GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #813: TIKTOK BAN

 

You probably heard about the TikTok bill working its way through Congress today because the House passed it on to the Senate, where it's likely to pass on to Joe Biden's desk. Biden has already said he would sign it into law.

I hesitate to use the word ban, because that's technically not what Congress is doing. Technically. Their problem is that ByteDance, who owns the company, is located in China, and we all know that talking shit about China gets politicians' dicks hard. Their concern is that the Chinese government might try to force the company to surrender its American users' data. (What about the rest of the world's data? Ah, fuck 'em, right?) What the bill actually says is, in order to continue operating in the US, ByteDance must sell TikTok to someone we're *not* enemies with. Either that, or they can kiss the US market goodbye.

So it's not a ban. It's a my-way-or-the-highway suggestion. It's altogether possible that ByteDance will eat the loss and move on because the US is only number three when it comes to population by country in the world. We're not even at half a million, and China and India have about 1.4M each. Granted, they're not all TikTok users, but that's a pretty wide market to take a bite out of. That's still not taking into account the populations of the other 231 countries. I saw a stat that says there's 172M TikTok users in the US. It would be painful to move on without us, but it's doable.

So it's possible it could turn into a ban, and all those politicians who voted for it will have their kids at their throats. I'm sure they live there on those various and sundry throats already, but I'm a little eager to see how that unfolds. Because I actually agree. TikTok should be held accountable, but not for the reasons Congress thinks.

Because ANY AND ALL corporate social media platforms do not give a single solitary fuck about their users' data. They view it as their job to take as much as possible from the users, not to help them. Helping people is detrimental to a company's bottom line. Social media is a huge fucking scam, and none of our data is safe.

If you doubt me, try turning down the terms and conditions when you sign up for a site. Have you ever read the terms and conditions? I'll bet you haven't, and if you did you wouldn't be so fast to sign away the rights to your data. But let's say you wanted to read the whole fucking thing. How long would it take?

That long. Whoo-boy, that Microsoft one is an absolute killer. These terms are designed that way to discourage you from reading it. Why spend the time when it's just easier to click on YES?

And don't get me wrong. I'm with you all, too. I signed my data away, as well, because there were more advantages to having, say, a Facebook page than there were disadvantages. But the longer I think about it, the less I'm comfortable with that.

I read a story today about how a bunch of people got scammed by a chef on Facebook. The problem is, it wasn't him. It was his profile, but someone hacked him, and when he tried getting his page back Facebook was absolutely no help. Such complaints apparently fall down into a black hole and are never seen again. No, really!

Like the guy in that story, most people who are hacked out of their profiles are so frustrated they give up and leave social media altogether. I understand that, but how comfortable are you knowing that a scammer now controls your Facebook page and has access not only to all your pictures, but also to those DMs you send?

You've known me a while, so I'm sure you know what my next step is. That's right, social media isn't special. ALL corporations do this. If you're unfamiliar with Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification," it goes like this. Companies are super helpful to their users while they're building their audience. Then they fuck over their users in favor of advertisers. The final step is when they fuck over the advertisers in favor of their own products. Since we're using Facebook as an example, you can very easily track their enshittification. The moment Meta reared its head was when it entered the third stage. For some reason, though, Facebook has not collapsed like so many others before it. But as Doctorow is fond of quoting, "Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop." Cheerful thought. Seems obvious, but think about it for a moment. What would you do if tomorrow Coca-Cola went out of business? Doesn't seem possible, does it? But one day Coke will be gone. It's a fact. We might not be around for that day, but it will come.

Long story short (too late) I don't think Congress is going far enough. TikTok is doing to its American users exactly what EVERY FUCKING SOCIAL MEDIA SITE DOES TO ITS AMERICAN USERS. All of them. No exceptions. So why go after just TikTok? Because they're Chinese and thus are our enemies?

Maybe we're getting a glimpse into the mind of Americanus politicianis, one of the most terrible species on the planet. The message I'm getting from them is, Chinese companies can't fuck with American users because, dammit, that's our job. We can't be outsourcing the abuse of American consumers to foreign nations. American companies might starve to death, and that's unthinkable.

Apply this bill to all corporations doing business in America, you fucking cowards.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #228: CLASSIC HOLLYWOOD AND SOCIAL MEDIA

I forgot who said it, but I remember hearing someone talking about the difference between contacting celebrities now and contacting them back in the classic Hollywood days. Way back when, you had to physically write a letter, be it by hand or typewriter, and you had to snail mail it to the studio. There a representative of the celebrity in question would type a phony letter, sign a picture for the celebrity and send the lot back to the fan. Now all you have to do is send them a tweet on Twitter. Sometimes you get ignored, but sometimes you get lucky and they respond.


Whoever mentioned this didn't take it to the next logical step: what if classic Hollywood had social media?


You fuckin' KNOW that Valentino would be sending out dick pics via DM. I would love to see Errol Flynn's drunken midnight tweets. I have a sneaking suspicion that the Duke would outrage millions by the far right things he'd post. Everyone else would probably be equally outraged by Bogie's views. I like to think that Rock Hudson would have been a gay rights activist. Perhaps someone would have been able to see Marilyn Monroe's problems and would have saved her life. Chaplin wouldn't be considered a genius today; he'd have been busted for his very active interest in underage girls instead.


Holy shit, could you imagine if Sinatra Periscoped his legendary parties? Jane Russell's Instagram would be on fucking fire. What if the Hollywood 10 protested on their Facebook pages? A lot of those guys were talented, and I'm pretty sure they could come up with just the perfect barb to hurl in McCarthy's direction.


Extend it to musicians. Images of John Bonham trashing hotel rooms would be all over the internet. Jimi's sex tape would be all over Pornhub (like it is today!). John Lennon and Paul McCartney sniping each other on Facebook. (And I'd bet even money that there would have been a Lennon/Ono sex tape. Maybe there is, but it hasn't surfaced yet.)


How about writers? Am I the only one who would have loved Jack Kerouac's blog? Or how about F. Scott Fitzgerald's? I can see Hunter S. Thompson posting videos of him shooting at high grade explosives on YouTube. Could you imagine the wonderfully depressing and soul-bearing posts Sylvia Plath would have sent out into the world? Shit, I know it's earlier than everyone else I've listed, but goddammit! I think Mark Twain would have been the Patton Oswalt of his time.


Presidents! Do you think JFK would be able to control himself with Snapchat nudes? Nixon wouldn't have needed Watergate to destroy him; he'd just need to do drunken live posts on Facebook. Everyone would have known about FDR's disability. Everyone would follow Teddy Roosevelt in much the same way everyone follows Sir Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellan when they're hanging out together, doing knight shit.


If you don't think all of this would be crazy, let me remind you that this happened recently. Yes, Charlie Sheen, star of MAJOR LEAGUE, is saying that he'd pitch for the Indians if they asked him to. Shit doesn't get more surreal than that.


Unless you give social media to classic Hollywood. Let's build a time machine, shall we?

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #221: BACHELORS GROVE AND BEING ALONE

Remember when I used to write a bunch of reviews for my blog? When I first started up Tales of Unspeakable Taste I thought it would be funny to do cemetery reviews. Who the fuck does cemetery reviews? I did a few before I got bored with the idea. One of them was on Bachelors Grove. If you want to read it, here it is. It might help you understand where I'm going with this GF tonight.


I was thinking about Bachelors Grove because a friend mentioned it earlier today. I realized that there was one thing I left out of my review. Let's rewind 17 years.


In 1999 I won an honorable mention at a State of Illinois journalism competition sponsored by the Trib. It was for feature story. When I worked for the Elmhurst College Leader it was suggested to me, because I was the fuckin' weirdo on staff, that I should write a feature piece on local haunts. So I did. I'd heard about Bachelors Grove a few times over the years, but I'd never gone down there.


I decided to make the trip for the story. I was floored by how spooky that place is. If you read the review in the link above you'll see a double grave that someone had slightly dug up. Years after my first visit a friend of mine took a picture of that grave. When he developed the film he'd captured what looked like two ghosts. I've seen the picture. I'm an incredibly skeptical guy when it comes to things like this, but I'll be damned if it didn't look like two ghosts. It was hazy, but they had human form, and I could see their eyes. One was obviously male, the other female, which matches up because a man and woman are buried there. I don't know what to make of it. I'm just going to say it's something I don't understand.


And no, the picture no longer exists. My friend lives the life of a transient (he is currently in prison and will not have a home when he's released), and he lost the picture and the negatives. Sorry.


If there is any place that is truly haunted, it's Bachelors Grove. But that's not what I'm here to talk about. There is something I left out of my review, and I only remembered it this morning during the IM conversation with my friend.


On several graves someone had left identical copies of the same letter. I know I kept one, but I can't for the life of me find it now. The gist of it was that the writer was a very lonely woman in her late twenties, a Wiccan, and she was looking for fellow cemetery appreciators to talk with. It wasn't a sexual thing. She just wanted to find a friend because she didn't have any. It was one of the saddest things I'd ever read.


Back then I still had a shell around me. I was anti-social. I wanted to separate myself from the world. The only people I wanted to talk with were people I was already familiar with. I later discovered the joys of alcohol, which cured me of this horrible malady. I never wrote to her email address. Only two years later I would have, and that's a thing I regret to this day. Out of mere curiosity I would have contacted her. I'm sure she's an okay person, so there probably would have been a great friendship in that.


Being lonely and wanting to be lonely is one thing. That's what I wanted back then. But this person was lonely and didn't want to be lonely. That's something else entirely.


We didn't have social media back then. I wonder how she's doing now. I hope she's found friends online. Friends online almost always leads to real life friends. There are about two dozen people I was online friends with before I met them in person this year alone. Social media can be a terrible place (Reddit, I'm looking specifically at you; I've never seen a more merciless pit of vipers). But it can also be wonderful. A radio personality I used to listen to back in the early 2000's was fond of saying that he was a high touch guy, not high tech. He blamed the internet for distancing people from each other. I disagree. While there is an element to that, I find that it's brought me closer to humanity. I wouldn't know a majority of the people I know today without the internet.


I hope that lonely Bachelors Grove woman has discovered that truth, and I hope she has tons of friends. I hope she's no longer lonely.


Our solar system is a big place. Only this planet is inhabited. As far as we can see into the rest of the universe is unpopulated. But the math is against us being alone in existence. Still, that's a lot of space, and that's a lot of loneliness.


Tell your loved ones that you love them. In the end that is all we truly have.