no no i think it's great that musk and zuckerberg arguably control social media

(on tiktok's ban)

In light of the destruction wrought over the Los Angeles area over the last few days, I wanted to share

Emily Wilson

’s “How to Help,” which contains a master list of resources and places accepting donations. My heart goes out to everyone who’s been impacted by the wildfires.

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TikTok might be banned in the States soon, which is a little wild to me because although I no longer regularly post on there, without the audience I built on the app, I wouldn't have been able to eventually pivot to this, to writing, a development that gave me new doors to open.

I don't know if I could do it today — there's something about social media that seems to love cultivating my meanest and most superficial tendencies, and I'm trying my hardest to discourage that in myself. 2020 Clara, though, was lonely and overworked and desperate to connect with anyone outside her limited one-block radius. So it's strange, yes, to watch the potential destruction of something that, for better or worse, changed my life. Even if that something is also partly responsible for the obliteration of our attention spans. But, you know. Layers and levels.

During Friday's oral arguments, the Supreme Court signaled that they are leaning toward upholding the ban. National security concerns, flow of commerce, China, the specter of future CIA employees, Gorsuch being bafflingly agnostic ... the gang's all here, I guess.¹

All things considered, it’s a bit sad.

(As a reminder, I’ve extended the 20% off sale on annual subscriptions until the end of January.)

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I know there are at least two people — three if we count Jeff Bezos and four, of course, if we count whoever was toiling at the altar of Google+ — who are probably not experiencing any sort of ill feelings over this: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Social media, after all, is an eyeballs game, and the more time people spend scrolling through TikTok, the less they have for Facebook (?), Instagram, and Twitter (currently known as ... you know).

Imagine doing this on purpose. (Getty Images)

There is of course a certain irony in discussing the threat of interference in American society via the acquisition and manipulation of private data as if it were a fresh and foreign concept. It was a little less than seven years ago, after all, that the general public learned (over two years after Facebook discovered it and kept it to themselves) that the firm Cambridge Analytica had obtained the private data of millions of Facebook users and — waste not want not — with that data created voter profiles to aid the efforts of the Republican presidential campaign (beginning not with Donald Trump but with eventual — and perennial — loser Ted Cruz).