"He sees you when you're sleepin'
He knows when you're awake
He knows if you've been bad or good
So be good for goodness sake."
Recorded by Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby, the Andrews Sisters, and others, 1934, "Santa Claus is comin' to Town"
Big Brother is watching me.
Big Brother wants to sell me stuff.
People whose opinion I respect tell me to be very worried about TikTok. "TikTok is different," they tell me. "TikTok is owned by China. Don't you see? China is spying on Americans."
OK. I hear those voices. But I still don't get it.
Everything one does on line is trackable and tracked. Tuesday morning I visited the Hoka website to get screenshots of shoes for my post on Phil Knight and Nike. By that afternoon I began getting pop-up ads for Hoka shoes when I visited politically-oriented websites. Foreign companies don't need to have spies skulking around in shadows nor do they need spy balloons. They could buy whatever data they need from Google, Microsoft, X, or Meta, just like Hoka did.
Google has its search engine, G-mail, this web hosting company "Blogger," and it owns YouTube. They know everything. The billionaire ex-wife of a Google founder just joined the RFK, Jr., ticket as the candidate for Vice President. She can legally spend as much money as she wants on the campaign. She opposes vaccinations. She opposes in vitro fertilization. I think she is a conspiratorial nutcase, but she is a billionaire conspiratorial American nutcase. She can legally make all the mischief she wants.
Tech firms know what I buy, where I am, who I talk to, and what I write, including what I delete. I own stock in each of them but I don't control them. I find TikTok interesting and fun. It is essentially the same thing as YouTube, except YouTube has more long-form, educational videos on history, geography, and science. My TikTok feed leans toward movie clips, stand-up comedy routines, political commentary, sleight-of-hand card tricks, and sports. It seems pretty harmless to me. Apparently I watch those short videos to the end, so TikTok feeds me more of them. That doesn't strike me as invasive or manipulative. It strikes me as responsive and attentive -- a bit of Dale Carnegie-style salesmanship: Listen to the customer.
I hear the criticism that TikTok is too good. It should be American-headquartered companies, not a Chinese-headquartered one, doing a good job. TikTok is winning friends and could influence people -- how American of them. The most dangerous and heavy-handed manipulator of information I observe is Rupert Murdoch and Fox. If TikTok is manipulating that feed by sending me hidden messages in the choice of magicians and commentary that I see, it is very subtle and I don't care. Fox isn't subtle at all.
I consider TikTok to be exactly as dangerous as YouTube. One has a corporate parent in China. The other is headquartered in Silicon Valley. Both are potential time-wasters, but so are cooking shows, basketball tournaments, and crime fiction novels. People should be free to amuse themselves. But shouldn't young people be doing their homework? Sure, but that won't change. People will find what is fun for themselves. TikTok is more interesting than algebra problem sets.
The most dangerous manipulators of the American mind are the Russian government and American billionaires. I don't trust government to ban speech and neither did the writers of the Bill of Rights. I prefer more speech even if some of it is dead wrong.
Maybe I am wrong here. But I am independent.
I will be happy to publish guest posts that attempt to persuade readers of this blog that TikTok is worse than Rupert Murdock.
For those who want to search on-line w/o having their information stored and sold to marketers, there are search engines to use. I use duckduckgo.
I'm all for free speech. I can ignore that which disturbs me or use my own words to rail against it. I am all for creativity and fun. That's what adds the spice to life.
I oppose snooping and ... perhaps worse ... using what is snooped for personal or corporate gain. The business model, based on algorithms, is wrong and it can be outlawed. Or at least regulated.
(and don't get me started on what computer generated and controlled "learning" is doing to our children)