Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexvoda | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> The government could literally take any power at any moment for any reason at any time that they wanted to.

It can but there is a process to follow and the process might take time.

It is the same with Russia conscripting and officially threatening to use nukes. Of course they could and they did, but in order to do so they first had to officially declare the annexation. Otherwise there was no internal legal basis to conscript since Russia officially was not at war, it was a "special military operation". They could have also gone the alternative route of changing the laws. Or the alternative route of officially declaring war as an aggressor from the beginning.

Same for official nuclear saber rattling, their official nuclear doctrine only allows defensive use and, before annexation, Russia could not claim anyone was attacking it. Before annexation, threats of nukes only came from TV people not high ranking officials.

No matter how democratic or repressive a regime, no ruler rules alone. Therefore even in the most authoritarian regimes there are processes to go through in order to achieve certain objectives. Different processes have different costs and risks. Those processes have steps with each step facilitating the next ones regardless of whether they are eventually taken or not.

This bill is just one of those steps towards dystopia.

You're kind of repeating the same thing here.

Government isn't a big slippery slope, it's a balancing act between the people and the government. Law represents where we stand on that balancing act.

It doesn't matter really how the government tries to shift the status quo. If things get out of line with the will of the people, and they notice, change will be brought to a halt.

This is a common fallacy, especially with recent talk of the "Overton window" that's convinced people it's a good idea to be as extreme as possible instead of approaching the middle ground.

Your party and it's positions do not determine the average person's point of view. They determine what positions you can sustainably maintain, and wherever you move you will see raising or dropping support based on that.

The government won't just slide on over to some crazy extreme. This is why Russia, despite all their bluster, is still not managing to pull a draft. The people don't want it.

And this is why TikTok is so dangerous. By getting into the minds of the people, they threaten to undermine the foundation of our political process.

Do you have a list of other dangerous ideas?

TikTok isn't an idea, it's a platform atop which people speak, and the platform is owned by a country that recognizes no right to free speech and is actively hostile to the United States.

You can't touch a platform, TikTok included. It's an intangible construct and as such it clearly falls into the category of ideas. Everyone knows this. The only reason someone would think otherwise is that banning an idea is a yucky concept and in a fit of cognitive dissonance, it must therefore not be an idea. Let's not fool ourselves. Folks want to ban an idea and we all know how that story goes.

Your argument is a bit too philosophical.

But going by that definition (intangible construct) plenty of ideas have been banned before without issue.

I do think there is merit in understanding that TikTok can be a threat vector unlike Facebook which is also a distinct threat vector.

Just as there is merit in accepting that this bill is a threat.

It's not even philosophical; it's sociological. Besides, the banning of ideas ventures too far into the IdeaCrime territory than I feel comfortable with.

It's absolutely tangible. It's an app. It's servers. It's a company.

I don't see how you can arrive at the conclusion that a company isn't tangible.

Companies are social relations with legal protection.

Apps are intangible and servers are merely substrate.

Hypothetically I could even steal all of TikTok's servers and I still wouldn't be TikTok. TikTok simply isn't the sum of its physical parts.

To put it in Saussureian terms, the signifier TikTok doesn't completely signify tangible objects. Therefore part of the signified must necessarily be intangible.

This is off-topic sophistry.

Your argument that "TikTok is an idea" does not syllogistically connect with "TikTok should not be banned" because the connector "Ideas should not be banned" is invalid.

Intangible things have been banned and will continue to be banned especially if you extend that notion to include companies.

nailed it. sophistry indeed.

> Companies are social relations with legal protection

In other words, they are real things, you can go speak to people who work for apple. You can visit its buildings. Your can install their apps.

> Hypothetically I could even steal all of TikTok's servers and I still wouldn't be TikTok. TikTok simply isn't the sum of its physical parts.

You're getting into the weeds here. To bring things into focus, how does any of this qualify the TikTok company/platform as an idea that would be "censored" if you shut them down?

I don't think you're going to convince me to re-reifiy the concepts of Apple and TikTok.

Once a concept is de-reified the magic gets sucked out of it. If anything understanding enough about the process of reification to de-reify the concept has a much greater chance of de-reifying the concept in your own mind than it does re-reifying it in mine.

Saying repeatedly that something is real to someone for which the concept is de-reified is only further evidence that they are attempting to reify the concept. That's the weird part of the reified mind - it's a self-alienating process - a mental blindspot and once you see your own blindspot, you can't unsee it.

That reads like a freshman’s essay on Baudrillard. It’s really hard to make sense of it.

I don't think it is impressive in any way. It's pompous bullshit that is really hard to believe they really believe it themselves and can now be generated by AI.

It's, like, saying that instead of seeing a chair, they now gained understanding and only see a collection of molecules forming some wooden fibers arranged in a peculiar shape and there is no chair because no physical object can be a true materialization of the platonic idea of a chair. Like, the chair was de-reified. In fact, if no one is sitting on it does it even have any chairness? You gotta, like, go deeper bro. Like, because of natures water and CO2 cycle, the chair is not a chair and you are not you, you are in fact one with the chair. It's all atoms and quarks and strings and stuff.

Same with any brain-in-a-vat solipsist concepts. Cute and logically rigorous but completely unworkable and useless. A philosophical dead end, a cognitive tar-pit and

If you think I'm saying that TikTok is not real in the same way chairs aren't real, then you haven't been keeping up. There are ways to argue against reification, but mocking ain't one bud.

I am arguing that whether the notion of TikTok or Apple or CocaCola is reified for you or me is absolutely irrelevant. They are reified to the vast majority of people so much so that even if a significant portion of their material substrate would be lost, it would be recreated because the brand is just that important.

The mocking was because it derailed the thread. The discussion was about a piece of legislation that has many undeclared goals and whose declared but unwritten goal is to ban TikTok. Whether TikTok is tangible or not, reified or not, an idea or something else is just besides the point. Thinking that it can not be banned is foolish.

Let me remind you that your argument was:

> You can't touch a platform, TikTok included. It's an intangible construct and as such it clearly falls into the category of ideas. Everyone knows this. The only reason someone would think otherwise is that banning an idea is a yucky concept and in a fit of cognitive dissonance, it must therefore not be an idea. Let's not fool ourselves.

You did not say "let's discuss about whether Tiktok is reified and how it could be de-reified". That would have been an interesting discussion.

There's a subsection of Berger&Luckman(1966) on reification that I'm applying. It's not a particularly difficult concept, but it has wide application and describes what we would call today "social facts" are made manifest as reality to some folks. It's a foundational sociological text and I'd encourage anyone who's slightly interested in epistomology to give it a read.

It might resonate with you like it does with others, or either seem completely vacuous, or even provoke a mentally allergic reaction like it does in some. The latter tends to have a load-bearing egoistic reaction to ideas contra to a singular objective reality in which everything must fit to a prescribed ontology, again a theme you might now recognize in the proceeding comments. Some folks desperately want to manifest their views as the correct view of what "being" is and wield it like a cudgel.

Never read Baudrillard; you're more than welcome to revise it to make it sophomoric, or even grad level if you want. Show me up and do it better than me.

> Some folks desperately want to manifest their views as the correct view of what "being" is and wield it like a cudgel.

That’s weird criticism. Why shoudn’t someone hold a view that in their opinion corresponds to reality to the greatest degree among all views that are available to them? For example, you seem “desperate” to manifest your views on TikTok and “reification” in this thread. And I don’t see anything wrong with that.

> you're more than welcome to revise it to make it sophomoric

That’s easy. You should clearly define the technical jargon that you use and the theories that you apply. It looks like you reify the ideas of Berger and Luckman and, what is worse, the words they use.

Explication will help others to make sense of your unconventional use of words and help you de-reify the ideas that you use ;)

Power is a slippery slope. That does not mean that it has a single destination or that going down the slope is irreversible. It just means that reversing an imbalance of power is harder.

Such a change can only be brought to a halt if the imbalance of power is small enough.

The Overton window is a thing. That does not justify extremism if your goal is a functioning society. The Overton window says nothing about whether a position is right or wrong. It only describes what is acceptable and what is extreme. The average citizen is not a static thing.

Russia managed to pull a partial draft even if the people didn't want it. People fled the country because of it. Because before that, all protests were swiftly crushed. It managed to do so because the imbalance of power is great enough that what the people want matters less.

For comparison France is seeing protests for increasing retirement age by two years. It is better to be a citizen of France than a citizen of Russia.

I never said that TikTok is not dangerous. Influencing the minds of people through TikTok is just one way to influence the Overton window.

What many people criticizing this bill are saying is that despite TikTok being a danger of multiple kinds, this bill is also a danger for democracy.

Not having ever used TikTok I will not speculate on which danger is greater, but this is not a dichotomy. Pass the bill as is or not are not the only two options. A better bill that addresses the threats while introducing less threats of its own is possible.

> It only describes what is acceptable and what is extreme. The average citizen is not a static thing

My point here is that government is ultimately restricted by the people. Any assumption what the government does will change that window of acceptability is wrong.

This bill won't make it OK for the government to ban (insert thing the average person likes or does here). To do so will likely mandate that the average person begin to dislike or oppose that thing.

> Russia managed to pull a partial draft even if the people didn't want it.

Key word here is partial, and as far as I'm aware it was quickly withdrawn. Ultimately Russia will act against its people, because it's an authoritarian nation, they just have to get there.

The USA, however, is a functioning democracy.

> What many people criticizing this bill are saying is that despite TikTok being a danger of multiple kinds, this bill is also a danger for democracy.

The number of blatant lies about the bill makes me think otherwise. The tone isn't "this needs fixed" it's "this must not pass".

The end result here rapidly looks like it's approaching an end to any ban on TikTok, and when that happens we will be deeply and truly fucked. Far far more so than we would be by this bill.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com