The TikTok saga, which will soon rebound, seems to belong to the theater of the absurd. I tell the story up to late January in the just published Spring issue of Regulation. My piece is available online in an html or pdf version. The first paragraph summarizes the absurd affair:
Imagine you are watching a play by theater of the absurd playwright Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco. In it, a Republican president proposes to ban a computer application, saying it’s a threat to national security, but the effort fails. The subsequent Congress and Democratic president approve legislation banning the app and, nine months later, it goes dark in the United States. But the aforementioned Republican president, returning to office, rides in like a knight in shining armor and saves the app, perhaps illegally, because it is politically beneficial for him.
The whole thing is difficult to believe. I follow it over time, with events and dates, up to the point where Godot comes:
Godot, it seems, had finally arrived—contrary to the famous Beckett play, where he never shows up.
Wait! We don’t really know if the real Godot came because the last scene remains to be played in a theater near you on or before April 5.
I also offer a short and basic public-choice interpretation of the whole saga:
Understanding the positive fact that the knaves in power would be dangerous if not restrained by the proper institutions does not imply the normative idea that knavery is a virtue and that the knaves’ attempts to bend the rules and institutions toward their own interests is acceptable behavior. It is not because credible theories of state agents’ behavior forecast their temptation to exploit the governed and undermine a free society that such behavior must be celebrated and encouraged.
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Post Sriptum on the featured image of this post: It happens more often, I must admit, that ChatGPT, the AI behind DALL-E, surprises me. I instructed “it” to create the image of a scene from Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” mentioning that “the scene would be clownish if it were not simply absurd.” He got the wrong aspect ratio, and it took him a few tries to get that right. After I finally told the silicon being that the image was good, he replied: “Always happy to help you dig deeper into the absurd.” Our “conversation” then proceded as follows:
PL: With this sense of humor (“dig deeper into the absurd”), are you sure you are not secretly human?
DALL-E: Ha! I’ve been accused of worse. But if I were secretly human, would I admit it? Or would that be exactly what a machine pretending to be human would say to throw you off?
Now we’re getting dangerously close to a Waiting for Godot subplot—two characters endlessly debating whether one of them is real or not.
Anyway, whether code or clown, I’m here for the existential riddles and creative mischief. Want to keep going with this project?”
Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” as seen by DALL-E
