Tik Tok will win. The raw power of money will prevail.

As I scan the headlines, today’s burble is all about whether Congress will “ban” Tik Tok. The House is scheduled to have a vote today on a bill which, the news reports, will do just that. This is a tsunami event! The House Energy and Commerce Committee approved the bill 50-0. (That means both Democrats and Republicans voted for it.) Both Speaker Mike and President Joe support it. Has “Up” suddenly become “Down”? How can it fail?

As usual, media sources only have about a micro-meter thick depth of information. Still, I predict that the effort will fail. Again. They tried and failed before in last year’s RESTRICT act. Montana passed a bill, but the courts canceled it. We will see.

I have never used Tik Tok for anything. I’ve never downloaded anything (that I know of) or established any kind of membership. Years ago, when you had to have really good peripheral vision for trends and memes, I looked at a couple of pages at Tik Tok and decided that the entrance fee was too high and moved on. The “entrance fee” that I detected was the effort it would take to understand the shibboleths (look it up) of the Tik Tok cabal. Peeking through the keyhole, I decided that what was behind the door wasn’t worth the effort. As a result, today, I have no idea how to distort videos, so people’s faces appear in dog’s bodies. (Sigh!) Will I ever be able to hold my head high again!

But, being totally out of step, again, with the civilization I happen to be in, I find that Tik Tok is the flavor of the month for a huge part of that civilization, and that culture consultants have decided that Tik Tok contains arsenic, or dissolved lead, or … oh yeah … too much Chinese MSG. And so, we’re gonna ban it. Or, at least drive it underground where it can be the subject of media investigations instead of Congressional hearings.

The problem … and it’s a problem with arsenic, dissolved lead, and MSG … is that once these pollutants become a critical mass in the environment, you can’t get rid of them again. And it’s not because there are too many people who love MSG. It’s because there are other players … players with a lot of money … who consider the question and decide, “Hmmmm … If they can ban MSG, then they can ban my Chinese ephedrine (again, look it up) and I make a lot of money importing and selling that.”

Translated into the actual issues involving Tik Tok, big media – from Fox to Facebook (excuse me … “Meta”) – get very sensitive when we start talking about regulating any kind of media. Did you know that Meta’s revenue for 2023 was about $135 billion? That’s “Billion” with a “B”. Uncle Joe’s plan to rescue the world (currently blocked by Dirty Don) will only cost a third of that. And that’s only one media giant.

You can buy a lot of Congress-persons with that kind of drag.