On the TikTok CEO hearing and what congressional theater reveals
A hearing room is designed like a drama: raised dais for the committee, a clock with red lights, nameplates angled toward cameras. Witnesses fold their hands, staffers ferry notes, and the microphones wait for sentences that can fit inside a clip. The point is nominally fact-finding. The incentive is performance.
Today’s target wore a calm suit and said the words executives always say: we take this seriously; we invest in safety; we will continue to work with regulators. Across the horseshoe, members read from binders that double as monologues—national security, kids’ mental health, data that travels where voters can’t see it. Some of it is true and urgent. Some of it is theater stitched to a headline. The ratio changes by the minute.
The interesting part is not whether the witness “won.” No one wins in that room. The interesting part is how the process handles complexity that does not love a spotlight. An app can be two things at once: a place where teenagers learn dances and a funnel through which influence can be exercised by people who don’t answer to this republic. Congress can be two things at once: a body with the authority to write rules and a collection of politicians solving for television.
We shouldn’t romanticize it. Hearings have always contained spectacle. But somewhere between the opening statement and the closing gavel you can sometimes see the outline of governance: a question that asks for a specific document instead of a confession, a request for timelines and enforcement mechanisms instead of a scolding, a reminder that jurisdiction is not the same thing as competence. That is the work. The rest is campaign footage in search of a donor.
What should “serious” look like here? Publish the statutory powers you plan to use. Publish the audits you will require and the penalties for lying to you. If you want a ban, say what triggers it and who decides. If you want guardrails, write down the guardrails and the budget to enforce them. Pretending a witness can solve a sovereignty problem in a hearing is comfortable theater. Solving it will look boring: standards, inspections, consequences, and the patience to do it again next quarter.
Back home on the bay, the wind freshens and pushes a tide line up the beach. The water does not care about speeches. It responds to structures you can measure—bulkheads that hold, channels that are dredged on schedule. Policy should work the same way: less applause, more maintenance.