Abstract
TikTok's short video culture confirms the idea of algorithmic cosmopolitanism (Elkins, 2019). It involves the algorithmic promotion of local identities and place-making practices as a symbolic representation of multi-culturalism, which nonetheless is also constrained by its “flattened, one-dimensional, and consumerist approach” (Elkins, 2019: 385). At the same time, the impending TikTok ban in the US seems to suggest the rise of platform nationalism as an emerging approach to platform governance (Craig et al., 2021). This paradox between algorithmic cosmopolitanism and platform nationalism demonstrates the political nature of today's digitalization and its promised transformation of society. It raises a renewed question about how technological practices and imaginations are prone to state and economic power. In the complex entanglement between the technical and the political, we must first of all be wary of any simplistic discourses of politicization and governance.
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