A famous poet once wrote that the waiting is the hardest part. Sometimes the antici-pation, can be wonderful, sometimes it can be terrible. But as we wait, that sound of inevitability, that rush of air in the distance signaling the approach of the sublime, sometimes all we can do is our best to get through the storm.

As we start 2025, we can see multiple storms on the horizon, some closer than others, and communities are handling this differently. One of the worlds we've been looking at is deep within cyberspace, and for the netizens of TikTok, the citizens are facing the looming dissolution of their world. Everyone is making plans on what to do next as they pass through that singularity, leaving messages about how to find one another on the other side.

We talked about this a little bit back in June of last year in TikTok Tribulations, but the trouble with tribulations is that they don't just go away. When faced with an incipient diaspora, what do you do? Is it about the waiting or is it about the recovery? We'll talk about both in this episode of the Implausipod.

But before we begin, a brief note. After we had started recording this episode in late December 2024, the Eaton and Pacific Palisades wildfires have devastated communities in Los Angeles, California, destroying thousands of homes and displacing many thousands more. Our hearts go out to those affected, our thanks to the firefighters and others involved in the recovery, and we urge you to contribute to a charitable organization that can assist with helping the survivors.

This episode is about loss and displacement, but it is not a commentary on the specific events of the 2025 L. A. wildfires. Thank you. 

Welcome to the Implausipod,

a podcast about the intersection of art, technology, and popular culture. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. In the last weeks of 2024, it was clear that there was a change in the air. The tone of the content made by various posters on TikTok started to change. A lot of people started making posts about other places they could make content on, or for the more casual poster, where everyone was going.

There was more than a few lurkers asking where the party was going to be, it had some real Steve Buscemi with a skateboard saying hello fellow kids energy. It was the collective realization that, absent any acts of deus ex machina, by January 19th, TikTok would go away, with legislation in the United States poised to ban the company from operating within those borders.

Of course, TikTok has a global audience, so various Brits, Australians, Canadians, and people from other countries behaved as if they were unaffected, because largely they were, but the net impact of the American audience and participants realizing that things were about to change shifted the tone of the discourse on the app as a whole.

It became a moment of incipient diaspora. As an observer, I'd like to capture a snapshot of what that moment was like as it was going on. It began shortly before Christmas 2024, as I saw people with more time on their hands, with their kids off from school, or university students home for the holidays, starting to realize that the time left with the app was short.

That there was under a month left to go. Some forward thinking people were starting to make posts asking what was going to happen in the new year. As the holiday festivities wrapped up and those who had vacations slipped into that weird, liminal, timeless zone between Christmas and New Year's, where everyone is sleepy from gorging on turkey dinner, leftover wine and cheese, and enjoying their holiday gifts.

The trend continued, with more people starting to ask questions, and by the time New Year's would have rolled around, everybody realized that time was drawing short. People began posting lists of links of their other social medias, other places that they could be found on. This was not unusual in and of itself, as something that happened fairly regular with content creators that derived their income from posting in various places.

Would often try to drive traffic to places that they had monetized. Or were able to capitalize off the audience. For a lot of creators, places like YouTube and Instagram were much better suited for that. So that wasn't that noteworthy, but by January 7th, this practice had spread to the smaller creators, too.

Those who hadn't necessarily monetized their content, but wanted to remain in contact with the friends that they had made, and the communities that they had become a part of, while on the app. In early January, this still included places that were the most wide ranging and popular, places like Facebook, Instagram, and X or Twitter.

Though the last one wasn't quite as prominent, as there was more mentions of Blue Sky, with the migration that had already begun there following the U. S. election in November 2024. However, this was soon to change, as by the end of that week, the U. S. Supreme Court would hear arguments requesting a state of the ban.

Politically minded posters and legal scholars noticed the upcoming case and started commenting on what they thought would happen, and this spread from there to all corners of the app. with many posters expressing concern about what the outcome might be. There was an additional group of commenters who put down their epidemiologist certificates they'd been using for the last few years, dusted off their internet law degree, and stepped outside of the Motel 6 they stayed at the previous night to offer their opinions about what was going on.

But perhaps I'm being too harsh. What I'm suggesting is that a lot of people were commenting on the outcome of the case, but many of them were adding noise rather than signal to the conversation. Regardless, by the day the case of TikTok versus Merrick Garland was going to be heard, January 10th, 2025, everybody's attention was focused on it.

The high degree of uncertainty about what the outcome of that case might be led to two notable things happening. The first was that everybody started making contingency plans, posting about other apps that they were on, places that they could be found, or profiles that they had made, and the second was that they started taking a deeper look at why the ban was taking place at all.

The argument that the app was a national security risk drew some scrutiny, and a lot of people started looking at the lobbying efforts of TikTok's biggest competitors. Again. Meta, or Facebook. Now, Meta, the company, and the practices that it engages in and the commodification of the audience is something we've commented on many times on this podcast before.

We discussed the audience commodity way back in Episode 8 in July of 2023, and we touched on it a little bit more in Episode 15, entitled Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, and of course the TikTok Tribulations episode from June of last year. We've also commented on this in the blog and the newsletter, so let's just say it's an ongoing topic of discussion.

If you'd like to hear more about it, I'd encourage you to check out some of those past shows in the archives on implausopod. com. But back to the topic at hand. With TikTok users realizing that Meta and Mark Zuckerberg were one of the larger reasons that the ban was actually going forward, There was a collective pushback against moving to meta owned properties like Facebook, and Instagram especially, as they were seen as the more direct competitor to TikTok.

There was also a pushback against moving to X, as people saw Musk as equally complicit in the ban, due to his recent role with the US government. And this manifested in posters explicitly calling those platforms out and looking for direct alternatives to TikTok that weren't owned by those companies.

This pushback was exacerbated by an announcement that Meta made on January 7th that they would no longer be using third party fact checkers, and an appearance by Mark Zuckerberg on the Joe Rogan podcast. Again, there's a lot going on, and it's all happening roughly contemporaneously. Following the initial arguments in front of the U.

S. Supreme Court, the users became much more active in finding alternative places. They began mobilizing, began contacting their various political representatives, and in their search for alternatives, they came up with an unlikely option. The app known as Zhenghongshu. Little Red Note, an app that was pitched as a Chinese version of TikTok, but was actually more akin to a Chinese version of Pinterest, an app that was actually Chinese state owned, operating in mainland China, and whose discourse took place largely in Mandarin.

Within two days, the TikTok userbase had collectively made this the most popular app in the App Store, and showed that they would rather learn a foreign language and deal with a directly foreign owned app than deal with a meta product again. The pettiness and spite of the American TikTok userbase apparently knows no bounds.

Much like Ricardo Montalban in Star Trek II Wrath of Khan stating, From hell's heart, I stab at thee. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee. The TikTok userbase were deciding to go out in epic fashion and take Meta down with them. And this brings us forward to now, January 17th, 2025, two days before the ban.

The diaspora is in full swing, and still nobody has an idea of what's going on. It leads us to a question. Is the incipient diaspora about the waiting, or is it about the recovery?

While as of the morning of January 17th, the U. S. Supreme Court has still yet to make a statement on their decision, and both U. S. administrations, both outgoing and incoming, have somewhat punted on making a final determination, lending to much uncertainty even two days before the ban, there's a lot that we can learn from the observations we've made about the reactions of the residents of TikTok.

The first observation speaks directly to that uncertainty. There's a from the creator of the Princess Bride. Nobody knows anything. Now, William Goldman was referring to Hollywood, and that nobody can really tell when it comes to creatives pursuits, what is going to take off, what would be a hit and what wouldn't.

But it applies in this situation as well, because January 19th is somewhat of a singularity. No one can tell for certain what's going to happen after that point. In early to mid January, there were posters that were stating with absolute certainty and confidence about what would happen, but they had no special knowledge about what was going on.

In those times of uncertainty, the best approach is to put on one's critical thinking hat. Because the truth is that nobody knows, and even the best can only make an informed decision based on past events and can't say for certain what's going to happen. However, in an era of uncertainty, there will be those courting clout and influence that seek to provide answers to a questioning audience, even where no answers exist.

In an era of uncertainty, all you can do is make backups, plan for contingencies, establish lines of communication, and try your best to ensure that you can see people on the other side. And that speaks to the second point, that there are identifiable actions that can be done. Even in an era of uncertainty.

The mantra of the three S's, Save, Share, and Spread, goes a long way in ensuring that those challenges can be met. The first one is that you save your information. You save your peeps. You get a list of everyone you need to keep track of, everyone you need to contact, and that makes it easier to get in touch with them afterward.

You know who the real ones are, and you ensure that those are available. And this is good disaster prep in general. Have that documentation available, and have backup copies too. The second is that users need to share their info. Have that copy a list of places that they can be found and contact cards, and share that widely with the people that they want to be able to track them down.

It doesn't have to be overly complicated, it just has to be a list of contacts on a card. For an older audience that may dimly remember the era before mobile phones, this is the list of places that people can track you down at. You know, if I'm not at the arcade, I'm at the rec center. If I'm not at the rec center, I'm at your mom's house.

You know where to find me, right? And the third task is to spread that information. If you see a mutual acquaintance that has that contact card, you keep a copy and share it to other acquaintances so it's more widely available. If there's multiple copies of something around, then it's more likely to survive and be able to be passed on.

Users are in the process of developing a network of resilience, and that's what they need in order to manage the uncertainty that may be happening during this era. This is because the place that they're looking to land might not even exist yet, or it might be just a app that's in beta someplace, and not really readily available.

Users might not know where everybody's going to be, but the idea is you create that network and you become that lighthouse that can guide the other users back to the community when you find one. And the third observation follows from that, and that is that the perfect is the enemy of the good. And when we're talking about third spaces, both real and virtual.

virtual, sometimes it's best to take something that exists and meets some of your needs than the perfect option that doesn't exist or may never exist. You can't let something not being your optimum choice deter you from using what's available. When it comes to third spaces, both real and virtual, you need to look at what you're trying to do.

Now, some of this builds on what Ray Oldenburg was talking about in The Great Good Place when he was originally discussing what third places are. When it comes to third spaces, you can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and the good that you're trying to do is to build community. When you're trying to build community, you can use the tools that are available to you.

In the late summer of 2024, there was a discussion of third places that was taking place online, both in blogs and on TikTok and other sites, and there was a lot of headcanon or misconceptions about what third places are and what counts. There are statements like a third place can't be a business, or can't have people working there, and if there are, then it doesn't count, and frankly, this is nonsense.

It might not be optimal, but it can still count as a third place. Remember, a third place is just someplace that isn't work or home, but a place where you can relax and spend some time. Some of the original examples of things like third spaces were things like barbershops or bars or coffee shops or pool halls, and these are all businesses, but they still count.

So it doesn't matter whether it's a McDonald's or a Rotten Ronnie's, or a mcds or a raunchy, Rons or a Macas. Those can all count as third spaces. You can go there every morning, grab a cup of coffee, sit around with your friends or acquaintances or people from the community or even just people passing through, and that might be the best part as you're exposed to news from elsewhere, and you can have a discussion.

This is how community is built. It might not be perfect because it's corporate and policy changes might change how things are going. They take out the seats or the price of coffee changes or whatever. Or this could reshape the environment and not make it as conducive to having that community and discussion.

And this can happen with the change of ownership of smaller businesses as well, whether it's a barbershop or a pool hall or whatever. But it is something that can be used while community is being built up. This is something we talked about in our earlier episode on recursive public. So if you want to go back and check that in the archives again, I encourage you to have a look.

But this is something that we need to get over, the idea that our virtual spaces have to be perfect from the get go and not recognizing that the previous ones that we had built up over time and acquired characteristics as the users interacted with them. So again, the rule is if you find a place that's suitable, you work to build that up and you become a lighthouse to your community and bring them in with you.

You start where you are, you use what you have, and you Do what you can. And I'm not just saying this from my own experience as someone who spent 18 months doing field work at Third Spaces looking at how communities form and interact. I mean, I am that person, but I'm not just saying that. But the point being is that a community has to be built, and it takes the effort of the individuals involved in it to come together and build and shape that community into something that works for them.

And then the fourth big takeaway from the observations is that users can make informed decisions and that their choices do matter. This became most obvious as the tide started to shift against using meta and its related products like Instagram and Facebook as An alternative to TikTok. There's a phrase that goes around that our audience may be aware of, that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

That in that system, someone somewhere is getting the short end of the stick. And while that's true, there's often an element or undercurrent of resignation, of engineered helplessness. Designed to get somebody asking, if every choice I make is wrong, if there is no ethical choice, then what does my choice matter?

But as I said earlier, that choice is critical because for users and for creators who are consumers of platforms, the choice of which platform to use really matters. On January 7th, when Meta announced that they'd no longer be using third party fact checkers, or an earlier announcement where they said that they'd be using AI agents within the stream so that your audience may no longer be an audience, one begins to wonder why even use those products at all.

A user or creator would have to ask themselves, does continuing to use this product legitimize those practices? This is a question that a number of users and creators started asking themselves when it came to X slash Twitter, and that led to the mass migration to Blue Sky as they finally realized that their presence, especially that of the journalists and academics, legitimized Twitter as a platform.

I say, finally, as it seemed like a patently obvious outcome with the change in ownership in 2022, and I'd be standing here like John McClane shouting out the window yelling, Welcome to the party, pal, but We all come to these things in our time. The point is, is once you make that realization, is you need to take action.

Long term, who's to say that blue sky was the right choice, but right now it seems to be a safer choice, even though it might just be a big pot of honey that one day will become commodified once the resource has been sufficiently built out and another wave of migration will take place, but Such is the way of life on the internet.

The last comment we'll make is the idea of the root causes of the ban. As we noted earlier, there was a lot of speculation about what those causes were, but most of it just boils down to two words, and those two words are market power. Market power is the ability of a firm to set the price of its good above the marginal cost.

And in this case, it's helpful to remember what the product of a social media company is. They sell audiences to advertisers. This includes you, and me, and Everybody else and everything that's done on those platforms, which is then packaged up and sold off to advertisers looking for those specific demographics.

In order to maintain that market power, you need to be able to manipulate either the supply or the demand. And for social media companies and other high tech firms, that works a little bit differently, because an innovation can come along and disrupt the market that they've gathered. For example, it doesn't matter if you're the best film camera company in the world, if everybody shifts to digital cameras and nobody's taking pictures anymore.

So for firms that obtain that monopoly position that allows them to exert market power, they'll often do a lot to retain that market power and maintain the ability to charge what they want. And I say monopoly, but it's often usually only one or two firms within any given high tech segment. Think about Microsoft versus Apple on the desktop or.

Android versus iOS on your smartphones. Regardless of whether it's a monopoly or a duopoly, they don't want competition. It messes with their vibe. And their vibe is the ability to extract exorbitant profits. Now, I'm drawing this from Mordecai Kurtz's The Market Power of Technology, published in 2023.

Kurtz is a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford, and he's been doing this for a long time. The book is pretty dense and technical, but it's been written with an eye to a lay audience, and there's sections of it that are very readable and include some real solutions as well. We reviewed it in a newsletter a few months back, and as I said, it was written in 2023, but what we're seeing with the TikTok ban reads like a case study.

It's like chapter and verse of the observations that Mordecai Kurtz made in his book about market power and how it's exerted in high tech firms. This is why something like TikTok, whose technologies presented a threat to the dominance that Meta had on its social media properties, was something that had to be dealt with from a lobbying perspective.

And I say technologies here because it's an assemblage of technologies. It isn't just the algorithm, which seems to draw a lot of the interest, but it's also the app and the associated tools, the way it functions, the way it's designed to allow users to create. All these things come together to provide a compelling alternative to met as products that are offered.

And it is in much the same way that all these observations come together to give us a picture of what happens during the incipient diaspora, the root causes as well as some of the effects that take place. As we asked earlier, when we look at an incipient diaspora, is it about the waiting or the recovery?

And in this case, What happens next?

Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Implausipod. We're happy to start 2025 with you, and we've got some new episodes coming out to you soon. We've been preparing them for a while, so I've been looking forward to sharing them with you. I'm your host, Dr. Implausible. You can reach me at drimplausible at implausipod.

com, and as mentioned, you can also find the show archives and all our previous shows at implausipod. com as well. I'm responsible for all elements of the show, including research, writing, mixing, mastering, and music, and the show is licensed under Creative Commons 4. 0 share alike license. No AI is used in the production of this show, though I think there's a machine learning algorithm in the transcription software that I use.

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