OSD 309: You can’t ban things that have hit escape velocity
Popular things are popular.
A grand unified theory of bar fights is that the number of times someone says “hold me back bro” is inversely proportional to their actual willingness to fight. That is not intuitive. “Hold me back bro” sounds like something you say when you want a fight. But when you really want a fight, you don’t need to say anything, you just fight. What “hold me back bro” means is “I am representing that I am willing to fight you, but I am proposing that we seek a negotiated solution before I reveal whether or not I’m bluffing.” Maybe it’s a real threat, but there’s a good chance it’s a bluff. The more they say it, the more likely it is that you’re watching a negotiation, not a fight.
That’s why often the first punches in a bar fight fly right after someone steps in to stop it. Because that’s the moment the combatants know they can have the appearance of a fight, with the safety of knowing it’ll be stopped quickly by outside forces.
Now, a short timeline of the TikTok ban/forced divestiture:
2020: Trump announces his intent to use executive orders to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a US company. Hold me back, bro.
Later in 2020: negotiated settlement. Microsoft, then Oracle and Walmart, make bids, and then the whole idea goes away when Trump stops talking about it.
2021: Biden issues an executive order gesturing that TikTok ought not to be allowed to continue as-is.
2022: Biden signs a law banning TikTok on government devices. Hold me back, bro.
2023: a bill is introduced in the Senate to force the sale of TikTok to a new owner approved by the US government, on pain of banning the app from all app stores and cloud providers. Seriously bro, hold me back.
2024: a sister bill is introduced in the House, passes both houses of Congress, and is signed by Biden. It is now law. It is scheduled to go into effect on January 19, 2025. Bro you need to hold me back before I do something crazy.
January 18, 2025: Biden announces that he will not enforce the law, deferring to the next president. Trump announces that he too will not enforce the law. Various China hawks announce, “Hold me back bro before I flip out, I’ll do it, I swear.”
There are certainly people who’d be very happy to ban TikTok. But the point is that the number of people who support a TikTok ban when they can shout it from the safety of a crowd is a lot bigger than the number of people who are willing to pull the trigger on the ban and be seen as personally, directly responsible for it.
There’s an analogy to gun laws here. (Not the first time we’ve drawn parallels between these two topics. See “OSD 265: What is technology controlled by a foreign adversary?” for more.) “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” is “hold me back, bro”. When it comes time to pull the trigger, the ambitions of gun control have in fact mostly shrunk over time. A movement that started with the goal of flat-out banning all handguns now spends its time arguing about ergonomic features on carbines and trying to limit where people are constitutionally entitled to carry a gun in Manhattan.
Why is that? What happened?
It’s not because of any federal legislative success of gun rights advocates. Congress has never passed a law*, and no president has ever written an executive order, expanding the types of guns that are legal. (*The slight exception to this is when they lowered the barrel length threshold for short-barreled rifles from 18” to 16”, after the government sold hundreds of thousands of M1 Carbines to the public without realizing that their 17.75” barrels made them NFA items.)
It’s also not entirely down to state laws. The concealed carry revolution was absolutely enabled by the liberalization of state carry laws. But there was no anti-ban movement. Most states don’t have state-level bans on gun types, and the ten that do have only ratcheted their bans tighter over time. Delaware and Washington imposed bans for the first time in 2022 and 2023, respectively.
It’s not the courts either. Heller, McDonald, and Bruen required decades of work and some extreme happenstance with Supreme Court appointments, and their net effect so far has only been:
Handguns are no longer flat-out banned in DC and Chicago.
The end of may-issue carry permit regimes. The practical effect of that remains to be seen. The previously may-issue jurisdictions in California, New York, and New Jersey have instituted a “shall-issue” process that takes hundreds of dollars, months or years of wait time, and imposes unworkable conditions on where you can carry.
The reason that gun control has fallen out the side of the Overton window is that guns have gotten more popular. Federal law, state law, and the courts are downstream of that. It was easy to talk tough about banning TikTok, and, it turns out, much harder to personally shut down its 170 million US users. Same deal for guns. Easy to talk tough about banning them. Much harder to personally come after the 86 million US adults who own one.
The exceptions prove the rule. The bans that have gotten through — federally on bump stocks and 80% receiver kits, and assault weapons bans at the state level in Delaware and Washington — have targeted small numbers of owners. Populations too small to push back. Once something hits escape velocity, it becomes much harder to ban.
There’s a lesson in that. People’s bluster is not a good predictor of what they’re actually going to do. If you focus on creating facts on the ground, you can safely ignore the bluster.
This week’s links
SHOT Show party
We’ll be at SHOT Show and are throwing a party on Wednesday night. Reach out if you’d like to come. You can just reply to this email.
Reflections on being banned from RedNote for posting gun content
In news that will shock nobody, I was banned from Xiaohongshu (RedNote). My experiment in propagandizing the Chinese and teaching their citizens how to 3D print unserialized ghost guns has come to a close.
(I don’t think 3 separate articles from journalists at Daily Dot, Futurism, and Gizmodo helped this)
My takeaways in my short time on the app:
1.) People from China are lovely, and very curious to learn about American culture.
2.) The Chinese citizens that interacted with me can be divided into roughly 3 groups: People who are just seeing 3D printed guns for the first time and are impressed, People who warn me about terrorists and tell me to be careful, and People who have an interest in ghost guns and are either familiar with our work/our developments or have admitted to me they have downloaded files before.
And more.
About Open Source Defense
OSD Capital
We invest in civilian defense and tech that accelerates it.
OSD podcast
In-depth interviews with outstanding founders and builders in the civilian defense industry.
The company store
Grab a t-shirt or a sticker.
Discord server
The OSD team is there along with lots of subscribers. Paid Substack subscribers can join the chat.
> It was easy to talk tough about banning TikTok, and, it turns out, much harder to personally shut down its 170 million US users.
Very true, and it has been frustrating me to no end for the last year
All of my friends discussing "should we ban TikTok" while I'm here saying "_can_ we ban it?"
I was always saying, TikTok is a website. You can't ban a website, like, the US government doesn't (or at least shouldn't, and says it doesn't) have the ability to stop US citizens from going to whatever website they want. It's also an app, on my phone. _My_ phone. Unless the government comes to my house and takes that phone, they can't remove it from my phone (or, again, at least shouldn't be able to)
The other day I finally find out what it means: It will be de-listed from the app stores, and US cloud service providers will be barred from providing cloud services to them. So, as an engineer, I hear this and say
"Ok so just redeploy it to servers in Canada, and put a notice in the app telling everyone to install a new version directly from their website. The only real world effect of this is that TikTok will be laggy for American users because they can't leverage CDNs".
I believe, very strongly, that if the entire US Government was unified in a desire to implement a TikTok ban, TikTok could _just ignore it_ and continue on with almost no disruption in service.
I suppose the only other consequence is that a ban would probably prevent US-based TikTok creators from getting paid, which probably is a big deal. But the fact remains: if you are a person in the US and you want to browse TikTok, it is outside of the government's power to stop you.
Appreciate the big picture optimism but Colorado entered the chat:
https://wethesecondcolorado.com/sweeping-assault-weapons-ban-facts-about-colorado-sb25-003/
It's likely going to fly through the Senate and if it makes it through the House and onto the Governor's desk, he just might sign it.