It may not be as arduous and indoctrinating as The Long March and the shadow of Mao, but unsuspecting end users in both North America and Europe are carelessly leaving terabytes of valuable information to be harvested by Beijing e-farmers, as the trail leads directly to vast server banks. The crop is allegedly bountiful.
While the ramifications may be serious from a privacy and cultural appropriation perspective, the apathy towards the once trendsetting social media selfie meccas are a symptom of Western society’s transformation into a gossipy vapid dysfunctional family lacking basic values. The passive aggressive trek plays directly into the hands of the Chinese government, who has executed a nearly flawless socio-economic based attack against Capitalism and the construct of the republic, strategy that was born in the 1950’s inspired by the surrender of Hong Kong on the foreseeable horizon.
YouTube is no longer the edgy neighborhood hangout for cerebral challenges such as combining a mousetrap and an electrical outlet to create a plasma wave.
Facilitated by Beijin. the viral platform of TikTok, where intellect goes to die, and younger Americans regularly prove Darwin’s evolutionary treatise, is the current endgame of grooming individuals to be receptive to oppression, an idea that was stolen from the guerilla mass marketing business model behind the first generation of social networks. Owned by the Chinese tech consortium Bytedance, an active corporatized contradiction possessing both elements of Beijing and commercial facets, the app has 1.5 billion users, including nearly 100 million in the US, according to various sources. While Disraeli’s premise of “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” probably applies to the figures, the behavior modification properties of the software are the real concern for those who embrace fundamental liberties, a pressing skepticism that has emanated after YouTube’s launch.
While Facebook and Twitter were engineered as enhanced texting frameworks, YouTube offered an array of streaming multimedia content where real life and entertainment collide in creating an immersive experience. In picking a poison, YouTube owned by Alphabet, Inc. is a less nefarious space than TikTok, administered by the People’s Liberation Army cyber defense division, however the masses have spoken with the steady wave of those under 25 sharing secrets, trivial moments, staged stupidity, and unintentionally disseminating strategic data to the Communist party.
But the lumbering Brontosaurus of the streaming pioneering organism is being left behind in a past geological age, at least from a content generation perspective.
As the crowded hike from YouTube to TikTok began in 2018, the tech giant is now a shell of itself in featuring trending content. While the site exists as a portal for entertainment and sports and a valuable archive of compelling information providing an electronic timeline for the last decade, the brand name status has been lost to the hive mind minions of Beijing.
While the raw YouTube traffic numbers for site visitors are actually steadily increasing, due in large part to the people still isolating from the Covid-19 pandemic, the gap between the prominent users and moderately visited account holders is growing wider. In viewing the recent current trending menu, once a vibrant and innovative collection of intriguing videos, the list now features site icon Mr. Beast and a collection of newly released songs, the latter a direct result of the music industry pouring billions of dollars into Alphabet’s coffers. However, the current absence of one-hit wonders uploading videos, points to the reality that the childhood of digital communities has now reached the teenage years, and the Chinese are poised to assimilate the vast gravitation to the electronic floodplains of the Yangtze River, a disturbing critique on the status of the near future. The domain has reached a stagnant cul-de-sac in relation to originality.
Unique viral content has a new home at TikTok and along with it the soul and attention span, attenuated as it is, of essence of youth in the industrialized world. Intertwining validation, emotion, and subtle propaganda, again a method employed by social media to promote products, the operators of the Chinese trojan horse are monetizing the political game. As rogue bots are prevalent among the Twitter environment, the entire TickTok platform is a universal bot, a phenomenon that should give psychologists material for decades, and gives a massive headache to those who still fight for free will. The electronic community is the People’s Republic.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew made the fallacious claim that he makes all the “strategic” decisions at the corporation in responding to industrial grade scrutiny from tech journalists. His disingenuous rhetoric is likely aligned with the survival instinct as he probably does not wish to face a similar fate of fellow tycoon Jack Ma. On the other hand, YouTube leader Susan Wojcicki has the company in a holding pattern as pressure from the US government and the European Union is mounting for big tech to adopt transparency. However, the dichotomy of the two entities is represents a comprehensive portrait of the tumult that leaders in the free world face as throngs of youth blindly race for an embrace with an accommodating, yet sinister totalitarian overlord.