politics

this "rebel" culture thing is weirdly associated with patriotic socialism and maga communism.

Lol yeah, I understand that. The people moving to RedNote are not MAGA Communists. They're typical average Americans. Typical average Americans have that dog in them because it's a passive expression of the culture. That's why these MAGA Communists latch onto the "rebel" archetype, it's already part of the culture. That's why, win or loose, collage campuses get trashed when their most profitable sports team plays in a high-profile game, rebellion lives at the heart of every American, even if their form of rebellion doesn't make any fucking sense. In fact, Eddy and his dogshit posse are on RedNote doing their typical ACP nonsense. They showed up late because they're tailing behind. They're not building "rebel" culture, they're attempting to high jack it.

why didn't people rebel when Netflix banned password sharing? [...] Or during the whole Gamestop/RobinHood stock thing?

What were they going to do here, the hard labor of figuring out how to torrent TV shows after almost 20 years of not doing it? That ship has sailed. The typical user isn't going to deal with the data caps on their cable internet service. They don't want to get a letter in the mail telling them to piss off with the downloads. They don't want to deal with attempting to store these files, or make the viewing experience convenient. It's not even a comparable example. Corporations make shit choices all the time, and no one blinks an eye. They piss and moan and they keep on paying. This is always true. People didn't lose the service, it just got more expensive, and people had to choose to ditch it or not. Also, that GameStop stuff, in terms of scale, is dwarfed by the number of users that will be impacted by TikTok just going poof. It also wasn't some grassroots movement, it was all part of a scheme to suck cash out of uninformed investors wrapped up in the "rebellion" aesthetic because again, Americans have that dog in them, rebellion resonates with them, and often they're not critical of what the act of rebellion even is.

There was a mass exodus of users from Etsy to TikTok a few years ago because Etsy changed its rules and was flooded with drop shippers that were outcompeting all the bespoke crafts people on the platform. Those people found better business on TikTok thanks to its shop feature, and the fact that they could build a following through showing the stuff they make via the timeline. You then had a whole population of leftists\activists\organizers that existed on the platform nearly undisturbed, who, if you are to believe them, did organizing that benefited their causes, communities, and themselves. Then, least not forget, all the right wing chuds who also used the app, for all the same reasons as the left and liberal users. The result of the federal government, and now the supreme court, effectively playing Nanny and telling these millions of users that they're banning TikTok, has people naturally angry at the feds thinking they know better than the average American. The impression the media and even TikTok's own lawyers have given the users of TikTok is that on Sunday, the app will be gone, and all the videos they had will be gone with it. I've seen users pleading with others to download their content because TikTok is going to purge all the files, true or not, that's what they think is happening.

This "rebel" culture extends all the way to the family dynamic, with countless stories and media about young people rejecting the demands of their parents in favor of going their own way. Often, as I mentioned in my previous comment, the depiction of this rebellion is one where the "rebels" in question don't just do what they're told not to, they attempt to do an extreme or more intense version of what they're told not to do, as a "fuck you" to those they're rebelling against. This notion of "Youth Rebellion" should resonate with the majority of TikTok creators, since the majority of TikTok creators are aged 18 to 24.

One of the first videos I saw after RedNote started gaining steam was someone calling it their "Boston Tea Party" moment, but instead of tea in the river, it was data in the hands of a social media app clearly controlled by China. This is what I mean by "rebel" culture. The Boston Tea Party, as historical act of rebellion against a tyrannical government, is pervasive and crosses the narrow American political spectrum. It's instigator, Samuel Adams, lives on as a corporate beer company In Boston. Every time someone has a beer from Sam Adams, they're participating in latent rebel culture. It doesn't matter to them that Sam Adams and the like were a burgeoning capitalist ruling class, the same kinds of people that lord over them today. History is never framed that way. To most Americans, it was an act of defiance against tyranny, and many of them couldn't tell you what form that tyranny took.

So I think it is an apt framing. Here you have a wildly unpopular Federal Government, reaching into the everyday lives and business dealings of its citizens, to enrich itself and its corporate allies, through the forced appropriation of a platform its citizens use for communication and trade. The app that they have used to build a business, organize their communities, keep in touch with their distant friends and relatives, is under threat by the "tyrannical" Federal Government. The young man in the video, who called it their "Boston Tea Party" moment, wasn't trying to invoke images of a national uprising, but instead invoking that feeling of "Fuck you" and "Just watch me". Now, it would appear that this Federal Government is looking to band-aid the issue, with Biden stating he won't enforce the rule, to Trump telling the courts to delay until he's in office so he can "save" the app. This is fuckery of their own doing, and now they're trying to unfuck it. A ball of shit set in motion in trumps first term is now resulting in everyday Americans offshoring to an app called Little Red Book out of spite and having a cultural exchange with the people they're told they should fear.

The fact that this bill, with bipartisan support, from representatives who actively use the platform to organize their own campaigns, was passed with such ease and efficiency, and was upheld as constitutional by the corrupt supreme court, just leaves the entry playbook out in the open. People who don't use TikTok, they're not invested in this situation, but those that do, even just those who use it for entertainment, have just received a massive shot in the arm of politics in action. They're witnessing what the Federal Government is capable of doing when they decide to cooperate. It's not passive, like when the Federal Government just can't seem to get it together on abortion rights. People defend the lack of action on that issue because "republicans keep getting in the way". Here, however, this is clear and deliberate action and mobilization of political forces to take away the treat machine.

And because of how clear, and deliberate, this action appears, people are tapping into that rebel spirit woven into American culture, and summoning it for a very silly form of disobedience.