I watched a friend’s 20-something daughter ask several relatives for money and favors at a party. She has a college degree but decided she didn’t want to become a dental hygienist after all because school was “too hard,” so she hasn’t done shit in over six months and has been sponging off her parents who are too much of a pussy to call her out. My kid said her buddy learned that most people have a hard time saying “no” and that asking people for things usually get people whatever they wanted.
And guess where she learned that bullshit?
TikTok has become America’s co-parent—except it doesn’t pay child support, it doesn’t follow bedtime rules, and it definitely doesn’t give a shit if your kid can read above a 4th-grade level.
And spare me the “just monitor your children” lecture. You can’t. Go ahead and try parental controls, “check their phone,” and do the whole Responsible Adult Theater routine… and your kid will still see everything you tried to hide, and you will have absolutely zero fucking clue what they saw.
The product isn’t the videos. The product is your child’s attention span—harvested, shaped, and sold back to them on an infinite loop. And America’s best friend, China, figure out exactly how to completely nuke two future generations of Americans into a lifetime of stupidity without firing a single shot.
Sound familiar? Sun Tzu said the highest form of warfare is winning without fighting. Congratulations: we’ve managed to lose without even noticing. (Yes, we've discussed this before on this blog.)
Back when media had adults in the room
In the old days, the cultural pipeline had at least some guardrails:
* TV shows were chained to advertisers. If a network got too out of hand, sponsors yanked money, and the problem fixed itself. But they never got there. Remember “censors?”
* Newspapers and magazines had editors who could be fired and publishers who could be sued. Facts were checked. Lies were punished punitively.
* And the government, you know, that elected entity that used to look out for its citizens and stop shit like this, hovered around the edges with rules and pressure points.
Kids couldn’t usually stray far from teachings of parents, schools, neighborhood kids, and churches. And if they did, Mom and Dad knew exactly who to rip into to straighten things out.
If a kid did somehow get corrupted, it was usually by the classic villain: that one shady student at school who whispered something awful on the playground. But even that kid had limits. He didn’t have an algorithm. He didn’t have 170 million users. He didn’t have a dopamine lab optimizing his delivery schedule.
Now? The babysitter is the battlefield.
These social networks are what happens when you take child development and hand it to a machine that’s aggressively optimized to keep someone watching—not learning, not thriving, not sleeping, not becoming a functional adult.
One minute it’s “life hacks,” the next it’s hypersexualized content, doom spirals, conspiracy sludge, or whatever new “challenge” is currently trying to turn emergency rooms into influencer studios. The feed doesn’t need your permission. It doesn’t need your kid to search for it. It just delivers as much bullshit as your idiot child will digest.
Parents are playing checkers. The algorithm is playing behavioral chess blindfolded with two queens. You can’t beat it.
And here’s the part that should make you sit up:
We pointed out before that China’s version of TikTok (Douyin) is widely described as pushing educational/“productive” content—while the export version feeds us the digital equivalent of sugar and energy drinks.
So, who’s the sucker?
Just to recap the vibe:
* China’s kids: “science, math, achievement, national pride.”
* Our kids: “watch me point at floating text for 8 hours.”
Raising your enemy’s children in a manner that destroys their capabilities is a textbook Sun Tzu strategy. And it’s working. My buddy’s daughter has become a lazy, brainless mooch.
“But it’s just entertainment!”
Right. And heroin is just for “relaxing.”
Remember that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, was based in China—where state access to data is… let’s call it “not optional.” Whether you think that’s exaggeration or understatement, the strategic anxiety is the same: we’re letting a foreign-made influence machine set the emotional tone and attention habits of a generation.
President Orange has now converted this money machine into a business that American oligarchs can profit from, but the shit won’t change. Non-educational, potentially harmful social media bullshit will still raise American kids.
Not because parents don’t care. But because no parent can out-moderate an algorithm that never sleeps.
And that, my friends, is the most Art-of-War thing imaginable: no tanks, no bombs, no bullets—just a glowing rectangle quietly turning a superpower into a nation of exhausted goldfish.
