The TikTok ban and a weaponized internet

Jan 19, 2025

I’m a bit faded from our rushed release of Pistachio Wars this past week. But I want to say a few words about the TikTok ban because, well, you know, I wrote the book on the history of the internet — about how it was developed by the Pentagon as a weapon and about how it remains a weapon today…

Come to think of it, I already wrote a little bit about the TikTok ban. But that was a while back, when Donald Trump first announced he was going to boot the app unless it found a buyer who was American. Yeah, it was Trump who first gave momentum to the ban-TikTok efforts — efforts that were taken up by the Democrats as a banner of their patriotism and then signed into law by a Democratic president. Now Trump, fully in character, is trying to emerge as TikTok Jesus, rescuing an app that’s loved by (and is destroying the minds of) millions upon millions of Americans.

It's all very funny and confusing. But I'll start out with a prediction: I don't think TikTok is going to be allowed to stand as long as it maintains any sort of ties — whether real or imagined — to China. The only way forward for TikTok is the same path that had previously been open to it: selling to an American (or an American-affiliated) entity. So all this stuff about Trump trying to save TikTok, I don't think it's going to work. My sense is he’s buying time to orchestrate a deal. “A good deal. The greatest deal.” But we’ll see…

The reason I don’t think TikTok will be allowed to live without a sale to a true patriot? It’s the politics of it. The push to ban the app, which started over four years ago, signaled a new phase in America’s internet politics: the end of internet utopianism and the start of a much more hard-nosed, paranoid approach to the technology. Everyone these days is convinced that the internet is a weapon…and that America needs to protect itself from evil foreigners who seek to use this tech to destroy the Great American Way of Life. But it wasn’t always this way.

Not so long ago, pretty much everyone in America — from politicians to journalists to think-tank experts to tech bros — believed in the utopian promise of the internet. They believed that the internet was an engine of democracy and freedom in the information age. The mantra was that the internet should spread without thought to borders or laws and should not be regulated at all. The reason for this was simple:

For the first few decades, the global commercial internet was dominated by America. It didn’t matter if you were in Rhode Island or Russia or Romania or Rwanda — if you were on the internet, you were using American tech platforms, American servers and wires and routing equipment, American programming languages, American encryption tools... In short, American companies ran the internet, and American spy agencies had information-sharing deals with all of them. It was the golden age of American power…and it coincided neatly with the USSR collapsing and America winning the Cold War.

America’s control of the internet made sense. Internet tech had been invented by the Pentagon during the Vietnam War era and then privatized into the hands of American corporations…corps that pretty much always had close ties to America’s security services. In this golden age of global internet expansion, America ran the show unopposed. And so it’s no surprise that this was when the ideology of radical internet openness reigned in America. The entire American establishment believed that if places like China or Europe or Russia tried to put restrictions (even small ones) on American internet companies or to regulate the flow of information coming across their borders, this was a sign of totalitarianism and anti-democratic forces…a sloppy slope to a digital dictatorship. Any attempt to regulate the internet by foreign governments was bashed, demonized, and aggressively opposed by the American state…sometimes with economic sanctions.

But things changed when other countries, specifically China but also Russia, started catching up and dominating first their own domestic internet spaces with their own services and technologies, and then taking these technologies abroad to America and Europe. Then, suddenly, America got all paranoid about the idea of internet freedom and internet openness and quickly began to talk up the need to protect America’s internet space from evil outside forces. In short, America started talking exactly like China and Russia and Iran and Cuba had done earlier — countries that America had previously criticized as authoritarian and evil for trying to protect themselves from penetration by American technologies and propaganda.

I wrote about this history in a general way in my book Surveillance Valley. And as I mentioned above also wrote about this history applies specifically to the TikTok ban.

I’m looking at the date of when I wrote about it, and I gotta say that I’m a little shocked. It’s from August 2020. I remember writing it now — it was the height of the Covid Isolation Era and I was sitting in a hotel room at a tacky resort on a fake lake in the hills above Inland Empire. We had gone there with my parents for the weekend to get out of our apartment and then immediately regretted it. There was nothing to do there except eat shitty food at the restaurant. And so while I worked, Evgenia was in bed with food poisoning… Oh, how time flies.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote back then. Not sure I have anything more to add on it right now…

From the start of the dot com boom, Silicon Valley and America’s political elite has done a great job of marketing the Internet as a totally new type of technology — a utopian system that’s removed from American imperial and business interests. Google? Facebook? Apple? eBay? These companies aren’t extensions of American imperial power. No way! They’re neutral technological platforms involved in connecting and empowering people. They’re serving users with digital democracy, regardless of their nationality or politics. They’re post-ideological and post-historical!
For a long time a lot of people believed this sales pitch. Even Silicon Valley bought into its own hype.
Of course, this idea of technological neutrality was itself extremely ideological and underpinned by massive historical revisionism. As I show in my book Surveillance Valley, the Internet has always been an instrument of American economic and military power. The Internet has always been a weapon — ever since it was developed by Pentagon in the 1960s and then unleashed on the world in early 1990s.
This ban of TikTok proves my point.
But there’s something bigger going on, too. It shows that no one really believes in Silicon Valley global utopianism anymore.
Read reporting on the issue and you’ll find that a kind of paranoid realpolitik prevails these days. No one talks about the Internet being a post-political platform. Now it’s all about how technology can be weaponized by a rival power againstAmerican interests. If an Internet company is Chinese, it naturally must be an extension of Chinese national power. If a company is Russian, the Russian government must be benefitting from its use somehow. And if a company is American — like Google or Facebook — it of course must pledge allegiance to American imperial interests. And Google and Facebook publicly agree.
The logic makes a lot of sense — and represents the hard reality that has always underpinned information technology. But what’s surprising is that is also represents a total reversal in American political culture.
From the moment that computer networking emerged in consumer culture, everyone believed in openness. It was a fundamental religious tenet of the Information Age.
From Al Gore to Newt Gingrich to Wired magazine — the consensus was that open networks, like open markets and free trade, would create a new global order that would topple monopolies, decentralize political power, and usher in a direct worldwide democracy that would render governments obsolete. Laws limiting or censoring networking technology were seen as an attack on the principle of democracy itself. This notion was endorsed in a landmark Supreme Court ruling striking down the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a law that sought to regulate obscene speech online.
Writing the majority opinion, Justice John Paul Stevens praised the network as “a vast democratic fora” — a unique new medium that brought Jeffersonian Democracy into the 21st century. “This dynamic, multifaceted category of communication includes not only traditional print and news services, but also audio, video, and still images, as well as interactive, real-time dialogue,” he wrote. “Through the use of chat rooms, any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual can become a pamphleteer.”
When the internet went global, this belief in openness became a central plank of American foreign policy. Under the banner of Internet Freedom, first formulated and put into practice under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. championed an unfettered global internet and has sought to isolate and punish countries — China in particular — that censored or controlled their domestic internet space and kept American companies away. “Information freedom supports the peace and security that provide a foundation for global progress,” she declared in 2010. “We should err on the side of openness…”
But as the TikTok bans shows, the internet is now too free. It’s too democratic for its own good. It needs to be protected from malicious outside forces that seek to undermine its democratic potential.
What changed?
As I’ve written before, the erosion of America’s religious belief in Internet Freedom began in earnest with Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016 and Russiagate, a conspiracy theory that was unleashed to cover for that loss. But with China and Trump, this ideology of openness and unfettered democracy is reaching a whole new level of disintegration.
Part of this has to do with the fact that America’s elite feels threatened by a rising power. But I think an even bigger issue here is the need to displace blame. Our political and business elite has presided over stunning levels of national decline and degradation. America is falling apart. And someone has to take the fall. So our ruling class has desperately tried to shift blame away from themselves and onto sneaky and dangerous foreign enemy — aka the Chinese and the Russians. And the Internet has been a perfect virtual reality canvas for this xenophobic campaign. You can project anything you want on it.x

And I just want to add one thing. I’m glad the era of internet utopianism is over. It was always based on an American solipsism and the blind faith in the power of technology. But the paranoid era we’re in now, even if closer to some sort of reality, has its own problems…

—Yasha

PS: Read Surveillance Valley.