TikTok as 'Chinese bioweapon' - by Gurwinder
His is a long an important article, so I'm giving some excerpt highlights --- and some great guitar music at the end... Merry Christmas to you and your loved ones!
If China were using addictive pleasure against the West, it would simply be returning blow for blow. Opium was used by Great Britain to addict the Chinese people and control China in the past, (and Merry Christmas Eve!)
“As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok.” (Gurwinder, Jan 21, 2023)
TikTok gets more site visits than Google…
“TikTok is the most successful app in history. It emerged in 2017 out of the Chinese video-sharing app Douyin and within three years it had become the most downloaded app in the world, later surpassing Google as the world’s most visited web domain.”
This Substack post by Gurwinder seems very related to the addictive factors of Youtube/Netflix which I was writing about yesterday.
TwXtter can be hard for me to disengage from which is a problem I have recognized and stepped away from occasionally, even recently. I started the graphic design projects in part because I was spending too much time on X again.
Then I was working so hard and enthusiastically on the squirrel coloring pages (and dinosaurs that you haven’t seen yet) that I was blitzing my mind a bit from the intense screen time. Watching the multiple action movies left a similar effect in my mind’s eye - ongoing flashing lights for a while after I was trying to go to sleep. Twice I stopped late at night on the coloring pages because my eyes or brain were going a bit wonky. When I laid down in the dark it took a while for the after images in my mental visual field to stop flickering around as if I was still moving the cursor to edit little bits of data.
I did set up a TikTok account but it was so fast (and overtly sexually gross) that I never stayed more than a few minutes.
Studies have shown that staring at the tiny screen of a cellphone adds to the addictiveness - we zoom in our focus and it kind of traps the mind. Set a timer while working and look up every 15 minutes to focus on something at a far distance to help relax the eyes and break the mental hypnotic effect.
This is really kind of serious.
If making Die Hard movies can wreck your hearing, then watching that sort of movies probably can also wreck your hearing… and maybe be risking cognitive damage too.
Ipod earbuds can increase risk of hearing damage as the sound is right in the ear and volume control may be turned up.
(Section I) “Research shows an association between smartphone addiction, abnormalities in brain gray matter, and “digital dementia,” an umbrella term for the onset of anxiety and depression and the deterioration of memory, attention span, self-esteem, and impulse-control (the last of which increases the addiction).
These are problems associated with internet addiction generally. But there’s something about TikTok that makes it uniquely dangerous.
In order to develop and maintain mental faculties like memory and attention span, one needs to practice using them. TikTok, more than any other app, is designed to give you what you want while requiring you to do as little as possible. It cares little who you follow or what buttons you click; its main consideration is how long you spend watching. Its reliance on machine learning rather than user input, combined with the fact that TikTok clips are so short they require minimal memory and attention span, makes browsing TikTok the most passive experience of all major platforms.
If it’s the noninteractivity of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most noninteractive social media platform, will naturally cause the most atrophy. Indeed many habitual TikTokers can already be found complaining on websites like Reddit about their loss of mental ability, a phenomenon that’s come to be known as “TikTok brain.” If the signs are becoming apparent already, imagine what TikTok addiction will have done to young developing brains a decade from now.
TikTok’s potential to stupefy people, both acutely by encouraging idiotic behavior, and chronically by atrophying the brain, should prompt consideration of its possible use as a new kind of weapon, one that seeks to neutralize enemies not by inflicting pain but pleasure.
Last month FBI Director Chris Wray warned that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could “use it for influence operations.” So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops?”
—> the BIG clue:
“The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok’s malign influence on kids is that it’s forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids.”
If the Chinese Communist Party thinks TikTok is bad for children, then the rest of the world should take note….
Dinosaurs need to walk the Earth again… oh, wait, they are still here.
Drumroll….
What do Chinese children get to use for online entertainment if they aren’t allowed to access TikTok?
“The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a “spinach” version where kids don’t see twerkers and toilet-lickers but science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am.”
Imagine if children played with blocks and coloring books and built blanket forts for fun. Health guidance regarding screen time and children is zero hours for infants and toddlers and less than 2 hours for older kids and slower paced visually is safer. ADHD has been linked to fast action videos (which is practically everything except Blue’s Clues).
“Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.” (End of section I)
Substack AI doesn’t know what a blanket fort is and also not quite getting Norman Rockwell except the kids are cute. Maybe we are seeing their imagination.
Haha. Merry Christmas Eve!
*Movie watching update, I managed to only watch one movie yesterday, Gone In 60 Seconds - Nicholas Cage stealing really great cars… guilty pleasure. I listened to the Nutcracker Ballet and watched a few bits.
Section 2 is about a Chinese leader and educator, Wang Huning, member 4 of a team of 7 top leaders in the country. He wrote a book about the US economy and culture, “the 1991 book, America Against America,” - we fight ourselves with goals that are opposite.
II […] “…freedom and equality—are mutually exclusive. It has many different cultures, and therefore no overall culture. And its market-driven society has given it economic riches but spiritual poverty. As he writes in the book, “American institutions, culture and values oppose the United States itself.” […]
“Since Wang and Xi believe the West is too decadent to survive, they may have opted to take the Taoist path of wu wei (無為), which is to say, sit back and let the West’s appetites take it where they will. But there’s another, more sinister and effective approach they may have adopted. To understand it, we must consider one final piece of the puzzle: an amphetamine-fueled philosopher who lived in my hometown.” (End of Section II - go read it: (Substack)
We learn about a Western writer, Land, who ended up moving to China later. He reached very similar theories about how capitalism will kind of lead to destroying itself through commodification of everything - profit is to be made from every aspect of life. All of life will move towards being saleable goods in some way.
“Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early 1900s, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties fall into disuse and disrepair.
And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth—its future—into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.
We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been gray matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ has been steadily falling. Though the decline likely has several causes, it began with the first generation to grow up with widespread TVs in homes, and common sense suggests it’s at least partly the result of technology making the attainment of satisfaction increasingly effortless, so that we spend ever more of our time in a passive, vegetative state. If you don’t use it, you lose it.”
The fluoride in the water and reduced iodine in the food supply was a deliberate policy in my opinion which has led to not only increased apathy and depression and obesity, autism and Alzheimer’s dementia, but also reduced intelligence.
Simply supplementing with iodine can increase IQ by 15 points on average in moderately low iodine populations.
If we speculate a bit… it seems like the US is working against itself, and it is being covertly controlled by a blackmailed pedophile network, then… maybe the blackmailed pedophile network’s goals are not really in the best interest of the US and that is why the US seems to be working against itself… it is.
“And even those still willing to use their brains are at risk of having their efforts foiled by social media, which seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut,” and the top answer among American kids was “influencer.”
If we continue along our present course, the resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. But, more importantly, if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, 箭双雕: one arrow, two eagles.)” […]
“The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is wholly the West’s.”
…dictatorial control isn’t really the answer either (summarizing, go read it.)
“That leaves only one solution: the democratic one. In a democracy responsibility is also democratized, so parents must look out for their own kids. There’s a market for this, too: various brands of parental controls can be set on devices to limit kids’ access (though many of these, including TikTok’s own controls, can be easily bypassed.)
But ultimately these are short term measures. In the long term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps like TikTok, exposing their ugliness so they fall out of fashion like cigarettes. If the weakness of liberalism is its openness, then this is also its strength; word can travel far in democracies.” Gurwinder, (Substack)
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
Top reply:
“I taught guitar lessons 10-15 years ago. It was during the apex of the guitar hero video game craze for those of you who remember. Students were signing up like crazy for lessons, often egged on by parents who were ecstatic that their kid might be showing some musical promise. There’s just one problem. Guitar Hero games were (like most video games) designed to be mastered in about two weeks time with a little focused effort. Learning to play an actual guitar is a slow, methodical, awkward, painful, years-long process. Once students realized playing an actual musical instrument was going to be much harder than mastering the video game version, they usually came to a rapid conclusion along the lines of, “this just isn’t my talent.” Students quit in droves as even more hopefuls were signing up. I did end up with a handful of long-term quality students from the guitar hero batch, but the attrition rate must have been over 90%.
This was the thing that got me thinking about the effect of digital media on the human brain. Well-meaning parents who just wanted their kids to be happy were paying game companies to reprogram their kids’ cognitive development for the worse. The discipline needed to develop actual skills, to learn, to exercise, to mature is at best the collateral damage of reckless digital media consumption. Tik Tok and services like it make the consumption even more mindless and broadly addictive than digital games. It’s very interesting to ponder how this dynamic might be weaponized, and how else it might fit into the geopolitics of our age.” - Dog Milk, (comment)
Disclaimer: This information is being provided for educational purposes within the guidelines of Fair Use and is not intended to provide individual health care guidance.
Great reporting. Incredible insights. You can see the results to stupefy already bearing fruit with the election of Trump.
it seems more like blaming a red herring for our culture
tik tok is the most successful mirror, a competitor to be eaten