The use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision:
Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification, because that’s what consumers want.
Over the past century the market has taken us toward ever shorter-form entertainment, from cinema in the early 1900s, to TV mid-century, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips. With TikTok the delay between desire and gratification is almost instant; there’s no longer any patience or effort needed to obtain the reward, so our mental faculties fall into disuse and disrepair.
And this is why TikTok could prove such a devastating geopolitical weapon. Slowly but steadily it could turn the West’s youth — its future — into perpetually distracted dopamine junkies ill-equipped to maintain the civilization built by their ancestors.
We seem to be halfway there already: not only has there been gray matter shrinkage in smartphone-addicted individuals, but, since 1970 the Western average IQ has been steadily falling. Though the decline likely has several causes, it began with the first generation to grow up with widespread TVs in homes, and common sense suggests it’s at least partly the result of technology making the attainment of satisfaction increasingly effortless, so that we spend ever more of our time in a passive, vegetative state. If you don’t use it, you lose it.
And even those still willing to use their brains are at risk of having their efforts foiled by social media, which seems to be affecting not just kids’ abilities but also their aspirations; in a survey asking American and Chinese children what job they most wanted, the top answer among Chinese kids was “astronaut,” and the top answer among American kids was “influencer.”
If we continue along our present course, the resulting loss of brainpower in key fields could, years from now, begin to harm the West economically. But, more importantly, if it did it would help discredit the very notion of Western liberalism itself, since there is no greater counterargument to a system than to see it destroy itself. And so the CCP would benefit doubly from this outcome: ruin the West and refute it; two birds with one stone (or as they say in China, one arrow, two eagles.)
Ironically, it looks like watching TV makes you smarter.
Reading books makes you better at reading books.
Watching TV makes you better at watching TV.
Watching infinity five-second context-free video clips of fertile-aged women doing increasingly spastic “dances” makes you better at watching infinity five-second context-free video clips of fertile-aged women doing increasingly spastic “dances”.
Fortunately artificial intelligence is coming along just in time to do our thinking for us.
Wireheading is a perfect meta-level rebuttal to utilitarianism and other forms of nihlistic cockroach philosophy; the clades vulnerable to the psyop will remove themselves from the competition, and ontologically superior forms of life will proliferate in their stead.
Dear P-C, utilitarianism is the default human mindset. In fact it’s the default life strategy of every living creature.
Mott and Bailey. Different senses of the word ‘utilitarianism’ are purposefully conflated using the same word in different ways with respect to different objects by sophists upstream, and inadvertently conflated by useful idiots down stream.
Much like discursiveness around other things like ‘psychological egoism’, there is a trivial and nigh tautological sense of the word that is invoked by the sophist when his tactic(s) come under criticism (eg, ‘everyone does something because at least some part of them judges it to have greater value’, ‘everyone does something because at least some part of them is gratified by so doing’, et cetera et cetera), and once the storm passes they go back to an other more particular desired sense of the word in action (‘the greatest good for the greatest number means it is my solemn duty to assume power as Party Commissar and appropriate all your capital and enact totalising managerial intermediation of all aspects of all human existence and also kill you – for the sake of greater numbers of random mysterymeat XYZ somewhere else on the rock, of course’).