TikTok, You Do Stop
Why TikTok should die (as currently constituted)
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Dear Matt,
Where do you stand on banning TikTok? Isn’t forcing a company to divest due to their Chinese ownership something the commies would do?
Wang Chung
This is a tough one. The freedom-loving absolutist in me is generally against banning things, unless they get on my nerves. On the other hand, The Kids love TikTok, and I’m generally for banning things The Kids love. Not out of high principle, but out of generational spite. We’ve now lived with social media long enough to say, with some certainty, that it makes people actively dumber. And the kids can’t afford to get much dumber. (Consider: If they’re so smart, why do they need to be in school until they’re 17 years old?) Besides, they waste too much life, staring down at their little handheld supercomputers. As someone who came of age in the pre-internet Eighties, I’d like to see a return to worthier pursuits, things that promote engagement with the physical world: like strolling the mall to shop for acid-washed jeans, and dry humping in the backseats of giant Oldsmobiles with V8 engines. Things that would Make America Great Again a lot faster than reelecting a walking rap sheet with a combover, or making bad dance videos with your midlife-crisis-suffering mom so the ChiComs can hoover up your data or feed you propaganda from that newly-discovered foreign policy sage, Osama bin Laden.