Charles Pépin’s editorial: “This morning I would like to tell you the story of a young girl and her decision. TikTok is over! All around her, there is shock: What? You’re not on Tik Tok anymore? Is it your parents or what? Aren’t you afraid of missing out on stuff? But that’s not really it. Maybe it is, but it’s much more than that. She tries to explain to them that this goes way beyond her attention, her grades at school, that it goes way beyond her own case.
Why do you think the Chinese banned TikTok from their own children? Don’t you find that fishy? Oh, I’m gooda friend retorts, you shouldn’t don’t worry about it any more, it’s entertainment! Funny little videos, you relax for two minutes and then you move on to something else, that’s all.
But no, that’s not all! She gets angry, she stammers. That’s not all, not at all! It’s far from being just entertainment. Don’t you see that it’s political! There it is, she has dropped the big word: politics.
Oh, that’s fine, another girlfriend bounces back, stop your act, are you a conspiracy theorist or what? Do you really think Xi Jinping gives a damn about the videos you watch in bed in the morning? Go ahead and relax, if you don’t want to waste your time on TikTok that’s understandable, but no need to swear, no need to say that it’s… “ policy ».
Do you know, she continues, that a quarter of TikTok videos peddle false information? That the United States and China are at war for global control of technology? And you see that TikTok makes you stupid, that the videos scroll by without you deciding, that this speed is designed to stupefy and hypnotize you? So, is it a conspiracy theorist to connect these two obvious facts:
- China is at war with the United States and, beyond that, with the entire West.
- TikTok takes us from a young age to make us stupid.
So, yes, it’s true: I wonder if TikTok is not the weapon with which China weakens its enemy in taking him out of childhood to prevent him from learning to think. It seemed to me like that, it’s true: TikToker is being a good little soldier in the service of Chinese interests, and that’s why I stopped: I don’t want to be a soldier anymore, I want to find the taste of my freedom again! This girl is not good, she’s completely sick!
But is it so certain? Isn’t technology, as our young daughter claims, always political? To talk about it this morning, I have the joy of welcoming a doctor in political science, a researcher at the EHESS and the CNRS, and the author of an explosive essay on the subject, Technopolitique, Asma Mhalla, who has joined us under the sun of Plato, in the cavern of France Inter, to help us reflect on this difficult question: does technology make us good little soldiers in the service of empires that we don’t even see? Does technology dispossesses us of our freedom?
To read
Asma Malla, TechnopoliticsThreshold, 2024
Musical programming
Feu Chatterton, Ecran total
Fabiana Palladino, Stay with me through the night
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