I suspect there’s a lot of nostalgia for the Cold War in the US gerontocracy. They were the centre of the “free world”, who had to accept American foreign policy on a “you’re with us or against us” basis, and they had a permanent excuse to splash cash on defense bric-a-brac, all without the political snafu of actually going to war.
It feels like the PRC avoided being a 1:1 replacement for the USSR; they never represented a “They’ll nuke Dubuque” threat, so you couldn’t rally support the same way. And the West is too wedded to cheap imports and entranced by new markets to accept a hard trade cutoff right now, so they pick little fights (semiconductors, EVs, TikTok) hoping to make bold gestures. Behind the gestures, it’s not about a direct military or national security angle (if people are using social media on military bases, that’s a discipline breach whether it’s TikTok or Facebook) so much as trying to push back the day that the US is not the unquestioned dominant economic and military power.
So in n years when the courts finally sort it out, TikTok will fire-sale to someone who doesn’t know what to do with it and let it rot, 90% of the users will have long ago moved on to the next social platform with a 5-year lifespan, and a bunch of foreign investors will have a bitter taste that if you make a product Americans willingly choose, their free-market-loving government will screw up your commercial investment to punish you for being Communist.
YT shorts, Instagram reels and tiktok are basically identical to me. Why is tiktok being singled out? Is it just “china bad”?
The US is desperate to rattle sabres with China.
I suspect there’s a lot of nostalgia for the Cold War in the US gerontocracy. They were the centre of the “free world”, who had to accept American foreign policy on a “you’re with us or against us” basis, and they had a permanent excuse to splash cash on defense bric-a-brac, all without the political snafu of actually going to war.
It feels like the PRC avoided being a 1:1 replacement for the USSR; they never represented a “They’ll nuke Dubuque” threat, so you couldn’t rally support the same way. And the West is too wedded to cheap imports and entranced by new markets to accept a hard trade cutoff right now, so they pick little fights (semiconductors, EVs, TikTok) hoping to make bold gestures. Behind the gestures, it’s not about a direct military or national security angle (if people are using social media on military bases, that’s a discipline breach whether it’s TikTok or Facebook) so much as trying to push back the day that the US is not the unquestioned dominant economic and military power.
So in n years when the courts finally sort it out, TikTok will fire-sale to someone who doesn’t know what to do with it and let it rot, 90% of the users will have long ago moved on to the next social platform with a 5-year lifespan, and a bunch of foreign investors will have a bitter taste that if you make a product Americans willingly choose, their free-market-loving government will screw up your commercial investment to punish you for being Communist.