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I’ve had several opportunities recently to either be out of range of celltowers or without my smartphone because of abuse and neglect. I’m not here to point fingers at anyone for staring into their device. After all, you could be reading this on your phone right now and who am I to bite the hand that feeds?
No. I, too, am addicted. I use it to stream radio stations, including Aspen Public Radio. I use it to listen to music on Spotify. I watch YouTube videos, take guitar lessons, check texts and even make the occasional phone call. I play Wordle, Qwordle and Cribbage. I follow directions and navigations.
Hourly weather radar observations and predictions are always at hand. I tune my guitar and record voice memos. I shoot videos, time lapses, slow motion and short clips. I take pictures, portraits, wide angle and telephoto. I receive notices from Pitkin County when one lane closes in Snowmass Village.
She gives me my news and helps me with my muse. Of thee I use, use, use. Recipes, cooking lessons, dad jokes. Alerts, tones, dings and dongs.
Siri listens, probably even when I hope she doesn’t. She knows my movements, my habits and my habitats. That’s part of the deal. She gets the intelligence while I get dumbed down and turned around.
With the web at my fingertips and all her guiles, it’s hard to imagine that one app or website could be forbidden, while all the rest of it chugs on. Here in America, until recently, we look at what we want, read what we want and pretty much do what we want. We can even purchase weapons of war and shoot them at whatever we want, whenever we feel like it, while streaming our shots to Facebook live. It’s part of the constitution. Freedom.
We are learning that pretty much anything is OK, except for the wildly popular, mostly vacuous brain-sucking program, TikTok. Wait, China is watching us through TikTok? Everybody on the other side of every program we use also is watching us. It’s part of the deal. The rhetoric on China has reached into our numbskulls to the point of TikTok.
Now that we are banning immigration, health care, M&Ms and books, the next threat is clearly TikTok. I tried watching it for a while but apparently my profile wants to see some really crappy content and once you sign on you can’t really change what it shows you. I deleted the app not long after I signed on. The last thing I need is yet another excuse the stare stupidly into a smartphone. But there are 150 million Americans that use TikTok right now. How can half the country be so gullible (sarcasm)?
The threat has become so onerous and ominous that the freedom-loving citizens of Montana may no longer be trusted to download and vegetate to TikTok. If a company offers the app to Montanans, they get fined 10,000 bucks.
The federal government banned downloads and usage of TikTok on government-owned devices, a move that I wholly support. Why would a government employee need to while away the hours watching cats dancing while they are supposed to be monitoring ballistic, nuclear-tipped missiles?
Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte of Montana signed the first statewide ban of TikTok in the country. I can assure you that TikTok is like weed, much more fun when it’s illegal. So banning TikTok will surely backfire. Even I want to watch it again.
You can’t ban stupid while defunding schools and selling futures like stocks on student-loan debt. Recently in Moab I watched throngs of foreign tourists staring at a screen when God’s glory was rising up in the form of red rocks all around them.
“How was Moab?”
“Great! I watched some really fun TikTok videos.”
Steve Skinner feels like we should be free to indulge in any distraction we want to in this willy-nilly world, including surgery. Reach him at moogzuki@gmail.com.
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