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Your Light Bulb Is Lying to You

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › light-bulb-mislabelling-problem › 681455

God said, “Let there be light”—everyone knows that. But God did not specify what color light, and this would eventually prove problematic.

In the age of the LED light bulb, consumers have an unfathomable range of lighting options. This has, perversely, made the task of pleasantly illuminating our homes harder, not easier. The culprit is not LED technology per se, but the bafflingly unhelpful way in which LED bulbs are labeled.

Walk into a well-stocked hardware store, and you will find two main types of bulbs to choose from: “soft white” and “daylight.” (Let’s ignore the existence of Wi-Fi-enabled smart bulbs, which are a solution in search of a problem.) Soft white sounds like it will be the whiter of the two, when in fact it is the more golden option. Daylight sounds like it should be warm and natural; it is instead cold and ugly. The confusing nomenclature has led an untold number of people astray, condemning them to harsh lighting that makes everything in a home, including its residents, less attractive.

[Read: The shopping method that isn’t going anywhere]

For about 99 percent of human history, all artificial light was incandescent, meaning the by-product of heating something to the point that it emits visible radiation. First came fire; then oil lamps, candles, and gaslight; and, finally, Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb, which operates by heating a filament until it glows. The light produced by an incandescent bulb has a yellow-orange color to it, which we accordingly describe as “warm.” In John Updike’s 1960 novel, Rabbit, Run, Harry Angstrom looks through his neighbors’ windows at dusk and sees, past the pale glow of their black-and-white televisions, “the warm bulbs burning in kitchens, like fires at the backs of caves.”

Incandescent lighting, however, is inefficient: It literally generates more heat than light. This is why budget-conscious institutional settings have long tended to use fluorescent light, which looks awful but uses much less energy. And it is why Congress passed legislation in 2007 mandating the phaseout of incandescent bulbs in favor of LEDs, which use even less. (Donald Trump rolled back that mandate, and then Joe Biden unrolled it; in his second term, Trump is all but assured to un-unroll it.) An LED light works under a wholly different principle from an incandescent one. Instead of heating a filament to the point where light is produced as a by-product, LEDs send electricity through a semiconductor in a way that causes energy to be released as visible photons.

“The first generation of LED lights were just heinous,” Bevil Conway, an artist and a neuroscientist who specializes in color perception, told me. The bulbs emitted a harsh blue-white light by default, creating a terrible first impression for the technology. But the industry has figured out how to “tune” LEDs to generate essentially any color or shade, including something very close to the warm yellow-white of a classic bulb. LEDs still have their share of issues—as I write this, the light in my apartment’s entryway is flickering erratically, as if haunted—but they can glow as warmly as the incandescents of old, while lasting much longer and using much less energy.

If, that is, you can figure out which one to buy.

LED light bulbs are not generally labeled as “warm” or “cool”; that would be too easy. That information is typically buried in the fine print on the side or back of the box. Instead, they have those perplexing labels—remember, “daylight” is cool (despite sounding sunny); “soft white” is warm (despite sounding pale)—and a color temperature, which is measured on the Kelvin scale. You might intuitively think that a higher Kelvin number corresponds to warmer light, but listening to your intuition would be a mistake. In fact, higher-energy light appears cooler. The “soft white” label generally corresponds to 2,700 degrees Kelvin light, while “daylight” is usually applied to 5,000 degrees Kelvin.

What we have here is a classic case of marketing that makes sense to the people selling the product, but not to the people buying it. Indirect natural daylight is, technically, pretty blue. (Perhaps you are familiar with the sky.) When the light-bulb industry labels its 5,000-Kelvin bulbs “daylight,” it’s trying to helpfully indicate that you’re getting a blue light—never mind the fact that a dinky white light bulb does not actually approximate the feeling of sunlight. As for soft white, that “goes back to the incandescent era, where the light emitted from your standard household [bulb] was marketed as ‘soft white light,’” Tasha Campbell, a senior product marketing manager at Signify, which sells Philips-brand light bulbs, told me.

Cold white might have its uses—interrogations, morgues—but the home is not one of them. If you live in an urban area, you can see what I mean by walking around after dark and looking at the windows of an apartment building. If your neighborhood is like mine, most will emit a cozy, warm glow, like fires at the backs of caves. But a troubling share—perhaps one in 10, or one in five—will instead emit a grim, sickly pallor. Those are the daylight apartments.

Bizarrely, some of these apartments are inhabited by people who were not tricked into purchasing terrible lighting, but actively chose it. These are the victims of an extensive body of online propaganda. One popular theory holds that daylight bulbs have a special capacity to help you focus on what you’re doing. “Daylight bulbs are perfect for areas where specific work or detail-oriented tasks are performed,” advises The Spruce, in an example typical of the genre. “These rooms include kitchens, offices, and basements. Bathrooms may also be a good place for daylight bulbs, providing ample light for getting ready.”

The implication is that, until LEDs were invented, everyone was fumbling around in dangerously warm light, unable to chop an onion without losing a finger or read a book without going blind from eye strain. This is preposterous. High-quality cool light can have some advantages for rendering color and detail, which is why it might make sense for, say, an art museum. But if Marcel Proust could write In Search of Lost Time by incandescent lamp, you don’t need 5,000 Kelvins to write an email.

[M. Nolan Gray: Why dining rooms are disappearing from American homes]

A related theory, popular within the lighting industry, holds that daylight bulbs are “energizing.” A video on the Philips website, for example, says, “Use ‘daylight’ to create a bright, energizing setting for improved concentration.” There’s a kernel of plausibility here. Manuel Spitschan, a professor at the Technical University of Munich who has studied the effects that different-color temperatures have on humans, told me that light suppresses the pineal gland’s production of melatonin, the hormone that tells our brains it’s time to get sleepy, and that blue light suppresses it more than yellow light. The daylight-bulb theory is that cool artificial light will mimic the sun’s “melanomic daylight illuminance” more than warm light will, thus keeping us more alert.

The hitch in this theory is that the pineal gland produces melatonin only when it’s dark out. This means that to the extent that cooler bulbs suppress melatonin, they do so mainly in the time when our bodies are trying to help us get ready for bed, not during business hours. Moreover, Spitschan said that the intensity of light “has a much stronger effect than the color temperature.” When it comes to alertness, very bright beats very white.

Because the world is a big and varied place, I’m willing to believe that some people genuinely prefer a cooler bulb, just as some people presumably prefer Bob Dylan’s most recent albums to his 1960s masterpieces. Good for them, I guess. For everyone else, let there be light—but, for God’s sake, let it be warm.

The ‘Dark Prophet’ of L.A. Wasn’t Dark Enough

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › books › archive › 2025 › 01 › l-a-dark-prophet-mike-davis-wasnt-dark-enough › 681399

A curious social-media ritual repeats every time a major fire explodes in Southern California, and this month’s catastrophe was no exception. Between dispatches about evacuations and the hot takes and conspiracy posts that followed, the armchair urbanists got busy citing literature. First came the Joan Didion quotes about the fire-stoking Santa Ana winds (“I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew”). Arriving shortly thereafter were the links to “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” by Mike Davis, a 1995 essay that methodically lays out the history of Southern California’s troubled, delusional relationship to fire. For the past few weeks, that relationship has been tested in ways that even Didion and Davis couldn’t have fathomed when they wrote the words that now proliferate on social-media platforms.

Davis, who died in 2022, was best known for his sprawling 1990 best seller, City of Quartz, a withering analysis of Los Angeles’s development. His Malibu essay is a clear-eyed explanation of how areas such as Malibu have evolved to burn amid natural cycles of regeneration, and how, prior to the arrival of Europeans, Indigenous people practiced controlled burns in these areas to keep the landscape in balance. Total fire suppression, he writes, “the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel.” Davis also assails the unsustainable “firebelt suburbs,” whose presence compounded calamity while policy decisions were “camouflaged in a neutral discourse about natural hazards and public safety.” Malibu, he concludes, didn’t simply have a tendency to burn—it needed to burn. After this article, first published in 1995, reached wide audiences when it was included in his 1998 collection, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, many local homeowners were not pleased.

As ash rained down on my home in East Los Angeles from the Eaton Fire, so did the online invocations of Didion and Davis on wind and flame. In a catastrophe, people are tempted to search for a theory that will explain everything. But as I prepped a go bag in the event of an evacuation, I wondered whether these writings were what we should be reaching for in 2025.

I won’t be the first to declare that it’s time to give Didion’s Santa Ana melodramas a rest; some of her stories are more noir mythology than incontrovertible fact. Almost two decades ago, in fact, Davis himself poked fun at “lazy journalists” who use these disasters as an opportunity to trot out lines by Didion and other writers about how “the Santa Anas drive the natives to homicide and apocalyptic fever.” (If you must pontificate about the winds, quote Bad Religion’s 2004 song “Los Angeles Is Burning,” whose dark refrain succinctly references “the murder wind.”) On Davis, my verdict is split: His essay remains crucial to understanding the events that led to this moment, but after 30 years, it can’t account for the constellation of issues we now confront.

“The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” is uncannily prescient. Davis pored over decades of historical and scientific research and then proceeded to smartly (and colorfully) synthesize the history of fires in the Southern California ecology and the policies that made them worse. He dug into the psychology around fire—both the human urge to “fix” it technologically and the tendency to spin conspiracy theories around its untamability. And he aimed his most pointed barbs at the new subdivisions springing up on fire-prone hillsides—what he terms “sloping suburbia” but what news stories commonly call the “wildland-urban interface.”

[Read: How well-intended policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

A lot has changed since 1995. Among the biggest fires described in Davis’s essay is Malibu’s 1970 Wright Fire, which claimed 403 homes, 10 lives, and 31,000 acres of land, primarily brush. Compare that with the Woolsey Fire, which in 2018 roared through roughly the same terrain, incinerating 97,000 acres and destroying 1,600 structures. As I write this, greater Los Angeles faces not just one gargantuan fire but two. Together, the Eaton Fire, on the fringes of the Angeles National Forest, and the Palisades Fire, in the Santa Monica Mountains, have burned through almost 38,000 acres, damaged or destroyed more than 17,000 structures, and killed 27 people (that toll is likely to rise). Davis was once described as L.A.’s “dark prophet” for his bleak view of the forces that shaped the city. But the 2025 fires have demonstrated that perhaps he wasn’t bleak enough.

Although Davis did, over the course of his career, write about climate change—and he added a postscript on the topic when “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” was excerpted online by Longreads in 2018—his original essay does not contend with how the climate would set the stage for ever bigger blazes, fires with different causes, effects, and solutions than the cyclical events of the past. “This is a story about drought and lack of precipitation this winter,” Lenya Quinn-Davidson, the director of a statewide fire program for UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, told me. “The extreme dryness combined with an exceptional wind event—to have those things concurrent is a recipe for disaster. Even if you had fuel breaks around those communities, even if you had prescribed burns”—a solution that Davis highlighted—”it might not have had any effect.”

Nor is Davis’s wildland-urban interface what it once was. The Eaton Fire (which likely began as a wildland fire in Eaton Canyon) quickly spread to urban areas of Altadena, razing commercial thoroughfares and ravaging homes that had been around for more than a century. The Palisades Fire likewise reached deep into residential developments, igniting homes and schools that sit just half a mile—and a few wind-whipped embers—from the border of densely populated Santa Monica. “In the ’90s … there were much fewer incidences of fires burning into communities,” Quinn-Davidson said. That has changed over the past 10 years; wildfires are no longer staying wild.   

Class and wealth also provided an important frame for Davis’s essay. He documented a tremendous gap between the hefty resources deployed toward fighting fire in well-to-do exurbs and the meager funds allocated to quash fires in L.A.’s poorer urban core (most of these caused by a lack of regulation in old tenement buildings). Today, the class disparities remain, but the particulars have changed. The real-estate magnate Rick Caruso hired private firefighters to watch over his Brentwood home as other homeowners faced down the flames with garden hoses. And as wildfires penetrate farther into the city, it’s not just wealthy sloping suburbia that’s getting scorched. The Palisades Fire wiped out a mobile-home park; the Eaton Fire destroyed a multigenerational Black middle-class enclave in Altadena. For everyone but billionaires, fire has become a threat at every level of class and wealth.

Some positive change has occurred since Davis first published his essay; more of the controlled burns he advocated for have become a tool of forest management, preventing the accumulation of dried brush that can turn into kindling with the tiniest spark. Indigenous people, including the Tongva and Chumash, practiced managed burning for millennia prior to colonization. Although some controlled burns were allowed on federal land starting in the 1960s, residential areas long resisted the remedy, thinking them risky or visually unappealing. (In his essay, Davis describes a Topanga Canyon homeowner fearful of what such a burn could do to their property values.) In more recent decades, however, the practice has spread. In California’s north, regular burns are led by Yurok and Karuk practitioners. Near San Diego, in the south, the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians has a “burn boss” in the ranks of the reservation’s fire department. In 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to promote the practice.

[Read: The unfightable fire]

But the hopeful idea that small fires might save us from big ones is hard to reckon with in the era of climate change. In 2019 and 2020, wildfires in Australia resulted in the loss of nearly 25 million acres of vegetation, 34 human lives, and more than 3 billion terrestrial vertebrates. In 2023, drought and unusually high temperatures led to the immolation of 37 million acres of Canadian land. That same year, another deadly fire destroyed the Maui community of Lahaina. Late last year, New York City’s drought-wracked Prospect Park burst into flames. In attempting to understand fire at this scale, it might be time to set aside Davis and turn to the work of Stephen J. Pyne, a fire historian whom Davis not only cited in “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” but also counted as a friend.

In his 2021 book, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next, Pyne provides a compelling (if rather jargon-filled) geologic and cultural history of fire, describing the types of burns that have shaped our planet. There is fire in the wild (such as a wildfire generated by lightning), fire set and monitored by humans (a cooking fire, say, or the controlled burn of a field), and the perpetual flame that consumes fossil fuels: the ignition of a car’s engine, the flare stacks at a power plant, the electricity that powers the smartphone on which we share essays about fire. This third type of fire is what makes it feasible for people to commute to sloping suburbias and fuels the helicopters that fight the fires that encircle them. It is the fire that has remapped the surface of the Earth, even in places that rarely see literal flames. “Not every place has to burn to be influenced by fire’s reach,” Pyne writes. “It’s enough for combustion’s consequences, in this case on climate, to shape biogeography.”

In “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” Davis asks Californians to reexamine the way that they live on the land. Pyne does the same at the scale of our planet. The Pyrocene sharply critiques our reliance on fossil fuels and endless sprawl, as well as our inability to live with fire in the way that nature intended. “We don’t need new science or more science,” he writes. “We already know what needs to happen (in truth, we used to know much of it before we got greedy and forgot).” Pyne updates and expands on Davis, but their goals are similar: not to tell us what to do but to remind us why it matters, even when (or where) the world isn’t in flames. In Southern California, we are currently feeling the burn, but the fire is everywhere.

The Future of the Internet Is Age-Gated

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › ideas › archive › 2025 › 01 › supreme-court-online-pornography › 681397

In the pre-internet era, turning 18 in America conferred a very specific, if furtive, privilege: the right to walk into a store and buy an adult magazine.

Technically, it still does, for those hypothetical teenagers who prefer to get their smut in print. For practical purposes, however, American children can access porn as soon as they can figure out how to navigate a web browser. That’s because, since the 1990s, America has had two sets of laws concerning underage access to pornography. In the physical world, the law generally requires young-looking customers to show ID proving they’re 18 before they can access adult materials. In the online world, the law has traditionally required, well, nothing. Under Supreme Court precedent established during the internet’s infancy, forcing websites to verify the age of their users is burdensome and ineffective, if not impossible, and thus incompatible with the First Amendment.

That arrangement finally appears to be crumbling. Last week, the Court heard oral arguments in a case concerning the legality of Texas’s age-verification law, one of many such laws passed since 2022. This time around, the justices seemed inclined to erase the distinction between accessing porn online and in person.“Explain to me why the barrier is different online than in a brick-and-mortar setting,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett requested of the lawyer representing the porn-industry plaintiffs. “Do you agree that, at least in theory, brick-and-mortar institutions shouldn’t be treated differently than online?” asked Justice Neil Gorsuch.

If the Court indeed allows Texas’s law to stand, it will mark a turning point in the trajectory of internet regulation. As more and more of our life has moved online, the two-track legal system has produced an untenable situation. And lawmakers are fed up with it. Roughly 130 million people today live in states that have a law like Texas’s, all enacted in the past three years.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Pornography shouldn’t be so easy for kids to access]

Technology has come a long way since the Court first struck down age-verification requirements. Age verification services are now effective, easily used, and secure enough to be widely deployed. However the Court rules in this particular case, the era of the online pornography free-for-all seems to be coming to a close.

Before the internet, limiting children and teens’ access to porn was pretty simple. Businesses weren’t allowed to sell porn to kids, and to ensure that they didn’t, they were generally required to ask to see some ID.

The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was supposed to establish a similar regime for the commercial internet, which only a few years into existence was already beginning to hint at its potential to supercharge the distribution of adult material. The law made it a crime to “display in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age” any sexual content that would be “patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards.”

The Supreme Court unanimously struck down this section of the law in the 1997 case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, concluding that it amounted to a “blanket restriction on speech.” The law’s biggest problem was its vague and overbroad definitions of prohibited material, but practical concerns about the difficulty of compliance also played a large role in the Supreme Court’s ruling. It repeated the lower court’s finding that “existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the Internet without also denying access to adults.” And in a concurring opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote, “Until gateway technology is available throughout cyberspace, and it is not in 1997, a speaker cannot be reasonably assured that the speech he displays will reach only adults because it is impossible to confine speech to an ‘adult zone.’”

After that defeat, Congress passed a new, narrower law designed to survive First Amendment scrutiny. The Child Online Protection Act of 1998 required websites to prevent minors from accessing “prurient” or pornographic material. That law, too, was struck down, in part because the Supreme Court opined that optional parental filters would solve the problem more effectively while restricting less speech. In the end, parental filters were never widely adopted, and within a few years, kids started getting their own devices, which were mostly out of parents’ reach.

The Supreme Court decisions, and the legislative inaction that followed them, bifurcated the rules around kids’ access to porn. In the physical world, their sins were tightly controlled—no strip clubs, no nudie mags, at least not without a fake ID. Online, they did as they pleased. According to a 2023 report, 73 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 have watched online porn. A young boy or girl can take out their smartphone, type a free porn site’s URL into their browser, and be met with an endless array of quickly loading high-definition videos of adults having sex, much of it rough. Seeing an R-rated movie at a theater would require infinitely more work.

The first crack in this regime emerged in 2022, when the Louisiana Republican state representative Laurie Schlegel first decided to act. Schlegel, a practicing sex-and-porn-addiction counselor, had been inspired to act after hearing the pop star Billie Eilish describe how porn had affected her as a child. “I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” Eilish said on The Howard Stern Show. “I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.”

[Read: The age of AI child abuse is here]

Schlegel was also inspired by the new technology available for online identity and age verification. In 2018, Louisiana had implemented a digital-ID-card app, called LA Wallet, that state residents could use instead of a physical ID. Schlegel realized that the same system could be used to share a user’s “coarse” age—whether they are older or younger than 18, and nothing else—with a porn company. The “gateway technology” that O’Connor noted didn’t exist in 1997 was now a reality.

Schlegel’s bill, which passed the State House 96–1 and the State Senate 34–0, required businesses that publish or distribute online porn to verify that their users are at least 18, using either a digital ID or another reasonable method. The law initially flew under the national media’s radar. (“I think there were only two [journalists] that called me in 2022 asking about the law,” Schlegel told me.) But legislators in other states took notice, and by 2024, 18 more states had passed similar legislation. In states without a digital identification program like Louisiana’s, porn sites must pay third-party age-verification providers to use software to compare a user’s face with their ID photo, held up to the camera, or to use AI to determine if their face looks obviously older than 18. According to a report from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the average margin of error for these commercial face-estimation services is about three years, meaning that those older than 21 are unlikely to ever need to show ID. In practice, this is much the same as a porn shop back in the day: Most people get through with a quick glance at their face, but people who look particularly young have to show ID.

These state laws have some weaknesses. They apply only where at least one-third of “total material on a website” is pornographic. (At oral arguments, discussion of this fact prompted Justice Samuel Alito to quip, referring to porn sites, “Is it like the old Playboy magazine? You have essays on there by the modern-day equivalent of Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr.?”) The law is also toothless against websites that are hosted abroad, including the Czech porn giant XVideos, which hasn’t complied at all with state age-verification rules, a fact that millions of teenagers in those states likely already know. Underage users can also evade the restrictions by employing virtual private networks to disguise their IP address.

Still, even prohibitions that can be circumvented tend to screen many people away from a given activity, as the country’s recent experience with sports gambling and marijuana suggests in reverse. Three of the biggest porn sites in America—xHamster (which contracts an age-verification provider called Yoti), Stripchat (which uses Yoti or VerifyMy, user’s choice), and Chaturbate (which uses Incode)—have chosen to comply with the state laws.

The big holdout is Pornhub, the most popular porn site in America and one of the most viewed sites on the internet, with billions of monthly visits. It has stopped operating in all but one age-verification state. (The exception: Louisiana, thanks to its digital-ID program.) In an emailed statement, the company said that the laws “have made the internet more dangerous for adults and children” by failing to “preserve user privacy” and nudging them toward “darker corners of the internet.” A Pornhub spokesperson who goes by Ian (he declined to provide his last name) told me that age-verification laws will lead children to seek out porn from even more troubling sources.

Joining Pornhub and other porn distributors in opposition are free-speech groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. They argue that the age-verification laws are “overinclusive,” because they would restrict young people’s access even to a hypothetical website that was one-third porn, two-thirds non-porn. At the same time, they point out, the laws are “underinclusive,” because, thanks to the one-third rule, they leave kids free to access porn on general-interest platforms such as Reddit and X, which have quite a bit of it. And, the free-speech groups say, device-based content filters are still a better, less restrictive way to achieve the desired result.

Much of the supposed burden on free speech centers on the notion that verifying one’s age requires surrendering a great deal of privacy. That fear is understandable, given the long history of internet-based companies violating their stated privacy commitments. But a company such as Yoti is not analogous to, say, a social-media company. It isn’t sucking up user data while offering a free product; its entire business model is performing age verification. Its survival depends on clients—not only porn sites but also alcohol, gambling, and age-specific messaging sites—trusting that it isn’t retaining or selling user data. Its privacy policy states that after it verifies your age with your ID, or estimates it with AI, it deletes any personal information it has received.

[From the May 2023 issue: The pornography paradox]

“From a data-protection perspective, all of our data, all the data we collect, is only used for the purpose it was collected for—i.e., to complete an age check—and it’s immediately deleted after the age check’s completed,” Andy Lulham, the COO of VerifyMy, told me. “This is standard across the industry.” (One company that appears to trust the industry’s assurances of privacy: Pornhub. Following a 2020 article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times that drew attention to the site’s hosting of rape videos, Pornhub began requiring online age and identity verification, conducted by Yoti, for every performer on the site. Ian, the Pornhub spokesperson, conceded to me that extending Yoti to its users would not raise privacy concerns.)

Recent estimates suggest that most kids have watched porn by age 12. Societally, America long ago agreed that this wasn’t acceptable. Now, finally, technology has caught up to the intuition that kids shouldn’t have unfettered access to porn just because it’s on the internet.

At oral arguments, the Supreme Court seemed inclined to allow Texas’s age-verification law to stand, although it might first send the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals with instructions to subject it to a higher standard of scrutiny than it originally did. Either way, some form of age-gating is likely here to stay.

“Were we to lose in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, we’ve got some new legislation ready to go,” Iain Corby, the executive director of the Age Verification Providers Association, told me. “They’re fighting a rearguard action in the porn industry, but I don’t think they’re going to be able to fight for long.”

‘I Won’t Touch Instagram’

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › technology › archive › 2025 › 01 › tiktok-exodus-rednote-instagram › 681344

What’s going on with TikTok right now? The app was expected to be banned in the United States this coming Sunday, when the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act is set to go into effect. But several possible turns of events could save it—a last-minute sale, a surprise judgment from the Supreme Court, or intervention from the Biden administration. An official told NBC News last night, somewhat firmly, that it was “exploring options” to prevent the ban from taking effect. “Americans shouldn’t expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday,” the unnamed official said. But then, today, Bloomberg reported that the administration will not intervene on behalf of the app, citing two anonymous officials with knowledge of the plans. Who knows! If all else fails, President-Elect Donald Trump has also reportedly expressed a desire to save the app.

If TikTok does indeed get banned or directly shut off by its parent company, it would be a seismic event in internet history. At least a third of American adults use the app, as do a majority of American teens, according to Pew Research Center data. These users have spent the past few days coming to terms with the app’s possible demise—and lashing out however they could think to.

Some have been posting satirical videos in which they say goodbye to an imaginary Chinese spy that they pretend was personally assigned to watch them and tinker with the recommendation algorithm on their behalf. Many more have been spitefully downloading another Chinese app, Xiaohongshu, which is referred to in English as RedNote and functions like a hybrid of TikTok and Instagram. It has shot to the top of the App Store rankings, and Reuters reports that more than 700,000 new users joined in just two days.  

[Read: The internet is TikTok now]

Earlier this week, I downloaded it myself to see what was going on—most of my feed was quickly populated by videos tagged with #TikTokRefugee. American and Chinese users alike appear to be reveling in brief moments of absurd cultural exchange. I saw a weird amount of content glorifying Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which seems to be a common experience on the app so far. Much of the text on RedNote is in Mandarin. This has become the subject of further jokes as well as a marketing opportunity for the language-learning app Duolingo (which has reported a surge in new Mandarin learners).

RedNote is not particularly usable for English-speakers. It also seems likely to be subject to the same legislation that is (currently) set to kill TikTok, because of its Chinese ownership. The mass downloading, then, is driven not by practicality, but by a mix of curiosity, pettiness, and that special type of half-snotty, half-sincere rebellion so common online. A viral post saying “Not only do I willingly give my data to China but I also freely give my heart” is obviously a joke. But other users who had posted on TikTok about moving to RedNote told me that they were serious about it and genuinely viewed the impending TikTok ban as a free-speech issue.

Mia DeLuca, a 24-year-old TikTok user from New Jersey who has joined RedNote, told me that she sees the popularity of the app as sending a deliberate message to U.S. lawmakers—“a way for us to stand our ground.” Abby Greer, 27 and from Chicago, told me she was aware that social-media platforms derive their value from user data and that she specifically wanted to “hand” her own data “off to the people that will upset Congress the most.”

In banning TikTok—unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells it to an American company—Congress cited concerns about national security and Chinese propaganda. Critics of the ban have argued that the national-security concerns are vague, that such a ban is legally dubious under the First Amendment, and that politicians are being disingenuous about their motivations in wanting American young people off the super-popular app—that they are just taking the opportunity to make a ham-fisted move to curtail social-media use.

Britton Copeland, a 26-year-old full-time content creator from Nashville, told me that downloading RedNote rather than an American-owned app was an act of defiance against what she perceives as exactly this kind of government overreach. TikTok, she said, was “being singled out because it is a platform that allows us to speak freely, without control.” She was optimistic that seeing RedNote at the top of the App Store charts could pressure Congress to vote in favor of a bill introduced by a handful of Democrats that would delay the ban by 270 days. (This appears to be a lost cause, as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested earlier today.) “I hope that this has been a wakeup call that my generation takes censorship very seriously, and we will find a way to make our voices heard,” she told me.

This is where things get a little convoluted and nonsensical. Most Americans downloading RedNote probably don’t even know what its content policies are, given that they are, again, in Mandarin. Those terms of service appear to be highly restrictive, as TikTok’s were before it faced significant pressure to hew closer to American norms regarding online speech and was most ardently criticized for removing or minimizing a wide range of content discussing LGBTQ issues and experiences. New users of RedNote have already noticed similar takedowns, and reporters have pointed out that political content is heavily censored on the app.

Of course, it would seem far more logical for Americans to move over to Instagram Reels, the shortform-video product that Meta created to compete with TikTok. Many will. But some TikTok users that I spoke with resented Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg personally. One referenced his public statements about TikTok’s possible dangers. (In a 2019 speech that name-checked TikTok just as it was growing popular in the U.S., he cited social-media apps exported from China as one of the biggest threats to free speech worldwide.) Another referenced indirect lobbying efforts by Meta that may have contributed to the passage of the anti-TikTok bill. “Knowing that Meta lobbied for this bill to pass makes me want to disengage with their apps entirely,” Kris Drew, a 27-year-old TikTok user from Texas, told me. Greer expressed even more disdain. “I won’t touch Instagram,” she said. Of Zuckerberg, she added, “The last thing I want to do is give him the satisfaction.”

[Read: The age of social media is ending]

The RedNote surge aside, TikTok’s rapidly approaching deadline represents the end of an era in online life and a strange moment for many—even those who don’t consider themselves ardent users. The ban is unpopular and has become even less popular over the past two years among all kinds of Americans. Though it is known as the Gen Z app, tens of millions of other Americans use TikTok; many have fond associations with it stemming from the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, when they first turned to it for entertainment and connection to the outside world. (Writing in Bookforum, the author Charlotte Shane described the app as “a precious source of solace during an unendingly precarious time.”)

Platform exodus is usually somewhat voluntary. Take for example the #DeleteFacebook movement, which came in a few waves during the first Trump administration, or the reports of large numbers of users leaving Elon Musk’s X, an outflow that has also gone through phases. People first looked to Mastodon before Meta launched Threads in the summer of 2023—but now Meta is following in Musk’s footsteps by rolling back content-moderation policies, so many find that Bluesky makes more sense. Although it’s often the case that a platform becomes inhospitable to a large segment of its user base for any number of business reasons (Tumblr’s emptying-out in 2018) or political reasons (Livejournal’s in 2017), it’s relatively rare for one to disappear overnight. The most well-known example is that of the shortform-video app Vine, but it’s never happened with a platform of TikTok’s size and economic import.

This is a unique situation and people are responding to it with a unique sort of stylized strangeness. Every time I check the X feed, I see another viral bit of gallows humor about the whole thing. For example: “If the government bans rednote i’m just going to start printing out my browser history every night before i go to bed and dropping it off at the Chinese consulate the next morning on my way to work.” That one’s got 118,000 likes and counting.

The Intellectual Rationalization for Annexing Greenland

The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › politics › archive › 2025 › 01 › greenland-annexation-trump › 681279

Donald Trump, for reasons no one fully apprehends, is preparing for his looming second term by talking like a 19th-century imperialist. At a press conference this week, he pointedly declined to rule out the use of military force to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, while insisting on renaming the Gulf of Mexico. He also has repeatedly alluded to a takeover of Canada, including using his social-media platform to share an imagined map of the United States consuming its neighbor to the north.

Rationalizing these statements in either moral or strategic terms is challenging. But the conservative columnist Dan McLaughlin is up to the task. “In fact, Trump is sending a message to the world and America’s enemies: We’re serious about protecting the Western Hemisphere—again,” he writes. Trump, he explains, is shrewdly analyzing the strategic importance of the Panama Canal and Greenland and seeking to ward off Chinese influence, and is belittling the sovereign rights of American neighbors in order to scare them into cooperation. It’s all quite strategic. If Metternich had had a social-media account, he probably would have been binge-posting fake images of a European map with a gigantic Austrian empire.

This is a now-familiar ritual in the Trump era. First, Trump says or does something so outrageous that any critic who dreamed it up beforehand would have been mocked as suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Then his defenders either pretend it didn’t happen, accuse the Democrats of having done the same thing, or reimagine Trump’s position as something defensible.

Trump’s cascade of threats has been too loud and insistent for No. 1. Even the most strained historical reading yields little suitable material for a whataboutist defense, making No. 2 a heavy lift. (Joe Biden’s litany of gaffes lacks any military threats against American allies.) This leaves conservatives with no choice but door No. 3: casting Trump’s trolling as a clever geopolitical stratagem.

Trump “starts a negotiation on his terms, starting with the most outlandish demands but with designs on a deal,” McLaughlin writes admiringly. During the first Trump term, some conservatives likewise insisted that his threats to obliterate North Korea were the prelude to some tough dealmaking. The deal turned out to be that North Korea was permitted to continue developing its missile program, but Trump got a prized collection of flattering personalized letters from Kim Jong Un.

[Jonathan Chait: The political logic of Trump’s international threats]

McLaughlin is a longtime hawk, so his current stance is unsurprising. More remarkable is the support that Trump’s bout of unprovoked threats has gained from conservative thinkers who otherwise cast themselves as anti-interventionist. Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has written extensively about the failures of the Republican Party’s hawkish faction, notes that the case for invading Greenland is not “sufficient” to outweigh its moral and diplomatic costs. Still, he can’t quite bring himself to reject the notion. “I’m not a war-hawk expansionist,” he said recently on a National Review podcast. “But I don’t think it’s a totally insane idea.” Yes, he granted, “it would be an unjust, aggressive war.” However, “it would be far less costly or dangerous than regime-changing Iran.”

This is an interesting method for evaluating policy ideas: think of a much worse policy idea that is not an alternative, and ask whether it would be worse than that. Repealing the First Amendment might sound risky, but in comparison with, say, blowing up the moon, it seems downright prudent. (You may also recognize this form of reasoning from the periodic conservative argument that “Trump is less dangerous than Hitler.”)

The journal Compact is one of those magazines that have popped up during the Trump era with an apparent, if unstated, mission of reverse-engineering an intellectual superstructure for his populist impulses. Compact’s proprietary formula combines statist left-wing economic policy with social conservatism. And, although its authors don’t agree on everything, it has been fairly insistent about noninterventionism as a foundational principle. The bread and butter of Compact’s foreign-policy line is articles with headlines such as “No to Neoconservatism” and lamenting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine gave new life to American foreign-policy hawks. (You knew there had to be a downside somewhere.) Matthew Schmitz, one of the magazine’s editors, has called for social conservatives to “cast off the ideology” of interventionism.

And yet, yesterday Compact published an essay celebrating Trump’s imperialist ideology. (Headline: “The Future Belongs to America. So Should Greenland.”) “Trump’s promise to Make America Great Again begins with making America America again,” Chris Cutrone writes. “Making Greenland and Canada American is part of this initiative.” Greenland, he explains, is strategically valuable, so we should take it. Canada is “the most European part of the Western Hemisphere,” and therefore deserving of geopolitical annihilation. The essay ends on this rousing note: “Approaching the quarter-millennium of the American Revolution, perhaps the borders of the Empire of Liberty are set to be revised again.”

It seems paradoxical that anti-interventionist conservatives (and horseshoe-theory Marxists, in Cutrone’s case) would be enthusiastic about naked imperialism, while even ultra-hawks such as John Bolton consider it bellicose and irresponsible. (“It shows Trump, again, not understanding the broader context that his remarks are made in, and the harmful consequences that this is having all across NATO right now,” he told CNN.) The ideological through line appears to be that intervention is wrong when it’s done to spread democracy (Iraq) or protect a democracy (Ukraine), but launching a war against a peaceful democratic ally is somehow reasonable.

The more likely explanation for this paradox is simply that the neoconservatives are the least loyal to Trump of all the conservative factions, and the anti-interventionists the most. And so if loyalty to Trump means developing reasons to favor threats against Mexico, Canada, Panama, and Greenland—none of which poses the slightest danger or was considered even vaguely hostile by Trump’s allies until Trump thought to target them—then, by jingo, reasons will be found.