The Cool War

Thesis: America is transitioning from the coolest country in the world to the holiest country in the world. From blue jeans & counterculture to blue checks & cancel culture.

America's soft power remains, but it's of a very different type, and more vulnerable in the long run. Converting all these soft power institutions like Hollywood into instruments for propagating a very American form of secular gospel may open up space for competitors.

The rise of TikTok is instructive. Twenty years ago, the idea that a Chinese app could outcool Hollywood & SV to win millions of US teenagers would be laughable.

Is it a national security threat? Maybe, but the soft power issue may be a bigger deal than even the data collection.

The closest analogy to US posture vis-a-vis TikTok may be France's reaction to Anglo-American hegemony. The Académie Française has waged a campaign of cultural protectionism against foreign influence for years, acting literally as the language police.
https://www.euronews.com/2019/11/22/french-academy-warns-public-bodies-to-stop-using-franglais

There is actually a common logic behind the French campaign against Franglais, the American campaign against TikTok, and even the Chinese campaign against Facebook.

Namely: “There is more power in rock music and blue jeans than in the entire Red Army.” https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/32495/1/exploring-the-ussr-s-underground-obsession-with-levi-s-501s

Cultural protectionism arises when a culture is insecure. That's not to say it's all bad, or always bad. For a small country or community to pass down its ancient culture and language intact in the face of global American cultural hegemony requires a determined effort.

The US still thinks of itself as effortlessly culturally dominant, so the recent wave of cultural protectionism & wariness of foreign influence hasn't been recognized as such. It focused first on politics (the Russians), then on social media (the Chinese), but won't stop there.

But it's a mistake to think of this as a conflict of nation states.

The novel thing today is that for the first time in living memory the United States of America has a peer competitor in terms of cultural attractiveness: namely, the uncensored, encrypted, global Internet.

The Internet didn't just birth companies that outcompeted older American names like Kodak, Ford, and Hilton. It staffed them with immigrants. And it generated ideas that jar the US establishment, currencies that challenge the Fed, even diets that contest the USDA food pyramid.

The Internet is still seen as largely American. But the early American colonies were seen as British. And the Internet is now >10X bigger than the US, and its own thing.

Maybe nothing comes of this. Or maybe further cultural divergence is to be expected. https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2016/09/29/why-is-america-giving-up-control-of-icann