A Week of Performative Security

Like that "animated singing group The New Generation" performing at the Jaycees' congress in Santa Monica circa 1970, there was something equally curious about watching TikTok's CEO testify before Congress in the opening weeks of 2025. One hundred and fifty million Americans spent fifty-eight minutes each day watching strangers dance on their phones, while the SEO research teams produced exact figures to confirm what people already knew empirically. It was a spectacle that recalled Caltrans highway signs: bright markers delivering official facts about conditions drivers had already felt.

In Washington, the choreography of concern followed a scripted pattern. President Trump re-elected amid swirling controversies, announced an extension of the TikTok ban by ninety days, recasting himself as the resolute hero of a crisis first sparked under Biden's watch. The ban's extension coincided with Martin Luther King Jr. Day, followed almost immediately by planned ICE raids in Chicago. Just as the Jaycees' congress once arranged a Disney sing-along while a young wife sobbed at her table, the federal stage managed two narratives at once: the promise of a national security victory alongside the routinized machinery of deportation.

Didion once wrote of James Baldwin, seated between William Styron and a young Black activist named Davis, his eyes closed and his head thrown back in what she called "understandable but rather theatrical agony." That image echoes today in the anxious posture of the TikTok CEO, aware that one misstep in testimony could jeopardize the livelihood of countless creators. The performance of institutional gravity speeches, data, acronyms remains the same. Only the names and platforms shift.

Seven hundred thousand TikTok users, bracing for a ban, migrated to a Chinese app called Rednote, or 小红书 (Xhs) in less than forty-eight hours, proving what institutions already knew: that we are all being watched. This exodus was a quiet rejection of official theatrics, the online equivalent of that young wife muttering, "Let someone else eat this slop," while a Disney tune played onstage.

In Washington, the Commerce Department framed the ban as a matter of national security, insisting that these Chinese-owned apps posed a grave threat. Meanwhile, ICE filed logistical requests for additional detention capacity, preparing to seize hundreds of migrant families in the Midwest. These parallel operations conjured what Didion might have termed "a sense of higher social purpose," the lofty justification that often cloaks more brutal calculations. Both in 1970 and in 2025, the headliner distracts from the persistent undercurrent of fear.

The ban's timing on MLK Day illustrated the institutional knack for leveraging symbols. Monday's commemoration of civil rights gave way to Tuesday's raids, unfolding in a familiar bureaucratic rhythm. Just as the Jaycees had held their congress in Santa Monica epicenter of counterculture so the government now proclaimed a digital emergency while users, unmoved by official pronouncements, sought new online domains. Everything can be reduced to a figure that sounds, on the surface, apolitical.

The machinery of bureaucracy requires exact figures: one hundred and fifty million Americans on TikTok, seven hundred thousand fleeing to RedNote, Latinx students showing -0.17 standard deviation in math scores, 0.25 increase in fear. These numbers, like Didion's California water rights, reveal how power shapes the flow of resources - in this case, digital attention. The metrics give an illusion of mastery while telling us nothing about meaning.

By Saturday of that weekend, #Rednote's surge had begun to plateau on Threads, a sign of trending cycle ending or moderations suppressing the hashtag, and cable news pivoted from coverage of the ban's extension to the usual talk of national security. The drama in Washington overshadowed the daily realities of Chicago families bracing for ICE. Me carrying my citizenship passport ID with me, just in case. It also buried the intangible fallout for students reading about the raids on their phones each morning, a friend on Threads getting emails of ICE updates. Didion often noted how official statements try to rationalize entire social currents, rewriting them into something neat and purposeful. This was exactly that: high generalities overshadowing everyday dread.

Even the shifting user trends seemed orchestrated, as if verifying another Didion truism: institutions and illusions exist in tandem. The government's alarm over Chinese data collection overshadowed the already well-known fact that American corporations compile and cross-reference everything from a user's contacts to their coffee orders. One spectacle simply replaced another. The official script demanded a specific villain, rather than TikTok but instead, Generation Z and generation alpha's unwillingness to use other social media platforms en masse, while ignoring the deeper anxiety that we are all commodities in a massive attention market.

Yet beneath the spectacle, a quiet truth endured. People migrated across platforms the way water finds new channels, refusing to be neatly contained. They recognized that while one platform might be monitored, so would the next, and the one after that, Why not let China instead of Zuckerberg or Musk. This ongoing shift was less an organized protest than a human reflex, a recognition that digital life cannot be policed into stasis. Even if one platform vanished, conversation would reemerge elsewhere.

For Didion, real significance always lay in the small details of refusal, the young wife's casual dismissal of the slop, Baldwin's theatrical posture that suggested both weariness and defiance, or the manifold ways power tries to disguise its operations. Today, that significance might be found in the quiet threads of discourse on smaller apps, where users voice anxieties about losing status or income, and share "What to say to the when pulled over" cards in anticipation of ICE raids. Religious groups performing protest as sanctuary doors being busted down. The government collects numbers, but cannot measure the private bargains people make to stay connected.

There is, too, a certain choreography in how trending topics camouflage state action. In 1970, the Jaycees pumped out show tunes to mask a sobbing wife's unraveling. In 2025, #Rednote hashtags conceal the hum of ICE engines warming in a Chicago dawn. Our era's intangible commodity, 'Data,' invites illusions of control. An illusion that official pronouncements can channel and contain entire populations.

By the time #Rednote's spike had faded from the news, the deportation raids had concluded, digital markets had shifted, and the administration congratulated itself on a well-handled national security measure. We were left with the usual generalities, the kind Didion skewered: big statements about progress that obscure the actual cost in human lives. Yet beneath each generality, a quiet undercurrent of resistance persisted, intangible yet powerful, a refusal to yield entirely to those who would reduce connection to a spreadsheet or a threat assessment.

Digital culture, like human connection, always finds a way. Even in the face of repeated bans and precise algorithms, there remain corners of the internet where people exchange stories, plan safe houses, or simply remind each other to hold on. As Didion might say, the numbers tell us everything about control and nothing about resistance. In that space between institutional performance and personal experience, we carry on, refusing to let them define us.