TikTok Doo Doo Doo-Doo

In 1961, in his farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the “military-industrial complex”. To oversimplify, militaries need weapons for wars (or at least for the threats of wars); corporations who make weapons like to sell weapons, so they have a vested interest in there being wars (or the threats thereof); politicians can easily become buddy-buddy with such corporations, and of course politicians are always going to support the troops; and so a certain vicious triangle can form whereby the government that should constantly be seeking peace is instead far too interested in seeking war.

Few people could have had a better understanding of all this than the highly decorated heroic general-turned-president, who of course has been proven right time and time again.

In his own farewell address 64 years later, President Joe Biden gave a similar warning about the “tech-industrial complex”, saying that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that reall threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedom, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.” He is right, of course, albeit his timing is, shall we say, pretty goddamn terrible.

At a base level, Big Tech has far too much power, and has been allowed to plow ahead with their self-seeking agendas almost entirely unchecked. Biden, interestingly, was the one important member of Barack Obama’s inner circle who was especially skeptical of Big Tech, and a fair argument can be made that over the course of Biden’s term you can see a notable shift away from Obama’s extreme friendliness toward Big Tech. That shift though was slow, jerky, poorly articulated, and not especially well embraced by most mainstream Democrats. Many of Kamala Harris’s biggest donors came out of Big Tech, after all, and it was increasingly clear as Election Day neared that a Harris administration was going to soften a lot of what the Biden administration had been doing.

Big Tech is not a monolith, though. As much support as Harris got from Big Tech, Donald Trump seemingly got just as much support solely from Elon Musk, and J.D. Vance was the hand-selected choice of Peter Thiel. And of course Big Tech has long since learned from legacy corporations to play both sides. It’s in this context that we see Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos in a competition to see who can prostitute themselves more to Trump.

That’s the context for my attempt here to explain what’s happening with TikTok as best as I can understand it, and how the TikTok mess demonstrates that what we need right now is a thorough overhaul of the Democratic Party. I think this is all especially relevant on this frigid Inauguration Day, because I think the TikTok explains a lot about more than just social media.

It’s tempting to go off in a lot of different directions and talk about AI and data centers and a lot of other related things, but I want to focus here on how I think TikTok fits in with everything in terms of both technology and policy. I’m going to simplify a lot of the backstory though, with an intended audience of people who aren’t especially familiar with TikTok or with the nuances of the American-Chinese rivalry. If you want a more robust breakdown of the back story, Matt Stoller published an excellent one last night.

TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. It is not owned by the Chinese government (though they do own a small stake of ByteDance’s Chinese subsidiary.)

As a Chinese company, however, ByteDance is beholden to the authoritarian Chinese government in a way that American companies are not similarly beholden to the American government. Accordingly, it has long been argued that TikTok constitutes a national security threat to the United States, on the grounds that the Chinese government could theoretically spy on American citizens, or could use TikTok’s algorithms in an untoward way to modify what Americans see.

This AP article provides a good overview of the timeline we’re operating in if you want more detail here. In short, a TikTok ban was first proposed by Donald Trump in 2020 via executive order, but a judge ruled it would have to come from Congress. It all sort of lingered in the background for a while - it seems there were “negotiations” for a while - and then suddenly became fast-tracked in 2024. A bill requiring TikTok to be sold to a U.S. company passed both houses with strong bipartisan support and was signed by President Biden in April. Even so, after the bill was signed, Trump, and a month later Kamala Harris, joined TikTok and started posting campaign-related material there. And in the midst of all this, Trump came out against a TikTok ban, even though it was originally his initiative.

It’s not clear what people thought would happen. Did Biden think a huge U.S. firm was simply going to buy TikTok? Did he, or anyone in Washington, really think about it much at all? What did Trump think was going to happen, and why did that inform his decision to reverse his position and support TikTok?

I do not have, and have never had, a TikTok account. I’m not about to claim that I have some indepth understanding of how its tech stack and algorithms work.

In September, a Pew survey found that almost 4 out of 10 young adults regularly get their news from TikTok. I’m not going to claim to understand exactly what that means in practice.

What I do understand - and what the Pew survey backs up - is that people younger than me are largely avid TikTok users, and the way that TikTok presents (social) media to them is something many of them prefer over other alternatives. And I also understand the potential for social media outlets to push users in different directions. There are numerous examples involving numerous companies over time. X / Twitter has clearly been rigged with a right-wing slant. Studies have shown the same thing about Facebook. TikTok has been pointedly accused of suppressing certain content, like that involving pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. And if you go hunting online you’ll find a lot of arguments about how bad TikTok is on the inside.

So what we have here is a lot of engaged users, a Chinese company which it is widely understood has to bend to the dictates of the Chinese government, and a lot of evidence of how social media can be manipulated. Add all of this up and there’s an understandable existential argument for TikTok as problematic, and for the monent I’ll extend that existential argument to the realm of “national security”. The thing though about “national security” is that it’s kind of like a gigantic archery target where it’s fairly commonly understood where the bullseye is, but where nobody knows where the edges are, which has long made it possible for “national security” to be cited as the reason for some governmental action, which in turn can’t be scrutinized, also for “national security” reasons. In other words:

Citizen: Could I get some information about such-and-such?

Bureaucrat: Sorry, that information is classified.

Citizen: But why is it classified?

Bureaucrat: Sorry, that information is classified.

Now: The reality is that if TikTok were something more than a theoretical existential national security risk, something should have been done about it years ago. And so, that something was done about in 2024 begs the question: Why then? What changed? And the answer is fairly obvious: 2024 was a presidential election year, and politicians in both parties saw an opportunity to trip over each other to look tougher on China policy. This is, after all, one of the lessons of the military-industrial complex: when the issue is called, you can’t be weak on national security, can you? So you better approve those extra billions of dollars in defense spending. And in 2024, this meant you better approve the TikTok divestment bill.

After all: They’re just going to sell. They have to, right? And, well, even if they don’t, what is TikTok anyway, it’s just kids and videos and Fleetwood Mac songs and they’ll all just go somewhere else if they have to. They’ll just go to Instagram or Snapchat or whatever. Restaurant doesn’t have Coke? Fine, I’ll have Pepsi.

I’m 48. I work in tech. I’ve been online for three decades. And as I noted, I’ve never had a TikTok account. And so while I don’t know a whole lot about the nuances of the TikTok experience, I guarantee you this: Congress had no clue whatsoever about what TikTok was or why it mattered to people or why young people chose it over other social media sites or any of that, because Congress is a horrifically out-of-touch collection of people who are not interested in the actual experiences of ordinary Americans, and especially not young Americans.

But who in the sphere of Washington politics actually does understand a lot of this on a deeper level? Or perhaps I should ask the question this way: Who has enough money and power and reach into the American political scene, and also understands all of this? The rest of Big Tech, of course. And who pivoted to a place of being open to what certain corners of Big Tech had to say?

Who is attempting to position himself as the savior of TikTok, the outlet that 40% of young adults get their news from?

Who has successfully gotten all of the other highest profile tech leaders to crawl up to his throne, sniveling and asking for various favors?

Looking back now, should we really be all that surprised that Donald Trump got reelected? It’s not that the Republican Party as a whole is any less clueless than the Democratic Party as a whole. But Trump didn’t run based on trying to convince people he was the candidate with the best ideas. He ran on something else entirely, something more vital than mere political ideas. He ran - again - on pure show, and the mass media was once again more than willing to roll with the show, and at least one major social media outlet very blatantly skewed its algorithms to support him.

And it was Trump and his people who recognized far, far earlier than others that TikTok was going to lose in the courts, and wasn’t going to sell by the deadline, and that there was opportunity there for Trump and his associates to personally broker something.

Get this: the TikTok divestment bill gave them 270 days to divest. What was day 270? Yesterday. The whole thing was nicely set up for Trump to intervene if he got the chance.

The reason Trump and his people understood all along what existential threat TikTok represented as a weapon of disinformation is that they wanted to have such weapons at their disposal. Musk got that when he bought Twitter, but that wasn’t enough. Now they have Twitter, and they’ve reduced Zuckerberg to a very sad little man, and they’ve even get Google and Apple lined up to at least play ball. Broadcast media has long been in thrall to Trump. The two most important newspapers are the Washington Post, oops that’s owned by Jeff Bezos and he’s already caved, and the New York Times, oops their cravenness is just different in form. All that’s really left is TikTok, and guess who their savior is?

It’s bad. Real bad. But it’s not hopeless, far from it. The hope goes like this:

Trump is 78. He’s not especially healthy. He’s termed out. He can continue to be a disruptive and destructive force, and there will likely be a lot of bad shit that goes down over the next hundred days, but I think we’re going to look back in 2025 as his last peak.

J.D. Vance isn’t a reality television host. He’s not going to be the next Trump.

The mass media is wretched but they’re also fickle. They’re going to pivot to the next shiny thing, which won’t be Vance. Television is in precarious shape right now and they need another star to focus on. It’s not clear who or what that might be, but I think they’re going to be looking for the next Obama.

The social media sites might become even bigger cesspools than they already are. But one thing TikTok shows us is that something new can come along and be the next big thing. And there’s a market opening for the next big thing to be an even better version of TikTok - a site that, regardless of what anyone thinks about it existentially, was clearly younger and more multicultural than its competitors.

There’s one critical piece in all of this though: as an institution, the Democratic Party matters a lot more than the Republican Party right now, and so the Democratic Party being run by a bunch of clueless fools is perhaps the biggest existential problem we all face in things turning around.

How clueless are they? CNN released a poll on Sunday showing that only 33% of Americans have a favorable view of the Democratic Party. Trump didn’t need everyone to like him, he only needed people, on the whole, to dislike him less than the Democrats, and collectively, institutionally, the Democrats are a disaster.

The reasons the Democratic Party matters more institutionally include that it is more diverse, more urban, and less beholden to its largest benefactors. Internal party politics are more informative to the direction of the party than is the case for the Republicans, where Trump so thoroughly bowled over internal party politics that it shone a light on how vacant the Republicans have become institutionally.

What has to happen over the next couple of years, in short, is that the Democrats finally have to move on. Chuck Schumer has to go. Nancy Pelosi has to fully go. They are barnacles on the potential for the party to evolve, and they know it, and everyone else knows it, but the intermediate party leadership has to finally do something about it.

Many of the most popular actions of the Biden administration were things done in the competition space. Americans can get relatively cheap hearing aids now. Americans can cancel health club memberships with a click of a button. The work at the FTC and at the Antitrust Division was broadly popular, but never the centerpiece of what the Democrats were pitching, and it’s telling that Kamala Harris was likely to have removed Lina Khan from the FTC and gone backwards on antitrust. All of those people who didn’t get it need to be summarily pushed out of leadership roles.

The media savors another Obama arriving upon the scene, and so too do the Democrats, but that’s not how all of this is going to work in practice. They need multiple people who collectively share some of the best qualities of Obama and Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but - and this is vitally important - they’ve got to embrace left populism, and not just because of policy, but also because social media demands a different kind of messaging, and populism is essential to that. Much of Trump’s success has had to do with his understanding that people want to feel individually spoken to. This can be done without sacrificing the potential for collective action. But the Democrats have gotten it entirely wrong. They’ve sacrificed collective action while degrading populism. They’ve done a terrible job of making people feel like they have agency - either individual or collective. Trump has done the opposite - he makes people feel like they do have agency, even when his policies are all designed to deprive any such thing!

I know the idea of betting on the Democrats to figure things out may feel like the worst news I’ve delivered yet, but I think we’re going to see things happen very soon, because the Democrats are creatures of polls and they know they’ve got to pivot. But I also think we need to rethink what our agency in this process could actually be. I’ve long struggled with understanding what I could individually do. I live in a place where there are essentially no contested elections - it’s all Democrats, all the time, and they still tend to get selected through quasi-Machine channels.

The thing is that I think a lot of people like me have also gotten stale in our politics. There are a number of understandable reasons for this, but I think among those is that we’ve fallen prey to a retreat from engagement that maybe has itself been a form of… algorithm. After all, we know that Facebook has suppressed political engagement in favor of decidedly non-political engagement. Do we really not understand ourselves as part of the people who have been manipulated? Can we really not think through a way to positively engage with others?

However bleak it may sometimes seem, I just can’t believe that we’re incapable of evolving our communications with one another.

And no, it’s not that I have high hopes for the Democrats broadly. I’ve been around the political scene long enough and been disappointed enough. I’m not interested in being Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. What I do think though is that the cyclical nature of American politics over many decades is such that we will see a shift, we will see opportunities, and we have to be prepared to be supportive of what positive things might emerge. We need to speak up on behalf of candidates who don’t appear to be intending to bargain against themselves like the Democrats have done for so long.

Central to all of this, the Democrats have to actually have a clue what’s happening with tech, and need to come up with coherent approaches to regulation. They need to understand how to pivot quickly across the various social media outlets. They need to develop modern and unique messaging, and understand that Trump can’t run again, and they don’t need to keep putting things in terms of Trump, but can instead put things in terms that resonate with the daily lives of people. And whatever any of us might think about TikTok, it is central to the daily lives of millions of Americans, and being aloof about that is just a recipe for more and more losing. Individual Americans may not need to fully appreciate the intricacies of the tech-industrial complex, but they know when they’re being ripped off - even if they’re not totally clear how or by whom - and oh yes, they’re being ripped off, and they don’t see the Democrats doing anything about it.

I have other thoughts as well, especially about what’s happening in the tech space, things which greatly disturb me and where I think there’s increasingly a need for ethical leadership. That’s a subject for another day, though.

For now, I think we need to understand the TikTok doo-doo for what it is, and how it fits in with the overall political scene. We need to not be the dipshits mocking distraught TikTok users, and we also need to be very clear that a lot of TikTok users may well fall prey to Trump’s posturing and think of him as some sort of hero for saving something very important to them. The whole TikTok affair isn’t something where there’s a lot of way to feel good about the things that we see, but there’s a lot to be learned about what’s actually going down that can inform us about how to get to better places together.