The TikTok Ban Shows America Is At War With Itself

national security, the attention economy, and communication infrastructure

A personal note: I spend a lot of time in Los Angeles. We are safe, but so many friends have lost absolutely everything. I am linking resources here and Khe’s fire resources and volunteer ops- please comment any other vetted resources. I will also continue sharing resources on my Instagram stories. I have a long piece that I am working on about it, from the angle of home insurance and the housing crisis (which I wrote about a few months ago). Above all, it’s a time of empathy - the fires aren’t out yet. Stay safe.

The $50 Billion Question

The $50 billion algorithm, also known as TikTok US, will probably be banned in the United States on January 19th. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is trying to fight the ban by saying it violates free speech laws, but the US Supreme Court is like “Well yeah, but you are a national security risk”.

But this isn't really about free speech or even national security - it's about attention. The price tag on TikTok isn't just about user numbers or revenue potential - it's about owning the behavioral infrastructure of 170 million Americans.

As Shoshana Zuboff explains in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, users aren't simply products being sold - we're the raw material for a new kind of power. Our behaviors, preferences, and attention patterns are harvested and processed into prediction products. The platform's value isn't just in its userbase but in the complex web of the data, the behavior, and the captured eyeballs.

So when we zoom out, like really zoom out, the problem is not just TikTok; it’s the broader way we communicate across all platforms. It’s the collapse of information hierarchies, the compression of complexity into entertainment units, the privatization of public discourse and the geopolitical struggle over the most powerful commodity of our time - attention.

The battle over TikTok isn't just another tech regulation story or a soft power narrative. It's a really important window into how technology is reshaping what it means to be human in the digital age.

The Ban

The TikTok ban has been looming for the past few years. I think this is the fourth time it has come up, and it’s like, alright, fellas, land the plane and stop debating so much. They keep almost banning it, and then figuring something out at the last minute. It feels weird.

ByteDance could save TikTok by selling it if they really cared to keep it around, but they don’t seem interested in selling (except maybe to Elon Musk?). They seem to be like “nope, full ban.” And of course, the reluctance to sell a $50 billion company makes it pretty clear that this is probably a national security issue: it might really be about American data collection, algorithmic opacity, foreign adversary ownership, and how the app could be influencing behavior in a concerning way

But, should the government be banning it? What about the free market? What would Milton Friedman say? Should the government prioritize national security and privacy, or should it let the free market sort things out and allow platforms like TikTok to operate independently, regardless of the risks? (By the way, bans have happened before and China bans all American social media apps). A lot of people are very mad:

• “Fascism is when countries ban websites”. Soupy, a TikTok creator (who, funnily enough, was the very first person I followed on TikTok in the pandemic), has a video stating that the reason that the government wants to ban TikTok is to essentially take away free speech and that it has nothing to do with national security. She doesn’t really offer any data or articles, but instead offers a lot of emotion, which of course, resonates quite well. A few other videos are saying similar things, that the US is not a democracy and that capitalism is stifling innovation.

This is interesting because President-Elect Trump has vowed to save TikTok, after trying to ban it during his first term. The Supreme Court will potentially deny his request to stop the ban. The Bloomberg Editorial Board suggests it’s “time for the Art of the Deal.” Which maybe! Perhaps a discussion around saving TikTok could prevent a larger trade war.

But like. A Chinese-state sponsored hacker attacked the US Treasury! Diplomatic solutions are difficult! Jacob Ward summarized this push and pull well, talking about the power that China has created with their ‘national surveillance apparatus’:

So handing a live nationwide psychological profile on 170 million Americans to a Chinese-owned company is asking for trouble. But we also have shown such callous indifference to the privacy of Americans that specifically wringing our hands about TikTok while giving free rein to the rest of surveillance capitalism rings hollow.

So that’s the crux, right? We have this app, owned by a foreign adversary, that has served an important purpose to the American economy and to some of the American people over the past several years. Everyone has a ‘TikTok strategy’. It’s a endless scroll machine that probably isn’t much worse than what Twitter and Facebook do.

TikTok users don’t seem to mind being prediction tools. People are moving over to the $17 billion company Xiaohongshu, also known as Rednote (good thread on that here), which is a Chinese social media app that hit #1 in the app store on January 13th. Lemon8, another ByteDance company, is 2nd. There was one tweet that was like “let China have our data” which is pretty funny. It’s a form of protest that is uniquely American.

Regulatory approaches simply might be futile here. And sure, TikTok likely has some sort of national security risk. But it seems like our tools to try and manage that risk (a ban) aren’t working in a world where digital platforms are fundamental in how people connect and work.

The Personal is Political

I have a complicated relationship with the app because:

1. I got my start on TikTok! I was writing an options trading blog throughout college, which got me from Kentucky to Capital Group out in Los Angeles, but once the pandemic hit 6 months (!) after I graduated, I decided to start making TikTok videos about interesting science papers I was reading. When I left CG in 2021, I started posting economics content. I wasn’t alone in that.

2. It’s where people are: I view social media as a tool. You can teach people the economy as they scroll! Small businesses can build from nothing! People get exposed to all sorts of ideas (good and bad). I think TikTok absolutely served a purpose during the pandemic.

3. Economic growth: It added a tremendous amount of money to the economy. It helps businesses sell entirely out of products overnight. That’s incredible and it’s the economic power of virality. It helped people with disabilities and working parents enter the workforce in unique and powerful ways.

4. Culture: There are also genuine works of art on the platform. And some of you are probably already crowing, ‘Oh, it’s a dancing app,’ and it’s not. It’s years of culture. It’s the app that chronicled the pandemic. It’s trends, stories, and life captured when we couldn’t see one another safely. It captured key changes in our society and subcultures and for better or worse, is the primary source for understanding our era. The content itself is ephemeral, but no other platform has documented social movements and cultural shifts like TikTok.

5. Opportunity: It also is a democratizer. I was some associate at a big finance firm who crawled through the door on blind resume, and through that app, I was able to really share a love of economics with hundreds of thousands of people that didn’t think that economics was for them. I don’t know how else I could have done that at scale. So many other people have stories similar to mine.

And that's what makes this so complicated - the very things that make these platforms valuable are inseparable from what makes them dangerous. The same algorithmic systems that helped me reach hundreds of thousands of learners are the ones turning us into prediction tools. The democratizing power that lets anyone build a business or share their knowledge is built on an infrastructure designed to capture and commodify our attention. We're trapped in a system where the medicine is also the poison.

And if you read Derek Thompson's cover story for The Atlantic (congrats Derek!!) on the Anti-Social Century, it’s like well... hmm... and then if you talk to teachers about the problems the phones are creating in classrooms, it’s another hmm. What the app provides just doesn’t seem very good for us from a social perspective, forget the media. I have an entire chapter on the Attention Economy in my book. Here’s an excerpt:

Our attention has become the ultimate commodity. When we log on to the internet, we are immediately exposed to thirty different things— from gut-wrenching to wonderous— in the span of one minute. This can lead to cognitive dissonance, especially when we define ourselves through the lens of the content we consume— be it TikTok videos or Instagram reels— which places artificial limits on our self-conception. 

This isn’t just a natural evolution of technology; it’s a new reality where platforms prioritize engagement over societal well-being. And we've been here before, but this feels different. Technology has reshaped our relationship to information, with each other, and with ourselves. It’s democratized knowledge, but it’s also commodified attention - and we have to figure out how to balance that.

The Four Corners of Digital Space

And it’s tremendously complicated because of four reasons:

1. The Algorithm Trap: We’ve built our entire communication infrastructure around engagement and entertainment metrics, focusing on scalability and optimization or whatever instead of knowledge. And those that win at the attention game (the Mr Beast, an incredibly complicated character who I wrote a long piece on a few months ago) are usually very good at capturing eyeballs, which usually doesn’t equate to societal progress. The best players aren’t the ones that benefit society most - a misaligned incentive, which Dr. Jana Gallus has done incredible research on. But the algorithm trap isn't just about engagement metrics - it's about how we've built our entire social infrastructure.

   

   What a goofball, so terrifying

2. Digital Infrastructure: Our entire system of mass communication is privatized and optimized for profit. Elon was able to buy Twitter! The billionaires own the papers! Meta owns Instagram and Facebook! The way we communicate is an addiction because it has to be - communication is a commodity. That’s how money is made. We are a nation of addicts, thinking that the scroll means we are connecting, when really, we are ghosts watching other ghosts. TikTok will likely be replaced by something else if it does get banned, and we are kind of kidding ourselves if we think American algorithms are any better for society. We're debating which company gets to manage our attention addiction rather than questioning the addiction itself.

3. Brainrot: Short-form video has also really changed how we process information. Instead of reading history books or talking to other people, we get information through absorbing half of some article and then regurgitating a few talking points heard on some podcast of two dudes in a dark room. And we tell people this is enough! We have drastically lowered our standards for what constitutes being informed. The medium isn't just changing the message - it's changing how our brains process information itself.

4. The Generation Gap: My generation, Gen Z (59% of US adults under 30 use TikTok, according to Pew Research Center) has mastered this platform, and if you want to be a successful company, you have to master it too. So, lots of people have jobs in social media or marketing, and that’s an extremely valuable skill set because if you can figure out how to make people tune in, you will have a path to success. But this is also killing my generation. It nearly took me out in late 2024 because I was internalizing so much of it (I am okay but some of you all should be nicer! And the platforms shouldn’t incentivize you being mean!). The horrible comments, the vitriol, the death threats - we are not designed to hear so many voices at the same time! It's a gift and a curse; we can't succeed without it, but we might not survive with it.

These four corners form a cage of our own making, each element reinforcing the others. The algorithm trap feeds our addiction to digital infrastructure, which enables brainrot, which widens the generation gap, which makes us more susceptible to algorithmic manipulation. As Danah Boyd writes, we must engage with this digital ugliness directly, but doing so means acknowledging how deeply these systems have reshaped our fundamental human capacities for attention, connection, and understanding.

The Global Stage

And it’s all playing out against a backdrop of increasing technological nationalism, where platforms become proxies for state power. The TikTok ban isn't just about privacy or user protection - it's about who controls the global digital infrastructure.

Again, there are murmurs of Elon Musk buying the app, which would be interesting because then two major media platforms would be indirectly controlled by the Trump administration (and by a guy who has his largest Tesla production factory in Shanghai). “We can’t be expected to comment on pure fiction” ByteDance said in response to that.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has new rules on how AI chips and models can be shared with foreign countries, with the “aim to keep advanced technology out of China and to ensure that cutting-edge artificial intelligence is developed by the United States and its allies” as reported by the New York Times. There are curbs on the exports of Nvidia AI chips, which can only freely be traded with 18 allies and partners, such as Japan, Britain, and the Netherlands (Nvidia said it "would threaten economic growth and U.S. leadership"). Clearly, it’s national security.

China is working on developing their own alternatives to chips. They already figured out how to scale an attention ecosystem that shapes human behavior.

How Do We Fix It?

The problem is that it’s an addiction. We are addicted to being informed, which makes complete sense, because we are little animals. If the rabbit could know exactly what danger it could or will face, it would be all over RabbitTok. Our little brains love knowing exactly what is up, and we love being nosy. These platforms haven't created these desires - they've just monetized them with unprecedented efficiency. But it’s making us inhumane. And like blah blah, we already know this! I hate that this dumb ban is in the news again.

There are two roads out. The first is fundamental reimagining - not just of apps, but of how digital spaces serve democracy and human development. This might mean:

• Building platforms that optimize for understanding rather than engagement

• Creating digital spaces that strengthen rather than fragment social cohesion

• Developing algorithms that reward depth over virality - focusing on content that encourages reflection, critical thinking, and deeper engagement instead of rewarding shallow content that capitalizes on emotional triggers.

The second road is learning to navigate existing systems more consciously. This means:

• Teaching digital literacy that goes beyond privacy concerns to understand attention dynamics and how you might be getting trapped by your preferences

• Developing cross-platform resilience for creators and businesses

• Creating ways to archive and preserve digital culture independent of any single platform (like Internet Archive, which is now under fire with copyright lawsuits)

• Create international agreements around data privacy and platform governance, so platforms are held to consistent standards across the globe

But both roads require something we seem to be losing - the ability to act collectively toward shared goals. The TikTok ban, and our fragmented response to it, suggests we might need to rebuild that capacity before either solution becomes possible.

Beyond the Ban

I think that TikTok also serves as a mirror for what collective action actually is in the United States.

For example, we have a horrific fire raging in California, and a lot of people on Twitter are responding with hate. There is no unity on that platform. On the ground, it’s a scene of care and kindness as people check in with one another, give out resources, and simply exist, human to human. But the platforms strip away that humanness, making it so anger replaces any common purpose.

Zach told me something really interesting - the people who lost everything in the fires are behaving in a way that is braver than those who are safe. I am on the travel whirlwind again this week for a few conferences, and I spoke to Bobby Lehew at Commonsku, who said, “Perspective is painful.”

That’s what those who lose it all, gain - perspective. And I think that’s what we lose on social media. TikTok and the other scroll sites create a warped sense of self. They know exactly what you hate. So you get shaped into an algorithmic self that makes you lose that perspective, makes you lose sight of what really matters.

The platforms reduce the shared reality into a power game of who can most anger people. We are torn apart, again and again. Ideology has won over humanity, at least on the platforms. This is what happens when our primary means of connecting with each other becomes optimized for conflict rather than understanding.

That’s a failure of communication infrastructure.

That's the real lesson of the TikTok ban. The new Cold War is not the US versus China, it’s between the US and itself. The fact that people are fleeing to a Chinese-owned app to give a giant middle finger to the government says a lot. Americans don’t like being told what to do.

In the end, this isn't really about TikTok at all. It's about whether we can find ways to harness technology's power to connect us without letting it tear us apart. The answer won't come from any single platform or policy - it has to come from us, from our collective choice about what kind of digital world we want to build and inhabit.

Banning TikTok won’t make all these problems go away. What we really need to do, as boring and banal as it is, is see if we can still come together to build something better - something that serves our need for connection without exploiting our attention, that bridges divides instead of deepening them, that helps us become more human, not less. It’s a tall order in the age of monetized division, but I think it’s our only way out.

Thanks for reading.

Disclaimer: This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.