Should we just ban *all* social media?

My TrueAnon appearance, TikTok's power, and further hipster studies

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In this week’s newsletter:

• My appearance on the TrueAnon podcast this week, in which we used the proposed TikTok ban as a jumping off point to talk some freewheeling shit about TikTok, Twitter, Russiagate, Gen X, Gen Z, and, most importantly, ourselves;

• rumination upon the question of whether or not TikTok has secret access to “the mindset of the American consumer”;

• why “banning all social media” is not a solution to the problems social media poses, even if it would be cathartic;

• some academic/intellectual questions and commentary regarding the following image:

  

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Does TikTok have secret knowledge of the mysterious American Consumer?

I had an excellent time talking with Brace Belden and Liz Franczak on the legendary TrueAnon podcast this week. You can check out the episode on Patreon or wherever you listen to podcasts, or listen to it on Soundcloud here. I have to apologize for sounding extremely disgustingly wet, which is due to having my sinus cavities and lungs filled with mucous at the time.

The ostensible subject of the podcast was the proposed TikTok ban but the conversation was characteristically wide-ranging, and we covered as many of the multiple ways social media sucks and is bad for you as we could possibly get to in the course of two hours. Among the Read Max Classixxx discussed were last week’s piece on the non-persuasiveness of the “TikTok ban,” my interview with the dead-eyed TikTok “satirist” h00pify, and this column on Matt Yglesias the secret of blogging. We also talked a little bit about Richard Seymour’s book The Twittering Machine, which I reviewed for Bookforum a few years ago.

At one point in the podcast Liz quotes from a good blog post by Arvind Naranayan (a Princeton professor and the co-author of what might be the only genuinely good newsletter about A.I., “A.I. Snake Oil”) that I hadn’t seen before--a concise and valuable refutation of the seemingly pervasive idea that there is something special (and specially evil) about TikTok’s “algorithm.” As Naranayan writes,

there’s no truth to the idea that TikTok’s algorithm is more advanced than its peers. From everything we know—TikTok’s own description, leaked documents, studies, and reverse engineering efforts—it’s a standard recommender system of the kind that every major social media platform uses. Besides, recommender systems are a topic of furious research in computer science, and it would be implausible for TikTok engineers to have made a breakthrough that no one else knows about. Companies stay at the cutting edge by having their researchers and engineers participate in the open culture of knowledge sharing at conferences such as RecSys. A company walling itself off will only get left behind. For all these reasons, I don’t believe TikTok’s algorithm is its secret sauce.

Naranayan goes on to list some of the reasons why we (“we”) feel like TikTok’s algorithm has some kind of unique dark magic, and most are pretty obvious, surface-level design choices: you swipe rather than scroll, you explore rather than subscribe, e.g. But the idea that there’s something particular and peculiar under the hood is pervasive, and it’s an annoying feature of discourse around TikTok. On the podcast we also discussed an extremely dumb-assed (and frankly pretty racist!) New York Times column about TikTok that argues along these lines:

No one was contemplating the possibility that Chinese engineers could design code that seemed to understand the mind-set of American consumers better than Americans did themselves. By the millions, Americans began to put Chinese-designed software, whose innards no one really understood, on their iPhones and Androids, first for dance videos, then for the memes and now for news.

First of all, why would it be at all surprising that people in a country from which we’ve imported trillions of dollars of goods over the past two decades “understand the mind-set of American consumers?” Which, look, let’s not kid ourselves, The American Consumer Mind-Set is not a particularly complex mind-set, as mind-sets go? But more to the point, that’s not even what they did! “The code” designed by these devious Chinese engineers, as Naranayan writes, is not particularly mysterious; it has no special access to the twisted fantasies of the American consumer. They put a good recommender system into a well-designed app, and then, and here’s the part that really matters, spent a gazillion dollars to advertise TikTok on Facebook:

In mid-2018, ByteDance began an aggressive push aimed at growing TikTok's U.S. footprint, surging app-install ads on Facebook's ad network. At the peak, it was responsible for nearly 22% of all such ads on U.S. Apple devices, according to data from Sensor Tower. It cut back drastically in 2019 once TikTok gained a teenage following and shifted to building an ads business to compete against Facebook.

The only special understanding of American Consumer Mind-Set required to make TikTok a success is a recognition that the American consumer is pretty receptive to brute-force marketing campaigns and enjoys consuming lowest-common-denominator video. (Facebook knows this, which is why it’s built an inescapable TikTok competitor inside Instagram in the form of Reels.) The mystification of TikTok as the hypnotic product of Scheming Oriental Mystics is moronic; no Eastern Wisdom is required to enter and dominate this market, just some good software developers and a shitload of capital.

What if we just banned all social media?

As I wrote last week, one of my many general objections to a singular “TikTok ban”¹ is that, while I think we can fairly assume TikTok is bad for us, there’s no real evidence that it’s uniquely bad for us compared to its American peers, and the likeliest outcome were it to disappear from every phone in the U.S. is that rivals like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts--on which clips from TikTok are constantly ripped and shared and cross-posted, and vice versa, already--would simply step in as the top platforms for the consumption and propagation of sugar-water recipes, Sigma Male podcast clips, and increasingly elaborate OnlyFans marketing.

But what if we could ban all social media platforms? Not just TikTok but also YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, X, BlueSky, Threads, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Tumblr, uh… Pinterest? I guess? etc. etc. etc. Clearly, I would support such a ban, chiefly because it would be extremely funny, but--at the risk of being both pedantic and obvious--but I wonder if, even as a joke, the idea suggests too much that social media is the source of our trouble rather than a kind of symptom of it; that it’s a subversive force imposed on a system from the outside rather than the obedient product of that system.

Look, “social media” in a broad sense is undoubtedly a cause of a host of overlapping crises in politics, trust, sociality, being normal, etc., but it didn’t arrive from nowhere in 2003, fully formed and ready to wreak havoc. TikTok and Facebook and Twitter and whatever else have taken what seem to be particularly deleterious forms because these are the forms that were encouraged by the structures of funding, business models, regulatory regimes (or lack thereof), cultural subjectivities, consumer behaviors etc. that they have encountered as they develop. The intermediation of so many spheres of life by software platforms was, for many people, common-sensical, lucrative, legal, and, maybe most importantly, extremely popular; the emergence of these companies and their assumption of the roles they take may not have been inevitable but it wasn’t surprising, and alternative possibilities were sharply circumscribed by the historical moment in which the technologies were developed.

None of which is to say that we shouldn’t ban all social-media platforms, nor that it wouldn’t probably “help,” especially in the enjoyable hypothetical parallel universe where such an idea is legally/politically/technically feasible. The social networks exacerbate the conditions of their own creation, and (hypothetically) wrecking them would at least decelerate the process. But the sudden disappearance of Facebook wouldn’t be a panacea even for the kinds of social and economic arrangements we think of as being its prdoucts. (Not, I suppose, that anyone really thinks it would be.) A real response to social media has to recognize that as much as it shapes the world (and us) in awful and damaging ways it was itself shaped by the world (and us) to be precisely what it is.

What was the hipster?

I recently was shown the following post from a Twitter user with the handle “@tulpailled”: 

I’m not really prepared to undertake an in-depth discussion or critique of this image, because it gave me a deadly stroke, but it strikes me as an important artifact of the current state of nonprofessional hipster studies and therefore worth sharing.²

First of all, I agree with the poster @CharlemagnumPI, who writes: “Totally ahistorical. No one identifiable as a ‘hipster’ would have been caught dead with a Mumford and Sons album. This is back-filling the Nashville-ass, Christian youth pastor pass at Williamsburg circa 2005 aesthetics from the High Obama Era.” It has become clear over the last few years that “hipster” in general use now no longer really refers directly to the fashion or culture of the residents of Williamsburg or Silver Lake between 1999 and 2012 but to a relatively distant approximation of certain late-2000s aesthetics on the part of those residents. This type of “hipster” look seems to have been taken up in particular by the wedding industry and Christian youth pastor-types. A more specific (and therefore useful) name for this aesthetic--I am not really convinced it was ever a “subculture” in a meaningful way--is “stomp clap hey,” coined by Twitter user @lemonade_grrrl in 2021, but outside of the rigorous world of professional hipster studies I think we have to accept that fine-grained distinctions between the “hipster”-adjacent classic-menswear revivalism of 2000s N.Y.C. and its bastard child, “Hitler Youth haircut guy with big beard,” are not really respected. “Actually, hipsters back then listened to Yeasayer and drank--” Nope. Sorry. Do not make the mistake of caring about this or saying it out loud.

Second, and maybe more interestingly, I was surprised to learn via the QTs of the original tweet that this “hipster” type--or the cultural imagination of what it entailed--is looked upon with nostalgia by the online right wing, who apparently see it as a macho (LOL) alternative to the imagined left-wing, nonbinary/genderqueer “hipster” of today. It felt like only recently that social-media reactionaries were pining for the ‘90s; to find them evincing nostalgia for the Edison-lightbulbed world of 14 years ago suggests that the cycles of braindead RETVRN cultural revanchism are tightening. But this is, for whatever it’s worth, the point at which subtle variations become important: What these guys appear to be nostalgic for is not “2010 hipsters” but “2013 Christian-girl wedding Pinterests.” Nevertheless, this is a development in online derangement that’s worth tracking.

1. Which, let’s remember, is not actually what’s up for debate in congress--the bill just passed by the House of Representatives would mandate the sale of TikTok to U.S. owners or face a ban.

2. I also suspect that it’s extremely finely crafted bait.