✷ The Right to Psychological Sovereignty
Originally written: January 19, 2025
Today the congressional ban on Tiktok officially went into place, but within hours Tiktok was back up again in the United States.
The pervasive attitude among Gen Z towards social media – when we look at things such as phone bans in schools – is that Gen Z is aware social media is making our lives worse, and we don't want to be on it, but we can't leave – both because for most of us, our entire community of peers are on it, and no one wants to be left out, and because a large swath of people are too addicted to stop on their own. A large number of high school students, when surveyed about possible phone bans at their school, support such bans because then they would have the social support they needed to break their addiction. Like rehab.
With the Tiktok ban, we almost had a chance to do that at a nationwide level. A chance for every American addicted to this app to just leave.
And yes, I know that people have been flocking to RedNote (whose name, a Chinese-speaking friend tells me, translates literally to "Little Red Book.") And Instagram Reels and other platforms have been mimicking Tiktok's features for so long that users forced off Tiktok can easily get their fix there.
But the point is, they would have a chance to leave. Forcing the entire nation to go cold turkey would give them a chance to actually get off an app that — let's see —
- offers very little sense of community, as most users follow no one on Tiktok that they know in real life
- is primarily a way to kill time or 'turn off your brain' rather than a way to connect with peers\
- fractures the attention span until many students currently in college can hardly focus on one thing for long enough to read a book
- diminishes some users' ability to enjoy any media not "laser-targeted to their precise array of dopamine receptors"
- is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese-run company. In and of itself, that wouldn't be proof of harm, except that it:
- was the platform by which a right-wing, pro-Russian extremist candidate won the election in Romania
Isn't getting rid of an app that has the power to algorithmically nudge whatever angle it wants, to show you ads and campaign videos from a pro-Russian conspiracy theorist who's running for president — and promote that candidate so aggressively that he goes from being someone no one's ever heard of before to winning the election overnight — isn't getting rid of a propaganda platform that users spend hours per day on something we should have done a long time ago?
And we missed our shot!
We missed our shot. Because the MAGA movement, spearheaded by Musk (who turned Twitter into the X hellscape that it is), thrives on this shit. Let's remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where Trump's 2016 campaign used the illegally harvested data of 87 million Facebook users to precisely target voters in swing states with a massive ad campaign, thus winning him the election. Pro-Russian political candidates reinstating the social media networks on which Russian interference got them into power. Of course they'll make every effort to keep their "constituency" captive there.
This wasn't what I originally wanted to talk about, however. What I want to talk about is the notion of psychological sovereignty. The notion that your brain is your own, that you control what goes in there – not having slop fed to you by an algorithm that can recommend whatever politically-radicalizing, mental-health-destroying content it wants in an effort to keep you on its platform longer.
Last week, I visited a bookstore with two of my close friends. This bookstore curates a very specific vibe – it holds books on democracy, autocracy, the history of East Asian, Soviet, and post-Soviet states, and a great selection of works on political philosophy. My friends love this shit and I like it too.
My point is, this is a bookstore that caters to a relatively niche set of interests. And we have the option to go there when we think, "I want to read something interesting, I wonder where I can go to find something cool that I haven't read before." Instead of letting an app micro-target our specific interests, surveilling us and selling that data all the while, we can go somewhere human. Somewhere with titles that are selected, curated, by a real person – who isn't surveilling you when you walk through the door, who's not targeting you but who's just put together a selection that they think is good. And if you don't like their collection, or if you don't like the vibe, you can go to a different bookstore! You can go and get a different human being's set of recommendations.
My point is that there's a choice. You are free to enter and leave, and browsing is an active, conscious behavior. There's no concept of the infinite scroll.
Your sovereignty over your own psyche, over what goes in, is respected. You make the choice – to wander around to whatever looks interesting, or to leave.
I hate the concept of the "For You" page on these platforms, precisely because it is an algorithm telling you what to read, to watch, to think. An algorithm predicts — not what you'll want to see, and certainly not what is good — but what will make you stay on their app longer. What will make you "engage."
Algorithms, especially ones from companies whose financial incentives are directly opposed to your mental well-being, should never have that power! The fact that your Youtube or Tiktok content recommendation algorithm can show you content you'll be interested in more accurately than your closest friend can is so, so, antithetical to the idea of human connection itself.
This is what L. M. Sacasas refers to in his call to "resist the enclosure of the human psyche" — to rebel against big tech's treatment of our human minds as resources to be mined. Because your psychological sovereignty cannot be bought and sold.
Do not let these companies, run by billionaires who do not care if you live or die, colonize your own headspace. YOU OWN THAT REALM. IT'S YOURS.
I don't want the bookstore to go the way of the milkman, becoming a quaint little thing of the past – "you mean, a person really used to come to your door and deliver milk? A person used to keep a whole shop filled with books they thought were cool, and you could meet other people who liked the same kind of ideas in real life in those shops? You could make friends who had the same interests, maybe even meet someone to go on a date with, just by hanging out in those stores filled entirely with books?"
Let the things you read be written by a human. Let them be compiled by a human editor who has style and taste. It might not hit every time. But it will be all the more human, and all the more special, when it does.
Don't let an algorithm silo you and tell you what you should like, what you should read and think, and who you are.
You're YOU.
You have sovereignty over your own brain.
Don't ever let them take that away from you.