I feel like it's been a very long time since I've seen handles like I've seen in Rivals. You have the console players, clearly marked by their platform allegiance in the UI, and then you have the mutant and feral horde of Steam players for whom laws are suggestions and for whom literacy is a sworn enemy. Expertly commingling the Third Reich with Pedophilia, the name in the strip is a real name. Well, not a given name. I hope that's not a given name, but we did see it. That's the one we felt could be included in the strip. The list of those which could not is robust! It's a deep roster.

TikTok went down with a message that exalted Trump, and then returned eight hours later with another message doing the same thing - closing down before it technically had to and then barely being gone long enough to miss it. At least on my block, on being told their Chinese app would no longer be available, the Wicked Youth downloaded RedNote, which is another Chinese app except way, way more Chinese. They started learning some Mandarin and wanted to talk about how cheap groceries were in China. So God only knows what our idiotic leaders were trying to do, actually trying to do, but this is what they've managed to accomplish: an unprecedented level of cultural exchange with a "foreign adversary," coupled with broad excoriations of America, its systems, and its way of life.

That channel of exchange is not something that can last, broadly, because our ideas about free speech and China's ideas about free speech are very different. There are material differences here and they aren't small. Take a look at RedNote's Community Standards:

It's pretty easy to get banned on there; most American users would have no idea what most of this even means. We are free to have opinions because it's a locus of social control and civil strife. They have a fundamentally different idea of citizenship and it's not a version of what we do. If you've never been someplace where you are the alien, maybe that doesn't track. They have different cultural ports. There's no guarantee your ideas will even plug in.

There is a lot to say about all this, but here are the two things I'm going to say for now. One, I'm startled at how fast the oligarchy got on the same page. You can say it's naive, but they were singing a very different tune and like a lot of people in my generation we got tricked into thinking history was over. Second, and I was here to see most of this happen, if the story we tell ourselves about America can't withstand or tolerate the most basic scrutiny, that is far, far more dangerous to the nation than this fucking app.

(CW)TB out.