The Hostile Country

And why a TikTok ban won't be enough

“It is imperative to return to a longer, slower, experience of time, of mythic time, an experience that spirals and fractals, condenses, evaporates, and rains down, not unlike the water cycle.”

—Slippery Elm, The Dead Hermes Epistolary

As you’ve probably heard, there’s some panic over the possibility that the highly addictive social media app TikTok might soon no longer be accessible in the United States. Decried as a violation of “free speech,” derided as an obsessive fear of Chinese influence by right-wing politicians, and lamented as damaging to millions of “creators,” the US ban on the application is set to go into effect this Sunday.

Gods, I hope this happens, but I know it won’t be enough.

No, I’m not worried about the influence of the Chinese government on the political thoughts of everyday Americans, nor am I in the least bit concerned for the “security” of the United States. I’d just like people to have a chance to get their own thoughts back for a little while.

Not that a ban would actually mean those millions of users — “users” meant in the same sense as users of heroin or crystal meth — wouldn’t just switch to some other platform. When you find out your dealer is skipping town or getting locked up, you don’t quit: you find another dealer.

That’s what happened when India banned TikTok in 2020, a ban that caused other social media platforms to implement their own addictive strategies to pull in those users. If you were using Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube around that time, you probably experienced the result without precisely understanding what had just happened. Those platforms began implementing “reels” — very short and meaningless videos — and pushing them through algorithms onto users to mimic the addictive mechanism of TikTok.

It was also at that time that those of us unfortunately reliant on social media as publicity for our work realized we were fucked. Time once was that a small publisher could post a book release announcement on Facebook and know that those who’d “followed” the publisher would see it. Same went for a musician or an artist. Now, unless you make a short and completely unrelated video (or, in my case, publish multiple photos of myself shirtless), Meta won’t push what you’ve posted to more than a handful of people.

Sure, we all could have adapted, changed what we were doing in order to play by the new rules. Some did and became “influential” in that environment despite having absolutely nothing to say. That, I think, was the most curious bit of these changes, the sudden flood of new services selling royalty-free “content” so that viral influencers didn’t also have to do the work of thinking up something inspirational to include in their videos.

That hints at what I think has been the most significant yet subtle alteration of thought brought on through these hyper-addictive forms. Time once was, and really not very long ago, that we’d generally be able to distinguish between the aura of popularity and the mechanisms of that popularity. Even with celebrities like Princess Diana, most understood she was celebrated because of her proximity to power, not because there was anything really powerful about her. A popular song on the radio was popular because the radio was always playing it, not because it was necessarily good. And in all cases, it was also because other people we knew were being similarly inundated with these media forms that they were also talking about them. And especially, we understood there was a small group of people — journalists, publicists, media executives, and particularly the corporations for whom they worked — pushing that all in front of us.

Everything is now faster and shorter, too fast and too short for our minds to comprehend what has just happened to us, let alone how it works and who is benefitting from it all. Nor can we even understand why something was suddenly infectious before it disappears completely from the feeds, replaced with something just as inexplicably and ephemerally viral.

That this all happened during another “viral” moment — that of Covid-19 — seems too curious not to contemplate. Something deadly and invisible and omnipresent had taken over humanity, and the governments of the world rushed to inform not of the dangers it posed to us, but rather of the danger we posed to each other. It was all too big for us to comprehend, and anyone trying to do so was quickly prohibited from infecting the rest of us through social media, and it was really best if we all just stayed in front of our screens and never went outside under any circumstances.

Social contagion and physical contagion collapsed into a singular and relentless moment that has not yet ended, and this moment has caused cascading changes in social and political thought — as well as human behavior — that are so fast we cannot keep up. What we believe to be “settled science” — a false idea to begin with — was particularly the first victim of this, and not just with the matter of Covid vaccines and physical contagion. This has shown itself quite clearly in the matter of other medical interventions, as for example the off-label use of gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH) agonists to “block” puberty, or how diabetics couldn’t get Ozempic because TikTok influencers made it popular for weight loss, with any attempt to slow down and actually evaluate the long-term effects of such drugs being labeled as not just conservative but outright “evil.”

Particularly worrisome is how we’ve barely had a chance to wonder at how these shifts have changed our epistemology (how we gather and perceive knowledge) and our ontology (how we understand ourselves). The problem isn’t just that we cannot easily judge who and what should represent to us an accurate source of knowledge, but also that we don’t even have time to ask ourselves these questions before scrolling on to the next post, the next image, or the next reel.

How this has affected politics has been openly questioned a few times, but mostly by politicians and theorists terrified of “populism” and an amorphous threat of global fascism. Little has been interrogated in the other direction: how what is considered “leftist” or “liberating” is determined not by the weight or potential power of the ideas themselves, but rather whether or not it’s been declared as such by an “activist” influencer.

But personally, I’ve been trying to trace the shifts in religious understandings. Illumination of the soul by means of the pale light of backlit screens is hardly what one might call “spirituality,” yet it’s precisely from such medi(t)ations most now try to understand what’s beyond them. Conversions to monotheistic creeds are trendy and will earn you temporary virality, or, if that’s not to your taste, there’s no shortage of spiritual influencers happy to re-narrate animism or Buddhism in ways that will never challenge your social media addiction.

And let’s be clear: a ban on one source fueling the addiction won’t stop the addiction, anymore than switching from petroleum and coal to solar and nuclear would alter the destructiveness of industrial society. Already TikTok users are flooding to lesser-known platforms like RedNote, with hosts of other sites scrambling help fill “that TikTok-sized void.”

And that comparison is not mere metaphor, as the contagion and addiction of social media are both products and pollutants of the industrial age. When one desolation spreads too widely to be ignored, the destruction doesn’t diminish, it only moves elsewhere. Banning TikTok only displaces the addiction, just as a police raid on an open-air drug market only scatters the sellers to other corners.

And there is also the problem that to communicate beyond just those physically around you means to also communicate on the internet. You are reading me this way, I am reading you this way, and many of you found my writing first through some social media platform or another. Exile is always an option, yes, but at a terrible price.

The way I’ve tried to practice — and perhaps the only good solution for this — comes from one of the most profound books I’ve ever had the chance to read, let alone gotten to publish. In his book The Dead Hermes Epistolary (this year to get a well-deserved re-release from Sul Books), the writer Slippery Elm wrote the following about this monstrous territory, well before the acceleration we see now had begun:

Albeit hollow and illusory, the internet comprises territory. However, as the internet is a hard drug, it should be treated as such, and only used infrequently and in safe doses. It should be a country one visits from time to time, not a country one inhabits. And when one visits a potentially hostile country one would do well not to announce one’s presence too loudly. In the same way unseen spirits make incursions into the visible, dissidents who publish on the internet must do so in the sense of making incursions into another world, only to vanish again not long after. When a witch or similar publishes online, she is, in effect, engaging in a haunting.

Apologists might moan about the uses of the internet to disseminate information, but this comes at too great a price. Remember, the advent of the printing press meant the advent (or at least a great intensification) of censorship… Or apologists might moan about the rapidity with which one might communicate. Remember, the artificial need for everything to move faster and faster, for transactions and initiatives to be carried out instantly, and to think in short spans of time—all things brought about by modernity—are a significant contributing factor to what’s causing the great crises of our age. It is imperative to return to a longer, slower, experience of time, of mythic time, an experience that spirals and fractals, condenses, evaporates, and rains down, not unlike the water cycle.

That’s the only method I’ve found that works. Post and disappear. Do not engage, take all social media apps off your phone, confine your use of them to clear purposes and never to fill idle moments. Each time you find yourself stuck, don’t only stop but also try to figure out what it was that trapped you. Especially since the alterations of social life wrought since 2020, the reason for most is a desire for connection, an alienation and indescribable loneliness we try to satiate in the same way people use alcohol, drugs, and pornography. Something is missing, and we don’t know how to get it, and so we turn to the hollow and illusory territory of the internet instead of trying to find it.

So, as much we might hope the TikTok ban happens, it won’t be enough to stop this acceleration. But as with other addictions, and as for capitalism itself, each crisis offers a potential Jetztzeit, a brief moment where we notice we’re active agents in the worlds we inhabit. Most of those users will find another addiction, of course, but maybe some of them might just decide to flee the hostile country and instead live again in the world.