Alexandra Konstanti

It was the morning of January 19th, 2025—ages ago, in today’s sense of time—when Americans woke up to find TikTok had vanished. Not a malfunction. Not a temporary glitch. It was gone. A decision by Congress had sealed its fate, declaring that any application deemed a threat to national security would no longer be permitted within the country’s borders.

One might wonder how it felt—the sudden vacuum, the abrupt disappearance of a digital empire. Businesses built on viral trends, influencers who lived and breathed by the rhythm of the algorithm, advertisers, marketers, content creators. How did they process this rupture? The disquieting uncertainty, the creeping instability. The frustration of losing overnight what had taken years to build. The fear of irrelevance, of slipping from public memory like a whisper lost in the wind.

But, of course, the wheels of adaptation turn quickly. Those who had relied on TikTok had anticipated the necessity of a plan B. And so, they scattered like digital nomads, seeking new terrain. Some turned to the familiar sanctuaries of Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, while many others gravitated back towards platforms of Asian origin—RedNote, Lemon8, Likee. The very apps that, in another moment, might have faced the same scrutiny as TikTok. A poetic irony, or simply a testament to the inevitable tide of technological migration?

This incident, small in the grand scheme of world affairs, smaller for the decision was revoked, yet colossal in its cultural significance, stirred in me an unsettling thought. We move through life assuming permanence, trusting in the existence of things as they are. Social media, the internet, the very fabric of our digital world—it all feels immutable, an unshakable extension of modern reality. But what if it isn’t?

I recalled a moment, just days prior, when I asked my students to set aside their devices during a break. The way their faces tensed, as if I had demanded they hold their breath underwater. The low, disgruntled murmurs that followed, the anxious shifting in their seats. It was a trivial exercise in restraint, but what if it weren’t voluntary? What if one day, we woke up, and it was all gone?

Imagine: tomorrow morning, the world flickers into existence just as it always does. The sun rises, the coffee brews, the notifications wait. Except they don’t. Your phone screen, usually alive with activity, is dark, unresponsive. No messages, no scrolling, no endless feed to plunge into. The first instinct is simple—restart the device. Check the Wi-Fi. Maybe it’s just the internet acting up. A minor inconvenience, surely. Perhaps an outage.

Minutes pass. Then an hour. People begin making phone calls—the old kind, the ones with voices instead of texts. There is a ripple of confusion, growing into something heavier. Offices, homes, coffee shops, subway stations—the same conversations echo. Nothing is working. Not Facebook, not Instagram, not Twitter, not even the great old relics of the digital age. News outlets report the same bewildering message: a global failure of all social media and communication applications. No clear cause. No explanation. Companies scramble, issuing vague statements about ‘technical difficulties.’ But as the hours stretch into the day, and the day bleeds into the night, a terrible realization begins to set in.

This is not a glitch. This is not a hack. This is something else.

It is as if a great invisible hand has swept across the digital universe and wiped it clean. Information flows halt, businesses teeter on the edge of collapse, entire industries begin to crumble. Influence, fame, livelihoods—all suspended in limbo. Without these platforms, who are we? Without the constant hum of validation, who do we become? The world is still here, but the window through which we viewed it has shattered. And in its absence, the silence is deafening.

Panic breeds speculation. Is it an attack? A cyberwar? An experiment? Theories multiply like spores in the damp—government interference, AI rebellion, some unfathomable catastrophe. There is something eerily familiar about it all, something that echoes the early days of the pandemic. The same unease, the same waiting for normality to return. But normality is a fragile thing, and now, it is nowhere to be found.

So we sit. We watch. We wait. For what, we do not yet know…

How do you think the story would continue?