A Subculture Too Strange to be Legal?
Slow-Foot Culture and the Global Tug-of-War Over Social Media Regulation
What the hell is 慢脚文化 (Slow-Foot Culture)?
Although my Chinese students could describe what it isn’t, we couldn’t actually find what it is. Maybe that’s because it’s already illegal… kind of.
Slow-foot culture started with Chinese short-video platforms like Kuaishou (the slightly more underground cousin of Douyin, China’s TikTok). It is an aesthetic and comedic style that thrives on absurdity, distortion, and anti-mainstream irreverence. From what I can tell, it’s full of stretched-out faces, exaggerated sound effects, and videos that sit somewhere between Dadaist art and a heroin-addict-going-cold-turkey-style dream.
According to my internet research, it’s something like this:
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But my students just kept laughing, and saying, “No, no, teacher. Kind of, not really.”
The Chinese government, however, isn’t laughing. It sees slow-foot culture as a threat to societal stability, a genre that promotes nihilism, chaos, and lowbrow humour at the expense of healthy and productive values. Platforms have been ordered to remove content, creators have had their accounts shut down, and the government’s larger campaign to sanitize the internet has left little room for this strange, chaotic corner of online (self?) expression.
As you know, China isn’t alone in dealing with social media’s ability to churn out content that melts our brains. The West is also struggling to regulate online spaces, albeit in a radically different way. While China’s approach is top-down and swift enough to make it impossible for me to find many videos, Western governments are engaged in a messy, drawn-out war of legislation, corporate self-regulation, and public indignations. The results? A tension between freedom of expression, societal harm, corporate control, and, I’ll be honest, kids that, on average, seem way less motivated and educated than the Chinese children I’m fortunate enough to teach.
Which got me thinking about China’s crackdown on slow-foot culture. Is it an overreach, or a necessary step to maintain order?
Look, my values are far from authoritarian, but right now, we have two big superpowers with authoritarian governments—China and ‘Merica. And to be honest, China’s authoritarianism is less frightening. Of course, that’s a topic for an entire book, so let’s keep this tight as [insert offensive low-brow nun joke that could be banned] with 慢脚文化 (Slow-Foot Culture).
Unlike China, where the government has direct control over digital platforms, most Western nations rely on private companies to moderate content. This leads to inconsistency and corporate bias. Meta, for example, has been criticized for amplifying harmful misinformation while de-platforming people arbitrarily. Twitter (now X) has reversed bans on controversial figures, reigniting debates about whether free speech should include speech that harms. And again, this can bring us into a whole new article, but I’ll try to keep focused.
Western social media platforms are profit-driven, which means they aren’t always incentivized to remove bizarre or harmful content if it generates engagement. Unlike China, where the government dictates content policy, platforms like Instagram and YouTube are constantly weighing revenue vs. responsibility—and you already know who wins.
While China removes subversive humour for being too chaotic, Western platforms actively promote it when it drive clicks. But in the West, it’s not the just weird and subversive that drives clicks—it’s the conspiratorial, enraging, polarizing, and mind-numbing.
As a result, content removal feels arbitrary. Some creators get banned instantly for minor infractions, while others spread misinformation and become the president. Censorship happens, but in a way that feels it’s left up to the tech gods. Again, this is a topic for a whole new article, and with the Trump-Musk-Technofeudal shit show, it’s something we’ll need to keep exploring.
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