Simon Guillain: "A famous spy!," plate 77.
Series/Book Title: Cries of Bologna [Una spia famosa] (17th century)

"We probably deserve anything stemming from our sorry reasoning."

In late April 2024, President Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, a bill passed by both houses of Congress in response to the abuses of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. The Act insisted that the company had systematically spied on American citizens, using TikTok as its medium of intrusion. The Act banned TikTok in the United States after January 20, 2025, the date of Trump’s second inauguration. The Trump administration refused to enforce the law as one of its first formal acts, later forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok in a transaction from which Trump was reported to have profited. Consequently, TikTok has gained even greater presence in our social media environment, without reassurances that it won’t continue its Surveillance on American citizens, and without an ounce of enforcement of the provisions of that act of Congress.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of our national scrolling habit might lie in this underlying, corrupting quality. To scroll social media is to accept complicity in what will probably later be “discovered” to have been the crimes of the century. The crimes committed inflict no immediate damage. They seem exclusively insidious, invisible in the instant of commission, and ongoing. Whether “merely” gathering demographic data or tracking individual users’ location changes, no fingerprints remain once the treasure has been lifted. Performance doesn’t necessarily degrade when the theft begins, and won’t improve after successfully completing any extraction. The corpus remains invisible to the soul it was extracted from, and nothing remains to point fingers or bring indictments afterwards. This amounts to a perfect crime.

We need no more evidence to conclude that our incumbent is complicit in these crimes. Congress remains complicit, too, for they could have mustered some enforcement mechanism after the non-administration refused to enforce their law. Indeed, the decision not to enforce should be on the ever-lengthening list of impeachable offences committed, though it, sadly, pales in comparison to the many other entries already on that list. Indeed, I and everyone still scrolling through their social media, might also be indicted, for by accessing TikTok, we’re violating not only a Federal law, but a perhaps more important social rule. We’re burgling our own security, complicit in the crime, perhaps liable to serve some time, though we suspect that outcome could never happen. It probably won’t.

But because of this single act alone, we demonstrate our lack of fealty to the law of this land. Our own corruption reflects our apparent lack of discipline. We can plead that we just couldn’t help ourselves. We experienced a compelling, undeniable urge, the alternative of which felt as threatening as death to us. We could not forbear our fingers from logging in so that we could peer into that dark mirror again and see ourselves in stark reflection, masquerading as the stars in our very own personal cat videos. Yes, there apparently are TikTok millionaires, people who post on that platform and somehow manage to eke out a spare personal seven-figure income as a result. The rest of us are cannon fodder in a war we can’t seem to perceive being waged in dark earnest against our best interests. We’re willing allies to the forces arrayed against us.

We plead addiction, obsession, or overwhelming compulsion, but we’re nonetheless entertained. We have conveniently forgotten all the sworn testimony that translated into a rare two-house majority voting to ban the application from operating against our citizens. Then, in a genuine act of Stockholm Syndrome, first the president and then the citizens rose in opposition to those who had imposed security on us. Frankly, it appears that we’d rather watch cat videos than live free. That old Revolutionary War slogan needs some amending for modern times: Live Surveilled or Die. We encourage and support the spy rather than rely upon our own resources to provide entertainment. We probably deserve anything stemming from our sorry reasoning.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Unscrolling, #PureSchmaltz