[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

Exactly four months from today, we’ll have a pretty good idea whether TikTok gets to continue operations in the US. The odds aren’t looking good.

On Monday, TikTok’s lawyers appeared at an appellate court hearing to make the case that a proposed ban of the popular video app in the US violates the company’s First Amendment rights. The three judges who heard TikTok’s free speech argument seemed unmoved — they were more concerned about the ways in which engineers at the Chinese-owned social networking company might tweak its content algorithm to manipulate what Americans see.

The hearing was so rough that Bloomberg Intelligence cut the company’s chances of beating the proposed ban to 30% from 70%.

You’d think a disastrous hearing like this would sound alarm bells, but the mood on the app appeared to be business as usual. When talks of a TikTok ban first emerged back in 2020 under then-President Donald Trump, the news triggered a massive outcry on my For You Page, as users flooded the app with posts decrying the possible loss of the app.

But Monday’s hearing barely made a splash. Most creators I’ve talked to over the past several months say they’re bracing for a ban and preparing to jump to other platforms just in case, but the January deadline for a shutdown doesn’t exactly feel real.

And why would it? Publicly, at least, TikTok seems to be carrying on as if nothing dark and stormy is looming. Last month, Amazon.com Inc. launched a partnership to sell its products directly through TikTok’s app, which could be seen as a vote of confidence. Kamala Harris and Trump have leaned on the app to promote their respective presidential campaigns, a strategy that seems to contradict the government’s stance on the ban.

Meanwhile, public support for blocking the app is fading. Just 32% of US adults say they back a TikTok ban, down from 50% a year and a half ago. Half of Americans say they doubt it will happen. If anything, Americans are using TikTok even more. The number of US adults who regularly get news from TikTok is up fivefold since 2020, the year Trump first floated the idea of shutting down the app.

It feels like Americans are simply unprepared for a ban, which is getting more and more likely. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Matthew Schettenhelm said that’s a mistake. Congress passed a law signed by President Joe Biden that requires TikTok’s China-based owner ByteDance Ltd. to sell the app by Jan. 19 or it will be banned in the US.

“It’s possible that people are thinking about a TikTok ban as just typical noise from Washington — a lot of talk but no action. While that’s often correct, it’s wrong here,” Schettenhelm said in an email. “This is not a drill…the only way for TikTok to stop [the ban], other than a sale that looks like a non-starter, is to win in court. And after Monday’s hearing, that looks difficult.”

When that Jan. 19 deadline rolls around, it may not be an overnight shut-off. The deadline can be pushed back 90 days if a sale seems to be in progress and legal action could cause further delay. But ultimately something will happen. Even though we can see it coming, a ban will likely stir panic among the 170 million American creators and users who use the app every month.

TikTok’s fans have lost a sense of urgency over the four long years this debate has dragged on, but things appear to be more dire than ever.—Alicia Clanton

Last month, a little-known Chinese video-game studio called Game Science released what is now one of the biggest games of the year — if not ever. Bloomberg reported that the myth-inspired role-playing game “Black Myth: Wukong” sold over 18 million copies in its first two weeks, making it “one of the fastest starts the global gaming industry has seen.”

On Steam, the online video-game marketplace, the site’s user metrics showed that “Black Myth: Wukong” reached a peak of over 2.4 million concurrent players in its first two days, setting an all-time record for single-player games on the platform. So how, exactly, did this game take over the world? Well, much like the billion-dollar movies that dominated the box office in the 2010s, the answer boils down to one important factor: it’s big in China.

But to understand how it captured the Chinese market, you first need a sense of how different the country’s gaming landscape is compared to the West’s. The Chinese government still needs to approve every title sold in the country, whether it’s made there or internationally. And for much of the 21st century gaming consoles were banned for fear they were bad for children's health. That led to a profusion of internet cafés. As any gamer could tell you, the games you play at home are not the same you'd play in a dark room full of other gamers. Nor are they financed the same way.

Even though internet cafés have lost their luster in China, their popularity among gamers led to the development of microtransactions and free-to-play games, which charged for in-game items rather than the game itself, so that people would still spend despite using the same computer to play. Microtransactions form a major chunk of all games revenue globally, thanks mostly to mobile games.

China has spent the past decade buying up major developers like Bungie, Riot Games, Quantic Dream, and FromSoftware, as well as starting a host of new ones. But what’s new is that China is now opening its own studios to capitalize on the massive industry. And it’s working.

One of China's biggest homegrown gaming studios is MiHoYo, which specializes in open-world role-playing gacha games. Gacha games are named after the Japanese onomatopoeia "gachapon," describing the sound a capsule vending machine makes before it gives you a random toy. MiHoYo's games follow a similar dynamic, letting users spend in-game (or real) currency for a chance to buy new playable characters. Its games “Genshin Impact” and “Honkai: Star Rail” have broken global records, with the former earning $5 billion in less than four years and the latter downloaded from the Apple and Google Play stores 20 million times in its first day.

The increase in Chinese gamers on Steam is happening across every major genre. A prominent example is “Naraka: Bladepoint,” a “Fortnite”-style battle-royale game by Chinese-owned NetEase Games Montreal. After becoming free to play last summer, it’s consistently been in the top 10 most-played games on Steam since Garbage Day began tracking the platform at the beginning of this year. In fact, the only area of gaming that China has been lagging in, at least up until “Black Myth: Wukong,” was AAA games. The most expensive and bestselling echelon of games, AAA games have always been tied too tightly to consoles to make a dent in China. But Game Science was founded in 2014 to try to change that.

According to IGN China, “it's considered a very commercially risky move to develop a premium console game” domestically rather than just investing in foreign ones. But it was a gamble that seemed to have paid off once the first gameplay trailer for “Black Myth: Wukong” made a splash heard around the world in August 2020. On its first day, the trailer got nearly 2 million views on YouTube and 10 million on the Chinese equivalent, Bilibili. It was also the top trending hashtag on Chinese social networks Weibo and Douyin. The hype didn't wear off, either. The game became Steam’s bestselling game this June, months before it released.

The game’s influence wasn’t just virtual: after Game Science partnered with Shanxi province’s tourism board to feature local landmarks as locations in the game, hotel bookings in Shanxi reportedly surged by 120%.

Most interesting of all, though, is that China's biggest gaming success story got there by shirking the hallmarks of Chinese gaming. Game Science did not include microtransactions in “Black Myth: Wukong.” There aren't any gacha mechanics. Rather, it's a standard single-player console game similar to “Dark Souls,” inspired by the folk tale “Journey to the West.”

All this should make Western game studios more than a little nervous. Even though video games are the most popular and profitable they've ever been, the industry outside China has had an atrocious year. Layoffs have plagued every major studio and, despite some massive hits, there have been some incredible misses. To illustrate exactly how wacky the dynamic between Western developers and Chinese studios has become this summer, as a standard game like “Black Myth: Wukong” dominates the charts, Sony's live-service, microtransaction-stuffed shooter game “Concord” shut down after barely two weeks.

The story of China's video-game industry over the last 15 years is not unlike what we've seen with Chinese apps like Temu, Shein, and TikTok. It took Chinese developers a while to figure out what global audiences want, but now that they have, there's no turning back. In fact, “Black Myth: Wukong” was just one of over 100 domestically made titles the Chinese government approved this year. There's a lot more coming, which should make the gaming landscape very interesting.

I wrote about my earlier OCD journey and diagnosis with OCD here, but you don’t need to read that article to understand this one. However, it could provide good context. Anyway…

Let’s talk about an absolutely batshit obsession/fear that I had last year, courtesy of my OCD. I gave birth to my second child, and because both of my kids were from IVF, I developed a horrendous fear that she was not biologically related to me, because I was given the wrong embryo by our clinic.

I would have loved her anyway, but my concern was that somehow her “real family” would materialize and want her back, or that our clinic would discover their mistake and try to remedy it by taking her away. No amount of lawsuit money in the world would have been worth losing her, and I couldn’t sleep my first night in the hospital because of this fear. I might have had the same concern about my first child, except he looked exactly like my husband immediately. Our second child looked like her own person—not like either one of us, and not at all like her brother. It was one of the first things I noticed when she was born and the nurses raved about how light her hair was. We did not have light hair in our family!

I spent days—weeks, even—scrolling through old baby photos of my first child and checking to see if there was any resemblance. I started examining her hair under different types of light to see if it was actually blonde, or really just brown with golden highlights. I found our old transfer consent documentation and checked to see if anything was out of place. I could have asked for a DNA test, but that wasn’t what I wanted—I wanted assurance that she was ours, not the truth, which might have been that she wasn’t ours. I did not want to send her back! My anxiety only heightened when the clinic texted me and asked how the birth went, including a request for baby photos. I panicked and considered blocking them. Stay away from my baby!! I don’t care who her real parents are!!

Of course, this was crazy, and even though I had OCD, there was probably some element of postpartum hormones at play. She was ours. She just needed to grow into her tiny little face and body, and by the time she was a few months old she looked nearly identical to me as a baby. Somehow, in my OCD spiral, I forgot that I had been strawberry blonde as a child:

You might be saying this doesn’t really sound like OCD, because there was no compulsion. But there was. Even in cases of what folks call “pure O,” where sufferers don’t believe that they have a compulsion, they usually still do. The difference is that instead of hand washing or some obvious physical manifestation of a compulsion, their compulsion tends to be a mix of the Three Rs: rumination, research and reassurance-seeking, all of which feel good in the short-term but ultimately “feed” the OCD and make it much worse. The main strategy for “recovering” from OCD involves quitting these rituals, even if they seem like normal parts of life (who doesn’t ruminate from time to time?) But some people find it incredibly difficult to stop, especially when reassurance is so easy to find.

My fear of being Maury’s first “You are NOT the mother,” wasn’t my first foray into the Three Rs. In fact, with the exception of a brief spell of germaphobia most of my OCD had always been about the Three Rs. I’ve asked my parents, brother, friends and husband for reassurance far more times than I’d be able to count. I’ve probably lost friends because I shoehorned reassurance-seeking into all our conversations (When I lived in San Francisco, my biggest fear was my husband dying in an earthquake. It probably wasn’t “socially appropriate” for me to go to house parties and start chatting up the host about the retrofit status of their apartment.)

Over time, I realized that the Internet was a much better place for reassurance-seeking. I could ask more people, I could be anonymous, and I could maybe even reach real doctors with my hypochondria for free (or at least people on Reddit who said they were doctors.)

Sometimes this went wrong in horribly embarrassing ways. At one point, I posted a photo of my nipple anonymously on Reddit when I was breastfeeding, convinced I had some kind of breast cancer that was manifesting as a nipple rash. I posted the same question (without the photo) on my Facebook mom group, non-anonymously. The first comment on my mom group post was another mom saying, “Wow, someone JUST posted almost this exact question on Reddit!” complete with a link to my post, nipple and all.

Sometimes asking for reassurance online helped me, at least for a while. I would ask about a disease I was worried about, and either the overwhelming majority of responses would be to tell me that I’m crazy (this is good) or someone who sounded legit would have some explanation for why my fear wasn’t warranted. Sometimes the question would be something casual: has this happened to anyone else? I’m not asking for medical advice, I don’t “need help,” just tell me if this also happened to you and how it turned out. As Tucker Carlson would say, I’m just asking questions!

When I started seeing my current therapist (one of the only therapists I’ve had who actually specializes in OCD) she told me that a particular obesssion I had—that I was a bad mother if I “allowed” my children to get sick by taking them to the children’s museum—was an OCD thing. I told her she was wrong. My reasoning was that I had seen a Reddit post about this (granted, I was banned from posting at this point, but I could still read posts) and all the moms had concurred that it was irresponsible to take your children to places where they might catch a virus. Many of them also said that they would never take a baby under 6 months old to a family Thanksgiving, which helped to solidify that rule in my mind as well. My therapist shook her head and said, “I would bet money that most of these women also have OCD.”

It’s kind of like being on the comments section in PornHub—not that I’ve ever seen that or anything. If you’re there and posting comments on “Big Boobs Teacher Hot Sexy Vid” it’s safe to say you’re horny. So why would you not assume that everyone else posting there is just as horny as you are?