolitics: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this instance, as Chinese technological aspirations (well, one of them) are thwarted, one cannot expect Chinese interests to joyfully endure the punishment like masochists in a house of spankings. You should expect that there will be consequences. Given the inevitability of a countervailing reaction, you should know whether you’re ready to respond in kind with a countermove that further intensifies the conflict. Similarly, you should expect another reprisal from your adversary after you’ve reacted to their initial reaction. Aggression begets aggression, and it could go on for a while. What’s the end game? Is there one?

In the case of TikTok, how would China likely respond if the U.S. insists on closing down the service or forcing a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations? A proportionate response from China might involve a closure or forced divestiture of U.S.-owned business interests in China. What might those be?

If China really wants to hit at the heart of the Trump Administration, it might decide to take aim at Tesla, ending domestic sales of the vehicles or temporarily or permanent shuttering Tesla’s manufacturing facilities in China. Yes, it’s an extreme reaction, and it might not happen, but can anybody say with certainty that it won’t occur? Maybe, maybe not, but it’s something that’s within the realm of possibility in these times where seemingly unthinkable scenarios have gradually become possible en route to coming to fruition. The scope of the possible is broader than ever; it expands every day.

Then again, other U.S. corporations remain active in China, so it’s possible they, rather than Tesla, could take a hit.

Maybe nothing of that sort will happen, but can you say for sure that you know how this situation will play out?

Sleepwalking Into the Unknown

We just don’t know, because you never really know how an adversary or an opposing side will respond to what they perceive as a provocation. In these sorts of situations, the law of unintended consequences often raises its ugly head, confounding blithe expectations.

In The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, a book that challenges conventional wisdom about the cause of the First World War, historian Christopher Clark contends that the war resulted not from the pugnacity of any one power (ie Germany) that desired military conflict, but because multiple major powers miscalculated, underplaying and overplaying their hands in clumsy and misguided gamesmanship. Nobody wanted a Great War, but that’s what they got. The consequences were catastrophic and reverberated for decades.

I’m not saying that China and the U.S. are destined for military conflict — I don’t think they are, at least not in the foreseeable future — but I think the Greek tragedians had good reason to condemn hubris. You might think you know what you’re doing when you strike at an adversary, but do you honestly know, with complete accuracy, how they’ll respond and whether you’ll be ready for what follows, be it further reprisals or a step back toward conciliation?

Depending on how the TikTok saga in the U.S. is resolved, the consequences might ramify for an extended period, having a potentially deleterious impact on U.S. technological interests. We can only hope that any damage is minimal, or at least limited.

Whatever happens to TikTok, however, will be and will remain a sideshow. The marquee event, the one we should all be pondering, is what’s happening to all of us as we accelerate through time’s tunnel and leave teetering social structures in our sonic wake.