#quibi

I dunno about you, but I am starting to find this Reese Witherspoon lady kinda shady.

It's about control. The United States government is losing control of their propaganda. Mitt Romney recently admitted that the "nationwide support for the Tiktok ban" was more about preventing people from seeing the truth of what was really happening in Gaza.

Since Tiktok was restored, users have noted it's a little more difficult to search certain terms, like "fascism." Less results come up, and in some cases, no results come up at all, even though there used to be content there.

But the thing I want people to keep in mind is what's observably happening to Twitter right now: when Twitter was purchased, it was revealed to be a lot more left leaning then we thought. And by his own admission, Elon Musk bought Twitter because he wanted to destroy its left-leaning tendencies and forcibly drag it to the right. (Or, you know, drag it towards whatever this hand gesture is supposed to mean)

But you know what happened when he did that? Twitter lost 75% of its userbase. People don't actually want that. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.

If people are going to Tiktok in search of some greater truth that the American government doesn't want them to see, they will find a new place to get it from. And the harder the American government squeezes, the more obvious the propaganda looks.

For what it's worth, I never used Tiktok. I never had an account. Friends link me Tiktoks, and I follow a Tiktok repost account on here (which only posts maybe once a day), but by and large I have avoided the service for the same reasons I avoided Vine.

I have been around long enough that I know if I indulge my attention span to embrace its worst tendencies then it actively makes me a worse person. It's like eating nothing but junk food. You become fat and lazy and your health deteriorates. Ingesting material designed to feed a bad attention span just makes your attention span worse.

Also, it's just chock full of people stealing content, there's almost no money to be made, the metrics are insane, and most short form content is just plain old straight up annoying as hell. It is cocomelon but for teenagers. My brain does not deserve to rot and neither does yours.

Drew Gooden has a good bit about this, when talking about how so many videos only exist to waste your time, about how there are two types of videos: the most obnoxious six seconds ever recorded and something that did not need to be six hours. And how weird it is that people forgot there can be a middle ground between those two points.

The Shield put FX on the map. Mad Men put AMC on the map. House of Cards put Netflix on the map. Writers did that. Not some CEO.

Know what you get when you put CEOs in creative lanes? You get Quibi.