As tensions between the U.S. and China escalate — and as more and more states within the U.S. are putting more and more restrictions on social media companies’ use of, um, us, haha — TikTok has found itself at the epicenter of our meta-cultural discussion.

Quite frankly, though, I find most of this discourse to be boring and repetitive. Does the TikTok discourse feel boring and repetitive to you, too? At least a little? Genuine question. To me, it feels like the same conversation, stuck at the most basic of levels, over and over again, to forever, just framed a little different from President to President. Maybe it’s that — Mighty Millennial™ that I am — I’ve now officially entered my thirties, and my entire life I’ve been absolutely saturated with every view point about every topic all the time, and three decades in deep with access to more and more advanced forms of the Internet, it’s just getting harder and harder for me to… care? How appropriate, then, that the current epitome of social media technology, the Thing that is supposed to be the best at engaging us and Not Being Boring™, is part of the same technological force that makes discourse around itself boring. And how appropriate that, amidst the absolute pinnacle of the Spectacle — in late March 2023, when TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress, setting the Internet unifiedly ablaze — a week later, IRL, all the discourse had passed and moved onto… huh, I don’t quite remember. And months later, as in, now, not everyone remembers? And even if I do remember, I remember it like a long-ago dream?

Look, I’m doing the Thing even now — Commenting on the commenting of the Thing. It’s all old hat. Cheugy? In any case, I’ve had enough of the Thing’s recursive spiral. There’ve been plenty Mighty Millennials™ before me who’ve written way smarter about it.

Still, at the heart of the discourse surrounding TikTok — as stupid as it was in late March 2023 — was an interesting dialectical phenomenon that I think can be illuminatingly transposed to discuss the state of the labor movement.

Oh my god, did I just write “at the heart of the discourse surrounding TikTok was an interesting dialectical phenomenon that I think can be illuminatingly transposed to discuss the state of the labor movement.” I know, I know. Just pull the trigger.

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I’m not even going to try to discuss the geo-politics or the potential racialized readings of Congress’ probe into TikTok — the perception that Communist China™ was using TikTok to spy on U.S. citizens, or (from the Liberal™ frame) that our White congress was trying to bully an Asian man. Frankly, idk. (Remember earlier? “There’ve been plenty Mighty Millennials™ before me who’ve written way smarter about it.”) What struck me as the most poignant argument from Congress about why the U.S. should ban/restrict TikTok was Congress’ most “um, duh” argument: that TikTok has a lot of harmful content. It’s well-documented: exposure to TikTok (and other social media platforms) is dangerous to the emotional and psychological development of kids — increasing depression, eating disorders, social alienation, etc. Even for adults, the app is literally designed to maximize dopaminergic spikes, numbing you from your bio-psychological self and alienating you from social reality. The argument that perhaps the U.S. should ban/restrict TikTok because of its psychological harms was poignant to me because the facts of that argument are prima facie, like, obviously, true.

In my viewing, where Congress was able to focus its arguments on TikTok’s psychological harms, Congress appeared strongest. Of course, arguing that social media causes psychological harm doesn’t Spectacle very well, so, uh… yet, in these brief glimmers of effective argument, Congress appeared strongest because all CEO Chew could do in his defense was attempt to talk about all the efforts TikTok makes to bludgeon its own self-interests by making the app safe and Non-Addictive™. Which… come on.

Yet, TikTok’s faux attempts at self-censorship are indeed quite funny on their surface — but funny in a way that I’d argue is dangerous. For example, you’ll never see the word “suicide” on the app. The app bans the word “suicide.” Instead on the app, you’ll see lots and lots of the replacement word “un-aliving.” Same thing with ‘controversial’ topics like sex work. There are no “sex workers” on TikTok. Only “accountants.” And you’ll find there is lots and lots of discourse on TikTok about “un-aliving oneself” and “accountants” and so on and so on… And of course, all TikTok users see through it. These substitution words are, as if this even needs to be pointed out, a pretense: as if the most advanced social technology the world has ever created cannot decode and see through what “un-aliving oneself” means. And so TikTok’s culture of word substitution is an obvious thinly-veiled charade.

But: I’d argue way worse than a thinly-veiled charade. As I said, *dangerous*, because — in proper Hegelian fashion — negating negative words like “suicide” on the app doesn’t just permit the proliferation of the idea of “suicide,” just with substituted language; here, negating the negation further obfuscates then entrenches the harm and power that TikTok has in relation to its users. To demonstrate what I mean: if TikTok didn’t censor the word “suicide” (hypothetically), it would be easy to hold TikTok accountable for encouraging self-harming behaviors to its users who are addicted to the dopaminergic spikes TikTok gives them when TikTok serves them self-harming content. But precisely because TikTok has indeed censored the word “suicide,” TikTok has obfuscated its self-interested motives in delivering these sorts of videos to its depressed users, effectively transferred accountability onto those users who now actively have to use the stupid pretense-speak of “un-aliving oneself,” and meanwhile in this obfuscation made its power-relation to those users even stronger. And in truly powerful and deadly ways.

So… even at its most convincing… Congress has hitherto only interpreted TikTok in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

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Is this TikTok dialectical phenomenon not precisely what is wrong with the contemporary labor movement? The contemporary fetishization of maybe not being “class conscious,” since we don’t use such words anymore, but “woke” or “progressive” or whatever word we happen to choose to use next?

Feeling a self-identity in being “progressive” is precisely the problem — the delighted feeling that “I know the secret values that could change the world if only the world would change and share my values.”

But the working class is not a natural a priori class. For Marx, the moment of realization within true class consciousness occurs when one refuses to participate in the mode of production which relates to that worker that it is their “natural class identity” that the system has already changed — that the system relies on the casual embrace that you have a self-identity as “working class.”

Then there are lifestyle choices. How did I feel about the Barbie movie? Should I buy organic? Should my next car be a Tesla? In the same way that TikTok has obfuscated its harms by transferring accountability for those harms to users’ self-self-harm, self-identity within “progressivism” goes from a genuine collective will to negate the universal that is the working class to affirming individual lifestyle choices. What at first appears as a genuine expression of identity is in fact the means by which the universal condition of real class consciousness is repressed. And this occurs both as an individual feeling (“I agree with MSNBC”) to even deep life choices (“I am a union bureaucrat instead of a finance bro”).

And yet, as TikTok users should know, what appears to me as a central site of my emancipation (a self-identity as a “progressive”) has become precisely the mechanism by which I am to remain oppressed and exploited.

Self-identity in “being progressive” does not achieve real change. Only a real mass movement of the working class to abolish capitalism can do that.

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And of course — in the end — this has been a pretty simple message. It’s a message we’ve heard over and over within the Thing Of It All — the Thing in which we’ve “been absolutely saturated with every view point about every topic all the time”… only my message being that we need to organize a mass movement of the working class to abolish the very concept of “the working class.”

And yet, here I am, more than a decade into my career as a union staffer, hoping that my silly, overly-complex essay transposing an observation about a TikTok dialectical phenomenon onto revolutionary labor organizing will amuse you.

The absolutely wrong question is, have I amused you?