How to win 170M voters

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tarazkp1.4 K10 days ago4 min read

How to win 170M voters.

How?

"A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can't use TikTok right now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!"

Pretty easily.

The majority of Tik Tok users are young, and like it or not, it seems that the "influencer" on the platform is pretty influential. But, that isn't saying much, because the consumer on the platform is well, pretty basic. Essentially, the ban in the US has ostracized the influencers with a large following by demonetizing them overnight, and 170 million people are going to be annoyed, especially since the reasoning behind the ban of "national security" is obviously a load of shit.

Governments are taking the piss.

Trump is no better. He is just as bad, just bad in a different way. He is looking to make America great again, for himself to benefit. The difference is, he is doing it openly, and still people support. The US political system and the current state of affairs exposes how much of a farce it all is, and it is contagious. It is like a magician showing how the trick is done, but still the audience believes it is magic.

TikTok is a scourge on human brainpower, though people don't fully understand what that means. Currently, the average user spends about an hour a day on TikTok, so let's think about this in terms of productivity, as that is what the economy cares about. In the US alone, that means that 170,000,000 hours are spent each day scrolling those short video clips. That is 7,083,333 days, or 19,406 years spent by US users of TikTok, every day. Put that into working hours, and an individual would have to work 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 58,218 years to make up for one day of TikTok consumption.

Small numbers add up.

A friend of mine at university decided to look at time as "units" that each equalled a half hour. So for instance, sleep was 16 units, gym was 3 units, watching a movie was 4 units and on and on. In his opinion, it made it easier for him to decide if something was worth doing. If "time is money" is being used, looking at average TikTok usage, what is the cost of those 365 hours in a year?

That is 48 days of work.
Do your math.

In Finland, the median income is around 4000 euros a month, and a month has about 22 working days in it. That means each day (before tax) is around 180€, so in "TikTok time" that is about 8,700€ a year. Would a new user be willing to pay that upfront in order to use the app? Unlikely. And while this is not quite how it works, we also have to consider that our time is valuable, and there is a cost to using it, no matter what we spend it on.

And of course, it isn't just TikTok, is it? It is Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, gaming, online shopping... Not only are we spending our time, we are also influenced to spend our money in the same places. Yet, we have no stake in these companies, and they aren't hiring people locally to benefit our near-world experience. While it seems insignificant for a ingle individual to waste some time or spend a little here and there, this is a massive collection scheme, scraping and skimming small amounts of value from billions of people globally and into a few centralised pockets.

It has an enormous impact on society.

But, what people focus on is the hype, the drama, the entertainment. While serious money is being made and we are experiencing the serious ramifications of our own consumer behaviour, we don't take any of it seriously. I don't mean that life should all be frowns, but the challenges humanity faces, and the challenges we face as individuals daily, are largely self-inflicted consequences of our own behaviours. They are symptoms of our own poor form.

People fight over whether the left or right is better, Harris or Trump, TikTok or Twitter - but the fact is, they are all fucking terrible, because they are all part of the same system, with the same agenda. They are all about control of resources to control us the people, so that a small fraction of society benefits at the expense of everyone else.