> Honestly, what is the solution? It depends on how much of a shock to the status quo you believe TikTok[1] is. Take the invention of the printing press, for

> Honestly, what is the solution? It depends on how much of a shock to the status quo you believe TikTok[1] is. Take the invention of the printing press, for example. It was instrumental in the development of the Protestant Reformation and the French Revolution. Both undermined the legitimacy of the the Catholic Orthodoxy and the Ancien Régime, respectively. The printing press was used by adherents of Lutheranism, Jan Hus, Zwingli, Calvin, and Gustav V to propagate texts outside the previous monestary-scribe-book economy which, as you can imagine, also served as an orthodoxy-preserving filter. Likewise, Jean-Paul Marat's L’Ami du peuple[2], Le Pere Duchesne(Hébert), and countless others[3] were able to publish revolutionary texts faster than the monarchy could stamp them out. Both are case where technology outpaced social capacity. The question is, "has TikTok and it's like outpaced our social capacity?" What I mean specifically: is throughput and velocity of idea propagation at odds with our current social superstructure? In hindsight, this was clearly the case in the Reformation ad Revolution. Attempts at stamping out the ideas failed and the social order changed to accommodate the technology. Talking today about outlawing the printing press is considered an absurd. I'll argue the same is true for calling a ban or regulation on TikTok. Bans are a technological solution to the social organizational lag problem. Instead, we should be developing and employing social mechanisms that bridge the gap. After developing and deploying these social mechanisms, it will seem just as absurd to advocate for a TikTok ban. We should be looking at the development of social mechanisms post printing press that acted as a counterbalance and learn from them when developing new social mechanisms that work to temper algorithmic feeds today. 1. Or more broadly dopamine-optimized and AI-generated content feeds. 2. Friend of the People 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journals_appearing_under_the_French_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journals_appearing_und...