alright, let's talk about tiktok, since that's what yesterday's main NYT story was about. still too tired to go through screenshotting it piece by piece, but i have enough to say regardless.
tiktok is a threat to national security, but it's also a threat to public health. i would like to see politicians arguing more for the latter than the former, but at the same time we don't have a great track record of banning things that are bad for us.
i don't like tiktok. i don't have a tiktok account, i avoid it wherever possible. i feel like tiktok has destroyed so much, and it's all at the behest of a country that does NOT have our best interests in mind. i'm not going to give a chinese authoritarian algorithm control over my dopamine receptors.
tiktok destroyed our attention spans. gen alpha can't focus on anything longer than 15 seconds anymore. longform social platforms have upended their formats to try and imitate tiktok. i don't want reddit to look like tiktok, i don't want youtube to work like tiktok!
and on top of the ADHD-brain bite-sized content format, it's promoting an addiction to endless scrolling. i used to be able to open up my sm of choice, read whatever had been posted since the last time i looked at it, and be done.
then there's the narcissism. i frankly don't understand the desire so many people have to be in front of a camera, to be the center of attention, to have millions of people watching what they do. if facebook & instagram introduced the plague of selfies, tiktok turned selfies into thermonuclear narcissism machines. EVERYONE is self-obsessed.
and 14% of americans get their news from TIKTOK?! FROM TIKTOK. from whatever batshit-insane conspiracy-addled whackjob points a camera at her own face to tell you birth control is a deep state plot to render women infertile and eradicate white people. that ANYONE thinks they're getting "news" from TIKTOK is a travesty and a serious threat, i'd even call it a crisis.
then there's the food trends. there's no time to actually post a recipe, you just watch someone chuck mystery ingredients into a bowl and microwave it for ??? minutes and magically produce some fun-looking thing. the fact that long-form content creators with actual food science degrees have to spend their time debunking these "viral hacks" is depressing as shit.