Not Without My TikTok
A banner week in Unhingement.
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Hi friends!
Well, here we are. Right where we’re meant to be. If where we’re meant to be is in America on the most bizarre timeline with the second political self-immolation of the year less than four months in.
Where do I even begin? Guess I'll start with my top personal spiral: celebrating Passover, the second best Jewish holiday, the one with liberation as its major theme, as Gaza starves and is still under siege. Not to mention the video from an injured Israeli hostage, horrific images of mass graves, and all the campus protests and the violent policing of the protests.
And Netanyahu’s false equivalency and deflection when he said the protests were reminiscent of pre-Nazi Germany. And the Jews who are protesting being called anti-Semites. And me reading at least one vile, actual anti-Semitic comment on almost every single post about the protests I have seen.
The devastation (and displacement) of the Holocaust shaped my own family’s history. So did leftist activism and a tradition of protest. I’d like to have a much more nuanced conversation about anti-Semitism. But I will need about a year to collect my thoughts and perhaps a full nervous system transplant before ever I publish that on the internet.
At least the great New York Trump trial can deliver the dumb shit we need. There’s the napping, the chanting, what the jury said about him, a former publisher of The National Enquirer who is literally named Pecker, and, of course, the pornstar of it all.
Trump is farting up a storm in the courtroom — I watched a weird TikTok and my dad saw it on MSNBC — so the story crossed the great brain rot generational divide and therefore must be true. What an absolute banger of an unhinged piece of news.
The other Trump case that has been unhinging the masses this week is less of a circus and more of an existential crisis for America. Seems like the Supreme Court is going to drag the question of whether Trump has immunity for attempting to interfere with an election past the next one he’s running in.
The Supreme Court had a busy week, also weighing an appeal that basically insists a patient is on the verge of death before an abortion is performed to save their life. If anyone is ready to dust off their pussy hat, I say go for it, and please do let me know where it’s been hiding. Because Harvey Weinstein’s original rape conviction, a pivotal win for the #MeToo movement, was overturned on Thursday. Though he’s still imprisoned for other charges, his lawyers are fighting those too.
With all that going on, we need our escapes. And President Uncle Joe is trying to take away our best source of dissociative algorithmic bliss, our most special app with endless content that somehow knows us better than we know ourselves.
In all my years of being stoned and looking at the internet, only Vine has come close to the level of laughter TikTok offers and no other app has put me in a similar fugue state. If TikTok really goes away, that would be a lifestyle change.
Who actually can with anything this week? Not me. But I did some googling for us (you’re welcome) and found out the deal with the TikTok ban:
We have at least a year before we play our dirges, probably much longer because the TikTok leader, a man named Shou who has a much better vibe than any of the American tech dorkuses, is going to sue.
Banning an entire app is a violation of free speech, so Shou has a great case.
The government claims that China is promoting propaganda on the app, but I think they’re just selling glycine and used trucks? All the propaganda I’ve seen seems to be coming from inside the house. But honestly, who knows, a third of the people I see are so filtered they could be AI.
Trump, who was at the vanguard of banning TikTok with his attempt in 2020, has now reversed his position for clout.
I’m all for deleting the internet, as most of you know, but it’s still hard to face the prospect of that happening to my favorite part. The part that has given me this old New York lady who likes to tell us about her drinks. Or this Italian guy who puts so much cheese on pasta and makes a noise. Or this woman who does interpretive dances.
The best of TikTok is the glimpse it gives us into other people’s lives and it is the realest glimpse I have ever seen on any social media platform. And also the weirdest. I love it so much.
We don’t have to start engaging with reality quite yet; we have some time to figure out hobbies, how to create dopamine again, or, in the worst-case scenario, we can go back to watching TV. We can have a meeting about it when and if we need to. But also, if this gets tied up in court for, like, two years, the way things are going, we don’t know what from society will remain. The best we can do is just take it day by day.
One more thing before I go: The written version of my newsletter is an offering to the unhinged community and will remain free. If you upgrade to paid, you’ll get access to the audio version, whatever else I start sending eventually, and the satisfaction of being a founding member of a still-under-the-radar newsletter cult.
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Wishing you a fun and relaxing weekend! Let’s all try to live in the moment, the devil only knows what next week will bring.
Less Lessons More Blessin’s™️
Liz
"If where we’re meant to be is in America on the most bizarre timeline with the second political self-immolation of the year less than four months in." Sheesh, ugh, this is grim reminder that there isn't any shortage of macabre units of time that present themselves in this age of unhingement, as if to confirm your observation about "the shitshow construct that is time". We cannot help but think of how-many-children-killed-in-Gaza ago, or how many days spent by hostages in Hamas captivity, or how many days this journalist or those other people spent in Russian prisons ago, etc, etc. And, of course, we've already had for a long while how many mass shootings ago, how many Trump indictments ago. And soon we'll have how long since democracy ended...
It's the weekend, but unhingement doesn't take a break; just reading the news headlines is enough to despair.
"30 years on, South Africa's dream of unity lies shattered"
"Iraqi TikTok star Umm Fahad shot dead in Baghdad"
And I barely started doom scrolling...