If it’s the passive nature of online content consumption that causes atrophy of mental faculties, then TikTok, as the most passively used 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.
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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. 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.
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The premise of the book is simple: the US is a paradox composed of contradictions: its two primary values—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.”
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- [note::Wow... I think this rings true even today. This makes me curious to learn more about what kinds of significant traditions other countries have and how those traditions contribute to feelings of unity and camaraderie among the people who live there.
Does Europe have similar problems to the one described here?
I also think I gravitated towards EA so strongly because it gave me a sense of meaning and purpose to my life.
Why do we put up with all this meaninglessness? How can we push back against this spiritual poverty?]

For Wang, the US’s contradictions stem from one source: nihilism. The country has become severed from its traditions and is so individualistic it can’t make up its mind what it as a nation believes. Without an overarching culture maintaining its values, the government’s regulatory powers are weak, easily corrupted by lobbying or paralyzed by partisan bickering. As such, the nation’s progress is directed mostly by blind market forces; it obeys not a single command but a cacophony of three hundred million demands that lead it everywhere and nowhere.
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Thus, by turning everything into a product, Western capitalism devours every aspect of American culture, including the traditions that bind it together as a nation, leading to atomization and polarization. The commodification also devours meaning and purpose, and to plug the expanding spiritual hole that this leaves, Americans turn to momentary pleasures—drugs, fast food, and amusements—driving the nation further into decadence and decay.
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- [note::This feels like a fairly pessimistic perspective of people's ability to find meaning in things other than drugs, fast food, and amusement. Though, I do think that the U.S. makes it relatively easy to engage in these destructive behaviors and relatively hard to stop them.]

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, and so our mental faculties, automated out of their jobs, wither.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.
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- entertainment, attention, distraction,

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. After all, TikTok dominated our culture as a result of free market forces—the very thing we live by. Land and Wang are correct that the West being controlled by everyone means it’s controlled by no one, and without brakes or a steering wheel we’re at the market’s mercy.
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Democracies are vulnerable because there’s no one controlling their advancement, but autocracies are vulnerable precisely for the opposite reason: they’re controlled by people—which is to say, by woefully myopic apes.
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In the long term the only way to prevent digital dementia is to raise awareness of the neurological ruin wrought by apps like TikTok, to expose 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.We’ll surely sound like alarmists; TikTok destroys so gradually that it seems harmless. But if the app is a time-bomb that’ll wreck a whole generation years from now, then we can’t wait till its effects are apparent before acting, for then it will be too late.
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- digital dementia, attention, technology, education,

The clock is ticking.Tik. Tok. Tik. Tok…
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- [note::You can think of TikTok as a time bomb, gradually ticking away (i.e. gradually impacting our brains' cognitive performance and fragmenting our attention) until we realize, at some future time, that the bomb has gone off (i.e. the brains of an entire generation has been impacted).]