As the TikTok ban approaches, US users have downloaded RedNote en masse - another Chinese video-focused privacy invasion app. There’s a sensational Bluesky thread describing it. It’s not even a straight up replacement for TikTok:
Please be aware, RedNote is in Mandarin. All servers are in China. It's a female dominated social media platform, sort of a cross between Pinterest and TikTok, that's mostly used by Chinese folks to get restaurant recs and beauty tips.
— Erica Wilkinson (@everywhereerica.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Some fascinating highlights:
And if you had any doubt as to how tangled things are becoming:
And you're going to have a hard time manufacturing consent for aggressive action against China when 170 million American TikTok Refugees are mutuals with half of the RedNote netizens.
This is absoLUTELY going to have diplomatic ramifications.
— Erica Wilkinson (@everywhereerica.bsky.social) January 14, 2025 at 3:50 PM
This is culture wars bundled with social moving fast bundled with the rate of change turning entire groups’ expectations into roadkill.
South Korea and Ukraine are “enhancing cooperation” after North Korea deployed 3,000 troops to Russian training grounds, and will exchange intelligence and expertise.
The world is getting so weirdly tangled.
Any time now we’re going to run into a political multi-ball pinball situation, where you have events ricocheting from bumper to bumper in a chaotic way that gains enough momentum to just keep going by itself.
I’m sure there is some sort of country-equivalent to Dunbar’s number, that is much lower than the one for people given the much added complexity.
If so, soon we are going to run into a level where our monkey brains just can’t process the required levels of intentionality.
Things will start looking random even for those who need to make decisions at state level, even if they have an entire intelligence apparatus at their service, because it becomes harder to assign a probability value to a potential outcome (or trace it back to a cause).
It feels like everything is getting more porous.
I wrote at one point that our brains weren’t web scale, and they definitely are not going to be able to cope with whatever dynamics this engenders.
Teemu brought up on Ep. 33 of The Spelunking Podcast a gripe against crypto that I’ve often heard myself: if crypto is so great, then why hasn’t it achieved more penetration in a decade?
The simple answer is that people forget the speed at which the Internet truly developed.
Over breakfast in Costa Brava, back in May 2023, the CEO and founder of an AI startup I know told me that he was worried because for the first time things were progressing too quickly, and he couldn’t tell where they were going.
It made me realize that I was perfectly comfortable with it, because crypto has inoculated me against future shock. There are buses hurtling all around you, so you can’t freak out about it - you need to figure out if any of them is headed your particular way, and what’s the smallest change you can apply to get out of its way.
Anything beyond that is overcorrection, and may get you into a different bus’ path.