TikTok Oracle Deal: The Great Digital Partition Between Empires

Oracle: The Private Mask of the Deep State

Larry Ellison has never been particularly adept at concealing the parasitic nature of his fortune, built not through the innovation that Silicon Valley mythology celebrates with religious devotion, but through the systematic capacity to transform every national security crisis into an opportunity to consolidate technological monopolies financed with public money and protected by regulations he himself helped write through decades of strategic lobbying and political donations distributed with the precision of someone who perfectly understands that in America democracy is a market where legislators are purchased like databases, and that the return on political investment exceeds any yield obtainable through simple software sales.

Oracle takes its name from a CIA project, Project Oracle, on which Ellison worked in nineteen seventy-seven before founding his own company together with colleagues Robert Miner and Ed Oates, transforming a fifty-thousand-dollar government contract into an empire worth over five hundred billion in capitalization that would never have existed without the continuous flow of federal, state, and local contracts that in the last twenty-five years has generated billions of dollars annually in revenue, making Oracle not a technology company that occasionally works for the government but essentially an intelligence contractor that sells its services to the private sector when time permits. In two thousand two, a quarter of Oracle’s revenue – two point five billion dollars – came directly from government contracts, and this percentage has never significantly decreased, it has simply become more opaque as the company learned to subcontract through other contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, creating that network of relationships that allows the military-industrial-digital complex to operate without having to publicly account for every single transaction.

In two thousand one, a few months after September eleventh, Oracle founded the Information Assurance Center, entrusting its direction to David Carney, who had just concluded thirty-two years of CIA career where he had reached the third hierarchical position, and Carney explained with disarming frankness how the system works: before September eleventh it was necessary to “hype the threat and the problem” to convince public and private leaders to pay attention, but after the attacks “now they clamor for it,” transforming collective trauma into a flourishing market where fear generates profits and profits finance the expansion of surveillance infrastructures that are then justified by citing the same fear that generated them, in a self-referential cycle where the threat and the solution are produced by the same industry that benefits from the existence of both.

Ellison has always publicly advocated the necessity of large national databases, proposing after September eleventh the implementation of a national digital identity card that would centralize the personal information of every American citizen in systems managed, presumably, by companies like his own, demonstrating that entrepreneurial vision which consists of creating the problem that only one’s own products can solve, and convincing the state to make the purchase of such products mandatory in the name of collective security. On Oracle’s board of directors sits Leon Panetta, former CIA director, and according to several sources Ellison personally invited Benjamin Netanyahu to join the board, creating that commingling of Israeli, American, and corporate geopolitical interests that defines the true nature of the “Atlantic community” where alliances are measured in surveillance contracts and personal friendships between billionaires and prime ministers determine which nations will have privileged access to critical digital infrastructures.

When Oracle obtained in two thousand twenty-five the role of “trusted security partner” for TikTok USA, with the task of managing data, content moderation, software security, and compliance with national security requirements, the mainstream press presented the news as a victory of democracy over Chinese digital totalitarianism, systematically ignoring that Oracle had already been hosting American TikTok users’ data since two thousand twenty-two through “Project Texas” – a one point five billion dollar project that should have guaranteed the separation of American data from Chinese control but evidently wasn’t enough to placate Congress’s fears, or perhaps worked perfectly in its true purpose which was to make TikTok dependent on Oracle’s cloud infrastructure, creating that condition of technological lock-in where changing providers becomes economically prohibitive and strategically impossible. Oracle earns between four hundred eighty and eight hundred million dollars annually from the TikTok contract alone, and the new agreement will only consolidate this rent by transforming a commercial relationship into a state-guaranteed monopoly, where the “trusted partner” becomes the only possible partner because no one else can take over without rebuilding from scratch an infrastructure that Oracle has custom-built to be irreplaceable.

The most extraordinary thing about the entire affair is that no one, not even among the most bitter critics of the agreement, seems to ask the fundamental question: how can a company born from a CIA project, nurtured for decades with intelligence contracts, managed by former intelligence officials, be considered a solution to the problem of foreign surveillance? The answer, naturally, is that the problem has never been surveillance itself, but only who controls it and who benefits from it. Washington doesn’t want to protect American citizens from data collection, it simply wants that collection to occur through channels that American intelligence can monitor, penetrate, and use when necessary, and Oracle represents the perfect incarnation of this model where the distinction between public and private is a fiction maintained only for public relations reasons, while in operational reality the state and the corporation function as parts of a single predatory organism.

The Digital Silk Road: Colonialism with Chinese Characteristics

While the West amuses itself with narratives about the “Chinese threat” that reduce geopolitical conflict to questions of individual privacy and personal data protection, Beijing has built over the last ten years an infrastructure of global control that makes nineteenth-century European colonialism seem like a dilettantish operation for lack of adequate technology, because the Digital Silk Road doesn’t conquer territories through military force but through technological dependence, selling developing countries the illusion of digital progress while installing the invisible chains of surveillance and debt, transforming sovereign nations into digital vassals who will discover too late that they’ve exchanged their informational autonomy for 5G infrastructures provided by Huawei, “safe city” systems that transform metropolises into urban panopticons, and e-commerce platforms that centralize in Chinese servers every economic transaction of their citizens.

The Digital Silk Road, announced in two thousand fifteen as a component of the broader Belt and Road Initiative, has already signed cooperation agreements with at least sixteen nations, but the real number is probably much higher because many of these contracts remain undeclared, protected by that opacity that characterizes agreements between authoritarian states and Global South governments where corruption is systemic and transparency a luxury no one can afford. China offers economic alternatives to Western technologies – 5G networks, fiber optic cables, data centers, artificial intelligence systems, cloud computing, mobile payment platforms, surveillance technologies – and does so through concessional loans issued by the China Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank of China that allow nations like Myanmar, Pakistan, Kenya, Ethiopia to access infrastructures they couldn’t otherwise afford, creating that economic dependence that then transforms into political dependence when the debtor country discovers that renegotiating the loan’s terms requires “cooperation” on diplomatic questions that initially seemed completely unrelated to the original technological agreement.

In two thousand eighteen Myanmar signed an agreement for the rapid expansion of 5G services through Chinese loans to purchase equipment from Chinese companies, and the mediocre quality of the provided technology becomes irrelevant when the alternative is having no infrastructure at all, while the real stake is the strategic control Beijing obtains over a country that represents a critical link between South and Southeast Asia along the commercial routes that China intends to dominate. American sanctions against Huawei, begun in two thousand twelve and intensified in two thousand nineteen with the ban on semiconductor technology transfer, should have strangled the Chinese company but instead accelerated the development of domestic production capacities, forcing Huawei to replace thirteen thousand components and redesign over four thousand circuit boards, a painful process that however made China less dependent on the global supply chain controlled by the West, culminating in two thousand twenty-three with the production of the first 5G smartphone with entirely Chinese chips, a development that shocked Western analysts convinced that Beijing was years behind in semiconductor technology.

The Chinese model of digital expansion combines infrastructural investments with the systematic export of surveillance technologies that eighty countries have already adopted, often within “smart city” projects that promise urban efficiency and public security but that actually install facial recognition systems, social media monitoring, movement tracking through interconnected camera networks, centralization of personal data in databases accessible to authorities without the legal protections that theoretically exist in Western democracies but that in practice are systematically circumvented there too. The difference is that authoritarian regimes of the Global South don’t even bother maintaining the appearance of privacy as a fundamental right, and China provides them the tools to implement that model of social control that Beijing has perfected internally through the social credit system, where every citizen is constantly evaluated through algorithms that aggregate online and offline behaviors to determine access to services, job opportunities, ability to travel, in a digital dystopia that governments present as meritocratic while it’s simply a method to make repression automated and therefore more efficient.

Chinese rhetoric about “cyber sovereignty” and “information security” serves to legitimize a model of fragmented internet where each nation maintains control over data flows within its own borders, a principle that Beijing actively promotes through international forums like the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen and through United Nations working groups on cyber governance, seeking to create diplomatic alliances with countries that share the interest in controlling the information their citizens can access. This model of “sovereign internet” is the antithesis of the American vision of a global and open internet, but the truth is that both visions are hypocritical: the United States wants an open internet only as long as they control the dominant infrastructures and platforms, and China wants fragmentation only to protect its internal censorship model while projecting power through its own platforms abroad, as TikTok perfectly demonstrates, operating with completely different rules in China (where it’s called Douyin and is heavily censored) compared to the rest of the world where it can disseminate any content as long as it doesn’t criticize Beijing.

Documents leaked in February two thousand twenty-four from I-Soon, a Chinese government contractor based in Shanghai, revealed details about hacking campaigns directed against the critical infrastructures of Digital Silk Road partner countries, demonstrating that the same China that sells information security is simultaneously compromising the systems it installs, maintaining backdoors and privileged access that allow Beijing to monitor, manipulate, or sabotage the digital networks of nations that believe they’re building their own technological sovereignty when in reality they’re simply changing colonial masters. The Belt and Road Initiative as a whole is accused of practicing “debt-trap diplomacy” where unsustainable loans are deliberately granted to then appropriate strategic assets when the debtor country inevitably fails to repay, and while Beijing denies these accusations claiming to bring development and opportunity, even African leaders have admitted that contract terms are often “exploitative and awkward,” in the words of Tanzanian President John Magufuli before it became politically inopportune to publicly criticize the continent’s main foreign investor.

Wang Huning and the Weapon of Decadence

There exists a man whom few know outside China but whose thought has shaped Beijing’s geopolitical strategy for the last thirty years with an ideological coherence that would be admirable if it weren’t so profoundly cynical, and this man is Wang Huning, the principal ideologue of the Chinese Communist Party who has been advisor to three consecutive presidents – Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping – and whom the Chinese call “guoshi,” teacher of the nation, for his role in defining the “core socialist values” that Xi has implemented with increasing ruthlessness, transforming China into a totalitarian surveillance state justified by the necessity of preventing the cultural decadence that Wang diagnosed as the West’s terminal illness during his journey to the United States in nineteen eighty-eight.

Wang spent six months traveling through America, observing with anthropological eye a society that simultaneously fascinated and disgusted him, and recorded his observations in the book “America Against America” published in nineteen ninety-one, a text that has become fundamental for understanding how the Chinese Communist Party interprets its existential competition with the West. The book’s central thesis is devastating in its simplicity: America is a paradox composed of irresolvable contradictions where the two primary values – freedom and equality – mutually exclude each other, where the presence of many different cultures means the absence of a unifying culture, and where a market-driven society has produced extraordinary material wealth and abyssal spiritual poverty, generating atomized citizens who possess every technological comfort but have lost any sense of collective belonging, any “core values” that could give meaning to their existences beyond the infinite accumulation of consumer goods that promise happiness but deliver only the anxious void of permanently unsatisfied desire.

Wang writes that “human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become targets of commodification,” and that “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to numerous serious social problems” that in turn increase pressure on the political and administrative system to the breaking point. Western capitalism devours every aspect of American culture, including the traditions that bind it together as a nation, leading to the atomization and polarization that Wang had already diagnosed in nineteen eighty-eight when cell phones barely existed and TikTok was unthinkable. “It is not the people who master the technology,” Wang writes, “but the technology that masters the people,” and every new microchip, every television, every automobile serves only to further distract and sedate Americans, dragging them into an abyss where purposeless technological progress becomes the engine of their own destruction.

According to Aristotle, Wang explains, citing the classics with the erudition of someone who has studied Western philosophy to better refute it, “the family is the cell of society,” but in late twentieth-century America this cell has “disintegrated” and “the real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” as implied by the free market policies of the Reagan era. The inevitable result is balkanized, Lebanon-style conflict between incompatible special interest groups fighting in a circular culture war without possible end, where university education teaches reading every text through identity prisms of race, sexuality, and gender while leaving students largely ignorant of their nation’s history and culture, and where infinite cultural relativism implies that Western civilization is nothing special, undermining from within the ideological foundations that could still hold together a society in advanced state of moral decomposition. “When ideas end,” Wang observes, “so do the social institutions and ways of behaving guided by such ideas… The existence and functioning of any social system can never be validated by the letter of the law alone; it is first and foremost a matter of people believing in these fundamental values and being guided by them in the way they behave. If the value system collapses, how can the social system be maintained?”

The solution Wang proposes in his nineteen eighty-eight essay “The Structure of China’s Changing Political Culture” is neo-authoritarianism: the only way for a nation to avoid American problems is to instill “core values” – a national consensus of beliefs and principles rooted in the traditions of the past and directed toward a clear goal in the future. This however requires the preventive elimination of nihilism and decadence, a cultural cleansing campaign that Xi Jinping has implemented with ideological zeal by banning Chinese minors from playing video games for more than three hours weekly (the “spiritual opium”), censoring LGBT groups, tightening abortion restrictions, disappearing celebrities like Zhao Wei, and launching crusades against “effeminate stars” and “decadent Western culture” to ensure that “the new generation doesn’t lose its toughness and virility so that we won’t fall… just like the Soviet Union fell,” in the words of a nationalist article promoted through state media.

TikTok’s creator, Zhang Yiming, originally wanted content on TikTok and its Chinese version Douyin to be determined purely by popularity, a meritocratic approach where the algorithm amplifies what users want to see regardless of its educational or moral value. But after Chinese authorities implemented Wang’s ideological directives, Douyin was transformed into something completely different: the most popular contents are no longer viral dance videos and frivolous entertainment but educational videos about science, history, culture, patriotism, and “beautiful scenery of the country,” with forty-minute daily limits and regular pauses telling users to “put down the phone,” “go to bed,” and “work hard tomorrow” at school, transforming the phone into a small electronic mother-simulator that disciplines and educates instead of entertaining and corrupting.

And here comes the detail that makes the entire TikTok affair so perfectly emblematic of contemporary imperial competition: while China heavily censors the domestic version of the platform to protect its youth from digital decadence, the international version – the one that one hundred seventy million Americans use obsessively – is left free to show any content except mentions of Falun Gong or Tiananmen Square, allowing “tittytainment” and “effeminate men” to proliferate without restrictions, deliberately exporting toward the West that same cultural disease that Beijing considers an existential threat when it appears on its own territory. Is it poetic justice for the original Silk Road, where Western powers preached Christian values while trafficking chemical opium into China? Is it the Taoist strategy of letting the enemy self-destruct while you strengthen internally? Or is it simply the demonstration that both empires perfectly understand technology’s destructive power and deliberately choose who must suffer its most devastating effects, in an undeclared cultural war where TikTok is the vector of a disease China has developed immunity to but the West remains vulnerable because liberal capitalism cannot resist the logic of supply and demand, and if consumers want instant dopamine and effortless gratification, the market will always find increasingly efficient ways to provide it until final cognitive collapse?

Wang refuses to speak with foreigners or give interviews, but his theoretical work has shaped every aspect of Xi’s cultural policy, from the emphasis on “core socialist values” to the “profound transformation” of Chinese society to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for effeminate stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.” The problem, naturally, is not China, but us. “America Against America.” If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is entirely ours. After all, TikTok has dominated our culture as a result of free market forces – the very thing we live by. And Wang is right that the West controlled by everyone means it’s controlled by no one, and without brakes or steering wheel we’re at the market’s mercy, driving toward the precipice while the algorithm tells us it’s the direction we freely chose.

Silicon Valley: The Pentagon’s Digital Arm

The official narrative paints Silicon Valley as the triumph of American entrepreneurship, where young visionaries build technological empires starting from garages through a combination of individual genius, hard work, and that spirit of innovation that would distinguish Western democratic capitalism from the statist and bureaucratic systems of the rest of the world, but the archaeology of big tech reveals a completely different story where births occur in military laboratories, financing comes from intelligence agencies, and the distinction between public and private sector is a fiction maintained for public relations reasons while in operational reality the major tech companies are essentially Pentagon contractors that sell commercial services in their spare time, when they’re not busy building mass surveillance infrastructures or artificial intelligence systems that make drones more lethal in their work of assassinating people in countries with which the United States is not formally at war.

The internet itself was created by DARPA in the seventies when the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers, and after about a decade passed operations to the National Science Foundation which proliferated the network through thousands of universities and then to the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web that everyone today takes for granted as a neutral space of freedom and information when in reality it has always been a military project that was released to the public only after the basic infrastructure had already been built according to military specifications. By the mid-nineties, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of projects to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector and the intelligence community, financing these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program managed for the CIA and NSA.

Google takes its name from a play on “googol” which indicates the number one followed by one hundred zeros, but its true origins lie in the Massive Digital Data Systems program (MDDS), an intelligence community initiative managed by MITRE Corporation, a defense contractor, on behalf of NSA, CIA, and other agencies, that directly financed Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s research at Stanford in an attempt to develop capabilities to identify “birds of a feather” – just as geese fly together forming large Vs or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that groups of like-minded humans would move together online, and they wanted the technology to identify, track, and if necessary neutralize them. Brin regularly reported the project’s progress not to his academic supervisors but to Dr. Rick Steinheiser of the CIA and Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham who worked for MITRE, and in the book “Web Data Mining and Applications in Business Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism” published in two thousand three, Thuraisingham writes that she and Steinheiser “began discussions with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency on applying data-mining for counter-terrorism purposes,” an idea resulting directly from the MDDS program that partially funded Google, demonstrating that the same senior CIA officials and CIA-NSA contractors involved in providing seed funding for Google were simultaneously contemplating the role of data-mining for national security purposes.

In two thousand three, Google began customizing its search engine under special contract with the CIA for its Intelink Management Office which oversaw top-secret, secret, and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other intelligence community agencies. In two thousand four Google bought Keyhole, a satellite mapping company that had originally been funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital fund founded in nineteen ninety-nine specifically to “identify, adapt and deliver innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the CIA and broader US Intelligence Community,” investing in startups developing technologies advantageous for spying operations. Using Keyhole, Google developed the advanced satellite mapping software behind Google Earth, and in two thousand five In-Q-Tel sold two point two million dollars of Google stock, realizing substantial profit from an investment that had helped launch.

Analysis of the federal contracting database maintained by the US government, combined with information obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, reveals that Google has conducted brisk business selling Google Search, Google Earth, and Google Enterprise to practically every major military and intelligence agency: navy, army, air force, Coast Guard, DARPA, NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, NGA, and State Department, sometimes selling directly to the government but more often working with established contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), an intelligence mega-contractor based in California that has so many former NSA employees working for it that in the business it’s known as “NSA West.” In two thousand eight Google won a contract to run the servers and search technology that powered the CIA’s Intellipedia, an intelligence database modeled after Wikipedia and collaboratively edited by NSA, CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies. In two thousand ten Google won an exclusive no-bid contract worth twenty-seven million dollars to provide NGA with “geospatial visualization services,” effectively making the internet giant the “eyes” of America’s defense and intelligence apparatus.

According to some calculations, seventy-seven percent of all government contracts awarded to Google since its inception were related to the War on Terror, a revenue stream that played a critical role in transforming the company from small startup literally operating from a garage into global behemoth, demonstrating that the Silicon Valley model is not that of spontaneous innovation attracting private investment based on technological merit, but rather a system where the government finances, incubates, and sustains companies developing technologies useful for national security, and then these companies are “privatized” while maintaining permanent government contracts and privileged access to markets that no true competitor can penetrate because they lack the political connections necessary to obtain security clearance and approvals to handle sensitive data. Google’s Project Maven used artificial intelligence to make drone strikes more lethal, and only after massive employee protests did Google formally decline to renew that contract, but the reputational damage was minimal and contracts with the Pentagon and intelligence continue through less publicly visible channels.

There exists a mephitic revolving door between Google and US government defense, security, and intelligence agencies, with former officials moving fluidly between public and private positions, bringing with them the relationships and clearances that allow Google to maintain privileged access to contract opportunities that companies without these connections couldn’t even know exist. Facebook – which now calls itself Meta in one of those rebrandings that primarily serve to bury embarrassing history under a new logo – received initial financing linked to DARPA programs, specifically through investors connected to intelligence networks who shared the same goals of data collection and behavioral analysis on massive scale, transforming what is presented as a social network for connecting friends into a voluntary surveillance machine where people spontaneously provide personal data, photographs, locations, social relationships, political opinions, consumption preferences, creating psychological profiles so detailed that intelligence agencies of the sixties would have considered science fiction.

Amazon Web Services, Amazon’s cloud division that generates most of the company’s profits, hosts NSA data and has multi-billion dollar contracts with the CIA, building the physical infrastructure where information collected through mass surveillance programs that Edward Snowden revealed in two thousand thirteen is stored, with the PRISM program that involved data collection from major tech companies including Google, demonstrating that the relationship between Silicon Valley and the surveillance state was not conspiracy theorists’ paranoia but documented operational reality where companies publicly preaching privacy and digital rights were simultaneously providing backend access to servers where millions of American citizens’ and billions of people around the world’s private communications resided. Palantir, the analytics company founded by Peter Thiel with direct investments from In-Q-Tel, has built its business model entirely around government contracts for intelligence analysis and anti-terrorism operations, selling software that aggregates data from multiple sources to create comprehensive profiles of targets that can be individuals suspected of terrorism or entire populations to monitor.

The CLOUD Act passed in two thousand eighteen imposes US jurisdiction on data anywhere in the world if managed by American companies, forcing Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others to hand over information to US courts even when the data physically resides on servers in Europe or Asia, systematically violating the privacy laws of sovereign countries and demonstrating that for Washington sovereignty applies only when it’s convenient, while the data of non-American citizens is essentially property of US jurisdiction simply because it transits through infrastructures controlled by American corporations. The European Union attempted to resist with GDPR, a data protection regulation that imposed more stringent standards, but implementation was systematically sabotaged through intensive lobbying and veiled threats linking GDPR compliance with access to American markets and partnerships in cybersecurity, forcing NATO vassal countries to accept American “sovereign” clouds as a condition for remaining in the Atlantic alliance.

The narrative of “technological capitalism” as an engine of free innovation is warfare by other means, with shareholders instead of generals but the same strategic objectives: control, extraction, dominance. American technology companies are not private alternatives to the state but extensions of the state operating with greater flexibility because they’re not bound by democratic processes or parliamentary oversight, allowing the military-industrial-digital complex to project global power through platforms that no state could openly build without provoking diplomatic resistance and economic boycotts. When Oracle obtains control of TikTok USA, we’re not witnessing the victory of the private sector over Chinese state control, but simply the transfer of a strategic asset from one empire to another, with users who remain equally commodified, equally surveilled, equally powerless in the face of systems that treat them as data points to extract rather than as citizens with rights to protect.

The Algorithm: The Inalienable Heart of Power

The most revealing aspect of the entire TikTok agreement is what doesn’t change: the algorithm, the software that determines which contents are shown to which users and when, remains ByteDance property, licensed to the new American entity but not ceded, not sold, not transferred in any way that would allow the United States to truly understand its internal functioning or modify it according to their own strategic interests. Oracle will be able to monitor the algorithm, verify it’s not doing explicitly prohibited things, even retrain it on exclusively American data, but won’t be able to rewrite it from scratch, won’t be able to access the source code, won’t be able to replicate it independently, creating a paradoxical situation where Washington declares formal victory on ownership while the technological “beating heart” of the application remains exactly where Beijing wants it to remain: under Chinese control, protected by that red line that Xi Jinping has publicly drawn and that no American administration can cross without collapsing the entire agreement.

This compromise reveals with brutal clarity that what was at stake was never truly the security of American users’ personal data, because if that were the problem then the algorithm would be irrelevant – it would suffice to ensure that data resides on American servers managed by American companies subject to American jurisdiction, and this problem had already been solved with Project Texas since two thousand twenty-two. The real problem is control over the mechanisms of collective attention manipulation, the capacity to determine which ideas, which narratives, which emotions are amplified and which suppressed through a system that processes twenty billion interactions daily and continuously learns how to capture and maintain the attention of one hundred seventy million Americans who spend an average of fifty-two minutes daily on the application, fifty-two minutes during which they’re exposed to contents selected not by human editors with identifiable biases but by a machine learning system whose biases are encoded in layers of neural networks that not even its creators fully understand.

A recommendation algorithm is not a neutral tool that simply shows people what they want to see, but an active system of desire formation that learns which stimuli generate maximum engagement and then obsessively reproduces them, creating feedback loops where emotionally intense contents – anger, outrage, fear, sexual excitement, cruel humor – obtain algorithmic preference over informational or educational contents because they generate higher click-through rates, more frequent shares, longer viewing times. TikTok’s algorithm is particularly effective at this task because it works with short videos that can be consumed and discarded quickly, allowing a much higher iteration speed compared to platforms based on longer contents, and because its interface deliberately eliminates the need for conscious choice – you don’t have to search for contents, you don’t have to decide what to watch next, you simply scroll and the algorithm feeds you an infinite personalized stream that becomes progressively more effective at retaining you as it learns from your reactions.

This architecture of addiction is not an unwanted side effect but the core business model: TikTok doesn’t sell products, it sells attention, and the more attention it can capture the more advertising it can insert, the more data it can extract, the more value it can generate for its shareholders. ByteDance itself is not a monolith – almost forty percent of ownership is held by American venture capital including General Atlantic, Susquehanna International, Sequoia, and this mixed ownership structure allows Trump to declare that the agreement represents “majority USA” in terms of invested capital, a creative mathematics that counts investors’ dollars but ignores that operational control remains with Chinese management that answers to the Chinese Communist Party that can impose any decision it wants through information security and intelligence laws requiring complete adherence by Chinese companies to government orders for data, regardless of where that data physically resides or who formally controls it.

The idea that a change in formal ownership can heal American social polarization is illusory because it presumes that TikTok creates division through deliberate algorithmic manipulation to promote divisive content, when in reality a machine learning algorithm simply does what it’s optimized for: maximize engagement, and if society is divided and desperate then the content that generates maximum engagement will inevitably be content that reproduces and amplifies that division and desperation because hatred generates clicks, anger generates shares, polarization generates viewing time. The algorithm has no political bias in the conventional sense – it doesn’t prefer conservatives or progressives, doesn’t promote specific agenda – it only has bias toward contents that generate strong emotional reactions, and in an already fractured society this inevitably means amplification of contents that reinforce existing divisions, algorithmic radicalization where people are fed increasingly extreme streams of content that confirms their existing prejudices because this is what keeps them glued to the screen.

The trial of TikTok has thus become, inadvertently, a trial of American society itself, revealing how the internal cultural crisis is the deepest vulnerability factor in the face of Beijing’s challenge. It’s not TikTok that destroyed American social cohesion, it simply made visible and accelerated a process of decomposition that was already underway, providing a tremendously effective tool for the manifestation of pathologies that already existed but that before required more time to fully develop. Wang Huning was right: America doesn’t have a TikTok problem, it has an America problem, and no change of ownership of a single application can solve the fact that a society built on total commodification of every aspect of human existence is inevitably collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions, and that technology only accelerates this collapse by providing increasingly efficient tools for voluntary self-annihilation.

Beijing has made clear it will never cede control of the algorithm to the United States, and this red line has remained intact through all negotiations, demonstrating that for China the algorithm represents strategic value that transcends any commercial consideration. Washington has accepted this compromise because the alternative – a total ban that would alienate one hundred seventy million American users and give China a huge propaganda victory – is politically impossible, especially for a Trump administration that owes its election partially to young voters who use TikTok obsessively and who would view a ban as personal attack on their primary source of entertainment and social connection. The result is an agreement that satisfies both empires by allowing them to declare victory before their domestic constituents while users remain trapped in a system that treats them as commodity regardless of who formally owns the application they use to drug themselves daily with digital dopamine.

The Precarious Class: Digital Cannon Fodder

America’s deindustrialization has produced a generation for whom the economic stability their parents took for granted – steady job, pension, affordable home ownership – has become unreachable nostalgic fantasy, replaced by a gig economy where the majority of young people work temporary contracts without benefits, accumulate student debts they can never fully repay, and face a real estate market where house prices have risen so dramatically relative to wages that the idea of ownership is reserved for those who inherit wealth or obtain capital gains through financial speculation rather than through productive work. In this context of structural economic precarity, TikTok offers an illusion of redemption through algorithmic virality: maybe you can’t afford an apartment or pay your student loan, but if you manage to create a video that goes viral you could get millions of views, thousands of followers, sponsorship contracts, that digital fame that has become the only form of social mobility still accessible to the precarious class.

Generation Z has become the heart of a vocational economy where digital recognition replaces real economic stability now precluded to many, where young people transform their lives into monetizable content by performing authenticity before cameras that record every moment of vulnerability, every emotional breakdown, every personal crisis because trauma generates engagement and engagement generates followers and followers might eventually generate income if you manage to convert them into customers for the products you sponsor or into subscribers for the premium content you sell on platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans. This “creator economy” is celebrated as democratization of fame and income, as if it were progress that anyone with a smartphone can theoretically become an influencer, but the reality is a system where zero point one percent of creators capture the majority of total income while the remaining ninety-nine point nine percent work for free in hopes of eventually “breaking through,” feeding with their unpaid labor and personal data the profits of platforms that have built multibillion-dollar business models on extracting value from millions of aspiring creators who produce content without compensation in the vain hope of being noticed by the algorithm.

TikTok has perfected this exploitation model because its interface creates the illusion that anyone can go viral – unlike platforms like Instagram or YouTube where success requires already having an audience or investing in professional production equipment, on TikTok a video shot with a smartphone can theoretically reach millions of people if the algorithm decides it’s sufficiently engaging, creating that lottery mentality where every video you post could be the one that finally changes your life, and this possibility, however statistically improbable, is sufficient to keep millions of young people trapped in a cycle of compulsive content production where every personal experience is immediately evaluated for its viral potential before even being fully lived. The world becomes a permanent film studio where everything must be documented, shared, optimized for maximum engagement, transforming existence into continuous performance that doesn’t allow moments of pause or privacy because every non-performed moment is a lost opportunity to accumulate that digital social capital that perhaps one day can be converted into real economic capital.

The precarious class sees in the virality offered by the algorithm the only hope of self-realization remaining after all traditional paths of social mobility have been systematically closed by neoliberal austerity, by the financialization of the economy, by wage stagnation that persists despite continuous growth of corporate profits, by the destruction of unions and erosion of labor protections, by the exponential increase in education and healthcare costs, by the housing crisis that has transformed housing into speculative asset rather than fundamental right. In this context, TikTok is not frivolous entertainment but critical economic infrastructure for millions of young people who have understood that the traditional economic system offers them no future and that therefore they must build alternative paths through digital economies where value is determined by engagement metrics rather than by material production. The problem is that these digital economies are built on foundations even more precarious than those they replaced, concentrated in very few platforms controlled by corporations that can change algorithms, terms of service, monetization policies arbitrarily and without notice, instantly destroying the “careers” of creators who had invested years building audiences on platforms they don’t own and don’t control.

When legislators discuss whether to ban TikTok citing security concerns and data protection, users hear something completely different: an existential threat to their economic aspirations, to their social identity, to the digital communities they’ve built and that often represent their most significant social connections in a world where loneliness is epidemic and physical third places have been systematically destroyed by automobile-oriented urban planning and gentrification that has made urban spaces where previous generations socialized inaccessible. The massive resistance to the TikTok ban is not just sentimental attachment to an app, it’s terror of losing the only lottery that still seems accessible, the only platform where success doesn’t require already having capital or connections or educational credentials from elite universities. And this terror is justified because the truth is that the majority of these young people have no plan B – they’ve built identities and economic aspirations entirely around digital platforms that can disappear overnight through corporate or legislative decisions that don’t minimally consider the impact on millions of lives that depend on infrastructures treated as dispensable commodity.

The empires perfectly understand this dynamic and exploit it ruthlessly: ByteDance builds a business model that makes users dependent, Washington threatens to eliminate the platform unless it passes under American control, Oracle positions itself as savior that will allow the platform to continue existing while extracting monumental profits for the privilege, and users – the precarious class that fuels this entire ecosystem with their free labor and personal data – have no voice in the decision-making process that determines their digital and economic future. They are digital cannon fodder in a commercial war between empires that proclaim to fight for their protection while treating them as resources to extract, as audience to monetize, as data points to aggregate into profiles that are then sold to advertisers or analyzed by intelligence agencies, in a system where the distinction between commercial surveillance and state surveillance has become irrelevant because both operate on the same technological substrate and serve complementary objectives of control and profit.

The Great Partition: Two Empires, One Servitude

On January twenty-second two thousand twenty-six the agreement should formally close, transferring operational control of TikTok USA to a consortium where Oracle plays the role of trusted partner that will manage security, data hosting, algorithmic oversight, while ByteDance maintains ownership of the algorithm and almost twenty percent of equity, and American investment funds and an Emirati sovereign fund complete the ownership structure in a configuration that allows each party to declare partial victory while no one obtains what they really wanted. Washington wanted to eliminate Chinese control but had to accept that the algorithm remains Chinese. Beijing wanted to keep TikTok globally intact but had to cede control of the American market. Oracle wanted to acquire TikTok completely but had to settle for a service position rather than ownership. Users wanted everything to remain as before but will gradually discover that the platform will transform into something different as American commercial and regulatory pressures modify content moderation policies, monetization strategies, and the underlying technological infrastructure.

But the most revealing aspect of the entire process is not the specific compromise reached but the fact that the compromise was reached at all, demonstrating that when empires must choose between proclaimed principles and material interests, interests always win. The rhetoric about the Chinese threat to national security disappeared not because the threat was eliminated – the algorithm remains Chinese, ByteDance maintains significant equity, the theoretical possibility of algorithmic manipulation still exists – but because all the principal players found ways to profit from the agreement: Oracle obtains multibillion-dollar contracts guaranteed long-term, ByteDance maintains access to a crucial market and a valuation that would have collapsed with a total ban, American investors protect their investments in ByteDance, Trump can declare to have “saved” TikTok to placate his young base while simultaneously implementing a bipartisan law that theoretically banned the platform, and the American political class avoids alienating one hundred seventy million voters who would have perceived a ban as personal attack.

This is the real functioning of contemporary geopolitics: not clash of civilizations or ideological competition between democracy and authoritarianism, but pragmatic negotiations between elites who share common interest in maintaining control over the populations they govern, regardless of which political system they formally represent. The “Great Partition” doesn’t resolve the underlying tensions between United States and China, it simply postpones them by establishing temporary modus vivendi that allows both empires to continue operating in their respective spheres of influence without open conflict that would damage both, while bellicose rhetoric continues for domestic public consumption because populations must be maintained in state of permanent alert against external threats that justify increasingly invasive internal security measures and ever-growing military budgets.

The TikTok model could become template for how the two empires manage other areas of technological competition: not total decoupling that is economically devastating for both, but rather selective separation where strategic assets are split into national versions while cooperation continues in less sensitive sectors, allowing commercial flows to continue while building redundancies in critical supply chains. This “de-risking” process – the term preferred by Western bureaucracies because it sounds less alarming than “decoupling” – implies massive duplication of infrastructures and investments that could be used much more efficiently in an integrated global system, but economic efficiency is secondary when priorities are political control and competitive strategic advantage.

The final result is a progressively more fragmented world where two parallel technological ecosystems exist – one centered on USA and its allies, the other on China and its partners – with third countries forced to choose or to attempt navigating both simultaneously at the cost of duplicating their digital infrastructures, increasing complexity and vulnerability while reducing interoperability and possibilities of global cooperation on problems that would require international coordination like climate change, pandemics, regulation of artificial intelligence. The balkanization of internet that Beijing promotes through the narrative of “cyber sovereignty” and that Washington rhetorically resists while practically implementing it through export controls, restrictions on foreign ownership of critical infrastructures, data localization requirements, is creating a future where the global and open web that characterized the first two decades of the twenty-first century becomes historical memory replaced by multiple national intranets connected through controlled gateways where governments can monitor and filter all cross-border traffic.

This is the “precarious peace” the Italian analysis mentions: stability reached not through shared principles or functioning multilateral institutions, but through tacit reciprocal acceptance of each empire’s right to exploit its own populations according to different but equally ruthless methods, where the difference between the Chinese surveillance model and the American one is primarily in packaging and the rhetoric that justifies it rather than in operational substance. Beijing openly admits that the state controls internet and monitors citizens to maintain social stability and national security. Washington insists that internet is free and open while building equally comprehensive mass surveillance infrastructures, simply outsourced through private corporations that collect data for commercial profit and then share it with government agencies through legal requests, “voluntary” partnerships, or direct hacking when other options are unavailable.

TikTok users, and more generally all those who live immersed in digital ecosystems controlled by American corporations or Chinese platforms, are digital subjects in empires that differ in form but converge in substance: both extract value through massive data collection, both manipulate behaviors through recommendation algorithms optimized for engagement rather than wellbeing, both censor contents that threaten constituted power simply calling it “moderation” when the West does it and “censorship” when China does it, both treat privacy as privilege rather than fundamental right, and both build systems where opting out is not really possible because participation in the digital economy has become prerequisite for participation in the economy in general and therefore in functioning society.

The choice presented to us is false: we’re not choosing between freedom and surveillance, but between two forms of surveillance marketed differently – one called “national security” and the other “user experience improvement” – and the fact that Oracle replaces ByteDance as principal data custodian of TikTok USA doesn’t fundamentally change anything for users who will continue to be profiled, monitored, manipulated, and monetized regardless of which empire formally controls the infrastructure they’re using. The Great Partition is not victory of democracy over authoritarianism or vice versa, it’s simply redefinition of boundaries between zones of imperial influence in a world where power is measured increasingly in capacity to control digital infrastructures that mediate how billions of people think, communicate, work, consume, and entertain themselves.

And perhaps this is the ultimate meaning of the TikTok affair: not the legal specifics of the agreement or the ownership percentages or who controls which piece of infrastructure, but the revelation that in competition between empires citizens are always and only commodity, resources to contend rather than subjects with agency to respect, and that narratives about protection and security serve solely to mask appropriation operations where the prize is not people’s freedom but the right to exploit them, and where the only real freedom that remains is the freedom to choose which chain you prefer to wear while deluding yourself that a golden chain is different from an iron one when both bind you to the same pole and prevent you from moving in the direction you would want if only you were allowed to imagine that alternative directions still exist somewhere beyond the horizon controlled by algorithms that have learned so well what you want to see that you’ve forgotten you once knew how to desire things no algorithm would ever choose to show you.

Sources

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The Great Digital Partition: Two Empires and One Lie