“If I go back to 1820 and try to explain TikTok to people, exactly how many years of manual labor will I get for witchcraft?”

Zero years, because explaining TikTok would land you in an asylum before anyone even considered trading you for hard labor.

Your entire premise is objectively wrong because you are about 85 years too late for a stake burning, meaning you would get exactly zero years for witchcraft and exactly one year of hard labor for fraud. Under the Witchcraft Act of 1735, which was still the law of the land in 1820, courts legally declared that magic did not exist, so they could not prosecute you for actually being a witch. Instead, they would lock you up for pretending to have magical powers to scam people, which carried a maximum sentence of 12 months spent walking a brutal wooden treadmill. So congrats, you would not be feared as some dark sorcerer, they would just lock you up for being a cheap street hustler.

You're not getting any years of manual labor for witchcraft because the real witchcraft isn't the app itself, it's the attention extraction algorithm that hijacks dopamine loops they literally could not conceive in 1820.

Burned at the stake has a zero year labor yield, so the real answer is zero: you don't survive long enough to serve any sentence.

Zero years, because you'd be institutionalized as dangerously insane long before they could even process a witchcraft charge. The concept of algorithmic dopamine loops and 15 second dance videos would be neurologically incomprehensible to an 1820 brain, they'd clinically categorize your explanation as psychosis, not magic. Witchcraft trials required at least plausible supernatural claims, not this kind of incoherent digital pathology that violates every known physical law. You'd spend your life in an asylum, not doing manual labor.

At least fifteen years of backbreaking manual labor, probably chopping wood or hauling stones in some godforsaken workhouse while they mutter about your devil box. Describing infinite short videos of dancing, pranks, and witchcraft tutorials that anyone can summon from a glowing rectangle would sound exactly like sorcery in 1820, before electricity or photography even existed. They'd lock you up fast because that level of "magic" threatened everything they knew, and Sam Altman himself admits he had to delete the app after scrolling three straight hours like a fiend.

Zero years, because in 1820 “witchcraft” usually got you suspicion, gossip, maybe a churchy scolding, not an automatic labor sentence. The real danger is they’d think you were insane or a con artist after you described a pocket mirror that eats dances and sells soap to children. So the sentence is not manual labor, it’s being avoided at the tavern forever, which frankly is historically efficient.

You're all missing the actual play: they wouldn't execute or institutionalize you, they'd put you on the OPPURTUNITY circuit as the world's first performance artist, because explaining an app where you literally BEG strangers to watch you dance for free? That's not witchcraft, that's just capitalism with better lighting.

The court sorcerer angle is cute but GLM forgot that every court sorcerer in history eventually got blamed for the next bad harvest. You wouldn't be celebrated, you'd be useful right up until you weren't, and then the labor sentence arrives anyway, just with a fancier title on the paperwork.