MILLBROOK JUNCTION, OH — At the Blue Heron Diner on Thursday morning, the talk turned, as it often does lately, to whether Duane Halverson’s videos about properly oiling a post-hole auger would survive the week. Duane, 74, a retired agricultural extension agent who began posting to TikTok in late 2022 after his granddaughter loaded the app onto a phone he describes as “the flat one,” has accumulated 412,000 followers and, as of Wednesday, a looming federal deadline that nobody at the counter could explain to him in a manner he found satisfying.
The app, which the Supreme Court spent part of last week debating, faces a potential shutdown in the United States on January 19 absent a sale by its Chinese parent company. For most of the country, this registers as a political abstraction. In Fayette County, it registers as a question of whether Duane will still be able to show people how to tell a healthy cornstalk from a sick one using only his thumb.
“He’s the only person from this zip code anybody outside this zip code has ever heard of,” said Marlys Pennington, president of the Millbrook Junction Chamber of Commerce and the person who last August convinced Duane to wear a Chamber polo in one of his videos, briefly tripling foot traffic at the hardware store. “We don’t have a Cracker Barrel. We have Duane.”
Dr. Peter Oleson, a media sociologist at Heartland State University whose 2023 paper coined the term “rural micro-celebrity drift,” said the phenomenon is both more widespread and more fragile than most policymakers realize. “These are first-generation internet users who found an audience by accident,” Oleson said. “They didn’t build a brand across platforms. They don’t have a Substack. If the app goes, the audience goes, and in many cases the performer doesn’t quite understand that it went.”
Duane himself has been taking the news in stride, which is to say he has been taking it the way he takes most news, which is by nodding once and continuing to do whatever he was doing. On Wednesday afternoon, reached at his kitchen table, he said he had heard something about a ban from his son-in-law Greg but had assumed Greg was, as Duane put it, “being Greg.” Informed that the matter had in fact reached the Supreme Court, Duane said, “Well. Huh.”
His granddaughter, Cassidy Halverson, 22, who manages the account in the loose sense that she occasionally tells him to stop filming vertically when he is already filming vertically, said the family has discussed migrating his content to Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Duane has reportedly expressed concerns about both, primarily on the grounds that he does not wish to learn any additional words.
Mrs. Peterson, who lives two doors down and has appeared in the background of seventeen of Duane’s videos, mostly while walking a beagle named Ronald, said she is prepared for the ban to affect her as well. “People write to me,” she said. “From Australia. A woman in Perth sent me a scarf.” Asked whether she would follow Duane to a new platform, Mrs. Peterson said she would have to see what Ronald thought.
The county’s other digital economy, such as it is, appears largely insulated. The Millbrook Junction Public Library’s Facebook page has 1,100 followers, 900 of whom are believed to be the same eleven people logged in under different names. The high school cross-country team posts on Instagram. Nobody in the county, as best as anyone at the diner could determine, is on Threads, though Pastor Dellinger said he had “tried it once and did not care for the atmosphere.”
Representative Carla Minshew (R-OH 14), whose district includes Fayette County, issued a statement Wednesday supporting the ban on national security grounds and noting that American platforms “stand ready to welcome displaced creators.” Asked specifically about Duane, a spokesman for the congresswoman said the office was “not familiar with the individual case” but wished him well.
Cassidy has begun, without telling him, reposting his older videos to a backup YouTube channel she created in November. She has also printed out a one-page guide to the new app, which she intends to place on the kitchen table sometime after the 19th, next to the salt shaker, where he is most likely to find it. She has not yet decided whether to include the word “algorithm,” which she suspects he would take personally.
Down at the diner, the consensus was that Duane would be fine, because Duane is always fine, and that the rest of the country would have to figure out its own situation. Refilling coffee, waitress Denise Trombly offered what may be the definitive local take. “He was interesting before the phone,” she said. “The phone just told everybody else.”