The TikTok in the Coal Mine
Joyful Sorting Hat … or 3rd Ring of Hell?
Beijing, June, 2018 — I visited TikTok’s corporate headquarters. Dozens of job applicants crammed into the surprisingly small lobby, waiting to be called. The vaguely depressing, low-rise buildings were not what you’d expect of a global tech leader, and certainly nothing compared to the posh, glass-encased SOHO towers just 8 miles away, down 3rd Ring Road, where another Chinese Internet leader held court from inside a massive executive suite, complete with locked double doors that, bizarrely, swung open at the press of the CEO’s desk button.
Dante would appreciate that TikTok, quite literally, lies along 3rd Ring Road. At the center of Beijing’s 3rd ring is the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong and Tiananmen Square. The streets radiate out, orderly and well planned, from their communist center. The 3rd ring of hell is the ring of gluttony. TikTok’s founders are set to earn tens of billions of US dollars exploiting gluttony for punishment, exploiting the extreme lengths people will go through for short-lived social media stardom and ephemeral status.
The screen in the TikTok lobby blared one number above all — a purple “221.” The other numbers were lower and green. We asked what “221” meant. It was the outdoor air quality index, and it was bad: Very Unhealthy.
The smaller numbers displayed interior air quality in different locations of the building, and they were good. If you can trust a big Chinese tech company to report accurate numbers on its screens, then you can breathe its air. That day, you didn’t need the screen …
You could taste the air in the back of your throat.
And to be clear, that was not the TikTok lobby
It was the Bytedance lobby. TikTok is just one of the apps this Chinese corporate giant happened to get right. They did it by cloning US innovation in Musical.ly and then far surpassing Musical.ly’s deep-learning algorithms. It also surpassed Musical.ly in an another way: its willingness to spend billions of dollars promoting itself through user-acquisition marketing.
These executives trusted their algorithm for a reason. They saw what it did inside China for their first Musical.ly clone, the app Douyin. The Chinese Communist Party considered AI a critical initiative for their companies to get right, Bytedance got the message, and they got it right.
In another meeting but at a different Chinese company, I was struck by the lip service paid to AI given that this other company, unlike Bytedance, didn’t appear to exhibit any special capability in the field. So struck by their presentation, I actually asked: “Why are you leading with AI?” I was told China prides itself on AI, and it sure does.
In July, 2017, the Chinese government initiated a master plan to be the world leader in AI by 2030. Chinese tech companies complied enthusiastically. The plan treats AI like the Americans treated the Apollo 11 lunar mission, except the Chinese are the only ones racing, and Bytedance’s success suggests they are winning. The Chinese studied the issue carefully, even commissioning white-shoe McKinsey studies to help them.
TikTok is no accident. It’s part of a plan playing out on schedule. The Bytedance AI was so good, it allowed a clone to buy the original. It’s like cloning LinkedIn in China but with a different algorithm for the feed, and then going back and buying LinkedIn in the United States. That’s scary good AI. This company cloned US technology so well that they bought the original app from its inventor.
If you clone it so well that you win … guess what … it’s not a clone.
Stay calm and TikTok on
TikTok is the newest and most powerful munition to date in the ongoing weaponization of social media. Prince Harry and Meghan are right to be concerned, but the fact of Chinese Communist Party control of the most powerful munition is an order of magnitude worse a problem than anything we’ve seen before.
The Atlantic breathlessly wonders if Chinese ownership of such a weapon is worse than US ownership? That’s too bad. Americans, even now, are not as bad to each other as a national enemy — a country we may well get into a shooting war with at some point. In our present culture of continuous outrage and divisive tweets, it is easy to take for granted decades of relative peace — a peace provided in part by US technological leadership.
That leadership is at risk.
Neither Microsoft nor Oracle nor Walmart will blackmail our leaders using GPS coordinates supplied from TikTok overlayed against a dataset of every known house of prostitution. It will not read their direct messages to destroy them. It will not grab, as TikTok inexplicably has, the contents of your last copy and paste, in the hopes, presumably, of finding something useful and private, like a password or a second family. It will not threaten to embarrass our politicians with their steady media diet of underage girls dancing in their rooms, a media form TikTok, the AI masters of the universe, seem not to be able to prevent, despite — I am quite sure — their best efforts.
Just this month, China continued to dismantle the free press in Hong Kong, arresting the publisher of Apple Daily and his sons. America may be divided, but let’s get real a second:
TikTok operates at the pleasure of the Chinese Communist Party
To imagine that TikTok is not controlled by the CCP is to imagine there is a rule of law in China above a CCP directive. China is a surveillance state and to think for one second that they wouldn’t peek at the full data stream of their most intrusive asset is to be myopic. In fact, Bytedance has already caved to the CCP on censorship issues. Will China’s independent judiciary prevent information from being delivered to the CCP? Lol.
Naturally, the Chinese government disagrees. The government-owned newspaper China Daily published an editorial threatening retaliation and condemning the US approach to TikTok as unilateral. Hmmm? How will they retaliate exactly? Will they ban Facebook? Instagram? Google? Twitter? Snapchat? Dropbox? Wikipedia? Medium?
All of those apps are already banned, victims of the “Great Firewall” years ago. Given just about every Western app is blocked by China. How is it possibly in the interests of Western governments and citizens to reward such anti-competitive behavior by doing nothing in the face of a very real surveillance threat from China and its apps?
“You’re a TikTok Harry.”
Eugene Wei, author of my favorite essay Status-as-a-Service, recently argued in his blog for the benignity of this national threat. He likened TikTok’s algorithm to a certain lovable, mythical head covering: the sorting hat from Harry Potter. After all, the friendly, smiling algorithm knows what we want, and we should just trust it. At one point, Wei says …
“the algorithm acts as a rapid, efficient market maker, connecting videos with the audiences they’re destined to delight.”
Destined to delight? In 2020, we compare Facebook to Big Tobacco and lay bare all of social media’s tricks from bottomless bowl to intermittent rewards to loss aversion, but the answer — apparently — to divisive times is to trust an algorithm to keep us apart. Wei says of big tech …
“they’d be much better off (and society, too) keeping the Slytherins and Gryffindors apart.”
I guess separation makes the heart grow fonder, except that this is the country of Jim Crow. Advocating for keeping people apart is something to be deeply suspected. Wei imagines TikTok giving voice to “subcultures.” According to this argument, TikTok seized on a highly efficient algorithm and acquired so many users to fill their mousetrap that eventually the algorithm sorted people into the subcultures where they’d be happiest, and then kept them there, away from those pesky other subcultures.
That might sound nice enough … maybe
By simply liking some short videos of people doing provocative and stupid things, you find your tribe and finally fit in! If the price of inclusion is not seeing the subcultures to which you would not otherwise belong, why isn’t that okay?
Because it’s a false choice. TikTok’s algorithm is not sorting people into “subcultures,” certainly not in any meaningful sense. TikTok’s “subcultures” are just a statistical cluster of similar users, the result, probably, of a deep learning neural network.
These clusters are identifiable mathematically, and they may well be labeled internally (although probably not as affectionately as Slytherins and Gryffindors), but from a statistical standpoint, some of these “subcultures” are guaranteed wastelands, including some groups who just watch young girls, and this group is probably itself split into various “subcultures.”
Maybe there is a separate “subculture” depending on the ethnicity you like to see and another for the age of the girls you like to watch. To these people, TikTok isn’t necessarily giving voice … it’s helping them hide, from everyone but the spying eye of the Chinese Communist Party.
Yes, TikTok trades status for gratification and attention. So be it. TikTok, as a product, is no better or worse at its core than anything built in the US. It’s clearly a good mousetrap, but Chinese Communist Party control of such a mousetrap is unacceptable, and completely so.
The TikTok of the iceberg
TikTok is the largest app subject to the control of the Chinese Communist Party on American devices, but it is hardly the only one. A quick perusal of the Top 10 social apps on iPhone reveal 2 of the top 10 top-grossing social apps in the United States are Chinese controlled, and neither of those is TikTok.
You don’t have to look far to know this is not the problem of one app. Chinese entrepreneurs have been attempting to grow US audience for years, and many have succeeded. In this country, we have a mechanism for reviewing the national security implications of cross-border deals that prevent sensitive US-built apps from being acquired or invested in by unwanted foreign companies.
In fact, the recent forced divestiture of Grindr by a Chinese company — news that broke in early 2019 — likely caused US-China deal flow to drop more than 50% that same year, as it no longer was rational to pursue Chinese acquisitions of certain US assets. However, there are no controls preventing a Chinese-built app from spending billions of dollars to promote that app to Americans.
Last month’s US government pronouncements related to clean networks approach the issue comprehensively. It is easy to be wistful, wishing both sides would step away from the edge and allow capital to flow and apps to fail or succeed without government bans. That certainly would be best for entrepreneurs and their investors in the short run, but at this point, US-China openness and fair dealing are Pollyanna fantasies.
It would be like wishing Nikita Khrushchev and John F. Kennedy would have just made friends and averted decades of The Cold War. It commits a fundamental error, that personalities are the primary driver of history, that the conflict between two geo-strategic competitors can be reduced to a clash of wills: Donald Trump vs Xi Jinping. But no one person determines US-China policy …
Larger forces do.
The next administration, whenever it is, will confront the same facts. I recently asked an attorney who works on US-China issues what he thought the next administration might do: would deal flow to China increase? He laughed:
“the new guys, whoever and whenever they are, will never be pro-China.”
There may be periods of less tightening of China policy but never periods of opening, not without some dramatic, unforeseen change to one or the other country’s fortunes.
The Sputnik Moment that wasn’t
The US and China both possess extraordinary strengths and potentially apocalyptic weaknesses. China is playing the long game, making plans to win decades from now, and enlisting the entire population to help it win.
In 2017, two-hundred-eighty-million Chinese tuned in to watch a Google AI dismantle a world champion in the ancient game of Go. Kai-fu Lee, AI expert and author of AI Superpowers, called it China’s Sputnik moment. China responded to the threat from its US rival the way the US once did to a far-reaching, long-term threat.
TikTok’s approaching mega-billion dollar exit, the clearest example yet of Chinese leadership in AI, should be our Sputnik moment, except the West is incapable of such a moment right now …
We are too fractured, too outraged, too short-sighted, and too sick.
The US’s dominance in AI research and development has been effectively neutralized. If China can embrace and implement the latest AI capabilities faster than its US counterparts against a market bigger than the US, it can build a sustainable advantage and may eventually make breakthroughs that may imperil entire US industries and fundamentally alter the world order.
As Lee argues, China tech is an immense, mostly unregulated cauldron of competition. Hungry entrepreneurs, many just 1 or 2 generations removed from poverty, out-copy, out-innovate, and out-compete their rivals, making Silicon Valley’s idealistic culture of mission and innovation seem quaint and slow.
TikTok should be the canary in the coal mine
It should not be chalked up to presidential politics. A single Chinese AI transformed a struggling US company into a global powerhouse in an industry known for American dominance.
TikTok is neither a joyful sorting hat nor a hellish wasteland. It’s good math, an advancement in AI, one of many to come from a hungrier, more intentional rival who’s penchant for surveillance and unfreedom is as strong as its commitment to a not-at-all secret master plan to topple the current world order through superior AI.
In these AI wars, time is not our friend. The worry is the war may not last long. What happens when China creates an AI so good that it is deployed to create future advancements in AI?
The US needs a comprehensive long game, that includes dramatic investments in AI research and education and enlists the Chinese to work together to reduce the existential risks posed by an AI run amok. Playing defense will not be enough; a massive investment in offense is required.
And to be clear, a forced sale of TikTok is defensive in the extreme. The damage has already been done. Bytedance’s AI leadership is the concern, not this or that mindless social entertainment app’s success. Selling TikTok to a US bidder will not bring that technology to the US. The CCP will ensure that never happens. Oracle, Microsoft, Walmart, or whatever buyer ultimately “wins” this asset won’t be getting the crown jewels.
They wont’ be getting the algorithm
Just this week, the Wall Street Journal reported China is imposing new restrictions to ensure technologies like text analysis and content recommendation don’t find their way into US hands. Given TikTok is the algorithm, what exactly is Bytedance going to be selling, and how could the Buyer ever trust the algorithm wasn’t dumbed down prior to the sale, and what recourse would it have if it was? Where would the Buyer assert a claim, in a Chinese court?
Two superpowers are waging war to prevent the other from gaining an advantage, but unlike the nuclear arms race, in this one, winning may be losing. This should be deeply unsettling to anyone paying attention. Certainly, Elon Musk is unsettled. The winner may create a third enemy, 100 times worse than their supposed foe: an AI who relates to humanity the way we relate to bugs, which is still, even now, at least one step up from the way we relate to each other.
Such an outcome would, of course, be bad
And you might imagine it reasonable for those pursuing AI to set up guardrails to prevent such outcomes, but as nation states compete in an all-out horserace, there are no guardrails. We are left merely to do what we always do when facing existential threats: close our eyes and hope the doomsayers are wrong, not because we are so confident that AI is benign, but because blinders help us run faster.
It’s a human trait to miss the big picture for short-term gain, why problems like global warming and inequality are so intractable. In that great lottery machine of 99 white balls and 1 red one, we’ll just keep pulling out white balls until we hit the red one. My fear is this:
When that ghost in the machine does finally fly out, it will be vastly smarter than our smartest human but possess none of the sorting hat’s charm.
Musk warned last month that Google’s AI DeepMind is a threat to humanity. He claimed he invested in the company just to keep an eye on it. He warned that the “nature of the AI that they’re building is one that crushes all humans at all games … I mean, it’s basically the plotline in ‘War Games.’.” What does Elon know about China’s AI progress?
I’m guessing much less than he’d like.
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