Living in the Land of Short Attention Spans

My Misadventures in the Land of TikTok

Let’s start this article with a few obvious statements. Firstly, I’m old. I’m okay with being old, and have no problem shooing unwanted trespassers from my lawn. All this to say that I don’t really like or want to learn new technologies, and if censorship and habit didn’t force adaptation, I probably would have settled into a comfy podcast long ago. Secondly, I am not a visual person - I prefer writing, audio, and then visual in that order, because abstractions engage the imagination, which is something the dopamine assault that is swipetopia offends instantly. That said, one can say certain things over there that are not possible on other social media, so the experiment continues.

I suppose one can draw certain conclusions just from looking at what is over there. TikTok has its own internal economy, and for those who are interested in the bird’s eye view of things, it’s frightfully brilliant. They understand intuitively that they need a market, and so they’ve made their video producers into sellers, and encouraged enough discounts to create a marketplace of habit to make money and collect much information. One could say they do that because China is leading them, and that might be true, but to be blunt, no one cared about that until Zionism was questioned. If that’s the third rail, I hope TikTok proliferates, because Americans deserve the decency of a government that at least pretends to care as much about us as it does Israel. It’s not like we don’t have real problems, like crippling inflation, planned energy shortfalls, and rent costs that are disqualifying to a better future. One thing I noticed is those topics come up there.

I can’t get over how oversocialized the young are, but I suppose that is the price of complete technology saturation. But, my misadventures of trying to slow things down and have a bigger chat in a different place will continue. That said, I might come back here more also.

Twitter forced me to choose, essentially, after Musk throttled traffic to Substack. But as I’ve watched Wonderboy do his tricks, he’s basically just marginalizing dissidents in a more elegant way. At least here, as my friend Kenaz noted, the conversation can be more interesting.