Tried to explain to my tween daughter that Oracle and Walmart taking over TikTok was the dorkiest most uncool companies in America taking over the coolest company and they will ruin it. Crony capitalism is hard to translate to kids but I tried.
Surely the company behind Java applets, arcane enterprise databases, and insanely privacy invasive adtech teaming up with Walmart, a cathedral of soul-crushing consumerism, will ensure TikTok remains the most relevant app of the moment. Trump donors say so so it must be true.
If any TikTokker was young enough to have to endure the trauma of installing Oracle Java to run some garbage applet then this deal would never had gone through. They would’ve killed it just like they killed Trump’s Tulsa rally. Just saying.
Parent: Oracle is the bane of my professional existence. It makes me want to throw my computer out the window on the regular.
Child: What is Oracle? I hear they are taking over TikTok.
Trump solved a marginal data privacy concern after committing the most egregious mass data abuse scandal in history (remember his Cambridge Analytica, a sketchy international military contractor) by picking his donor cronies, Oracle and Walmart, to do bullshit tech nationalism.
Trump picking winners so that Oracle and Walmart collect your tweens data instead of the PRC is tech nationalism and crony capitalism in its most purest contemporary form. Microsoft would have been a better choice for privacy, but obviously that co isn’t sufficiently Trumpist.
Tech nationalism is real. Data sovereignty is real. Data protection enforcement is a joke across the globe. Parental anxiety about all this is real. Trump is exploiting it all for political gains. Does Biden even have a stance on #datarights? There’s a lot going on right now.
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