TikTok — a digital pandemic
Intro
I’m not into conspiracy theories, almost all of them are just dumb bullshit, catnip for the intellectually challenged, Dunning-Krugerites and lonely incels and incelesses (not sure that is a word?). Flat earth? fucking hell. Chemtrails? It’s just planes bro…
I get that JFK was probably offed by the mafia, and who cares, honestly? The guy was profoundly afflicted by a battery of ailments. If the wise guys didn’t get to him first, then the autoimmune polyglandular syndrome type 2 with Addison’s disease, hypothyroidism, and coeliac disease would have done.
And no, Stanley Kubrick did not direct the faking of the moon landings. If you want to hire a guy to shoot a fake moon landing you would get a Bruckheimer or a Bay. Spielberg would knock the shit out of that brief. Kubrick was way too arthouse and a perfectionist.
And yet again, no, Elon Musk is not an alien. This theory born out of the interesting, yet bonkers theory that should a more intelligent species (lol) who were looking to colonise Earth, they would first send down an ambassador, a hybrid, someone to help with the transition, that person would be in the form of a genius who could ‘invent’ rockets, electric cars, digital currency and satellite communication. It’s a cool story.
Space Karen did not ‘invent’ anything.
However, there is one conspiracy theory that I can totally get on board with. It’s the bonkers yet plausible concept that China created TikTok as a digital biological weapon to slowly destroy the western world by stunting the cognitive ability of the (mostly junior) proletariat, a pandemic of dumbing down, starting with the young. That China are controlling young western teenagers in their hundreds of millions and collecting the data. That this is all a massive security breach and the Chinese government are at the centre of all of this.
It’s proper 21st Century Bond villain-level bonkers. I drink this frothy milkshake tho, it’s fucking delicious. So grab a metal straw and have a suck on this…
TikTok is digital Covid
Ok hear me out, if you were China, and you wanted world domination, how would you best achieve it? Well you could start World War 3 — but you’d lose, as nobody has really ‘won’ a war in decades. Ask yourself? name a country than won a proper war? Look at Russia, they know that conventional war is really expensive, dull and lengthy.
What about Nuclear? well theres this little thing called ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’. The issue with nuclear is the minute you fire it, they fire back and so does everyone else, and the entire planet is fucked. It’s a ‘Zero sum game’. Nuclear has always been simply a terrifying deterrent.
Or start a biological war? well its often said that when World War 3 happens, it will be in the form of a chemical bomb, The Iraq ‘War’ invasion was predicated on the existence of ‘WMD’ dirty bombs, Ricin was terrifyingly predicted and we all know what Botox is made of. My choice was always Rabies. There is no known cure once infected, and its delivery method is the humble canine. Its perfect.
How about a pandemic?. Well technically this IS a biological weapon. If it didn’t occur naturally. Let’s say, you wanted to create a dirty bomb that crippled the rest of the world, killed the world economy and created a legacy of societal problems. You know you would get in trouble. How about if you created that in a lab in Wuhan and blamed it on bats and pangolins? Yeah I know it’s hokey, and I struggle to believe China could be *that* bad. I’ve never been a fan of China, I try to internalise my xenophobia, but we all have our geopolitical boogeyman, and mine is China.
Ok well maybe something a little more stealthy? What is the most horrific thing to happen to humans in the last 20 years, apart from Mrs Browns Boys?
Social. fucking. media.
It’s infected billions, free to use, its super low barrier to entry, it feeds on the very worst parts of humans, and it can be used to spread fear, change elections and sell hugely inflated shitty sugar water to teenagers.
Social media is a delivery system for dopamine, the same way cigarettes are a delivery system for nicotine. But with cigarettes the chemical additives (over 7000) were profoundly unsafe, and many were carcinogenic. The nicotine was addictive, but the delivery system was fatal.
Dopamine loops are hugely addictive, it’s the same reward system as cocaine. It’s why kids are addicted to their smartphones, and it’s the perfect contagion for a digital pandemic.
Contagion timeline — 2016–2020
September 2016 — In a lab in Beijing’s northwestern Haidian district, China, after 200 days of development, a virus (app) called Douyin was uploaded to the internet, and began to spread rapidly throughout China.
September 2017 — The first international cases (downloads) of the virus were reported, and the digital pandemic given the international moniker ‘TikTok17’, later shortened to just ‘Tik Tok’
August 2018 — first cases of the virus were reported in the UK.
October 2020–2 billion cases of TikTok ‘download’ worldwide.
Transmission
The virus can be transmitted primarily via download, but secondary exposure is via a lethal mixture of viral transmission, FOMO and narcissistic personality. The virus mainly affects teenagers and 20-somethings. Scientists have hypothesised the TikTok17 pandemic started out with a small group of particularly irritating teenagers downloading another dumbass social app for their smartphones, but this one was like Snapchat on steroids.
Symptoms
The virus initially presents by offering totally vacuous and filtered videos of awful people, encouraging each other to do profoundly stupid and highly dangerous challenges, sometimes to music. In return, the app provides a steady micro-dosed loops of dopamine, along with a gamified metric of feedback, in the form of likes and reposts. As the virus progresses, it eats away at the victims short term attention span, encourages dysmorphia and decimates their self esteem. The user is hooked almost instantly and the effects are devastating.
Addiction is fast and brutal. the infected are helpless and need constant access to the app, and to receive attention and social clout from millions of idiots. Like rabies, there is no cure, and as soon as the infection is diagnosed, the slow cognitive death sentence is impossible to stop.
Disco snails — a tenuous analogue analogy
A few years ago a bizarre and truly terrifying image popped up across the internet.
A snail with seemingly pulsating eye stalks. A weird visual without context. What was this brutal example of nature?
Well the explanation was Nightmare fuel. A phenomenon that was given the cool, yet utterly disrespectful name of ‘Disco/Zombie Snail’.
It was a hard watch, but the real story was how a parasite called ‘Leucochloridium’ totally ruins a humble snail, by taking over its brain and changing its behaviour to create a totally zombified host, for the sole purpose of destroying it and then spreading the misery forever, with no cure or vaccine.
Mother Nature at her most premenstrual. The other diseases were horrified.
Even Rabies was like “whoah, cmon dude this is a bit dark!”
Leucochloridium is for me, the scariest example of how a biological weapon could manifest itself on the human race. It just needs to be tweaked, rebuilt in code, and deployed on an App Store. Then a half billion people are turned into slave hosts.
Leucochloridium is a parasitic worm that invades a snail’s eyestalks, where it pulsates to imitate a caterpillar. The worm then controls the host snail out into the open, where a hungry bird will to pluck its eyes out. The worm then breeds inside the birds stomach, releasing its eggs in the bird’s faeces, which are evacuated and then eaten up by another snail. This process is cyclical and utterly bonkers.
TikTok is simply the digital version of this terrifying phenomenon. A parasitic app that invades a persons life, changes their personality, augments behaviours and makes them imitate a total moron, and then socialises this zombie slave until other vacuous idiots feed on the shit they create. And then those idiots create more viral shit, and the cycle continues, forever, rinse and repeat.
Ok lets wrap this up
In the last 20 years the world has changed, democracy has changed, people have changed, genders have changed, and war has changed. TikTok is invading and the western world, in the way that even the best diseases couldn’t.
Thanks for reading!
Mx
p.s. If you like this sort of thing I also write about other stuff on my Substack
