RantTok

The Rant has always found America’s belief that a simple gesture, normally tinged with hysteria, can solve its systemic problems as oddly amusing. We offer up the current iteration: The fate of TikTok. Let’s review: The TikTok¹ is a video sharing app that contains an algorithm that looks into your soul and determines what you really want, not what you think you want, to see. So if you harmlessly pause one millisecond too long on someone’s urban chicken strutting around the yard set to the music of Beyonce, you will be inundated with an endless scroll of chicken-related feeds, growing ever more disturbing yet hypnotically compelling. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company committed to all the freedom and privacy the Chinese government says is healthy for you. Which in the case of the actual country of China is zero, as the app is banned there.

The TikTok worries the old white people running the country for two reasons. 1) The children, we must save the children! 2) The uncomfortable knowledge that Xi Jinping, President of China, knows all about their little chicken obsession, because the government can force any Chinese company to give them their data. The first reason is about as compelling as The Rant being told not to listen to Judas Priest records backwards during our youth,² and the second reason raises genuine privacy and security concerns.

Rather than tackle the issue in a reasonable way, everyone decided that the future of TikTok would solve/escalate countless imminent calamities. The toxic and isolating effects of social media; China’s quest to acquire American technology through any means; the ability to spread propaganda by altering the algorithms used in online media; the relentless cruelty of online comments that escalates anxiety and depression in many people, but especially teens.³

So a law was passed to make ByteDance sell its stake in TikTok or it would be banned in the US. Depending on your position, this would either A) Cause the collapse of the Chinese government, followed by a utopia of fair labor practices and balanced trade B) Herald the end of all free speech in America, thus denying you the right to rage online at the lack of adequate napkins at the new restaurant you visited and promptly condemned to hell. Although it has never been explained clearly to The Rant why corporations have some heavenly right to make billions off your lunacy without responsibilities or safeguards C) Children solving the problems of cold fusion, poverty, famine, and your Aunt Judy’s inability to find the right man (she has so much to offer!) because as they looked up bleary-eyed from their dark screens they had nothing but worshipful obedience to their parents and making all things beautiful on their minds.

None of these outcomes will occur, but many Americans will pat themselves on the back and declare the crisis over. In a Looney Tunes short, Daffy Duck keeps trying to outshine Bugs Bunny at a vaudeville performance. Finally, Daffy drinks nitro, gunpowder, and Uranium 238 and then lights a match (“Girls, you better hang on to your boyfriends,” warns Daffy). The crowd goes wild with applause as Daffy explodes, and Bugs tells him they want more. “That’s the problem; I can only do it once,” replies the ghost of Daffy. America stews over its ills, makes one enormous, showy gesture, and then congratulates itself on its heroic fortitude, never giving the issue a thought again.

The greatest instance of the phenomena this century occurred with the election of Barak Obama. Waves of pundits solemnly declared the end of racial strife in America. I don’t want to hear any complaints, someone yelled on Fox News; we live in a post-racial country. Take a look at our Black president over there.⁴

What happened next was as inevitable as it was shocking. Told racism no longer existed, people began uttering the most racist rhetoric imaginable, much of it directed at the President. Any complaints were met with cries of “being stuck in the past” and an enemy of progress about America’s new, enlightened outlook on race. No need for civil rights protections; no such thing as demanding equal representation since everyone is now magically the same; if you live in generational poverty, that’s your problem. You’re getting the same treatment and opportunities as everyone named Chad and Karen now. The smugness was breathtaking.

And so we repeat ourselves. By rounding up all the scary Black and Brown immigrants (you let The Rant know when someone that looks like Melania gets deported), all crime will cease to exist, inflation will vanish, labor will suddenly be rewarded with affordable health insurance and access to childcare, housing will be plentiful and cheap. And will rejoice at our ability to delude ourselves that our greatness can be confirmed in one sweeping, terrifying, moment of cruelty.

1. Fun Fact: By placing the word “the” in front of any social media or digital app, you immediately signal to the kiddies you are a hopeless Ancient One, incapable of understanding the importance of watching herds of people dancing for ten seconds, teenagers applying makeup, and people removing objects from cardboard receptacles. Side note: trying to monetize your children used to be known as pimping, now it’s just a fun family side hustle! “Get back in front of that ring light and do something cute, Ashley; Mommy needs the boots she saw being unboxed this morning!” The rest of the internet is conspiracy theories and sex stuff that is really just different combinations of everything discussed, plus the chickens.
2. Other supposed dangers during our youth: Our secretly Satanic friends slaughtering cattle in demonic rituals; Billy Crystal’s gay character on Soap. My grandfather despised Crystal for the rest of his career; The cross-dressing debauchery of Twisted Sister. Anything televised on HBO.
3. Another Fun Fact: Nikola Jokic, Serbian basketball unicorn, dominates the NBA and is amused at your efforts to stop him from scoring/assisting/rebounding at will. At 6’11”, Jokic dishes like Oscar Robertson, shoots like Steph Curry and rebounds like . . . a dude that’s 6’11”. When he arrived in the US, he found the harassment he received on social media so disheartening he simply quit and never even views it. Since then, he has been league MVP three times, won an NBA championship, and is on pace to average a triple double (points/rebounds/assist), which has only been accomplished twice, by much smaller point guards. Something to ponder when informed your existence is somehow an empty husk because you missed the latest viral meme.
4. Not So Fun Fact: When the Nazis looked to the US to formulate their segregation and purity laws, even they thought the Jim Crow stricture that Blackness was defined as “even one drop” of blood was too draconian. The Rant calls your attention to this because President Obama is Irish, Welsh, German, Swiss, English, and Kenyan, but in America he only gets to be Black. But hey, we have no race and identity issues any more.