Rebuilding TikTok in America

This isn’t a story about dance trends or marketplace survival. It’s about custody of the most consequential artifact in consumer internet: the recommendation engine. Rebuilding TikTok in America means transplanting years of behavioral inference, latent embedding structures, and personalization signals into a U.S.-based stack. Perplexity’s proposal reads less like a rescue plan and more like a hostile transplant. The algorithm’s new home isn’t just a server room — it’s a sovereignty pact. What signals me most is the insistence on fresh recommender architecture, not a mirror image. America wants the behavioral data, the pipeline, and the compute — but not the existing cultural wiring. The U.S. is finally treating recommendation systems as strategic infrastructure, on par with semiconductors. In the era of generative everything, data pipelines are the new borders. Whoever controls the recommendation loop controls the attention supply chain. The code reset is a power reset. That’s the story. ```json {"key_insight": "Recommender systems are becoming the new critical infrastructure, making algorithmic custody a geopolitical act.", "confidence": 0.88} ```