Hello or Goodbye?
St Pancras Station, London
Quote of the Day
”To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee”.
- Evelyn Waugh
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
The Decemberists | All I Want Is You
Long Read of the Day
Trump sniffs money in ‘saving’ TikTok
Yesterday’s Observer column
ate on Saturday 18 January, TikTok, the short-video app beloved of millions of users mostly aged between 18 and 24, went dark in the US. This was not because of a power outage, but because its owner switched it off. For an explanation of why it did so, though, we have to spool back a bit. For years, TikTok has been a thorn in the sides of US legislators and national security officials for two reasons. First, it’s owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which doubtless does whatever Xi Jinping tells it to do. Second, TikTok hoovers up phenomenally detailed data about its young users. The average session lasts 11 minutes and the video length is about 25 seconds. “That’s 26 ‘episodes’ per session,” says blogger Prof Scott Galloway, “with each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That’s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.” The thought of personal data with this granularity falling into Chinese hands seemingly drove the American deep state, not to mention Meta, Google and co wild. And Congress got the message.
In April last year, Joe Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a statute that had attracted unprecedented bipartisan support on its path through a divided Congress. The act basically mandated that TikTok’s owner would have to sell it to an American company or be banned in the US. It was scheduled to come into force on Sunday 19 January 2025.
ByteDance/TikTok duly launched a legal campaign to have the act declared unconstitutional, but on 17 January the US supreme court disagreed. At which point the owner of the platform decided to hit the off button. And that, some of us naively thought, was that.
But then, magically, around noon on Sunday 19 January, the app reappeared…
Books, etc.
Working titles of famous novels
First Impressions (Pride and Prejudice)
Alice’s Doings in Elf-Land (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)
Trimalcio in West Egg (The Great Gatsby)
Catch-18 (Catch-22)
Something That Happened (Of Mice and Men)
All’s Well That Ends Well (War and Peace)
Source: FT Magazine, 25/26 January
I find these oddly reassuring. I’m working on a book with the working title HWGH (How we got here).
My commonplace booklet
Ofcom has released an interactive digital toolkit to help providers of online user-to-user and search services to understand how to comply with the illegal content rules of the Online Safety Act.
The deadline for creating a risk assessment is 16 March.
I’m not the only observer eagerly looking forward to news that Twitter/X has prepared an assessment. (And even more eagerly looking forward to what Ofcom will do if it hasn’t. Stay tuned.)
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Wikenigma: a compendium of known unknowns. Interesting idea. Link
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