Amazon is often the home of great Apple deals, and that continues to be the case today. Right now, you can buy the latest Apple MacBook Pro with M4 Pro chip for $250 off. That means instead of paying $2,499, you pay $2,249. Thats not quite the lowest price its ever been, but its not far off the MacBook Pro with M4 has only ever dropping to $2,199 at its lowest. For the most part, $2,249 is a sweet deal and one of the better laptop deals around. If youre keen to learn more, read on and well take you through all it has to offer.The latest MacBook Pro tops our look at the best MacBooks for so many fantastic reasons. Its a true powerhouse of a machine while still looking super elegant and stylish. In our MacBook Pro review, we described it as the best gets even better. It offers record-breaking performance, with the M4 Pro chip proving to be exceptionally powerful for all kinds of tasks. It also has a best-in-class keyboard and trackpad, which adds to the experience.Apple is one of the best laptop brands around for anyone happy to use macOS, with it often featuring highly in our look at the best laptops. This model has the M4 Pro with 14-core CPU and 20-core GPU, but it also has 24GB of RAM and 512GB of SSD storage, which is all great to see. A little more storage space would be good, but you can always tag on one of the best external hard drives if you need more.RelatedIts 16-inch Liquid Retina XDR display may not be an OLED one, but it looks beautiful, with 1,600 nits peak brightness, up to 1,000 nits of sustained brightness, and 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio. All that power could have caused havoc for the battery life, but thats not the case here: all-day battery life of up to 24 hours. It even has a 12MP Center Stage webcam, which is a rarity, ably backed up by three studio-quality mics and six speakers with Spatial Audio and Dolby Atmos support.The laptop to beat right now, the Apple MacBook Pro with M4 Pro usually sells for $2,499. Amazon is currently selling it for $2,249, so you save $250 off the usual price. Take a look for yourself through the button below.Editors Recommendations

The artist, who rose to prominence in New Yorks downtown scene in the 1980s, creates manic, space-themed scenes with little to say.

health emergency Public health emergency declared amid LAs devastating wildfires Responders, medical equipment, and supplies are ready for deployment, HHS says. Beth Mole Jan 10, 2025 4:14 pm | 14 Firefighters fight the flames from the Palisades Fire burning the Theatre Palisades during a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Credit: Getty | Apu Gomes Firefighters fight the flames from the Palisades Fire burning the Theatre Palisades during a powerful windstorm on January 8, 2025 in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. Credit: Getty | Apu Gomes Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe US health department on Friday declared a public health emergency for California in response to devastating wildfires in the Los Angeles area that have so far killed 10 people and destroyed more than 10,000 structures.As of Friday morning, 153,000 residents are under evacuation orders, and an additional 166,800 are under evacuation warnings, according to local reports.Wildfires pose numerous health risks, including exposure to extreme heat, burns, harmful air pollution, and emotional distress."We will do all we can to assist California officials with responding to the health impacts of the devastating wildfires going on in Los Angeles County," US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. "We are working closely with state and local health authorities, as well as our partners across the federal government, and stand ready to provide public health and medical support."The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), an agency within HHS, is monitoring hospitals and shelters in the LA area and is prepared to deploy responders, medical equipment, and supplies upon the state's request.The declaration provides health care providers and suppliers more flexibility to meet the emergency health needs of people who are covered under Medicare and Medicaid insurance plans. HHS is also making available data on the number of certain Medicare beneficiaries in the area who are most at-risk of needing support amid the emergency. These beneficiaries include residents who rely on electricity-dependent medical equipment and certain health care services, such as dialysis, oxygen tanks, or home health care. The data will help responders plan and meet the needs of at-risk residents.The HHSDisaster Distress Helpline, managed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), is also available to residents experiencing emotional distress. The toll-free, multilingual, crisis support service connects people with trained counselors and is available 24/7. Residents can call or text the line at 1-800-985-5990.On Wednesday, President Biden approved a Major Disaster declaration for California, making additional federal funds and resources available to those impacted by the fires.Beth MoleSenior Health ReporterBeth MoleSenior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technicas Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 14 Comments

Dr. Joel Warsh is a pediatrician based in Studio City.He's also dad to two boys, a 5-year-old and 10-month-old.His family had to evacuate their house early Wednesday morning.This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Dr. Joel Warsh, a pediatrician with Integrative Pediatrics and Medicine in Los Angeles. It has been edited for length and clarity.On Tuesday night, my wife and I put our sons to bed and then went to bed early ourselves, around 8 p.m. We knew we weren't likely to get a lot of sleep. Outside the back of our home, we could see the Palisades fire getting closer and closer.It definitely wasn't the best sleep, but I managed to get some shut-eye. Then, at about 4:30 Wednesday morning, we got an alert that we needed to evacuate. Our bags were already packed when we got the alertWe had already packed essentials like clothing, a few of the boys' favorite toys, and my wife's breast pump, plus our important documents like birth certificates. We grabbed the bags and our sons, who are 10 months and 5 years old, and drove to my in-laws' house in Studio City, near where I practice pediatrics.My older son was excited to have a day with his grandparents. We talked with him a bit about the fires and he could see the smoke, but he didn't really understand what was going on.By Friday the evacuation order for our home was lifted, but the fire still wasn't contained. I briefly returned home and saw that we only had slight wind damage. Inside, however, the air was hazy, like it gets when you're cooking something and burn it.Even at my in-laws' house, the air quality wasn't great, so my family decided to head south toward San Diego for the weekend. We spent about $1,000 renting an Airbnb that could fit the extended family for two nights. Prices were actually cheaper than I thought they'd be, probably because people canceled trips to California.I'm more worried about the emotional impact on kids than the physicalEarlier this week, I sent an email to all my patients. I reminded them to take their kids to the hospital if they have any acute trouble breathing. But if anything, I'm more worried about the mental and emotional impact of these fires on kids than the physical impact. It's best if parents can help kids keep their routine as much as possible. We know from other disasters that when kids feel supported and know their parents are there for them, they fare better.We'll do what we can to help and will remind our son he's safeWith my own son, I'm focusing on the helpers. Next week, we'll donate toys and other items to families who lost everything. Those families have much more acute stress to cope with than we do. How much to share about what's happening with children depends on the family and the individual child. While parents shouldn't hide things from kids, you don't want to tell them too much that it'll cause them stress, either.Remind kids that they and their loved ones are safe. The rest you can figure out along the way, even if it needs to be done day by day. Helping children feel calm and supported rather than worried will help their long-term mental health.

Trump became the first US president to be sentenced with felony convictions. The president-elect, appearing remotely via video for the hush-money case, was given an unconditional discharge, which means he will not have to pay fines, serve prison time, or be under probation.Read the original article on Business Insider

Former DEI lead Maxine Williams tried to cushion the blow of Meta's plan to rollback DEI programs.The company has several employee-resource groups, known as MRGs.After more than a decade as Meta's Chief Diversity Officer, Williams is taking on a new role.Meta Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams told staff in a memo on Friday that the company's decision to back off DEI efforts won't impact employee-resource groups, according to an internal post viewed by Business Insider.Employee-resource groups, or ERGs, are worker-led communities that create a sense of belonging at a company. Meta has several of these groups. MRGs are Meta employee resource groups, and BRGs are Black employee resource groups.In a post to an internal forum, Williams tried to cushion the blow of Meta's decision on Friday to rollback its diversity, equity, and inclusion program. Some staff criticized the move, while at least one worker called it"pretty reasonable.""I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge that these changes may be difficult to understand and process since they represent a significant shift in our strategies for achieving the cognitive diversity we value," Williams wrote.She stressed that the changes won't impact Meta's support for MRGs and BRGs."You play a critical role in creating a place for community and connection among us and with the company," she added."I have watched you show support, share resources, and bond through learning, understanding, and appreciating our various backgrounds. Our Global Communities contribute to the richness of our experiences as we learn from each other and leverage our different backgrounds, working together to build products for the world."Williams has been Meta's chief diversity officer for more than a decade. On Friday, she told staff that she's taking on a new role focused onAccessibility and Engagement."But I, and my team, will continue to support you as contribute to our global community at Meta," she wrote.Do you work at Meta? Contact BI reporters from a nonwork email and device at and .

25 minutes agoRebecca JenningsHas TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse?For years, murmurs of a US TikTok ban have left users and creators furious and terrified that a social media app that had become central to their lives could be taken away. Again and again, the ban never actually materialized, and users continued to enjoy what had, since 2018, become one of the most creative, vital, and paradigm-shifting developments in internet culture. But this is no longer a boy who cried wolf situation. On Friday, the Supreme Court signaled that it would uphold the law signed by President Biden last April requiring TikToks Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok from its Chinese ownership or risk facing a ban in the US. Read Article >Apr 25, 2024A.W. OhlheiserImagining an internet without TikTokThe bill to require TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company or face a nationwide ban made it to President Joe Bidens desk on Wednesday as part of a huge foreign aid package that passed through Congress this week. And Biden, as he previously promised, signed the bill into law. ByteDance now has nine months to sell TikTok, a deadline that Biden can opt to extend once by 90 days. And while TikTok could avoid a ban with a successful sale or court challenge, the new law means Americans might want to start imagining an online world without TikTok. Read Article >Apr 24, 2024Nicole NareaIs the new TikTok ban for real?President Joe Biden has signed a bill to ban TikTok, starting a nine-month countdown until the social media apps Chinese parent company ByteDance will be forced to sell it or have it be removed from US app stores. The proposed ban has generated furor on Capitol Hill and online since it first passed the House as a standalone bill last month.Read Article >Mar 14, 2024Nicole NareaTikTok could avoid a ban with a sale. Finding a buyer wont be easy.The Senate is now considering a bipartisan bill that could force a sale of TikTok, with the House having already passed a similar measure and President Joe Biden throwing his support behind it. If the legislation is signed into law and if it survives likely legal challenges the question then becomes: Who would buy TikTok?The bill would require the apps Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform within 165 days of the law going into effect or else the platform will be banned from US app stores.Read Article >Mar 14, 2024Christian PazIts not just Gen Z. Heres what TikToks user base tells us about a potential bans impact.The odds of a ban on TikTok becoming a reality have never been this good.The House of Representatives passed a bill to force a sale of the Chinese-owned app by a massive bipartisan margin on Wednesday and the effort has some bipartisan support in the Senate, as well as the backing of President Joe Biden.Read Article >Mar 14, 2024A.W. OhlheiserBanning TikTok would be both ineffective and harmfulTikTok, like any place on the internet where a ton of people are watching and sharing and competing for attention, is best understood in terms of both/and. TikTok is both a vital platform for community building and plagued by dangerous misinformation. TikTok is both uniquely good at providing a means for non-influencers to reach a huge audience and a platform that has failed, again and again, to fairly and adequately moderate the content posted there. TikTok is both riddled with huge concerns about the privacy of the data it collects on its users and, just like any other major social media platform, intent on collecting that data as part of its business model. Read Article >May 23, 2023Li ZhouMontanas TikTok ban and the legal challenge of it explainedLast week, Montana became the first state in the United States to ban TikTok, amid concerns lawmakers have raised over the Chinese governments potential ability to access the apps data.The move which comes as the federal government and other states have vocalized national security worries about the app goes much further than existing policies to restrict access to the social media platform. The ban has also faced questions regarding enforcement, and has been legally challenged by TikTok on the grounds that it violates users and the companys First Amendment rights.Read Article >May 23, 2023Rebecca Jennings, Sara Morrisonand1 more9 questions about the attempts to ban TikTok, answeredSince its introduction to the US in 2018, TikTok has been fighting for its right to exist. First, the company struggled to convince the public that it wasnt just for preteens making cringey memes; then it had to make the case that it wasnt responsible for the platforms rampant misinformation (or cultural appropriation or pro-anorexia content or potentially deadly trends or general creepiness, etc). But mostly, and especially over the past three years, TikTok has been fighting against increased scrutiny from US lawmakers about its ties to the Chinese government via its China-based parent company, ByteDance.Montana became the first state to ban TikTok outright on May 17, when its governor, Greg Gianforte, signed the bill into law. The legislation doesnt make it illegal to use TikTok. Rather, it fines platforms that distribute it, like Apples and Googles app stores. The Montana law goes into effect at the beginning of 2024, assuming it survives the inevitable court challenges. At least one of those will come from TikTok, which sued the state days after the law was signed.Read Article >Mar 29, 2023Sara MorrisonThe RESTRICT Act is more bad news for TikTokThere might be a new way to deal with TikTok in DC: a bipartisan bill from Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) that isnt a TikTok ban though it could lead to one. It also doesnt just address TikTok or its parent company, the Chinese-based ByteDance, but all technology companies from countries that have been identified as countries of concern.Today everybodys talking about TikTok, Warner said in a press conference announcing the bill. But before there was TikTok there was Huawei and ZTE, and before that there was Russias Kaspersky Lab.Read Article >Mar 23, 20233 winners and 3 losers from Congresss TikTok hearingThe House Energy and Commerce Committees much-hyped hearing on TikTok, featuring CEO Shou Chew, took place Thursday without many fireworks. But over the course of five hours, lawmakers grilled Chew not only about TikToks or his own links to China, but also issues that are common across all social media platforms, like the promotion of harmful content and the immense amount of data they collect about their users.Members of the committee were almost uniformly critical of TikTok, but many though not all eschewed the grandstanding that has become more common at high-profile hearings like this. Instead, they asked Chew things that they actually seemed to want answers to.Read Article >Mar 21, 2023Sara MorrisonIs TikTok too big to ban?Its been a difficult few weeks for TikTok. An agreement with a government interagency group that it was depending on, which would allow the Chinese-owned app to continue to operate in the US, seems to have fallen apart. Without it, President Biden will likely soon have to make a final decision about the app: demand a sell-off, and be ready to ban TikTok if its owner ByteDance wont oblige.TikToks future in the US has perhaps never been in more doubt than it is right now. The status quo an impasse where TikTok operates as normal with the seemingly empty threat of a ban hanging over its head wont be tenable for much longer. But the choices that the US and ByteDance are left with dont seem very tenable, either.Read Article >Feb 15, 2023Sara MorrisonThe new Congress is enlisting kids in its ongoing fight with Big TechIt looks like the big bipartisan push against Big Tech in the new Congress will be about protecting kids. While antitrust and privacy efforts seem to be languishing for now, several child-focused online safety bills are being introduced this session. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has reportedly signaled that passing them is a priority for him. President Joe Biden recently said the same.And they just might pass, if this weeks Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about protecting children online is any indication. Witnesses testified about how children are harmed by online content and the platforms that help push it to a largely friendly audience of senators, some of whom authored prominent child online safety bills in previous sessions. None have become law, but the new Congress seems intent on making it happen.Read Article >Feb 3, 2023Christian PazInside the lonely and surprisingly earnest world of political TikTokI dont remember the first time I saw one of Jeff Jacksons TikTok videos, but I definitely remember the one that turned me into a follower.The new Republican majority in the House of Representatives was in chaos. I was on the West Coast with my non-politically obsessed family and a friend, watching Republicans fail to elect Kevin McCarthy as speaker of the House 14 times over the course of four days. We werent just watching a historic fail unfold (the kind of embarrassment Congress hadnt seen in a century). We were also seeing a confounding stalemate preventing the country from having a fully functioning government.Read Article >Feb 2, 2023Sara MorrisonTikToks master plan to win over WashingtonThe act of scrolling through your For You feed on TikTok might come with an additional sense of impending doom these days. After years of hand-wringing over the enormously popular apps ties to China and the potential national security threat they present, it looks like someone is going to do something about it.TikTok is grappling with an increasingly real prospect of being banned in the United States. This wouldnt just be a mostly performative prohibition of installing the app on federal or state government-owned devices. It could also be more impactful than the legally questionable ban that former President Donald Trump tried and failed to enact in 2020.Read Article >Dec 24, 2022Christian PazGood luck explaining a TikTok ban to young peopleAmong the many items tucked away in the $1.7 trillion spending bill Congress is working to pass to fund the government next year is a small victory for enemies of TikTok: Users of government-owned phones and devices will not be allowed to install the video app and must remove it if installed.The move, championed by Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, is mostly symbolic, my colleague Sara Morrison reported, since the app is already banned at a few agencies and departments, and would only apply to employees of the executive branch of government. It doesnt ban the app on phones of employees of other branches, like members of Congress or their staff, she wrote. That means the handful of members of Congress, staffers, and interns who use the app to communicate with constituents or to share a behind-the-scenes look at how the federal legislature works may still be free to do so.Read Article >Dec 20, 2022Sara MorrisonThe US governments TikTok ban is more complicated than it soundsIf youre a TikTok user, your For You page is about to get a little more transparent, the company said in a blog post on Tuesday morning. The announcement came several hours after federal lawmakers revealed the must-pass omnibus spending bill, which includes a provision that bans TikTok from some federally funded phones.The two moves are representative of the difficult year TikTok has had in the US as it tries to reassure the federal government that it has no ties to nor is influenced by the Chinese Communist Party. A growing number of lawmakers are increasingly skeptical of TikTok, believing the China-based company that owns it, ByteDance, is indeed controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. That control could mean that the Chinese government might try to compel TikTok to give it data on US users, or that the Chinese government may force TikTok to push propaganda or misinformation to TikToks relatively young userbase through the For You feed, which effectively serves as the apps homepage.Read Article >Dec 13, 2022Sara MorrisonMaybe Trump was right about TikTokHeres something you rarely hear a Democratic senator say: Donald Trump was right.But thats what Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) is saying now, and its all because of TikTok, the popular video app that Trump tried to ban in the waning months of his presidency. Read Article >Jun 9, 2021Shirin GhaffaryTikToks Trump problem is now TikToks Biden problemIts official: Biden has reversed Trumps executive order banning TikTok in the United States, bringing to a close a period of uncertainty over the immediate fate of the wildly popular social media app. But TikToks problems with the US government are far from over.On Wednesday morning, Biden issued an executive order that revoked Trumps prior executive order banning TikTok over national security concerns. (Trumps order never actually went into effect because US courts struck it down.) Bidens executive order also called for a broader US government review of all apps with ties to a foreign adversary, like China. This means that TikTok and other Chinese-affiliated companies could potentially face more restrictions in the future if theyre found to prove a risk to the United States economy or national security.Read Article >Nov 13, 2020Peter KafkaTikToks US ban has been delayed another two weeks or maybe foreverRemember when the Trump administration thought TikTok was a grave threat to America?No?Read Article >Aug 29, 2020The bigger stakes of the TikTok debateOn August 6, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting transactions with the video-sharing app TikTok. Since the app is owned by the Beijing-based ByteDance, it could pose national security and privacy risks to users in the US, the order states.But the Trump administrations actions targeting TikTok mark a departure from the traditional American techno-libertarian position on internet governance and free speech online. And it comes at a time when the concept of a global internet is under threat.Read Article >Jul 23, 2020Rebecca JenningsThe case for and against banningTikTokTikTok was never supposed to be political. When it launched in the US in 2018, the video app was marketed as a fun place to discover goofy content and experiment with its sophisticated editing software and vast music library. Yet nearly two years and 165 million nationwide downloads later, TikTok has been a platform for teachers strikes, QAnon conspiracy theories, Black Lives Matter protests, and a teen-led campaign to sabotage a Trump rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The TikTok algorithm is perfectly suited to spread political content faster and to a wider audience than any social media app in history, whether the company wants to admit it or not. Now TikTok is proving itself to be political in a much broader way, one that challenges the very existence of the app. White House officials are talking seriously about attempting to ban it (how the government would choose to do so is less clear) in the wake of rising tensions with China, where TikToks parent company ByteDance is based. Read Article >

TikTok has only been around in the US since August 2018, but its become the defining social media app of Gen Z.The app once known as Musical.ly was bought by the Beijing-based internet company ByteDance in 2017. Though it relaunched as virtually identical to Musical.ly, TikTok quickly transformed into something more like Vine: a goofy place for weird comedy, memes, and ironic inside jokes. In doing so, the platform has made famous tons of fledgling comedians, singers, dancers, actors, and normal teenagers becoming TikTok famous is now a popular goal for high schoolers.Its legions of underage users, of course, have landed the company in hot water on several occasions. In February 2019, it was hit by a record-breaking $5.7 million FTC fine for illegally collecting data from children under 13.That it is based in Beijing, too, has made it a target of skepticism. TikTok has been accused of censoring pro-Hong Kong videos, and it was found to be banning LGBTQ content in countries like Turkey. TikTok is now facing an investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, which aims to determine if the app poses a threat to American citizens.At least one other person is not thrilled about TikToks rise to dominance: Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook founder has tried and failed to buy, then kill TikTok with his copycat product, Lasso, which did not make any inroads.To learn more about TikTok, listen to Today, Explained. Voxs daily explainer podcast has an episode all about the app and another one that breaks down a TikTok meme, OK boomer.25 minutes agoRebecca JenningsHas TikTok made us better? Or much, much worse?For years, murmurs of a US TikTok ban have left users and creators furious and terrified that a social media app that had become central to their lives could be taken away. Again and again, the ban never actually materialized, and users continued to enjoy what had, since 2018, become one of the most creative, vital, and paradigm-shifting developments in internet culture. But this is no longer a boy who cried wolf situation. On Friday, the Supreme Court signaled that it would uphold the law signed by President Biden last April requiring TikToks Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok from its Chinese ownership or risk facing a ban in the US. Read Article >May 17, 2024Rebecca JenningsWhen TikTok therapy is more lucrative than seeing clientsDr. Julie Smith is sitting behind a rainbow of five Post-it notes, each meant to represent one of the Top Five Signs of High-Functioning Depression. Said signs will be familiar to anyone who has spent time scrolling through the part of social media devoted to improving ones mental health: You do everything the world asks of you, so no one would ever know you feel empty inside, you dont find pleasure in the same things anymore, social events are tiring. Perhaps you relate to No. 3: You find yourself scrolling on social, watching hours of TV, and eating junk food to numb those feelings.The British psychologist and author is an inescapable presence on TherapyTok, where psychologists, psychiatrists, and licensed therapists along with a swarm of coaches with varying levels of credibility make short, digestible videos educating the public about how to decode their own brains. Shes amassed a following of 4.7 million not just by distilling mental health into 60-second spoken-word listicles but by using intensely colorful gimmicks to draw in viewers who might otherwise think theyre about to watch an object being crushed in a satisfying way. Before explaining 3 Ways Past Trauma Can Show Up in Your Present or 5 Signs of a Highly Sensitive Person, Dr. Julie will use a visual hook shell pour out a bucket of candy, flip over a giant hourglass, or pose next to a tantalizingly tall stack of dominos (like any skilled content creator, she knows not to give us the final knockdown until at least halfway through) to keep you watching. Does it matter that high-functioning depression and highly sensitive person arent actual diagnoses? Maybe. Or maybe not.Read Article >Apr 24, 2024Nicole NareaIs the new TikTok ban for real?President Joe Biden has signed a bill to ban TikTok, starting a nine-month countdown until the social media apps Chinese parent company ByteDance will be forced to sell it or have it be removed from US app stores. The proposed ban has generated furor on Capitol Hill and online since it first passed the House as a standalone bill last month.Read Article >Mar 14, 2024Nicole NareaTikTok could avoid a ban with a sale. Finding a buyer wont be easy.The Senate is now considering a bipartisan bill that could force a sale of TikTok, with the House having already passed a similar measure and President Joe Biden throwing his support behind it. If the legislation is signed into law and if it survives likely legal challenges the question then becomes: Who would buy TikTok?The bill would require the apps Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform within 165 days of the law going into effect or else the platform will be banned from US app stores.Read Article >Mar 6, 2024Rebecca JenningsGen Z is officially old enough to feel old. Feel old yet?I keep seeing people asking the internet, How old do I look? Each time, I want to tell them, No, dont do that, youre going to get your feelings hurt, not because people in the comments will be truthful but because they will be mean, on purpose, for sport. The trend isnt really about the individual person; its a reaction to the larger internet discourse around young peoples fear of aging. Thanks to essentially three viral posts, there now seems to be a culture-wide acceptance of the idea that Gen Z is aging like milk (i.e., poorly), beginning with a video last fall by 23-year-old content creator Taylor Donoghue sharing that someone mistook her age for early thirties. A podcast called Staying Up included a small segment about it in January, which went viral, and then significantly more viral when the popular TikToker Jordan Howlett made a response video about his own experience being mistaken for someone significantly older than his 26 years. Combined with the concurrent furor over tween girls asking their parents for anti-aging products and 10-year-olds taking over Sephora, theres a general sense that kids today are freaking out about wrinkles and retinol way more than anyone else was at their age. Read Article >Dec 13, 2023Rebecca JenningsTikTok isnt creating false support for Palestine. Its just reflecting whats already there.For the past month, TikTok has tried to assure business leaders, influencers, and Jewish organizations that it isnt promoting anti-Israel or antisemitic speech on its platform. CEO Shou Chew has reportedly met with executives at Tinder, Facebook, and the Anti-Defamation League, among others, to discuss moderation and misinformation, while its head of operations held a private video call with more than a dozen Jewish TikTokers and celebrities, including Sacha Baron Cohen and Amy Schumer, during which Cohen accused the app of creating the biggest antisemitic movement since the Nazis. The meetings came after weeks of accusations by lawmakers that TikTok was pushing pro-Palestine videos into users For You pages, quietly indoctrinating Americas young people against the state of Israel. TikTok has denied these claims, writing that the hashtag #standwithisrael had received 46 million views in the US between October 7 and 31, making it one and a half times more popular than the hashtag #standwithpalestine, which received 29 million views. Still, a group of mostly Republican Congress members who have long called for the US to ban TikTok have used the war to re-air their grudges against the app. TikTok is a tool China uses to spread propaganda to Americans, now its being used to downplay Hamas terrorism, wrote Senator Marco Rubio on X, formerly known as Twitter, in November. Read Article >Jun 8, 2023Sara MorrisonHow a carmakers mistake created the ultimate internet challengeIts safe to assume that 17-year-old Markell Hughes wasnt too worried about getting caught for stealing cars last year. After all, he lives in Milwaukee, where just 11 percent of reported car thefts resulted in an arrest in 2021 and only 5 percent were prosecuted. But Hughes appeared in a documentary about the so-called Kia Boys, who take advantage of an exploit that makes certain Kia and Hyundai models easy to steal. The Kia Boys often joyride around in the stolen cars, usually driving dangerously and usually filming themselves doing it. The documentary was a hit on YouTube, and shortly after it was posted, someone called a police tip line and gave them Hughess name. Among the evidence against Hughes was a call he placed from jail, where he seemed to brag about how many people saw him driving the stolen car.Read Article >Dec 21, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe irresistible voyeurism of day in my life videosMy weekend as a 28-year-old in Chicago is, I would argue, one of the best TikToks ever created.It starts like this: A tattooed and mustachioed guy named Mike opens a Guru energy drink and explains that today is mental awareness day at his job, so he gets brunch with his friend Lizzie, which includes chicken and waffles and an electric-blue cocktail with cotton candy in it. The rest of his weekend is a similarly expensive caricature of a certain kind of hypersocial, hyper-consumerist urban 20-something: He eats, in one day, (another) cotton candy cocktail, a tower of margaritas with hot wings, small plates at a bougie-looking restaurant called Alpana followed by more small plates at Tanto, popcorn at a rooftop cafe, as well as a slew of increasingly gluttonous and unhinged meals and beverages. Total trips to the Museum of Ice Cream over the course of the weekend: four. Number of margarita towers: six. Read Article >Sep 7, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe sex worker teachingTikTokabout legal brothelsTikTokers have always found clever ways around the platforms notoriously strict content moderation policies. Some of the more delightful examples: referring to sex as seggs and lesbians as le dollar beans. Porn performers have taken to referring to their work by using the corn emoji, while OnlyFans stars have used accounting to describe their job on TikTok. Dac uses another descriptor: The Modern Working Girl.Since 2016, Dac her stage name has worked at the Mustang Ranch, Nevadas first legal brothel. Now shes demystifying what it means to be a legal sex worker in the US on her TikTok account, which she started in earnest a few months ago and where shes since racked up more than 75,000 followers. Most of her videos are answers to specific questions from commenters: whether she lives at the ranch when she works there (yes), whether she is allowed to leave (yes, but she has to be checked for STDs before returning to work), how much money she makes (probably more than you do). Read Article >Aug 31, 2022Rebecca JenningsSo your kid wants to be an influencerWhen they were 4 years old, Benjamin Burroughss kids became obsessed with a YouTube channel called Ryans World. The appeal wasnt all that mysterious: In each Ryans World episode, a child (Ryan) would open up a bunch of toys and then play with them, allowing viewers to feel like they were playing alongside him. Their obsession with Ryans World went beyond the screen; almost immediately, each of Burroughss children asked if they could be a YouTuber, too. We said no, says Burroughs, laughing. He and his wifes concerns were fairly standard: They felt weird about monetizing their children, they didnt want to create a digital footprint that couldnt be erased, and they didnt want to give mega-corporations like Google or Facebook even more information about their kids. But the experience led Burroughs, a professor of emerging media at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, to begin studying the fascinating, lucrative, and at times ethically questionable world of child influencers.Read Article >Aug 17, 2022Rebecca JenningsTikTok is great for spreading political messages and conspiracy theoriesA man sets his tactical gear bag next to the assault rifle on his bed, above which hangs an American flag. Dont mind me, he says, Im just getting ready for my IRS audit. This, pulled from a viral Twitter thread, was just one of the many TikTok videos that, explicitly or implicitly, threatened civil war after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. Its go time, he continues. Everybody knows exactly what Im talking about. (Hes talking about fighting IRS employees who are supposedly coming to seize his guns. The IRS is not doing that.)Most or all of the videos on the thread have since been removed from TikTok, but its no accident that this sort of inflammatory political discourse proliferates throughout the platform. In the past four years of its existence in the US, TikTok has become the most effective platform for any single user to communicate to the largest possible audience in the shortest amount of time. And despite the companys attempts to be viewed as apolitical, its now one of the most widely consumed sources of discourse, political and otherwise.Read Article >Aug 10, 2022Rebecca JenningsHow the internet broke the calendarA couple weeks ago, I saw a video of a bunch of matching women in a meticulously organized formation singing Smash Mouths All Star, except instead of the lyrics to All Star, they were singing about the Tri Delta sorority at Baylor University. I am not a student at Baylor University nor have I ever had the patience or the hair extensions for Greek life at a Southern college, but I knew this video was for me because it is the special time of year when seemingly every TikTok user is thrust into the world of sorority recruitment whether they asked to be or not. In the year since Bama Rush took over the internet last August, its become clear that TikTok works on a set calendar, except its slightly different from the regular calendar. For instance, there is no April, but there is a period of roughly eight weeks in which TikTok decides to serve you videos of beautiful people frolicking in bucolic settings and you consequently start looking up cottage prices on Zillow. Instead of September, October, or November, we have a section of time that can be divided between Happy Fall and Sad Fall, which are similar aesthetically but have very different emotional tenors. Read Article >Mar 22, 2022Rebecca Jennings12 hours online and zero regrets: A day with the internets funniest meme curatorWelcome to 24 Hours Online, where we ask one extremely internetty person to document a day in their life looking at screens.People tend to talk about their screen time the way they talk about fast food: Too much is bad, a marker of gluttony or laziness or some other moral failing. Ena Da, an actor, comedian, and manager of what I would argue is Instagrams best meme account, has a more nuanced approach. Despite her self-proclaimed ungodly 10-to-12 hours per day online, she argues that the lack of available third places in American society creates a void of shared community and culture that can only be filled by the internet. Read Article >Mar 15, 2022Rebecca JenningsWhere teen influencers go to become actorsIts a tale as old as time: Bright young things arrive in Los Angeles by the busload, waiting to be discovered by someone powerful enough to if theyre really, really, lucky! make them famous. The 2020s version of this tale reads somewhat differently: Bright young things arrive in Los Angeles having already become famous, wondering what theyre supposed to do next. Read Article >Mar 8, 2022Rebecca JenningsA day in the digital life of an internet it-girlWelcome to 24 Hours Online, where we ask one extremely internetty person to document a day in their life looking at screens.If youre on a certain corner of Gen Z-leftist-feminist-media-criticism TikTok, you already know Rayne Fisher-Quann, a 20-year-old writer whos been big on the internet ever since she joined it: As a teenager in Toronto, she grew a sizable Instagram following because her best friend got famous on a Nickelodeon show, and since then shes built equally formidable audiences on Tumblr, Twitter, and most recently TikTok, where she discusses feminism, leftism, mental illness, and, well, herself.Read Article >Mar 1, 2022Rebecca JenningsWarTikTokis a messIt is not novel to remark that the experience of scrolling through TikTok feels like emotional whiplash. Upon opening the app you might be greeted with a DIY project from Dollar Tree, followed by a manifesto on the power of friendship as a network for mutual aid. Scroll: a puppy eating peanut butter; scroll: news that a famous cat is dead. On February 24th it took me three swipes to land upon a video purporting to be a livestream of a city in the dark, filmed from an apartment window. Air raid sirens blared in the background, and the only other audible noise was the terrified whimpers of the person holding the camera.I have no idea whether the footage was filmed by a real person in Ukraine, observing what was happening outside their window in real time, but I am almost certain that the person filming was not the same one who uploaded it to TikTok. Watch it for long enough and youll notice its a loop on repeat, and if not one of the commenters will point it out to you: SCAM! they write in between the thoughts and prayers from other TikTokers. Staged for money! Read Article >Feb 22, 2022Rebecca JenningsIm a creator. Youre a creator. Were all creators!It was early 2019, maybe, when the kids Id interview whod gone viral on TikTok started proudly referring to themselves as content creators. My initial reaction was: Why not comedian or competitive dancer or aspiring actor? Didnt that sound more exciting than two of the most meaningless words in existence: content and creator? But as talking to kids tends to do, it only revealed that I was washed.More than 50 million people worldwide now consider themselves creators, a term that encompasses everything from YouTubers to podcasters to writers to artists to people who sell courses online to people aspiring to be any of those things. You have likely heard pundits lament the percentage of teenagers and children who aspire to be influencers and moralize on why thats a sign of societys unavoidable doom. I think the more interesting question, though, is when did seemingly everyone in the world become a content creator, whether they signed up for it or not?Read Article >Feb 15, 2022Rebecca JenningsCrypto, for cool girlsWhether we like it or not, its happening, the woman with the microphone is saying. I know it feels really fringey right now, but in, like, three minutes were going to be living in this world. Im one of about a hundred women in their 20s and early 30s with the kind of professionally cool haircuts you can only get at salons with big Instagram followings, in a dimly lit, rather swanky hotel bar in Manhattan. We are here to learn about the looming future of which our host speaks, the future that is paved with blockchain, NFTs, cryptocurrency, and, maybe, riches. Right now it is dominated almost entirely by men, but, were told, it doesnt have to stay that way. Read Article >Feb 1, 2022Rebecca JenningsFashion is justTikToknowHere is a list of fashion trends that, according to TikTok, are predicted to become a thing in 2022:Read Article >Jan 25, 2022Rebecca JenningsYou go viral overnight. Now how do you get rich?Monique Black, a 27-year-old fashion influencer from Detroit, likely wouldnt have a clue how much to charge brands if it werent for Twitter. Shed gone viral several times on Instagram and Reels for her fun, trendy, plus-size outfit styling videos and wanted to figure out how to turn her 100,000 TikTok followers into a career while the pandemic stalled her work as an esthetician. She stumbled upon a career mentorship program for women of color, and was later matched with a British talent manager who taught her the unofficial guide to Influencing 101.For a skyrocketing industry, there are very few places where aspiring content creators can speak publicly about the finer details of their work. Its a delicate balance, performing your life for the consumption of others, then calculating your value in the public marketplace of attention. While most influencers have multiple streams of revenue sharing affiliate links, making money from creator funds, launching their own businesses, or starting a subscription service by far the most popular is brand sponsorships, in which a company pays an influencer to promote or incorporate their product. Read Article >Jan 21, 2022Rebecca JenningsStop canceling normal people who go viralWhats worse, ghosting someone you met on a dating app or calling up that guys workplace and demanding he be fired for ghosting someone on a dating app? This is a question that nobody in the world should ever have to think about, but is unfortunately the kind of question that we must ask ourselves every time a random person is anointed as the internets main character.What Im talking about, in this case, is a guy known as West Elm Caleb, a 25-year-old who works at West Elm and does not seem like a very fun person to date. On TikTok, multiple women have accused him of ghosting, sending unsolicited photos of his dick, and scheduling several dates in the same day. If you have ever been a single 25-year-old in New York City, this kind of behavior is, while certainly not great, hardly uncommon. Read Article >Jan 11, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe misery of the Hype HouseIts in the third episode of Hype House, the Netflix docuseries released on January 7 about the TikTok content creator mansion of the same name, when it becomes painfully evident that nobody actually really wants to be there. Sure, most of them seem happy to live at the Hype House, currently headquartered in a $5 million home in Moorpark, California, which the collective pays for with sponsorship money from an energy drink brand and a TikTok competitor app. But its 2022, and being a member of the Hype House which two years ago was composed of the Gen Z social media A-list is now mostly an embarrassment.To understand whats going on in this bizarre, entirely-uneventful-but-also-sort-of-fascinating television show, its important to know why it exists in the first place. Almost exactly two years ago, a splashy feature in the New York Times introduced the arrival of the Hype House, a collective of mostly white, attractive teenagers who had recently become famous on an app that was only just beginning to be part of the national lexicon. It was part of a wave of Los Angeles social media mansions to pop up in the first half of 2020, all with the same purpose: to use each others clout to build more of it. TikTok, at that point, only had a handful of stars to break out beyond the app the Hype Houses Charli DAmelio, Addison Rae, and DAmelios boyfriend Chase Hudson among them but within the app itself, more and more teenagers started growing their audiences to hundreds of thousands, then millions, of followers. And when you get a taste of fame and decide you want more of it, you move to LA. Read Article >Jan 4, 2022Rebecca JenningsThe exhausting concept of the 2022 rebrandTheres a thing going around on TikTok right now about rebranding ones self for 2022; in other words, leapfrogging the concept of the New Years resolution and transforming into an entirely different person instead. The trends participants are almost exclusively young women, as is typical for this sort of aesthetic self-improvement content; they share mood boards of toned stomachs and Chanel logos, Amazon hauls of Olaplex and Crest Whitestrips, tutorials, and list templates that include lines like listen to inspiring podcasts and get a fake tan routine. They soft launch their 2022 selves by waking up at the crack of dawn, doing yoga, taking bubble baths, journaling.Its funny, not only because this stuff is so easy to mock (which I will not be doing!) but because it runs so antithetical to the general tenor of the present moment. Growth? Change? Self-improvement? In this economy? Nearly every New Years resolution-related commentary I have seen on the internet over the past week has come from a place of either jokey, performative cynicism (those Instagram memes that are like, Before I agree to 2022 I want to agree to the terms and conditions, the equivalent of a sassy Etsy mug) or takedowns of the idea that resolutions are worthwhile or even possible at all. It feels like resolutions arent really in vogue anymore, wrote my coworker Nisha Chittal in her most recent newsletter, and it truly does.Read Article >Dec 21, 2021Rebecca JenningsThe year of garbage internet trendsFifty years from now, when my AI cyborg grandchildren and I gather around the Christmas tree on an 80-degree day in New York City, I hope that I will find some comfort knowing that at least I can say I was there for the sea shanty renaissance of January 9-23, 2021. What? You dont remember the span of roughly four days when it felt like the entire internet sang a late 19th-century, New Zealand-linked sailing ballad called The Wellerman in perfect unison? You forgot how the whole thing was supposed to be a sign that we, as a species, were longing to come together as one because we couldnt do so in person? Youre telling me you dont recite the lyrics in your head as you rock yourself to sleep at night, as though you too are braving the treacherous waters of the South Pacific?Read Article >Dec 14, 2021Rebecca JenningsIs a new kind of religion forming on the internet?It just doesnt sit right with me, begins a TikTok by a user named Evelyn Juarez. Its a breakdown of the tragedy at Astroworld, the Travis Scott concert in early November where eight people died and more than 300 were injured. But the video isnt about what actually happened there. Its about the supposed satanic symbolism of the set: They tryna tell us something, we just keep ignoring all the signs, reads its caption, followed by the hashtags #wakeup, #witchcraft, and #illuminati. Juarez, a 25-year-old in Dallas, is a typical TikToker, albeit a quite popular one, with 1.4 million followers. Many of her videos reveal an interest in true crime and conspiracy theories the Gabby Petito case, for instance, or Lil Nas Xs devil shoes, or the theory that multiple world governments are hiding information about Antarctica. One of her videos from November suggests that a survey sent to Texas residents about the use of electricity for critical health care could signify that something is coming and [the state government] knows it. Read Article >More Stories

For years, murmurs of a US TikTok ban have left users and creators furious and terrified that a social media app that had become central to their lives could be taken away. Again and again, the ban never actually materialized, and users continued to enjoy what had, since 2018, become one of the most creative, vital, and paradigm-shifting developments in internet culture. But this is no longer a boy who cried wolf situation. On Friday, the Supreme Court signaled that it would uphold the law signed by President Biden last April requiring TikToks Beijing-based parent company ByteDance to divest TikTok from its Chinese ownership or risk facing a ban in the US. As of now, TikTok plans to comply by completely shutting down its app in the US on January 19 unless the Supreme Court intervenes in its favor, which appears increasingly unlikely after Fridays oral arguments. And despite the reported interest in buying the company from Shark Tanks Kevin OLeary and billionaire Frank McCourt, ByteDance has said TikTok isnt for sale. Nobody knows what a world without TikTok or at least a world where the TikTok app can still technically be used, just not downloaded or updated will look like. Incoming President Donald Trump has said he would try to reverse the ban, though he has limited options to do so. The governments ostensible reasoning for the last five years of attempting to ban TikTok is national security. A large and bipartisan swath of Congress is concerned that because ByteDance is based in China, the Chinese government could access American users data and push or suppress certain kinds of content to Americans. While these concerns are not exactly throwaways, they dont address the more existential question of TikToks presence on Americans phones (more than 170 million of them!): Is TikTok a force for good? What even is good on the internet? Can a social platform ever aspire to be it, much less embody it?TikTok is inherently different from Instagram, YouTube, Twitter (now X), Facebook, Snapchat, or any of the other social apps begging for our attention. What do we lose if we lose TikTok? Im not talking so much about the people whose livelihoods are tied up in it those people will surely lose business and clout, but many of them will or already have pivoted to other platforms. Im talking more about the things you cant quantify: the explosion of creativity youll see in just a few scrolls spent on TikTok, the bringing together of hundreds of cultures, the ways in which TikTok does and doesnt act as a democratizing force. Have we been asking the wrong questions about TikTok the whole time? Whether or not youre being spied on, was the app ever even worth using at all? Here, the cases for and against TikTok.TikTok is good, actuallyWhen TikTok came on the scene in 2018, the only thing most people knew about it was that it was embarrassing. Having evolved from the platform Musical.ly, which was populated largely by children and young teenagers lip-syncing to sped-up versions of pop hits, TikTok took a few months to shed the stench of cringe content. Slowly, however (and then much more quickly at the onset of the pandemic), more people were charmed by its unique video editing tools, the easy-to-replicate meme formats, and a new, burgeoning form of extremely silly comedy. In the depths of quarantine, TikTok offered an escape, whether it was in the form of scrolling through cutesy cottagecore content or families learning dance moves while stuck at home together. The experience of using TikTok sets it apart from its competitors. As addictive as TikTok is, it does not bombard you with constant notifications the way Facebook and Instagram do, and when you spend more than an hour scrolling, TikTok will encourage you to take a break.Even pre-pandemic, it was clear that TikTok was an extraordinarily powerful communication tool. First, its succinct: Until two years ago, all TikTok videos were capped at three minutes (the limit was originally 60 seconds; its now 10 minutes). Second, you can go viral even if you dont have any followers: Videos are served algorithmically to each user based on what theyve engaged with in the past, and even videos from small accounts can pick up steam on peoples For You pages via a snowball effect. Third, most of the time, you see the persons face as theyre talking, creating a stronger, more familiar bond than if youd simply read a tweet or listened to a podcast. Instead of feeling like youre watching a stranger, when you see a person talking to you for long enough, they start to feel like someone you can trust.While much of the attention on TikToks ability to make strangers feel like friends has focused on how it has hastened the spread of harmful misinformation, it has also encouraged young people to vote, to engage in local politics, and to organize sometimes against TikTok itself. It has helped some teens embrace their own mediocrity on an internet that nearly always serves them people who are prettier, richer, and more talented than they are. It has inspired people to make fun iced coffee drinks, to pursue careers in arts and entertainment, to romanticize their lives, to feel more positively about their own bodies. Its been a source of joy for people dying of terminal disease, an outlet for the grieving, a haven for queer and questioning kids, a diary for newly out trans people. It has democratized creative industries like music and publishing; its popular dance and meme challenges have the ability to skyrocket little-known artists making beats in their bedrooms to mainstream success stories. Now, the way to get maximum exposure as an artist is by leveraging TikToks algorithmic power, which in turn boosts streaming revenue and touring interest. Meanwhile, digital subcultures like BookTok have encouraged more people to read, go to the library, and support authors they love. Emerging writers who have been shut out of traditional publishing have exploded on the app, making the industry more welcoming to outsiders. TikTok has also supercharged the creator economy, or the millions of Americans who make money on social media platforms, making content in exchange for brand sponsorships, affiliate links, direct subscription payments, or from creator funds organized by the platforms themselves. Though its a lifestyle defined by precarity, an enormous gap between top earners and the average influencer, and deference to algorithms that can change overnight, its one that more people, either unable to find the stability of traditional jobs or supplementing them with internet side hustles, are choosing. In a 2019 op-ed defending Twitters effect on culture, Sarah J. Jackson argues that despite its reputation of being a cesspit, the social app actually made us better people. The same argument can be made for TikTok. Like all technological tools, Twitter can be exploited for evil and harnessed for good, she writes. Just as the printing press was used to publish content that argued fervently for slavery, it was also used by abolitionists to make the case for manumission. Just as radio and television were used to stir up the fervor of McCarthyism, they were also used to undermine it. Twitter has fallen short in many ways. But this decade, it helped ordinary people change our world. TikTok is, at its best, a champion for ordinary people, for democracy, for debate, for discourse. That doesnt mean its always nice, but it can be. Or maybe its all shitty, and were simply too addicted to scrolling through TikTok to notice or care how much its harming us. At least 15 children under 13 who tried to participate in its viral blackout challenge have died. While pursuing the dream that TikTok dangled in front of them becoming an overnight superstar many more have become burnt out, disillusioned, or otherwise hurt. Dance used to be the most fun thing in my life and now I dont like it. Social media has robbed me of that, says TikToks biggest breakout star, Charli DAmelio, in the first season of her reality show. I dont know how long anyone expects me to keep going as if nothing is wrong.Watch enough TikTok and youll start to see an extremely skewed version of the world, one where only the loudest, most extreme version of humanity is the kind worth noticing. On TikTok, its easy to get the sense that everyone is either beautiful or hideous, talented or cringe, billionaires or destitute, simply because extremes are what gets the most attention. As an algorithmically driven platform, TikTok rewards its users basest instincts. What hits on TikTok is a legible, irresistible hook or, in other words, the kind of content that smacks you in the face with its obviousness. One largely inconsequential example: At several points over the past three years, weve been told that millennials are at war with Gen Z. Despite the fact that a handful of viral TikToks hardly count as a war, the way TikTok amplifies meaningless controversy through algorithmic power and negativity bias is concerning, not just because young people desperately need solidarity to create a better world for all of us, but because these sorts of mostly made-up trends offer a distorted view of what the worlds actual immediate problems are. A far more consequential example: Accounts like @LibsofTikTok, which cherry-pick content from liberal or queer TikTokers and use them as strawmen for the left for their followers to mock and attack, function as rage-bait fueling the right-wing media. In the same way that chronically online discourse on Twitter distracts us with culture war kindling, TikTok makes it even more personal and ad hominem. TikTok videos brevity only adds to this problem; the short, headline-grabbing content that goes the most viral is largely devoid of context and nuance, seemingly designed to distract and anger us further. Even something as simple as, say, a review of a new skin care product, is often framed in hyperbole videos dont travel unless you make it sound like this is the BEST thing Ive ever tried, or its inverse: All the videos encouraging you to buy this product are LIES! Whats left is a cycle of buying and selling, loving and hating, embracing wholeheartedly and then forgetting, until youre surrounded by barely used bottles in your bathroom cabinet and never-worn clothes for a trend that came and went by the time it arrived at your door. The lightning speed of these consumer trends has also changed the way Americans buy stuff, from the staggering number of beauty, homeware, or other products that regularly go viral and flame out, to the introduction of TikTok Shop, which has populated users feeds with what are essentially infomercials every few scrolls, with regular people acting as salespeople who earn a commission. At any point, there are dozens of microtrends happening at once, though its hard to say whether the trends are actually meaningful or whether one or two videos are going viral at once. Consumers then take part in these ever-shifting trends by immediately purchasing an item on TikTok Shop from an ultra-fast fashion brand and then replacing it with a new one when the next microtrend comes along, leading to even more fashion waste. It can feel as though everyone is trying to sell you something on TikTok, not least themselves. The dark side of having the creative industries overturned by millions of aspiring artists on TikTok is that the job of an artist now involves spending half (or more of) your time promoting yourself online. This is to say nothing of the uneasy sensation of actually consuming TikTok, the reason that with every hour you spend on it, the app sends you a little PSA to maybe get off your phone and do something else for a while. Scrolling TikTok is the visual equivalent of a sensory deprivation tank, the adult version of transfixed toddlers staring at an iPad. It is a machine specifically engineered to get you to dissociate. In the span of about 30 seconds, you can watch a funny video of a puppy leaping into the snow, a sexy fan edit of a popular sci-fi franchise that may or may not be AI-generated, a poem about what it means to lose ones mother, a makeup tutorial in which all the comments are people making fun of the persons weight, a 22-year-old articulating why he doesnt think his girlfriend should be allowed to hang out with other men. Unless you were enrolled in some kind of therapy intended to remove you from all groundedness in reality, nobody would argue that consuming in such a fashion is good for you. TikTok isnt the problem, actuallyLest it is not clear, I dont think TikTok should be banned. I think the problems exacerbated by TikTok are the same problems exacerbated by algorithmically powered social media as a whole. The only winners of TikTok being banned would be Meta and Alphabet (i.e., Instagram and YouTube), companies that, while not carrying the political baggage of being based in China, are far more responsible for the sorry state of humanity under attention capitalism than TikTok.In a fascinating interview with Current Affairs, author of Stolen Focus: Why You Cant Pay Attention Johann Hari explains how social media distracts us from whats important by shoving meaningless controversy in our faces. How can we come together and achieve anything if we cant listen and are constantly screaming at each other and constantly interacting through mediums designed to make us angry and hateful towards each other? he asks. Its not only collective action that social media makes us miss out on, though; Hari argues that when our attention is constantly fractured, you miss out on the less tangible aspects of what makes a full life. If you cant focus, you cant form proper deep friendships and achieve meaningful work, Hari says. You cant have a meaningful life if you dont experience depth and attention.Few people, including Hari, are advocating that social media should be banned altogether. Its simply not compatible with the idea of a free and open internet, which, unless the US decides to erect its own version of Chinas Great Firewall, is the internet Americans live in. Thats not to argue that major social media companies should be allowed to exist the way they have for the past decade and a half, which is to say by doing whatever they want and enticing people to spend as much time as possible on their websites.Hari uses the example of how mothers in the 1970s rallied together to push back against the lead industry, which for decades had knowingly caused mental and psychological problems in children. They didnt say, Lets ban all cars and gasoline, he says, they said: Lets ban the leaded gasoline and force the companies to move to a different business model that doesnt poison our children.What would a business model for social media look like that didnt prioritize time spent on the app? Hari suggests something like a subscription model, making users of social media sites the true customers, as opposed to the advertisers shopping for users data. Suddenly, theyre not asking, How do we hack and invade Nathan? Instead, theyre asking, What does Nathan want? The other model would be something like the BBC, an independent but partially taxpayer-funded media institution, he says: Think about the sewers: everyone listening or reading is near a sewer. Before we had sewers, we had sewage in the streets, people got cholera, and it was terrible. We all pay to build the sewers, and own and maintain them together. We might want to own the information pipes together, because were getting the equivalent of cholera, but with our attention and our politics.Making either of these changes would require an enormous psychic leap, particularly for Americans, whose fealty to the free market runs core to our identity. But Hari urges us to imagine it anyway. We are not medieval peasants begging at the courts of King Zuckerberg and King Musk for a few little crumbs of attention from their table, he says. We are the free citizens of democracies, and we own our own minds. And together, we can take them back if were determined to.I dont think that banning TikTok is a step toward democracy. That the Supreme Court is considering upholding the ban for national security reasons, however, reveals that companies are not kings; that they are subject to the rule of law just as we are. Its possible that if Americans can envision a world in which an entire, hugely powerful social network is kicked out of our country, perhaps more of them can be transformed into a force that works for us rather than against us. Personally, Id start by taking a hard look at the companies that have been here longer.Update, January 10, 5:05 pm ET: This story was originally published in March 2023 and has been updated with new information about TikToks possible impending ban.Youve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

More often than not, Star Wars is about redemption. Darth Vader saves Luke. Ben Solo helps Rey. The Mandalorian gives up his code for Grogu. On and on down the list, characters that at one time are bad end up turning good. So far though, on the latest Star Wars show, Skeleton Crew, weve seen the opposite. Jod Na Nawood (Jude Law) has gone from a roguish would-be hero to a full-blown evil villain throughout the series and now, as we get to the end, were wondering, whats going to happen next? Obviously, your guess is as good as ours here. We have not yet seen the final episode, and wont until everyone else does at 9 p.m. EST next Tuesday, January 14. So dont worry about spoilers. Were just wondering if the show will keep its top-billed A-list star a bad guy or if its even a possibility not to. To quickly recap, the four kids who make up the crew met Jod in a prison where he used the Force to help them escape. He then became their de facto guide and leader as they attempted to return to their home planet of At-Attin. Jod however, who is known to almost every character on the show as a different name, seemed to mainly be tagging along not out of kindness. He wanted to see if the legends are true. If At-Attin truly has a huge treasure on it.So Jod took the crew across the galaxy, put together clues, and gracefully avoided any specifics about himself. We know that he is Force-sensitive. We think he was telling the truth about being lost and alone. He was definitely a pirate captain before making a few mistakes. But when it became clear At-Attin did house some kind of treasure, a switch went off. The antihero instantly became the selfish, evil pirate we met in the first scene of the series. And, by the end of the penultimate seventh episode, hed taken things well beyond that, killing his former first mate Brutus, brandishing a lightsaber to threaten bot the kids and their parents, and finally discovering At-Attins treasure.In our minds, Skeleton Crew has taken such care to show Jod fully embracing his pirate side, it would almost be a betrayal for him to go back. At least in this season. Maybe, by the end of this season, he escapes and in a hypothetical subsequent season, we see him learn the error of his ways. Anakin Skywalker, of course, very famously came back from the side of Actually Having Killed Some KidsJods pretty tame in the grand scheme of things. Sure, he lopped SM-33s head clean off, but he wouldnt step on the cute alien mouse that called that head home! If that switch happens now though, in this season, it would be a major disappointment if he immediately turns around on this path hes been on. Jods arc has been one of the true highlights of the show, setting up an emotionally charged showdown between him and the four kids he pretended to save. Lets keep it that way. Make the star of your show a bad guy. We dont care. We love it. If Skeleton Crew hopes to go down as maybe the second-best Disney+ Star Wars show to date, it should play that out and keep him living in that dark side for a little while longer. What do you think? Do you agree? Is Jod worth, or worthy, of saving? Let us know below.The first seven episodes of Skeleton Crew are now on Disney+. Catch up before the finale. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, whats next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.