Information Wants to Be Free (Except the Information That Makes Us Free)

RE: The TikTok Ban

From

Caitlin Johnstone

‘s Substack:

It’s amazing how fast the bill to ban TikTok is being shoved through by US lawmakers. This would easily be the single most significant act of direct government censorship in US history.

Not only would it be that. It would arguably be the biggest example of the US cutting off its nose to spite its face.

OK let’s backtrack a little:

When I first started writing this Substack, when I mentioned TikTok, I typically focused on two things: a) its harmful algorithm (or, as friend of the stack

Trafton Crandall

calls it, the “malgorithm”); b) its status as a center for mainstream, non-dissident, popular Internet culture, similar to MTV.

From one of my earliest Substacks ever:

But like I mentioned before, there are two Internets. And, off as this may sound, even TikTok lacks a certain hipness. Sure the normies love it. All the Chads and Stacys can't get enough. So TikTok is like AM radio. Places like Discord, Substack and even *sigh* Twitter and *deep sigh* Instagram are hosting the fringier side of things. Or, for a more current analogy, TikTok is like MTV and Discord, etc. are like the indie/cassette tape/college radio culture of the 80s.

Instagram hosting the fringier side of things? This is not me being wrong. This is me documenting 2022 not 2024. In 2022, Instagram was (along with Twitter) the home of dissident right as well as dirtbag left accounts and discourse. TikTok was overrun by center-left shitlib videos. The few right-wing accounts you saw had videos that showed an old sitcom from the ‘70s or ‘80s and said “You can’t say THAT anymore.”

A little more than a year ago, I wasn’t flying the TikTok flag yet, but I did notice that it was the first force possibly ever that threatened American cultural hegemony:

Then in 2020, Chinese-owned TikTok took over the world. For the first time ever, there was a serious contender for the cultural capitol of the world. Sure the stars may mostly be American, but the Chinese had all the data.

Like most people whose opinion on TikTok’s significance shifted, I changed my tune after 10/7:

Much like the graphic news footage of the Tet Offensive in 1968 attracted eyeballs from viewers even as it repulsed them, graphic videos on TikTok are getting the same attention. And mainstream legacy media was worried about losing attention to TikTok before last week….

And that brings us to our current moment. Places like Discord, Substack, X and Instagram are off the hook for now while TikTok is playing the unlikely role of free speech martyr that Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce and Frank Zappa played in years past.

If it is strange that I am comparing a networked media app to artists, this is because this is the first time an entire network was under attack. It’s funny: typically I look at legacy media history to explain what’s happening now. This is unprecedented.

If this ban passes the Senate and is signed by President Biden, some misguided patriots would say we are giving China a taste of its own medicine. China does not allow Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, YouTube, Wikipedia or Netflix. Why should we allow TikTok? We are centered on the belief of free speech. Open discussion and debate. Even if it undermines America’s aims? America’s aims do not exist unless they are discussed, debated and settled. OK, but this is the people disagreeing with their government. Exactly. That’s the problem — that that is a problem. Between a possible TikTok ban and National Guard in New York subways to “decrease crime,”¹ it is only a matter of time before we see an American dissident stand in front of a tank.

China, 1989

When I say America would be cutting off its nose to spite its face, I do not only mean as a democracy, I also mean as a technopoly. From the printing press onward, technopolies justified information overload by declaring that limiting information means limiting free thought. Stewart Brand, stumping for a free Internet in 1984, said “information wants to be free.” This was how America played it until 2017, when Trump was inaugurated. Then came the obsession with the spread of misinformation (which now we apparently could not trust the people to discern) and deplatforming (it is not enough to hear both sides of an issue, now even hearing one side was unacceptable).

Before now, this was an issue that primarily affected the right. Now that it affects a growing section of the left, there will be a return to free speech discourse that we have not seen since the ‘90s, when Gen X got its flannel torn and its X caps tussled over 2 Live Crew and Pee Wee Herman.

The confusion lies, of course, with the woefully mistaken assumption that the Internet was invented to share large packets of information. It has been and will be to track counterinsurgents. As we are seeing especially now though, the Internet has become an unruly meganet that no one (not even the military) can control.

LSD was also primarily used by the military before hippies started taking it and dropped out of plastic America. Then it became illegal. For decades, America had absolute power over the design of cyberspace. So if that’s the case, how was America able to allow TikTok on its shores to begin with? Besides the American ideal of free exchange of ideas, there is also the realpolitik of American businesses like Apple and Tesla entangled with China. If we already do business with China, why not allow a lip sync app? Needless to say, a TikTok ban will lead to less than happy days for both companies.

This is to say nothing about American users. With no TikTok to give competing, conflicting information, Facebook and Instagram will be more censored than ever. Already, Facebook suspended Palestinian photojournalist’s Motaz Azaiza's account.

Meta’s censorship post-ban may not backfire with normies, squares or toadies. But with free thinkers, yes. Whatever tech backlash has been brewing will gain momentum after the ban. The fight for open source AI will get a lot larger. Much like free speech was right-coded before now, open source AI is still primarily a right-wing cause. If TikTok is banned and alt-leftists see Mark Zuckerberg’s smug Cheshire Cat grin, allowing Google and Microsoft to control the future of AI for the sake of preventing “misinformation” will be an increasingly unpopular idea with anyone who is not OK with the status quo.

Speaking of misinformation, our guardians against it — print journalism — may be in even deeper shit than before if the ban passes. Publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post stayed afloat for a few more years by branding themselves as the last defense against Trump’s fascism. Now that they would be characterized as “approved channels of information” after a TikTok ban, the harm caused from a backlash may prove too great a cost even for people like myself who bristle at legacy journalism’s odious center-left bias. Their devaluation as guardians of misinformation may prove to be their downfall. Then again, like America centered itself on free speech but is seriously discussing a TikTok ban, the downfall of mainstream journalism may well come from them withholding information that favors the right as well as the alt-left.

The downfall of the Soviet Union is often attributed to Gorbachev permitting the free exchange of ideas (glasnost) with the West. Our banning of information may well lead to our downfall as a country. In 1984, America’c cultural hegemony was unquestioned domestically and globally. A TikTok ban begs the question: what don’t they want us to know? It is not an accident that the only pro-Palestine speech at this year’s Oscars was by Jonathan Glazer, a Brit. The Academy uploaded all speeches except that one to YouTube. Why?

I am not of course betting money that a TikTok ban will actually lead to America’s downfall. But the media skepticism — and general cynicism — will metastasize. 1989 was the peak year of American power, so it may seem odd that I close this with a song from that year. It is in fact odd that Leonard Cohen’s masterpiece “Everybody Knows” came out that year, particularly with the line “Everybody knows the good guys lost.” Whatever peppy enthusiasm the youth vote had before this year will go below zero after a TikTok ban. Nancy Pelosi gave an infamously cringe speech where she said “This is not an attempt to ban TikTok. It’s an attempt to make TikTok better. Tic tac toe, winner.” As Gen Xers like me learned from WarGames, tic tac toe is not a game worth playing.

I will not be here next week. Doctor’s appt. Let’s shoot for two Saturdays from now.

1. I see them at my own stop in Bushwick now (Myrtle/Wyckoff)