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I’m Louise Matsakis, a staff writer here at WIRED, where I cover TikTok, Amazon, and China.

By Sunday, when I was packing up my tent, Microsoft had announced that it was discussing buying TikTok from its parent company, the Chinese tech giant ByteDance.

The “Clean Initiative” is ostensibly about protecting US citizens from Chinese spying, but it’s noteworthy that Pompeo’s announcement uses the word “clean” far more times than it does “security.” Then late Thursday night, Trump ratcheted up tensions even more when he signed two executive orders prohibiting any US company or person from transacting with TikTok or WeChat, the messaging platform owned by Tencent.

As all this news was unfolding, I kept coming back to a series of videos that have recently gone viral on TikTok in the US.

What’s most interesting about them, though, is that the majority appear to have been originally uploaded to Douyin, ByteDance’s version of TikTok available only in China.

Their virality suggests that normal Americans, who arguably know less about China than Chinese people do about them, have a genuine appetite for crossing cultural boundaries.

Jason Parham’s beautiful WIRED cover story about TikTok and the evolution of digital blackface is not to be missed.

The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design.

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