The TikTok ban looms this month, while it could still get an unlikely temporary reprieve from Biden or an even more unlikely permanent reprieve from SCOTUS.
Either way, Hank Green (talking ON TikTok, but impishly wearing a YouTube shirt) points out that, whatever the government’s motivation for wanting to ban TikTok, TikTok itself is not “the good guys”. They’re a company. They’re out for money, and they do what they need to do to make money.
I’ve been bothered by something for a while, at least since the effective death of LiveJournal, probably since the coma status of Grex, then amplified by the zombification of Twitter, and resurfacing now: We (consumers) hate monopolies because of what it does to choice and price in the marketplace, but we (consumers) love monopolies because of the convenience.
We (consumers) have made Amazon a monopoly. Sure, Amazon engaged in a few predatory practices, such as underpricing Kindle books while using proprietary file encoding, forcing publishers who wanted to stay in the e-book sphere to have Kindle and non-Kindle versions of their files (initially leading some to choose to JUST have Kindle versions, marginalizing the other e-book reader companies which were also struggling in a marketplace where they couldn’t sell their hardware on Amazon, and boy is this parenthetical getting long).
But… for the most part, Amazon is a monopoly because we love the convenience of being able to shop for nearly everything at a single website and get things delivered the next morning at 4 am.
Even though we know it’s bad for us.
Here’s where I was at only a few years ago on social media: Facebook for my longer blatherings, Twitter for my short (hot) takes, TikTok for my viewing pleasure.
All three of those are basic monopolies in their own space. After the zombification of Twitter, a few competitors popped up, with BlueSky being the most potent, but I’m still dragging my heels about getting serious there. And TikTok has Reels and YouTube Shorts as competition, but they both pale in comparison.
Facebook still stands alone in its space, largely because of Meta’s clear violations of anti-monopolistic habits (even Google’s attempt, Plus, to compete was squashed).
It ought to be no surprise that we are heading headlong into the same oligarchical chaos that the Robber Baron era led us to a century ago. We are doing it to ourselves. We are volunteering, in the name of convenience. We HAVE volunteered. We aren’t heading into it, we’re well into it.
Even though we know it’s bad for us.
I don’t have a solution that I could successfully implement on my own. It’s just that the looming TikTok ban is a reminder, yet again, of what we’re doing to ourselves.