Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1412
Mostly thoughts on the TikTok ban.
Hello hello hello. Good morning. Tuesday woo who doesn’t friggin love Tuesdays they just rule. Jane is at school. It is cold. I stopped by the grocery store this morning. The self-checkout was closed, which, fine. Harris Teeter has the most anti-pattern, anti-social self-checkout out there, I hate it. So I go to the lady. She cannot handle I do not want anything bagged. NO BAGGING. That is my new obsession. I will bag myself, at my car, thanks. Don’t need you guys meddling. Woo neuroses!
The LA fires are insane and terrible and I hope you are all doing okay but even those whose houses survived, my god, that air quality, it must be driving you people insane. I could not handle it. Saw some videos of a woman who is changing her HVAC vents constantly, and how completely brown and black they’ve gotten, and of course most people do not change them. Watched another video of a dude in his Tesla drive his aunt to the site of her former house in Pacific Palisades, talked about how the Tesla has its “bio defense” mode and how even with a mask, the smell inside the car was overwhelming. Insane. He also showed a graph of the worst disasters ever to hit LA in terms of number of buildings destroyed, and it wasn’t even close. These fires are, like, almost double the next largest LA disaster, ever. Horrible, horrible.
Tik Tok Ban. We have five days. People are freaking out. I am so excited. Palestine is obviously first, but if there were another wedge issue in the United States that does not fall upon party lines, the Tik Tok ban is one of them.
There are a lot of people who absolutely do not buy the argument about national security. I am not one of them. I buy it hook, line and sinker, which is saying something since I am a person who does not, strictly speaking, believe in countries or care about national security per se. But I do believe in parity, fairness, an even playing field, and not being a hypocrite.
And I’m sorry but the democracy in the US is a far more real thing than the democracy in China. China has a long history of outright blackmail of the foreign companies that do business there: they influence their decisions worldwide. Just look at Disney. The two countries are nowhere near the freedom they let companies operate in their respective spheres. Facebook, Google, Apple, they all operate under significant restrictions, piracy and compromised user experience, if they are allowed to operate in China at all. And I am down with the teachings of Christ and turning the other cheek but fun fact, countries and companies are not people, they are made up political organizations and we are not required to display the same ethics to them.
It’s like pissing in the wind these days to recommend well-researched books to back up your arguments on the Internet these days because who cares but if you want to learn more about this dichotomy, there are worse places to start than Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy by Erich Schwartzel.
I also have delved for, oh, twenty years into the efficacy of advertising and propaganda and have worked at and for large internet platforms and can tell you unequivocally that yes, China could absolutely use TikTok to manipulate American sentiment. I’m not saying they have. I’m not saying they definitely will. Those are different things. But they absolutely could. Again, books are for old people and losers, but a good place to start on the efficacy of propaganda and advertising and… oh god what’s the point.
Yes, so could Facebook and Google and and and, and my god, I would be so happy to ban or break them all up, but unfortunately we do not have laws that allow for this at the moment, or at least not enough of a quorum of legislators and judges to apply the laws we do have in that manner. And they are different laws! (Though I do kinda think you could apply antitrust to TikTok as much as the next platform oh, dear, did Lina actually suffer from a dearth of optimism after all?).
There is a large body of well-established law around this exact TikTok situation. It has been going on for decades. This isn’t even the first time this exact thing has happened! It happened to Grindr four years ago and no one complained or even really noticed (I did, because boy did I want their ad business).
The sad thing is I still suspect the ban will not happen. TikTok has strategically insisted they will not sell, because that was the correct thing to do for them in that situation. But they are about to lose their last avenue of appeal, to the Supreme Court, who will (probably) issue a ruling in the next 72 hours saying as much.
And Trump could unilaterally try and undo this ban but I don’t think this will exactly happen for a couple reasons: 1) he is not currently in a politically needy or giving mood, 2) he actually agrees with the findings, 3) the thing will (probably) be already turned off, so even if he does an executive order, it will have to work its way through the courts with TikTok turned OFF at the start of that whole process.
Probably.
I still think that the most likely outcome is that on the 18th (the ban is supposed to kick in on the 19th), Tik Tok announces as US sale. I sadly concur that the most likely purchasing party is Elon. In a logical world, no bank would give Elon the cash to buy Tik Tok, the price should be astronomical, well beyond what he paid Twitter for, well beyond what his Tesla stock covenants will allow. But I suspect he could pull it off, because banks actually still suck up to the guy even after billions of losses on Twitter, since they have billions of gains on SpaceX and Tesla. His Tesla board are a bunch of pushovers. He moved to Texas and they DGAF as opposed to Delaware.
There could be other buyers, I would love a different buyer. A retired social internet exec: Pincus or Myspace Tom or some shit. But I don’t think any of them have any money.
And purchase price is actually really interesting because in theory this is a distressed asset, them getting some money instead of no money would be great, so buyers will have an incentive to lowball, and though I’ve read most of the docs, I don’t have a firm hand on the exact mechanism of turning TikTok back on if a sale happens after the 19th. I suspect that is just fine. I suspect you could buy TikTok on, say, Jan 30th and turn it back on and that would be completely legal.
Which means they could have an incentive to wait for a good price.
Except we’d be in uncharted territory about the decay in value of TikTok, day by day, as it is turned off: will everyone come back to TikTok after a 24-hour outage? yes. What about a week? What about a month? What’s the rate of decay? No one knows. So the price will probably go down a bit, as time goes on. It probably is a waiting game. But no one knows at what rate, and, assuming there is more than one buyer, they will be making their own calculations, and the buyer who makes the most optimistic calculations will make the highest big, and thus no buyer will be able to rely on this too too much, so, assuming there are two buyers, I don’t expect much of a fire sale.
Or, at least, there will definitely be a floor, since we have two or three bottom-feeding bids. Enough to keep it from being a fire sale.
(I should also say in passing that I have in my career gone through this exact process: attempting to purchase an asset that is the subject of government-mandated divestiture, so I’m not completely talking out of my ass here. Shockingly similar situation, actually. I was the bottom feeder. I lost.)
Assuming the ban does happen (my money is currently on about 52% that it will not happen), my god it’s gonna be crazy. Something like this has never happened before. In five days, a major internet platform will (maybe, probably not) go poof. I want that to happen so bad. I profoundly hope everyone feels freedom from it and stops using other internet platforms. That probably won’t happen, but man, that would be amazing.
And all this talk about “ha ha everyone is signing up for this other Chinese platform this is accomplishing nothing” is (probably) misguided. You know who will (would) win if TikTok disappears? YouTube. I would, at least, put large amounts of money on that outcome.
Sticking to current events, for you in the “this China thing is made up and does not matter,” here is a fun thing that is happening: all the drones in America are Chinese too! The government has been fretting about this for years, they have put certain restrictions on the drone companies, including the largest one, the Chinese DJI. These restrictions keep drones from flying above airports and other sensitive areas, from flying too high, etc.
This week the long-established, been-doing-this-for-decades US agency in charge of this stuff, CFIUS has started taking another look at DJI.
And then today we get this:
That is crazy.
This stuff is not just academic, it’s not just made-up to score political points. You can disagree with the findings. It is a perfectly legitimate point-of-view to believe that America should allow free speech from all foreign citizens, governments, and companies, even if they do not allow the same for us. But it’s not some incoherent policy. In fact, the reason this ban passed, as opposed to Trump’s endeavors, was because this effort went through the channels that have existed forever. It survived (probably) the legal review. It was about as fair and normal of a process as our government is currently capable of.
God, I sound like such a Republican. Except, like I said, this issue pretty clearly transcends traditional left-right. And I don’t care about countries. I care about level playing fields. And god knows the US is fuckin terrible about level playing fields, but in this one instance they got it right and we should not be so addled as to be able to acknowledge when that happens.
Wow I did not expect to write that rant this morning but here we are.
I should end on a positive fun Jane story but we got in a big argument last night, but.. Oh, you know. It was somewhat upsetting because it was one of those rare times where, in the morning, she is still upset. BUT we had a great conversation this morning and I think it was really productive? Maybe? I gotta remember this: there are times kids are in a mood to listen and times you can’t get them to listen to save your life. No point trying to get them to listen in the latter situations.
But this morning, ‘twas quite lovely. Make up hug was the best hug of the week.
Just a mix for you today. Was just listening to this Sheila Divine song and my god, what a great song, Aaron really is a phenomenal songwriter. I should check and see if that album is on vinyl. Not that I am allowed to buy vinyl at the moment. That Sinead song came on in the car this morning. I think Jane liked it? I love how much Sinead she gets in her life I caught her singing along to Mandinka a week or two ago that was awesome. New Dot Allison is gorgeous. Quite like the new Amen Dunes. That Nick Cave song came on this morning and, damn, I guess I gotta admit Wild Got is a pretty solid record.
OK love you bye. Be TikTok strong. You can do it.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.
i'm with you on this tiktok thing—i want it to go dark so bad—crossing fingers!