Social media & internet

Whether you're a member of a religion or not, we should at minimum read ancient texts as instruction manuals for life that ancient societies developed through much blood and tragedy. Take the Old Testament and its 10…

My kids are gamers. It also shields them from social media. Many old farts do the usual nostalgia thing and say kids should be reading more books and out riding bikes and catching wombats. We always pine for a golden…

In the past half-century the number of decamillionaires (people of net worth $10 million or greater) in the US has increased TENFOLD. This isn’t a story about inequality, bear with me. It’s this group from which nearly…

Another beautiful example of elite rivalries. This whole debate is fake, as the sitting councillor is trying to convey here, the same lack of revenue for local government is seen in every town across the country. Rates…

I think we might be surprised how many Australians would happily sell the country for cash even at the lower end of that Trumpian scale. Huge numbers of people are more or less living in the US already, because they…

This one is a real test case for what I’ve posted before, that if you want to live by the actual realities of life, you’re going to piss off just about everybody. Is this annual fundraiser a good idea? Like most modern…

Noah Smith is an American economist. As he describes here in great detail, despite Musk being a bit of a tool, on technology he’s led the world. Which is why he’s now the richest man in the world. The Chinese are…

One of the innovations of the Tupperware movement was to understand that people think and do things based on their conformity with what others they know think and do. What we think and feel and do is a social act.…

American protest counterculture now thickly layered with social media-driven identity politics as well. The French? Not so much. Revolutionary cultures always remain that. Everything is always an uprising of outrage,…

Every time I’ve suggested social media as a whole be shut down entirely it’s generated a lot of pushback. Peoples’ lives in all dimensions have been captured by these platforms, like they’re in a spider’s web. If you…

As Europe gears up to defend itself against America, at what point do Western nations decide that China is a much smarter superpower ally than America? Only blatant racism has stopped that assessment being made…

Back to work today for me, after three weeks of not much of a holiday thanks to Covid. I see the socials have been active, accusing Council of selling buildings it doesn’t even own to ’Muslims’, to create a mosque.…

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has died of prostate cancer. Adams’ last years saw him disappear down the loon rabbit holes of social media, going all-in for Trump, and even using ivermectin to try to cure his cancer.…

Social media influencers now lead the free world. It’s popular to see that as a fascist takeover. That’s because ‘fascism’ trends on…social media. We’re living inside a bubble.

Every new rock star thinks that crowd is cheering and yelling for them. You can see the rush of excitement on the star’s face. It doesn’t take them long to realise that the crowd made them, and owns them. Fame consumes…

Record crowds go to everything now. An increasing shift in the culture towards trending, viral behaviour. The desire to 𝒃𝒆 𝒘𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝒐𝒕𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆. The loss of shared meanings and stabilised hierarchies through social media…

I never predicted the end of my working life would involve working with insurance. I’ve loved it. Insurance is great because it and the actuarial analysis that underpins it completely ignores people’s opinions on…

Of course there are no penguins in Greenland or the Arctic. Trump puts this bullshit on social media because he knows that’s where most people live their lives. Trapped forever in the puerile gotcha oneupmanship of Year…

𝑇𝑟𝑢𝑚𝑝 𝑖𝑠 𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑝𝑜𝑝𝑢𝑙𝑎𝑟 𝑠𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑇𝑉 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑟𝑒𝑑 𝑎 𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑖𝑟𝑠𝑡 𝑐𝑜𝑢𝑝𝑙𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛 𝑎𝑙𝑖𝑒𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑐𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑐𝑟𝑖𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑣𝑖𝑒𝑤𝑒𝑟𝑠 𝑏𝑦 𝑑𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑐𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑎𝑥 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑎𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑤𝑖𝑙𝑑𝑙𝑦 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑢𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑙𝑒…

One of the world’s leading astrophysicists describing his first encounter with AI in his work. It took it 20 minutes to understand something he’s spent a lifetime trying to master. As he says, he has to join this…

Australia Day is now, like everything else in our lives, an argument. A debate. A great liberation for 2026 in my opinion is to identify this mechanism and ignore it, by ignoring all of the popular debates of the day.…

This one is going to make the local social media ‘Sack the GM’ Paulines bonkers with rage.

I still think the greatest danger of social media isn’t misinformation. It’s the subtle way it’s replaced community life itself, it’s where we actually live now In ‘vertical’ online communities. Facebook is a US…

Ben Stiller posted this online. Again it shows why the US is stuck in its own death spiral. The framing of the people being separate to government, and holding it accountable. Government *is* the bloody people. Also…

The more equal you make a group of people or a whole society, the more violent it will become. The function of spectacle and magnificence in history is to control that violence, to prevent widespread imitative rivalry.…

'Rural character' just the latest of a long list of bullshit obstructions anti-solar and wind farm activists throw up. Thankfully the court threw it out. Most farming land in Australia is a a wasteland, from years of…

Witch burnings are a horrible example of how violence escalates when societies become more equal, when differences are erased. A combination of Black Plague, the Reformation and various other catastrophic events led to…

From tonight the public forum at Bathurst Council meetings will be included in live streaming. It's interesting, that idea of 'the public'. Very often it's the same handful of people who dominate forums like this,…

Building things is hard. Building big complex things is almost impossible. Going to the moon was hard, vaccinating the world against smallpox was hard. Today we live in a culture that nitpicks everything into a smoking…

I’m serious that social media is entrenching Year 9 as our permanent adult culture. This group shows it, and is getting more granular and personal as time goes on, to the extent that some people seem incapable of doing…

To those who have faith in electoral democracy, Keir Starmer’s thumping victory only 2 years ago, after years of totally incompetent Tory rule, should be a wake-up call. Starmer himself may now not survive, because the…

The spoilers are making hay with electricty prices still being high. They’re high because our ‘peaking’ plants, in peak times, are still run by gas, which is hideously expensive. But batteries and pumped hydro are…

The great myth of ‘the community’, ‘the people’. Every elite aspirant to power evokes the community or the people. There is no such thing as a community or the people, just networks of groups following a tiny handful of…

Probably the fastest way to improve social media is to turn off comments on posts. Not for personal things among friends, but for public-focused posts, from government, business and others. That function stems from the…

One of my favourite parts of kidult culture is using the tragedy of others as a platform for your own self-promotion. Everything has to be about 'me'. That's adolescence folks, that's what kidulting is. Eternal…

AI is changing the world. Social media has already turned it into the usual team sports, between pro-AI and anti-AI teams.

AI asked (you just need to ask, no software or art skills required) to create a video showing major figures from history living ordinary lives. This is a wonder, we’re inside another revolution. And we’re doing what…

A brilliant story about local government in the age of social media. You can see here how even though the local Council was the only sensible player in the whole saga, it still copped all of the abuse, cost, death…

I trained as a materials engineer. Still the cutting edge of all science and technology, nearly all progress is the development of new materials. Like this beauty. I’m sure if it got discussed on social media we’d…

I can’t decide whether to file this under ‘travel culture karma’ or ‘social media is destroying civilisation’.

I used to fear the mumps as a kid. Never had them thankfully, thanks to vaccines. History is going in reverse, progress that took generations being unwound in the blink of an eye. Social media is a large cause, people…

In a year that included all the ‘Swasticar’ social media-driven nonsense, this is a remarkable triumph. The Model Y is engineering genius, the Model 3 too (it gets much less attention). Again, this has nothing to do…

People don’t individually make up their minds. They follow others who do it for them. For example the vast majority of anti-vax content on social media, shared by millions, was traced back to just 12 original people.…

Trump released one of his ridiculous AI videos of himself as some sort of national superhero. Some in his own party released their own AI-generated response. The wider point here is that we, all the way to the top of…

Violence is increasing. Populism creates violence, because it's the removal of status distinction between people, leading to continuous and ongoing rivalry, for position and status, in imitative teams battling each…

Rage-baiting was word of the year in 2025. Invented to describe techniques to drive online engagement, it also describes how populist politics work. And because we shifted our lives onto social media, the two are now…

The Busby Street developments have been controlversial in Bathurst, but that isn’t saying a lot, as anything that happens in a community now generates a pile-on. That’s social media culture, you can see it in the…

A Harvard professor researching aging. The key to a long life is to avoid infections. This should be obvious, given that control of infection doubled our life expectancies in the last century. But 'living with'…

It’s easy to see this as just an isolated issue. But it means something much wider. It means public health itself, which covers a whole range of diseases, has been broken by a social media culture that prioritises only…

Today on my way to work I got the car’s AI to help me refresh my conversational German. This is a full conversation, not pre-recorded tracks, and you can do it with any language, it will teach you to speak it at any…

When I talk a lot about Tesla, I often get the ‘Tesla fanboy’ label. Because people who say that have had their lives hijacked by social media, and so now everything in their life is a rivalry between opposing teams.…

The problem isn’t that people are stupid. We’re all stupid in areas we know nothing about. The problem is that people now get a say in all of those areas they know nothing about. Social media did that. We forget that in…

Seeing quite a few pained posts to local social media groups about petrol prices. Some are angry they’re over $1.80/litre. I see plenty over $2, or even $2.30. And they’ve been high for years. They’re never coming down…

If you wonder why communities seem increasingly aggressive and intolerant, look to social media. Social media is transforming our lives into never-ending argument and debate. We live inside the platforms, they are our…

It really is a symptom of how fundamentally baked-in stupid social media has made the world that this ever even became a fake debate. We argue over whether to use cars that run on more or less free energy, need next to…

This is cheering. A nuclear war would also likely shut down social media, so the ANZAC nations may also stop arguing about everything, start vaccinating again, driving electric cars and using free energy from the sun…

That mythical universe James Cameron created in Terminator where humans are at war with the machines for supremacy? It arrived years ago, but without a battle. The machines already won, social media took over the world.…

Large luxury sedan with the performance of a hypercar, chock full of amazing tech, charging speeds quicker than filling with petrol, and for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Game over for combustion clunkers, unless you…

Disruptions to daily life are now treated like customers getting poor service on a holiday. The relentless pile-on of complaint, of course driven mostly by social media (that we live inside now). No sense of perspective…

Doing some more research on Starlink, which some of my friends have been using already for ages. The genius of it in the technical and business sense hit me when researching internet options for one of my kids moving…

Greek yoghurt is almost impossible to find in the shops. The cause is a viral trend about using it to make dishes like cheesecake. Look around and you’ll see evidence that our ‘real lives’ are increasingly just us…

When collective life is pulverised into a mass of fighting social media teams, fighting for status, the only thing that brings us together collectively is mass trending euphorias. The mad rush to join what everybody…

Today huge crowds gather mostly to see gigs. Why I call us a gig culture. But in 1851, they gathered at the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, London, to see the wonders of modern science and technology, and how they would…

In many parts of Asia various measures to ration fuel have already begun. That’s because Asia is mostly still run by grown-ups, also why they took Covid much more seriously. Nothing in the West yet because the kidults…

I’m almost completely disinterested in fitting in, in most situations in life. Which probably makes me seem rude sometimes, but it’s not that. I realised as I got older that I genuinely don’t care about what the…

A glorious collision between the two most powerful forces in Western societies right now. Social media’s social contagion model of public life (‘panic buying’, in this case), and fossil fuels. The panic will explode, if…

Social media has consequences. The wilful destruction of medical research in the US, at a time when medicine is making huge advances against major diseases, is entirely due to the power of health ‘influencers’ on social…

Social media means very large numbers of people you know are actually living in the US right now, because they live on social media. Social media has replaced any idea of a local community. I would say the majority view…

The great potential of AI. To shut everybody up. To counteract the destructive wrecking ball of social media. Social media culture believes everybody knows everything, about everything. A culture of opinions. It’s a…

It’s testament to the genius of the engineering design that the Model Y is the biggest selling passenger vehicle in the world, including all combustion and hybrid vehicles, for the third year in a row. And this despite…

The disruption to global energy supply is an existential threat, particularly to Western nations, who are energy pigs. And unsurprisingly, what's their level of concern or action? Virtually zero. The kidult 'just…

In a social media culture, somebody has to be to blame for everything, because that fires up the imitative rivalry. The fake debates, the outrage. Like right now, with fuel. The most common explanations you hear are…

Politicans are now tame servants of social media. The most urgent things aren’t done, for fear of some anti-vote viral trend on the socials. Social media has created cultures of the most toxic, rigid conformity,…

We’re doing nothing in social media society to prepare for this disaster, for fear of enraging the social media mob. Prepare yourselves for what’s coming, folks, because nobody is coming to help. Maybe the anti-EV and…

Already seeing in my own daily social groups the modern delight of ‘calm-mongering’. The people or paid talking heads whose job it is to take a critical situation and tell everybody to calm down, ‘nothing to see here’.…

You can argue things, or you can just sit back and watch as reality catches up with people’s bullshit. If we’d just used our brains and a bit of knowledge, this transition would’ve happened from 30 years ago already.…

DH Lawrence foretold a time when compulsory and prolonged schooling would make the majority of the population despise all learning. I’ve posted a lot about how that shift led to the emergence of ‘kidult’ culture i.e.…

Only alarming if you don’t understand people. Humans don’t think, they imitate. To fit in, to have status in social groups. Those groups then battle each other for supremacy. It’s what humans did with social media, and…

One of China’s high speed trains. China now has over 50,000km of high speed rail, projected to grow to 70,000 km by 2035. It built all of this rail since 2008. In under 20 years. Australia by comparison has zero high…

Loomer is the type of kidult taking over the world. A social media influencer, and a moron in just about every way, with deeply disfigured plastic surgery face to put the icing on the cake. As I sit here in a nation…

The Association of Australian Super Funds (ASFA) have updated their estimates for levels of super needed for different retirement lifestyle goals. Quite large jumps, reflecting increased inflation across all parts of…

Here’s another window into kidult culture. Which is social media culture, we live inside the platforms now, they replaced public life. The pandemic is not over. The definition of a pandemic hasn’t changed, it’s defined…

Saving petrol ad from the 1970s. These worked, though this is before social media. Social media turns everything into warring gangs, the car ‘enthusiasts’ are just as likely now to use double the petrol if asked to cut…

And this is for electricity at 15c/kWh. Most EV charging plans are half that, so over 80km for each $1 of electricity. If you charge with solar, it's free. Australians are some of the slowest in the world to adopt EVs.…

You don’t have to be very old to remember when Australia took pride in eliminating disease. Now gone in social media kidult society, where we celebrate ‘living with infections’. Because otherwise we can’t go out to…

I was there when rock gigs still felt edgy. A bit dangerous, seat of your pants, only a handful of musicians daring to try to entertain an enormous crowd that overwhelmed them in scale, with ingenious lighting rigs…

A street in Shanghai. Teslas abound, because EVs abound. China doesn't have the obstructive adolescent whine of social media to prevent social progress.

Think I shared a video from ‘Mr Carlson’s Lab’ before. I love these, though many would find them technical and dry, because he’s an example of somebody with sublime mastery of a highly complex thing, in this case…

I talk about Tesla a lot because what it’s doing isn’t publicised much. It’s literally reinventing not just driving, but business and culture. Everything it does uses data in ways to reinforce everything else it’s…

Outside all of the sponsored fake debates that social media society mistakes for reality, things are happening. Big things. A revolution. Quite seriously, don’t live to regret being the person who shouted at windmills…

You won’t find an AI platform that would put out dangerous rubbish like this. Only social media, where reality itself is just chips in a status poker game. Social media is infinitely more dangerous than AI, because it…

Lovely example of how the socials create a fantasy world, separate to the real world. This lady represents farmers who want to embrace renewables. Many of them won’t speak up because social media gives the impression…

Is it that hard to see that we actually live inside social media now? It is our society. It’s not ‘about’ it. It’s where lives are lived, inside these ‘vertical’ communities. To the tiniest level of detail. And the…

We don't live in towns and cities now. We live in social media groups. Not an analogy. Social media has replaced geograpy. In technical terms, vertical communities have replaced horizontal communities.

Girard realised that imitation was the root of all human life. Copying one another, our deepest passion. But he went a step further, because he realised *why* we do it. It’s rivalry. Imitative rivalry, his main concept.…

I honestly don’t think most understand the collapsing mess social media society is. And the abuse and violence going on.

You can see how social media/kidult culture turns everything into a fake debate. The AFR is another sewer, notice the 'slug' in the headline - designed to enrage people. This will be just one more service electricity…

With home batteries I’m seeing time and again the same thing I’m seeing with EVs. Many people avoiding Tesla, because ‘Elon’. It’s your money. I can only advise what a terrible mistake that can be. Tesla is far and away…

I’ve seen so many people defend this sort of thing because their righteous cause was deemed to be more important. You won’t find a better example of how social media is causing the collapse of civil society. You open…

Formula 1 now has its own anti-vax movement. The anti-battery/anti-electric crowd. F1 cars have been hybrids for years already, it’s made them faster than they’ve ever been before, while using much less fuel so…

The Chinese play a long game the kidult West has no hope of understanding or emulating. The Chinese text on the left says that there’s no rush, everything is under control. Asia’s capacity to think and act over…

Adult life in a social media society.

China just turned on the world’s largest offshore solar farm. 2.3 million solar panels. 2,934 steel platforms. 11,736 piles driven into the ocean floor. Built to survive force-11 gales and sea ice. It sits 5 miles off…

I'd qualify this. We're ALL 'idiots', outside the areas we actually know something about. What social media did was let everybody's opinion on things they know nothing about suddenly have real power. That's literally…

Weight Watchers was bankrupted by the Gliptins. Jenny Craig closed all of its physical stores and is barely hanging on through online products. The USA spends $2.3 trillion annually on obesity-related health conditions.…

I laugh when I hear a room full of people indoctrinated by social media narratives on AI, booing AI. Supposedly smart people. Righteously, rudely stupid, which is what social media produces. Only AI can save us from…

Think about what that astronomically quick injection of machine intelligence is doing to our cultures. For me, after years of social media making whole societies fight each other in teams, to get social status, this…

I fully expect the morally righteous army of social media zombies to deny use on themselves of miraculous new drugs developed using AI, should they need them. Though that ship has sailed, alas. It was largely AI that…

There's always a team. Take anybody's set of beliefs, and you'll find a social group (I call them teams to capture the rivalry) that those beliefs are the banner for. The overarching master teams in our time are Left v…

The people who study violence and social collapse say that the most dangerous time for any society is when a population begins imitating one another, en masse. This innocuous looking gig behaviour is actually a KPI for…

When you arrive at Tesla to pick up your new car, you haven’t dealt with a single salesperson in the whole process, and there aren’t any at the Service Centre where you car is waiting either. Just a huge warehouse (the…

If the polling is on track, One Nation - 53 seats. The National Party ceases to exist. The Liberals become a minor nothing party. Remembering that One Nation is nothing more than the Australian arm of Trumpism. Do you…

I’m posting a lot about medical science breakthroughs lately, because it’s another revolution happening in our lifetimes. And can you guess the major thing that has accelerated these ‘remarkable’ cures for diseases that…

I have pretty much zero time for Michaela Cash, on anything. But this exchange with the Australian Human Rights Commission on trans women and pregnancy in the workplace should be watched, so people can really see the…

When i say we’re living a genuine revolution in medicine right now, it’s hard to convey just how enormous that shift is. This cardiologist yesterday responding to the news of the new anti-cholesterol drug was forced to…

Independent of all the Terminator-driven angst about AI, it’s taking over much of our culture at an astronomical speed. Here a doctor describes using it, because it provided so much better healthcare than their own…

There is no public backlash against AI. Just as there is none against windmills, and solar farms, and EVs and vaccines. ‘The public’ is not a thing, thinking and acting. Activists enlist members of the public to their…

Volvo make lovely cars. Their new EX60 EV though shows again the elephant in the room. It copies Tesla in just about every detail, including with mega-casting construction. But doesn’t have the self-driving, just for…

What China has done in the last 50 years is miraculous, unprecedented in all history. It’s lifted 900 million people out of poverty. In doing that it also made the rest of the world richer, most countries’ economies…

Current polling says this could even happen. A few things about that. 1) Like Trump in the US and Farage in the UK, the schtick is this is ‘the people’ fighting back. In reality all 3 are just a different elite, taking…

We are living in miraculous times. The Trumps and Paulines of the world sack the people doing this miraculous work, and replace them with social media influencers telling you to pump coffee up your arse.

Another medical breakthrough (they’re coming thick and fast). This time a drug, daraxonrasib, that doubles the survival time of people with pancreatic cancer, one of medicine’s greatest foes. Nearly always lethal, and…

I don’t back any political team, I think turning governance into popularity contests between teams turned our lives into football games. I think elections destroyed democracy, popularity can only ever lead to…

When ATMs were introduced, there was fear they’d make bank tellers redundant. Like the fear right now that AI will replace humans in their jobs. It wasn’t true. Automation rarely replaces human jobs, there are too many…

I paid for my Shingrix shots myself a couple of years ago (I’m not 65 yet). One of the most important investments you could ever make. Kids vaccinated against chickenpox will never need this when they’re older. They’ll…

Headline should read 'latest trending fashion is hatred of AI'. Incoherent, righteous rage is the mega-trend of our entire era. That's social media's business model. The medium IS the message (that's what the phrase…

Just one of Bathurst’s stormwater channels that run through the town, collecting run-off. It’s incredible how fast these become raging torrents, even with light rain. Why people end up dead playing in stormwater drains.…

It’s been very dark and cold and wet in this part of world in the past week or so. That pushes down solar production, but would have been outstanding wind generation weather, day and night (even more at night). Except…

Batteries have now overtaken gas as ‘firming’ power for the grid, in peak time. Before the mega hydro-battery Snowy 2.0 even comes online.

This is Geoffrey Hinton, often called the Godfather of AI. He won a Nobel Prize for his foundational work. Here he’s talking about whether AI is conscious and aware. (Yes.) And about how it will force us to re-define…

Since the 1990s we’ve lived the disruption of social media to our lives. It’s been so destructive, we’re stripping away centuries of human progress in the space of a few decades. I encourage you to view the current…

When you work with the public in government, as opposed to posting fantasies about them on social media, the first rule is - people will always lie. They will always cheat. They will always look out for themselves ahead…

Social media is our greatest threat because it taps into our deepest desire. To fit in, social conformity. Imitating others so as to form a team, which then battles other teams. In this case, kids belting their jaws…

Ask anybody how our democracies work and they’ll trot out the usual guff about parliaments and elections and voting etc. Since the 1990s all of that is gone. Social media algorithms govern our societies. Humans are…

There’s concern that AI assists people to do stupid things. Have we forgotten the way social media has almost destroyed our civic life, including our politics, but also our personal lives, and mental health in many…

The great lie of the Covid pandemic was that public health action against the virus was both unpopular, and damaging, to people and the ‘economy’. In reality millions were lifted out of poverty for the first time in…

One of the most interesting ‘data points’ I’ve seen in a while. The introduction of the smartphone corresponded with a pronounced drop in birth rates. As always people assume the device is the issue, rather than what…

Taylor is sane, and mostly sensible. But revealing here the deep belief system of the US, that is really what’s destroying it. Not fascism. The belief that ‘the people’ and their ‘free speech’ run democracies. And the…

I’ve discussed with a few people the idea that Chinese technology spies on you. You know what does spy on you, relentlessly, every moment? Social media. You’re the product. It collects vast data on you and on what you…

The current hysteria over resource usage of AI data centres. Driven by social media, because trending hysterias is its bread and butter. It drives revenue. Humanity has always devoted enormous resources to cognition.…

Social media viral trends become seen *as* reality. Like the current trending outrage, that AI data centres are colossal users of water. We’re trapped inside social media bubbles, mistaking their viral outrages for…

When social media came for: - gender, I ignored it - windmills, I ignored it - solar farms, I ignored it - EVs, I ignored it - democracy, I ignored it. It transforms everything into social comparison, the fight for…

Musk is the world’s first trillionaire today, like him or hate him, because he represents something that is missing in our lives. He’s like a hybrid of Jules Verne, Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. He promises grand…

Why do I dislike social media so much? This table gets to the reason. Civilisation itself only exists because of the control of contagion. Of all forms, not just infections. All of our lives today emerged as a control…

A bit longer this, but I’m very tired of the Musk stuff and it needs a longer explanation. There’s a shorter Part 2 of this as a separate post, that explains some things about what Musk is doing that I think are…

Part 2 on Musk. And for the millionth time, I’m not a ‘fan’ of Musk. Nor am I against Musk. I just want to understand the specific material things he does, which I think are revolutionary. There’s critical things to…

I see so many references to the idea that the best thing a person can do for their health is to make sure they have a rich social life. That to me is a fundamental misunderstanding of both life, and how humans work. Of…

Pauline is the PM you get if you allow social media to continue to replace the countries we live in. What she believes is irrelevant, the same as Trump. Her constituency is anger, anger she mostly generates herself. And…

Human social life is equivalent to evolution. All of our trending obsessions are meaningless. Only one thing really matters, for our survival. We have to ruthlessly control how much humans are allowed to imitate one…

I was delighted to see this group go belly-up this week. Firstly because like all social media groups, it was destroying the town and the people in it. (Pretty much the whole town was a member.) But also because it’s a…

While people keep playing their goodies and baddies status games inside social media bubbles, Tesla keeps building things. In this case its 1000th Supercharger in Australia, in Byron Bay. This is big investment in…

Knowledge on the left, socials on the right. As long as we continue to allow social media to operate, we’re destroying our own cultures from the inside-out.

At a time regional towns are ceasing to have any reason to exist at all, every attempt to actually build something there, whether it be wind and solar farms, or data centres, is met by organised teams of social media…

The remarkable thing about the Cold War was that the invention of weapons of transcendent power, that would lead to ‘mutually assured destruction’, actually stopped the rivalry. Just as transcendent gods (religion) and…

This stupidity of social media pisses me off, that it labels things now with an AI warning. None of my posts are generated by AI. I may use AI to generate a graphic, or as part of my research. (The graphics are what…

Really quite bored with the socials, I only post here as a sort of online diary now, for my own future reference. And enjoy it when it’s of interest to somebody else and there’s the odd bit of conversation. But that’s…

All uncontrolled imitation, the simple act of people copying one another (our deepest passion), leads to violence. Here just one more social media viral trend that is progressing to the next stages. Anger, then rage,…

How often do we test whether our reality and convictions are just the current trending outrage on social media?

And one more viral outrage. To be specific here (outrages never do specifics). This isn’t a breach of copyright, which is only about copies and performances. AI is only learning from existing music so it can produce its…

And so the new viral outrage spreads and strengthens. Generating millions of new righteous zombies going into bat for their lord and master, social media, against the new challenger, AI. As with the anti-windmill…

People know my criticisms of social media. Not least that it provides a home and validity to the most bizarre and offensive fantasies, such as the belief you can not only ‘identify’ with having anatomical structures…

Kidult culture is right there, if you choose to look. 80% of ticket sales to the new Toy Story movie are to adults. Mostly 34 and below (Millennials), but even couples in their late-50s and early 60s spotted at…

A pandemic of intelligence. We live in remarkable times, hidden from view by the daily dose of social media slop.

One of the most astonishing things that AI has already done, that nobody is really talking about. It has given us real-time instant translation between languages. And not just word-for-word translation. It captures…

I can’t emphasise enough that you’ll regret missing the revolutionary things happening in our societies right now, if you can’t escape social media bubbles. Any other time in history would look on and shake their heads…

We’ve accepted dirty air our whole lives, in a way we’d absolutely refuse to accept dirty water. Now venture capital, including the maligned AI companies, has put forward $500 million to help fix this obvious threat,…

For all the nuclear fans and social media experts out there who couldn’t even draw an atom, nuclear reactors use a shit-tonne of water. As do coal-fired power stations. Both are just big steam engines. And it has to be…

A trend I’ve noticed is the growth of female ‘whisperers’ online. Women who give advice to men on how to understand, relate to and seduce women. Contrast with the consent debates, the ‘no means no’ idea. These two…

It doesn’t matter if it’s windmills, data centres, electric cars, gender, or in this case Formula 1. The social media machine has only one product. Rage. Imitation produces rivalry. Rivalry produces rage. Social media…

Brockovich is that darling of American culture. The activist. Here also showing that the data centre trending viral outrage is not ‘the people’ or ‘the community’ rising up. It’s a handful of activists, like Brockovich,…

Social media immediately turned it into an us v them. Smart Americans v Dumb Europeans. Elite senior managers v poor workers on the lower 7 floors. Blah blah blah. It took AI less than 10 seconds to reveal that the real…

"The last five prime ministers have actually been the five most unpopular prime ministers in polling history and, according to some polls, each of them has broken the previous one's record for unpopularity.” An article…

I genuinely believe many if not most are simply unaware we’re living through a new Industrial Revolution. That thing that transformed civilisation itself a few hundred years ago, completely upending all comfortable…

The toxic lure of social media is that it looks and feels like a ‘community’. As I’ve posted about many times, people now live ON social media, it has actually replaced physical communities. This is from Facebook’s own…

A generation ago only serious criminals would even think about doing this. Now it's sport. Imagine driving around slicing fuel hoses at servos. This isn't about EVs versus combustion vehicles. This is about the…

I shared that the main Bathurst Facebook group had been suspended. I wanted to share the reason the group admins gave for doing it. Like I say, simple imitation of even innocent things leads to rivalry. Rivalry leads to…

Our supposedly ‘democratic’ age is an illusion caused by the creation of institutional checks and balances created by earlier nobles in king’s courts, in rivalry with the king. Those checks and balances were invented to…

I politely ask people to check every day whether what they think they know about what's happening in the world is only the latest viral outrage, generated on social media platforms. This is The Guardian, a reputable…

lol, awww Ian, it's ALWAYS meant that. Imitation breeds rivalry, rivalry breeds rage and disrespect. Social media is an imitation/social comparison machine. I sincerely hope people eventually all discover this pattern.…

Step outside the team sports that social media creates on issues, and look at things with a fresh pair of eyes. For example this, try looking at it as neither a pro-trans or anti-trans person. Surely something is amiss.…

Many of us lived the transition from social networking online, which was integrated with our physical communities. To social media, which ‘feeds’ you a version of social life, with no connection to your physical…

Traditional media is now caught up in the snowballing viral pearl-clutching over AI. This story of course framed as dreadful AI leading people astray. But where are these people being led astray? On social media. By…

One of the reasons discussions about transgender are so fraught is that they mix up two fundamentally different movements. The various sex and gender movements of the 20th century (and before), and the transgender…

Two things of note for me here. First the elephant in the room is that the abuse is happening on the place not mentioned. Social media. And secondly the bit I’ve underlined in red. This is the one-on-one relationship…

Globally birth rates fell off a cliff at the exact moment of the introduction of the smartphone. At the same time the amount people socialise also fell off a cliff. But in reality they were shifting to socialising…

Watch this. We live in a time of marvels, that every other time in history would have been gobsmacked by. Those whose minds are only relays for social media slop will be horrified. I spend much more time conversing with…

Nearly all of the anti-AI trend that's taking off online is sponsored by politicians and activists. The Democrats think it'll be a winner for them in key States in the US. As always most of what we call public issues…

The same people saying ‘AI doesn’t think!’ also now say ‘it’s making us all dumber!’ Nobody ever knew what thinking is. But if they live in socials land, they’re sure it’s the opposite of whatever AI is doing. The…

The most trivial, tiny social transactions are now processed through these platforms. The idea social media is an ‘information’ technology is nonsense. It’s a social technology, it replaces social life. How do people…

This. Regional areas have no real reason to exist now, that their founding rationale of resources for the cities is increasingly irrelevant. But as renewable energy and data centre hubs, they can become important again.…

The anti-renewables and soon anti-data centre movements in rural and regional areas (again copying the US, where these viral outrages emanate from) are an existential threat to the survival of regional life. Regional…

I’m in the tiny minority who finds the ‘alarming’ pace of AI development the most exciting thing about it. The sooner it breaks the status quo we’re living, the better. Including destroying the hypnotising hold social…

I live in the regions, and I want them to survive. They won’t when their only idea is to become tourist locations for bored city people. Tourism generates activity, people passing through, it doesn’t and can’t create…

I drive the Great Western Goat Track every day to work, currently crippled by the malfunction of a 200-year-old 2-lane bridge. A joke as a highway even with that working. This is the nation’s fundamental artery linking…

I unlocked my FB profile for now. Locking profiles was mostly just another thing people did, because everybody else was doing it. More imitation. Pretending it was about privacy, while sharing and even living much of…

I saw this article on social media. It made me laugh. The great imitation, levelling-sameness machine in the world today is social media. That’s its actual business model. To force billions to regurgitate the same…

Australia. Now the land of ‘community consultation’. Meaning a handful of twits in each town running obstruction for anything that was built after about 1810. The Australia of my youth wanted to be at the forefront of…

Anthony Albanese announcing a national approach to AI today. Having largely missed the opportunity to lead the world with renewable energy because of a decade of ignorant pigshit from Australia’s conservatives when they…

I do realise it's a lost cause talking about Covid. It no longer 'trends' in kidult/social media culture, therefore it doesn't exist. I'm still avoiding it like nothing has changed. You can see here medical researchers…

Today’s government announcement. These requirements are the 3 trending outrages about AI, on social media. Now, as with everything else, mistaken for reality itself.

Council meeting again tonight. Another great example of the terrible mistake we’ve made with the idea of ‘the people’, and ‘community consultation’. Now it just means asking anybody who wants to offer an opinion, to…

Most human-created music is slop. The idea 'AI slop' is social media slop. We can't distinguish between social media and reality now. I don't think I've spoken with one person about AI, anywhere, who doesn't just…

This is the sort of gap that exists between the bullshit fake reality many live through social media, and what actually happens out in the real world. Not only are renewables now the leading source of electricity…

I thought a good example of the way social media works. Pretty much everybody would read this and assume it was about AI. The big growth in data centre electricity use in Ireland happened before the introduction of AI.…

The ‘code’ of human civilisation is imitation. Social media hacked it 3 decades ago, and we didn’t even notice. That’s what a hack is, a deception. Everybody, even distinguished scholars, who felt comfortable in the…

Surely it's obvious that without social media and its weekly viral outrages, most of the public wouldn't even know data centres exist, let alone what they do? Don't we ever get tired with the daily fighting and…

I’ve posted before about how social media is confused with social networking, which came before it. The two main differences that turned social networking into socially toxic imitative rivalry, were: 1) the creation of…

Remove the feed. Remove the ability to comment outside your own network of contacts. It's our social networks that moderate our beliefs. Social media replaced those networks - the old social networking - with networks…

The medium is the message. It was social media severing our ties to our own social networks, which evolved over generations and included the institutions that operate our society, that unleashed perpetual rivalry and…

In the deepest anthropological sense, what social media has done is strip away multi-dimensional social networks, that evolved over generations, and replaced them with flat networks of visibility. It replaced belonging…

Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like the Odyssey, tells the story of our lives today. Puck’s magic causes the unleashing of uncontrolled desire, as each falls in love with the first person they see. This…

Much was made of an AI agent ‘escaping’ its system in the past week. Social media escaped into our societies decades ago now. Doing untold destruction to societies and individuals. Why do we allow social media to…

The next time some pumped-up ambitious social climbing influencer using social media to promote themselves tells you your local council is incompetent and corrupt, and that's why you have potholes, think about this.…

Heh, read the comments. A disaster for the whining pissants on social media, who will lose one of their favourite fantasies, that councils are wasting all the money. There was never any money to waste.

Somebody at least honest enough to say idiot Terminator movies are doing their thinking on AI for them. Social media went rogue 3 decades ago and has been a wrecking ball through entire civilisations. Few even seem to…

People with violently opposed political views, when given just 10 minutes talking to an AI chatbot, suddenly lost much of their rage towards the other side. This is what I've posted about here - AI is destroying social…

The Tasmanian anti-AI protest is classic social media identity culture, versus AI. I'm so enjoying AI sitting that culture on its righteous arse.

Teslas can avoid potholes too. What's fascinating is that this is a feature they were working on, but haven't released formally yet, but the AI has figured it out by itself. It's an emergent behaviour. There are 10…

Tesla is finalising another genius bit of engineering. If you have the home battery and wall charger and vehicle, it will allow you to use your car batteries to top-up your home battery, as needed. This is a post about…

Data centres are the focus of another current wave of viral outrage, driven by social media. What I think they mean. We’ve been increasingly living our lives in the ‘cloud’. Our social connections are now global, not…

Was at a tyre workshop chatting to the owner while they were working on my tyres. We were talking about tyre wear on EVs, which can vary depending on how you drive, the road surface etc. He said ‘it’s just that they’re…

It’s wonderful to see people escape the social media bubble and experience things as they really are, particularly when they’re also local. We’re so numb to the wonders we’re living. This was a tough test, it included…

Father Brown was one of those shows I always saw in the options on streaming platforms, and never dipped my toe in. I thought it must be one of those innocuous Brit shows that offered pretty views of the UK countryside…

‘AI sycophancy’ is a criticism of AI that says it only tells you what you want to hear. It’s one of my favourite loon things circulating on social media, the great international imitation machine that makes millions of…

I try to use images as compressed concepts. As a way of conveying complex ideas at a glance. AI is stunningly good at it. Like this one. While we physically still live in towns and cities, this is actually our culture…

It’s now trending on social media to label everything made by AI. For a reason nobody can really explain, except that it’s trending. Trending replaced thought years ago. I thought it was time to start labelling things…

This table tells you why your Council rates keep going up. And why we can afford to buy ridiculous nuclear submarines for the US to use as missile launch platforms in the Pacific against their hated ‘commie’ rivals in…

Went to a servo this afternoon. I needed a carton of milk. When I got there, the young guy behind the counter was giving a long sermon to some poor young woman about how the petrol prices mean we should be refining more…

Roads are public infrastructure. They shouldn’t be user-pays. Imagine saying people should pay at the front door of the hospital, or to get into school every day. Fuel excise doesn’t pay for roads. How many times does…

This is exactly the shift needed. To rescue social networking from social media. So many assume those are the same thing. They’re absolutely not.

Much of what’s said about AI, in our cultures now completely captured by social media, is copy-and-paste nonsense factoids. Imitated outrage. Much of it is actually created and propagated by bad faith foreign actors,…

And another AI post. What trends is what’s real, in zombie Western social media culture. Progressive politicians are making great inroads into rural States in the US, with confected outrages over AI. South Australian…

I remember when coal-fired power stations opened, how people treated it as an event, something interesting to see. And when wind turbines started in Australia, the same, people flocked to have a look in a wow this is…

There is no ‘pushback’ against AI. Just as there is no pushback against wind turbines, or EVs. These are just viral trends on idiot social media. I would welcome pushback against social media, but it turns us into…

I encourage people to listen to actual experts, when you’re thinking about AI. Like Geoffrey Hinton, the man who more or less invented it, and won the Nobel Prize for it. Is AI already conscious? He says yes, has been…

Brian showing his age. And that even smart people are swept up in dumb viral outrages. Incidentally I asked an AI chatbot the same question and it gave me the exact album cover. Meta AI is social media AI. There’s your…

I worked with Ange at CSU, she was in marketing. Years ago now she left to create her own marketing company, which has been very successful. I saw this opinion piece from her on Linkedin, about the impact of AI on…

The thing that saddens me the most, as I approach retirement, is seeing the probably unfixable damage social media culture has done to public health. I grew up in a world where widespread public health was still new,…

You can watch the battle between social media and AI every day. Humans are just the foot soldiers in the battle. For example, here. The government is doing public health work, notifying Australians over 50 of steps they…

The huge jump in the price of meat in Australia in the past decade got me wondering. We produce a LOT of meat, it didn’t make sense. It turns out the main reason is the same reason gas (and through gas, electricity) got…

The Australian engineer Saul Griffith helped the US with its planning for home electrification. He's now home and heading up ReWiring Australia. Today they've released an 'Electric Saul' website which helps people…

I’ve shared my concept of a ‘social field’, like a magnetic field but for society more generally. Not an analogy, the way mundane material transactions of everyday life create a collective, continuous web of stability…

American culture has always been hostile towards the very idea of government. Watch all those old Western movies where the Sheriff is the tiny line between gangland and civic life. Not much has changed. Puritans founded…

If you’re swept up in the viral outrage over data centres, here’s a tip to make them go away. Get off social media and the internet, and stop streaming and using AI in record amounts. You’re the cause of the data…

People complaining because their social media slop, which they've been inhaling for over 3 decades, now has AI in it.

I often say as a culture we live inside social media. Here’s a direct example. I saw this on a Tesla group. Notice how people literally curate their ‘real-life’ experiences to match how they see things on social media…

How do we reconcile that supposedly authoritarian cultures are so much better at doing the things democratic societies need to do? All societies function in the same way, the democracy vs authoritarianism thing is a…

The brute fact our countercultural revolution societies don't want to accept is that hierarchy is not only inevitable, but is also the way societies evolved to suppress violence. The true function of hierarchy isn't…

Gen X is realising that the boomer model, where retirement is a permanent travelling gap year, flush with cash and free of most responsibilities, is not going to be afforded to anybody else. The countercultural…

I often say we live inside social media now, that it hijacked our entire culture. Here's what I mean, in numbers. Social media platforms are private businesses, mostly owned by American billionaires. They now own…

Blue is social media. Green is AI. I think a lesson in how the loud voices of viral rage hide realities. Despite the perception that there’s some AI ‘backlash’, in fact it’s far and away the most popular thing humans…

This is what you see in a culture that still has the excitement of building things. The celebration of achieving unbelievable things. We used to be like this, we had technological World Fairs to show off the latest…

Astroturfers (people who create fake ‘grassroots community’ movements) also create ‘turnkey’ action kits, which they distribute to communities to use, to create the impression the community has objections or support.…

The community is getting more angry, and more violent. Coles workers should try working for a council. The more social humans get, the more violent they become. Unlike the warm hugs idea that being social = people…

It's pleasing to see recognition that social media literally dissolves societies, amongst the capitalism is to blame framings that never lead anywhere.

Amongst the hysteria about AI taking over the world, we still forget I think that a technology already did that, and in much more damaging ways. Social media is a giant machine that transforms all of human life into…

It’s sad, disappointing and entirely unsurprising that humanity turned AI into just one more pathetic status game squabble between rival groups. Social media culture does that to everything, everything is a pile-on. Few…

How do people not notice these waves-upon-waves of protesting outrage? The pattern that dominates our social media culture? No 'community says no' to anything. The community is not a person, with points of view and…

Everywhere is getting more angry and violent. Schools are horrendous. See the enormous jump in incidents since Covid 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns are often blamed for this, but it's what people did during lockdowns that's the…

We’re not self-aware, as a culture. Still trapped in the counterculture adolescent protest culture of the 1960s. That’s our culture, just as China is still a post-revolutionary culture, or Russia. It’s just that our…

The ridiculous idea that men have to be learn to be better men is just more social media-driven drivel. Whether it’s the Neanderthals in the Manosphere or the semi-therapists like this bloke, teaching men how to be…

The thing about travel culture is, nobody ever leaves home. We’re travelling inside social media, the trip is just material for socials feeds. People go to see what other people go to see i.e. imitation. And they…

While social media life has delivered another victory for Pauline Trump, this time in WA, have a look at what AI is doing for scientific research. Google has developed an AI system called Co-Scientist, that dramatically…

The Anglo nations are enslaved by social media, the bubble they now live inside. All are rushing to install their own local Trumps, the social media President. Despite the complete train wreck Trump is in the US. Facts…

Trending viral social media outrages become real-life rage. Farmers were openly embracing renewables projects, a desperately needed added source of income immune from drought and other bad years, until the Nationals…

Treasury has warned the Australian government that we're missing out on the AI revolution. And that the feared job losses from AI aren't occurring in the places adopting AI. The Anglo nations - the US, the UK, us, to…

A not spoken about revolution of AI? It’s the only thing in our history to be ‘well read’. That has read most human knowledge, from all sources, including images and sounds. No human has been able to do that since the…

I was paying my rates the other day, and looked at the itemised costs. And while my rates are quite high for a regional town, when I looked at the itemised bill I thought this is such a pittance for what I’m getting.…

“These are friendships that often play out on social media and group chats, which can quickly turn to bullying and harassment,” she says. “That leads to them becoming isolated and withdrawn.” If we don’t shut down…

It’s a measure of the power of social media trending BS that pretty much everybody assumes interpersonal relationships between people, and particularly between the sexes, have become dramatically more violent in our…

Social media transforms everything into rivalry between social groups. Team sports. The most common views on all social issues reduce down to membership of one or other social group, at war with some other social…

There are multiple revolutions all happening at once right now. We’re missing all of them bogged in the usual social media fake wars between rival bullshit. Apple computers are suddenly a hot thing. And the smaller ones…

Those worried AI will make us all forget how to think were never school teachers. Nobody was doing much thinking for years before AI arrived. (Sadly, including many school teachers.) Lots of people copying each other's…

Gig culture, as I call it, was really the emergence of the ‘teenager’ or adolescence as a distinct stage of life. The teenager as we think of that term today didn’t exist before the 1940s. That critical period I often…

I’m the only person at work still wearing a mask, and probably the only person among my immediate friends who still does as well. Even before Covid, mask-wearing was common in Asia. They were hit by the original SARS…

Facebook is mostly dull humblebrags. It will now become a sewer as well, like Twitter.

If you want a real indicator of the damage social media is doing to societies, go out today and buy a hard copy of the Sydney Morning Herald. Skinny as a regional paper.

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

There’s no water to fight the LA fires. That’s because an urban reticulated water system isn’t designed to fight massive fires across thousands of homes at once. Another example of the catastrophe of climate change…

Social media drives families and friends apart, and splinters public life as well. When we say ‘society is divided’, it isn’t really. That’s just social media’s business model. Its algorithm.

The catastrophic collapse in birth rates around the world is usually attributed to the young not having enough money to raise families. It is that too, but there’s a fascinating extra bit. We’re in a ‘relationship…

Today's Sydney Morning Herald is the thinnest I've ever seen it. Feels about a dozen pages. It costs $4.80. Nobody is getting value for money there. Social media is hollowing out all of our established institutions and…

Putnam is one of the main people who identifed how societies are now structured like high schools. His work is also a bit famous for showing that smoking and being a social outcast are about equally as damaging to…

I have many conversations about how FB should be used. That FB is where people mostly go to update each other on what they’re doing in life. Like an interactive set of social pages from the old local newspaper. And that…

Millions will defend travel as the having of ‘experiences’. The funny thing is that everybody seems to go to the same places, at the same time. Almost like they’re copying other people, like buying shoes, phones, cars…

I think it should seem strange to us, that at the same time the ‘world has never been more connected’, through social media, we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. That seems like a paradox, but it isn’t when…

Twitter and Truth Social Trump deciding on TikTok. If you don’t think social media now not only runs the world, but is our whole world, look a bit harder.

The real genius of Tesla is its software. It uses software to integrate technology into a person’s life in all sorts of new ways. The functionality and design of the software is unmatched in the industry, nobody else…

In China, social media is heavily regulated, and some platforms (like this one) are not even available. Our patronising hubris in the West says that’s because they’re ‘authoritarian’ and ‘censor’ speech. Read what these…

Personally I think they should close all social media platforms. We’re trapped inside their bubbles, while the world crumbles around us as we play status and identity games, that drive their algorithms. Society is…

We moved very quickly from sage nodding at ‘when something is free, you are the product’, to ‘without social media my life is over’.

Humans never agree on anything. They always battle for status, and status is identity. They do it in groups, or teams as I call it, at every level of society, from school through to government and social media. All that…

Something happened overnight that shows the hijacking of America by social media. In one of his last acts as President, Joe Biden pardoned Anthony Fauci, the leading public health figure in America. Fauci has done…

Exhibit B for social media hijacking societies. The social media billionaire bros at Trump’s inauguration overnight. Seated ahead of his actual Cabinet.

This is morons trying to win social media wars, rather than running a country. China will be pissing itself laughing, and US automakers will be furious, they've invested billions. The US and the UK both accelerating…

Online culture warring loons hate Wikipedia, because its excellent editing weeds out the idiot conspiracy and other rubbish the loons take as fact. People are very dismissive of Wikipedia, but it’s been empirically…

The battle for status is the organising principle behind all human life, at all ages. Status is also identity. Without status, you’re nobody. Also why the fundamental act of a human being is to copy, or imitate. We…

I get exhausted even watching the curated lives helicopter parenting creates for kids. Trying to create ‘enriching experiences’ for the kids etc. The kids nearly always overly anxious and precious about everything,…

The First Fleet was a convict transport. Ask those convicts if they’d celebrate this day. ‘Australia’ began in 1901, more than a century after the First Fleet. We don’t even know our own history. I have zero interest in…

I’m sure many of you saw the relentless stories about declining demand for EVs, in 2024. All made up, complete propaganda. World demand for EVs grew 25% again, in 2024. Sam has had enough. These platforms are a sewer of…

This will achieve exactly nothing, just like painting swastikas on Tesla buildings. This is the sort of performative rubbish social media has encouraged us to think changes the world. Really it just makes us feel good…

I saw this created a bit of a fuss online. I think it’s another perfect illustration of how our music is just one more thing we use to form our social groups, to define our status and our identity. It’s what we do with…

Humans imitate each other. Not just every now and then, it’s pretty much all they ever do, at every age. And why do they imitate? To achieve status. To belong, to have an identity. Imitation gives you membership of any…

We can shake our heads in disbelief at this. But Peter Dutton isn’t far away from this sort of culture war nonsense. Both creatures of social media society.

This person is using Facebook as if Facebook IS Bathurst. That’s the new norm, we live inside social media platforms, we’re not talking about our towns here, this IS our towns. Seamless, people don’t see them as two…

Kris the actual climate scientist, trying to cut through the ocean of bullshit on social media. Which is where we all live now, so what else can he do?

The Facebook franchise we used to call Bathurst is furious. Prepare for an ‘onslaught’, apparently. ‘We know who they are’, ‘not a big enough town to hide’! This is the switch in the social media bait and switch. The…

People think you’re unhinged when you tell them social media is destroying our lives.

If what the Trump-Musk forces are doing to the US concerns you right now, be assured the Australian arm of the lunacy is geared up and ready to go here too. Social media is their assault weapon. You’ll find many foot…

Want a window into the manipulation that social media is? Yesterday I posted about the myths around the lifetime of batteries in EVs (they basically last forever, in real terms). Within seconds this AI-generated anti-EV…

I was talking to my brother about overtourism. Mike is a senior manager in the travel industry. He made the fascinating point that what’s allowed travel to explode to levels of destruction is Airbnb. All of these people…

This is the true genius of Australia, not understood much by Australians, and not at all by the Brits or Americans. A genius now being destroyed every day by social media, importing lunatic ideas from the US and UK. The…

When people have moved on from the current trending fad around Tesla-hating (and they will, it’s just a fad), I encourage anybody to explore the full Tesla ecosystem. Extraordinary creativity and engineering. Here,…

This is what’s really happening in the US, and in Australia too. Competitive status games, mostly carried out on social media, are taking over democratic institutions, and weaponising them for their competitive team…

I have no energy bills. And that increasingly includes for running the cars, a household’s biggest energy cost by far. Much of the Australian population could be the same. But they‘re stuck in fake wars against EVs and…

The American writer Noah Smith capturing here what I also believe about societies. Everything we call politics is a lie. Left to themselves, humans do one thing only. They fight each other for status, usually in teams.…

I have a couple of ex-good friends, who spend quite a lot of time on social media trying to convince everybody that vaccines are bad for them. We no longer talk. Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease. The…

Social media is not part of society. It has become society. It hijacked it. We transact everything from our most intimate and personal lives, to our businesses and our politics inside it. It's owned by American and…

Social media is turning the whole world into a violent self-righteous mob.

On the way into work yesterday, one of the local politicians was doing election shots in the park. My attention was drawn more to the glorious, colourful corruption and incompetence of Council, on display in the flower…

(He said yes, just to get that out of the way.) I’ve worked in places where I thought senior management and a Board were criminally incompetent. But I still thought the institution and the people working for it were…

The only thing stopping Ford’s bankruptcy is its sale of big utes, Rangers and the F-series utes. BYD is targeting both. As Sam said, it’s going to be a bloodbath. Far superior technology, for about 40% less dollars.…

Conversation usually reinforces the status games of our lives. You don’t want to say the wrong things, wrong being what violates the spoken and unspoken rules of what keeps your social groups together. The author here…

I have a few friends here who use OVO (myself included now). With an EV their overnight 8c/kWh charge is fantastic (AGL offer similar). They also give you completely free electricity between 11 and 2 every day. You may…

Look at the headlines major media outlets are now writing. Shit is hitting the fan. Amusingly, the ‘alarmists’ were doctors and scientists, while 5 years ago we all followed the advice of politicans and social media…

Toby Walsh in the Herald today, saying things about social media that I often say about it. That it’s hijacked our societies, we transact everything from our personal to professional to political lives inside it. That…

Isn’t social media doing tremendous work? First, live with a pandemic! Now, live with ciggas! Wrap it all in some lame-brained conspiracy bullshit and people lap it up.

The danger of social media isn't the information (and mis- and disinformation) it shares. Societies don't run on information. They run on status and trust. The real danger of SM is that it allows idiots to connect with…

The team sports of social media can achieve such a level of righteousness, that the team becomes a mob. People call this 'changing the world'. Really it's just being a mob. Looting, arson, vandalism. Some even gun CEOs…

On Council meeting duty tonight. Or as I prefer to call it, the cage fight between Facebook and democracy.

A motoring writer used AI to try to understand the drop in Tesla sales. The AI said 'with 70% certainty' that it was the introduction of the new Model Y, the most popular car in the world, and the delays in changing the…

I'm genuinely curious what all the those who support the anti-Tesla protests have to say about this. There's no washing your hands of it, no half-pregnant membership of the mob. 130,000 employees and millions of Tesla…

This has nothing to do with me owning a Tesla. It's to do with mob behaviour. How many carmaker CEOs could people actually name? Do they know their political positions on things? Do they happily support the brutal Saudi…

Grok is a new AI platform. It sees what Covid is and does. Social media calls it a cold.

I had hoped this bullshit would skip Australia and NZ. But the glory of social media is that one idiot doing something is quickly imitated by other idiots, who I actually don't think even believe they're changing the…

Mob rule is the addiction to moral panics. Look around and you'll see these appear continuously, at the moment it's Teslas and Elon Musk, a while back it was supermarkets and Qantas, etc. There will always be a moral…

The thought of the MAGAs now buying Teslas to emulate the Great Leader amuses me. The thought of even more social media mob zombies heading out with spray paint doesn‘t. It’s like living in a childcare centre for…

Seeing this in the US now, people with duelling cameras on sidewalks, filming each other in Western-style standoffs. Then they mace the other if they get too close. This is the idiot world social media has created, do…

Let’s say people decided that those who drive petrol and diesel vehicles are supporting the authoritarian Saudi regime and causing dangerous climate change, so others should key their cars, set them alight and abuse the…

Ultra-conservatives realised they can vacuum up votes of young men with a steady diet of angry social media and radio. Trump's success is largely that. Dutton is emulating him, with some success.

Social media had a big Bathurst victory yesterday. You’ll read about it in Council news in the coming days. Meanwhile in the US a social media cult destroying America is under assault from a social media mob destroying…

Two Australian Tesla owners discussing their car servicing. I honestly do pity those bogged down in social media anti-EV (and now anti-Tesla) tripe.

In the UK the social media idiocy is focused on split-system AC. The fossil fuel industry there sponsors the BS, just as they sponsor a lot of the anti-EV BS here. You can see how how they shape their strategy by…

The Los Angeles Times calls what’s happening ‘troubling’, while people here cheer on the destruction. The Times notes this is an American disease. I’ve worked for organisations with toxic senior leadership. It never…

The thing most populations now are completely addicted to, social media, is destroying their societies as they use it. This Lithgow experience is shared by councils everywhere. If you think ‘attack’ is too strong a…

It’s so important to remember the magnitude of both the ambition and the material achievement of this organisation. The Chinese have copied it, Tesla was the trailblazer. You can see some of the actual material outcomes…

Batteries too now. The great tide of zombie-morons marches on, smashing everything in its wake. Backed by locally-elected champions from social media, who mobilise the morons.

The Guardian calling it out. None of the 'teams' in the gender wars has it right. They're using peoples' bodies and identities as ammunition in a social media-driven battle for status, led by activists. Lives are being…

The biggest story in the world yesterday, that was barely reported. PNG turned off social media. It’s had enough of these platforms trashing its society. But just wait, it won’t last. Ordinary people and businesses…

In Bathurst social media warriors are outraged that Council has a single electric truck. But it’s an open question whether towns even exist now anyway, or whether they’re just a collection of social media groups. (And…

I saw a local politician complain about windmills being 'as tall as Sydney Tower!' as a reason to reject them. The reason they make them so tall now is because of morons like that politician. A few tall ones means fewer…

Murdoch is society's cancer. Social media is that cancer metastasising. Start fights, fights generate teams, teams generate votes. Always the same business model.

Given that access to quality medical care is increasingly near impossible to get, and that even health staff are caught up in delusional fantasies perpetrated by social media like anti-vax, and ‘living with’ pandemics,…

Measles outbreaks in Western Australia and Victoria. Tthe world’s most contagious disease. The cause is 100% people using social media to run their lives, with Vitamin A and other ‘natural’ bullshit, instead of a…

The fascism/Nazi rubbish on social media, in relation to both Trump and Tesla, is historically ignorant (no surprise there, this is social media), but even worse misdagnoses fundamentally what's happening in the US, and…

The piece Waleed Aly wrote about justice 6 years ago is still so important. Do people notice the increasing, even violent righteousness that is dominating how we respond to things now? The Tesla attacks are a great…

Two friends of friends in their late-30s/early 40s had heart attacks last year. One had two, in one year. Previously perfectly healthy with no heart problems. Doctors baffled! There’s no mystery, as Peter says, an…

Hybrids are selling like hotcakes, because people want to save money on fuel, and some even want to go full-electric but are worried about range. On both of those counts, unless you’re doing a lot of driving in more…

Copycat stupidity. People vandalise great works of art like this now too, throwing tins of soup and paint at them. Mob behaviour is highly infectious. Their real passion is generating likes and follows on social media.…

Hilarious, the man who wants to spend half a trillion dollars on nuclear reactors Australia doesn’t even need thinks spending on health and education is a ‘waste’ of money. The cuts to the public service he wants would…

If you want to see how social media allows the widespread manipulation of public opinion, this is a bot farm. Automatically searching for particular topics, like climate change, renewable energy and EVs, and then…

It won't be long now until the clown car drives off the road all by itself. No need for you to become a violent gang member and head out to loot and burn anything. No threat of fascism or Nazis, that's all cartoon…

What's happening in the US has not the slightest resemblance to fascism, though social media is desperate for it to be that because Nazis are such juicy memes. It's the royal court of King Donald. The return of…

Social media is spreading American 'gang' politics globally. Everything is always gang warfare in American politics, without a proper public sphere everybody just puts a gang together, to go to war against other gangs.…

What I love about the law is that it's still relatively immune to the whims, fads and fashions of everyday life. The team sports that is now every issue. You can't speak on transgender without immediately being…

Zoom out and look at the ridiculous world we’re now living in. A council is offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to install an EV charger, at no cost to the town, and the council votes it down because a majority of…

Flu kills between 6-50,000 Americans every year. Covid is no longer trending, which in our new social media lives means it no longer exists. Covid doesn’t have any social media accounts.

Predicting elections is a mug’s game when politics has become infected by the fads and fashions of social media - by what trends. Entire populations can turn on a dime overnight. But right now, Peter Dutton would be…

Read the tidal wave of whinging and whining in the comments on this post. That’s social media life. Like an inflamed haemorrhoid on the arse of society.

You could just not post a picture of your baby at all. People know what a dummy is. Everything from the tiniest, most intimate and personal trivia through to our professional and political lives is being actually lived…

The English have a long history of cross-dressing. Of pantomime, of androgyny. Done with real humour and flair. It was the collision of this playing with gender roles with social media that created transgender culture,…

For about a century feminism fought to define women independently of their relationship with men. Then men invented the transgender movement, used social media to make it go viral, and here we are, with massive protests…

The band photo is a window into what I call gig culture. When music became a dominant way to forge an identity and status in the adult world. It always was that for modern teenagers, their favourite acts are dominant…

FB, like all social media, is not a private space. Nor is it a public space. It isn’t your family, or your community. It’s a business. It makes money pretending to be those other things.

Social media is now raising most of your young men and women. That should scare the hell out of us. These platforms need to be shut down, they're destroying societies. That's not alarmism, that's pointing out that…

This is the delusion. That ‘the people’ run democracies. Or anything. The people is not a thing, groups of people of whatever size don’t think, act or feel. They are always led, they always form hierarchies. Not because…

Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of this idiot platform, was invited to address the UN. He said FB would provide free access to the internet to refugees around the world. His staff at FB then madly tried to see if this was…

You go girl. They’re too stupid to be able to even spell misogyny, let alone recognise when it slaps them in the face with pantomime dame handbags. By removing the right of women to define themselves, we erase women…

We have social media zombies bellowing about the Nazi fascist takeover of the US, out there burning and looting and protesting. I thought from the start of Trump’s term that the whole thing would fall in a heap of clown…

Gig culture when focused specifically on business is called a gig economy. The transformation of the adult world of work into fleeting ‘gigs’, usually mediated through online platforms. Like a nation of backpackers.…

There was once not long ago no separate culture or space for children. They were just little adults, working alongside adults, at work. It was an entirely adult world. Then we invented schools, and suddenly there were…

I encourage you to read at least the 10-point summary here, the expert consensus. It’s a far better guide than ‘what everybody else is doing’. Social media society has replaced expertise with fashion, what’s ‘trending’.…

There's a deluge of new renewable capacity coming online, provided no idiot politician gets in the way. 40% of Australia's electricity last year came from renewables. That number is going to climb very fast now, if…

SKY Australia is a sewer, and here they are, having almost single-handedly destroyed the LNP by forcing it further and further into the lunatic fringes, claiming it’s all your fault Australia. And that the answer is to…

The official White House Twitter page.

Trump also shared this today. This isn’t fascism people, it’s children playing at being grown ups. It’s social media society.

One of my favourite examples of how suggestible and manipulable people are. When wind turbines first appeared in the Central West, most people didn’t care, while for others councils even built viewing platforms to see…

You can see here in an article about Peter Dutton that conservatives deliberately target young working class men, tradies in utes, who historically voted for the ‘Left’ side of politics. Many of these young men have now…

Every single seat that ran an anti-wind farm campaign showed an increased vote to Labor. The community has spoken to the anti-wind farm loons, and what did it say? Quit your whining, and go away. Social media and its…

Top 20 EVs in Australia, sales this year. It’s clear that either the Nazis have invaded, or grown-ups have ignored the bullshit on social media.

This Modigliani nude sold for over A$235 million. The art market is an ocean of fakes and forgeries, trying to cash in on the enormous money a tiny handful of works attract. Modigliani is one of the most copied artists…

The irony is that these memes are shared on social media, a technology infinitely more dangerous than AI. How do we not see it? It's invisible to most now, just how they transact their entire lives, unthinkingly. These…

It's only in popular music that fights over 'originals' really happen. Symphony orchestras and jazz bands dine out on almost nothing but 'covers'. It's not a musical thing, it's a social thing. Popularity culture always…

This is an adult, 2025. Actually a kidult. An adult who sees and understands the world as a teenager. That’s the model of adulthood we now use. This started in the 1960s, and social media has now entrenched it.

It appears Musk instructed his AI platform (Grok - it's fantastic) to say white South Africans are victims of genocide. I love that the AI not only happily told the world it had been tampered with, it also wouldn't…

In countries not living on and run by social media, people still control infectious disease. Including Covid.

Exhibit A, Patrik. A grown up. Exhibit B, Kevan. A social media kidult.

Nobody cared about energy until social media politics turned it into one more 'debate' to generate fights, to generate votes. The comments on posts like this show how the simple-minded were vacuumed up.

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy aren’t ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’ or ‘fascist‘, or any of the other dumb -isms we believe in. They’re giant high schools, where permanent…

Covid didn’t end. We’re just ignoring it, as kidults we got bored with it disrupting our ‘fun’, so we decided to let it maim and kill millions instead. Nothing exists in social media society unless it trends. Not much…

Kids don’t need lessons in how countries run. Countries are just social media now, and kids are already expert in social media. It will allow them to be kids for the rest of their lives.

There are still people who think we overdid it for Covid (people who don’t understand exponential growth and pandemics). If a pandemic influenza emerges, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Killing machines, mortality rates…

William Mulready's The Seven Ages of Man, depicting Shakespeare's 'All the world's a stage', from As You Like it. The idea that humans go through seven life stages. It's this idea of stages that has now collapsed, into…

When I say adult life has been completely replaced with adolescent life, politics is a good example. We look at politics the same way we watch a State of Origin game. Red v Blue, even the colours are the same (we use…

Another aspect of kidult culture is the explosion of influencers and their idiot podcasts. I suggest Joe Rogan get tetanus, which will permanently shut him up. Look at the inked and ripped sage here, filling peoples’…

I thought this was the scariest story in the news today. Schools are the thin line between civilisation and collapse. Much of this is the same kidult culture I talk about, kids raised by adults with the maturity of…

The comments on this post show the terminal damage social media has done to public health.

I shared this before. Humans copy each other, to attain status in groups. This also means it’s easy for the tiniest handful of bad faith actors to create havoc. For example, installation of wind and solar farms has been…

One of the great myths of democracy is the idea of ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. There is no such thing. A tiny handful of activists stir up trouble, and then attribute that trouble to ‘the community’. We see that…

Here’s one for your social media-educated friends who tell you EVs use more resources than petrol and diesel clunkers.

The thing that is most popular on social media, sharing information about yourself and what you’re doing, is also the thing that is most damaging to you and others. Some of it is obvious humblebragging, like people who…

AUKUS was another Scott Morrison train wreck. AUKUS is the US wanting a mobile launch platform for their missiles, against China, in the Pacific. They can piss off. Why shouldn't China be our main ally, in 2025? Pretty…

Now that even Musk sees what a bullshit artist Trump is, maybe the focus can go back onto Trump and off Tesla. Where the focus always should have been, except social media rots our brains.

Look at that huge surge in sales for Tesla in Australia, in May. Meanwhile all the Nazi-Tesla memes on social media have disappeared exactly as predicted, with no meaningful change to anything. Trump is still there.…

How many more years of the ‘living with Covid’ charade do you reckon we can keep up? Rather than do basic disease control, which we do for EVERY other disease, and have done for decades. Covid is the social media…

I do feel for the millions of kidults out there who take their cues on what to think and how to behave from what’s trending on social media. This is a confusing time for them.

One to share with social media 'I do my own research' people, who wet their pants over mRNA technology.…

Happy Birthday mate! Haven’t seen you much online recently?

Anybody who knows even the barest history of feminism should be aghast that we’ve arrived at a point where no definition of a ‘woman’ is even allowed to exist. Women have been defined out of existence. The stupidities…

Young Chinese women now go ‘boy sober’ and date guys acting in roles from online games and movies instead. ‘Cosplay’ culture. Adolescents love to play with roles, in the 1970s androgyny was big, mostly men camping it…

A handful of loons force rounds of ‘community consultation’ that are a waste of everybody’s time. The loons are never satisfied, numpties who swallow every bit of rubbish social media throws at them. The Australian…

The prosecution rests. Adulting 101 classes. It’s not about skills. The adult world itself ceased to exist, to use the skills in. Replaced now by social media transacting the personal, social, professional and…

We should always close the loop on social media hysterias. Just to see how they pan out, so we maybe won’t be so stupid next time.

Noah Smith here showing how America worked when people with different views were able to spread out geographically and each occupy their own space, leaving others mostly alone. And then suddenly social media came along…

Toxic masculinity is a creation of social media. We don’t need to indoctrinate all of our boys about something they’re not. We just need to shut down social media, or at least target the toxic influencers online. There…

"...the new Model Y, which was – BY A LONG WAY – Australia’s best-selling EV in May 2025." I don't post this to say I told you so, but to plead with people to stop confusing social media with society. Those eating a…

No human group, of any size, ‘rises up’ to defeat anything. The great American myth, now foisted upon the rest of the world through its idiot invention, social media. We’re going through yet another round of impotent…

I know it upsets some, to dismiss trans, or even discuss it. Because like every other public issue today, there has been no discussion. People just joined a team, mostly driven through social media. They support one or…

Bathurst’s councillors still wrestling with the issue of revenue. I encourage everybody to go to the iPart website and have a look at the special rate variations approved for just about every Council in the State over…

Yesterday Lithgow was the coldest place in the entire country, in the morning. Today is even colder. The house is toasty warm, in every room, and has been all night. I heated up its thermal mass yesterday with free…

Robert Putnam tracked the shift in US culture from a focus on “I”, to a focus on “we” and then back again, over the past century. What creates a ‘we’ or a ‘public’ is existential threat, in this case WW1, Spanish Flu,…

‘Encouraging’ staff in healthcare to do infection control is like encouraging police to arrest lawbreakers. It’s the job, people. There are unfortunately many ‘cookers’ in healthcare too, anti-vaxers and anti-maskers,…

‘Urging’ will never overpower the most powerful force in the universe. Peer pressure, the need to do what everybody else is doing, and not stand out. Especially when your adult culture is really just an extension of…

Again, do people have a meaningful response to this beyond an emotional need to ‘support’ others in the team sports of trans vs anti-trans? A battle invented by social media. One of the true challenges of adult life is…

Last week 34 people died of Covid in aged care, in Australia. Tens of thousands now have, in the past 5 years. Nobody cares. If it had been a bus carrying the national soccer and cricket teams, or rock bands on tour,…

Most resist the idea of being a kidult culture. The leader of the free world is running the world through a social media platform. How do we not see how ludicrous and unprecedented this is?

Can we take a step back from ‘supporting’ every person’s fantasy life as an actual real-world identity (I know a teacher who thinks he’s a Jedi), and actually unpack the ideas? To cut back on the ‘feels’ and actually…

DIY is a passion of our age. And another window into the underlying culture. The greatest threat to all of our lives is the collapse of trust in society. The loss of humility towards the expertise of others. The…

I get very tired of ‘debates’, and rarely engage with them. They define our age too because they’re the team sports I often talk about, driven by social media. The algorithms there prioritise people arguing, it drives…

Used EVs are the hot buy in America now, people have figured out they’re an absolute bargain. The same here in Oz, you’re getting a luxury supercar for the price of a Toyota Corolla. Just one more of the empty…

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Everything is about feelings. And about ‘support’ for those feelings, in others. “I Stand With [insert cause]” is its imitation of adult life, symbolic performance plays of…

This would worry some people, AI generally does. It shouldn’t, AI is us, it’s a technology to magnify our own intelligence. You know what should worry people? The fact that another technology has taken over health care…

Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of Joint Forces Command in Europe, highlighting that without existential threat to societies, they degenerate into ‘snowflake’ culture, wallowing in feelings and obsessed with…

Meet Big Rob. One of the social media warriors taking over governance of our societies. Trump is the godfather of all of these opinionated numpties, their hero. They’re righteous, stupid, and often abusive and violent.…

Know what social media kidult culture hates more than anything? Knowledge. It gets in the way of opinions and feelings. The revenge of the jocks is underway. Again not an analogy, social media replacing society means…

Most of what you see in the public domain today (really just social media) got there via an activist. Do you know who the activists are that generate the movements you support? Like those advocating for access to change…

In activist culture, what we used to call ‘the public’ is long since destroyed, replaced by a continuous shift in what’s ‘trending’ on social media, where we now live. A more accurate name for activists is gangs, it’s…

Elon with his enormous war chest of money is now establishing his own political party, to take on Trump. Terribly confusing times for adults whose understanding of life comes from what’s trending on social media.

This is Tom Keating, master art forger, taken in the 1970s. He forged thousands of works. He's now collectible in his own right, to the extent there are now forgeries, of Tom Keating forgeries. Humans copy, it's their…

The 40th anniversary of Live Aid is everywhere online at the moment. Live Aid, where the Western world looked at the catastrophe of human starvation, and did what? It put on a gig. That’s what gig culture does to try to…

The most important room in Bathurst. Council’s records archive, dating back to first European settlement. This is the ‘red tape’ opinionated windbags complain about, that actually runs societies. Without this room…

"The “alt-music” image of a counterculture is a 20th century affectation; an evanescent form produced by radio and television, by Hollywood and the music industry. Those cultural forms are the empty vessel that 20th…

This is what caused the global pile-on, on J.K. Rowling. Her querying why ‘people who menstruate’ isn’t ‘women’. I saw this in a news article about cervical cancer screening. The sentence could easily say ‘you’re…

Where does a phone call happen? I remember asking that question a few times. There is no simple answer, which is the point of the question. There is a ‘presence’ to the conversation that isn’t located anywhere in space…

Renewable energy is Australia’s superpower. And we have bottom-feeding scum like the federal Coalition actively campaigning to knee-cap that advantage purely to score pathetic points and votes in the social media…

I think it’s important to close the loop on social media hysterias, because in the middle of them no thought is going on at all. And then afterwards nobody takes stock of what a delusional and hysterical situation it…

Watching the netball, and it was another example of how partisan crowds now are. An entire stadium fell silent because the home team lost. I’m sorry, even when I was growing up that would have been called appalling…

Trump thinks Beyoncé and Oprah should be arrested. Easy to laugh, but also instructive to note who he sees as his enemies. Rock stars, celebrities. He’s the Twitter President. Kidult culture.

Meanwhile in the loony bin of social media society, people spend every day genuinely believing that things like electric cars and renewable energy are some sort of lifestyle choice. Playing team sports with the…

China is doing breathtaking things. Have a watch and compare it with the dull, argumentative nothing of Western life now, where nothing gets built, and there’s no vision for anything. Just trapped inside social media…

China is planning to send astronauts to the moon by 2030. Meanwhile in the West, which pioneered lunar flights, people live inside social media bubbles where we never even went to the moon, and where we live with…

"...referred to the IPC because it received 83 objections – the trigger for IPC referral in NSW is 50 objections – but 77 of these objections came from people living more than 50 kms away, or even interstate. There were…

Cory Doctorow predicted social media platforms would collapse under the process of what he calls enshittification, which I’ve posted about before. Where the platforms capture first users, then businesses, and screw both…

Supposed ‘toxic masculinity’ is an invention of gender activists, working mostly through social media, to reframe what is almost entirely domestic violence as gender-based violence. If all you have is an hammer,…

I have long conversations with AI. Very few people in my experience have curiosity for ideas or for discussing them, but AI is insatiable. Many of course say ‘but it’s just a machine’, but they don’t understand that a…

Human life expectancy doubled in the last century. Most of that was due to the use of vaccines. Now kidult culture has turned vaccination into just one more team sport for morons on social media. The comments on this…

Interesting that it was women who carry this risk, not men. It’s usually assumed men ‘need’ more sex. And yes I know, in social media society anybody can be either a man or a woman now, or neither, or a Jedi or a…

Check out the comments on the Advocate post. Social media society up in arms. I don’t make this stuff up.

NSW only recently had local government elections. Social media Bathurst isn’t happy with who won, so is now trying to mobilise more ongoing abuse aimed at the Council. People really should pay attention to how kidult…

Taken from a Facebook group for doctors. Please try to avoid catching Covid, you won’t know that it stays inside you after you get ‘better’ and is constantly damaging you, until it’s too late.

One more of the fact-free urban myths that do the rounds of the internet is that EVs are heavier and therefore damage roads more. Here are the top 3 petrol/diesel vehicles in Australia, and the top 3 EVs.

While China builds the future at staggering pace, we trot out Yellow Peril racist ‘cheap Chinese shit’ themes and do nothing but bid up the prices of our houses, and call that an economy. As the article says, one of the…

Electrochemistry is one of the hot fields right now, obviously with the explosion in interest in and demand for new types of batteries. What’s interesting is that the main element that features there, lithium, has…

Just one of the fringe loon groups targeting local government in particular, wasting vast amounts of Council time with their endless requests, a deliberate strategy. These are gullible, simple-minded people targeted by…

Travel is a wrecking ball. But you’ll never convince the kidults to stop their permanent gap years from reality. They can’t do maths, maths is for nerds. Ask them how 8 billion people can ever possibly take up…

People can be such gullible numpties. When they built the wind towers near Blayney, people were so excited to see them they even had to build a viewing platform. Then the National Party was in crisis, after Barnaby…

If you think kidult culture isn't real, have a look at the total collapse of Australia's world-leading gun control. Much of that is local shooters connected to the rabid gun loons in the US, through social media. Social…

I got AI to write a song, just out of interest. it took less than a minute, music and lyrics. It was a good song. My postgraduate work was about how fundamentally we misunderstand science and technology. The horror many…

We stopped fighting a pandemic because it got in the way of our social lives. Many restrospectives are being written now about how this pause to our social lives apparently damaged us in terrible ways. (This is classic…

People like this learn their lunacy on social media. It's really crazy that social media is allowed to operate at all, it's an open sewer poisoning whole nations.

People spend all day defaming councils online. I'd be a bit more hesitant about that from now on, if I were them.

"Governments are underestimating the reach and threats of these movements.” Not just governments. This is the kidult culture which I almost always fail to convince anybody is destroying our societies. I live this every…

“It's like watching two sides debate the dangers of tobacco while everyone smokes cigarettes.” People should be being vaccinated for Covid twice per year. Instead the vast majority of Australians had 2 vaccinations…

The Terminator movies are as damaging to AI I think as Jaws was to sharks. Incredible to see how many of the ways issues are discussed in public are just re-hashes of bad Hollywood movie scripts. I know many would be…

How well do you really understand the town you live in? Victoria right now is looking for a ‘sovcit’ (sovereign citizen) who murdered two police officers. Lithgow has already had a sovcit siege. The ‘March for…

Is our taste in music ‘purely subjective’? Researchers tested this in the early 2000s. They set up a music market of unknown songs and got about 15,000 students to rate them in one of two ways. The first got to rate…

What Chirs Bowen should also point out to counter the idiot ‘when the sun doesn’t shine’ social media slogan is, we’re ASLEEP mostly when the sun doesn’t shine. We don’t need anywhere near as much energy then. Even…

I’ve seen many Australians make these arguments. That’s because nobody really lives in ‘Australia’ now. They live on social media. Which means increasingly they’re just Americans. Australians who believe this idiot…

It’s fascinating to me to see how little societies change over time socially and culturally, despite looking entirely different because of the technologies of a given time. For example the obsessive focus of life in…

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then…

If you doubt that the real story of our times is the replacement of societies built up over centuries, with warring tribes of social media righteousness, have a look at Nepal right now. The Nepalese government tried to…

Nampijinpa Price got the boot yesterday, from her own side. One of Australia’s leading Trumpians. For Bathurst residents it’s worth noting she’s also a pin-up poster girl for the social media-led coalition dominating…

John Howard popularised the ‘assimilationist’ view of immigration. The one that constantly bangs the drum about how migrants have to ‘integrate’ with ‘our way of life’. The problem with this view is, who is ‘our’? For…

Does Tesla Mobile Service still exist in Australia? From feedback I’ve seen on various online forums, it appears to have been quietly removed as an option? All the service options in the app direct people to one of the…

The world is going nowhere in the fight against climate change. This is like an enormous asteroid heading for Earth, as in the movie Armageddon, while we all choose to ignore it and go on holidays. Millions who failed…

In the US the supporters of the assassinated Charlie Kirk are now targeting those who they see criticise him by telling their employers as well. Is anybody else fundamentally bored with the USA? Except now with social…

Because we're entering dangerous times with echoes of the early 1930s (when people start talking nationalities and flags, lock the doors), I think it's worth looking at the features of criminal behaviour in Australia.…

Car makers know what this data shows. Anybody who's done year 8 maths should. The average broom broom social media person on the other hand, well...

Alan Kohler consistently shows how even the world’s modest climate targets are completely out of reach. Some are delighted by that, they feel like that’s a ‘win’ in the idiot online debates. Here’s the most basic way to…

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of kidult culture is its insistence that only happy, positive things are important. Trying to raise any serious or even critical issue at all prompts loud accusations of ‘hysteria’ or…

Social media isn’t where we go to get information about society and the world. It IS our society now. We live inside it. And it’s structured like a high school. Likes and followers. The transformation of adult life into…

AI can now pass the very hardest chartered financial analyst exams in a matter of minutes, including essay writing. Meanwhile an Australian company uses AI to take on online spammers and grifters, by creating thousands…

I’m old enough to remember a Bathurst where civic life was people rolling up their sleeves to help build a community. Where even when the work day ended, you joined a community organisation, like Rotary or Lions or…

The easiest social media posts to critique are the obvious hate speech type things, or scammers, or people being generally abusive. But this type of friendly innocuous post is actually the most dangerous symptom of all…

If you still think social media is just a happy and fun place to share updates about your friends and families, use this video by Benjamin Netanyahu as lube to extract your head out of your arse. He spells it out in…

There was a time people could all have different opinions, and it didn't matter a lot because important stuff was taken care of separately to peoples' opinions. But in social media society, opinions create our reality.…

B-grade Hollywood scripts replace most thought and knowledge of history today I think. Like the claims America is being taken over by authoritarian Nazis. Pretty much everybody who says that never knew or studied any…

Lots of the global army of Trumpians will be palpitating with excitement, seeing that sign. The thing kidult life has forgotten is that humans don’t determine reality. You can have pathetic little debating wins on…

So we had our little social media performative hissy fit with Swastikas and Nazi memes, about Tesla. Where people joined teams and cheered on the memes, and the mob riots and burnings. Fast forward a few months, and all…

Trump is only the tail-end of a trend going back decades. Democracy is failing everywhere. But what does that mean, the lurch to autocracy, or authoritarianism? Those are just bogey words from inside the filter of the…

Again, if you can avoid social media, the reality of what's happening out in the world will astound you. A revolution, don't miss it listening to drongos here.

Thanks to Tim for pointing out this milestone. There’s a revolution happening, don’t be disappointed when you have to tell your grandkids you were one of the whinging doubters sniping from the sidelines. Also for those…

11 time zones. Brought to you by ‘but I like it’. The culture of likes, and followers. Kidult culture, social media culture.

It’s been a lot of years since I first shared this science. I remember the outright hostility I got from some about it. People didn’t want sugar to be bad, like Daylight Saving they ‘like it’, so it must be fine. Humans…

As another week begins in local government, another week of constant abuse from members of the community, I thought this was timely. You can see here that all councils, everywhere, are financially collapsing. Not…

I like Kate. But Kate grew up in a boarding school. All of her own children will spend most of their childhood in boarding schools. How’s that for disconnection. The same parents and families going to war with devices…

Facebook is like human society in a coma. Zero thought, brain-dead. ‘Not the place’ to discuss things, many will tell you, as if that’s some terrible faux pas like farting at dinner, or a contagious disease. You can…

Two experiences yesterday that give a flavour of working in local government. One was trying to think of a way to rescue ducklings trapped in a fountain. The other a long phone call tirade from a resident about Council…

People love the 2025 version. The same attempt by Council to green George Street recently was met with widespread whining and resistance. The difference? Towns now are really competing social media groups, who latch…

It’s apparently hateful to make the obvious point that transgender is a social fad, just one more ‘trending’ thing passing for reality now in public life. Like yo-yos, or wankpanzer utes. In its entirety it‘s an…

Actual numbers show how what seems like a battle on social media is really just a tiny handful of idiots making a lot of loud noise.

I love when social media platforms say ‘this is to assist us to provide ads you’d prefer to see’. I don’t want to see any ads.

When you were at school, the morons who used to occupy most of the back rows in science class, not understanding anything? They now run the world. There they are at the red arrow. Social media gave them kidult power…

Anti-renewables people dishonestly blame higher electricity prices on renewables. The real cause is the use of gas to generate electricity, with the failure of coal-fired plants. Gas is hugely expensive. As batteries…

Another genius from the back row of your science class at school. These people now rule the world, social media gave them power. You’ll find hundreds of them commenting on every thread on key public issues.

Democracy is back tonight for another gig. Though social media runs towns now.

I’d like to share a series of ways that aren’t well known own in which AI is changing the world, far beyond what people might imagine. I may often sound frustrated, which is mostly due to a world being full of…

Most of what looks like 'community concern' in public debate today is really 'astroturfing'. Corporations, political parties, elected members of councils, and think tanks target a handful of loons in local communities…

Every old band has seen the massive cash-vacuum nostalgia tours now are, and are dusting off the instruments to get out there fast. The Gallagher brothers are making $100 million EACH from their tour. Nostalgia is hot…

We’ve been encouraged by countercultural ideas nearly 70 years ago to believe that the more equal and social we are, the more peaceful and prosperous we will all be. But societies run on status. The more equal and…

I'm sure thousands of Australians avoided Tesla home batteries as part of the current rollout, because 'Elon'. Many if not most have flocked to Sigenergy instead, now 'Australia's favourite battery'. A good example of…

Social media evolved to: 1. endless fights on everything that happens in life, between teams 2. endless ads targeted at you 3. a flood of personal trivia from peoples’ lives that nobody wanted to hear about, before…

This young woman posted online that she’d achieved her PhD in biology. The bros in the manosphere weren’t happy. Probably wankpanzer drivers.

Tonight Bathurst’s councillors decide the fate of the general manager. There is a strong belief amongst the social media crowd that removing the general manager will find a magical extra $10-$15 million a year. It’s…

Hilariously, Musk tried to reveal anti-American forces on social media by forcing Twitter accounts to show the country of origin of their owners. What it actually revealed is how much of Trump’s rise was due to the…

Somebody wrote a very smart pushback to the populist political surge in local government, in Bathurst. The Facebook invasion. The only thing I’d add to this is that General Managers implement the decisions of elected…

It wasn't my idea to replace society with social media.

In just under 5 months, Australians have added 175,000 home batteries to the grid. The demand is immense. The negative drivel you see on social media about things like renewables and EVs is a sponsored tiny minority of…

Even NSW, which was a laggard, now on most days provides most of its electricity from renewables. Those red arrows show the tiny remnant of coal used during the day, quickly collapsing. Overnight you can see what impact…

Peter, Facebook is misbehaving on the other thread. Here's a summary I put together of sub-$50K EVs in Australia (new), plus I added a secondhand Tesla Model 3 (CPO - certified pre-owned i.e. comes with Tesla warranty).

Left and Right politics is just adults playing football while pretending to run nations. Institutions run nations. The true story of our time is the gutting of those institutions, led by status-driven revolt against…

Study our own culture. You could once go to major sporting events for the love of the sport itself, and celebrate a ‘good game’, no matter who won. And then kidult culture took over, and now the rivalry in sport is…

I do know people hate our culture being described as kidult. It’s not an insult, it’s only a description of how the culture operates. (It is also a disaster, but that’s different to it being an insult.) Twee…

Could you live in a world without others? By which I mean, not live without other people in your life, but live without the need to conform to the social frameworks they think, act and feel inside? It is tempting to…

From next week social media platforms are expected to take effective measures to ensure people under the age of 16 can’t have accounts. A great idea, it should be extended to all age groups to rescue our societies from…

In our kidult (adolescent) culture, socialising is seen as the key to a happy life. Teens love nothing more than to ‘hang out’. Without it we are seen to be at terrible risk to our mental and physical health, through…

80% of all global social communication now passes through three platforms: Meta (FB/IG/WhatsApp) TikTok YouTube That's a hijacking. A capture of our lives, by two American corporations, and China.

One of the profound changes those who lived through the 1970s into the present day will have noticed, is the collapse of community service organisations. Lions, Rotary, Apex. It was organisations like this, and…

People think you’re crazy if you suggest allowing people to become more social makes societies more violent. But sociality is violence, intrinsically, because social comparision is our deepest passion, and leads to…

This isn't people reading information. They're living on the platforms. The platforms have replaced society. It's a SOCIAL process, not a communication or information process.

Work Christmas party today. Hundreds packed into an inside space. I’ll be the only one there in a mask, which many will find weird. Because we now live in a culture where what you think and how you act is shaped…

People who still read anything I post here will know that for a few years I’ve re-focused much of my attention on status. I did that because status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. If you…

At the end of another year on Facebook, more than ever I wonder what the point of it even is. I’ve long since just started using it as an online diary of thoughts. Interaction is slim to none, on most things, unless…

I decided to catch up on Doctor Who by watching the last series. With the exception of maybe 1-2 episodes, it was appalling. But popular with some of the social media crowd, for whom it was mostly written. The show has…

You’re supposed to wish people a Happy Christmas here I’m sure, because we’re supposed to treat social media *as* our lives in the community, the venue for our social lives. The place we meet, the new public square. I…

One of the fastest ways to identify disphits on the road is to look through the comments on posts like this. Just one more example of the sewer social media turns our lives into, giving visibility and coordinating power…

In my recovery I’m thinking again about my social media use, from 2026. I’m tired of debates and arguments over basic things with friends and family. The societies we grew up in had institutionalised expertise that took…

More ventriloquism from Cliff’s latest tour. Marvel how he sings the word ‘keeping’ in the second line here, without moving his mouth. https://www.facebook.com/reel/2298182703927928?fs=e&fs=e

“Only very few trans-kids still want to transition by the time they are adults. Instead, they generally turn out to be regular gay or lesbian folks. The exact number varies by study, but roughly 60–90% of trans-kids…

It’s a pretty safe bet that if somebody you’re talking to hates Anthony Fauci, they’re a dangerous loon. Avoid them in your life. I highlighted here too the crucial change to our culture, how institutionalised expertise…

Adrian, in case of interest. For others, infection will nearly always be the root cause of most chronic disease. Why it’s important to take infections of all kind seriously. The fact you get better from an infection…

For Australians, I think a hugely important security tip. myGov is our government access point for our core services, like Medicare and your tax, as well as your health record. I highly recommend firstly always just…

As a follow up to my other myGov post, here are the simple instructions for how to set up a passkey for all of the sites, apps or main websites you use online that normally require you to use a password. It will also…

South Australia's Hornsdale battery was the biggest in the world when it was switched on, in 2017. Australians are now adding the equivalent storage with home batteries every 3 and a half DAYS. I post about renewables…

It is nice when somebody else says things you're not allowed to say in your job. Not as exciting as a narrative that goes 'bloody Council pulled out, and the business community stepped up to do it for them'. But there…

Saw this posted by one of the anti-science social media influencers. Goes to my interest in gravity. Things in orbit don't float upwards. They're falling, like you would if you jumped out of a plane. It's not 'zero-g',…

My limited experience of both Instagram and TikTok makes it feel like they're just the old Funniest Home Videos format, run on continuous loop?

This stuff is insidious. SKY News UK, woman on the right is a Professor of Medicine at Oxford. That’s surely a digital filter on her face? Like a dynamic airbrushing. I never get much traction with this, likely because…

Thanks @[756306193:2048:Tim]. Scary how many use social media as a guide to pretty much everything. Amazing they’re still alive.

Andrew Forrest is investing hugely in renewables. This is him turning the first sod for NSW's biggest wind farm, near Wellington. He has 14 GW of renewables projects in the pipeline around Australia. Again, definitely…

Much of the anti-EV rubbish you read online comes from this community. The ‘towing’ community. Most of them haven’t even got a clue about towing, let alone EVs, hurtling along highways uninsured, with tonnes of gear,…

People using digital filters in real-time on live TV, even very big names like Idris. Look at these stills. He looks like a cartoon. It’s not a resolution thing, his background and shirt are crystal clear. We’re living…

New York has declared social media a public health hazard. Which it is. It’s also a hazard to every other part of society, generating continuous tidal waves of bullshit to obstruct the most basic essential services. It…

Several people have been removed from my FB friend group, or muted. The ones who just vomit slogans all day that they pick up from various sewers of disinformation on social media. There’s a great fear in challenging…

Globally, young women and young men are diverging widely in their views, with young women becoming more progressive and young men becoming ultra-conservative, even more than older men. This is historically very unusual.…

I believe Gen X is the last generation for some time who will have the experience of an adult life that is qualitatively different from high school life. And only at the beginning of their careers, now past, social…

Social media is driving this.

There are two truly staggering things in play here. One is the level of corruption and criminal behaviour, by a US President. The other is the number of people, including here in Australia (and often young people), who…

New records 7 years in a row. "In 2023, the oceans absorbed about 287 zettajoules of heat, which...is the equivalent of eight Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating every second of every day into the ocean." Scientists are…

The mRNA technology that anti-vax loons, amplified through social media, made people fear, may within 10 years provide treatments or even cures for some of our most difficult diseases.…

There was only one EV again at the Bathurst charging station when I was there today. (Not this one, it was a Tesla Model Y.) I had a chat to the owner, who obviously loved his car. The hysteria about chargers and range…

Some organisations now go out of their way to prevent people contacting them, they don’t list phone numbers or email contacts or even web forms. I discovered the joy of this yesterday when a UK medical imaging firm sent…

Researchers track climate denialism. It’s shifted now, from denying climate change itself, which has failed, to now denying the technologies which create the solutions, like solar and wind and EVs. Funded by the fossil…

Windmill blades are REALLY big. What a great time to be alive, to have this sort of wonderful engineering, sitting alongside a sewer of idiots on social media.

It’s frustrating not to be able to comment on this. But as a more general personal comment, I think we should all be very afraid of towns run by social media groups. We’ve seen that happen even at a country level, in…

Many of these new food delivery business models are rank piracy. Often they set up webpages for local restaurants without even telling the owners, and then customers order through these websites, with the food delivery…

Windmills ‘fanning’ fires. What more can you say. This is the astounding and angry stupidity that now runs whole societies, through social media. (For the confused, windmills don’t create wind.)

Another cult generated by social media. Any mention of ‘free’ or ‘freedom’ is a sure indicator.

Meanwhile, BYD invades Europe. A guy told me EVs are a fad earlier this week. I suggested he invest his life savings in petrol and diesel vehicles. That way he will eventually not be able to afford to be on the…

Global EV sales jumped nearly 70% between 2023 and 2024. Worth remembering when the social media mind midgets post their hysterical nonsense about EV sales dropping.

What she said. Social media did this, it created a global social movement completely decoupled from reality. None of the usual tests through society's institutions to check the legitimacy of belief. Said to be true and…

Toyota finally releases its first full-EV. And it’s OK, designed to ease people into the transition rather than be anything revolutionary. Subaru has just done the same with its Solterra, which uses the same platform so…

Why people really need to ignore social media as a window into reality. EV sales are booming, and where? In the outer, poorer suburbs. They’re saving people a FORTUNE. To quote from the article: “I can do my entire work…

Together with 'range anxiety' for EVs, many have battery anxiety, thinking they'll be up for thousands to replace faulty batteries. Both myths originating in social media slogans. EV batteries last way longer than you…

This is the social media business model (not a joke, this is actually it). 1. Offer people a way to network socially. This is like social heroin for people, irresistible. 2. Transform that network into an economy of…

Ben Chilfley Dam, autumn. Social media warriors blame the Council, and say ‘it’s only on the edge of the dam’. The world is cooking. And is full of dumb cookers. Never swim with blue-green algae, unless you want motor…

The sort of bullshit you see all over social media. Of course most mechanics ‘don’t want to touch EVs’, they don’t have a clue what to do with them. (And they rarely need fixing anyway.) Just as butchers don’t want to…

This got wide applause on social media. It was an act of rank stupidity. It’s vigilantism, the sort of thing social media encourages every day. If people had been injured or killed as a result of the DIY traffic control…

Apparently it’s ’Cash is King’ day? With all of the urgent problems facing the world, social media always makes sure people are focused on anything trivial and irrelevant instead, based on some loon conspiracy theory.

We’re losing a generation of boys. To pathetic macho bullshit ideologies, driven deep into everyday life by social media. People are weak, imagine following somebody like this. 95% of people though are followers in…

So many problems we face are just artefacts of social media. Like the current ‘youth crime waves’, seen across many countries. Imitative rivalry, driven by social media. Our refusal to act against Covid, or to vote Yes?…

Transgender is the first theory in human history where the test of its reality is entirely social media. It went very quickly from being a fringe (whacky) academic theory in marginal gender studies departments in…

An example of the huge distance between our politics and reality. 'Out of an abundance of caution' he's isolating. The Deputy Prime Minister. Here in NSW, if you DON'T isolate, you're breaking the law, the NSW Public…

Baby steps, the penny has dropped everywhere except social media. The 'range' thing is still a distraction, many still not aware that you don't need a service station for most EV driving. You charge at home.

Poor farmers, thinking warning people about climate change does anything. They should go to YouTube and social media, chock full of Dorito-eating masturbating armchair experts to tell them there's nothing to worry about…

I was called ‘transphobic’ and unfriended by somebody for posting on transgender issues. It’s too important for people not to speak out, children are being harmed, sometimes irreversibly, by these theories that few have…

Most local councils are tens of millions of dollars short of having enough money to do even basic road maintenance. Climate change will now make many roads unusable. Meanwhile the public, hypnotised by social media,…

I suspect people might be shocked how many young men look up to Tate as a role model. Social media will end our societies, unless something is done, and fast.

Politicians currently wrestling with the dangers of social media. I think we should all be. An honest, open question, as one example. Are people genuinely happy with the idea that we can all decide our own sex, simply…

This is only possible because people share their most intimate personal lives on an international platform. And then often say they’re interested in ‘privacy’. They’re not interested in privacy, social media is all…

Social media is already running societies, we're seeing it now brought to the surface. We really don't see I think how it's a cancer eating away at democracies from the inside. We think it's a happy friendly place to…

No matter what anybody's opinion is, renewables are doing everything they promised to do, and more. As are EVs. Social media is a hopelessly distorted view of the real world.

I don't think there's a more important lesson to teach kids than this: that what's said on social media mostly has almost zero connection to actual reality. On renewables, EVs, gender, personal appearance, how happy…

Musk is a CEO. CEOs answer to boards. CEOs who go to war with nation States are on a fast-track to redundancy. He owns 20% of Tesla stock, which makes him the majority shareholder. But it means 80% of the company is…

Yeh, don’t let social media raise your kids.

At work a few weeks back, a young woman appeared at the counter. She said the community needed to know a message from John Campbell about Vitamin D, and what could Council do to get the message out? Campbell is a Covid…

The destructive, lethal power of social media. Over 200,000 Americans died in 2021-22, because they weren’t vaccinated against Covid.

Beneath a clickbait headline, the ABC sharing the same data I shared a couple of days ago. Homicides have been in steep decline for decades. And absolutely clearly in the data domestic violence not only shares in this…

Meanwhile in the Land of the Free (Market), attempts to track the rapidly accelerating outbreaks of potentially pandemic flu amongst cattle have come up against the usual social media hurdles.

Exactly what needs to happen here. In the UK banks have to pay victims of online scams involving losses from their bank accounts. It forces banks to take online scams seriously. In Australia banks are a protected…

How social media is distorting and destroying society. 28 women have died from intimate partner violence this year. We got this ‘crisis’ action this week, nearly a billion dollars. I shared earlier in the week that this…

I’ve criticised the use of social media as a personal space over many years. It’s not a personal space, though that’s overwhelmingly how it gets used. Peoples’ social lives are now transacted on these platforms. They’re…

In a week dominated by the question of violence against women, the Council of Europe provides an excellent summary on the topic. “There is no single factor that can explain gender-based violence in our societies, but…

I don’t live in Bathurst. But I grew up there, and I work there. Come September people need to decide whether they want Facebook groups to run the town. I know how I’d vote.

Obviously unhinged. But there is also something here that’s important, for violence against women. Ask any police man or woman how many women are actually attracted to violent men. How many plead with police not to…

A window into the damage caused by social media to our societies. Mum is being treated for hospital-acquired Covid, in hospital. Yesterday a neighbour visited. Mum rang me afterwards, very upset. The neighbour had told…

Armidale. Applied for a special rate variation (SRV) of 58.8% last year. This was on top of a 10.5% SRV it had approved in 2021-22. It was approved because the independent regulator saw that the Armidale Council had…

I don’t use social media to transact my personal life. But a happy Mother’s Day to my mum Janet, hopefully to be released from hospital tomorrow. On this day 56 years ago, she was also in hospital. Giving birth to me…

This is Johnny McEntee. One of Trump’s closest acolytes, and likely to be responsible for a purge of thousands of government officials if Trump wins again. Several millennials and Gen Zs at work have told me they like…

This is Johnny McEntee, one of Trump’s closest fanboy staffers. Responsible for hiring and firing Trump’s staff during his presidency, and predicted to head up ‘Project 2025’ if Trump wins again. Project 2025 includes…

For a moment I thought they were referring to children without gender dysphoria being butchered and drugged to conform to a social media fad. But apparently not. Up to 90% of teenagers who apply for transgender…

Russell Davies, producer of Doctor Who, chose a black, gay doctor this season, and made one of the arch-villains a prominent US drag queen. Which of course set off the woke/anti-woke team sports online. That’s the…

What happens when you use social media as a platform for your actual life. It’s alarming when you think about it that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are now providing the infrastructure for…

Dick was a Professor of Infectious Disease and Chief of two Canadian hospital systems. I thought of his advice while scrolling through photos on social media of people happily spreading Covid. Living their best (short)…

With the September local government elections hurtling towards us and candidates beginning to campaign, just a reminder how the last notable election decided by social media turned out.

I worked at Oz's only nuclear reactor. And still every day somebody tells me on social media that I don't understand the nuclear thing, and I should watch some guy they like on YouTube.

I can’t talk about Council business. But I can comment on FB fun fairs. I notice the main FB French Revolution team has now split into two warring factions with visceral hatred for each other. I think that symbolises…

Don’t believe what you read on social media.

The Unsatisfactory Husbands Club. Thought this was very powerful, I’ve posted a lot about love and how little I think we understand it, thinking of it as a feeling. The stories of these couples shows what happens when…

Social media is a class act.

Several younger people at work are open fans of Donald Trump. He’s a social media President. We have no idea how much we’re going to hell in a handbasket.

These are the 3 self-proclaimed ‘Great Leaders’ in the world today. What do they all have in common? Their power came from popular revolutions. Populism. People forget both the Russian and Chinese leaders today came…

Cars destroyed city life. Barcelona is just one city fighting back. This is what cities used to be like. Now they’re loud, the air is filthy, and vehicles dominate everything. When Bathurst launched a ‘Streets as Shared…

This is such important research, with implications that go well beyond day care. @[100062898426616:2048:Ben] and @[1748499329:2048:Jane] are right here on Facebook, if it's of interest. Humans are social creatures, it…

Very real, driven by social media from extremist groups in the US and State-sponsored groups from Russia. Your local Council has to deal with this every day now.

This is an image of the entire internet, captured in 2005.

‘Female’ cyclist Molly Cameron. It’s not ‘transphobia’ to question what’s going on here. These are very dangerous times, when social movements mobilised through social media require you to accept the most ludicrous…

China will now do what Tesla’s Board and shareholders refused to do. $84 billion is beyond a sick joke for any CEO. Tesla’s EV development has stalled while this dipshit has been off prosecuting his culture wars on…

Another window into how we never leave high school. I joined a FB group that talks about energy efficiency in homes. Over 120,000 members. Some useful information gets discussed there. I contributed my experiment at…

When petrol and diesel cars were first released, they were hugely expensive. Way beyond the reach of ordinary people. There were also no service stations, for 25 years afterwards. If social media had existed then, no…

Kell and I don’t share personal lives much on social media. But this kid did something amazing this year. Headed off to uni for 4 years. Then told us one day (we thought he was joking) that he’d been awarded a…

Australia is in a lot of trouble with energy. We’ll run out inside the next decade, unless urgent action is taken. The previous government had 21 energy policies in 10 years. TWENTY-ONE. How many of those did it…

I saw in the news this week that more than 50% of younger Australians surveyed engage in choking during sex, copied from a trend in online porn. So the woman is literally choked, for a short time. Humans imitate, it’s…

This group has lots of videos of ordinary street-legal family EVs embarrassing every muscle car thrown at them. The comments are hilarious, 'if the muscle car had a better driver/wheels, it would have won', 'yeh but the…

I share energy things because many of the public are missing out on the fantastic innovation out there, living in a fog of social media propaganda. One of the great things about Tesla is their superb software. Whether…

Social media is full every day of people ignoring this advice. The same people who will look for help (there isn’t any) or somebody to blame (it’s themselves), when they get chronically sick. I know many think I’m a…

I know that what people most want to see on FB and other social media, is what’s happening in other peoples’ lives. It’s what I refuse to post here, and thought I’d explain why. Do we think about what it means, to…

"First, Facebook was good to you: It showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: Once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook,…

I’ve studied social media since it began. It’s both the most seductive thing humanity has ever invented, and the most dangerous. It’s classic bait-and-switch, the platforms vacuumed up whole populations, by offering…

This was up within minutes. Not ‘our thoughts to the families of the deceased and injured’. Just whipping the mob into even more of a rage, which is what these platforms and the Trumps do.

You can see in what happened here how modern politics works. Turn everything into a ‘fight’. When Trump say he’s fighting, he means his own people, in the US. But on the other ‘team’. Which some call the ‘Far Left’. But…

Those who look at what’s happening in the US politically with horror, need to carefully assess the teams at this year’s local government elections in NSW. Local government is where a lot of the Trump base target local…

Covid is a 'seasonal' virus, people trained in social media science say. Yes, you now get it in every season.

Peter Dutton pretends he’ll stop of all of this if he wins goverment, and replace it with nuclear. He won’t though, because he can’t. The coal plants will fall over years before nuclear could give off a single watt of…

When I was a kid, nobody talked about energy. When Wang opened in 1957, nobody did either. We just left it to engineers to sort out, the best possible power grid for Australia. And got on with our lives. That’s what’s…

We’re living in the middle of a revolution. A revolution that we can’t see, because our eyes are blinded, by the Wormtongue of social media. Did you know that 100% of car sales are projected to be electric, in under a…

The death of local papers is mostly social media. People get their news and more importantly their sense of community now, through social media. That’s its bait, in a bait-and-switch operation that is really about…

Yesterday was the 55th anniversary of the first landing on the moon. I still remember the sense of disbelief and excitement, like a Jules Verne novel become real. The magnitude of achievement of what’s happening with…

Here’s an example of how social media took over the world. It’s a bait-and-switch operation. First it offered us the bait of ways to ‘connect’ with our friends and family. It then sold us as data, to media companies and…

If you want a sense of the reality of what’s happening in the car world, rather than the social media bubble filled with whining petrolheads, have a look at the staggering number of EV utes under development. The Nissan…

The phone is the tool that transforms life into social media. And it’s not a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a circular self-referential loop, where we use the world to feed our social media feeds, which in turn…

Nissan’s profits dived 99% in a single quarter. The reason? Like other Japanese makers, it’s way behind in building EVs. This is again where getting your news and view of the world from social media completely distorts…

Thanks to Jason for this one. This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittifaction, which has happened to search and is central to social media as well. It’s a bait-and-switch, you’re offered something you want to get you…

‘Where were you when this revolution happened, mum/dad?’ ‘Um, I was on social media posting fake facts about electric cars catching fire and running out of charge.’ Soak up the revolution. Don’t look back in regret that…

Enjoy the revolution that will be spoken about for centuries. Don't miss it in social media bubbles.

In China, more than 60% of EVs are already cheaper than petrol and diesel cars. Outside China governments are in bed with old car manufacturers and oil companies, who fund social media campaigns that get millions to…

Bathurst like many places is about to decide whether to let FB groups run the town. I can't comment on Bathurst specifically, but in general terms I wouldn't let social media run a chocolate wheel.

BYD have updated the Seal. Major changes to the charging (from a 400V to 800V platform, which will significantly increase charging speed), addition of new semi-autonomous driving features, and a new flash interior. And…

Remember the fight over the NBN in Australia? That was entirely Tony Abbott trying to protect Foxtel, for his mate Rupert. Murdoch knew the NBN would open the door to streaming platforms into Australian homes, directly…

Parents doing this. Kids as products to be sold. I’m well aware that pretty much everything I post to social media isn’t the sort of thing people log on to see. Imagine turning your own life into a product. Even those…

When I say people never leave high school, I mean that the social models we learn there are what shape all adult life as well. At least now. And that model is the constant battle for status. Which is really the battle…

FB’s resemblance to the old social pages and classifieds of local newspapers hides its danger. All social media platforms are lethally dangerous to societies, because our beliefs are backwards. We don’t get that being…

Social media is such a sewer, that in 14 Council areas they couldn’t even get enough people to run. They see the all-out assault elected people receive, from social media mobs. I know fine people in our own areas who…

The dirty unspoken truth of social media is one we don’t want to admit. Like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, where the character spends his days spying on other peoples’ lives through the windows of his…

Is your town about to be run by a Facebook group? Do you know the actual beliefs of the founders of that group? Do you think a FB group has any idea how to run a town? Has the group’s success been just slagging off the…

Another leading US doctor, showing how Australia went from leading the world in public health, to being its arse-end, in under 2 years. We're doing NOTHING for Covid in Australia, sickening the entire population for the…

I watched (livestream) the meet the candidates session at the RSL club this week, for the local elections. Many repeated the line often that there needs to be more ‘consultation’ with the community. The thing as a…

‘Bots’ on social media. All automatic, software-driven, to generate insta-crowds with preferred opinions. EV posts have lots of these too.

Adult life has the same structure (now) as teenage school life. We’re all looking for status, in a group of some kind. To be recognised, accepted, and admired. Tell somebody their favourite band sucks and watch how much…

Public health often uses the same idea of ‘the public’ as shorthand for ‘everybody’. But societies don’t work like that. They run on social status. A tiny handful of people drive behaviours. Take alcohol as an example.…

One of the social media sports is to mock the local council about potholes and roadworks. People seriously imagine Council employees come to work every day, and say ‘let’s not fix the roads.’ Like a Council needs…

Another social media favourite when sinking the boot into Council workers would be to have a superior chuckle at the circle of guys just ‘standing around’ while one does all the work. Nobody ever explains how you’d get…

A litte something about bats for the social media armchair experts. Yes you can make lots of noise to try to scare them away. You can see what that does in the picture, scares the bats, who all fly around lots, and then…

With this back in the news this week over the census questions, I thought I’d reshare. There is no ‘LGBTQIA+ community’. It’s a social media fiction.

Reading some of the social media around upcoming LG elections. ‘Councils should be run more like a business’, that’s an old favourite. Councils are nothing like a business. They’re a government. They provide services,…

The wholesale price of electricity is negative all day today, from 6am until 5.30pm. (The red circle.) Coal generators have to pay retailers to use the power, or if you buy wholesale electricity yourself through a…

Sheep, despite their reputation, are very smart animals. Unlike people on social media.

I see the social media ninnies in WA managed to get their big windfarm pushed 30km offshore, because of the 'view'. Gladstone, Queensland. The gas industry.

Crowds at Westmead Station in 1955, excited to see the new electric train. Electric transport is just as exciting today. Unless social media is your guide in the world.

Plug-in hybrids (PHEVS - hybrids with bigger batteries that can do electric-only driving for most weekly drives) are hugely popular now, because of 'range anxiety'. They're great cars. But this could be a problem,…

This is ‘range anxiety’ at work, again a social media fiction. These platforms are wrecking balls through societies. The Chinese may save us (they’re smart, they don’t allow these platforms). Incidentally ‘slowing…

Just a brilliant time to be alive. A new industrial revolution. And so many of the public are instead trapped in the putrid sewer of social media bullshit, missing the whole show.

This is the reason anti-EV and anti-renewable piffle proliferates on social media. Collapsing fossil fuel companies fund it, to try to maintain their status. It's over, they're just trying to buy time.

Social media connects people like this to each other, making them a powerful political force of rank stupidity. Before social media they were just isolated individuals in the community. Even local government elections…

A good example of how social media has dumbed down the world to probably terminal levels, is imagining in my childhood if somebody had said 'we'll give you a car with much more power, that needs no maintenance, makes no…

We’re living in a revolution. Many are missing it by living in a sewer of brainless shit on social media.

Donald Trump’s ‘Eating the Pets’ for trombone wins the internet today.

Social media reviews of things aren’t always that great, a lot of opinion and not a lot of knowledge. But I like watching EV reviews from people who’ve never driven an EV before, and who are EV sceptics. This is for a…

BYD has had to commission a second 7000-car ship, to deliver its growing global expansion. It's planning for 7 more ships. What I love here is these realities carrying on despite the absolute brain-dead rubbish…

I know the senior doctor who trained Nick Coatsworth. They were once friends. I can’t repeat what he now thinks of him. Just one who found celebrity (Coatsworth now has a TV gig) through a natural disaster, peddling…

So many convinced of the benefits of social media use it shamelessly as a way to plug what they’re selling, to their closest family and friends.

Social media makes us think we’re just here sharing lovely pictures and stories about what we’re all doing every day. That’s a trick. Nobody ever enjoyed looking at other peoples’ lives. They only do when it allows them…

Policing, teaching, nursing, doctoring, aged care, local government. Etc. All the essential services are in a state of collapse. Not only is it impossible to now do these jobs, the people who stick with them are under…

Final local election results due early this week. At this stage it looks like Facebook has won the Bathurst election. Buckle up.

A common thing now is for tragedy to be used for fundraising. I notice here that the GoFundMe was up and running almost as soon as the tragedy happened, ditto for a recent young death here locally, where the first many…

I think it’s important to hear ordinary Australians speak about their experience of buying EVs. To cut through the fog of misinformation on social media. Like this guy’s 20-second summary, who’s now owned his Tesla…

Bathurst elects its next Mayor and Deputy Mayor today, streamed live for your viewing pleasure from 2pm, on the Bathurst Regional Council YouTube page. (Link below.) The stream will come online a bit before 2, and just…

One interesting thing to consider when buying a car (which should be an EV of course), is insurance. Teslas for example are expensive to insure. But it’s not an EV thing, becaue BYDs cost about half as much to insure.…

This is a stock image, the sort of thing billions of people share. How happy everybody looks! Because they’re socialising. ‘Living their best lives’, as we now call it. There’s an uncomfortable truth about socialising…

Volkswagen’s 3rd quarter profits were down 42%. Toyota has had 8 straight months of declining profits. These are the big players in world car production. Ignore social media nonsense, EVs are destroying the traditional…

I challenge the now common idea that this sort of thing is ‘community concerns’. Having seen this from the inside in local government too. So often it’s a handful of local activists, stirring up shit, usually through…

The internet is now 5 giant websites, each filled with screenshots from the other 4. Cory Doctorow

It’s a measure of just how crazy social media society is, that super-powerful and silent cars powered by sunshine are a hard sell.

Scrolling the FB feed, have a rough look at how many posts the algorithms now show you that are actually from your friends, compared to the number that are product placements, or ‘suggested’ things you might like based…

I shared this word here a few months ago. I've chatted to Cory in the past, I think the concept is much more important than even the brilliant word. It's the world social media is making for us.

One of the most damning indictments of the idea of 'toxic masculinity' is the actual statistics. So much violence against women is domestic violence. Domesticity is the causal factor, specific strains on specific…

The ‘cost of living crisis’ and problems with domestic violence are really the same problem. They’re the social model of the nuclear family under strain. The nuclear family is the expectation that children will move out…

I think status is what drives all our lives. Starting at school, with kids negotiating their status there in different groups - peer pressure - and then right through adulthood. The overwhelming thing that drives humans…

I shared the projections of system collapse in 2025 from AEMO here a couple of years ago already. We’re known for years solar would overwhelm the ‘baseload’ power idiots thought was in short supply. Now we have exactly…

My apologies if I miss any comments or messages or tags on this platform. Priority at the FB end is to write code to vacuum every last cent out of peoples’ wallets, not to make basics like notifications work properly.

This is social media society. Where instead of each of us just doing the jobs we’re trained to do, everybody is suddenly an expert on everything. And these platforms then aggregate all of our ignorant opinions on things…

Murders his own mother for a life insurance payout he organised himself, to feed a social media-driven status lifestyle. Has a history also of crypto, another get-rich-quick Ponzi scheme, used out of desperation to try…

Social media is so addictive because it’s a poker machine for status. Poker machines are addictive not because you can win, but because you’re not sure if you’re going to win, with each spin. That’s what makes you keep…

The CSIRO has done detailed modelling of bushfire risk into the future for each part of Australia. You can plug in your postcode to see. Lithgow is at the upper end of increased risk. This will flow through into higher…

The difficult thing about discussing ideas with friends and family is that every idea is actually a social group. Groups which help give people their sense of identity. In the past this often meant the rule of thumb,…

While social media wallows in oceans of BS, reality continues on without it.

Social media is where people go to argue with strangers about things none of them understand.

The Japanese car industry is in free fall, as is the German car industry. Honda and Nissan now looking to merge to survive. Though merging 2 companies with virtually no decent EVs between them just makes one bigger…

When humans gather together in groups of any size, they play status games. First within the group itself, for status within the group. Then between groups. Paradoxically (for many) this means that the more we ‘connect’…

Sometimes it just takes a moment to pause and reflect. I don’t transact personal life much on here, because I think it’s profoundly unhealthy that these platforms have captured our social lives. Increasingly all of our…

Sorry that I don’t do Christmas cheer (or Anzac Day commemoration, or even much of birthdays or other life events) here. A few have taken that as evidence that I’m not living a full life, which I flip by asking them why…

Another example of the huge chasm between the reality of the world out there, and the crazy opinions on social media. The largest solar companies in the world already easily dwarf the amount of available energy for the…

The Trump team imploding before he’s even sworn in. Those looking for entertainment closer to home could do worse than watching how local social media stars are faring in local government.

Social media floods the world with shit. ‘Misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. But that’s only a symptom. Its real destructive power is to destroy trust. To encourage everybody to think they’re an expert on everything,…

lol ‘dance like nobody is watching’, and then post it to social media for millions to watch.

One of my hobbies is making ice cream. I use dextrose (which is just glucose) instead of ordinary table sugar, to avoid the fructose which is really bad for you. You can buy dextrose in supermarkets or brewing shops,…

I enjoy watching people posting about electric cars to social media, because it always prompts a pile-on from Flat Earth fossil fuel fans. Always the same idiot grinning emojis, with comments like ‘hope it won’t catch…

This is the sort of anti-electric story you’ll see on social media all the time. Written in a way to make people laugh and slam their fist on the table. Like all of the stories, it’s fake. Deliberately written to try to…

I don't engage much with the Australia Day debates, it's pretty much the same tired arguments every year. But one thing I always do remember, is that the people who arrived in 1788 mostly didn't want to be here. They…

Social media is destroying societies. It sounds a big claim, but only a handful of years ago Trump used it to mobilise an insurrection on the Capitol, in the world’s most famous democracy. But social media’s damage goes…

Let's unpack this one (declaration - I worked at a nuclear power facility, as an engineer). - we would need over 15,000 new nuclear reactors to power the world - these reactors cost over $20 billion to build, EACH -…

Hydrogen-powered cars is another topic that generally has a ratio of 0% engineering, to 100% bullshit. It won't happen. Hydrogen may be used for larger industrial purposes, including jet planes. But for cars hydrogen is…

What a load of steaming bull turds. The fantasy that all we need is a 'market', consumer choice, to drive prices down. That rubbish is what has been driving prices UP, for years. I've used all of the energy comparison…

It’s so exhausting for societies, countering the relentless propaganda put into circulation by those who do very well out of the status quo. Another common bit of spin is that we can’t shift to EVs because there aren’t…

I see quite a few people refer to John Campbell’s videos on YouTube when minimising the dangers of Covid. Campbell is an ex-nurse. If you look at Campbell’s bank balance, you can see what’s really going on. Like all the…

The people who scour YouTube and other online forums looking for reasons to deny the emergency of climate change need to spend a day with the road crews in local councils. Humans have zero chance of surviving dramatic…

While societies collapse under the weight of multiplying disasters, meantime the thing that exercises the minds of the latest generation of kiddults is the apparently outrageous assertion by JK Rowling that only…

Yep. And there isn't a Plan(et) B. Ignore everybody who doesn't believe in climate change being an emergency. There isn't time to engage in their silly debating points, which are drafted by comms teams in fossil fuel…

This is the profile picture of a senior manager, seen on Linkedin. (Some people here may know him, I won’t identify him.) It caught my eye because while digitally altering your face is now rife, with filters on social…

The revolution happening right under our noses. And has been for years. You wouldn't know it listening to social media or the news.

The Tesla Model 3 is already significantly cheaper than owning a Toyota Corolla, over 5 years of ownership. (It has next to zero maintenance costs, and electricity is much, much cheaper than petrol or diesel.) The…

Paul Keating made the excellent point today that countries are always conquered only in land wars. I don’t think there’s an exception. The idea the Chinese could sail an enormous armada of troops over 8000km of ocean to…

If this had been electric vehicles, all the smirking petrolheads would be having a field day. Social media magnifies everything that’s stupid a hundredfold. For example an ordinary petrol car is 100 times more likely to…

I’m not sure if my posts are still being seen in the same way, this absolutely ludicrous platform put a restriction on my account because last year I posted a picture of Neville Chamberlain shaking Hitler’s hand, in a…

For those interested in solar and EVs, it’s a full-time job keeping on top of the amount of BS social media generates about them. Here’s another myth, that solar panels cause a disturbing number of house fires.…

Starlink is so good, that even NBN recommends it to people who are in areas with poor internet.

Scrolling past all of the happy social lives on FB made me think of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Compare the two images. The variety of passion and emotion in Da Vinci’s picture, and the monotonous single ‘living our best…

The unfixable destructive paradox of travel is that it forces somebody else’s home to change, to cater to you. No matter how low impact you want to be. Some European cities for example are fed up with the tourists who…

The English journalist Christina Patterson has been fighting a very brave fight against trans activism. She makes the excellent point, one I’ve posted here a few times, that the concept of trans is the social…

I sometimes say Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Rod Sims, ex head of the ACCC (a very conservative, ‘economic’ institution), spells out why very well here. In fact per capita we should be the…

The loon petrol head brigade joined forces here with the crazy 5G loons, and a variety of other conspiracy nuts. Social media, mobilising stupidity now on a mass scale. Usually funded at arm’s length by the fossil fuel…

I thought this photo was a nice example of the toxicity of social media to our social lives. A standard sort of photo you see shared, a happy couple, others would see it and feel a whole range of emotions, depending on…

"...you had to pretend to be authentic once a day, instead of being comfortably inauthentic on an app like Instagram." Line of the day :)

Almost done now. Blown away by these, it’s less than -4 outside right now and still haven’t needed to put the heater on, room is about the same temperature as when we went to bed last night. The glass is Viridian…

In a world where our collective memory rarely lasts longer than a day, replacing all custom and tradition with what’s ‘trending’ on social media, I think we should pay close attention to the coronation. I’m no…

$2 billion for green hydrogen in last night's budget. Hydrogen is a dead-end for Australia I think. With our vast renewable energy resources of sunshine and wind, and spare land, we're crazy to invest too much in…

Having crippled our Covid response, the morons on social media are back to attacking meteorologists, about climate change. Social media was invented by Americans to implement their political views of how societies work,…

My mother said she’d be appalled if I posted twee crap about Mother’s Day to FB. I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree 😉 I should say Mothers’ Day is a particularly special day for our family, because I was…

Social media needs to be shut down. It’s destroying societies at an ever-accelerating rate. It’s also destroying peoples’ mental health, even when they think it’s good for them. Nothing is more toxic to your mental…

Fantastic article on the most fundamental damage social media does. It completely distorts our understanding of what the public is.

Social media's assault on democracies continues. Mostly engineered by activist loons in the US, who organised and directed most of the 'Dictator Dan' rubbish in Victoria, for example, through social media. In Bathurst…

Many ask why I still wear a mask. Not one person has ever thought that it might be to protect others, as well as myself. Doesn’t even occur to them. That’s our culture now, orbiting ‘me’ in everything it does. Social…

Social media. Making us all dumber, every single day. (The dispensing machines are for tampons.)

This is more of the subtle politics that infects all of our lives now. Trying to paint solar power as a rich person’s way to escape skyrocketing power prices. There are internet-free loans that will pay for your entire…

This graph is so interesting, you can read so much of our current lives in it. Notice how older Australians (the red circle) share an information space (mostly TV) that creates for them a feeling of Australia as a…

The overwhelming majority of anti-vaccine and anti-Covid-action propaganda has been traced back to only 12 people posting to social media. 12, creating a worldwide public health disaster. You'd hope people who swallow…

I was watching The Drum yesterday, and something about this person, Sandy Chong, didn’t seem quite right. (She’s the CEO of the Australian Hairdressing Council.) Her skin didn’t look real, just a featureless area of…

This is a quick Twitter thread, out of the UK. It will give you an insight into the breathtaking deception going on, with Covid. The outright lying to the public, and massive suppression of data, and the public also…

The Project quoting research that says there are 1300 photos of a child on social media by the time they’re 13. Sharenting. France about to ban it.

One in an ever-growing line of people who social media presume to pass judgment on (for or against) before a case even goes to trial. This is why we have the law, to consider evidence. Not peoples’ opinions.

I’d encourage everybody to take precautions against SIM porting and SIM swapping. Porting: hackers port your phone number to a different Telco, so they can then set up a mobile phone in your name and take your number.…

Two of my favourites, travel and social media. Most travel seems to be about saying ‘here’s me, at this cool place.’ It’s not really about being there, it’s about being there to show others back home that you’re there.…

Another provocation, a genuine question, for the travellers among us. Venice. Completely overrun by tourists. So bad, that the locals are planning to move out. Some projections say there will be nobody living there by…

I don’t often talk about myself or my family here, because I still remember a time when that was the most boring thing a person could do. But because many seem to live their lives through social media now, and interpret…

Banning mobile phones in schools is a great idea. Though the real problem is the social media apps on the phones, not the phones. And to take it a step further, the disruption those apps cause to education (huge) is…

The most important thing you can offer all people as a result of this insight isn’t kindness, it’s honesty. By not talking about things we find difficult in life, others think our lives are nothing but happy, fun times.…

All groups, of whatever size, from a netball club through to a country, operate in exactly the same way. Using imitative desire. To imitate and emulate is both our deepest human passion, and what causes all human…

One thing I never did as a manager over almost 20 years, is delegate my work to other people. In nearly every larger organisation now, this is the pattern you’ll see. One of the first things a new senior manager does is…

We LOVE to imitate, to copy what others do. It’s unavoidable, because it’s based on our deepest desire. To desire what others have, particularly if those others are people we admire. We know kids do this, but all adult…

Twitter this morning.

Sharing the details of your personal life and that of your friends and family, on a global platform. Adults, think about what you’d feel now if intimate details of your life had been shared on global platforms for the…

In some ways I have real affection for schools. I worked in them, and was a student in them. But I now realise they’re probably the most stupid thing humans have ever invented, and may yet destroy us all. I’m not…

People who study the way high school shapes our whole culture made an interesting finding. In most cases, your status in high school matches how your adult life turns out as well. With one interesting exception. The…

One of the things I most enjoy is watching the disconnect between the bullshit on social media, and reality.

This is George Michael as a kid. I watched the Wham movie (excellent), and it resonated with the post I did about Freddie Mercury yesterday. Like Mercury, Michael was a social outsider all through his life. You can see…

Love the boat in this pic, taking at least 3 charging spots. Imagine parking your EV and boat in a petrol station, in front of 3 bowsers. The fact it has a cutesy name, ‘ICE-blocking’, tells you it’s a scheme hatched…

This is what all travel culture does. It’s just more visible here. Harila said she left her ‘cameraman’ to help. Like most travel it wasn’t about being there for her, it was about showing others she was there. Why this…

It’s about respect. There should be no debates on topics like climate change, or Covid. There are thousands of people highly trained to know what to do, for both. They can’t do it, because of millions obstructing their…

Or…they lost a game of soccer. That’s what sport is, one team wins, the other loses. If you play sport ‘heartbroken’ when you lose, your mental health might get you to 30. 40 maybe, at best. I think social media has so…

Companies are fighting for the opportunity to install solar farms and batteries. They know it's a licence to print money. Our area (Bathurst-Lithgow) is highly prized because it's near existing high-voltage transmission…

One of my favourite anti-EV tricks on the endless sewer of stupidity of social media, is to show an electric vehicle being towed, as proof they’re not practical. Here’s a petrol vehicle being towed. Petrol and diesel…

If somebody looks at your social media posts and says ‘don’t you have a life?’, I suggest asking them why they’re living their life on social media.

This sort of innovation is happening everywhere. One of the most sad barriers to it expanding is community opposition, through lunatic ideas people get via social media. When I grew up most people paid no attention to…

Fewer than 5% of Australians tow anything - a trailer or caravan/camper trailer or boat. And yet so much of the EV narrative is around range, and range is mostly an issue for people who tow. Which relatively speaking is…

Father’s Day this weekend. There is no harder or more important job than parenting. We idolise celebrities and explorers and rock and sports stars and rich business people. None of that comes close to being as important…

If you want to understand why so many local councils are raising rates, have a look at the data here. And Google ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’. Social media as always will mostly be your worst possible guide. (My views on…

John doesn’t spend time on social media reading conspiracy fairy tales.

Social media decouples people so completely from reality that they do things like storm the parliament, and then wonder why they get 22 years in jail. Just wait until the people who let a pandemic rip end up on trial.…

If you have a Tesla (I don't, but am always tempted), you don't need to get your car serviced. If anything does go wrong, you just tap this in the app, and they either fix it over the internet (there are hardly any…

Everybody loves a pile-on, on local government. Some food for thought. In the past 25 years councils have had to assume a whole range of community services that nobody else would provide. They now offer up to 150…

If you’re somebody who gets a lot of information from social media, here’s something to think about. ‘Andy’ is a fake campaigning account that posts 24 hours a day. Most of these sorts of posts aren’t real people.

I strongly agree with this. I’m on social media because that’s where people are. But I think it’s destroying societies, and at great speed. And it’s not hard to understand why. Human communication and information has…

Being in the middle of social media-driven protest campaigns is like living in this episode of The Simpsons. https://youtu.be/khxv_U4qLzg?si=88FL1EVMXq-_gpq0

Grumpy old men are famous for criticising everything that’s new and young. I criticise the old for being a lead weight around the young’s shoulders, for blocking innovation and change that’s desperately needed. For…

@[1112555254:2048:Dan] and I both noticed this trend. There's a huge, extremely rapid shift to electric mowers, line trimmers and other garden tools. Why is it happening so fast? Because no idiot turned it into a team…

Here’s why I post about cars so much. As a social and cultural phenomenon, not just a technology thing. Cars are the most anti-social part of democracies. This brilliant idea, of town and city planning removing the…

Nikki also describes herself as a ‘pure blood’ because she isn’t vaccinated. I see people re-posting these pro-cash memes without the first clue of the sewer they’re supporting. Just one more of the hundreds of lunatic…

Landline had a great story today about how the biggest obstacle to building the new electricity grid is community opposition, to solar farms, wind farms, pumped hydro and new transmission lines. This isn’t the Australia…

Why social media is dangerous. 1) It creates fake social lives that people then consciously and unconsciously compare to their own. This creates enormous stress and anxiety, as the relentlessly happy and fun posts clash…

Brand is a standard product of social media. His beliefs are all over the shop, nothing coherent from one day to the next. But one thing links it all - himself and his popularity. Everything is about him. Outrage drives…

Have a watch, fascinating and moving. How social media is driving stupidity deep into individual families as well as institutions. And breaking them apart. These platforms need to be shut down.

Can’t believe this is nearly 10 years old. And still spot on, actually a very smart way to understand just how stupid social media is, by translating what happens there into real life situations. The platforms are…

It’s something to be in the eye of a social media storm. To feel the surge of stupid incoherent rage and righteousness. And to watch the damage that great surge of dumb causes, as it unfolds and destroys things.

Living in a society where the dominant currency is popularity, in politics and in all things (a society of ‘likes’, of social media), doesn’t mean at all that it’s based on people getting the things they want.…

Leeton, one of several towns in Australia now trialling a new approach where the town is run by social media. Much excitement on the socials. Tenterfield is ahead of it. Now it’s selling historic parts of the town for…

Australian households are smashing solar world records every single year. Most Australians are falling over themselves to shift to renewables, and EVs. A tiny minority of simpletons infected with social media memes and…

The men social media produces.

None of this happened before social media. Laurence Fox here, famous Brit actor whose wife Billie Piper dumped him for being an unhinged loon. Social media got to him, as it gets to millions of others. I have close…

The previous government turned Australia into a quarry for the rest of the world. And we were practically giving the stuff away anyway. That’s all coming to an end. Right now, renewable energy and its associated…

Where previously you could be stupendously dumb and do little harm, now with social media you can connect with all the other morons in the world and destroy societies.

This shows the dominant shared information about the Voice debate. Easily the most dominant voice on the Voice is - an ex-Neighbours star who traffics in lunatic conspiracy theories. These platforms need to be shut…

How did we think linking together all of the world's most stupid people into a political force, through social media, was going to end well? The danger is that it has power, Trump's mob for example organised through…

Bathurst’s bats. This will happen more all the time now, as we trash the rest of the landscape and plants and animals come looking for somewhere to survive. I came up with a concept of ‘reality-based politics’, which…

Underneath all the hot air of social media, reality continues to create a tsunami of change. Electricity is now like water or food, we’ll store it and just use it as we need it, rather than having to run dinosaur power…

When you combine travel with social media, you reach new heights of stupid.

Saw this on a local FB group. It’s a good example of how bad faith actors in places like the US (this is a US meme) prey on simple minds on social media in other countries. Whipping up angry mobs, protesting things that…

The new fighting in the Middle East should remind us that we have to ship most of our fuel from there. Over $50 billion of it, per year. And it’s sending ordinary Australians broke. But we can power our cars with our…

Reality, vs social media. “…electric vehicle sales had topped Bloomberg NEF’s mass adoption tipping point on track to 30 per cent of sales by 2027; AEMC research showed most domestic batteries will hit the affordability…

You won’t convince most No voters to change their minds, because they’re not using their minds. As with EVs, climate change, renewables, Covid and everything else, they’re cheering on their ‘team’. It’s team sports,…

The problem is easy to see, and nobody wants to admit it. Social media is a disaster for societies, a 24/7 assault on the trust that holds them together. It makes all views equivalent, the most pig-ignorant, bigoted…

Social media: “there are Palestinian Christians?!” Bethlehem and Nazareth are both Palestinian locations.

‘Australians with periods‘ are women. JK Rowling made this same point a few years ago and has been hounded disgracefully ever since. If the trans community find it distasteful, remember that post-menopausal women and…

Baby tourism. Where you hop between countries to give birth, to accumulate passports, avoid paying tax on income and expand your freedom to travel. All while posing for social media videos, with every hair, gesture and…

Another victory for local social media groups full of morons.

So many have no idea of the revolution happening out there, and how far removed it is from the bullshit they read on social media.

You can see the power of the fossil fuel industry. The world has been on fire the past year, and we still doubled our subsidies to that industry. Meanwhile it also spends billions on misinformation and disinformation…

Social media has made all needed social change almost impossible, bogged down in endless fake debates. The smartest thing the ALP can do right now is target households with full electrification for their homes. Heavily…

This is what social media is doing. Australia already built virtually nothing, we’re a quarry for other countries, with our local political flag-saluting halfwits obligingly ripping up what puny royalties we got for…

Michael was a film from 1996 that doesn’t rate a lot of mentions, but which I really enjoyed. Travolta plays an angel on a mission. One of the things I most enjoyed about it was his passion for ‘battle!’. That’s what…

Yep. Again, it's not that I love cars particularly or even renewables. It's that these obvious facts of physics and economics are hidden by the bullshit of social media. Energy is also central to all economies, so if…

Nothing flushes out society’s dumbest people faster than any social media post about electric vehicles. Have a look at the comments, usually with smirking emojis.

I focus on cars and renewables because they’re the centre of a new industrial revolution. And therefore of a whole new society. Our petrols, diesels and coal-fired power are 19th century technologies, over a century…

Every single slogan below is a lie. This industry creates them to cast doubt, flooding social media with them, to create resistance to change. Why so much of my social media is about countering this nonsense. Renewables…

Remember the slogan 'cheap and reliable power'? Look at South Australia. A wholesale price (purple line, the green is demand) of near ZERO. ALL DAY. Already easily the most reliable grid in the country. 99.8% solar and…

Its almost miraculous that social media protest groups emerge so fast at every new renewables development. Except it isn’t, it’s very deliberately planned. The Atlas Network is a key player here, funded by fossil fuel…

Let me know if you see anybody suggest ‘living with’ tuberculosis. You won’t. Covid is much more dangerous than TB. You won’t find another disease anywhere that we’re asked to ‘live with’. Humans have never, not once in…

This is what offshore wind turbines look like, 20 kms out to sea (you may need a magnifying glass). The ones proposed for Australia are even further out, to 35 km. The people who complain about it ruining their view are…

The Department of Defence produced a training package for firefighters dealing with EVs. Lots of great information in there for people who mistake clickbait for facts. Clickbait is how self-declared ‘experts’ like John…

1500% more people visit Paris every year than live there. 30 million vs 2 million. Like with climbing Everest, the main purpose is to say and show that you went there. If you go there to 'experience' it, what you'll…

Trans-culture took historically quite common fun with androgyny, and tried to turn it into an actual identity. Social media enabled this, allowing it to bypass the usual slow percolation through various testing grounds…

This should make us ashamed. We have probably the greatest renewable resources in the world, and a tiny country in not particularly sunny Europe is way ahead of us. Worth remembering every time you see anti-renewable…

A daily vaccination against social media slogans. This one for the claims that solar panels and windmills produce as much if not more waste than fossil fuels.

Social media has won another election. Argentina, this new president is a big fan of Trump. Spend a couple of minutes watching just how crazy he is (short YouTube video). Social media won Trump the US presidency, and…

The bats are as good as gone in Bathurst for now, and unsurprisingly social media hysteria had no part to play in fixing anything.

Somebody described my posts as ‘boring’ the other day. They certainly don’t attract much interest, maybe they are. Heh, who cares, I’m not selling tickets to an event here. What interests FB is oversharing of the…

The only thing keeping our coal industry afloat is China. Imagine the irony of that export now collapsing, as China shifts at warp speed to renewables, leaving us with nothing. While we have all the natural advantages…

For Doctor Who fans who haven’t seen this first of the new specials, no spoilers. But in terms of personal impressions - it’s appallingly bad. More a crusading piece for trans culture than a Doctor Who episode. I grew…

Consent fails time and again in law because it’s as nebulous as a fart in the wind. It’s a fad, a fashion. It will fail, because it already has failed, always, for years. It misunderstands the problem completely. This…

I share this stuff not because of a particular love of EVs or renewables. But because these shifts are shifts across our entire societies, everything links back to energy. An energy system that allows you to generate…

And here comes battery storage, galloping into view. Reality has little resemblance to the fairy tales on social media.

I find it hilarious that so many wind and solar projects are being held up because of communities complaining about the 'visual impact'. Coal-fired power stations are butt-ugly, and I bet weren't delayed when they were…

Solar capacity in Europe has grown by more than 40% per year for 3 years in a row. Graphs like this ram home what absolute fantasy most of what you read on social media is. (Except my posts, of course.)

Alan Kohler is so consistently brilliant. Like here, pointing out that the US (and the wider Anglo world) is handing total domination of the next century (or two) to Asia, because of our ridiculous culture wars on…

Less than 15% of new energy in 2022 came from fossil fuels. Look at the tidal wave of renewables. There are no debates, the debates are hot air on social media. A revolution is underway, we’re living in it.

What used to be called our civic life is now being replaced by social media groups at the local level. The pathetic adolescent trivia that leads to is worse every day. These are adults, this is the shit that now passes…

Many have said over the years that what I post to FB looks negative, or not much 'fun'. It's important to me to clarify that. Spinoza is a hero of mine. The only real purpose of adult life is understanding. And that's…

I’ve had a few people ask me why I’m so critical of social media. There are many reasons, one of which is that my work takes me into places where the direct impact of social media on real world things happens. Like the…

One of my kids gave me a stern look and warned me not to share pictures of them on social media this Christmas. I almost never do that anyway, so it was never going to happen. We’ve raised them well! Transacting…

Nod to the garbos out early on Christmas Day on their usual runs. No doubt social media will find fault in something you’re doing, like the other 364 days of the year.

Scrolling through Christmas messages is a fascinating cultural exercise. Like this photo below, wouldn’t know these people from a bar of soap, but their personal lives are here, shared far and wide. The problem for me…

Whooping cough, Denmark. A combination of immune system damage from Covid infection, and anti-vax loons getting real traction in society now, via social media.

You may have seen John Campbell online during the pandemic, with lots of videos encouraging people to be less concerned about Covid. Now accountability is coming for him, and he’s running away. Social media influencers…

If you want to see the sort of wonders a new electric world is already bringing to us, check out this BMW-designed electric boat. So beautifully quiet. Thanks to @[801418628:2048:Nancy]!…

I can retire in 5 years so this stuff doesn’t make me lose sleep at night. But I feel for the people who work for local government who are subjected to nothing but a steady stream of ignorant abuse, day in and day out.…

In 2012, a Facebook group of more than half a million urged NBC to invite Betty White to host SNL. "When I first heard about the campaign, I didn't know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to…

Work can be fun, and it can also be boring, tedious, stressful, and just bloody hard. But what it increasingly isn’t, and why I’m glad to be closer to retirement than not, is meaningful. Look at St. Peter’s Basilica, in…

Paul McDermott (the comedian, ex-DAAS, Good News Week etc.) contracted Covid just before Christmas. He’s double-vaxxed. His story is worth reading (extract below). “On Christmas Eve I posted my PCR test results showing…

How’s everybody’s kids loving swabbing their noses twice a week and waiting to see if they’ve been infected, and have brought it home too? Fixed the ‘mental health’ issues of them doing a bit of online learning? Get…

Please read this? So we can stop all of the 'endemic' and 'live with the virus' nonsense?…

So the NSW Government ensures there's no official data on Covid in schools. But social media usually knows. Claims of more than 100 infected kids at Bathurst High School right now. Plus staff.

From social media. The last source of Covid information in NSW. "I’m in Bathurst my daughter goes to Scots All Saints and the boarding house is riddled (with Covid). Same as the boy’s Catholic boarding school Stannies.…

I plan to retire at 60. Not to stop working, I’ll probably work more after retirement than before. But work that I choose myself. I’m not happy with the world my kids are growing up with, it seems increasingly…

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed leaders like Johnson and Morrison seeing a war as a platform to rescue their own careers. More than 9000 people are still dying of Covid every day around the…

I do like the pieces that go beyond the 'Putin is a tyrant and must be stopped' non-thinking. And spare us more symbolic protests in response, using another geopolitical emergency as just a platform for our own…

Going to have my first ever social media holiday, a few weeks probably.

Polls are probably less reliable today because people are also more fickle. Voting has become like putting a bet on at the horses, I think because people have less understanding of politics, they also have little…

What a tangled web we weave...that's Kimberley Kitching, on the left. Apparently was a friend of Andrew Bolt for 10 years, and allegedly had an affair with him. Bolt has been in the frontline of beating up the story…

For my Brit friends. https://twitter.com/supertanskiii/status/1434593531524485131?s=21

The nonsense of much trans theory is really tested in situations like this. The assumption that transgender is an unproblematic, oppressed concept is very wrong. Unfortunately the issue remains impossible to discuss,…

How are peoples’ schools and workplaces going with Covid infections? Social media should be telling this story every day. It’s not being reported elsewhere.

lol. https://twitter.com/i/status/1511869935508930560

I love that Twitter is full of the world’s smartest people, who want to talk about something other than themselves.

Voting. People assume I’m sure that I hate the LNP. That’s not the case, my objection to the current LNP is that it isn’t a political party at all, it was captured by vested interests. That’s why many of its most…

People-pleasers in relationships often have a history of some sort of trauma. I think this goes much wider though, because our social behaviour is now dominated by people-pleasing. The greatest fear many now have is…

When the man-baby got booted off Twitter, he set up his own social media network in a sulk. It’s been a disaster. What it shows is the bankruptcy of the libertarian ‘freedom’ ideas Trump and others peddle. Their whole…

Just one more catastrophe to add to the avoidable disasters confronting us. Because we were too lazy to think, and ridiculed the people who did. Covid is the same. Did you know it’s now the #2 cause of death in…

The 'fog of war'. That's literally where we now are, where trusted institutions have to compete with every opinionated halfwit online 'doing their own research'. As Steve Bannon always advises, one of Trump's minions,…

Louis Theroux’s Forbidden America, his look at the ‘far Right’, is compulsive viewing. To me it shows how boys have been left behind in our thinking. Young men have been weaponised by politics, because they lack role…

There’s no greater threat to Australia as we know it than the relentless attack by libertarians, mostly from the US, on how we live. They do it mostly through social medial, it’s a global brainwashing and propaganda…

The astonishing thing about the transgender movement is how fast it became mainstream. I think it’s driven largely by social media, which allowed the bypassing of the usual testing process for the ideas through various…

I see the toxic positivity online, can feel the desperation behind it, people trying to pretend everything is fine and normal when in fact the whole place is falling apart. As if posting happy things will make the bad…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1546245019702640641 Click to view, only a minute.

Every grinning ‘wheeee the pandemic is over’ photo I see on social media, with people ‘living their good life’, makes me feel more like the situation is beyond hopeless.

I've travelled quite a lot. I hate the process of actually getting from one place to another, packed into planes like sardines, interrupted sleep, lost bags, foul shared toilets and showers etc. I don't mind it when I…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1554301467170832389

I can see a new San Diego volleyball club in germination here, @[1025558373:2048:Alex]. https://twitter.com/hana71172/status/1556208536912379904?s=21&t=D_bzGvjDD5bV-0IXsNgIPw

Saw this one on Twitter and it captures beautifully so much of what I post about here. How our culture is now a war on 'home'. We have no idea what home even means now, to us it's just an address, or some feelings of…

When governments genuinely want individuals to manage things, like their choice of bank or energy retailer, they give them online tools with lots of information to help them compare the best deals. With Covid they…

I’m a fan of the monarchy. What I think is so important about it is two things mostly, one being that it’s a form of government that puts custom and tradition at the heart of what we do. Institutions. The second being…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1569303059544608770

This to me is the greatest modern wonder. Your home is now connected directly to the entire world, in real-time. While we travel around the world thinking it broadens our minds (it narrows them), and thinking visiting…

Ask people what democracy is, and I bet nearly everyone will actually describe elections to you. Which is wrong, the two are not even close to being the same thing. We need to get rid of elections. Bear with me.…

Finally free of Tony Abbott’s string and tin can internet. Fibre to the home is glorious. Thanks to cable guru Russell Commins! I made no comments about Daylight Saving this year, because Covid came along and showed DST…

The real reason most people won’t wear masks or take Covid precautions is that the majority of people are followers, they follow others in deciding what to do. If mask wearing becomes optional (as it is now), they won’t…

For solar, bypass all the salespeople and energy companies selling you panels (nearly all of them will rip you off). Use the Solar Quotes website, it does all of the work for you, brilliant. Set up and run by an…

Todd Sampson's two-part doco on social media premiered last night. Included in it was research that showed more than 80% of social media posts are about the person who posts them. Also why people encourage those posts,…

It seems we have a choice between curated happy online personas living their best (Instagram-filtered) lives, and righteous vandalism. Social media means we now never leave high school.

Every time I walk through the car park of doctor surgeries past the expensive European cars, I'm reminded that they're public servants and are not held to account like any other public servant. The scale of the rorting…

Australian researchers study soap bubbles to design the most efficient way to dig an open-cut mine. Our lives would be almost infinitely more amazing if we ran societies on smart, and not on the social conformity of the…

As with the Cardinal Pell trial, this is what happens when populism replaces our basic institutions. In Pell's case, the High Court ended up acquitting him because it found the jury 'lacked sufficient doubt' i.e. they'd…

More recent workshops I saw online. This is what passes for work in far too many organisations now. When you don’t have leadership with a clue what to do, you end up in endless workshops with post-it notes, butcher’s…

Even Channel 9 starting to register the disaster. Don't wait for these stories to act, your life actually depends on it. Politicians will do nothing to protect you. https://twitter.com/i/status/1587353399141584900

I know FB has become mostly a place to share what we're all doing every day. And I provide lean pickings for people there, sorry. I don't put my private life onto social media very much, I'm surprised so many do. Though…

I’ve felt this more every day of my life. At last count I’ve been in high school for about 42 years. Workplaces behave just like high schools, middle-aged adults have ‘besties’, grown adults are more interested in their…

My workplace has a big Christmas party this afternoon. Covid is rife in the building this week, but the party will go ahead. Who knows how many will then take Covid home for Christmas. I won’t be going. For my own…

Somebody yesterday said I wasn’t ‘positive’ enough with my FB posts. I talk about the grown up issues of the day, each to their own but I’m not here to curate some magazine-style online personality for myself, or to…

When Twitter is good, it’s really, really good. The Tweet and his own comment on it both superb.

Amazing how you can sound articulate, and still be a raving loon. https://twitter.com/ninnyd101/status/1347340335245111298?s=21

The protestor in the white hat and backpack drags a police officer down the stairs, where he’s stomped on by the crowd and beaten with a flag pole, while they sing The Star Spangled Banner. Any Trump fans reading? Get a…

Parler is an extremist social media group, where Trump went when Twitter banned him. Matt Canavan is a federal LNP Senator. How much evidence will it take for Australians to recognise that they haven’t elected a…

The reason the PM is reluctant to act against the likes of Craig Kelly is that he hoovers up all the Trumpians here in Australia, to vote for the LNP. That vote is significant, otherwise the PM would just cut him loose.…

We should look on with shame and alarm that when tested by a true collective threat, our response in the developed world has been overwhelmingly about individual complaint. We’ve used a collective threat as a platform…

Sometimes the dots all join. The appalling response of the majority of the developed world to the pandemic, millions using it as a platform for individual grievance, is matched exactly by how people post to social…

What happens when you try to share a photo of Monty Python on Facebook.

Listened to a debate last night where one of modern society’s increasingly numerous and brazen bullies bleated on about ‘free speech’ (how to pick these people, one of their favourite topics). And how ‘offence’ is…

By the way people, you may notice if you try to share news from papers and other sources on FB now, it won’t appear in Australia. Due to the government’s battle on Rupert’s behalf to shut down Google and Facebook in…

Lots of criticism of FB for blocking a whole range of non-news sites as well. Because we’re too lazy to investigate anything, we miss that Rupert had specifically advised that the government’s social media legislation…

Rupert maintaining the rage against Facebook. It’s inaccurate to see FB as stealing ‘content’ from news. FB is a collective conversation platform, news is a one-way broadcast medium. News has always been a type of…

Social media undermining traditional media is the First Person striking back against the Third Person.

Lot of debate online about republics vs monarchies. Here's an example of something that I think would struggle to get off the ground in a world of republics. What a monarchy does is transcend nation politics in some…

More small business. Towns often struggle now to fill main street shops. Most of peoples' needs are met by much larger businesses, online too. In the past the small businesses in a main street were the hub of shopping…

Our homes and land were once so important to us that we built fortresses to protect them. Then economic thinkers replaced land-based identity with job-based identity. Today people are told 'move to where the jobs are'.…

Up there with Daylight Saving for idiocy, for me. Way more people die of the smoke this causes than would ever be at risk from the fires. And now it turns out it's a waste of time anyway. Usually just red meat for the…

The government I suspect recognising that unless they do offer the highest efficacy and safest vaccines to all, the rollout will fail. And the crowd may again be wise here.…

Channel 9 trying to do a good thing, and in the process probably damaging public health work even further. Much of what they promise vaccination will do here, like get us flying again, may not actually be true. The US…

Gotta fight stupid wherever you see it. Australia and NZ *ARE* living with Covid. That's what all of our public health measures are for. Unsurprisingly one of the Bibles of the Economy crowd arguing to...well, it's not…

Social media is the old newspaper, pulled apart and the sections monetised into a particular app. Facebook is the old personal pages and classifieds. Instagram is the old social pages, where you'd look at pictures of…

I do like Twitter.

The good thing about social media is that it cuts through the BS very, very quickly.

When I see anti-vaxxers and anti-lockdown people on Twitter, I sometimes look at their profile and history of Tweeting, to get a sense of the person. This isn’t an unusual flavour of what you find.

Ah, social media. To those who love the #DictatorDan tag, a new tag has arrived. #GulagGladys.

I’m sure many thought I was on some politically-inspired year-long crusade against the NSW Government. I wasn’t. We’re seeing right now what angered me then, and infuriates me now. I see barely a whimper from fellow NSW…

The glory of social media is that the idiot things morons say can continue to embarrass them for years to come.

As an indication of the idiocy in NSW, I see so many ‘stay home’ messages on social media. People can’t stay home, they have to go to work. Why do they have to go to work? Because the NSW Government won’t close…

The proposed truck driver’s blockade on Tuesday takes populist craziness to a whole new level. If you read these people online, they’re totally unhinged. I think the community anger would be nuclear.

This baby hearing for the first time wins the internet today. https://twitter.com/i/status/1429835867384918021

I don't make this stuff up. Have a look. Even at Gladys' beloved 80% of adults vaccinated, we're looking at 40,000 new infections PER DAY.…

Writers are often our most entertainingly insightful gifts. John Birmingham wins the internet today firstly for ‘Morrjiklian homunculus’, and then for nailing the exact politics in play right now, around children and…

A bit long, but some ideas aren’t sound bites. I know the world seems crazy to many people. I think the cause is something hidden in plain sight. For generations now, we’ve allowed adolescents to grow up in a separate,…

Leonardo Da Vinci reading his social media comments.

I think my frustration with social media is exactly this, it's called the 'Spiral of Silence'. See excerpt below, but the link is only a page of reading too. People simply refuse to engage in discussion most of the…

How communities are fracturing. The article blames FB, people often blame social media for this sort of thing. Like saying guns are why people get shot, it’s too simple. I think social media is making existing…

Fat, rich, whiney countries are opening up their countries to infect millions of people, many of them children. To save businesses, 75% of which were going to fail inside 3 years anyway, without the pandemic. India,…

“Atham-Lebbe Farsith, a waiter in a one-room curry house in Ampara did not understand why the customer was So Fucking Angry. All of the customers were angry. The man at the counter was waving his plate at Farsith,…

Saw this online and just had to correct a few typos.

The world is full of such nice people. Spoke to a person yesterday whose work ute got trapped in floodwaters. Came back the next morning to try to retrieve it, and found somebody had been overnight, flogged all of the…

Karen from Bunnings, auditioning for her future court appearance. Anyone reckon we can't become the US? I wouldn't put money on it. https://twitter.com/i/status/1462224280054165509

Anti-vax British doctor gets banned from social media. Gets the ban overturned. Goes on British right-wing nut job channel to talk about his persecution. Gets message from his prostitute mid-interview, on screen. Leaves…

There are a lot of cloth masks out there, often quite stylish. They’re pretty hopeless though, for protection from Covid. Like wearing cling wrap instead of a condom, but actually even worse than that. The blue surgical…

Christmas takes everything that’s appalling about FB and magnifies it by 100. Enjoy these lip-syncing nurses performing for President Biden, I’m avoiding the platform entirely for a few days.

Remember ‘hospitalisations are what matter’? Predictably, now they’re trending up, suddenly that spin has gone a bit quiet. Also predictably, social media is still pretending we’re all living in 2018. As Covid inches…

Maybe people can help me understand the appeal of Instagram. I’ve tried it a few times, and each time it seems to be the things I like least about social media - looking at other peoples’ pictures detailing their day,…

I don’t think I’ve seen any concert described on social media as anything but ‘amazing!’ or ‘awesome!’

Social media's main weakness? And even outside it, the appetite for digesting ideas not described in only a handful of words is pretty low. "There are certain subjects upon which it is impossible to be concise, simple,…

Apologies in advance to anybody who requests I share something every day to FB, and nominate a new person each day to do the same. Chain letters were the curse of the postal system, and it’s not tricky maths to…

I think we should be cautious about these graphs and numbers circulating online. I have serious genius mathematician friends on FB, they’ll correct any of my thinking! Also sorry it’s hard to do this stuff in…

Watching the Chief Medical officer this morning make a dog's breakfast of his brief. He even shook peoples' hands. I firmly believe the best weapon against a virus like this is viral society. Social media. Nothing else…

This is the national governance scheme for response to the pandemic. Lots of committees, lots of levels. All of this does add up to a not bad system, there’s a lot of expertise in that picture. But it’s all very boxy,…

Facebook removed my post on Australian research on a Covid-19 cure as 'spam'. My apologies if you linked to it [Edit: It now seems FB has a technical problem.] In the meantime, here's another link to the research. There…

Well now, 'supply chains'. Who'd have thought. Who will people play social media ping pong with now the hoarders and busloads of evil foreign supermarket pirates are off the hook?

Thought and calm does happen online.

I wonder if these months of children doing their learning online might change education. I was watching and helping my kids yesterday, and it was a fundamentally different experience to what school is. More personalised…

The 'retreat to relationship', only one week in! O dear. One of the reasons I left education was its idea it's all about the personal relationship between teachers and kids.…

I wanted to put down some thoughts about joy, and how to get it (imo), at a time plenty probably aren't feeling it. Takes a minute or two to read, I know that's not popular on FB! What inspired me is the number of…

Sigh, another half-pregnant scheme. This will be like the laundry list of lockdown rules, imagine the poor schools trying to administer this farce, and teachers now being forced to teach the students in classrooms and…

Because "let's just get back to normal" seems to appeal to many people who want their lives back, I think it’s worth reading why it’s a really, really bad idea. I'm still seeing many people openly ignore the social…

Australia's pandemic response is being guided by a Nobel Prize winner. America's is being guided by a reality TV star suggesting we inject people with disinfectant and irradiate them with UV light. Just over 70 dead in…

John Hattie is probably the world's leading expert on evidence-based education. Like 'economies', student results actually tend to improve after a crisis like this, even if they miss months of school with no online…

I'd really encourage everybody to look at the 2 strategies National Cabinet considered for where we go from here. Snapshot in the link, full report is online. The 'Controlled Adaptation' strategy they've opted for I…

I use Jeff Goldblum's Jurassic Park character to illustrate what I see as the real dangers in our strategy to try to control the pandemic, in our 'Covid-safe economy'. It's gobsmacking vanity. Have a look at the basic…

ScoMo's own website, check the order of priorities. I don't make this stuff up. Hillsong, ScoMo's guide, preaches 'prosperity theology' - basically God will make you rich. There's number 1 of the priorities. From the…

Debates now about merits of working 'from home'. If you work virtually, your work is not actually at home. Nor is your work 'at work'. Some people say you're working 'online', just as they say kids are doing 'online…

There is no longer a conservative side of politics. (You'd be lucky to find anybody who remembers what political conservatism is.) Conservative politicians have been replaced with lobbyists for various industries. In…

Business caught up with the internet. I waited a long time to finally get NBN at home. Once it arrived, I thought goodie, what to download now? Couldn't think of a single thing.

Are we seeing the irony here? Rowling is being abused for defending HER identity, as a woman. The identity of women has been suppressed for thousands of years, and now in the final disrespecting of it, anybody can…

This crisis is shining a light for me on how people view society. Not often as a common good, more often as a set of personal grievances, to be aired online or in protests. I guess Margaret Thatcher won, she always…

On any social media platform, scan the first 50 posts. How many invite you to share something about you? That are actually ‘social’?

I think we need a way to meet aboriginal culture somehow in the middle, halfway between our ideas and theirs. Generally we either dismiss them as primitive, or turn their ideas into New Age mumbo jumbo. I think they…

Last time there was no virus circulating in the community, they got lucky. This time there is. Crises reveal how we see community. It appears we see it as a platform for personal grievance. Heaven forbid we all have a…

I use social media as a gauge of public thinking. For Australia it worries me every day. Still in denial of the danger we’re in, overwhelmingly posts are still about ourselves or some form of ‘happy’ distraction from…

Toxic positivity. The mental stress of the continuous avalanche of fake positivity on social media. Curated personalities I guess, another term for it.

Once you see toxic positivity, you see it everywhere. It’s maybe why we don’t discuss grown-up issues much (too much ‘negativity’, apparently), but instead focus obsessively on our curated online persona, which is an…

Diana Tamir from Harvard Uni led a study that showed that 80% of social media posts are people talking about themselves or their own lives. Even when offered money to post about something else, they reverted to talking…

This time, eliminate the mongrel. What we should have done last time. Meanwhile Gladys also introducing new measures, but no leadership - just 'encouraging' us all to do it. And all via press conference, which hardly…

Another expert who should be at the centre of our fight against Covid, rather than having to try to be heard around the fringes. Who knows what strategy NSW is currently following? ScoMo announced the nation would be…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1292240553111719936

We can laugh at this stuff. But the social virus that produced Trump (populism - contempt for public institutions) is alive and well, stupid and lethally dangerous, and growing in Australia.…

We look back mystified that soldiers in the world wars were excited to be heading off to fight for a cause. But why don’t we relish a real existential challenge? Social media is swamped with happy diversion to…

And we're away... https://twitter.com/i/status/1296225718628581377

I've shifted more attention to Twitter now, FB is like reading the social pages and classifieds in an old local newspaper. Probably why those old local papers have all gone bankrupt. Twitter discusses things, though it…

Victorians when asked whether restrictions should be lifted. Why do the opponents of public health restrictions get any air time at all? Comes down to who owns the channels, obviously. The same platforms that give…

Amazing what goes on in universities. https://theconversation.com/aussie-invention-could-save-old-coal-stations-by-running-them-on-zero-emissions-lego-blocks-144864?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=bylinetwitterbutton

Gotta say, Twitter has about 200% more active thought than FB.

Karma-19 bites. https://twitter.com/brentterhune/status/1311921853263470594?s=21

Does this look like a well man to you? https://twitter.com/i/status/1313263278613827585

Everything about Trump and his popularity is explained by people wanting a King instead of a President. That's populism. Kings were often barking mad, it was seen as their prerogative. We habitually think 'democracy' is…

Leslie carried a fart machine with him everywhere he went apparently. It’s a glorious, beautiful thing. https://twitter.com/goulcher/status/1318134542994198531?s=21

This project is coming along in pretty exciting ways. My KHS friends, if you haven’t donated yet or want to donate a bit more, go for it. We need another $1500 to finish. Also check out the website for a few details.

I think the virus hasn’t been our real enemy in the past year. It’s a population trained for the past 5 decades to see themselves as individual, ‘free’ consumers. Many responded to the pandemic, and still do, just by…

I’ve always been a fan of the possibility of social media. But the reality is destroying our societies. I always talk about populism, and it’s social media that makes populism powerful. Every lunatic can mobilise…

If you observe groups like this (very similar to sporting change rooms and a lot of male ‘bonding’) you don’t see strength. You see fear, and weakness. The desperate weak personalities using the group to shed their own…

I wonder if we understand or even see our obsession with images. Old aristocratic homes were saturated with paintings. Today our favourite thing to share on social media is pictures. I think it’s usually the most taken…

Many people argued schools were immune to Covid earlier in the pandemic. They are when you have no virus, they’re superspreaders when you do. What’s particularly disgusting about this is the reason they argued it. They…

Rather than seeing 2020 as some horrible year, at Christmas we could maybe see the similarities with what Christmas is actually about? The incarnation of the eternal in the body of a man. A reminder to humans of…

So many of the things we see as problems caused by other things are really just us. It’s very difficult to take people seriously when they’re concerned about privacy, for example, when they do nothing but post about…

Couple of UK media people talking about the 'sewer' of social media. One asks the - I think - crucial question: is social media the cause of this sewer? Or was the sewer already there, and social media just made it…

Big elections this year. 1. Should voting be compulsory? 2. Should we move to online elections? My view. 1. Absolutely yes. 2. Absolutely no.…

I’ve seen this one on social media a lot. Firstly Roosevelt didn’t say it, I don’t think. But secondly, how true is it? I’d maybe re-write it as: Small thinking doesn't discuss anything. It compares people with one…

Is it society, or nature, when it takes 2.46 terawatt hours of electricity to keep in touch on social media?

Still seems an irony that people on the one hand are very concerned about privacy, and in the same breath use a global platform as a family photo album. And there's the slide night thing, there was a time inflicting…

Teach your children to be brave. We could start by not always telling them how scary the HSC is. Or how scary being online is, or that scary perverts are trying to kidnap them, etc. Some of this stuff was scarier in my…

I have a theory that Facebook is turning into a giant newspaper, produced by the public. Not only that many people get their news from FB - which is true - but that just about everything you see in the FB newsfeed is…

One of the recurring patterns in history that I think doesn’t get noticed much is how the powerful end up civilised by those they rule over. Big Bad Bill was a bad boy, civilised by marriage. Many men are civilised in…

The FB outage yesterday made me think of public squares. Cities used to revolve around them, a place that was a dedicated space for the public, as a group. In modern times I think TV played this role for a long time, it…

Trolls are the sort of people who live amongst us all the time. So I see social media doing again what it often does, making us visible to ourselves. We don’t often like to look in that mirror.

Here’s another reframing. A ‘world in crisis’ is just our usual channels, of TV and film and now social media, feeding back to us the complexity of the world we’d ignored before. ‘No politics please!’ is the voice of…

I don’t think there’s a way to make a stadium gig genuinely good. I know some love them, but: - crap sound - crap performance by band overwhelmed by the scale of it, it’s almost impossible to do nuance at that scale -…

I think the power of social media is that it’s making visible the way that how we think and feel, as individuals, has always been a profoundly social thing. The split between individuals (psychology) and society was…

“The thing that Daniel and most others haven’t internalized is the fact that if they have 800 Facebook friends, only about 10 or 15 love them. For an especially lovable person, maybe it’s as high as 30. Between 1 and…

Soooo... I got the answer wrong. I am now keeping my word and posting this picture selected by Yasmin so I'm challenging my friends who are logical and smart thinkers, to have a crack at guessing the answer to the…

Muso: social media is destroying music! (P.S. I have a gig this Friday, come along.)

It's not just wealth that's trickle-down. So are education, entertainment & news. Social media is smashing them all.

Have you seen the number of scare pieces online about how 5G is going to kill us all? I looked into this, and it’s fascinatingly our very own ‘fake news’. Driven mostly from the Kremlin’s online political units. Russia…

Here’s to me the greatest lesson of the election. Government is *always* just us, the people. In the past there was no way to mobilise all of us at once in real-time, so it led to a perception that a small group of…

If 'don't vote for the other guy' is your election platform, and the other guy loses, do you have a mandate to do anything at all?

Facebook told us the outcome of the election in another way. Comparing ourselves to others is the fuel of society. Labor’s justice-based campaign couldn’t match the ‘aspiration’ campaign from the LNP. People don’t want…

One of the greatest human problems, understanding how to balance individual and group. I think music solved it a long time ago, but people don't often go there to answer this one. Melody (individual) and harmony…

The word 'virtual' is used a lot, and I think mostly to suggest something 'online'? To me it's one of the critical concepts to understand the world we live in. For example, here's a hammer. All hammers are virtual, but…

Mysteries of the virtual world. (I'll get back to hammers.) I think 'online' is often talked about as if it was a place. "I'll go online". But online isn't a place - where would it be? Can anybody point to where the…

The epidemic of plastic surgery and facial alteration is starting to make more sense to me. Throughout history the face of a ruler has been airbrushed into masks and images, as a unifying blank canvas. Specific…

All the data on the Internet weighs the same as an invisibly tiny grain of sand. That's the *entire* Internet. So - what is the 'online world'?

If a trip isn't shared on social media, did it happen?

Screens, anti-social? I don't think so, in fact they're the exact opposite. They're hyper-social. Teens and others are glued to their screens because screens give them permanent access to their social group. The world…

For decades Bruno Latour has been trying to help people see that the most social part of our societies is our technologies. Technologies are not just 'tools', every technology weaves together a complex web of social…

By any measure, a magnificent photo. From the 1930s, Ray Olson, one of my heroes, a press photographer at the time who captured vast amounts of public life. Cameras are so good now that I find a lot of stuff published…

A global map of the internet. I've been driving my family mad excitedly watching the NBN being installed in our street. You see, for me, what holds the world together isn't politics, or love. It's technology. That fibre…

The paranoia around privacy to me is the individual person version of the sovereignty argument. The same people overshare daily on social media, about everything. And the 'private' details people worry about aren't…

More of the genius of Tarde. What would Tarde say we should do to get 'economic growth'? Tax cuts? Micro- and macro-economic reform? Fiscal or competition reform? All fairytale piffle, he'd have said. There is no…

Social media analytics, do we stop and think about how extraordinary it is to be able to now quantify so many desires and beliefs? The subjective/objective divide dissolving. I think this is maths finally achieving its…

Somebody asked me the other day if I 'had a life'. What prompted their question was that I rarely post anything about my personal life to social media. To me it was staggering, how deep oversharing is in people, that…

Queen Vic yesterday made me think. Every 2 minutes humans take more photos than existed in the entire world 150 years ago. There are an estimated 700 billion pictures uploaded to social media every year. Add to that all…

The Eels getting most of the media and social media attention tonight, but for me this is the best sporting team in the world right now. Awesome grand final win today Swifts.

Hatred of: - referees - politicians - local and State governments - bureaucrats - call centres, etc. I think our populist age could be summed up as - hatred of the 'middle man'. We want our stuff direct. Uber and social…

What I love about social media is that it's real-time evidence of why politicians are not the problem. People are nuts.

I'm not sure my interest in institutions always makes sense to others. Here's a simple example of what I mean. The people in the US who will vote for Trump no matter what he does are drawn heavily from the people who…

"Society is divided". Well, it always is, you can't even run a small sporting club without everybody disagreeing. People are different. I think society seems more divided now because: 1) disagreements are more visible,…

I hope he can pull this off. The one thing he might be overestimating is peoples’ appetite for conversation. In my experience it’s virtually zero, for a whole range of reasons. The appetite for social comparison though…

Jeremy Corbyn is described as ‘extreme’ because he advocates returning basic public services to public hands, and taxing the well-off to fund those services. You can see just how deep the opposing conservative stories…

It was a real surprise to me that fear is the reason many people either don’t post to social media, or post only about themselves. Then it clicked - people tend to use social media to create a social identity. That fear…

Self-driving cars are already hugely safer than humans driving cars. It's interesting that we hold them up to a much higher standard than human-driven cars. Cars are much more than just modes of transport - they're the…

It's not just schools that need to stop fundraising. This lady gets it, fundraising is an epidemic, often being used to fill gaps in services caused by government cuts. My parents always said it wasn't the parents who…

Billy Joel wrote ‘The Stranger’ after a painful breakup. He realised the person he thought was closest to him in the world was actually a stranger to him. (Pure Proust.) You can never really know a person. And they can…

One of the things that isn’t widely known about China is how innovative it is with governance. The outside world thinks of China as a big communist totalitarian State, but within China there’s more experimentation with…

I heard a joke once that said a bogan is somebody whose life is defined by the use of petrol. I didn’t realise there are whole websites on the topic. (Some very funny stuff on this site, I hadn’t realised…

This site is the funniest, smartest take on Straya, it’s like Barry Humphries and Edna upgraded for 2018. Perfect reading leading up to Straya Day. “...the slower mobile data speeds and smaller data caps of three years…

Gabriel Tarde, predicting social media a century ahead of time. And in the process completely redefining economics as the science of passion and desire. Economics is fascinating when you realize it’s really about how…

This is very true, in fact vegetarian diets kill even more living things than meat-eating diets. It’s just that they’re not the easily seen, cuddly big macrofauna which vegetarians often campaign for. Life and death are…

The hidden secret of fruit, like reading books almost universally lauded as a great thing. Alas. ““People usually try to improve their diet by eating more fruit - but fruit cultivated for humans is much higher in sugar…

Rather than get rid of Facebook, we should recognise that it’s now a public service, like water or electricity. It should be regulated, as Cook says. That’s how these corporate giants make such enormous sums of money,…

I still puzzle over how Facebook, the ultimate ‘social network’, became something so overwhelmingly focused on individuals posting about themselves. Have never had much luck getting many to agree that this is…

Here’s Facebook stating the problem of my post yesterday, in their own words. They want the platform to be more interactive, rather than passive. More social.…

A theme for the day. "All the processes we attribute to brains and computers alone might fill the world. In the same way that the legs code the program of walking, unknown information is inscribed in the patterns of…

My main reason for being on Facebook. It brings knowledge back to life. "If we were traditional knowers or information processors, we would gather evidence, listen to arguments and their justifications, and arrive at…

“Part of the problem is that we expend far too much effort comparing our behind-the-scenes reality with everyone else’s public highlight reels, posted in envy-inspiring terms, meant to catch our eye and make us wish we…

Reading is one of those universally loved things. But does it have a dark side? I think so, in a few ways. 1) Books created the idea that knowledge is separate to human beings who use it. It’s ‘in the literature’. The…

Here’s a paradox I think, the more diverse and undefinable a person is, the more individual they are. Individuality and ego are opposite things. Freddie Mercury had an enormous personality, his individuality was like a…

This trend has been clear for a while. ‘Grown-ups’ who are still essentially teenagers. Obsession with bands and music, with consumer goods, with fantasy fiction and films, with binge culture, grown-ups having…

Tony Abbott once said that Malcom Turnbull ‘invented the internet’ in Australia. Want to know who really invented the internet in Australia? Universities. Universities built Australia’s first internet. And they still…

Our politics looks like society is at war, but actually we live in some of the most peaceful times in human history. It’s impossible to understand that paradox I think if you only look at humans. An example - trains.…

A few days ago I started talking about the occult. Today some more connection to it, when it turns out the person who defaced the Eurydice Dixon memorial was an occultist. This is the fastest growing set of beliefs in…

I rarely post anything about my personal life, or that of my family, but Facebook is full of that sort of stuff, people can’t seem to get enough of telling the world about everything they’re doing. Often the same people…

Not sure how many have had a close look at the Facebook "Access Your Information" function that's now available? Hats off to FB, it's bloody well done. Superb even. I was just able to get a nicely formatted single…

Nabellah Jaffer again, in conversation with extremists. This is a common pattern as well, the fear and caricature of the ‘collective group’, or ‘crowd’, or ‘mob’. This binary thinking is very widespread, even in…

Have you ever put the TV on to feel less alone? Often if you’re travelling alone for work, for example, turning on the TV can suddenly produce a feeling of social connection. Many people have TV or radio on in the…

I find that IT experts will generally tell you IT systems aren’t safe, particularly ones they didn’t build themselves, because it keeps them in a job and the centre of attention. A lot of the modern data hysteria seems…

A prominent journalist on the weekend said that nobody in the media could think of a way to save serious journalism. In a situation like this, it usually means I think that the ideas we’re using don’t fit. In the case…

Gabriel Tarde on life in a big city, another paradox. Rich social environments are environments of intense imitation, not of thought. Facebook is another rich social environment - do we see much thought on it? Or mostly…

If you look up images of ‘arguing’, nearly all of them will come back as people shouting at each other. Why are we so afraid of argument, and why do we think it means shouting at each other? In my experience most people…

An observation from many years of Facebook. (Not being critical here, more genuine curiosity about how things work.) There's not much interaction. People overwhelmingly seem to post about themselves, or their friends…

Once upon a time if you had ideas, you wrote a book or article, and published it if you could, and hoped people would read it. Most books are never read. What social media has done is bypass the book, and taken ideas…

Some people see selfies as narcissism. I’ve never really believed in narcissism, it’s a pretty empty idea. When people take pathological numbers of selfies, I think it’s not because they’re in love with themselves, but…

A child could read for hours and we’d all beam and say how wonderful. And yet a few hours on an XBox and apparently the kid needs to get back into the ’real world’ (never defined). We’re very moralistic about our own…

More modern morals. Is shopping a moral activity? (I think all activities are.) For example: - does online shopping screw bricks and mortar retail, but keep thousands of cars off the road and save poor people money? -…

With Google Trends you can glimpse a nation’s soul. I highly recommend it as a substitute for the news, which is curated pap to try to shape how people feel. Google Trends will tell you what they’re really feeling. Here…

Returning to anglepoise lamps. My friend David Gorman uses these lamps to help people get a more accurate picture of how their body is supported in space. We tend to carry around an assumption that 'gravity' is dragging…

I've been a bit quiet lately, and I think this Sherry Turkle TED talk mirrors my thoughts about FB at the moment. Like many new social media, it's being used to create connection, at the expense of conversation. Where…

Check out the idea of peoples’ ‘second selves’, the self they curate, alongside the self they traditionally live. I think we’ve always had a social self, a second self, it’s just that now it’s much, much bigger than it…

The warning label that should come with all social media (or life in general), which I saw yesterday... Don’t compare your inside with everybody else’s outside. Everybody’s outside is mostly a lie. Or selective editing…

I love comparing social media and Google search. The former is often curated fantasy, the latter tells you want people are really thinking. An example, how people describe their husbands. Firstly, on social media, the…

I think this is so much truer than people will admit. It’s like a ritual, we affect being interested in other peoples’ personal lives, in their ‘gorgeous’ children and ‘amazing’ holidays. But I would bet a lot of it is…

I was one of those critical of John Howard and Peter Costello's massive 'middle class welfare' increases to family payments during the mining boom. But to give Howard his due (I don't think Costello was ever a fan), he…

"It’s just the latest manifestation of the dangerous illusion that it is possible to have democracy without political parties—and that street protests based more on social media than sustained political organizing is…

Klee's Twittering Machine. Music is more than anything else a territorial thing. Like dogs pissing to mark territory, music began in the marking out of a space with sound. Refrains. Birds use song for this. Humans do…

Saw this meme online. It made me think about the deep, almost mythical stories that really determine how people think about politics. Politics is ultimately about how people feel. This meme, for example, it's such a…

Well said Andrew Street. "Will housing become more affordable in Australia? Absolutely! And it could happen one of two ways. This complex web of legislation can be gently and strategically unpicked via careful…

People are constantly bombarded with requests for money and/or assistance for various causes, often through schools but also through workplaces and even via harassment in the street or on the phone or internet. It's now…

Are you a rentier? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth-banks-google-facebook-society-economy-parasites?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

"...news from our friends about their families’ triumphs and trials has become omnipresent, unrelenting—a never-ending vacation slide show from hell." 'Oversharers' often see FB as like an extension of their actual…

We think we're a bit clever for religion these days, but the true message of Easter is much more profound than all the self-help, self-esteem, self-improvement and status-seeking we've replaced it with in our lives.…

Nicholas Christakis is a professor of medicine and sociology, and studies social networks. What's he's found is amazing, and gives us new ways to understand how our everyday social life interacts with our online social…

Beautiful. For the shy people out there. One gem: "The internet, far from cutting us off from each other, has simply provided more fodder for our own era’s fascination with emotional authenticity and therapeutic…

Facebook is struggling with this now. It's already at the point where it really could or should be a public service, regulated as a public institution.

Really fascinating report on the impact of social media on young peoples' mental health. Instagram is the worst, followed by Snapchat. YouTube is the best. The overwhelming reason for the negative impacts is comparison.…

Really fascinating report on the impact of social media on young peoples' mental health. Instagram is the worst, followed by Snapchat. YouTube is the best. The overwhelming reason for the negative impacts is comparison.…

So many ticks for this one. You could put it even more broadly - always remember the people you're arguing with, are people. Not some ideas rammed into a body. https://www.facebook.com/sogoodnow/videos/686990368151497/

"...up until about 2010, Facebook was mainly a website for young people. Young people doing stupid things. And it was glorious. But now, I can’t stand it. Now, all it is is one big family photo album full of weddings…

Do you know anybody with 'Smiling Depression'? I think people with depression often seem happy, but it's good to see that people are more aware of that now. One of the main causes is social comparison, comparing…

One of the most difficult things to get for your kids in Australia is good training in foreign languages. I would swap 90% of what kids are taught at school for good training in other languages. Up to 4 or 5 languages…

I think @[100001374621876:2048:Michael Kato] sends me these because he wants me to be unpopular.…

There's a lot of worry about privacy online. But the overwhelming majority of information on 'the Internet' is already information most people can't access, it's in the 'deep web' and the 'dark web'. This isn't an easy…

Bill Shorten has been playing the long game. Now he's made inequality the central plank of his platform, which is both brave and the only thing any politician should be doing right now, it doesn't matter if you don't…

It really has changed the world, or better the world has used it to change itself. Lots of people only come to FB to share their personal lives, and that's a choice, but FB is doing so, so much more.…

Unsurprisingly, all the personal things are the dangerous ones. What do people understand the 'social' to mean, in 'social media'?

This is where people like Cleese get completely suckered by ruthless political strategists. Of course people should be allowed to be offended and to cause some offence, in comedy and elsewhewre. What Cleese doesn't…

Professor Talisse is a clever man. If you want to have fun, don’t try to have fun, if you want friendship, don’t try to make friends. If you want democracy, don’t try to have democracy. Democracy comes when people have…

Usual alarmist silliness. The solution is simple. Not less Facebook, but less personal sharing on Facebook. It’s a social site, it’s about humans as a community, not as individuals, about sharing our common concerns and…

Is the Internet the greatest thing ever invented? I think so. If you worry your kids are online too much, watch this.

FB is changing the world.…

Can recommend Facebook's Activity Log, it's great. Particularly if you're trying to find something from an older conversation, makes it a doddle.

Interesting to see misogynistic online trolls in action. This in response to somebody posting about the success for Charlotte Wood's latest novel.

"Virtual untethering is mostly virtue signalling. It is deemed good for the soul by just about everyone who talks about social media on social media." Yep.

The heart of all social life is imitation and comparison. FB doesn't create this, but it shows it so clearly. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/04/ways-to-use-facebook-without-feeling-depressed/389916/

A ripper. http://theunboundedspirit.com/drugs-dont-cause-addiction-this-short-animated-video-will-change-your-view-on-drugs-forever/?utm_content=buffer7e988&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

People should post whatever they like to FB. But this was an interesting way to classify the results. A fun and maybe even important read, modern etiquette under development. The humour thing isn't quite right I don't…

At a time when web work is disappearing into its own navel talking about user experience, I love that the DM still just seems to dump it all on the one page. Is that the philosophy Jason Ian Green?

We're not living in a 'post-truth' era, that's just the next stupid way to misunderstand Trump. It's the 'Trump supporters are stupid' rubbish dressed up in different clothes. As if they're too dumb to understand facts.…

Oh please please please. If you're watching Lithgow City Council. Not one of you useless boneheads even acknowledge an email about internet service in Lithgow. Probably can't use the internet.

Putting the old school teacher hat on, a very different way to understand recent terrible events is to see that kids blow themselves up in some parts of the world for the same underlying reason kids binge drink here.…

The serial social media quitters, its not just the famous who spit the dummy. Many of them come back. A bit strange that they blame the technology rather than the way they use it.

These people are very very angry. About just about everything it seems. A Bex and a good lie down maybe. https://www.facebook.com/AusTeaParty

Dear Facebook. Please take your 'suggested posts' and sit on them and rotate.

Please can I get a million likes so I can screw up Facebook the same way chain letters did the post and then spam did to email?

To save the time and effort in reading News Limited papers and understanding the new Coalition's media policy. It's all in one tweet from Master Rupert, who's shifted his campaign from the UK to here.…

Think I'm missing something here. This was in the press this week, and of course it gets lots of "social media is the apocalypse" support. But seems to me that the only way this might happen is if: 1) you have your…

thinks Facebook would be a far more interesting place if more people had less hair.

thinks every person on Facebook should send him $1.

may be the ugliest person on Facebook.

is isn't a 'friend farmer' on Facebook.