Although the precise details are still in question — Steve Mnuchin is circling with a coterie of potential investors and there is always the possibility parent company ByteDance might bite the bullet and sell — it appears to be certain that TikTok in its current form will not survive the year. The Chinese-owned social media app has been a titanic cultural and financial success with massive influence on young people especially in the U.S. and worldwide. But that hasn’t stopped, and according to some accounts may have even contributed to the U.S. House of Representatives last week voting 352-65 to pass a bill restricting the app unless it is sold to non-Chinese owners.
The reason for TikTok success has been chalked up to an algorithm that according to both superfans and opponents of the app has an uncanny power to reel in users. The idea that screens have hidden psychological powers is at least as old as 1950s discourse alleging the existence of coded esoteric messages in cinema advertisements and hidden persuaders on television. Critics have argued such claims deny human agency and choice; a position backed up by the fact that claims made of subliminal ads and, more recently, groups like Cambridge Analytica, have been overhyped.
There are others, however, that have made the opposite case; and whether you believe them or not, or identify with their political aims, they provide an insight as to why the U.S. may be taking a move that marks a sharp turn away from more than 30 years of comparatively hands-off internet regulation
In the early 1970s, so-called “apparatus theory”, “suture theory”, or “screen theory” arose as a psychoanalytic structuralist theory of the cinema in Anglophone academia, primarily through the journal Screen. Apparatus theory, derived loosely from and associated with the ideas of Louis Althusser, purported to explain the role of film as part of the so-called “ideological state apparatus” of capitalism and attacked “realist” cinema as complicit in upholding an oppressive civilisation.
Through the early 1950s through 1979-1981, the left’s central question became comprehending how the working class in liberal democracies did not appear to be supporting a revolution. The ideological state apparatus was a theory advanced by Althusser used to explain the influence of the sensemaking institutions – such as the church, the media, and the education system – in keeping employees down.
Portraying a supposedly “unbroken” narrative chain of happenings through a realist script, the “cinematic apparatus”, according to screen theory, shaped subjects who were unable to dissociate their own experiences from the supposedly reliable and mass-consumed world of the film, in the process imbibing a world view that made them more easily exploitable workers.
Viewed as they were en masse in cinemas, films thus contributed to the creation of a culture perfect for a manufacturing-oriented Fordist society that prioritised rote activities and a stable sense of self.
Screen theory and structuralism generally has been criticised for neglecting the role of human agency and subjectivity, and the idea that people are entirely passively created by social institutions is absurd. But one need not be a full-blown anti-humanist to suggest that media strongly informs people’s behaviour and life habits. It would thus be foolish to see TikTok as purely a waste of time (although it can be that) or a leisure activity with zero social implications.
Although the justifications for banning TikTok have mostly been made on the basis of alleged Chinese spying risks or the app’s content being either potentially or already rigged in a manner that benefits the Communist Party, the actual significance of the social video app come not from its exoteric content, but its format.
In a precise inversion of the realist theatrical film of the mid-century period critiqued by apparatus theory, TikTok videos are shot in a hyper-fast-paced manner often absent narrative or wider story. The users themselves are made to feel as conscious actors in a personalised process of co-creation, rather than as passive and rote participants in a mass narrative. TikTok users are involved in curating and “suturing” together the clips in their feed, even as the algorithm determines the process at a level that can escape their immediately conscious thinking. The chopped-up, cobbled-together subjects of TikTok are not stable, and the app has indeed been linked to a supposed rise of falsely diagnosed mental disorders and tics among youth.
In prioritising flexibility, creativity, and adaptability, TikTok thus reflects and prioritises the traits demanded in the post-industrial “conceptual economy”. As discussed critically in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism and lauded in Richard Florida’s Rise of the Creative Class, the rise of the new class of so-called “symbolic analysts” demanded workers who would be dynamic, entrepreneurial, and no longer attached permanently to a specific company or location. Entire schools of so-called creative management suggested that everything from Lego at work to “open-concept offices” could be used to amplify imagination.
Although these traits are present across TikTok in general at the level of its format, they have even crept into content at times. The most blatant example of this was the “day in the life” genre of workplace videos. During the 2021-2022 period of re-opening the economy after the end of the coronavirus pandemic, but importantly, prior to the wave of layoffs at major tech companies after the Federal Reserve announced the beginning of the end of the period of low interest rate policymaking, a style of video depicting an employee at an urban email job hot-desking across the office using all the infamous Silicon Valley corporate yuppie perks, became ubiquitous. These videos were ridiculed for symbolising an age of excess at Big Tech which was in the process of coming to an end.
The out-of-the-box creative usability of knowledge economy consumer apps like TikTok and even many enterprise software platforms meant that even if they never took a marketing course in secondary school or university, hundreds of thousands of millennials and Gen Z arrived into the labour force already mentally oriented to self-branding as a hobby.
Ironically, expanded access to and experience with easy-to-use creative technologies has undermined the value of academic degrees in “symbolic analysis” to a possibly fatal extent, even before the arrival of generative AI, which former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and Open AI board member Larry Summers quipped “is coming for the cognitive class”.
More importantly, the shift of Western economies towards industrial policy and a revival of manufacturing industries and state intervention under the imperative of a renewed age of “great power competition” and hawkishness towards China will prioritise a different kind of subject. There is an attempt to displace the conceptual economy with a new age of hard power.
It is thus a completely logical decision for a TikTok ban to be central in any project of “securitisation” of Western societies and newfound demands to pivot to a “resilient” economy re-linked to manufacturing employment and away from software-as-a-service (SaaS) and its much poorer false relative, media. Venture-capitalists who have prioritised SaaS are notable among the critics of the proposed ban as are elements of what remains of the digital journalism industry.
Other obvious direct losers from a TikTok ban include the book publishing industry, which has seen YA fiction surge in popularity under the hashtag #BookTok, and more importantly, the fast fashion industry, including companies like Shein, the most popular fashion brand on TikTok with an impending IPO. Shein amounts to an anchor store in what Katherine Dee has described as the digital mall of TikTok, and has in recent weeks come under severe scrutiny by the U.S. Congress for supposed supply-chain human rights abuses, claims which the company has rejected.
The app is also connected to more anarchic markets of a more subterranean and casual yet just as potentially controversial nature. Recent years have seen outrage over human traffickers and smugglers of illegal migrants advertising passage into the UK and elsewhere at a comparatively low cost via social video app. Few could defend this sort of activity, which has contributed to the normalisation of a ghoulish, game-show like abuse of asylum systems which places lives at risk, ignores the needs of the most vulnerable refugees, and has contributed to political backlash that in many cases has been expressed in xenophobic rejection of immigration a priori.
But in cracking down on TikTok, there is a significant risk policymakers are contending with something they cannot completely comprehend – a spontaneously self-organising set of emergent phenomena. For as much as they are shaped by media and other tools, people ultimately use these tools in unpredictable ways that defy security state imperatives, contrary to structuralist arguments.
Although often attributed to other forces, some research has suggested an increase in businesses applications during the pandemic may be linked to increased productivity growth. Some begun merely as side-hustles during the lockdowns. Dee has noted that TikTok is similar to sites like Etsy and eBay and such small businesses exist across the country, including in de-industrialised and rural areas that are supposedly intended to benefit from the turn towards New Cold War policies. Decentralised and casual solutions to everyday problems and relationships are part of all social media apps and TikTok is no exception to this. Indeed, the communities and habits formed on TikTok may likely move elsewhere, rather than be squashed. If America is in effect mimicking China by restricting apps, it might well be the case U.S. citizens, like Chinese exporters with VPNs to post on and monitor Instagram and other Western apps banned in that country, resort to more bootleg measures to balance supply and demand.
If the anarchic and creative ethos of TikTok users and the app itself reflects more fundamental aspects of capitalism as a phenomenon and its evolution since the days of the mass cinema and the Fordist factory, it will be a lot harder for governments however strongly motivated to impose a security mindset than many believe, no matter the fate of the app itself.