Society, status & imitation

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…

The kids in this pic look like they all want the same toy. But it's not about the toy, they fight over the toy because the other kids want it. That's what makes them fight. The kid who wins the fight will likely drop…

All the stuff about status and imitation and rivalry I post about is in this diagram. It shows that our lives exist in cycles, in time, and we get stuck in our thinking at one part of the cycle. For example right now…

Trump’s regime change adventure in Venezuela will horrify many. (And Trump is a dangerous buffoon.) But let’s add the context. The US does this sort of thing all the time, and for very specific reasons. Russia too,…

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…

It was Abraham Lincoln who said democracy is government ‘of the people, by the people, for the people’. That’s pretty much the majority view of what democracy is and how it works even today. It’s complete rubbish. And I…

Party-goers continuing to dance and film with their phones the fire that was about to kill 40 of them. To get a good vid for the socials. It’s the perfect window into our entire culture. All threats to our collective…

For well over a year, many have said America’s democracy is being taken over by a totalitarian regime, the Trump regime. But America has always been a plutocracy, a country run by its economic elites. It’s never been a…

Et tu, Brute? Caesar’s greatest enemies, the ones that killed him, weren’t the peoples Rome invaded. It was his own team. This is ALWAYS how power works. Even when countries invade other countries, what gets called…

There was a TV series on Bodyline, but it amazes me there’s never been a film about Bradman. His sporting achievement is one of the most extraordinary things statistically in all human history, it almost defies belief.…

The oldest you will ever be is the day you’re born. Everything you inherit, in your biology and culture, is ancient. And then everything you add to both of those in your life is brand-new and young. The more you…

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…

Trump is not an authoritarian takeover of America. He’s the logical outcome of American culture itself. America still doesn’t understand this, though some are starting to join those dots. 

Somebody at work today asked why, if I’ve now had Covid, I just don’t get rid of the mask? The sort of question I’ve had for years. What’s revealed by these questions is that peoples’ assessment of what they should do…

I’ve never had a fly or maggot infestation in any place that I’ve lived. I wonder if this is down to the more recent trend of no fly screens in new homes, because they come into conflict with trending style choices like…

Many evoke the civil rights reforms of the 1960s as supposed evidence that activism and people-led change are both possible and define democracy. You can see with Trump’s rapid reversal of those reforms, which in…

Everything is a Hollywood movie in the American psyche, and this is also another key characteristic of kidult culture. Most views on AI for example are little more than feels from James Cameron’s Terminator movies. This…

The 'balance' people think needs to be made between disease control and their social life? We learned how to control disease to GIVE us social lives. It doubled our life expectancy. You don't control a disease by…

I needed a new drink bottle for work. We had one of these at home and I thought perfect, one simple moving part, easy to clean, potentially usable for the rest of my life. What happened next is another window into an…

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.…

We're living inside a 2000-year period of history that has been mostly dominated by China. Our collective memory is about 10 minutes. The only thing that interrupted the total dominance of China was what they call their…

Societies don't run on information. They run on status, which is also identity. In the absence of some way to make the smarter thing to do also the higher status thing to do, people will default to what they're already…

As another window into the culture, and again our own cultures are as invisible to us as water is to fish, our ideas about bodily agency and sanctity are resolutely adolescent. For example, I’m sure most would say rape…

The instability creates a breeding ground for the generation and spread of novel pathogens. The pathogens then in turn create greater instability, as humans struggle to cope with them. Why the status quo moved to…

SAT scores are used in the US mostly to select people for college admisison. They’ve been in free fall since the pandemic began (circled in red). I don’t know about your experience, but in workplaces I feel a real…

All the poll numbers look terrible for Trump, particularly in the groups that he brought across to the Republican side, like Latino voters. Total collapse in support. This is how populist surges always end, the crazy…

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…

America is and always has been a very violent country. It’s orders of magnitude more violent than any comparison countries in Western society. Because it has no mechanism to rein in status rivalry. The ‘American Dream’…

The skill of firing a good shot is like any other skill, pleasurable for the achievement. In that sense I can understand guns. In every other sense I find them boring, and just another example of how humans can turn…

America has always been snake oil oligarchs overlaid upon a pious small-town fundamentalist Puritanism. It was the latter that created the former, Puritans wanted to avoid State control of their lives (why they were…

This is humanity heading for extinction. It’s barely mentioned. This is *global*. There are all sorts of reasons given for why people no longer have babies, most correct, like the cost, greater freedom for women to…

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…

From Barack and Michelle Obama’s statement on Trumpian America. You can see here why the problem with America is…America. It’s not being taken over by anybody, every American is encouraged to sink the boot into…

Is it not obvious that this same pattern repeats over and over in America? Shit happens, people take to the streets, nothing is fixed. This is the broken culture on full display. Basic, calm, public administration…

I talk a lot about imitation and imitative rivalry. Imitation (copying) is the centre of human life. Rivalry (Rene Girard studied this) comes because to imitate another person is one of the most hostile or aggressive…

The more we replace human thought and decision-making with machines, the safer and happier we will be. Humans overwhelmingly don’t think, they battle each other for social status.

This is the ideas about status and identity I post about a lot. For example people who oppose or support renewables, or EVs or petrol and diesel cars, or this or that band, brand of bags or shoes, political parties…

There are usually foundation-level social teams in the status games that define human society, at least in modern times (with the decline of Kings and Queens, at least temporarily). Today that’s the politics of Left and…

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.…

America’s foundation was a revolution. Societies who are founded by revolutions tend to never shed the operating system of that revolution i.e. deeply held views about authority and tryranny, about carrying arms and…

'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…

I can’t engage in what’s called ‘politics’ because it’s really just social team sports overlaid upon the material realities of human life. It’s literally like a football Premier League added to what keeps societies…

When the pre-eminent scientific journal in the world says hang on, AI easily already passes all of the tests for intelligence we devised years ago, and MUCH more, but humans keep shifting the bar higher to try to deny…

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…

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…

Dennis Altman is an avowed Australian Republican. But he was compelled to write this book, because when he looked at the topic, he realised monarchies not only never went away, they keep being restored, and countries…

“There is a growing consensus that the democratic model developed over the past century is in trouble, but there is less clarity about why people are so disenchanted with their democracies.” Because democracy as we…

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 Epstein files are damaging for Trump because they expose him to be a key player amongst the elites that he, and populists like him, pretend they’re fighting against. Pauline Hanson is the same here in Oz, pretending…

The reason monarchy is pretty much all of human history is that it's a technology to control status rivalry. Modern minds don't understand this. Take the rituals around royalty, which modern republicans see as outdated…

The UK de-fanged monarchy, but left it the critical role of status sink, making rivalry for the top position impossible. This allows politics there to become mostly procedural, and creates de-personalised continuity…

We have mental models of populations or societies derived from things like gigs (thus ‘gig culture’). ‘The people’ assembling. In reality social network analysis shows that societies look like the diagram. Like an atom,…

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…

The ongoing problems with inflation always talk of supply and demand, the non-thinking person’s answer to everything economic. But wealth is the dominant marker of status in societies, so inflation represents…

For any social progress or change, you'll find a rivalry between elite groups, using ordinary people as leverage. For example universal voting, which we're taught and assume was introduced because of pressure from…

Nothing excites kidults more than the euphoria of a crowd. A few days later, exactly diddly squat has changed in America.

The uncomfortable truth is that successful entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, spitting in the soup of the status quo, a fart in the collective elevator. They’re…

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…

When a society says “we are all equal” but behaves otherwise, something lethal happens: • differences still exist • power still concentrates • prestige still accumulates • but no one is allowed to say where. Everyone…

Hardly anybody I know found this odd, even though it’s obvious. Societies don’t run on knowledge, they run on social conformity, driven by the desire for status. The principle most use to guide them is: ‘what is…

Sharing just part of my conversation with AI about ORAC, the 1970s fictional intelligent supercomputer. By the way you may notice AI now asks you more questions? That’s deliberate, to reduce the possibility of…

The only public or even private buildings where this would be allowed. Also the breeding ground for most disease in the community. If schools had the same basic HVAC as all other major public and private buildings,…

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…

We're living inside a revolution that will be written about for generations. Just imagine the current Opposition and One Nation coming to power right now, shutting all this down in favour of their old policy of…

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

We should abandon AI and all go back to just writing with a pen, apparently. Emma one of many who don’t like a shift because their once dominant way of doing things, in a culture they had a high status in, is now not…

Wonderful short piece to camera from a UK installer of solar and batteries, about how many adults now tell him they refuse to have any Tesla products. Some are even ‘embarrassed’ if their neighbours see them. And how he…

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 thing about back to nature/authenticity/getting away from it all movements is the ticket prices for entry. These are on the low side, and don't even include fuel. When people say they want to get away from it all,…

Because we make the disastrous mistake of thinking democracy is ‘the people’ individually reasoning out situations, we also assume the answer is to just get rid of ‘misinformation’, and everything will be fixed. I post…

Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the owner of ChatGPT. Their projected debts were so enormous that many felt they would collapse under the weight. But now they’ve found the only bottomless pit of funding in the world - the…

We watched the latest series of Bridgerton on the weekend. Why do people love period dramas? I think for a reason that links to what I post about a lot. Period dramas are pretty much all about one thing. Social status,…

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…

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…

When I use the word ‘kidult’, it’s not meant to be just some cheap insult. It’s an analytical term invented by people who study societies, to describe a type of culture, where adult life is replaced by an extended…

I’ve been seeing this in my own kids for some time, they’re immersed in Asian culture. It puts the recent rise in One Nation/Hansonism into perspective, as a last gasp from ageing boomers to cling to a time already gone.

Housing affordability is trapped inside a filter of understanding that will prevent us ever fixing it. The supply and demand filter, which is total nonsense. All sides of politics and most people will tell you the…

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.…

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…

I don’t post so much about renewable energy and electric cars because I’m some ‘fanboy’ of them. I hate the whole fan/kidult culture we live in, where you join a team as a fan and then fight other teams for status. I…

This is Omar Yaghi. You may have seen hm in the news recently, he won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He invented a technology using Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) that will pull moisture out of air, even in…

Only catastrophes change people and their societies and cultures. Without them they just default to pissing contests for status. It will take this sort of ongoing disruption to our ‘cost of living’ to wake people up to…

Or: Status Status Status Everything in human life is about status, when you look.

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.…

I wonder if people can feel the imminent crash of what I call lifestyle culture. Where life and all of its existential complexities was replaced in the last century with the idea of life’s purpose being the maximisation…

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…

Mods or speccing your ride is classic child behaviour. Like buying Ken or Barbie with all the accessories. All of this culture is in plain sight. As the saying goes, fish don't know water exists.

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…

Tesla did release this model yesterday, and we bought one. We’re now as a family almost completely independent of the need for ruinously expensive and unreliable oil, coal or gas to power our lives. The sooner the same…

One response to this mess that is not as common is to tell people to just stay home for once, and keep off the road. To avoid all unnecessary travel. But we can’t do that, because apparently all travel is necessary for…

Everything we label a political problem is really a social/cultural problem. Specifically that adult problems can’t be solved by adults with the understanding and attitudes of permanent teenagers. That’s not just some…

The most interesting things in life are usually hidden in plain sight. Like this disruption, it tells us hugely interesting things about our way of life. I often post that as a culture we have no idea of what ‘place’…

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…

Some deaths hit you hard, this is one of those, for me. David was remarkable, a unique mind who discovered the most astonishing things about how humans work, and shared what he discovered with thousands in his…

It's beautiful to see the social status mechanism brought into the light like this. 'Load-bearing for people's sense of self'. That's glorious. "Here is what the shock jocks and the Murdoch machine and the fossil fuel…

One of the many young Paulines in Australia told me today that anybody who moves to Australia should have to follow our culture, and not try to change it. I asked what our culture is. They couldn’t think of an answer.

Medicare is a universal health care system in name only, since John Howard introduced public subsidy of private health insurance. And that was always the plan, to destroy Medicare, which the Liberals hate and have…

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…

Chinese cars are already dominant in Australia. Fleet sales make it look like older Japanese brands are, but they’re not. Ordinary Australians are already buying more Chinese cars than anything else, because they’re…

What concerns me about this is that we already live in a culture where adult life was replaced by adolescent gangs, fighting for their respective ‘brands’ in everything (cars, coffee, clothes, energy, etc.). If petrol…

Insurance is my day job, for Council. Unaffordable insurance is a leading indicator of social collapse, because it means a society isn’t managing risks, leaving it all to insurance. A society that doesn’t manage risks -…

In the past half a century the fear of overpopulation in the world was pretty common. But during that entire time, global birth rates have been in free fall. To the extent that many parts of the world now face a genuine…

The deepest human desire and behaviour is to imitate. To copy others, because that gives us status and therefore identity in social groups. Imitation can be used for good, or bad. Good is the control of imitation, so…

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,…

The same free homemade energy you can drive your car with will also power your stove. I love how people think things like work from home are a choice we get to make, as a society. With no fuel, there will be no choice.

In kidult culture you have zero chance of having anything changed that's popular. And what is popular is nearly always stupid, but that makes no difference. Popularity overrules everything. And it needs to be removed…

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’.…

We’re a culture where history is something that lasts about 10 minutes. And therefore we don’t see this sort of thing for what it actually is. Cultures that were founded by revolutions, endlessly reproducing that…

Attention is a gift. Most people don’t know how to give it. BY TOMASZ KOPEC3 A good mother doesn’t just feed the baby, clothe the baby, keep the baby safe. She keeps the baby at the centre of her attention. The baby…

The idea of ‘community consultation’ is nonsense. A community is a whole range of separate groups, all aligned with their particular ‘influencer’. All fighting the other groups for social status. The winners always…

The great American delusion, that ‘the people’ is a thing. That’s because they’re a society founded by revolution, and it’s all they know.

Innovations that succeed follow the famous S-curve pattern. For a while nothing much seems to be happening. Then suddenly the change explodes and everybody is doing it. It’s not gradual. This is the status thing again.…

This is the one that really kicks Kidult culture in the gonads. Denying recreational travel. That’s what broke the Covid defence too. Kidults see it as an existential right and necessity, to burn tonnes of jet fuel to…

This isn’t uncommon, that the elderly do the deliberate vandalism. The counterculture they grew up in never leaves them. Permanent revolutionaries. Kidults.

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.…

Arson attack against a Western Sydney Tesla dealer yesterday. I worried this bullshit would start again. Basic civil order is the first thing to go with upset kidults, especially when they lose their petrol and diesel.…

I learned a big thing today. I would never have learned it without AI. The skin is often neglected as a vital part of the body. Very few people look after their skin well, women much more than men. The basic act of…

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…

Remember when Bob Hawke was criticised for promising that no Australian child would be living in poverty within a very short time? If he’d said ‘old person’ instead of child, he’d have actually been right. To this day…

Setting up Starlink for a family member reminded me again of some brutally hard truths about human beings and their groups. Like buying a Tesla, it’s the most beautifully elegant and simple process. Everything just…

I’m up an hour early today. The only way I’ve found to counteract the stupidity of Daylight Saving is to change my bed and waking times, to avoid as much as possible the shift to the circadian rhythm, which is so…

Good on Sammy for despairing at the social breakdown afflicting all of us. But like all rock star culture, the diagnosis here is all about feelings. Love vs hatred. As if the problem is an outbreak of people being nasty…

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…

Status runs all human life. “It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new…

There have been debates for years between people who believe in ‘socialism’ (i.e. government-led life), and those who believe in ‘capitalism’ (a life led by individuals in markets). And me? I don’t think either -ism…

I see this all the time at work and in the community. The avalanche of retirees, freshly released from the pressures of work and then suddenly feeling unplugged from relevance to our societies. This is part of the same…

I often post about how culture is invisible to the people living it. Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. And that Western culture has no idea of ‘place’. No meaningful connection to the ground under its…

As the author says, the bizarre culture we live in is one where the population is ageing rapidly, western societies are literally giant aged care facilities. But at the same time the culture of these wrinkly nations has…

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…

The motivation for the NDIS is wonderful. But it’s a public administration nightmare, it’s punitively expensive. Astronomically, cancerously expensive. If people deny this reality, the NDIS will lose its ‘social…

The head of Australia’s largest super fund speaking the truth about housing that Australians never want to hear. ‘Supply’ won’t fix the housing crisis. Nobody is going to flood the market with cheap houses. It would…

Spinoza made visible an impossible tension at the heart of all of our lives. What is ‘right’, in terms of morals but also facts and knowledge, is always in opposition to what is socially acceptable or popular. If you…

Watching some US Masters. You can see status in everything, because it is everything for humans. Take the beloved baseball cap, worn universally by professional golfers and even fans. It’s completely idiot headwear for…

Times are tough and are likely going to get very nasty. Possibly a recession. All of this was avoidable, but humans refused to give up fighting for social status, to follow what knowledge told us needed doing. And so,…

Democracy has been a failure since its introduction, and it's been getting worse on all measures since. It's also deeply unpopular. That's what populism is, the popular response to democracy. 'The people' never run…

That's a heckuva stat. The threat is greater than any war, the possible end of all civilisation. We stopped the whole world, everything we were doing, for over a decade, to fight the world wars. A far smaller threat.…

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.…

What's not as often said about the fertiliser crisis is how completely dependent on fertiliser our farming methods are, to grow anything. And that fertiliser in turn comes from fossil fuels. Agriculture will be smashed…

A fascinating insight into how driving changes qualitatively as an activity, once you’ve had prolonged experience of semi-autonomous technology. Just as these cars change the nature of cars fundamentally, they also…

I’m going to give concrete examples of kidult culture, rather than just mention it in general terms. A guy at work bought one of these, a BYD Shark hybrid ute. He’s a car guy, has owned over 20 cars. All combustion…

Catastrophe is the only thing that forces change in human life. Everything from relationship breakups to natural and human disasters, like Granville. Without catastrophe, the status quo is the strongest force in all…

Towing is another glorious example of human status games. When the BYD Shark was released for example, many people refused to buy it because it ‘can only tow 2.5 tonnes’. But in reality BYD’s engineers in China, removed…

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…

The Trump family are masters of ‘pump and dump’ politics. They make announcements, knowing they’ll cause big shifts in the stock market (the pump) and then secretly in the background they and their crony mates buy and…

I’ve been using FSD this week on my long commutes. It’s remarkable, the most calming and relaxing drive, knowing you have a system doing the driving that is paying attention in eight directions and across multiple…

This is the much bigger, profound shift that autonomous driving technology is bringing to roads. It’s not just replacing human driving with machine driving, it’s changing drivERS themselves. It’s stripping away the…

Unsurprisingly the majority of comments on this post gushed about how amazing the Oldsmobile is, and how the Tesla has no soul, and how everybody would choose to ride in the old car. That’s kidult culture, rampant…

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…

The hilarious thing about our Yellow Peril racism is that we’ve already been ‘dependent’ on China, for decades. The US does almost nothing for us, in practical terms. China funds almost our entire society, through the…

This guy traces the shift from institutions that build things, which we saw after WW2 in massive ‘nation-building’ efforts. To today, where nothing gets built. Where the main social activity is obstructing change,…

Trump’s idiot adventures in Iran are dramatically accelerating this shift. I’ve posted a lot here about how cultures need to be broken, catastrophically, to make meaningful change. Otherwise status always rules, the…

As of right now, no ‘deal’ looks close either, so we’re not even at the point where things like mine clearing could start. And even though the price of fuel has moderated slightly, we’re at the critical point where the…

This is what the counterculture produced. There was an assumption that we didn’t have peace on Earth because people chose not to have it. So if we just sang a song about peace on Earth, maybe people would change their…

To reframe the debates around Council rates. They’re framed in these debates as costs to residents, charges. Like buying something at a shop. But Council rates are really public investments. They fund infrastructure…

Kidult culture is a culture of the ‘feels’. Reality is ignored. Then when it arrives and everything collapses, kidults get violent. A collective tantrum.

We’re not ‘living with’ Covid. It’s continuing to destroy our health. Long Covid is now the most common chronic disease suffered by children, surpassing asthma. And we allowed this and still do nothing for what reason?…

You’d think an original comes first, and then copies of the original. But without copies, there’s no such thing as an original. Imitation always comes first, as Miles says.

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘦 𝘱𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯; 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘪𝘥𝘥𝘦𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘩𝘺𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧, 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘢 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤 𝘵𝘦𝘢 𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘺 𝘢 𝘥𝘰𝘰𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘭𝘦 𝘧𝘦𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘢𝘭𝘮. 𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘰𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭…

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…

Towards the end of my time at CSU, it took on a visionary project called Smart Learning (SL). I mention it because the ideas behind Smart Learning were more or less identical to the ideas that run Tesla, as a company.…

Autumn is nearly two-thirds over. The leaves on the deciduous trees at my place and around it are not only not falling off, they haven’t even changed colour yet, in many instances. The people who deny climate change are…

Me practising guitar about 40 years ago. The key to mastery of something is to practice so much that it becomes habitual, and then innovation can arise from that automatic set of habits. In my life more generally, I’ve…

Tiny numbers of people drive all social activity. For example, the ‘love the sound of a combustion engine’ crowd is absolutely tiny, compared to the number of drivers on the road. Listen to all modern cars, the most…

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…

Look at the ad spend for Tesla, compared to other car brands. It's almost non-existent. It also does very little PR. The downside of that is people don't get to see the real novelty of what they're doing. They put the…

If we are going to stick with the idiocy of voting, let’s trial a new system where only the ladies get to vote, for three terms of government. Then the blokes, for three terms. And compare the outcomes. And who knew…

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…

Acting your age. Paul Prenter worked with Queen in the 1980s. This short interview snippet from then shows what remnants of the older adult world thought about the idea of rock bands playing into old age. Mick Jagger on…

I have zero interest in anybody’s opinion, and who wins elections or other popularity contests. All that interests me is the use of knowledge to make life remarkable and easier. You don’t need to route knowledge through…

Fuel should have been rationed in Australia starting weeks ago. Much of the population acting like toddler pork chops during Covid makes all politicians too terrified to do anything. Global supplies are non-existent.…

Some of the nicest and smartest Americans will argue with you day and night that their cultural model of ‘the people’ running the country is democracy. When in reality it’s just their revolution, repeating itself over…

Iggy Pop at Coachella. I remember the elderly performing at big music festivals when I was young. O wait, no I don’t. They were acting their age, playing bowls. The boomers who cheer this on wouldn’t have let the…

I post so much about status because it really is the key that unlocks all human behaviour. Another example, maybe 20-25 years ago I noticed quite a few more luxury European cars circulating in Lithgow. That wasn’t…

Dolly did a long selfie video to explain why she’s disappeared from performing. Her immune system stopped working. You can fool yourself Covid is a nothing burger for a while. Dolly is a master of putting a happy face…

This follows a pattern I see every day. The entire culture does no risk management, of anything, because it would mean people having to alter their routines. This includes for extremely dangerous things. If it's…

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.

When populism strips away all existing social hierarchies, including hierarchies of expertise, it leaves people without any way of belonging to a society. You have to then ‘perform’ your identity yourself, to have any…

Do you believe in God? Or even gods? Here’s a fascinating twist on that question. Rene Girard was called both the Einstein and Darwin of the human sciences. I’ve posted about him a bit. He saw the central role of…

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…

A huge performance looks like a collective sharing. But I think it’s much more interesting than that. The performer is somebody who has spent years mostly in isolation, mastering and understanding an art that in turn…

To be brutal, I don’t listen to Americans about democracy. They’ve never understood it or lived it. They’re a revolutionary society that mistakes revolution for democracy. “American democracy is in such a sickly state…

For those who don’t follow American politics, Trump’s Supreme Court, in an act of ludicrous overreach, overturned a voting rights decision from about 60 years ago, that stopped States using openly racist methods to…

School uniforms were a way to try to reduce status competition between people, by mandating everybody wear the same outfit. But status won’t be suppressed. Students and parents quickly develop micro-status…

Supporters of all political parties are now rushing to adopt EVs. Even One Nation. Politics is a waste of our time, it’s nothing but a popularity contest between groups of people fighting for status. The material…

Following every election is a search for what it means. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a popularity contest. Popularity has no link to reality at all. When you fly on a plane, you don’t do a quick election to pick the…

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…

The secret to the future of the world is in the contrast between that 5, and everybody else. Going far beyond cars. When you shift things to design and engineering, away from sales and marketing - away from status - the…

Only catastrophes change what people think and do. Without them they just fight each other for status. We’ve known for decades that we urgently need to get off fossil fuels. We did almost nothing about it. So now the…

I can guarantee anybody going to an election promising to help the poor will lose in a landslide. The poor vote for people promising they’ll be rich. Humans run on status. Promise people status (which will be a lie) and…

Another reason I went with Tesla is that they, by design, allow you to integrate all of your energy use in the one brilliant app. This includes your vehicle use, by far the largest energy use of any family, as well as…

The changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing were long, long overdue. But it won’t fix housing. Supply is not the problem. Housing and land were transformed back into status objects, as they’ve been for most of…

A humanoid robot sorting packages. This went for 8 hours, uninterrupted. It’s actually mesmerising, watch the sophistication of the engineering of the hands and arms for example. The robots are coming, with AI. Kidult…

Tesla employs proportionally 4 times more engineers than other carmakers. The money others spend on things like advertising and servicing, Tesla spends on creating and improving its technology. That's the model the…

One for the fascists under every bed folk. Did Hitler or Mussolini have merch? The Trump Mobile by the way is actually an older Chinese phone with a gold cover. Without the crap Trump merch cover it sells for hundreds…

Brands are the way business taps into the imitative ‘team sports’ status rivalry I post about. A brand is a team, in these status battles. Like a footy team, but for all products. People are ‘brand loyal’ in the same…

Strip all the bullshit away from 'politics', which isn't even a thing anyway. It's different social groups in the community fighting for status. Modern conservatives are the old landed gentry and industrialists trying…

How to see kidult culture. Culture is like water to fish, mostly invisible to those living it. In the 19th century, Jules Verne created magical stories. About travelling to the moon, and amazing submarines exploring the…

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.

The empirical data-based historian Peter Turchin says one of the most dangerous things a society can do is educate most of its young to a high level. (A difficult truth for any educator to hear.) All revolutions in…

Modern conservatives for decades have sold the idea that government is a barrier to prosperity and aspiration. The dreaded ‘red tape’ of government bureaucrats, with their taxes and regulations. They claim to ‘free’ us…

We’re living inside a medical revolution, right now. The greatest leap forward since the invention of antibiotics. Status as always will determine the outcome. The status quo will resist - lots of GPs and specialists,…

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…

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…

Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. As a culture, and like most other nations on Earth, we’re dying out. Our birth rates are at terminally low levels. Cost is often given as a reason for this.…

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…

Who cares what people think? This is our delusional idea of democracy being ‘the people’ running countries. Most wouldn’t have a bloody clue on this question, or most questions of public policy. And nor should they,…

When I first started reading the giants who said that the core of all human life is imitation and status rivalry, in competing groups, I thought - can it really be the main thing? Now it’s absolutely obvious to me. It…

The same young people Labor is trying to help with tax changes now fighting back, because ‘aspiration’. Societies run on status. Not money, not information. Try to help ‘the poor’ and they’ll punish you for implying…

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…

A longish but very interesting read about why the airline industry can never make money. This actually links to my dislike of travel more generally, a culture that would be simply impossible without jets and jet fuel.…

Researchers have developed a gene-editing injection targeting the specific mechanism creating high cholesterol in people. The results were staggering, up to a 62% sustained drop in LDL cholesterol. If knowledge work…

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…

Of course you can’t win against kidult culture, because it’s the status quo. No status quo can be defeated by logic, or activism, or debating. It can only be destroyed and a new one put in its place, by some internal or…

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…

We’re one or two generations removed from people remembering or knowing about infection as the great killer of humans. ‘Living with’ infection is now the thing. All infections, Covid was just the catalyst to accelerate…

The only alternative to catastrophe for human progress (catastrophes create most meaningful human progress) is to BUILD things. We have this bizarre idea that progress comes from people talking to each other. That can…

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…

There are no agreed definitions of either consciousness or intelligence. All of these debates are mostly hot air. Most of what humans think of as intelligence and even consciousness is just them copying one another.…

Pauline’s big attraction is the same as all populists. They promise to ‘take down the elites’. Populists are always actually just an alternative elite, wanting to take over the top of social status hierarchies from…

A graph that's a window into status, the core of all human life. Real wages only began to rise after the apocalyptic first half of the 20th century, when millions of ordinary workers were killed, meaning those left had…

Two things to see here I think, one obvious, the other not. The obvious - China targets poverty specifically, and has made spectacular progress, unprecedented in history. The US like the rest of the West uses the poor…

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…

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.…

While I think this is an excellent analysis of the state of play of the various players in our electoral team sports, I’d caution against this idea that the Pauline/Trumps of the world are only the result of ‘blue…

What’s another passion of adolescents? Historically, their cars. So we should expect to see that reflected in a ‘kidult’ culture, where adults think, feel and act like adolescents. Australians have more than 4 times as…

It's really something else that there are people out there arguing that this is a bad thing. That we should be polluting more, not less. Because that's what their 'team' demands. Puppets to status games. Nobody ever…

I often post about how only catastrophe brings meaningful social change. Cars are a good example. Until World War 1, horses were the dominant way people got around in their daily lives. 8 million horses died in that…

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…

I saw that over half a million young Russian men have been killed in Putin’s adventures in Ukraine, and well over 100,000 Ukrainian young men as well. It’s only when you have kids that the reality of them dying for some…

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…

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.…

Something a school kid says. Friends are adolescent currency. Welcome to kidult culture.

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 worldwide obsession with ‘experiencing’ other countries through recreational travel is now accompanied by a worldwide xenophobic hatred of immigrants. So we love to ‘experience’ other cultures. We just don’t want to…

One of the enduring symbols of fascism is thousands of troops goose-stepping in perfect unison. The origins of fascism are societies which reach a ‘mimetic crisis’. Meaning that everybody begins copying everybody else,…

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…

I’m not a fan of anybody. But I do have guides in life. Spinoza is one of them. Retirement for me is the luxury of some escape from a world dominated by human rivalries. It’s certainly not bucket list travel, just one…

This was the Germany of my dad's childhood. He knew a bit about fascism. (And to be blunt, look at that. Trump is a rank amateur.) One thing and one thing alone produces tyrannies. Not ideologies, not violence or…

I watched the game, it’s a good game. But as when I watch F1, I also watch the people. You can see here the root of our culture, in plain view. The fanatical desire to be part of some team, and to go into battle against…

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…

The greatest misunderstanding I think of populist movements like Trump or One Nation is that they're the product of people being economically disadvantaged - cost of living, unemployment etc. The anger of populism is…

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…

The English so often talk about ‘going up’ to bed. Bungalows i.e. single-storey living have traditionally been associated with lower status, with the old and infirm. Again, this is about status. In a show like Downtown…

The grandad of lad culture, leading an entire generation of men into eternal adolescence through broom broom cars, Tonka Truck wankpanzers, and a general all-out assault on all change, has now hit the brick wall of…

Such a decent guy. But this is the common misunderstanding, and why I talk about status all the time. Firstly that the community will rise up in some way. And secondly that 'vested interests' will motivate them to do…

Tell me you don’t see, every day, how our status games turn everything into ‘cartoonish’ struggles between goodies and baddies. I still heartily recommend people read Storr’s book, on status and status games. It’s a…

By far the biggest billing at this launch of the Obama Centre is musos. It’s a big gig. Like all countercultural political movements, it’s just another leftover Woodstock movement. Not only is modern popular music just…

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.

Top Gear changed the motoring enthusiast community into a mocking, nasty movement attacking a whole variety of social groups. As well as stifling innovation by going to war on everything that isn’t gas-guzzling, usually…

The tragic irony of travel culture is that the beautiful places people trash to get their photos with, for their social status rivalries at home, were created by people who didn’t travel. That’s why those places are…

Lawrence is one of the world’s most famous theoretical physicists and science communicators. No ‘fanboy’. The technology is a revolution. The trip he mentions is over 8 hours of driving, urban and highways, more than…

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…

Why do humans love music possibly above all else? It’s not for all the reasons they often give. It’s because music is imitation in its purest form. And imitation is the root of not just all human life, but of existence…

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,…

The seductive and dangerous power of music is that it is the only pure imitation. It doesn’t look like or sound like other things. It is imitation for its own sake, which is why it’s like social heroin. And why it…

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…

I think the single most dangerous belief humans have is that their desire to form groups and crowds is benign. That it's a warm and cuddly desire to connect and be together. Let's talk about Love Parade 2010. In reality…

"...more than 40 per cent of 15- to 25-year-olds in Australia reported being lonely." In a kidult culture, anything that isn't constant socialising is a pathology. Friendship is a social tool adolescents use to help…

Mass imitation on wide display at the World Cup. Once you start to see imitation, you'll see it everywhere, in all things. Fans will all swear they're there for the football. But their real passion is to be part of a…

The hardest thing I find for people to accept is that their personal, ‘subjective’ taste is also not only social, but created by status games. They will swear to (and at) you that their taste in music and fashion and…

One of the great myths of technology is that it's 'only technical'. That humans only relate with humans, and when they decide something in all that chatter, then you can go and build something. In reality technology is…

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…

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,…

If you watch a lot of films and TV shows that weren’t created in your native language, you may have experienced the frustration of reading sub-titles. Or if it’s dubbed, the usually horrible mismatch between the dubbing…

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,…

Ozempic now costs $15 per month, in India. Uptake is slower than was expected. What’s going on here is that people have been trained by decades of ignorance from the diet and fitness industries that their weight…

"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…

Populism is a relative status movement. It’s people who used to be part of a dominant social group, now feeling threatened by the rise of other social groups. What gets the punters through the door is to appeal to the…

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…

Himans attribute social progress to themselves, and catastrophic disruptions to that progress mostly to other humans they don’t like. In reality it’s the exact opposite. The catastrophic disruptions create human…

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…

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.…

The status quo thought it got away with pretending we can 'live with' pandemics. The pandemic said fuck you. And here we are.

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…

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…

America was broken long before Trump. It won't be able to elect its way out of its problems. Elections are the mechanism its plutocrats have gamed to assume total power. America is a plutocracy because it's a…

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…

Farage is the UK’s Pauline. Both are franchises of Trump. Farage unravelling now as the truth that he (and Pauline) are simply opposing ‘elites’ to the elites they pretend to be taking down has become obvious, with his…

Status drives all human activity. The same people expressed entirely different political views, depending on the group of people they were talking with at the time. At the top, in a politically liberal group, they…

Elections as corruption laundering. This is what populists do, and why elections are what are actually breaking democracy. Farage is standing down in the hope he'll be re-elected, and that will wash the slate clean (he…

Viral trends include our ideas for understanding the world we live in. A current viral idea is that there’s an epidemic of ‘loneliness’, and it gets worse as we age. This to me is another mistaken idea, caused by the…

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…

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…

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…

We hear a lot about mental health these days, and resilience. At a time when life is actually easier than at any other time in history. So what’s going on? Nietzsche knew. Humans will endure any hardship, so long as…

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…

Kidult culture sees knowledge and enjoyment as opposites. Not surprising because kidults equate knowledge with school, and fun with not being at school. All thinking is ’overthinking’, for a kidult. ‘Just Do It’, ‘live…

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…

It’s became very popular to see ‘oligarchs’ as the root of evil in modern life. I shared a few weeks ago the fate of the oligarchs that led the first Industrial Revolution. They got very rich and powerful at the time,…

For 75 years the Turing test was accepted as the standard machines would have to pass to be considered to be indistinguishable from humans, in terms of intelligence. AI now easily passes the test. This is an existential…

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…

The World Cup is another wonderful window into human culture. Most fans pay no attention to the soccer itself. All that matters is that the team wins. That’s the passion, the desire. To be part of a team, beating other…

I've spent an adult lifetime studying technology and social change. The idea a status quo can 'manage' the implementation of a technological revolution (like AI) is laughable. The technology will overflow all of that…

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…

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…

Christopher Nolan has made a film of Homer's The Odyssey. In an important way the world has come full circle back to the concerns of ancient times, without recognising it. Homer's Iliad is about rivalry and status and…

I talk a lot about how human existence is people imitating one another, driven by a battle for social status. We imitate to become part of some social group, to recognise other group members. Creating rivalry within…

I encourage everybody to learn some actor-network theory. Our world is divided by most into two apparently distinct domains. The human, and the ‘technical’. The first has creativity, purpose and intent; the second is…

Stupid is what stupid does. This trend is hot right now, quick get onboard before you miss out. Watch for next week's trend, on any topic. There'll be one. Full of outrage, absent facts. Like this one it won't be about…

The great mythology about 'authoritarianism' is that it's evil people oppressing good people. Authoritarianism is ordinary people operating without any status structure, so that they destroy basic civic life to create…

Germaine is still alive! But I’ve worked for years to understand the particular genius of her work, separate from all of the fake outrages about her. Most people who I discuss Greer with haven’t read a single word she’s…

Kings and other high status individuals exist because status hierarchies control the spread of imitation, and therefore violence. Imitation produces rivalry, rivalry produces violence. That’s the fundamental law of…

It’s stupidly funny, all the rhetoric about the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese. The Chinese are one of the few empires in history with almost zero interest in war or fighting in other countries. They nailed it here. The US is…

A short highlights package of some of the things Tesla's autonomous driving technology can do. If you can look in 9 directions at the same time, all around your car, 30 times per second, then you win. (And you're full…

Just to give a sense of the sort of analysis AI can turn out in a matter of seconds, I asked it to describe what it saw as the legacy of Live Aid. A superb analysis, and describes the kidult culture I often write about.…

Manners evolved amongst elites, specifically amongst rivals for elite positions. Manners were the way rivals signalled to each other that they deferred to one another, rather than have conflict or fight. A way to hold…

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…

The deliberate conflation of learning with copyright in this debate. Training is not stealing. Copyright is to take somebody else’s work and to use or sell it as your own. But to train is to learn. We have never taxed…

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…

Those dreadful authoritarian Chinese again. As a thought experiment, make a list of major national or international initiatives Western nations are involved with, to alleviate major challenges facing our world? What are…

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…

To me the real meaning of The Odyssey is not really registering with the interest in this film. It’s a story about going HOME. About a culture of conquest and accumulation and travel - an empire - trying to rediscover…

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…

Part 2 on why Australia should industrialise house-building, but probably won’t. As always, it’s about status. All societies run on status. The way we currently build homes in Australia is driven by a massive growth in…

A much shorter Part 3 on why we need to industrialise house-building. Look at the collapse in productivity of house-building, when it was ‘subbied’ i.e. houses being built on-site, by a range of independent contractors.…

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 Bathurst ‘Current Affairs Group’, meeting with the local member. Highlighting something I’ve posted about before here, the big growth in retirees in our community, often highly capable and with long careers behind…

Cities are remarkable in a way I only recently came to understand. Throughout all of history humans have struggled to find ways to live together, without violence and death. That’s because humans relating only to other…

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…

It's fairly standard to say that peer review is the test of objectivity in science. For most of the history of science, it didn't even exist. None of the giants of modern science had a single publication peer-reviewed.…

Every machine is the folding together of the social relationships of the people who made it, and the people who use it. People and machines are not two separate things. Machines aren’t ’tools’ for people. A machine…

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.

Post-revolutionary societies never recover from their revolutions. It’s like Stage 4 metastatic social cancer. As a post-revolutionary society, the US sees all attempts at collective organisation as a tyranny of some…

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…

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…

Towns and cities are a remarkable invention. Humans didn’t invent them, or even create them. Wtf, hey? Surely humans create towns and cities? They’re certainly part of the mix. But nobody and no group designs and…

‘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…

The greatest difference between Western culture and everybody else is that they know maps are only navigational tools, and we think of them as descriptions of reality itself. We think we live in 'space', defined by…

It takes a diagram to capture what Tesla is really doing, and it goes so far beyond cars. It's a breathtaking idea of using continuous feedback between people and the technologies they use, to create an entire culture…

This is a very common thing, to point out the vastness of the universe and how insignificant we are, in it. But it’s wrong. This is the ultimate mind-twister, the root of our culture we don’t understand. If you bother…

AI is not some super-intelligence rival to humans. (What humans call intelligence is mostly just imitation.) Nor is it just unthinking statistical word patterns. AI is what happens when engineers test the abstractions…

One of the roots of our culture is the idea we live ‘in’ space, like in a universe that is millions of light years across. Or ‘in’ towns or countries. That idea is an artefact of maps and geometry. In reality space is a…

In historical terms, many urban environments are remarkably peaceful and functional. Not utopian, not without issues, but compared to human history as a whole modern cities are very livable environments. We often…

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,…

Many of the vandalism against Tesla incidents are actually committed by the elderly, and so often by elderly women. That’s the old 60s counterculture still in play, revolutions never end, they just generate violence,…

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…

We celebrate peak human performance in almost everything. In sport, in work, in skills of all kinds, etc. But there’s one thing that breaks this rule. We absolutely don’t celebrate peak performance in thinking itself.…

Kidult framings are so pervasive. For older adults, the problem often isn’t not having friends. The problem is not having actual meaningful social connection to the life of the society. A purpose, being useful to…

Because music is just about enjoyment and not about status, apparently, or at least everybody tells me. Being a rock star became so popular because it meant you could avoid adult life forever.

The emergence of a near-transcendent force of destruction in the Manhattan Project created the fear of global annihilation. Instead that transcendence ushered in an era of almost unprecedented peace, via the threat of…

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…

The importance of 'right-sizing' a home battery. This is the data for our place yesterday, a typical winter day. You can see from the green line that the battery charges once per day, and that's enough to get us through…

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…

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,…

There was real genius in George Michael’s song for Wham, Freedom. One of the catchiest pop songs ever written, but I think a much bigger artistic achievement than that. It was released in 1984. The song is about a…

Humans are social animals. The biggest outcome of that is what is ‘normal’ for humans is defined entirely by ‘what everybody else is doing’. Humans will do the most lethally stupid, toxic things, provided everybody else…

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…

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…

Here’s a simple way to show that time doesn’t pass. It doesn’t flow like a river, from past to present to future. A melody. If time actually passed, melody wouldn’t be possible. Every new note would just stand on its…

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…

As populist politicians fall over themselves attacking migration, for votes, the reality is Western nations are aged care homes, staffed by these same migrants. At the same time the fastest growth identity in our…

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…

The name ‘astroturfing’ is clever, what it means is people creating the impression of a ‘grassroots’ movement, a ‘community’ movement, that is actually a planned strategy from a small group to generate support or…

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…

If people are asked what is wrong with the world, 99% of the time the answer will involve a rivalry between some kind of goodies and baddies. Left v Right. Capitalists v socialists. Patriarchy v everybody else.…

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 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…

Every man and woman and their dog will tell you the joy of travel is to ‘experience’ other places and other cultures. Experience is a tautology. Everything in your life is an experience. The travel guide book shows the…

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…

As a culture it doesn’t even register how perverse it is that we need to use ‘gear’ to access our own landscapes. Landscapes people walked barefoot through for tens of thousands of years, that they *lived*inside. That…

When humans go to gigs and other performances, their real excitement is the opportunity to imitate one another, at scale. To be a part of an imitating crowd. The performer is just a means to an end.

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…

Neural networks have a lesson for people. When you have different things interacting, like neurons in your brain, or weighted numbers in an AI network, or even people, what will allow them to together produce…

One of the most glaring symptoms of the problem with all Western cultures is their total neglect of regional life. You only need to look at the highway system to see it. Tens of billions spent creating smooth multi-lane…

The process of social progress and change is so frustratingly stupid and slow sometimes. The resistance is about breaking down status barriers. Peer pressure. 'What everybody else is doing' is always the Number 1 reason…

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.…

All of this was avoidable. But humans won't follow knowledge to guide them in what to do. They always just follow each other, to protect their status in a group. And so then reality bitch-slaps the whole sorry group,…

With Bathurst coming up, even if you’re not a car racing fan, there’s a genius to V8 Supercars that I think it’s still super important for everybody to understand. A specific Australian genius, that goes well beyond car…

“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…

Photo (not mine) from the 1970s, showing just how rampant smoking was as a habit for many decades. It dominates the photo. Walter Lippmann said that when everybody thinks alike, nobody is thinking much. It’s a useful…

"This is the most annoyingly good car in Australia right now. I want to hate this car. I just can't." Wonderful seeing kidult culture completely defeated by genius engineering. Even the small things he doesn't like -…

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…

Medicare is under enormous pressure in Australia. Some of that is an ageing population. But a big chunk of it is price gouging by doctors and dentists. Fees being charged by many medical professionals are extortion,…

Beginning another year of work today. As colleagues collapse with increasing chronic disease around me, and ask why I still take Covid precautions like vaccination and masking. Because rich cultures are cultures of…

The annual flag worship is almost upon us, so just a few of my thoughts on Australia Day. I have zero time for any of the debates over the day, they're all fake arguments set up to create division, to harvest votes. I…

My posts about ‘gig culture’ get bogged down in the offence people take at their favourite acts being criticised. It’s a wider argument about cultural and social change. The 20th century was a century of revolutions.…

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’ve often suggested here that the motivation for most recreational travel isn’t to ‘see’ places, or even to ‘experience’ them. It’s to tell *others* that you’ve been there. It’s a pissing contest, about status. The…

Given freedom to do whatever they like, what do humans do? They copy what other humans do. This simple fact, that imitation is the heart of all human life, is in direct opposition to every idea about democracy that we…

This is the disgrace of Australia’s approach to Covid. Anybody below 17 can’t even get a vaccine. Why is that? For one reason. Your elected politicians decided the best way out of the pandemic was to let children get…

Just one sporting ground in the UK. This is climate change, they're no longer even denying it. This particular ground has flooded 8 times in the past year alone. Many big clubs are not confident they will survive.…

My posts on travel are explorations of the idea of 'being there'. There's an automatic assumption that going somewhere brings you closer to the 'real thing'. Proximity as authenticity. I argue the opposite. 'There' is…

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…

I'll wait for the articles about how how buying a standard petrol or diesel is doing your money, because there's no resale. Heh. Interesting that in a 'cost of living' crisis people still are prioritising new cars over…

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…

Insurance (big part of my job) is going to collapse in our societies, because our 'small government' politics doesn't solve any of our collective problems, dumping all the responsibility back onto individuals. Who can't…

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…

Cars are a cultural thing, social groups align around them. They talk technical, but it's really about keeping the group together. Also why a major change to car technology triggers such resistance.

“The Fab Four's music endures because it mirrors an era we still long for, says Adam Gopnik.” Yep, nostalgia. There’s a new Beatlemania right now, major films from Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese and now Sam Mendes.…

This again is gig culture. Teen culture. There’s a disaster, and our only thought to what could be done is to hold a concert. There is literally not one other suggestion on the table. The old Woodstock model, still…

For most of history, children were not thought of as a separate group. They entered the adult world from a very young age. When universal schooling arrived, we flipped the world in the complete opposite direction. As…

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…

In my childhood, the old were not the wealthiest part of society. They were the people buying Iced Vo-Vos for a weekly treat at the supermarket. We refuse to notice or acknowledge the fundamental re-writing of society’s…

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…

I still do everything I can to protect my family and myself from Covid. I refuse to take part in the craziness of trying to beat a pandemic by infecting our way out of it. By basing what I do on ‘what everybody else is…

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…

The Economist published a fascinating piece on the refusal of boomer culture to grow up. It defines that culture, a Peter Pan cult of eternal youth. Will share bits. Today, STIs.

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,…

It’s not how powerful or wealthy people are, or how famous, that drives humans. It’s their relative rank, to other people. Their status. Status gives them an identity, they are ‘nobody’ without it. Begins in childhood,…

The new Model Y. The aerial view shows some of the design not as visible from ground level. There’s a reason this is the best-selling car in the world, its design is literal genius in multiple ways, capturing the needs…

Trump is a bone-idle, entitled old white guy who spent his first term eating cheeseburgers and watching FOX News. The secret to defeating Trumpism is to make him actually do some work, and pile up society’s problems on…

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…

This year is the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Have we learned anything as a result of it? I don’t think so. Why did the Germans do this? Modern team sports claims it was ‘anti-semitism’. But the…

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…

Fascinating to watch this cultural shift play out in real time. This is WAY more than just technical arguments about cars. This is society changing at its roots.

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.

I’ve watched the entire Women’s Ashes series, including tonight, and it’s so disappointing to see the pathetic crowd at the MCG. This team is far more ‘The Invincibles’ than Bradman’s was. Astonishing performances, in…

In Australia heat pumps (air conditioning we use in homes and many businesses) are not really a debate. Because they don’t really threaten status hierarchies here. In the UK it’s a furious fight, with the sorts of…

Venice is fighting back against travel culture. It’s not winning. The travel mob is relentless and stupid.

What a window into the mess of our ideas about relationships. I love that many are realising that being alone is not a bad thing. But their reasons here are all about personal development, incredibly self-centred. Being…

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…

AI may end up being the best healthcare many of us can access. Even in a larger regional town, it can be impossible to get into a GP. Mine has a 5-month waiting list, good luck if there’s anything actually wrong with…

This is populism. The belief that democracy is elections. The elected should have all the power, and get rid of everything else. That’s a recipe for total social collapse, and fascism. Hitler and Mussolini were…

A 'wit' shared this with me the other day. Loving the Tesla, loving sailing past poor combustion clunkers madly down-shifting and revving, trying to keep up. Loving no fuel costs, no servicing, loving the 17-speaker…

The irony of the 'range' ICE crowd is that the quoted range of petrols and diesels is often a lie. Often a very big lie.

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…

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.…

The massive shift to private schooling in Australia in the past 20 years was a deliberate policy decision of the Howard government. And what made that shift successful was that it targeted status. That’s what…

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…

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…

You don’t perceive how much our thoughts and tastes are shaped by our desire to belong to a group, until something goes ‘out of fashion’ and you suddenly find it ridiculous. At the time you definitely didn’t find it…

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…

Many kids growing up dream of this moment, being the band striding to the stage in a stadium full of thousands of adoring fans. It’s not really about music, it’s about the desire we have from the youngest age to be…

This is one of the Bibles of the Trumpian revolution. A how-to guide for super rich people to avoid regulation and taxes. This is also why crypto is so huge now, because those super rich see it as a way to get around…

You'll never see a clearer 'vote to protect the status quo' graph (noting that the blue is in the lead, overall).

As once big acts descend on tiny regional towns to try to get any gigs, while acts in those local towns increasingly gravitate to themed cover band type shows to attract audiences, you can’t help but feel gig culture is…

Hear the dreams here? That’s gig culture, music as a pathway to status and wealth in adult life. A very rare, modern thing in history, from about the 1960s, and now in terminal decline for all but a handful. I would…

There have been many criticisms of 'boomer' culture. Nearly always misunderstood as being about them as supposedly horrible human beings. But it's a *cultural* criticism, about a mindset and attitude. About the…

This is a false distinction that I often post about. City v country. These aren’t two things, they’re one thing. Neither exists without the other. They’re a single form of life. There was no country without cities, and…

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…

Humans copy one another. They imitate. Not just sometimes, it’s ALL they do. I remember seeing that suggested, and at first thinking no, it can’t be everything. It really is everything. Everything humans do is the…

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…

Great to see the Shark rocket into the Top 10. The RAV 4 is a tired hybrid, you'd be mad to buy one over a Sea Lion 6 for example. And dual-cab utes are literally the worst cars ever built. Hopeless as utes, hopeless as…

The mob is turning on Coldplay a bit now. Bands becoming less ‘cool’ is the group of people who follow them losing some of their social status. This is the point I make about ‘gig culture’, bands were used to help…

Buying a fragrance because a high-status person is associated with it (I doubt they wear it) is about as dumb as life gets. But it sells. This is pure peer pressure, team sports life. Adults doing what teenagers do,…

The Welcome Stranger nugget is the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found, in 1869 in Victoria, over 70kg of gold. What I find most fascinating about it though is how it shows so well that what we value is socially…

US influencers by follower numbers. Red is conservative, blue Democrat. There’s a lot of angst about mis/disinformation today. Societies don’t run on information, they run on status. They’re not a huge crowd of people…

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…

Apparently somewhere in Denmark. It’s funny, but old-fashioned grown ups would see an accelerating collapse of basic human decency and civic order. Frat boy culture, soon to be Lord of the Flies.

The lifestyles of rock stars reveals the true function of gig culture. To create a fast-track to high status life. Old aristocratic villas in Europe are lived in by rock stars. Being in a band wasn’t really about music.…

Another aspect of gig culture that is bizarre, but is missed because our own culture is usually invisible, as culture, is the idea of music being ‘performed’. A tiny number of musicians, on a stage, performing music to…

Reading the real life (joyful) experiences of people who bought a Shark reinforces even more strongly how changing a car culture is like deprogramming somebody who's been in a cult. Unbelievably strong forces of peer…

I used to wear Crocs, and became notorious for it because they were considered socially 'out'. Now they're all the rage. If you look, you'll find everything in life, child or adult, follows this same basic mechanism.…

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…

Status runs societies. People who glory in anti-establishment protest in their youth fall over themselves for knighthoods in their autumn years. Fake wars against the establishment are one of the fastest routes to…

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

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…

Get every vaccine you qualify for, for every disease. Including the annual flu shot. Nearly all serious disease has an infectious origin, and any vaccination alerts the immune system, and offers cross-protection against…

Kidult culture. A culture that finds children a burden is a dead culture.

Gig culture.

Wonderful footage from the 1960s of construction by the then Department of Main Roads (the DMR) of part of the Sydney-Newcastle expressway. Lots of familiar bits of road even today. I love that post-war public optimism,…

I hardly ever see some friends on FB. Until they go on holiday. Then suddenly there’s a burst of posting. Which to me is a window into what travel culture is really about. It’s not about experiencing the world or…

Probably the only thing combustion car enthusiasts have left to distinguish the technology is the noise those engines make. But have a look around at the overwhelming majority of cars being made today, how much quieter,…

I talk a lot about cars not because I love cars, but because they’re key to understanding our wider culture. Notice the debates around EVs are all about the technical pros and cons people see. But that’s not what this…

It’s ute and 4WD drivers who are least likely to shift to electric. That’s partly because there aren’t many electric utes and 4WDs yet, but the number of people who actually use utes and 4WDs for carrying things and…

There's a vehicle driving from Lithgow to Bathurst every day, normally at about 90 km/h. Often has a queue of traffic behind it. I went to overtake them today, and suddenly they were doing 125. This sort of driving…

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.…

‘Ute Man’ is dying. We’ve reached Peak Ute (love that term). It was Scott Morrison’s big tax concessions for utes that led to them exploding in sales. Now with efficiency standards coming for Australian cars (last in…

There was a time when elders guided the running of societies. Now they fire drummers. Gig culture.

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.

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,…

Ruh roh Scoob, another mystery! Darren very likely has POTS, an extremely common side-effect of Covid. Gigs are a great place to go to catch Covid, for performers and crowd. We would rather infect all of the few…

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…

When you're in the middle of a wave of outrage and euphoria, like we've had for women (metoo), Tesla, and here for climate change, it feels like you're changing the world. You're not. Sometimes protest movements cash in…

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…

Rory talking about how humans change, in this case using cars as an example, it’s about shifting a status quo. When first challenged a status quo will launch a whole range of increasingly bonkers ‘defensive opinions’,…

Gig culture. Bands who think they can change the world. The fact nobody laughs at them shows the extent to which most people agree with the culture.

Many feel uncomfortable at discussions of ‘gig culture’, because it’s our culture and impacts peoples’ sense of status and identity. But this isn’t an argument that musicians shouldn’t be wealthy, it’s just pointing out…

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.…

Also gig culture. The reason the gig economy is so popular, zero commitment to any wider purpose. Everything is about ‘the feels’, about how we individually feel. Total absence of any sort of collective purpose, of…

Marshall McLuhan once said “we don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.” In the same way our own culture is mostly invisible to us, we assume it’s just the way things are. As people who read my…

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…

Made me chuckle. At the same time it’s more kidult culture, where bliss is apparently being permanently in a child-free state of romantic MAFS adolescent ecstasy. No doubt they’re getting ready to go to a gig too, while…

Australia follows a pattern also seen in the US and other places. The real tension is between urban and rural environments. The more urban a society is, the more cosmopolitan voters tend to be. Living in cities…

People over 50 are (on average) rooting for an LNP win, people under 50 ALP. All the Left and Right baloney in politics is hot air. All social decisions are about who controls the status quo. ALP looks on track to win…

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’.…

Reform UK, the UK’s One Nation, just dominated local government elections there (like our State elections - the UK doesn’t have States). It did that by doing what Trump did in the US, targeting the lower socio-economic…

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 ALP is sometimes called ‘the natural party of power in Australia’. That’s historically true, and has nothing to do with which party you may prefer. It’s the only party that can and has ever won elections in our…

I missed this story at the time. Yikes, blows every other deal ever made out of the water. Queen were never the coolest band in the world in their heyday, but the greatest artists create the future, they’re rarely the…

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

If you’re 50 and over, and say these things, do you see it as equivalent as saying your favourite bands and music are the best bands and music ever? If not, why not? It’s the same stage-of-life social status behaviour.

The ALP landslide was really the young now finally having more votes than the old. Political parties who interpret it as a win or loss for them personally will continue to fail. The LNP is now toast. The ALP won only a…

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…

Most human interactions are imitative rivalry. We copy one another, there’s next to no thought involved, but almost entirely a rivalry, based on our desire for status. It’s not surprising to me at all that AI provides a…

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…

That last column is a disaster. Multiple generations will now never afford a roof over their heads. We turned housing into a speculative status-driven casino, even the ridiculous TV shows that egged it on reflect what…

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…

Tom Cruise is an interesting cultural thing. Currently marketing his latest movie, and genuinely charming and professional and gracious with his time. And yet he’s a global leader of a cult. (He also can’t act, but it…

I'm over people saying 'cheap Chinese shit'. Apart from it being the gutter-level racism you'd have hoped Australia left behind in the 1950s, it's also factual bullshit. China is the world's factory. If something made…

You are going to meet status. And most will refuse to see it.

The only true joy is understanding, I learned that from Spinoza. Everything else we see as the best things in life - love, happiness, experiences, fun, family, friendship, music, travel etc. - all of these are just…

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…

All major change is the same, we saw the same with the introduction of cars over horses. The status quo will whine and whinge and invent all sorts of fantasy ‘technical’ reasons they shouldn’t have to change. Eventually…

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…

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…

So interesting to see how many people had bundled their farms into super, to milk the big tax breaks. High status people sponsor an entire industry in tax minimisation and avoidance.

It’s worth remembering that what we call farming has its origins in settler culture, which in turn derives from aristocratic landholding in the UK and Europe. Sometimes called a squattocracy, because the origin of…

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…

The tax cuts Trump is gutting US public healthcare to fund. Using Scott Morrison's favourite line for tax cuts, 'it's your money!' And it is, but it's not going to you, just to Trump's level of society. The legislation…

Australia subsidises utes and SUVs to the tune of $250 million a year. That’s a big reason lots of people drive them. It’s time Australians went back to driving sedans and station wagons. Both utes and SUVs have the…

One of my mini projects is to explore how all human behaviour is people copying other people, driven by the desire for status. You can explain pretty much everything using that framework, it’s the periodic table of…

Few will join the dots here. You won’t see what you don’t want to see. Top performers also tend to have elaborate anti-Covid measures, but they don’t give a shit about the same for fans. Just happy to vacuum up their…

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’…

Buy a car designed to maximise aerodynamic efficiency, something with a really low drag coefficient. You can see why, here. This is why we used to drive sedans, until utes and SUVs became kidult status games.

Status is the key that unlocks human thought and behaviour. Once you see it, nearly every part of life suddenly unravels in front of you.

Look at the red circle. The national strategy for Covid was to protect the ‘vulnerable’, so the rest of us could go back to our meaningless adolescent lives of recreational travel, gigs and dining out. That’s quarter of…

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…

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…

I spoke with Hayley (the reporter) about this last year. My mum went to hospital for heart and lung issues and caught Covid there. No precautions were taken. Politicians direct health departments to minimise Covid…

Nearly everybody moans about 'red tape' and 'bureaucracy'. That's because people are mostly pretty dumb. Right now that red tape and those bureaucrats are giving Trump the kicking that's needed to save American society.…

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…

Had to do a quick trip to Sydney today, and it reminded me again of how human life is all about status. Driving that Tesla is a wonder of the world. Supercar levels of performance, totally silent gigantic torque on tap,…

It’s now cheaper to build fences out of solar panels than it is to build them out of wood. And the fence will power your home. We’re living inside a revolution, people. Stop status scrolling and get on board.

The enrichment activities in aged care now are something else. Let’s get as many name-drops in one sentence as we can, boys. Gig culture, the culture of ‘cool’. Of ‘making it’ i.e. achieving high social status.

Van Gogh sold only one painting in his lifetime, and died penniless at 37. Now high status people make hundreds of millions off his work. Great art is rarely if ever recognised in its own time, it creates the future.…

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.…

The marble-columned ruins of ancient Rome are instantly recognisable. They copied them entirely from the ancient Greeks, whom they idolised for their culture and learning, after invading them. It was Romans trying to be…

If you want to escape kidult culture, Vincent can be one of your guides.

Humans’ own culture is as invisible to them as water is to fish. The massing of tens of thousands of people into a space to all watch and listen to a handful of musicians doesn’t exist for 99% of human history. Its…

I talk a lot about kidult culture, because it's our (mostly undiagnosed) culture. You can see it everywhere, if you look. Just one more example, the proliferation of ridiculous names for children. It's like…

I noticed yet another symptom of kidult culture this week. A preface, those with no exposure to the front line of classroom teaching decided it was a good idea to give parents a much bigger role in schools. Now ask any…

Just wanted to share this to show that i don’t make up the idea of ‘kidulting’ and gig culture. This is the cultural shift that dominates our societies, and has done since the 1960s.

This car should blow people away, the new BYD Tang-L. A 7-seater. Coming to Australia this year apparently. Can charge at up to 1000 kW, meaning you could add 400km of range in only 5 minutes. The electric motors in it…

The same people who cheer on McCartney and Springsteen doing stadium gigs in 2025 would have laughed at the ridiculous idea of Louis Armstrong or Count Basie being invited to play at Woodstock. They wouldn’t have been…

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…

This is Nicolas Fouquet. He was treasurer to Louis XIV, in the 17th century. And a beautiful example of how status works. He threw an enormous party for the King, to honour him. The party was incredibly popular and…

The fashion writer Derek Guy makes a wonderful distinction between tailored clothes and designer clothes. For example he says the UK princes often wear designer suits, which fit badly and don’t look stylish. Their…

What applies to fashion also applies to cars. The distinction between status and functionality. The idea that you can either have a practical car or a stylish car is rubbish. The Ferrari here is clearly the higher…

Springsteen reportedly makes about $3 million every time he steps on stage. He makes more in a week of touring than giants of music like Louis Armstrong or Nat King Cole made in a lifetime. Most of the greatest artists…

Cultures that travel obsessively love to call themselves ‘nomads’. They’re nothing like nomads, nomads move to survive. Meanwhile travel cultures invest trillions in their own homes, and in ‘strong borders’ to stop…

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…

More kidulting. You may recognise Keith, from the Great Pottery Throwdown. A master potter. He and his wife Marj bought an old chapel in Wales, to renovate. What’s fascinating about the show is watching the modern adult…

These lists of notable deaths every year another window into the culture that’s invisible to us. Almost entirely celebrities - rock, film and sports stars, mostly. Others from the entertainment industry. Some…

In countries like the US with very weak or often non-existent public administration of key parts of life, when things don’t work people pile onto the streets to protest. This is said to be democracy in action. Really…

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…

You can see here that the rhetorical nonsense in the US about democracy isn’t how the US actually behaves. And that’s not to criticise how the US acts, it’s to criticise the rhetorical nonsense. Nobody who governs…

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…

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,…

Going back to the distinction between tailored and designer clothes. This is current F1 drivers. All of them, to a man, are badly dressed. All of them to a man are *expensively* dressed, in ‘designer’ clothes. None of…

‘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…

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,…

Early Council meeting today, probably another fight. One of the most frustrating things about kidult culture is its general attitude of ‘chill’, of ‘have fun’. Until doing that for years and taking no responsibility for…

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…

Mercury was bored of gigging before he was even 40. Rock and roll culture is teen culture, he knew it and said it. We miss that insight in him in the rock stars now left, most of whom have only a fraction of the talent…

I remember asking a few years ago what people think ‘love’ means. Nearly universally they agreed with this, that it’s a feeling. Usually they described it as an enhanced form of friendship or affection. Probably not a…

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…

This seems a sensible article. Except more than anything it shows the collapse of public health. The idea of public health is to prevent disease *arriving* at your home in the first place. To control diseases in public…

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…

Elegance is a difficult concept to define. But it’s far removed from modern designer/brand culture. You rarely hear about somebody being elegantly dressed now. Tailored clothes are elegant, because they combine style…

One of the things the collapse of our education has created is the misunderstanding of thinking itself. Thinking is a job. Just like plumbing. It has a set of specific skills, that take a long time to learn. It’s what a…

Honestly, it sounds uncaring, but I’m over the critical problems facing us as a community being reduced to the ‘anxiety’ people feel about them. More ‘feels’. This is a total absence of resilience, snowflake culture.…

This sort of greeting card garbage is rampant in a society of the feels. You know the way to true resilience and happiness in life? Facing its challenges head on, instead of wallowing in how we feel about everything. In…

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…

The interesting thing about this article is that it looks for the origins of 'cool' in personal psychology (it is a psychology journal). The much more interesting question is why 'cool' has any currency at all once…

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…

An Australian family pays 2% of its annual income to fund Medicare. Right now the same average family is also forking out 4-6% of its annual income, in private health insurance. Do we not see how insane this is? They…

If democracy means ‘the people’ running things, why is every part of human life still structured by status, like the class system we say we left behind?

Tattooing another thing that ‘went viral’, in our culture where adult life was replaced by what’s trending - fads and fashions. Many cover much of their bodies in them, total saturation coverage. I suggest that may have…

Travel is a classic example of status in action, that again we mostly don’t see because our own culture is invisible to us, as water is invisible to fish. Why do millions now travel? They will to a man or woman tell you…

Watching UK home shows, so often you see red, blue and pink carpets, which look (to my eye) hideous. I often wondered why these colours seem so popular, and then the penny dropped. These are the colours you find in…

Watch any home renovation show and in every case they do 2 things. 1. turn a home into a house i.e de-personalise it, making it more like a hotel. 2. ‘update’ the style to the latest trend, to ‘meet the market’. 1 and 2…

We can learn to distinguish between timeless elegance, and the following of fads and fashions of what’s ‘trending’. The former is not about what you think, or about what others think about what you do, or about what you…

This room has a timeless elegance. Because its design is about elegant functionality, not showy comparison with other people. None of it is particularly expensive, nor are the furnishings premium. Compare it with the…

A contrast, for my thoughts on timeless elegance. A very popular modern look for a bathroom. Superficially I think most would feel it has style, it looks pretty fancy. But does it have elegance? This is where I think…

Many say to me that people flock to gigs as a mass social event because of the music. But I think this video shows well that big gigs appeal to many people because they like being in a crowd of people. It’s a social…

I often bizarrely get asked if I’m a ‘germaphobe’ because I still mask against Covid. It baffles people, everybody else has stopped wearing masks! Which shows, again, kidult society, where what adults do is just ‘what…

We’re born alone, we live alone, and we die alone. True adult culture understands this, kidult culture never can, it craves continuous social life. That’s what adolescents do, it’s their appropriate stage of…

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…

Europe went from getting about 25% of its energy from coal, to only 6%, in only 10 years. All the anti-renewables and anti-EV ‘debates’ are fake, stirred up and funded by vested interests in the fossil fuel industry, to…

The US began this rot, the idea that the population somehow magically runs the country. There is no such thing as ‘the people’. Every person is attached to a variety of status hierarchies, groups of any kind don’t think…

As the big bands of the 60s and 70s reach the end of their own lives, it’s generating an explosion of last-gasp gigging and nostalgia, with astronomically lucrative returns. In my youth it would have happened in local…

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…

‘Systemic infection.’ Gig culture is taking on Covid, and losing.

“Irish musician Bob Geldorf said that 40 years on from Live Aid the concerts inspired people to feel that ‘the individual was not powerless’ and that they could change the world.” There’s the constitution of gig…

This made me laugh. I've decided that 'gig culture' is too abstract a term for discussing this topic, the basic argument is that the countercultural movements of the 50s and 60s are now over, and those that led them are…

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…

Tobacco plantation owners were some of the high status, wealthy people of their day. Every era has its high status positions, that generate wealth and power. The counterculture we’ve all lived since the 1960s is the…

"...nearly half of Americans in their 60s and 70s play some form of PC, mobile or console video game every week, as do 36% of people in their 80s." I know, I know, but this IS kidult culture. Where adult life is just an…

Name something today that has that sort of collective excitement and vision. Public life now is people queuing up to complain and protest about everything. Like children, because that's what the culture literally is.

NASA routinely transported space shuttles along city streets. Huge crowds would gather to look and cheer. Trees, signs and lamp posts had to be temporarily removed or adjusted. The route required levelling the streets…

Look at every person in that crowd, and find me the one who’s really ‘there for the music’. They’re there for the crowd, the appeal is to be part of a crowd. Hardly anybody you see in this pic is actually listening,…

"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…

Some scholars say World War 2 ended with The Beatles. The early 1960s, when the huge surge of babies born after WW2 were coming of age, as teenagers. The Boomers. A mass of humanity looking for a way to remake the…

Billion dollar plus tours are not uncommon today for the legends of pop music. People refuse to see how fundamentally different this is to how this industry began, as kids trying to ‘make it big’ in the world, as the…

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…

The official White House page. I don’t see how America ever recovers its reputation globally, it will always be a joke to others now. This stuff isn’t fleeting, or an authoritarian takeover. Americans elected the idiot…

AI is a brilliant tool for summarising whole areas of research. Like this one, a discussion a few of us have been having here, about the role of popular music in the countercultural revolution, the dominant culture of…

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…

Bathurst Our Town doesn’t celebrate the lives of great engineers or teachers or nurses or tradies who die. But musicians, yes. Because they’re like our gods. Kidult culture. What Bathurst Our Town does most is give…

Bureaucracy is the only democracy. Everything else is just a pissing contest, for status.

As the boomers have aged, their enormous demographic clout has gradually removed all of the public services they benefited from, for free, in education, health care, energy etc. That’s what the privatisation push was.…

Rousseau said a society has all of its habits at once. When we destroyed public health by ‘living with’ Covid, we destroyed all of it. Vax rates down for every disease now, and millions convinced they can infect their…

There was not and will never be a ‘Concert for Covid’. Think about that. Up to 36 million people are thought to have died, so far, from Covid. That’s up to twice as many as died in World War 1. Why won’t there be a…

Many people tell me that ‘capitalism’ is the cause of our many problems in the world. Others think it’s communism, or authoritarianism. Did you know none of the -isms are even real? All societies are functionally…

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…

Gaza bewilders, how can Israel continue what it’s doing? It can because despite all the guff about Anglo countries (dominating the grey in the pic) being democracies, no country is actually a democracy, in the way we…

Philip worked for NASA and MIT, and in Biotech. He’s an expert. Most will be more worried about losing their social lives and/or doing something different to what everybody else is doing, to make any changes. That’s…

AI is us, the idea it could be against us comes from watching too many Terminator movies. It’d be like thinking your left hand and right hand are at war. Given that collectively humans mostly engage in pissing contests…

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…

Kidult culture is also name-drop culture. The death of or publicity for a legend of kidult culture has others madly sorting through even the merest contact they may have had with them, so that the post can be about the…

Noah’s distinction here between horizontal and vertical communities is the most crucial defining feature of our lives today. When the two collide you can get real hostility. A lot of what passes for ‘local’ issues, like…

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.

I’ve had a day with multiple reminders of the kidult bullshit those at the front-line of actual provision of basic public services have to deal with. I know it annoys some to speak of kidult culture - well folks, come…

This child behaviour, fighting over toys, really is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Neither really wants the toy, it’s a sideshow. Each wants it because the other wants it. It’s desired purely because…

My plumber commented the other day that he loved our bathroom ‘because it isn’t all just greys and whites’. This isn’t our bathroom, but I like the use of colour here. The minimalist greys and whites in home design are…

You can only ask your friends and loved ones to avoid infections. There are a million life-saving reasons to avoid all infections. Yes you’ll survive a lot of them, at first. But you don’t go around crashing your car…

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…

I see this argument a lot. All laws can be got around. Hardly anybody follows speed limits on the road, for example. This is now 2-3 generations' worth of anti-establishment counterculture, still going strong. Yes, just…

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…

The sooner we learn this, the sooner life gets better. Step off the status treadmill. Leave high school, once and for all. Learn to see status in every facet of life, where it’s often cleverly hidden.

"...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…

Ricky is one of the well-meaning, smart younger generations that think belief in God is belief in fairy tales. But they then adopt the *exact* same structure of belief, of an independent, ‘objective’ something that…

Or in other words, ‘farmers have been illegitimately using superannuation as a tax avoidance scheme’. Farming is high status life in most countries, brilliantly re-badged as the ‘struggling cocky’. The landed gentry,…

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,…

Watch sport now and you’ll have a beautiful window into the culture I post about a lot. The ‘team sports’ culture, really kidult culture, of competing teams battling for status. Not just in sport, in every single area…

Betsey was a member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and formerly Chief Economist at the Deparment of Labor. Here she’s noticing the destruction of adult, institutional culture by kidult culture. The enemy is…

The belief that assembling a big crowd is democracy in action is never tested against actual outcomes. Which are usually non-existent. 4 times as many people went to see Taylor Swift play in Sydney as marched across the…

Status runs societies. Look carefully and you will see it in every nook and cranny of our lives.

Why does it matter so much to understand that our lives are run by status games? That our particular culture uses a status economy developed in high schools and then rolled out to all of adult life? Well, it matters…

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…

I like sharing this stuff, not because I’m some middle-aged hobbyist but because it shows the brilliant things that are available for us to use today, if we can escape lives enslaved to social conformity. High school…

My 'kidult culture' posts aren't just random opinions of mine. It's a cultural shift, the countercultural revolution of the last century, carrying forward to today. Studied by many. It's not 'Peter Pan syndrome', adults…

It’s almost universally advised now that social interaction is the key to good mental health. That’s another symptom of the counterculture, kidult culture. The worship of friendship, of ‘besties’. Sociality is violence.…

Sting here talking about the disappearance of venues for live music for new bands to learn their trade. The problem though isn’t that, it’s that young people no longer see being in a band as a way of ‘making it’. That’s…

Here Jessica talks about how doing the right thing is entirely dependent (like everything else) on what’s the most popular thing to do right now. Social status. And that when the tide turns, people will ‘morally…

It’s common to attribute negative human behaviours to individual psychology. Greed is a favourite, and there’s an absolute epidemic of calling everything narcissism now too. But in reality, nearly all human thought and…

Thanks to David for this. I’ve highlighted the critical sentence. This isn’t just a cheap shot, this is exactly the cultural shift we’re living. Because societies are social, and use social models, the fact ours is…

Why do I continue to talk about high school/adolescent culture? Again because it’s our culture. Those who don’t believe it, consider this. Humans in the West from the age when they can just walk and talk attend school…

Trump appointed a fossil fuel executive to run his energy policy. This is the BS at the heart of the US as a culture, this belief in freedom and free speech is really sponsored horseshit from its corporate barons, who…

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…

It’s not a change in their personality, they’re just opting out of caring about working themselves to death to support an aged society that denies them basics like housing and education.

Here’s a fun paradox. Humans copy one another obsessively. But why? Because they’re all different. We’re obsessed about imitating other people *because* we’re all different. If everybody is different, the only way to…

If you work at the front line of public service, the thing you will overwhelmingly notice is that what humans do above all else is complain. That complaint in turn is driven by the status games I often talk about.…

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…

Let’s celebrate our senior citizens. And that their biggest hit, Money for Nothing, pointed out that rock stars are high status, vastly paid people who don’t do much.

Read the comments on this, for an indication of what a pathetically stupid, whining, childish culture we’ve become. Relentless complaint, every single day, like a culture of inflamed haemorrhoids.

It’d be pretty common to say that the function of a road is to get you from A to B. Mary Beard, the historian of ancient Rome, points out that that was never the function of roads. You’ll have heard the expression all…

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…

I don’t think as a culture we will ever understand how bizarre it is to travel around ‘seeing’ or ‘experiencing’ places. The world as a theme park.

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…

The wonderful opera singer Elsa Dreisig, on her recent holiday, shared to the socials. The socials are full of images like this. I was watching an old episode of Man About the House the other day, those who were around…

Transgender and its politics is really just one more subset of what we call identity politics. And identity politics in turn is the kidult society I talk about, where instead of focusing collectively on collective…

Germaine Greer has more or less retired now from public life it seems, living out her years with her brother’s family in Melbourne. She will always be one of the greatest minds of our time, for me. Always resolutely…

The Gallagher brothers are reportedly earning about $13 million each, per show, on this reunion tour. We're a million miles from rock and pop being some form of cultural expression of youth now. The counterculture is…

What began as a mechanism for ordinary kids to ‘make it big’ in the adult world became just the adult world. Gig culture is over, it just hasn’t realised it yet. It also doesn’t recognise how unusual it is to make music…

One of the reasons I decided against becoming part of the music industry is that it’s mostly not very bright. Like I always say, I know, it’s an industry about entrenching teenage life across our entire lifespan. And…

The bank manager is a great way to see the outcome of decades of anti-establishment culture. They were once a central figure in a local community, getting money involved a discussion and negotiation with the manager,…

Fossil fuel companies have their fingers in every pie. Jim Chalmers is gung-ho to tax EV drivers now, parroting slogans from the same industry. The reason I talk so much about renewable energy and EVs goes well beyond…

One of the brilliant things AI can do for you. If you’re out walking and want to identify plants, it can do it instantly. In the paid versions you can do it in real time, with your phone camera, while you chat to the…

I am aware that no amount of horrible facts about Covid will shift attitudes or behaviours. Information doesn’t run societies, status does. The overwhelming reason people think and do the things they do is because other…

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…

This is my bread and butter every day. The Council will no doubt cop a bashing, but read it and you’ll see the obvious cause is that some wally fell over, and then sued Council for a huge sum. This is kidult culture…

Democracy is not about electing people. Everywhere mass elections have been introduced, democracy is in free fall. It turns the ordinary running of basic things into an endless popularity contest, where the things that…

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…

"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…

One of my favourite stories was about the time Eric Clapton showed up at somebody’s local, and after playing for a while somebody in the crowd yelling out ‘do you know any songs, mate?’ Big acts love this sort of thing,…

Always check the data. The reasons semi-autonomous ‘autopilot’ driving will save many lives is that greater than 90% of crashes on roads are due to human error. This isn’t about driving skill, it’s about unavoidable…

Paul McCartney recently mocked this song’s meaning as childish and naive. But it’s also a vital piece of evidence for the time that the kidult culture I talk about was taking over the world. Decades of compulsory…

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…

The Australian magistrate at the forefront of addressing ‘sovereign citizen’ type arguments in Australia made the interesting observation that many come into the movement after some kind of traffic offence. I post a lot…

If you want to see how humans work, watch any sporting event. People don’t just go to watch the sport. They go to support their favourites. That support creates teams in the stands as well. Being a member of a team like…

Not money. Not power. Not ’capitalism’ or any -ism. It’s all status. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. Everywhere. You are literally nobody, without status, for social animals status is also identity. Even what you…

Hamill describing the explosion of the counterculture, with an impact going well beyond music. The moment teen culture began to replace adult culture, at scale. The counterculture is our culture, just as the Soviet…

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…

The real enemies of society now aren’t the ’Left’ or ‘Right’ of politics. Those are interchangeable pieces of the same game, like soccer teams. At the end of the day they’re both playing soccer, just running to…

It’s one of the wet dreams of all modern popular music culture. The walk to the stage to be screamed at adoringly by tens or even hundreds of thousands of fans. In reality few will notice anything particularly musical…

Armani was a great man etc etc. here we are with him, let’s make this about us. Kidult culture.

If we keep mistaking democracy for elections, then the most popular idiots in our societies will keep winning them and leading millions of other idiots to their own destruction, like lemmings over a cliff. There’s not…

I admire J.K. Rowling because she’s one of the few higher status people who actively take on desperately unpopular causes, because she (rightly) sees what’s happening as wrong and unjust. Like Germaine Greer before her,…

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…

The average age on stage in these shows will be over 80. This is still mainstream culture, not some nostalgia act in an RSL club. That's what kidult culture means, nobody ages, nobody is allowed to age. Just permanent…

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…

My first call at work yesterday was a guy who said “what can I do about the prick who lives across the road from me?” The default state of human life is not happy, peaceful coexistence. It’s fighting, for status.…

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…

Microplastics are a big issue now. The two greatest sources of them are washing your clothes, and car tyres. You can buy filters for your washing machine output now that stop the microfibres entering the sewer system…

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…

The comments here show why in history meaningful change only comes when vast proportions of the human population are completely wiped out by war or natural disaster, or plague, or generations die of old age. Planck’s…

‘All You Need is Love’ became an anthem for the countercultural revolution. Which is still our culture today. The Beatles split up after only 8 years because they couldn’t bear being in the same room together.

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.…

China is saving the world. Meanwhile here in the West we just produce new identities every day. We join teams and battle other teams for status, which in turn gives us identity. Everyone has a list of ‘causes’ in the…

America’s decay isn’t caused by ‘authoritarians’ taking over the country. It’s caused by its cultural obsession, its hatred of public regulation and policing. That’s the theme of every Western movie, right there in…

Here’s the problem in the US in one graph. It refuses to do basic public regulation and policing (all sides of politics), because the entire culture of the US was founded upon deep distrust of public anything. Of the…

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…

The battery rebate program has been hijacked by wankpanzerism. A lot of the rebate money is going to people supersizing home batteries to ridiculous sizes they’ll never need. Like people buying RAM Utes, it’s ’my…

People wilfully ignorant of history refuse to see how the surge in importance of rock stars was the pointy end of the countercultural movement. Here are John and Yoko spelling it out, ‘power to the people’. That’s still…

David is one of Australia’s leading specialists in the treatment of Covid. What he sees in his rooms and at the hospitals every day horrifies and scares him. Much of it going undiagnosed because GPs don’t even…

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…

Gig culture (adults being adolescents forever) is still fighting public health. And losing.

If you’re sceptical status runs all human life, the road should be a great teacher. For example, why is it so overwhelmingly popular to overtake other vehicles, even those doing the speed limit? And why do people being…

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…

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…

Not only will installing solar save you thousands of dollars in electricty costs and pay for itself (easily the smartest investment for your spare money), but it also significantly increases the value of your home at…

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…

Covid attacks CD8 T cells in the immune system. These are the cells that usually fight cancer. We declared the war won against Covid when it was only just beginning. And we're infecting all the kids, over and over.…

215,700 millionaires live in London. 516 of them have more than $100 million. There are also 45 billionaires. The rest of the UK? Average incomes are lower than the 5 poorest states in the US, and the OECD average as…

I don’t think our global Covid strategy was widely understood. Let me spell it out in a few words. “Infect all the kids, so they can build up immunity and it won’t spread into the working community.” No conspiracies…

Had a quick drive in and out of Sydney yesterday, and observed driver behaviour as I always do. What I found. About 30% of drivers were consistently below or well below the speed limit. About 40% of drivers were…

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…

This painting captures a moment in the 1650s that in many ways has been a guide in my life, in the past decade. Spinoza was excommunicated from his own Jewish community. Spinoza categorically refused to follow the…

One of the great cons of our time is politicans and others telling people that only existing energy is ’reliable’ and ‘affordable’. They tap into deep-seated reluctance humans have to change, it’s always easier to sell…

RIP Patricia Routledge. Most known for a series that focused on the defining feature of all our lives. Status. Keeping up appearances. In a cartoonish way, Hyacinth was seen as the only status-seeker, when in reality we…

If you want to understand why the status quo is fighting so desperately to save fossil fuels, and funding wave after wave of propaganda drivel to try to get ordinary folk to help them, just follow the money. Seriously,…

EVs are following the classic S-curve of innovation. Slow early, then an exponential take-off, followed by a flattening out when mass adoption has happened. The reason all change is like this is, again, status. ‘Early…

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…

What different parts of the world charge for university education. The Anglo world (the US, UK, Australia, Canada - in pink), really just big nursing homes now in the demographics, unsurprisingly more focused on…

Final part. Remember C is the trajectory that actually happened, from 2022. So you have two choices. Do what everybody else is doing - nothing. That’s what most will do, because that’s how humans decide how they’ll…

A Formula E car. All-electric. These cars only carry relatively small batteries, much smaller than modern EV road cars, less than 40 kWh. It's still enough to do nearly 100 km, at very high speeds. They flog an F1 car…

This 1940 video designed to teach the public about new dialling telephones (as opposed to having to always use an operator) highlights just how difficult it is to get humans to change anything. The task itself is…

The lychgate is one of my favourite architectural features, at the entry to old churchyards. Functionally lychgates evolved as a place to shelter a coffin from the weather, while waiting for the arrival of the priest.…

Wow, Bathurst 1000 price now. I'm sure the $25 hamburger crowd think that's reasonable.

People who’ve never studied much science, which is most people, need to understand what’s at stake with climate change. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in the UK have done the sums. Actuaries are not ‘Greenies’…

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…

I’ve posted a few times about how country towns are doomed when the extractive industries that founded them (mostly mining and farming) leave. This article details the calamitous stats. There is no such thing as the…

This happened in Lithgow on Friday. Cut water to much of the town for the weekend. I know people resent the idea of kidult culture, but it was another classic example of it. What was the overwhelming response, from the…

Pathetic, as pathetic as our attempt to use the 'market' to create affordable homes. The market doesn't exist, it's code for 'letting everybody do whatever they like'. And what does that produce? People copying each…

Kidult culture despises children. It’s why it doesn’t have any, because they get in the way of lifestyles. Of ‘living your best life’. Lifestyles make them unaffordable. It seems paradoxical only if you think kidult =…

I’ve been experimenting a lot with AI. It’s astonishing what it can do. Unfortunately the deeper story is that the toxic dysfunction of American culture has driven most of its development, and could destroy everything…

“We need to stop trusting the experts.” RFK Jr spelling out here the toxic stupidity of American culture, the belief that ‘the people’ not only run societies, but also know things better than any expert in their field.…

Tony Seba is probably the pre-eminent thinker on disruption and innovation. He has a rule he calls the “10x” rule. If an innovation is 10 times cheaper and better functionally, change is inevitable, it’s just a question…

In the UK, the extreme levels of sacrifice the community had to make for WW2 lasted *15 years*. Rationing didn’t stop until 1954. That’s adult life, identifying a critical threat and acting accordingly, including making…

The US democratic fallacy winds up again. Create a big crowd and delude yourself this means 'democracy' at work. Everything 'public' looks like a gig. Societies are never, ever run by the people. 'People power' is a…

Estimates that about 7 million people marched in the No Kings protests yesterday in the US . Well over 70 million people voted for Trump at the last election. 10 times as many as turned out yesterday. It’s theatre.…

Throughout history the old had the role of guiding a society, with their life experience. The kidult culture doubters take note. In our culture the old do what many teenagers do when they finish school. They go on a…

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…

This appears not to have worked. The No Kings (and Black Lives Matter, and MeToo etc.) symbolic feels haven’t either. What sort of person ‘protests’ ineffectually against adult life? A teenager. This is still the…

A re-creation of the view between the Blue Mountains, Southern Tablelands and Monaro, as observed by Dawes (1788-89), Mitchell (1830s), Hume and Hovell (1824). A 'burning mosaic', alternating patches of fresh green…

It took all of one day for rare earths to become the new battleground between rival social teams. Western democracies bring this on themselves with the idea communities or ‘the people’ run nations. All that does is turn…

Australia has by far the longest continuous culture in all history, about 65,000 years. I hadn’t realised the Māori only began to occupy New Zealand between 700 and 750 years ago. What I also hadn’t realised is which…

The damage to the immune system caused by Covid that I often post about is sometimes lymphocytopenia. Damage to your immune T cells and B cells. Patients with lymphocytopenia experience recurrent infections or develop…

Some angered by the suggestion Covid is extremely bad for them say ‘but my doctor says it’s fine’. Doctors are human and subject to the same social dynamics as the rest of us. It will take millions of deaths for the…

For nearly all of history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. More than 90% of societies always were peasants. So what changed that? The only thing that changes anything. Catastrophe. The Black Death…

The status games that we see with wankpanzer utes, caravans and camping gear has now entered the solar and battery world too. I saw somebody say their house has 30 kW of solar panels (!!), and a 40 kWh battery, and…

Teenagers didn’t exist until the 20th century. You were just a little adult, as a child. The idea of teen rebellion therefore also didn’t exist, until the middle of the 20th century. The idea of uprooting custom and…

Europe and China are rapidly arriving where Japan has already been for many years. No younger workers left, to service huge elderly populations. Look at Japan, it’s pretty much at 1 working person for every 1 retired…

The same demographic trend but now looked at via the birth rates. You can see from the 1970s, fertility rates went into free fall. The 1970s was the decisive shift away from adult-centred life, the countercultural…

By mid-century, about half of all public and private social spending in rich nations will be directed toward sustaining, treating, or caring for people past working age. I do wonder if people see the kidult society more…

AI is immune to political propaganda. People need to realise that what was done for Covid was not only historically unprecedented. It was criminal. Never before in history had public health advocated to address a novel…

I think one of the most abused words in modern culture is ‘experience’. It’s our religion, we see life as something to be ‘experienced’. Like we’re passive tourists on life’s journey, and it will keep throwing up new…

The reason Western countries no longer have children is simple. They don’t like them. They will howl bloody murder at being told that. The truth hurts. This (official NHS) advice for example to deliberately now infect…

We’ve had so many years of brilliant PR from farmers about being poor and downtrodden that it’s always forgotten that farming was the original wealth and privilege in Australia. The settler land-grabbers, who literally…

This is the wet dream of many adolescents of the past 70 years. Adulation from a stadium full of screaming fans. Anybody who studies crowds knows the screaming isn’t about the act. It’s about the crowd themselves, the…

There's the Greased Lightning scene in Grease where teen gangs sing songs while modifying their hot rods. Post-war counterculture. I know we won't develop any level of self-awareness as a culture. A generation will need…

I have literally less than zero desire to attend any stadium gig. The only reason you would go is the reason they exist. To give people the experience of being in a crowd, responding to a current viral trending artist.…

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…

All of the stuff about Nazis and authoritarian/fascist takeovers in the US are the sort of hysteria that is endemic to US culture. Nick Bryant was US correspondent for the BBC there for 13 years and I think nails much…

I hate crowds. And wonder why anybody would like the experience of them, in fact I suspect most hate them. Nobody turns up to anything except a gig or battle and says ‘o goody, a crowd.’ Crowds have replaced public…

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…

It’s belief in ‘the people’ as an actual thing that destroys all democracies, all republics. All populist utopias. Every attempt to lead a society somewhere is seen as a tyranny, against which an insurrection is then…

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…

You can go back to the original 1960s events and watch the emergent Boomer generation firing up their countercultural revolution, the avalanche of teens taking over the world. Facing up to things like wars and…

So the LNP did it, they decided to become the Dad's Army of climate (in)action. One part of their spin will be that Australia is only a small contributor to global climate change. Australians are carbon/energy PIGS.…

Very well said. Doesn’t matter if Minns isn’t your pathetic political ‘team’ (I don’t have any political team). This is basic engineering. Like he says, the anti-renewables crowd are ‘bullshitting’ people.

BritTV is streaming The Good Life. Each episode is prefaced by a warning that the show is from another era, and the language and concepts may offend some viewers. lol, what a window into how every tiny bit of life has…

I posted about the explosion of nostalgia the other day. People flocking to bands from decades ago, to religions from centuries ago, to 'trad wife' marriage models from the 1950s and earlier, etc. The world of…

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…

It really is. Unfortunately the Americans will likely fuck it up for everybody doing what their culture always does, try to use it to make a tiny handful of people richer than most of the planet combined. I spend far…

Most public debates are completely fake, they're not about the issue in any way. They're about the status of the competing teams. Here's a good example, in the US the two main parties (Democrat and Republican) have…

The greatest con of the past 5 years is that ‘lockdowns’ damaged us. Lockdowns freed vast numbers of Australians from poverty, for the first time in their lives. They forced much more workplace flexibility, which…

Nathan’s Tesla has done 404,000 km. The only maintenance he’s needed is some work on the air conditioner, and on the suspension at 345,000 km. He’s paid not one cent for fuel, or on regular servicing. Fuel savings alone…

Everything we mythologise as ‘democracy’ actually had its origins in battles between the highest status members of a society. Take the idea of a ‘fair trial’, or procedural fairness more generally. That had nothing to…

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…

The level of stupidity out there in the anti-EV crowd. Looks like a KIA Seltos, which is a petrol car. The smoke coming from under the bonnet gives it away anyway, the battery is in the floor of an EV, not under the…

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

Public health is toast in a culture of ‘living your best life’ i.e. adolescent life. Replaced by ‘cool’ i.e. with what’s trending. Surely people see this, how every facet of public life now is just a series of…

One of the great Australians most have never heard of. Tony Rinaudo, an agronomist i.e. an expert in agriculture. Rinaudo looked at degraded landscapes, particularly in Africa, and like many others helped with projects…

More belief that ‘the people‘ run democracies, through their votes. Leading to the idea that people are all voting strategically for minor parties and independents, to hold power to account. It’s a ridiculous idea, do…

I said when Trump was re-elected that the whole farce would likely implode by the mid-terms, and that the hysteria about fascist takeovers of the US is nonsense, that ‘totalitarian’ paranoia has always been the defining…

We’ve arrived at the green part of the curve. It gets very fast from here, the hangers-on to the old status quo will be run over in the rush. How change always works. Many still opting for hybrids. My advice? Don’t do…

The Press has never been free. What we call media was invented by elite members of societies, barons, as part of the furthering of their own aims. It only began to appear free when multiple barons established opposing…

I’m in a very small minority. I don’t like travel. Which is interesting in a culture obsessed with it. To me it’s a dislocation, a very clear indication of how disconnected we are from the landscapes we live within,…

A more subtle manifestation of kidult culture is how songs are used to express emotion in TV shows, streaming and films now. Rather than characters articulating a set of feelings and exploring them, which used to be the…

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…

You can see here how the world today is really just the decline of various European empires. Only Asia is a counter-force, now on the ascendancy again as the failing European empires degenerate into populist status…

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…

The big questions never get asked, let alone answered. There is no necessary reason that work and home had to become two separate places in the first place. For most of human history humans worked at home, on their…

Sigh. The wankpanzer effect has hit batteries too. Humans run on status, the home battery program dominated by people putting truly ridiculously huge batteries on their homes, in a pissing contest. I want to leave high…

Supposedly abstract art, like Francis Bacon’s portrait here, annoys many because it doesn’t ’look like’ things. That gives it away, for non-artists ‘recognition’ is essential. Just as the greatest excitement at a gig 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…

Crypto is the 21st century way to be a teen forever. (He paid the woman btw.) Throw in hatred of children and you have the counterculture still in full swing, nearly 70 years on.

Always loved the show. But looking back at it, something really stands out. There’s not one child in this entire show. The ’good life’ had no place for children. Neither couple had children or even mentioned them. Both…

Car brands are a fascinating study if you want to see how human societies are really just status games. Only five global companies own most of the brands of vehicle that people buy. It’s like laundry detergent, where…

I think many school teachers today would say that their biggest challenge isn’t the kids. It’s the parents. Because the parents never left school, they’re kidults, and they then pass on those mindsets and behaviours to…

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…

You can see the usual pattern of all fundamental change happening, with AI. People rushing to find reasons to protect the status quo, rationalising what they're already doing and finding fault with new things. But AI is…

All of history and all human life is a rivalry between social elites. What looks like ‘the people’ running the show is really those same people being co-opted by different elite groups, to partake in their battles…

In China fishermen use cormorants to help catch fish. The cormorants dive into the water to catch the fish, and are prevented from swallowing the larger fish by restrictions around their necks. This is just one example…

Great to see this scheme almost tripled in funding. And also more evidence of what most deny, how status runs societies. The moment this incentive was first announced, people rushed to put the largest batteries they…

In many ways China is uniquely similar to Australia. Both are ancient cultures who found way to live IN the landscape, for thousands of years. Not on it. To make the landscape part of their society. Those farmlands are…

Veteran music producer Tony Visconti, who lived through Beatlemania, describing the EXACT shift the counterculture of that time was. And it had nothing whatever to do with music. Like he says here, until The Beatles,…

You can watch the entrenched interests of the status quo, in this case American car manufacturers, implode in real time as their industry gets destroyed in front of them. The Europeans are reportedly going to weaken…

Nothing of much use will be said in the coming weeks about this event. Every team will use it to try to promote their team even more. We weaponise catastrophe for our social status games. Until the catastrophes destroy…

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…

Nothing reveals our culture more than disaster. The event has to be turned into a movie/TV show, it has to be narrativised. The culture of the feels, people need to be emotional to be engaged. Emotion precedes action.…

Less than 24 hours, and the culture of the feels has kicked in with the crowdfunding. No question that he saved lives, but the precedent here is deeply problematic. For so many years we were told ‘not to take the law…

I want to talk about the ‘hollowing-out’ of towns, to give more context to my deep dislike of modern travel culture. This is Bourton-on-the-Water, in the Cotswolds, one of the most photographed towns in the UK. It has…

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.

What to do, in the face of horrible events like Bondi this week? To me the answer is always the same. Think. Learn. Don’t try to find a team to ‘stand with’, our usual populist kidult response to everything now. This…

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…

We’re not connecting with others not because of some epidemic of ‘loneliness’, but because as a culture we’re not engaged in any collective projects. We’re not building a common world, we’re all ‘living our best…

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…

Societies always have a foundational status hierarchy, social teams that are the most fundamental people belong to, that structure the rest. For most of our history those teams were religious. In our lifetimes that…

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…

“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…

Ricky and the Culture of the Influencer, of the performative Feels. Oh, and i’m doing a gig, lol.

More than 100 years ago humans already realised what was much better about electric cars. I’ve highlighted some of the main reasons then, which are the same now. So what happened, why didn’t this recognition in 1912…

This person has a Masters in Public Health. I’m sharing it to show again that what we did with Covid, letting all kids catch it over and over without allowing them to even be vaccinated, was a deliberate strategy. To…

It’s a huge genre of vids on the socials now, everybody sick at Christmas. Everybody is sick all year. In Australia the flu season stretched into mid-summer, ffs. Will anything be done? Of course not, kidult culture…

This is Demis Hassabis. I don't think we realise that we're living in a time where the greatest revolution of all time is unfolding right in front of us. That revolution is AI, and Demis is at the centre of it. He heads…

Who knew that crowdfunding was a mass movement of mobilised stupidity? I don’t go anywhere near mass crowdfunding things, no jeans for genes, or red noses, or bandaged bears. All adolescent cutesie things that nobody…

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…

On the same day there were stories about Warner’s seven-storey mansion at Maroubra with its own private beach, he hires a helicopter to get to a game. It should ring alarm bells. This game, where they struggle now to…

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,…

When you look at adult life, socially little changes from your days at school. Take the fake debates over EVs, as an example. Grease put to music that cars have always been a key rallying point for particular social…

EVs are already changing the culture of Australian towns. Many towns are bypassed by big highways with big servos on them. Now those towns are adding chargers and suddenly people are visiting them again. The service…

A personal post, a bit long, but a rare one about me, the person. I know many people who avoid the news, feeling that the world is too depressing and they don’t see a way out of the numerous problems societies are…

Trump is clearly an imbecile. Electing him again would be a disaster on just about every measure. But it’s looking increasingly likely. How does this happen, in a democracy? Because democracy always was a fantasy.…

Australia Day? I love Australia, it’s truly unique in the world. Not the imported Barnum and Bailey flag-waving patriotism of the US, which today will be full of. A convict colony that survived being sent to the remote…

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…

I sometimes say society is falling apart. If you work in essential service areas, the collapse is visible every day. Why did this happen? I think because the retiring generation is so large that the focus of attention…

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…

I still get people telling me ‘we need to learn to live with this virus’. What they mean is we need to constantly lie about being sick, so that we can fit in with the peer pressure that says the pandemic is over. I see…

One possible future for agriculture.

The north Tasman Sea is currently as warm as sub-tropical Queensland water. Just look at this graph. The ocean is boiling, and we’re cooking. Also the hottest ever January, globally. The people who continue to argue…

This is huge. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/feb/13/trial-offers-hope-for-millions-that-jab-could-prevent-rheumatoid-arthritis

Just about to be released and already sold out. Did you know Australia's housing market is running at $10 TRILLION? Outrageously absurd. I liked Michael Pascoe's review: "The vast majority of what is written and said…

Solar farms in the UK take up less space than golf courses and Christmas tree farms. People forget that farming was the activity of the most privileged parts of the population, who now don’t want their lifestyles…

It’s not difficult to make medium density housing beautiful. In fact many would prefer to live in this sort of house than in vast acres of separate dwellings unconnected to any social life.

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…

I think the greatest mistake we made for the mental health of our entire population is to use a model of social life for popular kids, of lots of social mixing, as the ideal for all people to aspire to. We’re all…

Not a bad crowd in Las Vegas for the rugby league. Amazes me that, with the emergency of ongoing concussions and head injuries in the game, nothing excites the commentators more than a headshot.

I love the story in here about a location in Iceland that was touristed almost to death, because Justin Bieber filmed a video there and millions then visited. Now closed to visitors for all but 5 weeks a year. Travel is…

From the late-1970s, a political movement created what we today call 'the economy'. To replace what we previously called society. Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the big drivers of the shift. Thatcher said 'there…

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…

Fascinating graph that should make us question the Australia we think we know (and it applies to many Western countries). The grey is Australia’s population broken into age groups, in 2022. Blue is what 2034 will look…

For all of the years shown on this graph, most Australians would tell you that house prices can only ever go up. It's our culture, it began with gold rushes and other get-rich-quick schemes. All the get-rich-quick…

I've often posted about how 'the economy' isn't even a thing. It's a political invention designed to replace public life with the dominant cultural form humanity has used for nearly all of its history - feudalism. How…

Senator Alex Antic. I used to go to barbershops at the age he’s talking about here, and it wasn’t to get product-saturated wanky hairdos while sipping beers, drinking barista coffee and playing Playstations. Just to get…

Here’s how to end Covid. Ventilate schools. Schools are the breeding ground for community spread, because the entire community is mixed there, in its kids, who then take it home. You can see it in the prevalence data…

I’m so bored by rock stars and music more generally. Also why I’m so critical of gig culture. The reason we have no kids doing subjects like maths or science now is that all of our role models are fucking musicians. And…

Boy jumps from bridge. Dies. Crowdfunding launched before the body is even cold. (How vulgar is crowdfunding now? Disgusting.) Council asked to take more measures to stop idiots jumping off bridge. How about a sign that…

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?…

Brilliant shot of The Beatles watching Jimi Hendrix perform, in shock. I love the contrast with the face of the woman on the far left, relaxed enjoyment. Popular music (and all human activity) is about social status.…

Humans like to form teams, and then to compete with other teams. The underlying principle of all of society, if you look, we learn it at school but our adult lives are this too, whether it's the cars we drive, the…

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…

Every single party to this action has been disgraced by the findings. Spruikers for the various cultural battles that attached themselves to it will claim victory here, in a variety of ways. There is no victory, it’s a…

Comment about a hybrid vehicle. A very common misunderstanding among the anti-EV crowd. An EV is a vehicle that uses electric motors. *Where* it gets the electricty from is irrelevant. Because electric motors are so…

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…

This is a trend gaining real speed. Child-free spaces, on holidays, in restaurants etc. In societies that already have plummeting birth rates. The focus is recreational lifestyles, free of the ‘interference’ of…

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…

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…

Brilliant series, watching him stuff everything up on a farm, but with help struggle through. What makes it compelling is Jeremy confronting some of the realities of the environment and climate change, things he’s…

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…

Sting once said a band is a way to avoid growing up. It’s why he left The Police, because he didn’t want to be a teenager forever. When you read the history of most bands, you’ll find the same thing, how for members it…

An obsession of a rapidly ageing society.

Pre-1950, fresh air in schools was prioritised in many places, to prevent disease. Look at those windows. Now the air in schools is filthy. Unflued gas heaters, windows closed year-round, a Covid and flu and RSV soup.…

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…

DIfferent times. ‘Spastic’ also a common term in those days. ‘Moron’ as well. Actually all terms that had specific scientific meanings, then weaponised by society.

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…

One of the last refuges for anti-social bastards is driving. I have to drive a lot of kms every week, and nowhere in society do people behave more appallingly than on the roads. Few follow a speed limit. They don’t…

Listen to the bitchiness of it. Obsession with status. Artists who ascend the status hierarchies of the industry to the level of ‘cool’ could shit in a cup and people would swear it was the best thing they’ve ever seen…

In Asia this cartoon would be met with disbelief, or incomprehension. They wouldn’t be able to imagine a culture making fun of being educated. It’s why they’re taking over the world, while we build nothing except vastly…

It seems the local member was excited about the prospect of nuclear power, until somebody told him Mt Piper and Wang are on the list of possible locations. How many Lithgow folk know that? Good morning Springfield!…

The 'natural beauty' of a monocultural crop of European pines will be interspersed with some European windmills. The humanity.

Jimmy Fallon is part of a new breed of talk show host where everything is about him, the host. And part of the spreading culture of commercial radio too, where everything is about cutesy pranks and stunts. Imagine being…

'Flooding the zone with shit', have a read. This is how very bad people have managed to destroy trust in expertise in society. Meaning every person is now a supposed expert on everything, and actual experts on things…

Travel isn’t about seeing the world. You can do that with photos. It isn’t about experiencing the world either, because tourists don’t experience the world. They’re tourists, they don’t live in the places they go to.…

Just another moron rock star. This interview was from 2021. Covid karma caught up with him. He’s just had 2 forced weeks of rest following collapse from ‘physical exhaustion’. He joked he’d been ‘hanging upside down’.…

A provocation. I think Cold Chisel are probably the greatest band of all time. The greatest songwriters at least. Unlike The Beatles or Elvis or any of the other huge names, the songs found a way to marry white and…

Open the windows in schools (and give them proper HVAC too). Schools are the engine rooms of sickness in the community. How is this difficult to understand? This is an entire generation under threat. Fuck what a society.

People who swear that the best music is ‘subjective’ can’t explain manias. Where millions of people suddenly all swarm around a single act. That’s not subjective, when everybody likes the same thing. Humans don’t desire…

Alan is Trauma Director at Nepean Hospital, works at Royal Hobart and is also a clinical Associate Professor at USyd. Knows his shit. At a time the population is ageing rapidly and needs exponentially increasing amounts…

I don't even need to criticise travel culture. It does a good enough job on its own.…

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…

The two greatest cultural forces of the past 70 years.

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…

We haven’t been to trivia nights in over 4 years. This nonsense yesterday made me think about it. The reason we stopped going to trivia was simple, it’s not Covid-safe. Objectively, scientifically, you should not catch…

In the energy debates, lots of mention of 'baseload power'. The public is encouraged to believe this is the minimum amount of 24/7 power that is needed to keep society running. That's not baseload power. Baseload is…

I saw a candidate for election say this. "[Aborigines] were not an advanced civilisation and DEFINITELY would have had to have some form of colonisation by someone in the 18th century." I think many Australians probably…

HIV is an initial infection or infections that seem like a cold or mild flu. Followed 8-10 years later by total system collapse and death. We have no idea of the 8-10 year outlook for Covid. We do know people are…

-5.5 here this morning. Have 7 heat pumps running, keeping the whole house toasty warm (as it was all night). Collectively they’re drawing less electricity than a single standard column or bar heater.

The game of make-believe we’re playing with Covid. Reality isn’t fooled. Vedder blamed the crowd, no self-awareness at all that everybody in that crowd is also at risk, because of his band’s show.

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…

History shows time and again that the only thing that makes humans act meaningfully outside the existing status quo, is total catastrophe. Read Alan Kohler today if you want to understand just how much that's us right…

17 years ago today, dad died. That's him on the left. From the generation whose young lives were taken by war. Never spoke of it. Part of that huge wave of European migration post-WW2 that transformed Australia, with…

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…

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…

Ford researched American driving habits, when considering their EV models. More than 50% of Americans only travelled over 200km, 4 or LESS times, every year. The 'range anxiety' debates on EVs assume everybody is a…

I know at least 3 people exhibiting symptoms of MCAS. All of them have had Covid. MCAS is quite common after Covid infection. It can be torture to live with. It has no cure. Many GPs won't recognise it nor link it to…

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…

I think we’re in denial about just how old our society now is. Take Lithgow as an example. Current population is over 20,000. Here’s a trivia question - how many of those people actually work? Only just over 4,500.…

Precision fermentation (PF) is a revolution still happening. Industrial agriculture is the most destructive industry on the planet. PF may destroy it. With dairy, outside that 3.3%, which PF can make easily, the rest of…

Fish dont know water exists until they’re beached. In the same way, our own culture is the thing most invisible to us. Like travel, again. This passion Australians have to do the ‘Big Lap’, or equivalent. To accumulate…

I talk about EVs so much not because of any fetish for them. But because they’re a window into our culture. Take the Chinese EVs. The true genius of China isn’t in design, they plagiarise most of that from Europeans.…

Another cultural observation. I often hear ‘cheap Chinese crap’ when there’s talk about Chinese goods. The Chinese are master manufacturers, just as the Japanese learned to be, very quickly. Or BYD, now making big…

There’s a huge train crash coming for aged care. Many working in that industry say it’s here already, which is also true. But it’s about to get much, much worse. There is no easy answer to this, apart from importing…

People think Covid is over because they’re lied to. Every day. Data is suppressed, no testing is done, nobody tracks the avalanche of pneumonias and whooping coughs and flus back to trashed immune systems, caused by…

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…

Had to do a quick run Into Sydney yesterday, and always find being on the roads gives some of the best insights into human behaviour. Like these newer adjustable speed limits. A great idea, when they monitor traffic…

I guess I can safely say that I’m clearly not sharing this denial. I get more or less zero traction with just about every person I work with and know, in trying to warn that the pandemic never ended, and never got less…

Nothing will set off the loons faster than a combination of EVs, and them being ASIAN. The terror! The comments are hilarious. Channel 7 being part of the jingoistic sewer culture of modern Straya even calls it an…

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…

When I first started posting about travel here I think it probably sounded deranged. But now stories like this are everywhere. Travel culture is turning the world into theme parks. It destroys locations, as locals…

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…

Cricketers today remind me of the boomers in the 1960s. All noble ideals, while in reality gorging themselves on the proceeds of the fire sale of institutions developed over centuries. Leaving the game/society a smoking…

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…

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

As a culture we decided going to gigs was more important than public health. Karma is arriving quickly now.

The ‘outback’ is a mythology Australians love. It’s a myth. We’ve always used the land outside the main cities as either a big farm or big mine. Extractive industries. We’re a settler culture, ferrying resources back to…

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…

Petrol and diesel cars were the EVs of their day. You have to force the old status quo out.

The most common health advice for people is to exercise, eat well, don’t smoke or drink. But check this. Research shows that people at the lowest rungs of an organisation, with the lowest status, are 4 times more likely…

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.…

What we don’t seem to get is that climate change is *infinitely* bigger as a problem, than Hitler. Has anybody noticed their life being disrupted in the way entire societies stopped, to fight Hitler? For 7 years? No.…

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.

New Disco Clubs, where women in their 40s and 50s get to pretend they’re 18 again for a few hours. Of course that’s the culture now, 18 forever. But there’s also an interesting Covid angle here. Why do some people go to…

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.

In the absence of catastrophes, like natural disasters or wars, human societies just battle each other for status, in status hierarchies. Like we do at school. Only catastrophes force societies to stop doing that, and…

Over the years I’ve seen others here do periodic pruning or culling of their friend lists, for various reasons. I’ve never done that, but am thinking about it now. I think there’s increasingly very little shared…

Australians travel obsessively for the same reason they drink and gamble obsessively, and always have. We’re a settler culture with no connection to place. Settler cultures accumulate places as ‘land’, and drink and…

There are all sorts of reasons people don't have kids, some out of their control. That's obviously up to each person to decide and deal with, their free choice. But I think as a society we've lost our way in not making…

This is a team sports battle going back decades, Mac vs PC. PCs (and Windows) are rubbish, like the ICEs of computing, only dominant because of historical trickery from people like Microsoft. No integrated hardware and…

Human groups and whole societies will not make important changes until total disasters force those changes. Without those disasters (wars, pandemics, natural disasters), humans only ever do one thing. They fight for…

China is literally saving the world right now. Which is why Yellow Peril politics is being ramped up, our existing status quo knows the threat. China is not only single-handedly building more renewables and EVs than…

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…

This dude turns 19 today. Society’s present to him is an infectious illness, hooray. Making his gentle and determined way through the world. I often compare gentle people to gravity, far and away the weakest force in…

Walking in a large shopping mall in a school holiday is a brilliant people-watching experience. What I increasingly notice is how the mobile phone has allowed us to essentially live inside our social networks now, more…

We’re just back from a short Queensland holiday. Visited Sea World again, to give Alice a taste of theme parks (she’s never been). We were all bored by everything except seeing some marine life, and winced at $13…

12 men walked on the moon. Only 4 are still alive. I was born just as the Apollo program was doing this. I’d sit for hours staring at the NASA photos of all the missions, amazed by the audacity of the engineering and…

A few notice the transformation of all adult life into high school life. In my 50s I decided to say enough. I now break all the rules of that adult life, probably alienating many I know. I refuse to play those status…

Somebody standing around that yellow arrow (for example) is the reason I think big gigs are not about the show or the music. They’re about people liking being in a crowd. You couldn’t pay me to do it.

He says ‘This is Bad’ because (watch it) he’s saying the Shark is so good, it will destroy every other ute. The ute is a totem in Australian (and US) life. It stands for everything in both of those societies that is…

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…

My RDO today and I’m on school pick up, sitting watching a whole line of wankpanzers with windows up and engines running, to run AC. On a glorious Spring day. Says a lot about the whole culture of those vehicles.

Cliff is 84. There were no 84-year-olds touring big venues when I was a kid. Our culture repeats the same adolescent life now, over and over, right until the end of life.

The social basis of technology was my postgraduate work. It’s one of the reasons I talk so much about cars. Vehicles are central to our culture, and to our identities. Take the modern ute. Useless as a ute. Useless as a…

The pandemic made many people rediscover the most important place on Earth again. Their own home. For many that will lead to lasting change, society is only just beginning to figure this out. The obsession to be always…

On suspension, some interesting recent examples. Teslas are famous for having bad suspension, by which is meant uncomfortable. They’re ‘sprung’ for cornering and speed, Tesla has a bit of a hoon culture. BYD on the…

When you get on a plane, you don't vote for who should pilot it. Scale that up to a whole society, and you can see why elections are such a bad idea. Democracy isn't, and never was, 'the people' running the country.…

Car enthusiasts will tell you every day of the week that a ‘driver’s car’ is the ultimate type of car. What they really mean by that is a car that is good at going fast around corners. Basically a race car, driven on…

Most country towns owe their existence to one or more extractive industries. Agriculture and mining the two biggies. I don’t see them surviving with barista coffee and tourism. It also makes the claims that this is…

How many adults do you know whose passions and interests have remained mostly unchanged since they were teenagers? This is the social and cultural core of our time, ‘kidult’ culture. Grown adults have little to any…

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…

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.

I know just about everybody I know (and don't know) will maintain a silence on Covid. They all want to believe good times are back, time to move on, 'you gotta live your life' etc. All that greeting card, live as a…

Peer pressure runs societies. We never leave high school. Here's a story that shows it. This is Dan and Fran Keller, from Texas, in 1992. Standing trial for child abuse at a childcare facility they ran. Children from…

There’s a potential influenza pandemic brewing in the US. It’s doing next to nothing about it, and under Trump will do even less. Pandemic influenzas generally kill 40-50% of people who get infected, of whatever age or…

In the inevitable transition to electric cars, the existing industry throws up one fake scare campaign after another. Like ‘they all catch fire, or ‘range anxiety’. Or now, ‘they have no resale value’. One of the most…

I think this generation is clearly on its cultural death bed, and the more they feel the cold grip of mortatlity approaching, the more an enormous bubble of nostagia is inflated, with gig revenue to match. A…

Why do monarchies and churches exist? The answer has been forgotten, but is still there. They were human inventions to prevent violence. Left to themselves humans will *always* fight each other for status, in groups.…

Snapshots from the kidult culture we live in. This is Bathurst’s new animal rehoming centre, its new ‘pound’. Fabulous facility. But now closed to animal drop-offs, because it’s completely overwhelmed by abandoned…

The attempt to do this in Bathurst led to community outrage. I mean everything leads to community outrage now, that’s the culture worldwide.

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…

People have been encouraged to believe nothing can be done to prevent Covid, so we all just need to 'live with' (i.e. catch it) now. That's just political bullshit. For every pandemic in history, you know who ended the…

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 found this story powerfully symptomatic of the times we’re now living in. The total collapse of a ‘public’ anything. People stripping power cables from streets, to sell the copper. Just outrageous, like living in…

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…

This is the sort of rank populism that plays well in our times. ‘Get rid of red tape!’ The problem with that idea is that the people who say it have no idea how things get practically done. ‘Bureaucracy’ is just the…

Shows how the status quo simply won’t change, unless it’s forced to. It’s been clear for years that electric cars would be the way forward, traditional car companies mostly ignored it. Now they’re having their Kodak…

I think a very good and not often asked question is why 'performance cars' are even allowed on public roads. It's clear they're designed to use public roads as race tracks. Also sometimes called 'driver's cars', a very…

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…

I don't read as many books as I used to, life is short and there are too many crap books. But Will Storr's book I recommend to everybody. It might reframe how you see most of life. I'd already been studying status…

A more common driver behaviour I’m seeing now is widespread total impatience. If there’s a line of traffic behind a slower vehicle, and then an overtaking lane arrives, it’s now common for people further back in the…

The roads are a fascinating place to observe. The bigger and more expensive cars have become, the more aggressive driving has become. Huge SUVs and utes are the main drivers (ha) of increased aggressiveness. Humans play…

Australia is going nowhere with greenhouse emissions. The whole thing is being gamed by the status quo. That red circle is ‘carbon offset’ programs i.e. planting trees and avoiding cutting down other ones. That’s a…

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Have been saying this for years. Makes you about as popular as haemorrhoids. Travel is the most stupid and destructive part of our…

Trump has given Elon Musk the task of improving ‘government efficiency’. Trump has called the department he’ll lead the ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ (DOGE). Worth paying attention at this point. DOGE is also a…

Observe the culture we live in, and you will always find status driving nearly everything that happens. Whether it’s homes, food, cars, watches, or whatever, there’s an increasing push towards high-status luxury or…

The solution to most of society’s problems is to tell engineers what the problems are, and then to get out of their way. If you don’t believe that, I encourage you to read history much more carefully. How’s an 8 million…

The battle between gig culture and Covid can only have one winner. Ariana Grande has cancelled all her touring for 2025. (She contracted Covid filming Wicked.) Maria Carey has just had to cancel some of her Christmas…

Rock stars in their late-70s announcing their new album, with their luxury mansion and own soccer field as background, is about as ridiculous as our culture gets.

I worked with somebody who told me it didn’t matter how far off in the distance a car was, they had to speed up to catch them, because they couldn’t bear anybody being in front of them on the road. That’s probably about…

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’…

John Deacon (bass player in Queen) is considered a bit weird, because he refused to have a single thing to do with rock n roll after Freddie Mercury died. He wanted to go home and spend the rest of his life with his…

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…

Anyone working in local government will chuckle reading this one. All the ridiculous idealistic rubbish about ‘community’, in complete contrast with how people actually behave together. Societies are status games, not…

This is the cultural shift that’s almost impossible to talk about without people of that age taking great offence. (People identify themselves individually with demographic groups, but these are cultural rather than…

Have others noticed how smoking has made its ugly way back into films and TV again? At the turn of the century it had been virtually eliminated from TV and film. Now whole films and shows are like ads for smoking. You…

4WD culture carries an assumption of getting closer to ‘nature’ (whatever that is). When in reality it’s using the landscape as a theme park for cars. Doing terrible and increasing damage as it goes, and grows (and it’s…

Something I think many vegans (and others) don’t understand is that the best way to protect the diversity of life, is to eat it. If you eat a wide variety of plants and animals, then it’s in your best interests to…

In a culture that now defines a woman as anybody who cares to identify as one, we shouldn’t be surprised that all the gains women have made in the past 100 years are being rapidly wound back.

Every ’stunning’ home on this show looks pretty much like every other stunning home on the show. And like most homes on most shows on TV, about houses. Polished concrete, big windows, open plan living, stone and wood…

The Great Divergence, where economic benefits are flowing overwhelmingly to the old, is the flip side of eternal youth culture. Part of the ‘circle of life’ is a passing of the baton to younger generations, including…

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,…

At the same time the public has been glued to years of reality cooking programs, home cooking has actually fallen off a cliff. The same has happened with things like gardening, where lifestyle homes and garden shows…

In saying Happy New year, I’d like to focus on the Happy part. So often in history the times of their lives when people found the most purpose, meaning and often even happiness was when they were confronted with a…

The most important fact about human behaviour is that humans imitate one another. Social conformity is the basis of all society. It starts from birth, continues through school, and into adult life. This is an obvious…

Covid, using Freddie as a guide. Freddie in 1984, and in 1991, immediately before his death. Medical experts suggest Freddie probably caught HIV in 1982, which corresponds also with a flu-like illness he had in that…

Genius innovators in agriculture have called enough on this sort of landscape vandalism. Not least because nobody makes any money out of it, long-term. They’re shifting most of our food production to massive…

For those interested in the shift to indoor farming (it will blow your mind), Landline did a nice story on it. With increasing climate disruption, it may be all that keeps food on tables. It definitely keeps farmers…

It’s hard to put a finger on what’s unique about Lithgow, in Australia. I’ll likely never leave. I think that it’s the transplanting of a British industrial village, into the Australian landscape. The picture below is…

When I started in the workforce, I was a bit in awe of people in their 50s. They were the ones who knew how stuff worked, who had an authority about them because of their long experience. They were often the calm ones…

Skipped the ’watch with free Covid’ sessions at the cinema and finally saw this yesterday. Great fun movie, amazing flight scenes. A few things: 1) the mission at the centre of the movie is a copy of the destruction of…

The 120-hour driver training for young people now is very interesting, and says a lot about what 'good driving' is. Car enthusiasts will always tell you good driving is something like race car driving - fast, picking…

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…

It’s a show, with a limited scope for what it can do, I know. But the trend it represents, of all of society becoming a giant high school, isn’t slowing. People well into middle-age still passionate about getting drunk,…

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…

Three catastrophes paradoxically gave us the peaceful and prosperous lives we’re used to. If you study history you’ll see that the era post-WW2 is unprecedented in human history, for its prosperity and peace. But why…

If you're buying your Year 7 kid a Macbook Pro, you're not only wasting thousands of dollars, you're perpetuating the ridiculous status games you went through at school yourself. The Macbook Air is far and away enough…

Covid spreads to these busloads who die every week, via our work and social lives. Our social life enables these deaths. I'm yet to see more than a handful of people who give the tiniest fuck. Apparently being at home…

As my friend Henry Madison says, you can see what the ‘economy’ actually is in times like right now. First we infected the entire country, repeatedly, to save ‘the economy’. Rather than ask business to pay for the WHS…

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…

In the eternal battle of who feels too hot and who feels too cold in the workplace, you have to default to making the people who feel too hot more comfortable. The people who feel too cold have a range of easy measures…

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…

Come and work in childcare. We’ll pay you less than a kid working at Maccas, let you get Covid 4 times a year, and throw in some other bonus viruses if you sign up now. People do know society is falling apart right in…

One aspect of cost of living that isn’t spoken about as much is financial illiteracy. Many people in their 40s and 50s still manage their money the way they did when they were 17. Using my favourite example again, of…

Approaching the time when the fake prosperity of the last 30 years will be exposed for exactly what it was. A bubble created by astronomical amounts of personal debt. It’s what kept people voting for the politicians who…

Life is a high school (not an analogy). If you think back to where each person (including yourself) sat in the social hierarchy of school, track just how often people retain this same status throughout the rest of their…

Paul Keating introduced mainstream super to Australia, because he saw it as a way to transform who holds wealth in our society, towards working people. So far it’s working. Super is the greatest financial nest egg we…

FB is such a bizarre place. From it I know a lot about what my friends are doing. But I know almost nothing about what they’re thinking or feeling, about anything. I know a lot about what people are doing in their…

Regional areas are expected to need another 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are also expected to leave teaching in the next TWO years. Try finding a tradie to do anything without waiting months. This day…

I still remember when dual-cabs were invented, we had a few growing up. The thing about them, which I remember my dad talking about (as a builder) is that they’re not good utes. Trays are small and too deep for a lot of…

I was 1 when humans landed on the moon. The thing that interests me much more about it now is how society has changed, since then. Look at the pictures of that day in 1969, people gathered around the handful of TV sets…

"I think it's very hard to leave a band, after a certain point. Because a band is like a teenage gang, it's like a street gang. You don't want to be in a street gang for the rest of your life, you can't mature, you…

Like everybody else, I’ve travelled. But I’ve never, not once, really enjoyed it. Getting home was always the highlight of any trip. Of course there are things you can do on a trip that are fun, even wonderful, but it…

Cars are a culture. And often a not very nice one. Look at car posts on FB, for example, of any kind (including about EVs), and you’ll always find that laughing emoji. When you open the comments, the people who post…

It's a shame Australia is increasingly moving towards the US in its culture, politics and tastes. Like the RAM. Americans (sorry my American friends) make almost universally rubbish cars. (We don't make any at all now,…

Was in a building where most people have been living the ‘Covid is over’ stuff for over a year, happy and chirpy as if life is back to good ol’ normal. Then a member of the public entered the building, wearing a mask,…

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…

Young people have $74 billion of HECS debt. At a time when housing is completely unaffordable, wages have been going backwards for decades, and the country is desperately short of skilled workers. You could not devise…

Nobody can get staff, it’s a genuine crisis. The thing is, we knew this was coming. It’s demographics. Our population was ageing, and is now old. There are nowhere near enough workers to support that older population,…

"Why are you still wearing that mask?" Because I don't want to have to inject insulin every day? Does that work for you?…

One of the most common criticisms from the anti-renewables Flat Earthers is that solar panels waste good agricultural land. But they don't, in fact they improve it hugely. Sheep are much happier and healthier, as are…

Australia a global laughing stock with EVs. Being left far behind, in this and in so many other things. We have only a handful of years to pull our heads out of our collective arses.

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…

I continue to share Covid things because nothing has changed, including the fantasy that it’s over. This research was for healthy people under 40, not people in aged care homes. Covid is a vascular disease, not a lung…

The older I get, the less driven I am by social life, 'living my best life', all the stuff that gets equated with having a good life. The things that drive me, that I'm passionate about, are understanding things, and…

There's a fun story about the Toyota Tundra hybrid in the US, which explains why we've been so slow to see hybrid utes here in Oz. Unlike the V8 competition gas guzzlers there, the Tundra makes almost no noise. (While…

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…

Think I may have posted this before. It’s from Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlin’s book ‘On Kings’, published shortly before both of their passings. They were leading anthropologists. Both thought monarchies were the…

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…

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…

Michael is a professor at the University of Oxford. I was very glad he shared this, and not stories about his social life, about which let's face it, who gives a fuck.

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…

It’s a pretty classy affair all around. Driving like fucking morons, 4 young people dead. Then some of the parents immediately crowdfund the tragedy for money.

Any of the passengers in this car could have said ‘whoa, slow down’. They didn’t because they didn’t want to look like killjoys. And so now they’re dead. This is exactly the psychology that is preventing people doing…

I’ve heard livelier crowds at a lawn bowls game than this Adelaide Origin crowd. What a stupid idea.

My workplace has been near-empty for weeks. People so, so sick. With Covid, and secondary infections, often caused by Covid (but nobody tells them that). There’s another big surge in Covid cases in Australia right now,…

This story reminded me of the car crash story, were parents were crowdfunding for cash the same day the kids died. A married couple expressing disappointment that the cash gifts from wedding guests didn’t cover the cost…

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…

If you'd asked this question to any generation of retired people in history, before today, they'd have laughed and asked what medication you'd forgotten to take. Socially and culturally, the retired being the richest…

Remember Tupperware parties? The brilliant idea that to break down resistance to people buying things, the smartest way is to get your own friends to flog them to you. This is the secret to understanding all society and…

Where do you reckon society has all of its money squirreled away?

“We must act now, the baby boomers are coming," she said. "Within a decade, our nation will have, for the first time in history, more people aged over 65 than under 18.” Australia will be one giant aged care facility,…

It's time Australia and the world dumped the 'pub test' and replaced it with the smart test. Society will never progress if the only thing that can be done is what people pissed off their tits can understand. Here's a…

The Olgas, I just flew there in Apple Maps. Cost of AvGas = 0. I don’t usually succeed convincing people of the absurd ideas that run our travel cultures, but I’ll keep trying. Take Australia’s interior, it’s become a…

Again, people should be in jail over this. Politicians. Over 600 dead and it struggles to even make the news. What an idiot society.

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…

SBS has a great series right now looking at the fundamental shift in research on Aboriginal Australia. The recognition of a vastly more complex culture than we realised. Here’s a clip (whole series is on SBS catchup),…

Agnes Callard. I’m sure people think I’m a contrarian, on travel. But travel is just our old imperial cultures, still colonising places. We don’t see it.

Wilcannia is a famous outback town. Like all outback towns, the history is one of expansion of some empire. Nearly always mining (Broken Hill, Lightning Ridge, White Cliffs) or agriculture (Bourke, Wilcannia to some…

Today’s thoughts on travel come from G.K. Chesterton. I’m a stationary traveller, I travel from my couch. This will seem a laughable thing to a travel culture, but bear with me. Here’s me at the Devil’s Marbles, in the…

Thoughts on travel #2 for today. The cost, in resources. Nearly 135 thousand flights, per DAY. We burn about 400 BILLION litres of jet fuel, every year, to satisfy our travel lust. If you fly to Europe from Australia,…

Cockburn a good example of our relationship with the outback, and with the bush more generally. It only exists because of mining, it was a place where trains and drivers exchanged when transferring mining ore out of…

I post a lot about why I think travel is a symptom of a sick culture. But not as much about what I see as the alternative. The alternative is both simple and impossibly hard - we need to rediscover what the term ‘home’…

Did you know ‘the outback’ is pretty much the entire country? It’s the weirdest idea, that we refuse to understand. But the secret to understanding our bizarre culture is here, in plain sight.

The appeal of the outback to tourism is that it’s one of the world’s last ‘untouched places’. So if millions of tourists flock to this place, doesn’t it stop being the thing which they go there to see? Travel is like…

Transgender is the topic nobody will discuss, because its proponents are so often aggressive and even violent. But the distinction between sex and gender isn’t rocket science. If your sense of gender is a mismatch with…

What I say about travel even the travel industry says itself. It knows there’s a crisis. It has no idea what to do about it. Travel is Tinder, for locations. Momentary flings, wham bam, thank you…next. If you think your…

Word for word what I’ve been saying about cars in Australia, for several years. Notice how Australian life has changed, the Toyota Corolla used to be our most popular car. People considered smart things, like fuel…

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…

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…

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…

That some NRL players wear headgear interests me. Not sure if they think it protects them from the brain damage many players are now experiencing (it doesn’t), but even if so it shows real grit to go against the crowd…

I’m pretty critical of gigs. To explain why. As a teenager and young adult, I was passionate about them, found them thrilling. Now they mostly bore me. Partly because they haven’t evolved a lot, they’re still using a…

Another way to see the shift in culture. U2. A fantastic band. Still active, so much so that they’ve been the highest-earning musicians in the world 5 times this century. Bono is worth $700 million. Let’s add some…

Music was always my greatest passion, and the thing I was best at. But have posted before how I listen to it less than I used to. It nearly always leaves me feeling a bit unsatisfied now. Like it’s pointing at a…

I’ve been called a ‘germaphobe’ a few times in recent weeks. Because I still wear a mask. I couldn’t care less, the people who said it are like most people in this pandemic, dumb as a box of hammers. Covid isn’t ‘germs’…

One of the most disturbing examples of the collapse of public health in Australia is seeing pregnant young women taking no Covid precautions at all. No masks, no avoiding large indoor crowds etc. I think most are…

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…

As a kid growing up playing sport, would any coach have tolerated you crying after a game if you lost? Or tolerated over-excited celebration at winning? Remember the days of losers and winners calmly shaking hands after…

Very proud of Molly, who’s about to finish uni with a near HD-average. A wise teacher said to me when I was at school that you can’t judge a kid’s true ability, until they leave school. School is about 90% social status…

Every year the same dumb traditions play out. Would your backyard catch fire? No, because you maintain it. The reason we have huge bushfires is because we leave most of the country unoccupied, while we huddle on the…

Most of the early settlers to Australia were from the UK. So here’s a mystery. The famous Australian accent doesn’t sound like *any* of the UK accents. Not even blended in some way. Know what it sounds just like?…

We have the history of Australia backwards. Take the conversation about the ‘Voice’ right now. Like all conversations about Aboriginal Australia, the starting point is the idea that post-1788 Australia, the European…

I share all of this data because governments don't want people to talk about it. It's not a conspiracy, we've been lied to, blatantly and repeatedly. 'We have to learn to live with this virus' was an election slogan…

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…

‘Closing the gap’ for Aboriginal people. What we mean by that is a paternalistic attempt to have them ‘catch up’ with us. Us modern, ‘advanced’ Australians. But the gap is actually the other way around. Australia, the…

People with ‘people and culture’ in their job title in my experience rarely know anything about either.

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…

This article was an excellent window again into the almost impossibly complex world that is the real Australia. And how we who think ourselves advanced because we can build cars and aeroplanes and computers, have not a…

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…

The worst possible, most brainless thing to be happening here. The roads will become a killing field. One of these flew past me yesterday on my way home, doing about 20-30 over the speed limit. 3 tonnes of metal, the…

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…

The Snowy Mountains Scheme was a dominant force in building post-war Australia, socially. It brought over 65,000 Europeans and their cultures here, which changed Australian life fundamentally. And the engineering was…

I still recommend every Australian (and every human) read this book. It provides firsthand accounts from the first European settlers of Australia of what they found when they got here. What they found was the greatest…

People who constantly chop-and-change lanes are 6 times more likely to have an accident, and in almost every case don't get where they're going any faster. The gaps they swerve into are also the main thing that keeps…

The average Australian household spends 5 times as much on alcohol, cigarettes, take away food, dining out, holidays and recreation than it does on local roads, water, sewer, waste, libraries, parks and museums. That's…

Such a fascinating story that has very deep meanings if you unpack it. Our eucalypts are now fuelling catastrophic fires globally, including here. Eucalyptus got to be like this because of thousands of years of…

Unpacking modern Oz culture. Households spend 400% more on recreation, than they do on their roads, water, waste, parks, libraries and museums.

It’s finally happening. Shifting to this is the fastest way to cut the unproductive crap out of all workplaces, in the process of finding the savings. Small business making the most negative noises as always, proving…

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…

Travel! Say you like somebody, in a desiring sort of way. And you had the choice of standing next to them and taking a photo, or a personal letter from them. Which would you choose? The letter, of course. It gives you…

I think of travel as a relationship, because that's what it is. A relationship with place, as opposed to just people. It takes time to build a relationship, a lot of time to 'get to know'. My criticism of travel isn't…

Teachers are thought of as people who put knowledge in peoples’ heads, like you put fuel in a car. That’s not their actual job. Their job is what holds all of society together. They take a classroom full of people who…

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…

This is one of populism’s tricks. To identify expertise in society, call it an ‘elite’, and then rally ‘the people’ against this expertise. The actual elites in society are the rich, like Murdoch, or Trump. Who pretend…

What’s less known about populism (believing that only what is popular is right and real) is that fascism is just a form of populism. Fascism is what you get if you let populism run. Hitler and Mussolini for example…

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.…

Society is a giant high school. Not an analogy.

Hundreds of thousands of people all looking for their own secluded spot then get puzzled and annoyed when the rest of the hundreds of thousands arrive too. Byron trashed, Ballina will be next. Travel culture is so dumb…

It’s Bathurst 1000 week, my favourite of the year! As a sporting event, it has a crowd almost 3 times the size of any football grand final. And it runs for almost a week. The ‘Figure it Out BRC’ FB group have had lots…

The idea of ‘Country’ is one we as a travel culture simply don’t understand. Our travel obsessions reflect our understanding of place. Travel and Country are fundamentally opposed things. It’s pretty simple, as a…

The same society that kills tens of thousands of people a year with Covid, because otherwise it would be too disruptive to our lifestyles.

Facts from the cultural files. Australia has 2 million more dogs than children.

And once you arrive, with thousands of others, there’ll be no ‘natural’ beauty left to see. Travel culture has this weird fantasy that we’re all travelling the world alone, the picture even says it.

Interview with voters about why they voted No. “We already have some of them in the parliament.” (‘them’ 🤔) “We need to be one nation, not special rules for their culture.’ (‘their’ 🤔)

I’d rather be having an ingrown toenail cut out without an anaesthetic than be at something like this. Note Mark just coincidentally managed to share a picture of himself addressing the crowd.

My politics? Get rid of all elections, all referendums. All political team sports (parties). There are very simple, clear things that need doing to fix our worst problems, none of which need a popularity-based mechanism…

The late-18th century was when the First Fleet arrived. But it was the 19th century when the wider settlement of Australia happened, a history only now starting to be really told. It was an uncontrolled expansion into…

I post a lot about cars because they’re the centre of a whole universe of social behaviours that need to change. The car is the most anti-social part of societies, and ‘drives’ (pun intended) a whole swathe of other…

When these guys got famous in the early 1990s I thought they were the only interesting new band I’d heard in years. Fantastic live too. Then they split up just as they were becoming really big. Very few bands come back…

I wonder if young people today aren’t really into band/live music culture as much, and this is the pandemic accelerating a trend that was already happening. Nothing anchors people permanently in adolescence more than…

Over 100 communities are now building their own power stations, owned by them with profits going to them. Solar farms. They're cheap, and quick to build. There's a farmer here who doesn't like what it will do to his…

I know people resist the idea that our culture is now a teenage culture, from cradle to grave. Always follow the money. If peoples' lives and passions at 80 are the same as they are at 18, so that you become super rich…

Peter struggling to understand here. We do this because 99% of human behaviour is imitative rivalry. Status games. Keeping up with the Joneses, as it used to be called. I saw it in Lithgow, the rivalry even got locals…

The waltz was considered scandalous when it began, due to the close touching of male and female bodies. We can laugh at that now, but what replaced it? Modern dancing is mostly individuals making stuff up (very often…

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…

We’re very close to a time when there will be no living Beatles. I think that will be jarring for us as a culture because they marked the real escalation point I post about a lot, where adult life was replaced with…

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.

The pro-petrol/diesel crowd trawl FB looking for any mention of electric vehicles, and then it starts. The same dumb things said over and over. Not one of them here for example even understands what a PHEV is, that the…

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…

I don't apologise for fixating on this revolution. What's happening out there should astonish people. This will change our whole society, not just energy. (These numbers are projected to double again by 2030.)

We're infecting everybody. Let that sink in, the social implications of that if Covid ends up having catastrophic longer-term health outcomes, like HIV/AIDS. We didn't let the entire population get HIV, our society…

‘Here I am on the beers’ should be as ridiculous a topic for adult photos as ‘here I am using the toilet without a nappy’. But it isn’t, because we live in a teen culture, at all ages now. Once you see it, you can’t…

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…

That modern cultural curiosity, where tens of thousands of people gather in stadiums to watch TV, with crap sound and disgusting toilets, before queuing for hours in traffic to get home.

Elias won the Nobel Prize partly for his work in understanding crowds, something his generation experienced in frightening detail in 20th century Europe, where tens of millions died as populations with previous ties to…

There’s an oppressive social framework hidden in our passion for music. The economy of ‘cool’. Musical acts are central to the way people shape their social hierarchies. You can see it here in Luka Bloom’s fun take on…

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…

These guys were playing with established male roles, each character a famous way of ‘being a man’, which they made fun of in gentle, funny ways. They didn’t think they were cowboys or bikers or policemen, they were…

A new trick the anti-EV crowd use is to compare costs of charging an EV at the most expensive public charging infrastructure with the costs of petrol or diesel. As this petrolhead influencer explains well, this…

I realised the reason I’ve become so bored with rock gigs is that they’ve lost their theatre. Plenty of acts use big light shows and effects, but they’re not coordinated into a show in the same way. A great rock show is…

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…

Again it's not a particular interest in energy that makes me post about it. It's because energy is the centre of societies, everything they do. The black line is the US. Australia (not shown) is close to that black…

It’s an international embarrassment that the LNP went to COP28 and advocated for Australia to do nothing, and just wait a decade or more for nuclear power to be built. Reactors that don’t even exist, that nobody wants…

Telstra has now finalised all of the energy it uses being renewable by 2025. Day and night. This is one of the solar farms. Some people don't like the look of solar farms, but nearly always they're on land that's been…

Real change doesn’t come by convincing everybody it’s needed. It comes by pushing them out of the way, making them redundant. That’s what solar is doing right now, smashing fossil fuels and everything in our culture…

Had another person say this week ‘why are you still wearing a mask?’ They asked in the way I know very well, what they mean is ‘nobody else is wearing a mask, why are you?’ Their measure of what to do is what other…

Germany has been trialling hydrogen trains to replace diesels. All now shifting to battery-electric instead, because it’s so much cheaper. The people who back hydrogen do it for one reason only. Team sports. They’re the…

It’s so accepted now that friendship is a vitally important thing that nobody really questions it. And it is a vitally important part of life, but it has its time and place. It’s also the most powerful way to stunt a…

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…

I've been a critic of hit and giggle cricket. I also saw today cricketers buying homes worth $25 million. At the same time most games of cricket now, except T20, struggle to get any sort of crowd, unless they're…

Christmas is of course a Christian festival. But do we even understand what that means any more? In reality we in the West are all Christians, in that the Church pretty much built our societies, over millennia. 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…

These red letters were in a local museum for 13 years, and nobody could figure out the words they’d originally formed. They put them out to the crowd to solve, and somebody did it in a few minutes. The clue that set…

There are times you can really feel living at the arse end of the cultural world. Like when cricket commentators ask touring Muslim cricketers how they plan to celebrate Christmas.

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.

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.…

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…

Sometimes I think it’s complete ignorance of infectious disease history that explains what’s going on right now. Take polio, as an example. Many I ask aren’t even aware that for the majority of people who caught polio,…

Mike Ryan, one of the WHO’s most senior public health experts, on what we’ve done wrong in this pandemic. Really worth a minute of your time. Particularly on the last sentence, notice how our leaders have the whole time…

From NSW Health yesterday. Three things: 1) those beds are required for everybody who is sick enough to require hospitalisation, and 2) ICU capacity in NSW is 1000 beds, but again that’s for all conditions. 300-500…

Excellent question that very few are asking. You can’t just keep giving booster shots. Ultimately you have to stop the spread of the virus. That’s what ‘elimination’ means. That’s why the smart people who deal with…

I have no idea what most people are thinking about the current situation, because they don’t say anything. This is what I see every day, a society that is broken. Generations of work being shit down the toilet. And a…

I’m not convinced any of the ‘live with the virus’ people will change their view, despite society crumbling around them in clear evidence of the bullshit of that idea.

I wanted to talk about 2 things we’re told not to talk about, but I think we must. Politics and religion. My views on them, so people have a reference point. Politics first. My personal political leanings are to…

A few people last year told me India was approaching herd immunity. Like most of the live with the virus crowd, they’re all really quiet at the moment. But wait until this current wave starts to head down, when they’ll…

Over 40 people at my workplace have Covid. Meantime I have some friends who have been allowed to work from home for the past 2 years, or who are retired, telling me the whole thing is not as bad as is made out. I’m sure…

Watched a bit of BBL last night, and struggled to see a single person in the stands. BBL crowds have been staggeringly low this year, as few as 480 people. I don’t think it’s the format, which people still like (though…

I never have much enthusiasm for Australia Day. Jingoistic claptrap most of the time. Culture wars about flags and invasions etc. We turn everything into sport. Yes the country was invaded, stolen. Yes many love the…

A re-share. If you think the world seems crazy and there’s no way out, you may be right. It’s nothing to do with who people vote for. It’s because for the past 50 years we’ve been smashing all of our institutions.…

Tennis fans are such a prissy crowd.

We think the Spanish Flu ended in 1919. But it didn't. People just got sick of fighting it and reporting it in 1919. The 1920 variant was even more lethal, because of that collective giving up. This same thing then…

Two tired concepts in public conversation are: 1) narcissism, and 2) toxic gender. Both take wider social and political issues and try to make them about individual psychology. Which suits those who are in society's…

The people who will do best in 2022 will be those who wear a mask, even if government says you don’t have to. And those with no debt. If interest rates go up, many Australians with big mortgages are going to be in a lot…

And this is why the pandemic never ends. We celebrate the wrong things. We celebrate the removal of our protections against Covid, rather than the elimination of infections. Eliminating infections ends the pandemic.…

LEGAL BLOOD ALCOHOL LIMIT TO BE RAISED. With only 1000 road deaths a year in Australia, most not even alcohol-related, there is plenty of spare hospital capacity to deal with alcohol-related accidents. The legal blood…

Grace Tame is a superb operator. Smart, funny, refuses to be cowed. Her speech at the Press Club was up there with Julia Gillard’s on misogyny, for impact. But, there’s a but. Where’s Julia Gillard now? Anger without…

‘We’re tired of the pandemic, let’s just say it’s over’ is the standard script worldwide now. Another reminder that it’s already killed more people than World War 1, and deaths are still climbing. And that returning to…

We (mistakenly) think democracy = what’s popular, wins. ‘Majority rules’. It doesn’t mean that, it never has. That’s populism. Populism always ends the same way. Leaders promise people to only do what’s popular. But…

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…

As a P.S. to today’s brain dump. I love being in my 50s, it’s the best decade of my life so far. I remember when I started work over 30 years ago, being a bit in awe of people in their 50s. These were people at the…

Superb from Stan Grant today. These are the deep currents underneath our lives and our politics. All politics comes down to identity. In the West we fractured into a million competing individual identities. Russia and…

Now that masks are gone too, I think it’s worth looking at the data when assessing risk. Here’s Lithgow. The green line is the average of cases. It’s not going down, in fact it’s going up. And this is based on the…

I should apologise to my friends in advance that I won’t be taking part in ‘normal’ social life until Covid is at some sort of manageable level in the community. I’m not being part of the political attempt to wish Covid…

Wear a mask. Avoid crowds, especially indoors. Or just ignore all of that and get Covid, it’s very on-trend.

John Howard used to say fuel prices are political dynamite. At current prices many will go to the wall, not just directly through the cost of buying fuel, but through the costs passed all the way down the supply chain.…

You hear the argument a lot, that employers can’t afford to pay higher wages. But wages are just like any other business expense. You can factor them in. What they really mean is they don’t want to pay people more,…

Going back to the idea of ‘business’, and how I don’t think it’s even a thing. There are just customers. You can easily prove this. Can a business exist without customers? No. Can customers exist without a business?…

For my Brit friends. https://twitter.com/supertanskiii/status/1434593531524485131?s=21

Have posted before about how society is a high school, and how all adult life is being consumed by adolescence as a cultural model. (This is something researchers actually study.) A perfect illustration of this is the…

I still don't think many, even most, people realise just how much we're destroying our own society, right now. They act as if we can constantly run our hospitals, schools and everything else in emergency mode. Terrible,…

I put this in the category of stuff you REALLY need to know. Something that isn't said in public discussion, that I've seen, is that for a long list of workers (below), if you catch Covid-19 it is PRESUMED in law that…

I share facts that aren’t reported. It’s not an obsession. It’s trying to be a small part of saving society from morons, for my kids.

Amen to this. And you could append a long list of others, not just sadness. We’re a culture of distraction, from everything that really matters. FB is the engine room of that distraction.

lol. https://twitter.com/i/status/1511869935508930560

What those who have been determined to portray Covid as a ‘sniffle’ have done to millions of human beings kicks you right in the guts when you read this. Notice we never hear the details of individuals who die of Covid?…

The story across the developed world. Retirees are wealthier than people raising families. They’re the wealthiest group in society. (People really don’t think about how perverse that is.) People don’t have kids because…

I think work nosedived when ‘managers’ became Directors, CEOs and all sorts of other new titles. Driven by the MBA crowd. When the work of senior people stopped being the basic MANAGING of what’s going on, and…

There are so many aspects to assessing Covid risk. (The government considers almost none of them.) I'm 54 this year, so this shapes my own assessment. Vaccine-boosted people ages 50 to 64 are more than 10 times more…

Please don't be surprised that the politicians who told us to live with Covid, also hold these views. Society is returning to feudal times. Peasants were allowed to get the Black Death, and die. There were always more…

Bit longer post, but (to me) a mysterious, magical topic. This is Tollund Man, buried in a bog in Denmark for 2500 years. Many cultures mummified or embalmed dead bodies. Today very few cultures still do, we’re…

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…

How the vaccines are now doing stopping you getting Covid. ChAdOx1-S is AstraZeneca. BNT162b2 is Pfizer. mRNA1273 is Moderna. In a nutshell, they're not really stopping infection at all, after 20 weeks, even with 3…

It’s not surprising that a culture which thinks changing clocks gives you extra sunshine, also thinks the best way to end a pandemic is to pretend it’s not happening.

When you replace your society with an Economy, there is no collective care. There is no collective, just a global market. And you’re just a 21st century disposable peasant worker in that market.

The great con of conservative pay-media is that it has no viewers. SKY call itself the ‘voice of the people’. Barely 40,000 people watch it. The let it rip Covid crowd always talk about ‘this is what the people wanted’,…

I see all sorts of theories as to why Western democracies seem to be a complete mess. But to me you can trace their decline to one point. That point we stopped building things. For 50 years China has built pretty much…

We're still the 'Commonwealth of Australia". I think people think that's just a name. It's not, it means what it says- all 'wealth' is considered to be common, meaning you need a full society to generate it. There is no…

Most jobs aren’t about producing things. Most jobs are pointless, society produces so much already that there’s very little need for many of us to work. A job is the way those with most of society’s wealth ration it out…

“Doctors at some of Sydney’s biggest hospitals say emergency departments are so overcrowded that patients are being treated in corridors and ambulance trolleys, as the number of ambulances on the city’s roads at night…

Latest polling suggests the election could go right down to the wire. Unbelievable, as it was last time, that such lethal incompetence as the current government is currently even in the ballpark to win. It will be a…

Scientists are now almost certain multiple sclerosis, a terrible and often fatal disease, is caused by earlier infection with glandular fever. Mononucleosis. Many of us have had it. It can take years to turn into MS,…

Election day musings. No other country in the world has an election day like ours, it’s like Grand Final Day but even bigger. It’s really hard to describe what’s unique about Australian society. But I think there is a…

Governance is my profession. People know I love to talk about stuff here, including why the LNP in 2022 was not just a threat to Australia, but also to itself. The Liberals in particular may not even survive as a party.…

Here’s a story which I promise gets more interesting as it goes along. The ratio of tax paid to GDP in a country. (Stay with me!) GDP is a measure of how much wealth a country produces, usually in a year. Australia’s…

A really superb piece showing more clearly than ever before how the story of the past 30 years has been a story of the reversal of a century of workers’ gains. All very deliberate, forced by conservative governments who…

Can society survive $10 iceberg lettuce? A serious question. It’s an indicator of breakdown.

Another hike in interest rates coming today. I think it’s worth remembering that this only matters because much of society has no money and is living off debt. And that this is why the gutting of the living standards of…

An ED department in an Australian hospital right now. A major metropolitan hospital. Schools are even worse, some have 35 classes without teachers on a given day. Society is falling apart.

Another in my series of 'Covid is destroying society, and people are somehow not even noticing'.

Saw an American reviewer say (correctly) that it was questionable value to pay over $450 for nosebleed seats to see Paul McCartney, whose voice is gone. He sounds like a wrinkly at an aged care home singing happy…

And yet…still nothing changes. No comment and certainly no action from government. Deliberate suppression of any mention of Covid at all, every day. Meantime the public takes little to no responsibility at all either,…

‘Base load’ power does NOT mean ‘a base amount of energy needed to keep society running’. That’s politicians using slogans to change the facts. Base load power is the amount of power we all need to USE, to prevent…

Have often posted about why I think small business is a major hurdle to a much better Australia. We worship it, unthinkingly. It doesn't have the economies of scale to be a healthy backbone for a society, it's an…

A pandemic caused by obscene amounts of travel has now crippled the travel industry. Colour me astonished. The themes I post about often inter-relate, I was very popular posting for years about how our travel culture…

Every time I open LinkedIn it occurs to me that you need to be vaguely interested in your own 'career' to have even a passing interest in anybody else's. Total fail on the first for me, so unremitting boredom on the…

Don’t you love NSW Government spin, ‘temporarily non-operational’. Meaning ‘the State is so infested with Covid we can’t operate.’ You have virtually zero protection from these new strains if you’ve been infected…

I reckon this is so common. And they don’t mean to become the person who hurt them, they try to be the opposite of the person who hurt them. But it means they’re trapped inside the same universe of pain. Like how people…

When politicians ‘opened up’ to Covid, vaccinations stopped. Stone dead. And less than half of us went to get a free flu shot since then. And now stories like this. People are not seeing the bigger picture here I don’t…

One of the main reasons cars dominate cities, is that city design has been handed over to property developers. A car is a dream to a property developer, because they can keep building millions of houses on unoccupied…

Do you really want to be a person in history who thought ‘living with’ a pandemic was a good idea? It will go down as possibly the greatest act of collective stupidity of all time. And it’s all very deliberately…

There are massive solar and wind farms near Wellington, from a distance you think it must be some bluey-silver crop, like lavender. Companies from around the world have been queuing for years to try to get these…

I learned this from the Australian biologist Tim Low. Which of these two locations has the greatest biodiversity? The city, or the bush? Answer: the city. Hands down. The bush is a wasteland, created by agriculture. I…

My dad and his friends emigrated to Australia at the start of the 1950s. They were part of that big wave of post-war immigration, that gave Australia the hugest rush of European culture and energy, after the war. They…

Yesterday the new PM said Covid from this point on is a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. ScoMo-lite. Treating a pandemic with personal responsibility is like telling people to build their own roads. It’s a…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1546245019702640641 Click to view, only a minute.

FINALLY journalists are seeing it, but way too late. Infecting an entire population and hoping you have enough hospital beds is not a public health strategy, it’s a public disease strategy. I still don’t think people…

People may have seen me posting here for a few years now about how the political battles between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are actually something else. The continuation of the driving force of our history, the battle between…

It might dawn on the ‘society is an Economy’ people at some point that you can’t live with a pandemic. Might.

The Project talking about a huge list of drugs now unavailable because of the pandemic wrecking supply chains. A diabetes patient going without his drugs entirely, they’re not available. Society is falling apart. This…

The National Health Service in the UK has already collapsed. 332,000 people there have been waiting more than a year for treatment. Not coincidentally, over 300,000 people now have long-term chronic illness from Covid…

It didn’t occur to the Brexit crowd that leaving Europe would mean basic things, like needing to now show your passport and other papers when re-entering Europe.

Talking about solar because energy right now is the key that unlocks a lot of what looks crazy about society. Here’s another reason to install solar, if you haven’t already, and to install as much of it as you can…

Lots of talk about masks and mandates. We need to push back on the stupidity of the idea a mandate removes peoples’ freedoms. Here’s just one of thousands of examples. Is ‘swim between the flags’ oppression? Tyranny?…

There was a time when these numbers would have outraged Australians. The reason it doesn't now is that they're being deliberately led to not care. Groups are always led, whether it's a committee or a society. They…

Some people still cling to the idea that Australian Aborigines were primitives. But you won't find any other 'primitive' people whose cultures or civilisations lasted more than a few thousand years. You won't find any…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1554301467170832389

One of the most important things to note about the re-emergence of polio is that it was nearly always an incredibly mild disease, causing no symptoms at all or known lasting effects. But the minority it impacted badly…

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…

The marginal cost of most things we use in society now is actually pretty much zero. Industrial manufacturing is so efficient that we long since haven’t needed most people to work at all. The only reason they do work is…

Yep. All because of an insane set of political beliefs that ‘privatise’ society. Insurance is as ‘capitalist’ as the day is long. It collapses in a privatised society. Disasters are empirical proof that these beliefs…

A while ago I posted an article about how precision fermentation may replace agriculture almost entirely. It may be the greatest ever revolution in human life. It’s arrived, see ABC report below. Agriculture is far and…

Yes, everybody is tired of Covid. They’ve ‘moved on’ (i.e. got bored and ignored it). Think of it this way. When was the last time we, as a society, chose to deliberately INCREASE the amount of death in the community? I…

In the pandemic Australia has sacked over 40,000 of the smart people who do this sort of work. Meantime TAFE will again be free, to fund the desperate shortage of tradies, a shortage that’s mostly an already bloated…

Reading about how the Colorado river system is on the brink of collapse in the US, with 70% of its water usage being agricultural irrigation, made me think of how precision fermentation and other new food creation…

I’ve never been comfortable with children driving cars, children having children, or children drinking alcohol. Makes me sound old-fashioned, but actually it’s just that I was a teacher too, and saw firsthand how…

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…

Here's a way to think about Queens and Kings, in the time of Covid and climate change. The Queen reigned for 70 years, and we know almost nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her personal opinions or beliefs.…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1569303059544608770

The old ceremonies of mourning around the Royal death are like the Queen herself. Us in service to something older, bigger and more mysterious than our own beloved personalities. You don't have to be a monarchist to…

Peter is a climate scientist with NASA. That ‘too big to put into words’ should scare the absolute crap out of us. But it won’t, until it’s much too late, and we’re collectively incinerated and drowned. It’s probably…

If there is a meaning to life, it’s pretty simple I think. Raise the next generation. If you don’t have kids, do everything you can to help society raise them. No civilisation that makes raising the next generation a…

Crocodile Dundee is like the Frank Sinatra or Elvis of the Australian landscape. The whitefella substitute for the culture we didn’t understand and mostly destroyed. Elvis and Frank mined black music heavily, and became…

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…

For the first 25 years of motoring in the UK, there were no petrol pumps. People had to buy fuel in 2-gallon cans from retailers, lug it home and fill the car. I mention this because often electric cars are criticised…

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…

Climate change has so many ways of destroying society, and I think we’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. The damage to local road and rail over the past few years isn’t sustainable, enormously expensive to fix.

Alex Jones is like the Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt or Paul Murray of the US. This legal case was parents of the Sandy Hook school massacre suing him for running repeated conspiracy stories that the massacre was a hoax.…

Society is falling apart, and it's like we're just hoping it will fix itself. But it keeps getting worse, not better. The way we did things pre-Covid is not coming back, no matter how much we pretend.

If you didn’t see this last night, I highly recommend you watch it on iView. Griffith in NSW is collapsing. And everywhere else will follow. What Covid did is expose a dark secret. Slavery never ended, we just called it…

I do realise most people won’t change their behaviour, because they think nobody else will either, so it’s like school, peer pressure will win. Without change being led, nothing will change. Yaneer is an international…

This is why I think the NDIS will not only ultimately fail, it may in fact consume our entire democracy and sink it. A big caveat upfront, I’m a huge fan of the NDIS and what it represents. But I think we’ve introduced…

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 see very little evidence anybody cares. It's a defining moment in Australian society, deliberately infecting our children. Over and over, not just once. Our society may not survive it, the health costs alone could be…

This is what we're going to see in increasing numbers. Young healthy person gets Covid, and their immune system gets wiped clean, leaving them wide open to every other infection. Have posted as well about how research…

What struck me again in the middle of the Bathurst floods yesterday is how destructive ‘the economy’ is. A sensible society would have looked at that river yesterday and said ‘I think people should take a day off, this…

Took me an hour-and-a-half to get from Raglan to the centre of Bathurst this morning. ‘Stay home until we get this road properly open’, imagine a society with brains.

'Living with the virus' is an idiot idea concocted mostly by male politicians and business leaders, whose wives and staff do all the actual work in society. They don't have a clue about any of it.

NSW Health has never stopped telling us to wear masks and avoid crowds. That’s never stopped being the medical advice. Bizarrely, people are basing their own health and that of their family and friends on the advice of…

Two things I think have done this. One something I used to post about - T20. It’s destroying the wider game by giving crowds an appetite for nothing but bashing, and players an appetite for big sacks of money. Second is…

This is quite seriously all the ‘economy’ is. A magic trick for grown ups, to protect the status quo by shrouding it in economic mumbo jumbo. Notice everything that might upset the status quo, like paying people more or…

National emergency in the US with children succumbing to a whole range of different infections, because Covid has damaged their immune systems. We are deliberately infecting our children with this virus. And I don't see…

Many think peer pressure somehow ends when we leave school. That’s not true, in fact it’s the main way all of life works, even more so with adults. The primary driver of what people do, is what everybody else does. The…

Got the World Cup on again. I realised the reason soccer crowds are so noisy and animated, singing, rioting etc., is that there’s nothing else to do. What’s happening out on the pitch is so boring, they’re forced to…

Some research shows that people who use a saline nasal spray have up to an 8-fold lower risk of hospitalisation, with Covid. The Covid vaccines don’t target the mucosal areas in the head, where you breathe Covid in, and…

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology.” Carl Sagan (Exhibit A - electric cars, and Covid.)

The Brits going where not even the Americans will go. They may still destroy the vaccines for everybody by doing this. What happens when you vote for people who think we live in an Economy and not a society.

To me home is a sacred place, my favourite place on Earth. I’d rather be at home than anywhere else. I see thousands of people drive in traffic jams for 1.5 days of a 3-day weekend, just to ‘get away’. Get away from…

I think we need wide education in political language, the Greeks called it ‘rhetoric’, it was a cornerstone of their education. For example yesterday the acting Premier was asked about risks to regional NSW from Sydney…

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…

From Paul Bieniasz, a virologist. Worth a read, it’s only a page. How using a vaccine as a magic bullet in a pandemic could mean the vaccines end up worthless. Broken record I know, but when you turn your society into…

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…

Liberace became a bit of a self-parodying joke, like a later stage Fat Elvis. But the man had talent, and could entertain. Also reminds me of a time when to admit being gay was social suicide. And watching all these…

Julie Anthony (and Freddie Mercury) understood anthems. Look at this, at a footy crowd, she has the whole (singing-reluctant) audience on their feet inside a minute-and-a-half. Anthems are supposed to energise you, fill…

The government vaccination ad campaign seems badly conceived. Featuring prominent talking heads who are just the sorts of people anti-vaxxers don't like. At the same time members of the same government fill the airwaves…

It’s fascinating that on the one hand, travelling (crossing borders) is a global passion. But on the other hand easily the most powerful politics of our time is stopping people crossing borders, internally and…

You’ll hear the same argument here I’m sure from the Economy crowd. Once the most vulnerable are vaccinated, get rid of the restrictions. An idiot suggestion.

Radio host today, asks why Australians are so ‘compliant’ with health orders? Bizarre, how collective action is now seen as compliance. The victory of those who want to turn citizens into consumers, and countries into…

Economics looks dry and boring, because it's designed to, to make you not pay attention. Look at this train wreck coming, hidden in a graph. At the moment that big dip down to about -15 is the government spending to…

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…

Straya! And the people who brought you all this are *gaining* in popularity with voters. Which means, basically, that as voters you and I are stoopid. (And, to be fair, it means we have an old society that doesn't…

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…

The Victorian lockdown will be the main virus story today. But the fact NSW is currently looking for 7000 people who travelled to Victoria is just another reminder how mobile our society now is, and the dangers of that…

We’re all taught that big things are complex, small things are simple. It’s absolutely wrong. The world gets more complex the smaller you go. Tarde saw it all more than a century ago, it changes everything we think we…

Statistics reveal that collectively we behave in ordered, patterned ways. That’s what ‘we’ is. But we don’t know we’re doing it, we need statistics to reveal those patterns to us. Why I saw ‘we’ is one of our greatest…

When we’re not in a pandemic, libertarians will tell you society doesn’t even exist, there are only individuals. In a pandemic, they will tell you your ‘freedom’ is being destroyed because of lack of access to society…

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…

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…

“Being a homebody means you're comfortable enough being alone that you consistently seek it out just to get some quality time with your favorite person: yourself.” There’s an immaturity about obsessive social life, a…

Marshall McLuhan once wondered why researchers spend so much time surveying people to find out what they think. McLuhan pointed out the billions spent on advertising does all that 'market research' for you. Every ad is…

'News' is a really bizarre thing when you think about it. It replaced stories told between generations in multi-generational families, to make sense of the world. What we call news is in the third person, the view from…

Another view from nowhere. Seeing the Earth from space is said to have created some sort of Earth-consciousness. Actually I think it distanced people even more from the planet we live on. Nobody lives in this viewpoint,…

England lifting its lockdown. Step one? Get the kids back out in the front line of the pandemic. The joy of living in an ageing society.

Collective psychology and the Korean War. The Korean POW camps were unique in that there were not only no escapes, but also no attempts at escape. The Koreans began by observing all prisoners as they arrived. Those who…

Watching the increasing number of people with rigid, fixed faces through botox, fillers and surgery, I wondered if we're turning our faces into permanent masks. Masks are a social face, as opposed to an individual face.…

A story of 2 pictures. In 1996 John Howard came to power. From that date union membership collapsed. A big part of why is people felt well off (and gave Howard the credit). The other picture tells the real story. Howard…

Why don't we question what the 'culture' of an organisation even means? How people relate to each other? People are at work to work, that's how they relate to each other. A toxic organisation is one that can't do its…

This 'culture' angle will fail, because it's another one of those abstract words that doesn't point to anything that actually exists. I've worked in organisations said to have absolutely toxic cultures. The problem was…

Extremely powerful piece. England and the US in terminal decline, we're copying their ideas. The Economy the cause, an invention to strip away basic collective mechanisms to re-route everything to a small elite. The…

This is breathtaking, an era-defining essay. Read it and you'll read the script of our lives right now. Liberalism - the cult of individualism - first replaced society with the Economy. But it also produced what looks…

The #ReclaimTheseStreets vigil in the UK right now another example of how what looks like opposing sides in public debates are actually the same side. Stupidly risky to gather in these numbers in a pandemic, but woke…

Australia (and much of the developed world) had pretty much full employment for 30 years after the war. Then in the 1980s unemployment took off. At exactly the time the 'market' and the 'Economy' replaced 'society' in…

These marches are now nearly half a century old in Australia. The problem with protests for me is that I don't think they're anything really collective at all. They're a space for people to express their *individual*…

Same pattern all over the world, growing quickly. People with no idea how to collectively organise a better world, brought up being told their feelings are what is important, simply gather in large numbers to express…

It's very common to see democracy as replacing hierarchy with a flat social structure where all are equal. That's not what it is or ever was. Hierarchies represent levels of expertise and knowledge and quality.…

Have been mentioning liberalism a bit lately. Ideas create societies, and liberalism largely created ours right now. And it's failing, and was always going to. Both what we call the 'Left' and 'Right' use this same…

Don't listen to people who say the Economy has suffered under this pandemic. It's been tremendous for the people who say that, look at the money pouring in. They say it to provide cover for their even further strip…

There's a great episode of The Office that (unintentionally) debunks both the Economy, and small business. 3 of the office set up their own breakaway business, and undercut all the local big paper supply firms. They…

You hear the word 'development' a lot. Usually seen as a great thing, creates money and jobs etc. What it actually creates is millions of houses sitting on often prime land, unconnected to most services or social life.…

Agency and landscapes. Aboriginal rock art can look like some sort of primitive attempt to draw. I don't think it has anything to do with art as we conceive it. Aboriginal people gave agency to all things in the…

I've had a book of Ainslie Roberts' Dreamtime paintings for years, and they've always fascinated me. It seems for aboriginal people, the key is to have eternal ('everywhen') agencies at the root of your society. Imagine…

'Location, location'. What sort of society turns basic shelter into an opportunity to make money? Not only do we have no understanding of how to live in our landscapes, we parcel them up into blocks and sell them at…

The Easter long weekend coming. A time to worship our true God, travel, by sitting in traffic jams for 2 days. Surprised the anti-lockdown crowd aren’t demonstrating, people being forced to stay away from work for days.

It might be surprising that I actually love cars. But I also think you can either have mass car ownership, or a functioning society. You can't have both. Notice how high on the list cars and roads are for those with…

It costs up to 5 times as much to maintain ‘infrastructure’ over time than it costs to build it in the first place. Buildings, roads, sewers, pipes, parks etc. That funding is rarely forthcoming. Many local councils for…

Adrian shared this. So much truth in it. The game stops working without that $200 on every cycle around the board. If people don’t have money, society stops working. No point giving it to ‘business’, business is just…

Australians spend $60 billion a year on overseas travel. That's 10 times what the country spends on infrastructure, and about equal to what it spends on education. And nearly every cent of that money ends up overseas.…

On a holy day, I think we need to understand why, once a week, entire communities would gather for the Sunday church service. Modern thinking describes these people as credulous, believing in fairytales. I think…

The reason I post about ideas and less about my self and my life is that I think our lives really are just ideas. It doesn't look like it for 'ordinary' life, but it is. Every tiny thing we do, every little day trip…

Why is the idea of a 4-day working week so slow to move forward? We're all well-trained hamsters. Look at Daylight Savings as an example. We all wanted an extra hour of daylight at the end of the day for social…

In 2020 international air travel was smashed by Covid (it's said). Only 1.8 billion passengers. That's the same number who flew in 2004. What seemed like a shut down only returned us to what was normal just over 15…

The gun debates are about agency. One side says the gun has no agency, it's all people pulling the trigger. The other side says guns kill people. I suspect there are ultimately so many gun deaths in the US because it's…

What if 'real life' is actually school, and everything after we finish school is an imitation of life? What I mean is that all of life is, literally, made of ideas. There isn't a single thing you think, feel or do that…

Doesn't seem a coincidence that most superheroes were invented in America. When you worship individualism, and don't even see collective things as real, the only solution (even imaginary) to the inevitable problems you…

'Home'. We don't understand how *where* we live defines who 'I' am. We don't understand 'place'. That's my apparent obsession with travel, and landscape. The keystone of our entire culture. "Most Westerners believe that…

The problem with maps I think, is that they're designed to help you navigate, but we see them as pictures of the world. We think they look like the landscape, without noticing that nobody actually lives in the viewpoint…

Brits outraged by this, football about the only thing a post-Thatcher Britain is united on. I wonder if they see the parallels, with themselves and the US creating a Covid Super League, hoovering up most of the world's…

I often think about the damage the gym junkies have done to our collective mental health, with their skinny ripped ideas. So successfully that 10 out of 10 people will probably describe a healthy body as ripped and…

Love the bit in here about how ‘traffic’ is not some homogeneous thing, like water coming out a hose. It’s a decision by thousands or millions of individuals, based on many factors. Getting rid of roads actually makes…

Look at these people, going to Winston Churchill's funeral in 1965. A nice orderly pattern, what we call a crowd. I think we see crowds and individuals as 2 distinct things. But look at every face in that crowd. Each…

A scholar, courtesy of Rembrandt. Scholars are the tradies of ideas. Ideas are the literal building block of our lives and societies. Everything you do, think and feel is based on some idea. Unis now compete for…

As a kid I still remember shops being closed both Saturday afternoons and Sundays. You needed to get cash out on a Friday to get you through the weekend. Partly this was the religious Sabbath still shaping society,…

It's not actually clear that Socrates said this, but it does the rounds occasionally and is interesting. I'd add "The strongest minds discuss how ideas shape events and people". It's difficult to discuss this sort of…

As a kid I asked my dad once what his favourite food was. He said 'soup'. I thought he was mad. Now I find myself actually agreeing with him (a bit late to tell him, but if you're reading somewhere...). The Japanese…

Much of China is still an entirely different model of humans in the landscape. One that Europe used at one time, too, the village model. People and other living things living in close proximity, in an integrated way.…

Agriculture is culture. It's in the word. Look at farms in our country, and what they say about us.

Two models of society. The most common one used by us is millions of separate individuals, who mysteriously add up to form a 'whole greater than its parts'. Then, to return to Venn diagrams, there's this one. Each…

There are all sorts of theories about why bad things happen in the world. Capitalism, power, inequality, toxic masculinity, Left, Right, etc. etc. None of those things are real, I don't think. This photo to me…

On Mothers Day, I've been thinking about a magical mystery that women do. Men build houses, but women create homes. Home is a word like love, almost impossible to define. But, with love, the most important thing in the…

Joining a few more dots between my posts, notice how politicians win votes with new transport spending, particularly roads. Moving around is the basis of our entire culture. Where are we going, with all that movement?…

Life returning to 'normal' a.k.a. people depressed in meaningless jobs, in debt to the eyeballs. Living for the next trip, to suck the life out of some place with actual culture, to compensate for what we don't have at…

Mouse plagues are caused by the destruction of diverse ecosystems in favour of monoculture agricultural crops. This destroys most species, leaving the field wide open for single species to dominate, who no longer have…

Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi is the most expensive painting ever sold, at $578 million. If it was found to be a fake, its value would drop to about a dollar, immediately, even if the copy was impossible to distinguish from…

Wisdom of the crowd. It's an actual, studied thing. In the right circumstances, a crowd is smarter than anybody in it. It's not what we usually call 'democracy'. In this case, the overwhelming crowd favourite is also…

The modern idea of 'events'. Bringing large crowds of people together. It's always felt a bit forced to me, like the only thing that will bring people together now is some type of personal entertainment. Even in my…

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.…

Last year I argued with people here about Covid and school safety. I feel vindicated that the year since has proved Covid spreads in schools as easily if not more easily than everywhere else, that children are infected…

Zoffany's The Tribuna of the Uffizi. Hilarious story behind this one. He'd bankrupted himself investing in Cook's voyage to Australia, on which he was supposed to be a passenger. He pulled out. Being friends with the…

Thanks To Dave Roma for this shot. They're doing extensive renovations on the court house at the moment, I watch them every day. Another example of how technology is really morals wrapped up in materials. When you build…

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…

Before 1847 there was no such thing as 'time' or 'space' in England. Each locality was a whole universe unto itself, with its own rhythms of life driven by things like seasons and cropping, and didn't see itself as part…

Got my first Astra dose yesterday. Listening to whining UK tourists on TV right now, saying 'what was the point of getting vaccinated if we can't travel?' The fault of idiot politicians promising people that vaccination…

Waleed's thinking is everything Australian culture has come to hate. Nuanced, researched, complex. Many Australians hate him for it, often the types whose banner of Straya-ness is putting a flag somewhere. It's hard to…

One of my passions is unravelling the big generalist terms that dominate our lives. Like 'The Economy'. Or 'business'. Or 'traffic'. None of those exist. Another that doesn't is 'the public'. There is no such thing.…

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…

Politicians who believe we live in economies, not societies, adore transport projects. Do we stop and ask why? Transport is displacement, and displacement is dispossession. Taking goods and people from where they live,…

Here’s one for the people who have Australia love it or leave bumper stickers. A society that can’t replace its own population is a society in terminal decline. The only thing keeping Australia from becoming an aged…

Fascinating that we smashed flu last year - you can see its death spiral at the start of the big national lockdown in Feb-March 2020 - but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021. It's just non-existent. Despite NSW…

The oldest trick in the modern conservative's playbook is to knee-cap taxation (on the wealthy), and then claim the resulting budget deficit is due to too much spending. The spending doesn't change much at all, it's…

This is how society tends to develop. A bit like some kids put on weight before they hit a growth spurt, social things go through ‘mass’ phases - mass transport, mass shopping etc. - before then re-building ‘local’…

There's nothing quite as disgusting as Boris' latest spin. 'Levelling up'. The idea being, rather than address rampant, outrageous inequality, with the top 1% of society wallowing in all of a country's wealth, he will…

A photographer from regional Victoria. Her anger is at a public health measure, designed to save thousands of lives. That isn’t even mentioned. Her collapse in income is her only focus. No doubt that’s extremely…

Bezos flying into orbit in his rocket-powered dildo is where society ends up when you turn it into an Economy. The vast majority of people can’t afford to take basic shelter in their own homes (if they own one, which…

When the Economy crowd take over government (regulatory capture), this is what happens. Never, ever trust somebody who believes the Economy exists. They will kill you, and your family, without blinking an eye.

Another major industry doing its bit to undermine basic public health measures. Alan Joyce was back at it again yesterday too. Gerry Harvey is a regular. There is no society for these people, just an Economy. The…

Really interesting article about how the development of universal schooling led to the emergence of a separate culture for children, that then went on to change adult culture. The growing adolescence of adult life.…

Articles like this see this as an amusing analogy. But it isn’t, life is high school. The social world we all live on our way to adulthood is school, it gives us the framework we use in adult life. It explains…

This is why NSW is not making progress against this outbreak, these dipshits are still talking about the ‘Economy’. The evidence is in, smash the virus, your ‘Economy’ booms. Know why? It’s just society.

I spent 18 months putting the PM and Gladys at the top of my ‘risk to every Australian’s life’ list. Gladys saying exactly why, in just a few words, here. And making it quite clear that she and the PM are working…

The tabloid theatre (like toilet paper selling out) which political libertarianism generates. Everything is about the individual. At a time of collective emergency, the pile-on starts, on ‘naughty’ transgressors. No…

If only people took a pandemic as seriously as they take kicking a ball around a field. A society of adolescents, again. (By the way women had more cases in the earlier stages of this graph, because women in the UK get…

The ‘Economy’ and economics are the most deeply brainwashed ideas. Here’s another example. The word ‘economics’ comes from the ancient Greek, meaning ‘management of a household’. Who does that? Overwhelmingly, women.…

There’s a common and simplistic view that ‘democracy’ means each person’s opinion is as equal as any other. It doesn’t mean that at all. Democracy is hierarchical, as hierarchical as any other system. That hierarchy is…

Parents usually send their kids to uni to ‘get a good job’. It often does a lot more than that. Ideas and beliefs are the raw material of society, and therefore education can fracture relationships between generations,…

DH Lawrence, himself a teacher, was scathing about the idea of universal education. His reasoning was that only a handful of people are suited for what we call more ‘academic’ type work, and forcing all kids to sit…

My favourite thing to watch is Nordic Noir. Watching a lot of shows with sub-titles made me think, notice that no matter the language or ‘culture’, the world people live in looks almost exactly the same. The houses,…

This baby hearing for the first time wins the internet today. https://twitter.com/i/status/1429835867384918021

This vaccination rollout will be a brilliant test of the Australia we live in, compared to the one we maybe think we live in. Right now about 5 million Australians are saying they won't get a vaccine. Compare to our…

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,…

Of course there's nothing wrong with checking if people are OK, it's lovely. But it's an example of how collective problems become individual problems, in societies of adolescents. There are many discoverable reasons…

The government released a ‘roadmap’ out of the pandemic yesterday. The metaphor tells you everything. Nobody uses roadmaps any more, we all use GPS. Real-time data adjusted to constantly changing conditions. Somebody…

Why aren’t we as a society insisting upon vaccinating kids against Covid before sending them back to school? Here’s a historical comparison. Whooping cough, pertussis. Before vaccines, about 50-120 deaths per year. I’ve…

This is a growing pattern in Western democracies. Gated communities. Where the well-off shield themselves from crime and poverty. From the rest of society. Billionaires have bought entire islands and built bunkers to…

The NSW Premier and our PM both tell us that the reason 2021 is different is because ‘Delta is like nothing we have seen before’. More lies, more spin. We’ve beaten far more infectious diseases than Delta. The only…

An aspect of the months between now and Christmas many aren’t aware of, is that the National Covid plan, modelled by Doherty and driven by the PM, involves the mass infection of children. This is quite deliberate, as it…

Fresh from killing 140,000 Brits, and another thousand each week, with an idiot ‘live with the virus’ strategy (which we’re copying now in Oz by the way), now the UK has nationwide fuel shortages. More populist…

Society is just conversation. All of it, even the Economy. Great article about what this means for journalism. If you look at something like FB, notice that in libertarian societies like ours, a ‘public’ act is thought…

In years to come, remember this video. Substitute ‘cholera’ or ‘Ebola’ for ‘this virus’, and you’ll get a sense of how collectively insane we all now are. That we swallow these ridiculous, meaningless slogans, like…

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…

Australians are much more Aboriginal than they realise, I think. Not only does the landscape shape us in ways we don’t understand, but our encounter with aboriginal people has become part of our cultural DNA. Take the…

Every period in history sees itself as breaking free from history. As the new 'modern' thing that leaves history behind. Like every generation thinks it invented sex. Here's a fun example of that being untrue. With the…

As a younger person, I was terrified of standing in front of a crowd. It stopped me ever going into music as a career, or doing public speaking, debating, dancing, even going to parties. About a decade of teaching beat…

Isn't this great, even where parents try to carry the cost of clean air in schools, because the NSW government won't do anything, they're not allowed. No masks, 'open a window'. Just disgusting, corrupt, and probably…

Of course it didn't. We're a society of adolescents, interested in drinking and holidays. The world is a high school.

The world seems more stupid today. I know a lot of people feel that. It's not because individual people are getting dumber though, I don't think. It's because a huge part of a society acting intelligently is its…

More life as a high school. Melbourne re-opens. It’s curious that the narrative around lockdowns has been that people are healthiest and happiest when they can mix socially. That without it, they become lonely and…

So often the smart and right thing to do won’t be the popular thing to do. Have a look at this excerpt from a BBC interview in 1967, of a female government minister introducing drink driving laws. Don’t go along with…

Eglinton now. Schools only really opening again today, and here we are already. Put masks on the kids if we’re so desperate to open schools to get back in restaurants, pubs and planes. Only 7 weeks of school left, what…

The Deputy Premier referred to use of masks in schools as 'ludicrous'. This is the official CDC advice, in the US, just so you get a sense of the calibre of the NSW Government: "Due to the circulating and highly…

58% of Americans opposed going to the moon, when Kennedy announced it. ‘Moonshot’ became a term to mean pushing for a massive collective achievement. Kennedy succeeded. Compare and contrast this with the pandemic, where…

I like Simon Holmes a Court, we've chatted a few times. His family came from a time when the wealthy in this country actually thought about the public good, and not just tax cuts. Australia could be the Saudi Arabia of…

Before the 20th century, overwhelmingly the greatest fatalities in war came from infectious disease, not the fighting. The US Civil War, for example, where about 700,000 people died. Two-thirds of those died of…

You can look at this two ways. Regulators being cautious, as they're supposed to be. Or key members of these expert groups being culture warring, political operatives who have spent weeks attacking any sort of…

This morning's discussion, with an emeritus professor of epidemiology, who opines that kids shouldn't wear masks in schools because it will harm their 'social and psychological development'. I mean really, is there a…

I’m happy to be only a handful of years off a possible retirement. Not because I don’t like to work - I love to work. But our societies seem increasingly meaningless, as Stan Grant highlights here. What’s it all for?…

As a measure of just how out of 'balance' (a word dear to modern conservatives, by which they mean 'do nothing') society is, the other day one of Australia's most powerful unions negotiated a 3% per annum pay rise for…

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

Society is a high school. Not by analogy - literally. It's where we learn our social models. Great piece here on the US that shows it in a way that can't be missed.

Zooming out can give a very different view. This is an age of extreme and growing wealth inequality. At the same time it’s an age of populism, where increasing numbers of people reject democratic due process in favour…

We never leave high school. Here’s a lens to look at the world today through. There are 2 hierarchies in school and life. A social one, of status, with Prom Kings and Queens, the most popular people, at the pinnacle.…

I assume the 'live with the virus' crowd have unwavering faith in their death cult.

'Only hospitalisations matter'. Just one example of the stupidity of that statement. People who get infected are just like people with the flu - out of action. Multiple that by the tens or hundreds of thousands, and…

Again I apologise for those who find Covid discussion distasteful. Plenty of things for you to scroll past and look at instead. But think of it this way, if the government has given up keeping you healthy (which it…

Bear with me, with Covid. Cat pictures available upon request. This is a big reason 'live with the virus/only hospitalisations matter' (a mass infection Covid strategy) can't work. Society shuts down, just as it would…

What those who argue against lockdowns haven’t understood for 2 years. They’re not a choice. You do them, or people will do them for you. You can’t function as a society with masses of people infected.

From inside NSW Health. Worth a few minutes. Insight into what’s happening inside pathologies and hospital For the past few days there has been a huge amount of misinformation regarding COVID testing and as a healthcare…

Here’s a way to maybe bridge the gap between how we think about landscape and how aborigines do. Our agriculture sees soil, water, plants and animals as means to an end. To provide us with food. However plants, animals,…

Monks once saved civilisation. In the Dark Ages their monasteries were what kept the ideas that are actually what we call civilisation alive. They were the only ones who kept the knowledge of basic things like…

Fish don’t know water exists until they’re beached. I don’t think we see our culture as a culture, we see it as just as how things are. Take the idea of ‘having a good time’. While nearly every part of the planet…

When our collective orgasm of disaster and disaster appeals is over again, will we listen to those who say it’s all as simple as more hazard reduction burning? Or to those who want to lock up these spaces again as…

I think all civilisation is the management of one basic fact. Stupid people are too stupid to recognise their own stupidity. That sounds like some cheap shot or judgment, but actually it’s a deep reflection on how…

You’ll often hear people argue against renewable energy as being unfairly ‘subsidised’ by government, whereas existing energy generation isn’t. This is because the costs of carbon pollution aren’t included in the sums -…

I would say what makes a person smart is if the ideas they have capture and change reality in some powerful way. It’s the ideas that make them smart, it’s not them (ideas don’t belong to any of us, they can be shared by…

More on selfies. Yes they’re a picture of ‘me’, but isn’t the ‘me in many (most?) selfies actually a copy or imitation of somebody else?

Tarde, Plato, Lippmann, Lawrence and others independently saw aristocracy as the mature state of society. They saw democracy as a transition state, when new aristocracies replace old ones. They both thought hierarchy in…

We’re still living the destruction of the world wars. Agriculture was even called an army in that war, and huge parts of the landscape were ripped up and changed to plowed fields, for the war effort. What we call…

So all up there’s about $250 million of bushfire relief money to spend. That’s the scale of the emotional tidal wave that followed the fires. It’ll be a mess, it takes huge amounts of coordination to spend that sort of…

I find it interesting that even in modern scientific agriculture, very few farms survive without an ongoing connection with the people who work them, across generations. A small remnant human-landscape link survives.…

Elaine Ingham, soil scientist. The word soil comes from the Latin word humus, which is also the root of ‘human’. Our agriculture turns soil into lifeless dirt. Some facts about soil: - one handful of good soil contains…

Australia should maybe do what Europe started years ago. Pay farmers to stay on the land. Not to farm, but to regenerate the land. Fix the soil, the vegetation, the water. It’s the obvious solution to the crisis,…

Years ago already, Mike Archer (picture) suggested that Australia needed more mines, and far fewer farms. The mythology around farming in Australia masks the fact that it’s the single most destructive force in…

“Pater familias” was the Roman term for the father as ‘head of the family’. The father as authority figure in the family is still the foundation of our societies, the ‘State’ was modelled on the pater familias. Ultra…

These always look scary. But it’s possible we misunderstand that viruses are active agents. It’s not in their best interest to wipe us out, we’re their hosts. They need us to survive. Usually pandemics arise in extreme…

Lots of ridiculous talk about arson in the bushfires. But there is another type of arson - social arson. People deliberately trying to inflame social relationships in society. Shock jocks are social arsonists. In the…

Democracy is often seen as the increasing freedom of individuals. But actually, that freedom is the increasing freedom to have others serve you. Under kings and emperors and tyrants, only they have the right to demand…

When I was a kid Australia spoke about how clever it was, most people could list our famous inventions, like the Hills Hoist. Can you think of many great Australian discoveries or inventions of the past 25-30 years? Our…

Our senses aren’t a window onto the world, they’re statistical outcomes of our immersion in the world. What’s interesting about that for me is that what we usually call ‘statistics’ are actually perceptions. Perceptions…

I’m not sure I explain why DST bothers me so much, how it connects to other ideas. My objections to travel, or to the idea that we’re not responsible for what our ancestors do, or to cars and maps, or a ‘climate’…

A huge number of the world’s most successful businesses were started and/or run by engineers. What this shows I think is that the image of engineering as just making stuff is fundamentally wrong. That stuff is as social…

There’s never enough money for new infrastructure, lots of our towns are crumbling, and at the same time millions of people are sweating every day in gyms and other forms of training, with the only outcome their own…

Humans are said to ‘cheat’ in relationships when they ignore their commitment to a person. I’d suggest that our travel culture should be seen as cheating on our landscapes. Space for us is just different coloured areas…

For events, what does ‘live’ mean? For example, I can see and hear more of any sporting or musical event from the comfort of my lounge room. Yes it’s not the same, but then if I were there ‘live’ I wouldn’t ever…

The hay runners show that ‘the bush’ is more about national identity than about farming. Look at the flags. Agriculture is in terminal decline worldwide, mostly because it’s an absolute bloody disaster. Agriculture is…

Travel makes all places equal, they’re just points on a map you can move between in comfort. But those points are also where people live. So I think you have this constant tension introduced at the heart of society,…

The bushfires showed me two big things. That the conservative project to turn society into a collection of disconnected individuals has largely succeeded. We don’t see ‘society’ any more, our response to the bushfires…

I wonder if we see this contradiction of our culture, as one that worships the free movement of travel, for ourselves. And the locking up and restriction of movement of others who try to emulate us. Know what that…

We’ve spent 50 years flirting with one catastrophic idea: that society doesn’t exist, it’s just a collection of separate individuals. It explains our massive and ongoing accumulation of debt, the increase in family…

Panic and smugness (at the panic) are phase 1 of the pandemic. I’m waiting for phase 2, crowd funding for ‘hero’ doctors and nurses. Phase 3, people drive utes of canned food and toilet paper to victims. Um...

Here’s why we need philosophers so badly. (And we don’t get this, in my experience.) Philosophy studies ideas. Ideas are what society is made out of. Whenever society is confused, it always - without exception - means…

I wonder if the Chinese view of the world might make us notice what populists we really are. Nothing will make you more popular in our society than outrage against the establishment, against tradition and bureaucracy…

Populism to me is far and away the most dangerous virus in society, and I don’t think we see its full symptoms. From a recent post I saw on coronavirus in Oz. Populism includes ‘noble’ things like donating hundreds of…

I did an experiment this morning because I'm sick of the 'hoarding' idea around toilet paper. I got up early and went to observe the rumoured 6am rush to buy fresh supplies at the local Coles. It was real, maybe 20-30…

I’ve posted lots here about the wisdom of crowds, the now well known phenomenon where crowds, under the right conditions, are smarter than any of the people in them. What smug people with superiority complexes are…

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…

Some people think it's mad to shut down society for this virus. Maybe they don't know maths. I think this guy maybe misunderstands flattening the curve - it's meant to be a reduction in infections, not just spreading…

Try this reality filter. These shelves are empty because the crowd already knows the future. Lockdown. The crowd knows, people really do refuse to believe that. They think the crowd is dumb. They speak of the crowd as…

I keep coming back to the shops because it’s much bigger than shopping. It’s a window into the group mind. Take this meme, this is the populism virus in action. Complex social, collective problem, highly individualised…

The exponential function in action. It took 3 months for the first 100,000 people to be infected with Covid-19. It took 12 days for the second 100,000. It's taken 4 days for the 3rd 100,000. As the WHO says, if you…

I'm sure I sound like The Grinch sometimes. But this teddy bears in windows thing. Doesn't it just encourage people to leave their homes and wander through the neighbourhood, in large numbers? Spotted last night locally…

We had world wars that lasted 4-5 years, and what happened on the other side of those? The greatest ‘economic growth’ in world history, usually shuffling winners and losers at the same time. The people who have been the…

After the pandemic is over, we could readjust peoples’ pay based on need instead of power. Those who had to work all through it are obviously the most essential people in society and should be paid the most into the…

If you're at home looking for something to do, play this game designed by one of the world's top labs, to help design a drug against Covid-19. It may lead to a drug within a month.This is serious science, crowdsourcing…

One thing i'm enjoying right now is how the people who are the real brains and muscle of society are coming into the limelight, while the celebrities, sports stars and shock jocks disappear into their country estates.…

Latour brilliantly explores connections between Covid-19 and climate change, and how both result from us excluding non-humans from our definitions of society. And what that means about where we go from here.…

It's struck me that the idea of being alone and doing nothing has scared many people - there's a sort of frenzy of in-home entertainment being invented, that and increased booze, a frenzy of stimulation. It feels fake…

Viruses are literally like rock stars - moving beyond the 'germs' idea. They begin looking like a threat to society, and they really are in those early times, upsetting ways of life. Like early Elvis. Then society/our…

Always was a dipshit, one of the 'this is alarmism' crowd. Now at 65,000 deaths, only 3 weeks later.

Re-watching Smokey and the Bandit (Kell's idea). Bit of fun, Jackie Gleason steals the show. The same theme runs so deep in America, over and over again. The man against the establishment. Got me looking at road…

One of Australia’s leading financial analysts, not a Leftie of any kind, has been saying for a long time that communism is the only answer for the world. I don’t think communism is necessarily the answer, but what he’s…

It astounds me that we've only been isolating for a few weeks and already some people are saying it's too hard. Ffs, our ancestors lived through nearly 10 YEARS of food rationing in the last world war, and 4-5 years of…

Here's why I think the idea of staying at home in social isolation is such a drama for many people. It goes to the deep roots of our culture. We are compulsive travellers. Being at home - being grounded, being present -…

They did it 100 years ago. They didn't even have many communications technologies to stay in contact with one another or be entertained. They were resilient. And they went hard, and early, and in multiple layers, and…

Oz numbers plummeting. Elimination has to be tried, any other option means maybe 2 years of what we have now, which will cripple society. All pandemic strategies are actually elimination strategies - you have to…

This cracked me up (thanks Alex). This is our pause to think time, in lockdown. Why does Covid-19 destroy the economy? Because we're too mobile in how we live. I say what we call the economy is actually our culture of…

I post about the pandemic a lot because to my mind, it's a true existential threat, not just to some people but to our societies as a whole. We can distract ourselves from it for a while with entertainment, but that…

Virgin is just one example of something some have observed in this lockdown. How few businesses of any size had any reserves to buffer them through difficult times. Our business models are too often rape the business…

Speaking to a 20-something this week about why they weren't following the social restrictions. "My age group doesn't die of this". It all comes back to this graph. People overwhelmingly read it as individuals - what is…

For years we've had to endure zealots tell us society isn't real, only individuals are real. Free market, libertarian hocus pocus. Then suddenly, they get their wish in lockdown, because everybody is just an individual…

I keep coming back to one insight from Camus. Humans are not free, because there are pestilences. The thing that annoys me most is the choice we're being asked to make between 'normal life' and lockdowns. Normal life is…

On the one hand, you had an economist saying that the cost of lockdowns exceeds the benefits, and causes more human suffering than it relieves through loss of social life, livelihood, health etc. Valid argument. On the…

Related to my previous post, I'd be interested how people would answer this question. Is it better to not disrupt society so comprehensively, as we're doing now, and let more people die of Covid-19 to minimise the…

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…

The reason I left the university sector after nearly 20 years there was this. Supposed to be the custodian of society's ideas, but instead a gravy train milked by senior staff for exorbitant salaries, and utter contempt…

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…

On Health vs Economy again. 'Economy' just means the way we do things now. The obvious answer is - do them differently. We don't have to shut down society, we can reshape it to work differently. It's already happening.…

These lockdowns are crippling society, hey? https://time.com/5819507/crime-drop-coronavirus/

The main evidence we have of ancient cultures is overwhelmingly about their ways of dealing with death. Death was the centre of their cultures, it gave everything meaning. For us death has become a disaster to be…

'The economy' is about 100 years old. It was invented from a single number. Today it's common to replace the idea of society with the economy. We've seen that clearly all through the pandemic, where the economy was even…

Another great investigation of why supermarket shelves emptied (hint: it wasn't 'panic buying'). It's also the same reason we had a pandemic: not a virus, but our just-in-time society. We're now trying to save the wrong…

How's that for a 1.5-metre gap. Another headline said 'no hugging mums on Mothers Day' (if you're visiting mum). The problem with choosing a controlled adaptation strategy is, you can't control society. And the controls…

Right now we're hearing a lot about how kids' education is being damaged by them not being in school. One of society's greatest secrets though is that, no matter which way you look at the data, schools make no…

I'm still bemused at the number of people who find sheltering in their homes a type of torture. All the stuff about 'mental health', from the simple act of staying at home a while? This is where I think we need to have…

I feel explanations of domestic violence rarely talk about the domestic part of the term, focusing mostly on the violence. To me it's a violence intrinsically linked to our ideas of domesticity, not just to gender roles…

I only recently discovered that Beelzebub translates as "Lord of the Flies". A story of our populist time, what happens when you let society be only individuals.

Like many people I've been baking bread recently. It made me think about how we understand the world with models, mostly metaphors. For example our model of society tends to be little people-atoms that aggregate…

An indication of how 'the science' is just a political phrase designed to stop people actually looking at it, is that our PM can call powerful and effective public health measures 'hiding under the doona', and not one…

Lots of talk about mental health and the pandemic today. I offended some people by saying that the idea we should scale back quarantine to protect peoples' mental health means we must have become a nation of snowflakes.…

Here's a suggestion. The thing to fix our economies? Frugality. We don't save, as individuals or as businesses. Our economies collapse at the first whiff of trouble, in days. It's not just our mental health that lacks…

I was amazed they decided to push on with exams, just seems another example of how schools and kids are cannon fodder in this pandemic. I say don't be fooled by the appearance of care for education in Australia -…

AC/DC preceded and played alongside punk and grunge, and were way rawer and harder than either of them. They make The Sex Pistols look like what they really were - a manufactured boy band pretending to be rebels. And…

Most of our antibiotics were found in the soil. There are potentially millions of other antibiotics sitting in the soil. We’ve had almost no luck isolating others. The reason teaches us a lot about ‘germs’ I think. The…

You can see this right now. The same people who won't trust the experts on climate change, because it means interrupting 'the economy', are the same people who trust the experts on Covid-19, when they can make them say…

I’d hope what’s happening in the US, UK and Brazil right now might finally stop people calling a society an ‘economy’. I’m not confident, this delusion is very deep. We’ve taken one way of measuring society and made it…

"She'll be right" is sold as some great Australian laid-back attitude. I don't think it's that, I think it's the way Australia avoids thinking. It's a type of fatalism - if we have a hard problem, it's easier to ignore…

Aboriginals understood animals and plants and what they prefer, and would shape the landscape to appeal to the animals and plants. It was a contract, they'd provide what the animals and plants needed, and would get to…

What is it that makes us so passionate about quarantine? We've been doing it for thousands of years. I think it's because moving around, whether that's travel or even 'going to' work, IS now our culture. I don't think…

Next time you hear somebody whine about the current restrictions, remember that the people who do the important work in society have been at work the whole time. No luxury of lockdown for them. So who are these whiners?…

Covid-19. Where libertarians protest not being allowed free access to the society, that they say doesn't exist.

Talk of the economy being in desperate trouble mistakes the economy for the budget. The old normal was a tiny group of each society hoovering up most of the money, and the 'economy' then unable to function because the…

Civilisations last 336 years on average. Australian Aborigines were left out of this graphic - their civilisation lasted 100,000 years. (They would have gone right off the edge of the graph, by about a metre and a…

How to fix all the world economies? Simple. 1. Stop believing in economies. 2. Remember money was invented by government as a tool for people to exchange things with. 3. Redistribute the government's money to all people…

"The Age of Chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold the generous loyalty to rank and sex,…

Bad people win because they're always strategising, to get an outcome. Good people too often just make symbolic gestures of outrage, grief, togetherness etc. As if the real problem is their feelings, and telling…

The age of crowds. Even microbes - a pandemic is a crowd of microbes. Research on crowds suggests individuals hate to touch except in relationships. Why people walking along a busy footpath do a sophisticated ‘step and…

Public debates and protests are battles of ideas, using humans as troops. Ideas are beings, they’re alive. They enslave us. Education is supposed to free us from that slavery (it rarely does today). I don’t think ideas…

“Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people...". Yes Daniel, but transgender women, to my knowledge, don't menstruate. Which is what Rowling is…

“Men will never establish any equality with which they will be contented...when inequality of condition is the common law of society, the most marked inequalities do not strike the eye; when everything is nearly on the…

Humans invented parliaments and courts, where two sides debate the merits of issues, to stop arguments infecting all of society. I think the reason our public debates have now become so polarised into two sides is…

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…

I think the key thing at any protest is the banners, not the people. 'Division' is the clash of ideas, not people. It's like a maths problem that you haven't solved, unresolved ideas mess up society. We tend to form…

I suggest Tarde as a guide in these ‘economic’ times. The economy you have is nothing more than the social conversation you have. They’re not 2 things. An unequal society is a society not having conversations, it really…

I think the most disgusting reframing of the pandemic from the ‘open up’ crowd is the ‘you have to live your life’ bullshit. As if society has a collective case of man flu, and we all just need to grow a pair and get…

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…

Believers in the economy do actually think of society as a machine, with numbers that they tweak by turning the knobs. Nailed it.

School often seems like preparation for 'real life'. I think we need to flip that - society (real life) is just a collection of ideas. Working through a set of problems at school is not practice for real life - it is…

Did you know medieval peasants worked fewer hours and had more holidays than we do? A job is a stupid way to distribute our wealth. The unemployment 'crisis' is a crisis of the idiot idea of the economy, where society's…

Stonehenge is about 5000 years old. It's mysterious, it fills us with awe. Our own landscape was crafted over more than 100,000 years. It's not clear if how it was done is now lost to us, no other culture lasts more…

Superb. Latour uses the analogy of The Truman Show to talk about the 'economisation of society'. Where all the relations that make up social life are corralled into a handful of 'economic' relations, using millions of…

'Cutting red tape' is seen as the way to 'get the economy going'. What's hilariously perverse about this is - do people even know what all that bureaucracy is doing? It's people converting social life into data, to…

Our main reference point to the planet, an address, is defined by roads, pathways to other places. Our own ‘place’ is defined by movement to other places. We’re not grounded. Our torture in a global pandemic is to be…

If you Google ‘subsistence’, you usually get pics like this, self-sufficiency stuff. It’s revealing for me, because it suggests that to subsist you have to withdraw from society. Society is about movement and economic…

Humans’ deepest passion is to copy or imitate. Baby names are a great example. Despite parents likely believing they’re choosing the name they personally love the best, in fact they’re often just copying everybody else…

Society had 2 choices to try to get 'normal life' back. Staying at home, away from each other. Or going back to semi-normal, with a whole range of social distancing restrictions. It's proven incapable of option 2, I see…

All living things when under threat seek shelter, if they can’t fight off the threat. If all of society had sheltered for even 6 weeks when this pandemic started, it would now be over. Why didn’t it? Because it can’t,…

The obvious evidence that conservative politics worldwide was simply bought out by the big end of town, is that these parties have the same 3 policies no matter what crisis or situation is in front of them. Cut taxes,…

New Zealand (yellow) and Australia (the other graph). The ‘we’re doing just as well as NZ with even fewer restrictions!’ crowd have gone a bit quiet.

This work by Greer was criminally neglected I think. Like all of her stuff it didn’t slot neatly into the position of either warring side of the day, so it got ignored or completely misunderstood. Her main idea here is…

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…

We teach people subjects, like maths and science and English, but we don't teach them how society actually works. How all that knowledge works in everyday life. So there's this growing group of people who, without that…

When Michel Serres died last year, the French President paid tribute. The French revere their scholars. I think society is literally made of ideas, and if you don't understand them they'll destroy you. Great scholars…

When you look at the history of disease, most of it, including plagues, comes back to the most basic things. Clean water, clean air, healthy food, no crowding, no abject poverty, adequate shelter. All of these diseases…

Have been driving to work because of the pandemic. One thing I’ve noticed again is just how many people completely ignore road rules. Had a person go past me yesterday who was doing about 140 km/h. Couple of P-platers…

Jeans for Genes, one of those fundraising things that people give to, often without having the first idea where the money goes. I don’t like it for 3 reasons, one that genetic approaches to disease are nearly always a…

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…

I think Australia has 'Americanised' significantly in the last 40 years. Take our approach to the pandemic. 40 years ago a pandemic triggered a public health response, where large teams of experts were mobilised to…

This reeaaaalllly irritates the modern sexist culture warrior. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025203?query=featured_home

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.…

Just dip into this video in a few spots, no need to watch the lot if you'd rather not. This is the sort of conversation going on out there, these views are mobilising. I can't even find it funny, when we turned society…

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…

Going back to this reality filter. Society is literally just ideas fighting each other. Not people - ideas use people to further their agendas. Ideas are living things, they're not stuck in books. Unless you train hard…

Listening to Hugh talk about this book. Saying that sociability is the core of humanity (agree), and that love and compassion is what creates sociability (fundamentally disagree). The usual idea that we have to be…

More than 25% of Americans believe Bill Gates is using vaccines for mind control. When will we start taking seriously the destruction of our institutions (education, government, journalism etc.), creating this lunatic…

And we're away... https://twitter.com/i/status/1296225718628581377

Brilliant example here of how to do public health in a pandemic. The traffic light system, like the fire danger system. Takes it completely out of the hands of politicians, and culture warrior alarmists, and it helps…

Do we have an idea of ‘we’, or only ‘I’? Covid created a tidal wave of personal grievance. Pandemics do that I think, hold the mirror up to society.

I'm so sick and tired of what passes for public debate. The bushfire enquiry recommendations published today. 76 recommendations. All the Neanderthals want to talk about is 'hazard reduction burning', the tabloid…

I have nothing against the defence forces, but a thought experiment...we would never expect the defence forces to make a profit or even break even. It’d be a ridiculous expectation, we know they’re performing a public…

The beliefs are scary, the fact millions sign up to them is even scarier. Conspiracies abound when you destroy the basic institutional infrastructure of society.

Wanted to post this separately. Kenny is part of that anti-lockdown brigade who are trying to turn the pandemic into some ridiculous culture war. Now they've realised lockdowns are actually hugely popular, so the next…

The anthropologist Wade Davis made a fantastic observation about America's obsession with the individual, how it almost completely rejects the notion of society or the group. He said it was the sociological equivalent…

Why we need to think? Society is made of ideas. Ideas aren't just 'about' things, they are what all things are made of. Like a car engine, what's it made of? You could say metal and oil etc. But that metal and oil exist…

Remember during the big fires, the culture warriors telling us arsonists were to blame, not climate change? Guess how many were found to be caused by arsonists? Zero. Not a single one.

The Economy Crowd. Not only spending their pandemic happily sheltered from the virus while undermining public health action for the rest of us, like demanding borders open to help mates in the tourism and airline…

Notice the same people who argue through Right to Life that every life is precious and must be protected at all costs, are quite happy to say 'let people die of Covid to protect our economy'. The Economy Crowd. If…

I'm gobsmacked that even educated people have swallowed the political 'herd immunity' strategy from the Economy Crowd. It was invented by a small dirty tricks unit in Boris Johnson's office.

When a pollie talks about debt and deficit, does it scare you? It shouldn't, it's a steaming pile of horseshit. We have Scrooges in charge, who need to open the country's fucking wallet and start investing in society…

Deloitte, one of the big business consulting firms: "The underlying equation is simple. The greater the success against the virus, the greater the success in protecting economies against the pandemic." Anybody who tells…

"Specialist referrals from GPs, and indeed GP workload, have fallen dramatically". Society is apparently coming to an end because the work (and income) of one professional group has been interrupted. Everybody has been…

6 of our 8 States and territories are sitting there as good as free of Covid, while the remaining 2 are held hostage to a culture war, led by the PM, about scoring cheap political points and undermining the public…

Lots of prominent Australians signing this one. This is a tipping point for Australian society, I think. Do we want to head down the American road? https://nb.tai.org.au/tax_investment_price?recruiter_id=854569

Judith Butler's interview about trans issues has been getting a lot of attention. I criticise a lot of transgender thinking, and wanted to say why a bit more over time. Transgender is defined as a person who feels that…

We call the Chinese authoritarian. But maybe their more unified collective system is what they actually want. And what we actually want too, we just won't admit it. "The absence of vandalism is a very appealing aspect…

This budget in October will be generation-defining. The government can either spend up hugely, investing in society for decades to come. Thankfully it at least seems to understand now that the 'debt for future…

Trump just nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the US. Mother of 7, reads the Constitution as an 'originalist' (i.e. as if Moses had brought it down from the mountain), loves guns, hates abortion, hates…

Overthinking. Most of us live in our thoughts, that's true. But true thinking is noticing that those thoughts are not us at all, they're ideas that have infected us and won't go away. You don't escape overthinking by…

Karma-19 bites. https://twitter.com/brentterhune/status/1311921853263470594?s=21

I'm over the battle on this one. Heaven forbid society just work an hour LESS every day, fuck as if we could do that. Let's change the clocks instead, be good little wage slaves, and stuff up everybody's circadian…

Thanks @[738682522:2048:Nicole] for this ripper. The herd immunity crowd include even quite educated people. It’s a dangerous fantasy, a political bastardisation of science. https://apple.news/A_kBEJSlMSZO0uRb1TKoErg

Does this look like a well man to you? https://twitter.com/i/status/1313263278613827585

The parties that say they value individual initiative more than anything else, never give anything to most individuals. The budget last night could have been targeted at individuals, by giving them money. Instead the…

You might think there’s no depths to which Fox News wouldn’t stoop. But look at the host’s face when our own Miranda Devine suggests old people are selfish for not dying of Covid. Even they were stunned. The…

All of the ways we say 2020 is horrendous - loss of social life, loss of income and jobs, people dying of infectious disease etc., are just descriptions of the lives other people live in the world all the time. In fact…

Look at that line I’ve highlighted with yellow. This is staggering. It shows that the productivity of the workforce has exploded during the pandemic. What that basically means is that the million or more jobs lost were…

Seeing the world. It's like porn, seeing sex. If we just wanted to see the world, we could use photos. But we have to modify the world, to make it able to be seen by us. We turn the world into geographical and cultural…

What caused all this in Europe? The Economy crowd in their summer demanding everything open up. They're at Dan Andrews every day here saying the same thing. An *extra* 7000 people will die in the UK before Xmas because…

Left, Right - all irrelevant. The fastest way to win votes in just about every country is to smash your institutions. Society is eating itself. That’s what populism is, to want celebrities to lead you, bypassing…

Did you know 80% of all businesses fail? Instead of blaming the virus and public health action against it for the global emergency right now, let’s blame the idiot idea of trying to make business the basis of society.…

Fake or Fortune is one of my favourite shows. Where they investigate whether paintings people own are genuine or fakes. What’s most interesting for me goes back to imitation, or copying, copies or imitations are worth…

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 is a statement from NSW Health yesterday: “The only way to find new cases and prevent further transmission is to increase testing." That’s just obviously wrong. There are all sorts of ways to prevent transmission…

When we compare public transport with private transport, why don’t we ever question - why transport? Why is that the given? Why do we always have to be moving people around in large numbers? Why does everybody always…

It took generations to build cathedrals, started by fathers and finished by sons or even grandsons. We struggle to do anything that lasts longer than the 3 years between elections. So what’s to learn here? I think that…

Germans are often seen as efficient, orderly, logical etc. Actually I think that’s a misdiagnosis, you understand so much about Germany when you understand they’re a nation of craftsmen. That’s where their apparent…

Humans always have hierarchies, because humans value things, and those values create hierarchies - some things are better than other things. I think there’s a misunderstanding of democracy as being ‘rule by the people’,…

I think we can safely gauge the quality of the anti-lockdown crowd, that they haven’t noticed that the lockdown is over. Not the sharpest tools in the shed.

Americans have voted in a QAnon person. Pay attention people, get away from all the Left and Right rubbish. Populism is a lethal social virus, it will destroy every society that catches it. Starting with the Left and…

My photo for every modern election. The Simpsons know. It’s not Left vs Right, that stuff is long over. People are at war with their own institutions. Populism. They’ll vote for anybody who promises to stick it to the…

I’ve said pandemics reboot societies. It’s not really Joe Biden who ultimately beat Donald Trump. It was the virus. Trump was cruising to another victory until Covid. Pandemics do this because they force every belief we…

Watching 4Corners about the blokey, sexist culture amongst federal LNP ministers last night, made me think again that we’re maybe looking at the relations between the sexes in the wrong way. The deeper problem to me…

In NAIDOC week, read Gammage’s book to completely change how you think about this whole topic. Aboriginal Australia was nothing like what you might have been taught or imagined. It was a manufactured Garden of Eden, a…

That beautiful moment when a female federal cabinet minister is asked if Canberra's blokey culture is still bad. And the bloke-PM just talks right over the top of her. She then says my PM is terrific. Good girl, know…

What your health care workers look like when you try to replace your society with an economy.

For those who wondered about the full-house crowd at the footy, this is what ‘balancing’ the economy with public health looks like. We shouldn’t be surprised.

It usually takes a decade or so to develop a new vaccine. With funding it’s now been done inside a year. You could make a list of things we’ve been told society can’t afford - free childcare, free dentistry, affordable…

Around 50% of the art in the world’s galleries is estimated to be fake. Nobody even notices. Art in our time, including music, is obsessed with originality, with ‘authenticity’. The worst sin is to do ‘cover’ versions.…

With tens of thousands already to die over Christmas in Europe, the same ‘open up’ crowd like Boris are lifting restrictions, seeding another new wave of death in the New Year. I started this pandemic saying the idea we…

Meanwhile in the UK, Boris negotiates a deal with Covid to stop infecting people over Christmas. "Happy Christmas, look what I got you - a lethal infection!" will reverberate around the land. Funeral directors looking…

Good on him. Domestic flights should have the same rule. This is one way to identify and hammer the pockets of populist lunacy in society. Make their beliefs have consequences. If they want to enjoy society's freedoms,…

If somebody is born a girl, but says they feel like a boy, isn't that saying that your sex is something you can feel? Which is exactly the point trans-activists argue against. It's circular thinking. I'm male, and I…

The danger of identity politics, which is neither a Left or Right thing, just as populism isn’t, is that it takes a fragile social commons, and splinters it into a million subjective grievances. It happened with the…

Keyboard warriors. We make fun of them, but actually they’re a a sign of real human progress I think. Society is built from ideas. Ideas cause all disagreement, violence and war. When we don’t fight ideas, they turn us…

The argument that people working from home damages ‘workplace culture’? You go to work to work, not to have a culture. Workplace culture is just all the petty interpersonal squabbling you have to deal with when you…

What if it’s not loners who have a problem, but people in groups? What if people in groups are those who aren’t mature or strong enough to discover and strengthen their own individuality, trapped inside an endless game…

No clearer evidence that the core human activity is imitation than what we’re seeing with young women and men, in this increasing imitation of appearance. If you look hard I think you’ll find that nearly 99% of human…

In the UK, millions of children will potentially contract Covid in the next week, take it home to extended families over Christmas and kill some of those family members. In both Germany and the Netherlands, they’re…

When you boil an egg, the water is a heat transfer medium. It takes a point source of strong heat - the hot plate - and distributes it gradually and evenly around the whole egg. This to me is also the function of…

A public service announcement, because I doubt they'll spend much telling people this. NSW Health advises that if you're in crowded shops this Christmas, please wear a mask. Notice, no rule saying you should, which…

Al Capone (yes, the gangster) ran a free soup kitchen for the unemployed in the 1930s (in the pic). It fed several thousand unemployed people 3 times a day. When people can't eat or shelter without a job, you have the…

If you wanted electrical work done, you’d ask an electrician. But experts in areas like science, governance, and public administration are told their views are just ‘opinions’ like anybody else’s. This contempt for…

William Topley. In the 1930s one of the first researchers on the idea of herd immunity. The idea that if enough of us are immune to a disease, it will prevent it spreading at epidemic levels. This is why it pays to do…

I often think about the world wars, when I hear people talk about the inconveniences of the pandemic. 6 years of this. I imagine somebody at that time saying the fight against the enemy was a restriction on their…

The toilet paper ‘panic buying’ idea to me shows something entirely different to what people say. There’s very little panic, and most people aren’t buying truckloads of toilet paper. Just a bit more, they’re…

Just wow. Read this to see how the pandemic, unaffordable housing, toilet paper disappearing, economic booms and busts and nearly everything else in society is due to the drive towards ‘efficiency’. A lack of social…

Modern cars are too well made, and too comfortable. I say this because I think the reason cars are destroying our communities is because they’re not just modes of transport. Cars are the way people never have to leave…

I couldn’t recommend this show highly enough. Gripping Brit crime thriller, but way more than that. The Brits are peerless with this stuff, so much more sophisticated than the black and white moralising coming out of…

“In Nothing We Trust”, the motto of our times. Without institutions, superstition, chaos and conspiracies replace trust. Have a look at the graphic for the US alone. The definition of an institution is “stable, valued,…

Many people look at politicians as evidence the world is broken. Me, it’s more people like the couple of anti-social dickheads who walked my street last night randomly pushing over peoples’ garbage bins, forcing people…

Was at the cricket yesterday. Made me think about crowds again. Have a look at the faces in any crowd, they don’t match the usual assumption about crowds, that the ‘mob’ is stupid and acts with one big, dumb mind. Every…

Evidence lurks in interesting places. We wonder how society ends up split between millions of ordinary folk and ‘elites’. In the last 30 years almost no movie that people actually went to see has won best picture at the…

An observation. It’s very difficult to get people to engage with ideas, unless they see it as a battle between two sides. Left versus Right, Trump versus just about anything, Migrants versus home-grown, Men versus…

Droughts and flooding rains. Mackellar’s line was a bit of misty-eyed fondness. But ironically, droughts cause flooding rains, and flooding rains cause droughts. Both are symptoms of how the Australian landscape has…

D.H. Lawrence used to say that love has two sides, and ignoring either of them leads to perversion. An embracing, inclusive side, and a side that pushes away, that respects the unknowable in the other. ‘Tough’ love.…

Is it a bit peculiar that we call ourselves a materialistic society, but consumerism is actually about throwing material things away? If we valued material things - if we actually were a materialistic society - we…

Watching Brexit debates. Every single person, from member of the public through to Prime Minster, says ‘we should...’. But the whole country can’t agree on any of it. There is no ‘we’. Isn’t Brexit trying really hard to…

102 ways (and counting) turning your government off destroys your society (thanks @[100002452996169:2048:Nigel]).

The Pledge is a UK debating show on SKY. Here in Oz the ABC is doing something a bit similar, though not as good, with The Drum. This is one area where ultra-conservatives have been so clever. What engages people is…

Tennis was my main sport as a kid. I’ve been interested in Federer regularly being called the greatest player of all time. The statistics don’t bear that out, Margaret Court is like the Bradman of tennis, nobody else is…

Can we as a society discuss this fantasy? The fantasy that countries can exist separately. It's poison, it will literally destroy us. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-brexit-fantasy-goes-down-in-tears

Two of the most destructive concepts I think of our times are nature and culture. They’re glittering generalities, absolutely meaningless. The idea of nature has prevented us from understanding the natural world, and…

Is it society, or nature, when it takes 2.46 terawatt hours of electricity to keep in touch on social media?

Watching this story unfold made me think again about our gambling culture. It's not just limited to what we see as traditional gambling? Get-rich-quick is like a society motto. How many people churned multiple homes in…

There’s talk that the ‘organisational culture’ at the banks needs to change. Consultants make millions trotting out ‘culture’ as an explanation of struggling companies, because it’s bullshit. You don’t get paid to have…

At first glance this looks like a boring list of numbers. But this shows the age distribution of voters across all Australian electorates and States. It’s a window into who we really are as a country. If you look, what…

I find Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray one of the strongest metaphors of the times we live in. It's a bit of a theme for me right now, because I think most of our big problems as a society are being misdiagnosed. Our…

It's nice when your theme of the week plays out repeatedly in the press in front of us. Doubt the elderly run our society? Look closely.

Every year engineers release a report card on the health of US infrastructure. (They do the same in Australia.) D+, not pretty. It’d be the same in many countries, we tend to build things and then just assume they never…

Here’s another way to look at a society without tradition and meaningful institutions. Williams describes the end point of doing that, the young, and the old and frail get thrown on the scrap heap, with only the healthy…

Spinning tops should be impossible. They move, and don’t move. They’re stable, and unstable. All at the same time. For me, they’re telling us something super important. Whenever we come up against a binary argument,…

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…

“Bohemian Rhapsody is more a crowd—pleaser then cinematic excellence.” Film critic. I still don’t think people see enough how the split in our wider world is all there in a statement like that. The ‘crowd’ is not able…

Good on them. Let’s get the grown ups back, we can send the culture warriors our ‘thoughts and prayers’ for their loss.

Spiders aren’t responsible for the fear of spiders. A society saturated with outrage will produce outrageous injustices.

In an election year, it's interesting to again look at the 'coalition'. Have mentioned on here before that I think there's hardly a single point of agreement between the Liberal and National parties. One is a free…

The genius of England for me is the common law. One of the things shock jocks get very wet in the underpants about is what they call ‘activist judges’, judges making law. But that IS common law. Law made from…

Scott Morrison, talking about tax cuts again this morning. "We want to give people back more of their own money." This is classic ultra-conservative framing at work, the 'tax relief' nonsense, gotta call it out. There…

Macca taps into the ‘Big Lap’ culture. Where travel becomes an accumulation of places, like collecting stamps. I’ve been everywhere man, the old song. It all seems a bit phoney and desperate, as if you can somehow…

What I mean by the idea that we don't occupy space any more. We live 'in' space instead, we see the world as one big set of coordinates, a map. Look at this Greek village. Nothing there is built to allow easy passage…

This is the average date that countries in most major parts of the world came into existence. Notice Europe has the oldest date here - it was from Europe that the big modern empires came, and it was them who divided the…

There’s an old (sexist) saying that if you have people by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. There’s real wisdom there I think, notice how people rarely agree on major issues, and yet society today is the…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

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…

Porn has sullied the word, but one thing Tarde did that is unique is reshape all of our ideas, around the concept of penetration. There isn’t a part of life that doesn’t rely on the idea of individual isolated ‘bits’…

The face of ‘sovereign borders’. Sovereignty is the issue of our time, it’s the most dangerous and difficult idea in world history. It also explains climate change, you get 2-for-1. But then, most of us don’t study…

Imagine you have a child who is sensitive to loud noises. Then, you go and buy everybody in the house their own drum kit, and ask them to play all day. Then imagine unhinged, violent people who feel like we’re being…

How would you answer if somebody asked, who runs Australia? Or who runs the world, or the place where you work, or your household? My guess is many would name a person or people to answer each of those. My answer is -…

I have a daughter now old enough to drive. It's a tension for me, because: 1. I don't think kids should be driving cars. 2. I think society already has way too many cars and drivers. 3. The greatest killer of…

Metrology isn’t well known. It’s the science of measurement. There are lots of debates about how ideas and words and numbers and theories ‘apply’ to the world. None of them do. Metrology is what builds the bridge…

Could you see ‘society’ without some sort of screen, a TV or computer, for example? What if that’s all society is, a representation of ourselves, on screens? How else would you ‘see’ society? We’re the actors AND the…

4 minutes of wonder. Underneath the veneer of anxiety and apocalypse, there are patterns in the world and society that we don’t see. But when somebody finds them, everything else falls into place.…

Elections and leaders to me are like picking the colour of your car. Society is the car, a very complex piece of engineering, needing large numbers of smart people, hard work and tradition to keep running. It doesn’t…

This is cute, but I think there’s something very important about it at the same time. It’s the same thinking that points at a map and says ‘you are here’. None of us live in maps. And none of us live in space, like…

More reframing. The people of the UK can’t agree, on Brexit. Is it a crisis, or could disagreement be the basis of a society, not just agreement? Compromise as the basis for society, rather than the false gods of…

I have no problem with the old, that’ll soon be me too. But we need to see society for what it is, and at the moment society is outrageously skewed to the old at the expense of the young. There isn’t one political issue…

Being a homeowner teaches you, I think, the same thing civil engineers and plumbers know. That civilisation is mostly about drainage. Get the drainage wrong, even a small amount, and everything crumbles. I love the…

I’m proud to say I’m an expert on committees, it’s a big part of my job, I get paid to do it. Some observations about committees from years of working with them: 1) everybody hates them, but take them away and people…

I think I drove some of my friends mad by always asking ‘what does ‘we’ mean?’ We is one of society’s genuine mysteries. What is it? Yes it’s all of us, as a group, but how does that group actually hold together and…

Selfishness - it’s all about me - versus altruism - it’s all about you. It’s a bizarre choice? I think the animal kingdom shows a much more sophisticated range of relationships, which are all part of society too:…

I still think we often have society upside down, in our thinking. Take kids, and school. We often assume society is made and driven by adults. I think it’s the opposite. Not only does our own social circle of adult…

Politics as sport, an example. Brexit again. Divided into pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit forces, which is how politics should work. However outside politics, this is also how the public is tending to line up, backing their…

Watched some election talk today. It comforts me thinking that society is way too complex for anybody to really be able to lead or run. No person would know how to keep society running for even 5 minutes. Elections and…

Metaphors shape how we understand and act in the world. The overwhelmingly dominant metaphor for organisations and society is the ‘top and bottom’ metaphor. Leaders are at the top, everybody else is at the bottom, and…

I'm sure that there are profound things about our society that are unspoken. My strong guess is that the idea of touch would reveal a lot of those profound things. There's a real anxiety I sense around the idea of…

All political movements are grounded in promoting particular interests. I think this helps focus what we see in politics, always look to the actual interests involved. The ALP: - is the oldest political party in…

All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players... (Shakespeare, As You Like It) I think Shakespeare’s genius is that this is literally true, not a metaphor or analogy. Society is like a huge story or…

More myths of the middle. The middle class, it probably doesn’t exist. The spatial metaphors around middle or centre are misleading I think. Yes you can find a middle point between two other points, in space. But there…

I defend institutions. It seems a boring and unintelligible cause to some, for me it’s the last defence against total social chaos. Read this, what’s going on out there, in this in case schools. All of our institutions…

Consumerism, and the great piles of rubbish it produces, is often said to be evidence that we’re a ‘materialistic’ society. But I think it shows exactly the opposite. We consume and throw away so much because we don’t…

Australians see government as a service provider. Something to make sure the basic infrastructure of society is in place, working and affordable. I think it’s a very healthy framework for government, and have actually…

It’s the blue and green rows here, and one of the purple, that I think are not well understood. It’s there that the presumption of innocence mostly lives, and also why you have the right to remain silent - silence has…

Teenagers’ bedrooms are maybe the perfect way to change how we think about climate change. Their habits create their HABITat, a much better word than ‘environment’. Environmental politics never really gets traction I…

The bullshit of positive thinking ideas. Just do it, be part of the solution etc. As if you’ll be happy by choosing to be happy, rather than happiness being the *result* of your life working well. Working well because…

If you think science produces ‘facts’ that tell us how the world is, and those facts speak for themselves, then like most scientists you’re probably horrified that we now live in a fake news society, where facts mean…

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…

Selfish and selfless. Another toxic false opposite, I think. As if we either look after ourselves, or look after others. If you frame it like that, you have no choice but to either be a dick to other people, or to be a…

I don’t like the term re-wilding, because it’s not about letting the landscape be ‘wild’, just about letting far more things live in it. It turns out all landscapes need as many animals, plants and people in them as…

At school you learn about compound interest. It's the basis of nearly all investment. It's an exponential function, which you can see in this graph. Which means it's a time bomb right at the core of our societies,…

What is it about Bill Shorten that people don't like? I have a feeling Shorten could be a great PM, very pragmatic, focused on results, in the long Labor tradition of investing in and building things. (Which the LNP…

The huge increase in early voting for elections, yeh nah. Election Day is a collective tradition or ritual, but pre-poll voting is making it an individualised thing. Vote when it’s most convenient it to you, customer…

Utopia hit a vein by focusing on infrastructure. But it’s interesting to think about why infrastructure has become such a political issue. Maybe because most of the wealth of the country has been channelled to the old,…

These are the 2 most significant PMs of my lifetime so far. I’m not really interested in comparing them as people, but one thing each of them said I think defines the debates Australia is still having. Hawke: At every…

10 thoughts about the election. 1. It’s not sport, nobody actually won or lost. Any party who reads election results as being about them, win or lose, will always get smashed by the people eventually. 2. The old still…

Who is ‘we’? Notice how often ‘the people’ are spoken about, as if that actually existed. Look at the faces in any crowd, different, each doing their own thing for their own reason. The world over people are trying to…

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…

I think these signs are a model for where democracy needs to head. Away from the unsolvable problems of representative government, where everybody argues about what 'the people' want', when nobody actually knows or can…

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…

Humans like to see themselves as separate to 'nature'. But have a look at how our societies exactly match what we call the natural world. Patterns. For centuries we had leaders like the Sun King, at the centre of…

One of the beautiful, profound things I learned from Michel Serres was about legends. Because the true humanities are absent from most peoples' education today, a legend can only seem like a made-up story. But Serres…

From cradle to grave, I think humans' most fundamental act is to copy, or imitate. In politics, school, shopping, fashion - everywhere. Have mentioned before that to try to go against the current trend is to be even…

I'm not a republican, for this reason. The monarchy is one of the few institutions left in society that still understands institutions. Listen to the Queen's words to Donald Trump: “After the shared sacrifices of the…

Here's more evidence that our society is run by (scared) old people. Do you know our two most trusted social institutions? Schools maybe? The legal system? Marriage? No. 1) Australian Federal Police. 2) State police…

Everyday social life is like weather, it can change from hour to hour, and politics follows short cycles too. So most of what we experience in daily life is these short-term patterns and cycles, changes in fashion, the…

Hard to describe some ideas in 10 words, but this one is a cracker, I think. Jacinda Ardern got a lot of press recently by saying economic growth would not be her government's sole measure of achievement. Some described…

One of the ironies of modern life is that the Soviets pioneered what every business now thinks is important. Strategic planning, 5-year plans. The ruins of Soviet Russia are like the ruins of most modern business, just…

Faces in crowds are a fascination for me. Mostly because when we talk about crowds we assume they're a dumb mob. But every picture you can find of a crowd will make a lie of that. If there are 1000 people there, you…

Anxiety is at plague levels. What if it has nothing to do with psychology, but with the loss of faith? Faith in reality being something bigger than us, that has its own patterns and reasons. Some call that God, and…

Capitalism, socialism, communism etc. Do any of these things even exist? Watching a debate on TV. They're spoken of like they're a computer program you plug into society, a type of operating system. I think all of these…

My Alexander friends use a physiological fact not well known in wider society. Your head and neck 'lead' your body - what happens in your body is determined by what's happening in your head and neck. Head leads, body…

I'm with Tom Gleeson on this one, the Logies have always been a complete joke, all about fatuously inflated egos looking to further careers etc. An interesting twist on this one though is that he may become the Trump of…

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…

The Madonna-whore complex is a condition attributed to men who can't find a woman both nurturing and desirable at the same time. It's real. I think this is the same complex all of society now has, it turns all issues…

I reckon every behaviour you can see on the road is matched by a different way people live and act in society. Have a look at this, our roads tell us every day how to solve society's problems. (It won't be individualism…

Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of Their Money) Bill 2019. I kid you not, the Bill is actually called that. The culture warrior virus has now infected legislation. Oh, and nobody…

I'd go even further than this article. 'Business' doesn't exist, it's a fantasy that was created at the same time as the fantasy of 'the economy'. What exists is people, with or without money, and their needs and…

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…

Society's deep tectonic plates. It occurred to me yesterday that most of the modern conservative agenda, of small government and lower taxes, is actually driven by the same people who opposed the separation of church…

This is the belief destroying our societies, that government and individuals are separate things. Just as countries didn't exist before there were international agreements, individuals didn't exist before we had…

Aristocrats are mocked for living privileged lives separated from basic reality. But - this is us. Our societies are the rich, privileged people on the planet. It's why social life is freaking us out right now, because…

I've posted several times about vitamin C, most recently how it's being used to cure sepsis. I think Linus Pauling was really onto something, you don't win 2 Nobel Prizes for being stupid. You need to take this outside…

In a society of ripped bodies and flabby minds (society struggles to solve its current issues), how do you workout our thinking? I think the law knows, and the fact the law is so disliked suggests it's the place to…

This is the next step for the 'sovereignty' movement. Sovereignty moves inside the individual. Seriously nasty in many ways, these people do things like shoot policeman asking for their driver's licence. Notice they…

This dam in Derbyshire is threatening to fail, dumping 300 million tonnes of water onto the town below. You could see this as an engineering or infrastructure problem, but our infrastructure is a group of social…

Michel Serres once called our times the "reign of the Beatles - the shit-eaters". (He loved the Beatles.) What he meant by that was obviously a play on words referring to beetles, who like to eat turds. And the…

How do you determine what's right and wrong? What's good and what's bad, or less good? In any situation, including what music you like, whether to send your kids to this or that school, etc. This question really…

We collectively turn a blind eye to the well-off getting handouts, but are scathing about the poor getting them. I wonder if it's because social life is intrinsically comparative and competitive, no matter how much we…

I still think the real political divide in society isn't Left versus Right. It's old versus young. Wealth is being funnelled to retirees, a time of life that used to be about slowing down. And society has no money to do…

NBN came and finished connecting my street last weekend. What struck me was that every worker was young and obviously from India, and they really knew their stuff, fantastic to watch them. And it made me think how…

It's liberating I think to stop seeing the news as a description of the world. The reason the news reads like the Apocalypse is the same reason the music industry pumps out pap artists now - both industries are…

One day I hope to convince people that maps are our culture. We see the world as a map. Travel is our way of exploring the map that wars put in place. That violence is our history.

Time began in 311 BC. Invented by this fella, Alexander the Great. Before him there was no 'river of time', where time 'flowed' along some linear path, there were just events, tied to geographical locations. The dynasty…

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…

This is a beautiful bathroom. The fascination with luxury scares me a bit. All civilisations that collapse flirt with luxury towards the end. I think what keeps a society alive is curiosity - questioning things to adapt…

Since the Second World War, the increasing prosperity of average people has been a mirage. We've looked and felt richer, but it's mostly the result of increasing levels of personal debt. While the well-off have taken…

Electric cars are a great step. But the bigger problem I think is - there are far, far too many cars. More mass/public transport options is an option, but even more than that is changing cities and towns so you don’t…

Here's another way I think to describe why maps are actually pretty sinister, and define our culture. Before maps, there was no 'local' and no 'global'. Anywhere you lived was a whole world to itself, it wasn't 'part'…

Was the problem with communism the idea, or the implementation? The idea is straight out of the Bible - a society based on sharing. (It's bizarre that modern conservatives evoke the Bible so much actually, nothing they…

If you want to know why total dickheads keep winning elections around the world, these 2 fellas (Srnicek and Williams) know. They studied how the Left of politics, in its big anti-establishment push, moved to 'folk…

Here's a perfect example of what I mean when I say maps define our culture. This is the couple the Iranians have detained. The photo shows how their entire trip was motivated by a map, how they saw the world as a map to…

This guy discovered what I wish more could see. Breaking up unions has nearly destroyed society, and not just for working people. Unions are the institutions that keep society balanced, without them businesses end up…

The small and the big. At the individual level, humans are complex and messy. At the social level, they're simple and structured. So why do we see it so often the other way around, thinking society is complex and…

I love files. They created the modern world. Not those big words like capitalism or socialism, those are fairy tales for grown ups. If you want to know what built our societies, I say this is it - files. It's where all…

Humans are driven by comparison and imitation. Notice they added these to energy bills? Research told them to. Just telling people how much they use doesn’t work. Comparing them to their neighbours is dynamite. (This…

Isn't the problem obvious here? A whole bunch of individuals (with views I agree with btw), whose only collective action is to stand together and complain. They have an industrial-scale political weapon they can use,…

This pair, who promote themselves as the champion of the ordinary person against 'the elites', come from the very top level of elite society. Super-rich and privileged families, and leading parties funded by the top-end…

This is Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the UK Tories. On TV just now, saying "parliament isn't sovereign, the people are sovereign." I believe that any politician who sets parliament up in opposition to the people…

Where does grown-up discussion of grown-up issues mostly happen in society? A genuine question. I don't see it in many places at all. You can find small tribes of people focused on more grown-up things, but that's the…

It still befuddles me that I see adults even into middle age talking about their BFFs. And I think there's a sort of worship of friendship, when it's actually the most superficial of all human interactions. Nothing…

More Venn. This is how I see people. Say you're discussing a topic, in politics for example. No person is just an issue, that issue is part of their entire way of seeing everything. It'll link to what washing powder…

Artists often have amazing homes, it's part of their work. Steve Alderton captured Margaret Olley's in this shot. None of the tedious 'luxury' of modern homes that makes them look more like hotels (because, as…

A Venn I did yesterday. I think it's ok, that it's law that is the connecting thread to all of the 3 main separated 'powers' of our society. Why both Trump and Johnson are currently struggling to take over the world,…

Trump has arrived in Australia. ScoMo actually plagiarised Trump directly this week. Populism I think is politics for utopians, meaning people who don't think politics should exist at all, that we shouldn't have…

In 2018, for the first time in history, there were more people aged 64+ in the world than there are people aged 5 or younger. (Those who think poor nations are filling the world with too many babies should let that sink…

Notice the shift, and this is the US, a really tough battleground. The battle of ideas is turning. If you grew up hearing how vicious and corrupt unions are, you grew up in the middle of the massive assault on them - it…

A huge proportion of the world's houses are either badly maintained or not maintained at all. If people move out of a house it quickly falls apart, like this one. Technologies are I think our most social things. You can…

One of the great mysteries and frustrations for planners and people who live in regional areas, is why no matter what they try, people keep moving to big cities. Big cities are getting bigger and bigger. Mega-cities. I…

A car is an institution. I think all successful technologies are institutions. For a car: - the car company itself is an institution - the parts and spares industries are institutions - road building and maintenance are…

MND is motor neurone disease. A really, really nasty thing (Stephen Hawking was one of the most famous sufferers of it). This bacteria is in all our waterways and dams, and the warming climate is making it much worse.…

I thank Kato and the good people of Newcastle for evidence that we're ripe for our own Aussie Trump. And that hatred of institutions has been the defining characteristic of society since the 1960s. These comments in…

The distribution of birthdays in Australia. September 17 is the most common birthday. Across the Western world September/October are the most common birth months. Nobody is really sure why birthdays follow the patterns…

One of the things keepers of slaves and domestic servants discovered was that they introduced all sorts of obligations and responsibilities for owners. They had to be looked after as well as ordered to work. This shift…

One thing I've noticed that is shared by most of the competing beliefs in society right now, is a retreat to the ideal. Whether it's spirit in religion, or New Age metaphysics, or absolute truth in science, or the…

The culture warriors' latest obsession is dams. They're not interested in the actual issues, they just love to keep starting new culture wars. In this case, assuming water problems will be fixed by building new dams I…

"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,…

Try this reality filter. Can you think of a single thing you do, think or feel that isn’t an imitation of what somebody else does, thinks or feels? That question can be upsetting to some, because we place such negative…

In Extinction Rebellion camps, they have health activities that are straight out of the 1960s. A whole range of New Age therapies. ‘The system’ is the enemy. By disrupting everyday life they feel they’re disrupting the…

I’m quite partial to cruises. But I’m not sure the facts about them are widely known. They’re scary facts. Travel again, a deeply compromised cultural obsession.

I did some research with Professor Alan Bain about why ideas about education never improve education. The results can be applied to any part of life. Ideas will only change things if they ‘fit’ the actual reality in…

Another reality filter. Everything we think and feel ultimately can be traced back to an idea or ideas. We often miss that I think because we mistake ideas for the people who adopt them as beliefs. (It’s literally an…

I dug back into the crap thrown at Tim Flannery by Straya's culture warriors a few years ago. Flannery predicted dire shortages of water and rain. The crazies were outraged, as in this article below. There are now over…

Lest we Forget. Over 100 million people died in the 20th century fighting for freedoms. Everyday people were bombed daily, but got through it with stoicism. So...are we betraying those 100 million and more who died…

Everything is a copy or imitation of something else. Here’s a way to show it - find a picture of ‘nothing’. It can’t be done, Google might give you a black screen as an example, but that’s not nothing - it’s a black…

Another reality filter to try. Dump all the Left and Right and other explanations for society, and look at society as a set of ideas that clash or harmonise. Like this girl in an exam, society sometimes can’t resolve…

ScoMo and BoJo are both implementing populist programs right now, following Trump. Populism isn’t Left or Right, it isn’t even politics. It’s society eating itself. The damage these people do, fuelled by the public’s…

The whole world loves sport. They love a contest. But strangely, this doesn’t usually extend to ideas. A contest of ideas is a debate, an argument. When societies go through changing times, like right now, and there are…

We don’t see ourselves every day as hypnotised in the things we do, but I think that’s because we don’t understand hypnosis well. Hypnosis is suggestion in its purest form. Suggestion is desires and beliefs. Society is…

I hear so many comments about how society is in a mess. What stands out is that people usually see the problem as disagreements between people. But all social problems are really clashes of ideas, and I think because we…

Given that the stats clearly show that no school makes a difference to student learning, it’s not surprising that recognition at school is mostly about social status and who likes who the most. Doesn’t mean some…

Both winners and losers of elections talk about the 'will of the people'. There is no will of the people. There are millions of people each with their own view, that's all. You have to get closer to those individuals to…

The second a Tory has the election over, all the ‘governing for all of us’ disappears and we’re back to the standard script. Sell off public assets, sack public servants, tax cuts for the rich. ScoMo followed exactly…

I see schools are now doing rain dances, does stupidity have no limit? Australia’s problem isn’t lack of rain - ‘drought’ - it’s stupidity. Australia builds its towns and cities on its best agricultural land, flood…

As individuals, we know how much we hate when our own beliefs don’t align. That’s laying awake at night territory, trying to make sense of our lives. We like our lives to be governed by a small number of powerful,…

Anybody who wades into complex public issues, especially at times of emergency, armed only with their pig-headed unresearched opinion, is a danger to society. I bet though in the aftermath of this catastrophe, we'll…

I'm in the middle of the bushfires with many others. The same patterns are recurring though - we post lots of powerful pictures, we thank the firefighters for their genuinely superhuman efforts, we get that nice sense…

Maybe the fire crisis is nothing to do with fires, or with firefighting. These fires are the natural result of myths Australians tell themselves. I'm very interested that books like these are starting to unpick…

More on luxury. The core human act is imitation. Comparing yourself against others and copying them. Imitation has a hierarchy, people aspire to be like the ‘best’. In societies that leads to classes, and there’s always…

One thing that makes me nervous about emergencies is that it inflames a society already swimming in emotional treacle. It adds even more treacly unthinking emotion to the mix. Unthinking emotion creates problems, and…

Every age has its aristocracy. I didn’t realise for a long time what the function of an aristocracy is, they just look like daft rich twits. But it turns out the true function is to make a country open to ideas from…

Spending some of my Christmas break re-reading these amazing books. You’ll never look at Australia the same way again, if you read these. For tens of thousands of years, tens of millennia before the pyramids or anything…

Don’t listen to all the spiritualist mumbo jumbo about what aboriginal peoples believe. I think it all boils down to 4 entirely practical principles: 1) treat everything as something you might eat or use 2) do…

Kelso High School was a unique school. The buildings were beautiful, light everywhere, central courtyards with gardens, everything carpeted, long ramps everywhere as well as stairs, it had its own cinema and…

There's a popular view that people get paid what they're worth. So doctors, teachers, nurses, bankers etc. are all apparently paid according to how much each of them is worth, to society. Thank you Real Housewives for…

The Big and the Small, Part 2. A crowd, a public, flocks of birds, staff in an organisation. Large groups. A common way to explain these groups or crowds is that the individuals in the crowd each do their bit, and then…

Apple have been asked to look at ways to make their devices less addictive. But I think we’re looking at this backwards, it’s not the technology (technology isn’t a thing). Why are people so glued to screens? My guess…

It’s time to de-privatise banking and return it to being a public service. Since the earliest days of all cultures money-lending has been seen as a social and moral evil. We think we’re too clever for that ancient…

I think this is one of the greatest fantasies at the heart of modern life. The idea of starting society again from scratch, going off-grid, being more ‘authentic’. Think I’ve mentioned that before, I see the passion for…

If it seems that the world has gone mad, Urban Dictionary can help. All of the talk of ‘the Left’ and ‘the Right’ in politics is a sideshow. The real clash we’re all living through is probably much deeper, and nothing…

The maverick Australian farmer Peter Andrews had what I think is a genius insight about the Australian landscape. That water in the Australian landscape has usually been stored in the soil, not above ground in dams or…

Have often wondered about this, the number of jobs out there that really add not much to all to collective happiness or health. We long ago reached a point where society didn’t need as many people to work or for those…

You can have a fair and sane and well organised society, or you can have good pop music. But not both.

I'm betting there will be vocal criticisms of these ads. But it's a message that is actually true and the key to society staying healthy and happy. For too long we've been led by (mostly men) in suits who use the…

It's very instructive that if you take a rort off wealthy retirees, it becomes a national news avalanche. But business systematically underpaying low-paid workers and breaking workplace laws? Let's see how much momentum…

One for @[1240225973:2048:Nell] 🙂 Frugality is an important thing for me, but it’s a difficult topic because how people spend their money is a powerful part of their psychology and personality. In boom times, the…

Hmm, I accidentally deleted my earlier post on this. We need not just more trees, but more plants in general. Not only do they protect the soil, they actually generate rain. Some argue that climate change could be…

Some of the most solemn drivel in public debates is the stuff on A.I. Artificial intelligence is portrayed as computers becoming brains. Brains don’t ‘think’ either so it’s layer upon layer of drivel. There will never…

So, when you sit and watch Ricky Ponting, with his $65 million in the bank, commentate on the ‘Big Bash’, doesn’t it ring alarm bells - cricket is losing its way? Gambling is trashing the game, and its culture. The Poms…

The cricket scandal says as much about cricket fans as it does players. The Big Bash and T20 in general is the cancer that funds the behaviour, and the destruction of the culture of the game. And the public love their…

DH Lawrence, who was himself a school teacher, often said that education forced on all people was an evil. To be ‘uneducated’ is not the same thing as not being smart, it just means to not spend a lot of time in schools…

Viral 'challenges' seem to come from gym/fitness/workout culture. What could go wrong?

Always surprised that people think it is, particularly with the passions they show for their own favourite art and artists. And in every genre of art, there is a canon - a list of artists people generally agree are the…

Anybody else love The Good Life? One of those wonderful 1970s TV shows, about leaving the rat race, with the Goods (in the picture) deciding to be self-sufficient. As I got older though, I wondered how healthy the…

The mythologies of small business. I don't actually have anything against small business, what I don't like is the mythologies around it, which this article talks about and traces back in time. There was no such thing…

So...the finance industry are crooks. Who knew? I wonder if Scott Morrison describing our banks as "some of the best capitalised in the world" is a splendid own-goal. And while on the bleeding obvious bandwagon:…

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…

“No human collective can exist without an object. There is no object without a collective, no collective without an object. The political animal is a fiction. The group floats wildly; it settles for a short time only by…

“But this is not, or not really, an article about speed, or cameras, or even cars. It is about the rise of the antisocial bastards who believe they should be allowed to do what they want, whenever they want, regardless…

Applause is a curious thing, when you stop and look at it. The crowd at an event periodically clap their hands and sometimes yell or whistle or stamp their feet etc. The origins of this are probably anthropological, in…

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…

I love parliament, and I despair of people wishing politicians would be ‘nicer’ to each other. Paul Keating once said politicians fight so that people on the streets don’t have to - that’s real wisdom. (The picture…

How to spot a culture warrior of the alt-Right. Every sentence ends in exclamation marks!! Yes, every sentence!! (alt-Right was apparently short for 'alternative-Right'. But I see that alt-right arrow on a keyboard is a…

People were gushing about this. But I dunno, here’s a thought experiment. If an unemployed person posted “I can’t get a job, would people please donate some money to tide me over”, what would the response be? Serious…

The cerebral mystique. There’s a lot of it about. “The more we feel that our brains encapsulate our essence as individuals, and the more we believe that our thoughts and actions simply emanate from the bundle of flesh…

Anthropologists have been studying how humans use objects. Take a soccer ball as an example. Without the ball the players would just stand around on a field chatting, but with the ball suddenly there’s a hugely complex…

Watching old movies makes me think about how much language has lost power. Paradoxically the proof is in how accepted and even ignored swearing is today - 100 years ago telling somebody you found their behaviour…

A few book reviews. This one is a must-read if you're interested in science and how it works, and what it needs to do to stay relevant to people. Stengers is a world-class thinker, who in this book looks at how 'fast'…

Sorry if you’ve just eaten. This is the Black Plague (it really is black), alive and well in the 21st century. This man had removed a mouse from his cat’s mouth, to stop the cat from choking. The reason I posted this is…

Boo hoo? I think betrayal is the heart of not just social life, but of all of reality. In love, we hear what we want to hear and project what we want to see, onto the people we love. Friendship the same. A new road…

More love, because it’s a lovely topic. Proust is valuable because he allows us to strip away what Greer called the ‘wretched cant’ of love. The self-motivated projections we put onto other people, that are really about…

Are you a monarchist or republican? Or something else? And why? I edge towards constitutional monarchy. When we look at kings and queens and their children, we see only a tiny tip of all of the traditions that monarchy…

Why do fashions change? Have pondered that for years. And now I think it’s pretty simple, all human behaviour is based on one thing - imitation. Humans imitate, in every walk of life. So this article has an interior…

Who hates committees? Pretty much everybody. But committees in some ways are the heroes of modern life, it’s a fascinating history. Particularly after the Great Wars enormous effort was made to develop meeting…

Patterns appear, and nobody plans them or designs them. So they’re pretty mysterious, but maybe also the secret to understanding society, because society is these patterns. They’re not designed or planned by…

Organisations mostly fail because they think there's a 'big picture' that captures the organisation, and they draw up plans and graphs and flow charts and org charts to try to draw that big picture. The problem is -…

Sex and gender, one of the big debates of our time. And like most of those debates, I think it’s not really about sex and gender at all, but about who gets to call the shots in society, with more morally and socially…

Our public life is becoming a fantasy, like a film set. Celebrities at the front of the church with royalty at the royal wedding, now two TV stars in the White House. (Remembering Ronnie Raygun was also an actor.) I…

Why I love libraries. One of the only places in society now which is still relatively silent. Our world is so noisy. Motors and engines mostly, the din is constant. But music too, too much music. Music as noise, music…

Artificial intelligence is famous, but much more interesting I think is the research in the past couple of decades on collective intelligence. Can groups or even crowds, think? There’s a lot of prejudice against crowds,…

It’s easy to look at the world today and assume it’s falling apart. But that maybe because we only look at how humans act with each other, and don’t look at how the things they build and maintain act to glue society…

I think machines are the most social parts of our societies. Tracey Kidder, an American journalist, spent about a year visiting a major computer manufacturer, observing how a computer was made. He wrote up his…

So...the proposed tax cuts seem popular. Because government is unpopular, and the silly myth that tax takes ‘our’ money off us. Around the world there’s been a rush to gut government, often through tax cuts which starve…

A group of ordinary people, using nothing more than Google search, give better (much, much better) intelligence advice on real-world complex issues than the best intelligence agencies. And without access to the same…

It is a bit scary, the Nazi storm trooper type zealotry coming through the ranks. "Today, a publicly funded national broadcaster crowds out its private competitors and is an indulgence we can no longer afford." We need…

The top 3 grocery items in Australia are (drum roll): 1. Berries 2. Bananas 3. Avocados I bet nobody picked berries at number 1, or that fruit fills all of the top 3 places? I didn’t. Indulge me a little - how do ‘we’…

More tribal mind/patterns. After 9/11, many Americans shifted to their cars to avoid planes for travel. This led to a spike in road deaths of about 1600 above the average. Most of those people would still be alive if…

“Do you believe in God?” How did religion end up being thought of as ‘believing in’ things? To have ‘faith’ that what you ‘believe in’ is real? Like some sort of guessing competition. The atheists that oppose religion…

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.…

I’m curious if the concept of maturity/immaturity is used less now? As a kid I remember people often assessing a person’s maturity, evaluating peoples’ behaviour according to how well emotionally developed they were. I…

I watch this show a lot, the English countryside is one of the wonders of the world. One thing that people moving to the country often say on the show is that they’re doing it because where they’re living now has become…

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…

Photomosaics may be a good model to show that ‘parts’ and ‘wholes’, or local/global, are not two separate things. Each part of a photo mosaic is itself a whole image. What we call society is all of us, obviously, but…

Margaret Thatcher famously said "there is no such thing as society". I agree with her, but for different reasons. Maggie didn't think society existed at all - she thought it was a fiction. She was like Ayn Rand and the…

“The usual explanation of why humans are so successful as a species is simply that we are smarter, with huge brains and uniquely flexible intelligence that allows us to figure everything out through sheer force of…

One of our greatest prejudices is against 'the crowd' or 'mob' (of which we're all a part - it's a bizarre set of beliefs). Philip Tetlock is famous for studying expertise, and showing that groups of people - the crowd…

Maybe our increasing anxiety around privacy tells us a lot about how we see our own society. A lot of it seems focused on ideas about somebody - corporations, governments mostly - spying on us and using what they find…

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…

The modern world seems peculiar. On the one hand life has never been more complex and connnected and rich. But on the other we seem to often be in a state of panic about it all, for example: - belief in conspiracies is…

This flocking behaviour has a beautiful name - murmuration. Murmuration is when individual and group behaviour is indistinguishable. The thing I call the mystery of the ‘we’, and of patterns. Watching the patterns of…

The Bad Boy. (Or girl.) Not always recognised as being extremely socially timid, like kids who struggle to make the transition from family to wider society. Which is in fact the space where most bad boys come from, that…

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…

Another lens to view our world through (see link). This example comes from business, but applies to anything society does I think. Most of what’s seen as disruption in business is really that companies are dumber than…

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…

The farmers we need to support most, I think, are the ones who recognise that a lot of our agriculture hasn’t been farming at all, it’s been soil mining. Stripping the land of vegetation and using whatever nutrients are…

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…

Brian Rotman studies the physical roots of mathematics. One of his passions is to ‘take the God out of mathematics’. By which he means the number of ways people have taken the patterns of mathematics to derive from…

A sort of Part 2 from earlier, about whether organisations should have an 'opposition', in the way politics does. Here's the famous separation of powers in our societies. One thing that's not mentioned that I've seen,…

The bridge collapse in Europe overnight. Stories. The story of the collapse is ‘wasn’t properly maintained’. Which means the story of maintenance wasn’t one that resonated with enough people. Vast amounts of the…

I find this a powerful image. You can tell an awful lot about a society by what they throw away. That idea is actually quite strange - to 'throw away'. Not many cultures in pre-modern times threw things away. This isn't…

Men like this are helping to break our society. So why do people listen to them? I think it’s the same thing again - stories. They tell simple, emotionally powerful, stories. Stories that give a feeling of resolution to…

There’s a saying, “speak truth to power”. Meaning telling the ‘powerful’ what’s really happening, rather than stay silent because of their ‘power’. I scare quote ‘power’ because just about every photo you can find of…

It’s a difficult time to be an administrator. Both politicians, and senior managers in organisations, are running roughshod over due process, due processes set up often over generations. Sports stars do the same with…

If you have Netflix, check out Derren Brown’s ‘Miracle’, a recording of his latest live show. The show itself, as the name says, is about human suggestibility, and miracles, and Brown explores things like faith healing…

I think it’s tempting to say freedom is the freedom from responsibility. From attachments, ties, obligations. But I reckon that’s another one of life’s paradoxes. The more attached we are, the more obligations we have…

“What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view, as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in ancient law of the slave by…

I think this is worth looking at again. There’s a very wide fitness and exercise culture now, but this sort of evidence suggests that we’ve forgotten things about the human body and how it works. The body is stronger,…

Can you think of a single thing you think, feel or do that is entirely original? I doubt it, humans copy, they imitate, it’s what they do. I think there’s an extension to this, it means that we are always part of a…

An evening with Shakespeare last night, Julius Caesar. It reminded me how naive and silly our modern ideas of power are, and how much these old works saw it very differently. The play is a meditation on power. The…

Walter Lippmann was skeptical about democracy. He thought the idea of a ‘public’ was a myth, that there is no such thing as some collective entity called the public. So he called it ‘The Phantom Public’. John Dewey then…

Some classic examples of political framing - feel free to suggest more. This is how smart politicians shape how people feel, and therefore vote. Use the frame enough and it shapes how people think. Tax cut = "tax…

Are we really democratic in our hearts? I talk to people about this a lot. I think nearly everybody prefers living in a democracy, but I’m much less sure it’s well understood what that actually means. My experience is…

As a kid I used to see ‘pasteurised’ written on milk cartons and wonder what it meant. Louis Pasteur’s story is amazing, he came at a time when society debated whether life was something that was added to a broth in a…

One of the fascinating things about oxygen I think is that it was a deadly poison to earlier forms of life on Earth. So what we see as vital to keep us alive was also what killed billions of other living things in the…

I’m struck every day at the near-panic people feel about our world being a divided place. But to divide is to share, breaking bread is a famous example. I look at the world and see the arguments as just the social…

We don’t always see ourselves as a ‘culture’ in the same way we see other cultures. But the defining thing about us I think, as a culture, is that we don’t actually occupy space. We like to move, travel, to go from A to…

Maybe labouring consent here, but it's topical (and fun - apple of my armpit!). My view is consent is what we have left, once we remove all the more sophisticated rituals of courtship we used to have. It's another…

It’s a well-established pattern that people tend to have fewer friends, the older they get. Some see it as a problem, but actually as this site talks about, that’s how life is supposed to happen. Friendship is like a…

Bit of Henri Bergson magic. Bergson pointed out that space and time aren’t two separate things, they define each other. For example, something ‘far away’ is space, right? No, said Bergson, it’s also time, because it’s a…

NASA took this beauty from moon orbit in 2015. Some say viewing Earth from space changed how we feel about and experience our planet. But if you live here on the surface, not much has actually changed as a result of…

I don't think we're going to fix this until we understand our obsession with travel, which is becoming clearer to me all the time. I say we're a culture who has separated itself off from connection to place. We're…

The idea of ‘Left’ versus ‘Right’ came out of the French Revolution, where those who voted to retain great power for the King sat on the right of the chamber, and those to limit that power sat on the left. At the same…

I couldn't recommend Edmund Burke highly enough. Also John Howard's hero, though I think Burke would have found Howard clueless. This description of Burke describes exactly the world we ended up living in, which he…

Try this - we should all be much more selfish. We see selfish as evil, and its apparent opposite - selflessness - as good. But isn’t it obviously another false dichotomy? To me this all comes down to one basic…

Just watching a conservative pollie trotting out the standard "a strong economy gives us the money to do the things society needs" guff. This is how 'the economy' works - it's a political device. It's a trick. Throw any…

Have now seen the movie. Thought it was great, verged on telemovie in a couple of spots, but it was Queen doing what it knows how to do better than anybody - appealing to the widest possible audience, and entertaining…

Here are some huge companies. If somebody asked you ‘where’ these companies are, what would you say? If you were asked ‘please take me to Coles, the company’, where would you take the person? The corporate headquarters?…

Being ‘cool’ at school, or one of the in-crowd, is apparently a very good predictor of problems later in life. It’s the kids at school who are outsiders, who buck the trend and are their own people, who are more likely…

Thank you David Rowe. A picture and a thousand words and all that. I'm not obsessed with banks and finance, but since the time of Jesus and before, major religions have attacked usury. Lending, finance. There are very…

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…

*wince* maybe a worse dancer than me. Isn’t it funny that conservatives the world over campaign on slogans like ‘opportunity’, and when you see them here in the crowd you see people who would have an anxiety attack if…

This is a true conservative. Bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the culture warriors who use that name today.

I still recommend people replace assumptions about society with Google Trends. Which shows what people really are thinking. For example, the political attempt to link terrorism to Islam has clearly been a tremendous…

Teenagers get bad press on most things. But to me they've always been the age-group that keeps society honest. "Researchers originally found a correlation between a teenager's being adopted and a variety of negative…

Ever noticed that people can only live 'off the grid', in 'self-sufficient' ways, in societies that have a grid in the first place? They're not self-sufficient at all, they're absolutely reliant upon a strong, stable…

A senior teacher I worked with said one day, “we need to do more for the gifted kids”. I said, “how do you know which kids are gifted? Are you gifted? Would you recognise a gifted child?” It was a serious question.…

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…

Why do we have so many conspiracies today? (New Coke was just one of hundreds.) Some even call it a ‘conspiracy culture’. A real Christmas question for me. I think it’s actually pretty simple. Society’s institutions are…

Did you have a New Year resolution? Mine, hmm. Maybe that we don’t make public thinking about life and enjoying life mutually exclusive things. Australia can be frustrating like that, it often opposes thought and…

Have been battling this mongrel for a couple of months now. Whooping cough is on the rise, and both the pro-vax and anti-vax crowds miss the point I think. We're possibly making the same mistakes with vaccination that…

"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…

Amidst the great collective orgasm of protest, some people are still thinking. "Progressives on both sides of the Atlantic are on the sidelines, unable to comprehend what they are observing."

The symmetry of this graph speaks for itself. Politics without unions means governing for the top 1% of society alone. Join a union. Your opinion is hot air without them.

You can dig deeper into the dramas of the world right now. This is what it's really all about, from Trump to Turnbull here in Oz. Not so much about religion trying to take over the role of the State again, although…

Today's Proust. Social life, society. Proust saw social life as both important, and as the shallowest of all human experiences. For Proust all of life is an apprenticeship to 'signs', signs of love, of art, of social…

It's possible PewDiePie isn't anti-semitic (I have no idea), and has fallen victim to passing on jokes created by people who are. Jokes are the original viral marketing, they lower the threshold of what's acceptable and…

Good on SBS for its Face Up to Racism set of programmes, and good on Ray Martin for being onboard. Australia doesn't like talking about racism, we're like the Brits, funnily enough. The Anglo world has been the dominant…

Every year they change the rules in F1 to try to make the racing interesting. It never works because the rich and powerful in the sport always have the money to make best use of the rules and regulations. So F1 actually…

Talking about road safety brings up interesting comparisons with air safety. Private planes are nearly as dangerous as cars. Commercial flight (much, much safer) went the way that driving and cars are being dragged…

Maths has one clue for why the world is a bit batshit crazy. Exponential growth, even if you haven't done a lot of maths, means something growing at a great rate. So when it's something in the real world, it's something…

Seen the price of sending a package through OzPost lately? Makes your eyes water. And those awful loss-making letters. That's why it was a public service. Ain't the 'efficient' private sector grand, consumers paying…

Bill Mollison was a wise man, he knew that it wasn't actually difficult to grow vast amounts of food just about anywhere. But his whole career he was followed around by hippies who thought this was a 'back to nature'…

Ads have billions of dollars of research behind them. I think they become fascinating when you realise that, they can tell you more about society than just about anything else.

Another one for the anti-government crowd. If you think the government is the enemy and the cause of the shit in your life, go and live somewhere without one. Like Syria. http://time.com/4089171/mariana-mazzucato/

Can we crowdfund a shirt for Wayne?

Edmund Burke was a brilliant political thinker, living at a time when politics was probably even more dire than today. Some of his wisdom (note women weren't thought to be active players in society in his day, although…

Are you a rentier? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/30/wealth-banks-google-facebook-society-economy-parasites?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Happiness is giving $24 billion of your money away. It's not like we needed it for anything. Is there a collective noun for idiots in dark suits?

Another one of the interesting myths that live with us. Average life expectancy. You can ask just about anyone, and they'll tell you that we live much longer today than our ancestors, mostly due to advances in…

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…

There's much more going on in the sharing of personal life on FB than we see on the surface. Lots of it is driven by comparison, under the cover of keeping people updated on what's going on. Comparison is the heart of…

Rand gave birth to thousands of obnoxious twats who launch 'culture wars' to force us all to be, um, individuals.

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.…

We've just lived through two decades of economic 'boom' times. Part of that was people losing perspective around their spending, at every scale, from what they're prepared to pay for a drink or a meal, through to the…

This is the true face of the 'culture warriors' who have been spewing their filth into the country for the past 15 or so years. People who talk about the 'Left' and the 'Right' a lot. And who never shut up about the…

This is Marissa Mayer, previous CEO of Yahoo. She made over a million dollars *per week* (yes, you read that right, per week) as CEO. And not to single just her out, it's only one example, there's an entire culture of…

I do actually love wine and beer, although I rarely have any these days. But we as a society have a lot more trouble with alcohol than we do with terrorists, for example. And another take down of the 'moderation' myth…

Another aspect of the word we've been living in for the last couple of decades - the world of sentimentality, of extreme emotions, and of debt-fueled social comparison - is brands. Brands are the way people…

Inequality in history has always been 'fixed' by plagues and wars. (Inequality played a big role in creating those plagues and wars at the same time.) Are we smart enough to avoid more wars and plagues (including…

Ho hum. The worm keeps turning. The article is a good one in that it understands that there is nothing different between everyday tourists and 'authentic' tourism - it's the authentic tourism that opens up new spots for…

All freedom comes from habit. From routine. Many fight habits, but (by far) it's much harder to make a habit than break one. Humans have individual habits, but also human institutions are habits, collective habits. This…

We tend to think of kids as adults-to-be, as if we adults shape the world and then kids grow up and start shaping it too. But to me kids start shaping the world in all sorts of ways we hardly notice, while they're still…

"This is the paradox of travel writing, and it's also something every traveller faces. On one hand, you want to share with your friends, with your family, with the world, these amazing places you've discovered. On the…

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…

"But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she…

A while back I shared the fallacies around life expectancy, and how we think we're all living longer than our ancestors, when we actually aren't - it's a misunderstanding about averages. Another classic area where…

Not a status update, more like the meaning of life.

Les Fehmi researches how we pay attention. He developed a technique called 'Open Focus' which helps people to move out of a common addiction to what he calls 'narrow-objective' focus, where we spend much of our days…

Nick Hanauer, smartest billionaire in the world. "From 1950 through 1980, during the heyday of the Great American Middle Class, a combination of New Deal programs, a corporate culture of civic responsibility, and a…

Professor John Buchanan, from the University of Sydney business school, says policies of both conservative and Labor governments over the past 30 years have resulted in depressed wages. "None of this stuff is an…

The same-sex marriage debate is brilliantly showing us I think what's really going on in politics, we just have to look. Why are people so prepared to go to the wall on this issue? I think it's because the people so…

I'd call myself a frugal person. In an era of debt-funded orgies of consumption, that tends to make you look 'cheap' or 'tight'. But it's not about saving money, it's about a whole way of understanding life. How people…

I don't think this is just about smart and dumb. It's true smart people need to speak up more than they do, but what usually determines what happens in the world isn't thinking - it's power, and status. Most of life and…

Gabriel Tarde, describing most of our lives in one sentence. Tarde showed that there is almost nothing that isn't explainable by imitation. "...it is for the pleasure of change, of not doing the usual thing, that the…

This is what every cake except one, in one store, says in Woolworths. And even in that store the 'Special Persons Day' cake was one only, amidst a great pile of Happy Fathers Day and Dad cakes like the one in the…

Sitting is the new smoking, they said. What a load of bollocks, some of us said. The bollocks crowd wins, double the risk of heart disease in people who stand all day at work. In fact, until these studies look at HOW…

One commentator said we're rapidly becoming the US, with millions of working poor with little job security, poverty-level wages and no ability to keep up with everyday expenses. And public services becoming privatised…

I think you can understand nearly all of our society with this one story.

"...a society is a group of people who display many resemblances produced either by imitation or by counter-imitation. For men often counter-imitate one another, particularly when they have neither the modesty to…

I don't express many views here about same-sex marriage. But one thing the debate has highlighted for me is the resources and determination of very conservative people in Australia and around the world, and their…

Yep, this is the real issue. And why is the US so much more violent? My favourite theory: because it hates regulation. Because it has no real tradition of collective focus, so that each person then becomes their own…

Did you know the collective noun for a group of ladybirds? Made me smile (thanks Kell). A loveliness of ladybirds.

The Simpsons understood American violence as well as anybody. Itchy and Scratchy are all about the insatiable appetite for violence as entertainment, and the normalisation of violence in culture more generally. Bought…

Today’s collective noun. For Zebras. A dazzle of zebras. (No joke.)

I know people love my Daylight Saving rants. Here's another angle. The only argument anybody ever gives in favour of Daylight Saving is "I love it". Is an argument for beating your wife, that you love hitting women? Or…

Today’s collective noun. For hippopotamuses. There are actually a few. The best: - a bloat of hippopotamuses - a crash of hippopotamuses - a thunder of hippopotamuses. Hippos are considered the most dangerous of all…

Politics! But hopefully not what you're thinking... There are 2 games in town I think, and mixing them up is what's destroying our societies. There are traditional political parties, like Labor and the LNP here in Oz.…

Super is a time bomb. Shifting retirement funding to the finance industry will likely have the same outcome as financialising anything else - a complete disaster. As a society, we would have been much better off keeping…

I read a lot as a younger person. But I’m a bit off books now, except for some that are important to me. Text and books are very restrictive and narrow things, and we’ve turned books into a fetish. But hypertext is much…

I've substituted LNP for "Republican Party" in the quote, because they're reading from the same playbook. "What is the fundamental purpose of the LNP? To minimize the tax bill of the rich. For those in the highest tax…

One of the things I think Marshall McLuhan made people aware of was that copies make originals. The idea of an ‘original’ doesn’t even exist, until you have copies. Tarde said it, imitation is the heart of all life. Our…

This is a very common gripe doctors tend to have - administration. Academics are the same. And we’ve all been told to despise bureaucracy. It’s well known that the amount a charity spends on administration has almost no…

More fun evidence that societies are built out of imitation and status. Now that everybody is going private, a new way to differentiate yourself is to go public. If everybody follows this trend, people will then shift…

I went to a family event on Saturday, a barbecue lunch for a local club. Generously they’d laid on all the food, and drinks were free as well. What disappointed me but didn’t surprise me was what the younger parents…

I’ve discussed this with a lot of friends. Flirting really is a lost art, as the article says, in an age of such appalling manners and almost zero etiquette even being polite can be misread as flirting. We confuse and…

This sign is most peoples’ wet dream writ large. But it’s bollocks. Here’s to the bureaucrats, society’s heroes. Why? It’s pretty simple. Every generation lives a certain time. It can’t reinvent history in every…

Anybody else noticed this happening? Crowdfunding requests for entirely selfish things. http://time.com/money/4270854/crowdfunding-selfish-cause/

Continuing on stories. People hate politics, but actually it all makes a lot more sense if it’s looked at as stories. The two main sides of politics, around the world, each have their own story. Roughly, these: Story 1…

Wisdom of the crowd. Punters predicted India would make 184 in the 20-20 tonight, earlier in the innings. The Indian final score - 184.

Indigenous issues aren't always interesting to a lot of people. But the numbers alone are so staggering. Some theories say Australian Aborigines may have been on the continent more than 150,000 years. By contrast…

Yes, cut teachers some slack, all true. But...teachers also need to get rid of the idea that teaching is all about interpersonal relationships. Teaching is about...teaching. If teachers don't want to constantly be held…

Watching the Brexit results. There are some simple things that go wrong in countries, and every generation forgets them. It took us to 2 world wars, and we still forget. 1. If things are unequally shared, people get…

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/

How much of life is just school repeating itself over and over. No matter how old people get. The same cliques, the same desperation to outdo other people in terms of possessions, status - whether it's cars, houses,…

To see the origins of this sort of culture, it doesn't hurt to ride the bus each day with boys from all-boy schools. The 'old boys' networks attached to these schools are also instrumental in running a lot of the…

This is often voted the greatest rock performance in history. Only 20 mins long but they took the stage and literally blew the other biggest names in the world off the stage. Mostly Freddie, nobody before or since could…

Mark Twain said history may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme. Modern companies and organisations have so much in common with much older organisational forms. I did a fantastic course on organisational forms and…

More than 700 tonnes of antibiotics are imported into Australia every year. More than half of those antibiotics go into stock feed (column 2), nearly 10% is used by vets (column 3), and about 35% is used in the health…

A little bit risky to see history through the lens of human development, but is the Western world stuck in a rut of adolescence? Adolescence is a time of ruthless comparison, of defining yourself according to others and…

For those interested in the universal basic income idea (everybody getting a living wage whether they have a job or not). Not a bad summary of the underlying ideas at the link below, here's a taste: "In the mythology of…

Bankruptocracy. The world you live in when banks control economies, replacing work and investment with finance. And then becoming 'too big to fail', so that real or potential bankruptcy of banks becomes a gun to the…

I'm fascinated by the desperate need many people feel to always be doing something. Not just at work, but even in holidays. Some of it is just having new experiences, no doubt, but there's a lot of it that feels like…

The dietitians out in force, listen to me, not to Pete Evans! What an utterly failed field, decades of abject failure in every possible way, no serious, reproducible scientific basis for just about everything they say.…

The problem in America isn't really guns. The problem in America is violence, and giving violent people guns isn't going to end well. So why is American culture violent? That's the question. Itchy and Scratchy knew that…

The effects of WW2 are still being felt, emotionally and psychologically, as well as in all sorts of other ways. For example agriculture changed profoundly after this war, as the war industries looked to new sources of…

The culture worriers (not a typo) will no doubt note that even the Insiders set has now shifted to the left.

So, and no people I'm not a "Labor supporter", what Tony Abbott plans to to do to create jobs and have a strong economy, because he won't spell it out (but it's a standard set of ideas for conservative parties all…

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.…

bets this is the most boring status update you've ever seen.

is finally updating his status again.

is updating his FB status.

thinks that at the end of the day, what really matters in life is being able to remember what you were going to say when you started typing a status update.

wonders how status updates disappear by themselves (nothing to do with my memory, it's FB's memory, I swear).

is updating his FB status. Again.

is not interested in updating his status