Well, TikTok's Gone

+ digital animism, thought digest, 01.19.2025

It’s Sunday night, and TikTok is gone.

The reaction this week has been intense—and very personal for many users, myself included. I cried myself to sleep last night. A friend left me a tear-filled voice memo today. To older readers, this might sound overwrought, but TikTok wasn’t just a black hole of distraction. And I don’t think this is the reaction of an addict losing their fix, either. Even the loss of sending TikToks to friends feels like it deserves mourning.

TikTok was a virtual third place. And before anyone says anything: no, I don’t think this is dystopian. I believe that there’s a reflexively anti-tech bias that unfairly paints TikTok as “brainrot.” I reject the idea of brainrot, at least as a blanket term. Mediated relationships and online communities aren’t inherently worse than those in the physical world. They’re just different.

But I digress—

If you watched this week’s episode of The Computer Room, you know I’ve started to understand why politicians view TikTok as a threat. For months, I dismissed their concerns—I even lost a couple of friends with how dramatically I was defending ByteDance. But the whole conversation was so off-putting to me. Remember Nikki Haley’s bizarre quote about TikTok making users “17% more antisemitic”? It was hard to take these criticisms seriously when so many bordered on self-parody.

The criticisms, while often absurd, weren’t entirely baseless.

Other concerns aside, TikTok excels at making information stick. Watch someone prepare the same meal enough times, and suddenly you know the recipe. It’s brilliant for language learning. There’s an old adage in advertising that movement helps people remember things. Apple famously leveraged this idea in its iPod silhouette ads. TikTok amplifies this principle: movement is everywhere on the platform and it works. Movement grabs attention, engages the brain, and helps embed information. Pair that with repetition, and suddenly it’s not just something you’ve seen—it’s something you know.

This is why TikTok is—or was—so effective at spreading ideas, whether it was a viral song, a product, or a recipe. And while I don’t believe TikTok was meaningfully shaping political discourse, I can see why lawmakers were uneasy. When a platform can make anything from candy to leggings sell out or make decades-old songs top Billboard charts, it’s hard to ignore its power. The mechanisms that made this happen, in theory, be harnessed for other purposes, like political subversion. It wasn’t happening IMO—but it could.

The ban has predictably triggered backlash. Now, many are asking whether banning an app truly protects national security or just hides that “life is better in China.” Enter RedNote: a platform that—in the U.S., at least—started as an app for Chinese immigrants and language learners but has now become a hub for disillusioned “TikTok refugees.”

This week, RedNote became a space where Americans are waking up to what they believe is a better way of life in China¹ and questioning their lifestyles stateside in the process. My feed is filled with fan art of “the people’s hero” Luigi Mangione, videos of sleek Chinese cities, and endless praise for China’s affordable groceries and modern infrastructure. I’ve seen countless clips of Chinese users expressing sympathy for Americans, too—“you guys can’t even afford fresh vegetables!?”

Many of the criticisms about life in America have merit. I’m not going to sit here and pretend American healthcare is flawless or that I’m entirely comfortable with how our food is produced or priced. But there’s something about the tone of this newfound admiration for China that feels... off. Smug, maybe? Half ignorance, half this weird urge to stick it to “the Man” in a way that makes me uncomfortable. It feels like a kid going to someone else’s house and being like, “Damn, Billy’s mom is better than my mom.” You know what I mean? Maybe “guy who just came back from Berlin” is a better analogy.

I keep thinking about Taylor Lorenz tweeting, “Long live China,” which was obviously bait for conservative outlets but still perfectly captures the vibe. The whole thing feels oversimplified, even uninformed: rooted in fleeting glimpses of life abroad rather than any meaningful understanding. I don’t think RedNote is filled with astroturfed propagandists or anything, but it seems like our progressives just accept this rhetoric at face value. Or, more charitably, struggle to have valid concerns about their own country while not immediately rushing to romanticize another.

It’s worth paying attention to.

The shift in attitudes toward China is striking, too. I suspect that many of these people who now “wish they lived in China” were once indifferent or even critical of China. This doesn’t feel temporary. If anything, I have a strong suspicion that it’s a glimpse of the other half of the vibe shift. If being “based” goes mainstream, then, inevitably, there’s going to be another side of the coin.

Then there’s the backlash against technology itself—something that’s still simmering—which I think the TikTok ban plays an important role in. In 2020, I suggested that our “real” culture war was not simply left vs. right, but rather a three-way struggle between Big Tech, small tech, and neo-Luddites, each pushing a distinct vision of how technology should shape society. If there’s a “Tech Right,” then what I think we’re seeing here is the rise of a Tech Left²³.

Not represented by Silicon Valley, but rather primarily by progressive consumers.

Digital Animism. This has got to be the second time I’m writing this but I stand by it. I really don’t like the idea of tech being “demonic”—AI in particular. In fact, I would go as far to say that I’m deeply annoyed by the use of the word “demonic.”

But, and maybe contradictorily, I AM drawn to the idea that each piece of technology might carry its own “spirit” or “essence” in a more animistic sense. This is one of the lenses I use to think about people who fall in love with non-physical entities or objects.

I’ve spoken at length about the role of imagination, but there’s also a more spiritual dimension. It’s not about pretending they’re human but rather acknowledging that real emotional currents can flow between us and objects or even concepts. We can connect with the essence within, and from that connection, real love can be born.

Shintoism—for your phone.

1. A big part of what’s driving this fascination, too, is that many Americans genuinely have no clue what a modern Chinese city looks like.

2. As a user I suspect will want to remain anonymous on X pointed out earlier this week—both the Tech Right and Tech Left are transhumanists, whereas the neo-Luddites are not. I think I might be one.

3. One trepidation I have with these divisions—though I think they’re the right ones for this particular cultural moment—is that I don’t know where, for example, Open Source advocates live. As with most things, I think it’s best to think of these as clusters or ecosystems, as opposed to discrete groups.