This note continues the ‘to orient’ series, prompted by a recent visit to China. The plan is for this ‘batch’ to be published relatively quickly, and with that done, return to a slower publication schedule. Previous notes in the series: here and here.
Thinking with China, the prior note offered some observations about the need for expanding and globalising how we consider the consequences of smartphones and digital technologies. The narcissism of the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) is strongly felt. As of 2021, 63% of the world was online, so in terms of the impact of the internet, there is still plenty of room to run. Demographics are relevant here:
Sub-Saharan Africa is where the youth bulge can be found, it is also where internet penetration remains lowest (36%). As this percentage increases, it will occur primarily through people gaining access to phones. And from this, one can assume there will be social media use, and lots of it. As WEF carefully judges, ‘Emerging markets continue to spend the most time on social networks during a typical day. This could be driven by these markets generally having younger populations, with the 16 to 24-year-old segment driving growth globally.’ The future that awaits is likely one of more people blankly staring into their phones for longer. And with it, plenty of other consequences. Consider this remarkable article about the rise of ‘migration influencers’ and the impact it is starting to have on the movement of people.
Some more indicative infographics to consider, care of DataReportal:
As previously noted, the data for global usage of social media is not as robust as one might expect, but it is possible to identify some general dynamics. YouTube appears to be the most heavily used overall, with TikTok rapidly gaining ground. And so, the algorithms that shape what users see and engage with on these platforms are especially consequential. An important point follows: there is a tendency to view most of our greatest challenges today as ‘wicked problems’, dilemmas that cannot be resolved, only managed. This is not an appropriate frame for thinking about the tech giants and social media. There are some pretty simple solutions that we are choosing not to pursue: regulation, turning off algorithms, making content less viral.
Reflecting at the end of his book, The Chaos Machine, Max Fisher judges that most of the experts he engaged with proposed something like 2000s era internet, one that would be less appealing and attention grabbing:
But whatever the counsel, for a great many serious researchers, analysts, or human rights advocates, it comes down to some version of turning it off. It would mean a less enticing, less engaging internet, one where surprising YouTube videos or emotion-grabbing Facebook groups were rarer and less readily at hand. But all available evidence also suggested that it would be a world with fewer schoolteachers chased into hiding, fewer families burned alive in their homes by rumor-fueled riots, fewer lives ruined by undeserved infamy or by the false promise of extremism. Fewer children deprived of lifesaving vaccines or exposed to unwitting sexualization. Maybe even fewer democracies torn asunder by polarization, lies, and violence.
Despite so much evidence of blowback and harm, there has been remarkably limited willingness or capacity to hold big tech responsible and consider serious regulation. Given this, it is noteworthy the speed with which the US has legislated banning TikTok. The reason is straightforward, as the NYT surmises: ‘it all comes down to China’, with fears about user data, surveillance and misinformation stemming from TikTok being owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.
And so the basic problem is that the app best at ‘fracking our attention’ happens to be Chinese, not the harm it is causing to people and societies. In this genre of ‘TikTok as Chinese trojan horse’, Bloomberg recently reported that, ‘TikTok Shows Less ‘Anti-China’ Content Than Rivals, Study Finds’. From the article: ‘“What sets TikTok apart is that the accurate information about China’s human rights abuses are most successfully crowded out on the platform,” says Joel Finkelstein, director and chief science officer of NCRI [Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University]’. One of the study’s conclusions is that: ‘TikTok's content may contribute to psychological manipulation of users’: hardly a shocking conclusion or one distinctive to that app. Indeed, the other reports prepared by the NCRI on ‘the spread of political deception, hate and manipulation’ highlight the considerable damage caused through US-based platforms. The logical end point of such thinking is rather absurd: it is ‘ok’ for surveillance capitalism and big tech to manipulate people and use their data, it just should be American.
From Appendix II of the report, an example of how TikTok is ‘boosting pro-China propaganda and promoting distracting, irrelevant content’:
I’ll leave the reader to judge how convincing such plots are. The point I want to linger on is that TikTok needed to be securitised and framed as a security threat in order to generate a political response. On this, Lauren Armistead from Amnesty International, proposes:
Rather than handing out arbitrary bans, the US authorities should address the underlying problems of surveillance-based business models by introducing regulations that govern all tech platforms to truly protect our human rights in the digital age.
Indeed. It is remarkable how much ground has been ceded to big tech, and how little willingness there is to simply state that social media has become deeply harmful to individuals and collectivities, and that major change is needed. Our capacity to think and speak in terms of the good, in reference to collective interests, has become terribly degraded. TikTok, YouTube: yes - different platforms, different owners, different algorithms, but how different are the harms and the negative externalities? How much do these apps exacerbate ‘the trap the world has become’? Why can’t we simply say these are bad?
Self and other, friend and enemy: difference presented with simplicity and starkness. Yet if one goes to China, and interacts with young Chinese, what does one discover? Similar behaviours and problems: smartphone addiction, mental health issues, body image pressures, misinformation, with these issues interacting with socio-economic disadvantage. And even without Cal Newport, there are attempts at digital minimalism.
Framing TikTok within the dulling frame of ‘Cold War 2’ might be easy to do, but it is choosing to prioritise difference, and missing how much overlap there is in terms of the underlying challenges. Politically and socially, there still remains a deep underestimation of how significant the changes are being wrought by digital technologies. This is of relevance for all communities and societies. Indeed, the US and China stand out as two of the only countries with the power to seriously influence the way big tech continues to reshape our fragmenting, shared world.
As a way of ending, in A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, Antón Barba-Kay points to the far reaching nature of these transformations:
…digital technology is training us not simply to a new sense of what is real and really good, but to a new understanding of the contrasts within which we see that reality. It is by way of these contrasts between real and virtual that we see the programmatic course we’re on, the arc of what we are now collectively yearning into being. Digital technology does not have a hidden (or programmed) agenda of its own. But it does embody certain kinds of imperatives or aims that will continue to organize our experience of the world, so long as we continue to use it – “ideals” that define us as digital moderns and that we would otherwise have no occasion or context to pursue. These ideals represent an altogether new stage in our relationship to technology – the point at which human beings themselves become the objects of deliberate design, in which the bounds between what is given and what is made are altogether blurred.
The platforms and companies might differ, but the underlying dynamics are consistent, creating fundamental challenges for all of us, individually and collectively.