RedNote migration

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:

• People are doing this mostly to show the middle finger to the ban - RedNote is backlash tech, even if not the kind that Peter Watts would have hoped;
• The application is in bloody Mandarin and Americans, who notoriously hate even subtitles, will run an app in Mandarin if they get the interactions they crave for - it’s not just that your UX sucks, but that the underlying app isn’t desirable;
• American kids now get to point out how their own government is helping Israel pulverize Gaza as a way to self-justify using a Chinese app;
• This is getting an entire young generation acquainted with (at least a view of) the Chinese way of living, and they’re finding out it’s not as terrible as the US would have them believe.

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.

Approaching jackpot

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.

Outside Context Problems

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”

– Iain M. Banks, Excession

My last piece on where prediction markets break down made me realize I hadn’t written about outside context problems here yet.

Outside Context Problems are the most interesting situation one can encounter, when considering pure innovation.

Where Prediction Markets Break Down

TL;DR: if you expect an embryonic prediction market to tell you the result of a highly-politicized event when there are perverse incentives at play, and a significant disparity between amount-at-risk and expected outcome, you are going to have a bad time.