October 2022

It feels good to say these things, to describe the world in simple categories that fit into simple narratives. It can really mobilise our given team, because in populist societies everything is about playing for your team. It’s why football seasons define our adult year. /2

Just as the economy doesn’t exist, it’s a character constructed out of statistical indicators, neither does capitalism, nor socialism, communism, or authoritarianism. Sure these ideas exist, but in reality no country comes close to actually implementing them. /3

Take the definition of capitalism, the private ownership of the means of production and of wealth. In Western democracies the wealthy overwhelmingly use the State - the public sphere - to create and maintain their wealth. While in ‘authoritarian’ countries, most of the wealth…/4

…is concentrated in private hands. ‘Private’ and ‘public’ are more fairy tale characters that don’t exist. My personal definition of ideology is applying all of these beliefs to reality and thinking they define it. We have to look at what actually happens in societies. /5

I shared this article, because it’s a window into what we’re not seeing. Despite all of these ideologies, the same pattern recurs in every nation, throughout history. Hierarchical organisation, organised around some ‘sovereign’. /6 https://t.co/QZPwjEyY2I

Who or what the sovereign is varies, but it makes little difference to the actual social patterns that evolve. In the West we make ‘the people’ sovereign, in our ideas anyway, even though the idea is an oxymoron. If everybody is sovereign, nobody is. /7

What happens when this, our own democratic ideology, meets reality? We turn it into a - surprise - hierarchy, with a sovereign on top. Because we think ‘the people’ (whatever that even means) run our societies, we set up vast populist methods of accumulating their views. /8 https://t.co/uxPgAhzq6D

We call these elections, and between elections we call it polling. Nothing is valid unless it’s popular, even though in all the rest of our life and work popularity runs pretty much nothing. Because it doesn’t work. I Tweet a lot about how we started believing this nonsense…/9

…because the intergenerational social structures we had previously were levelled by the invention of adolescence, and its home, high schools. Without connection between generational activities, each generation just ‘living its best life’, we leave high school with it being…/10

…the only model of social groups we know. So we remake all of society in that same way. Popularity is the engine room of high school, and is now of society too. That’s where populism came from, not ‘capitalism’. Societies that didn’t re-route everything through high schools…/11

…retain a lot of that inter-generational social structure, and appear ‘authoritarian’ to us because people there think their ‘best life’ is following the traditions and customs of the past, regulated by older people who they look up to. But I’m not even opposing one to the…/12

…other, because as I started this thread by saying, they’re really pretty much all the same. Only the names we call things change. We abandoned inter-generational authority structures, but we remade them as popularity-based authority structures, performing an equivalent…/13

…function. As the Aeon article describes so well, the only thing that really disrupts all of this equivalent activity in every country, just called different names, is large-scale emergencies like wars and plagues. Between these emergencies we create an illusion of…/14

…levelling hierarchies in various ways. Usually it involves debt, to inflate the apparent wealth and power of the majority of people who normally would just be perennial peasants. Financial crises can be another leveller, for the same reason, when this debt explodes. /15

While some see history as a gradual secular victory over old religious superstitions, I think that may be backwards. The Bible for example is full of stories about plagues and debt. My feeling is religion emerged as a reaction to politics, not the other way around. /16

Humans wanted a hierarchical organisation that bypassed the endless warfare of populism and generational cronyism. They wanted a ‘higher power’ or principle that couldn’t be gamed by humans, because it wasn’t human. And that’s where religion maybe came from. /17

Christ in the temple is this exact battle, explicitly. Religion cleaning up the political and economic mess of the day, purging the moneylenders. The story itself betrays which came first here - the politics. Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins in some of their last work…/18 https://t.co/VUsc84amAZ

…both agreed that this is why the King form of hierarchy is dominant throughout history. The monarch is always constructed as God’s representative on Earth. As Walsingham says in the film about Elizabeth 1, people must be able to feel like they touch the divine, on Earth. /19 https://t.co/7dMxM57io1

It won’t have escaped all of us how deeply enmeshed the funeral of QE2 was with the church and religion. Most of the ritual we saw was the complex exchange of powers between monarch and church, and thus the divine, however defined. These are the structures of our entire…/20 https://t.co/TA4EII3COO

…history. We just don’t recognise them now because we call them by different names. Harry and Meghan’s wedding was an important event in this way. It made visible the shift, they packed the church in this monarchical and religious occasion, with celebrities. /21 https://t.co/mwQpmSu5LG

Our new populist monarchs. Rock and film stars, and social media influencers. We pretend we’re free of hierarchy and pomp and ceremony. But then we reinvent it all, in new ways. The problem with populism is, and this is the rotten bit Stan worries about, that it provides no…/22 https://t.co/pAmDXamMLO

…stability. There is no continuity in historical terms, you get fads and fashions. Celebrity doesn’t last, it can shift inside a week. And electoral democracy is churning through its populist leaders at great pace now, for the same reason. We tire of them, as celebrities. /23

Elections, and more broadly popularity-based politics, are destroying democracy. Not capitalism, which is a myth anyway designed by people who use it to hide that they’re really just plundering the Treasury. /end

The Teals are just the latest way to try to address the problems popularity-based politics creates. The whole reason they exist is to force action on agendas popularity politics had shut down. Without elections, there are just the issues to be dealt with. /2

No need to ‘build support’ to do basic things, like fix water, roads, electricity etc. No manufactured consent for whatever the manufacturer wants for themselves. No consent needed at all, just work on the problems that need fixing. This terrifies us because the libertarians…/3

…have spent years getting us to believe democracy and elections are the same thing. Foreign aid becomes dependent on ‘free and fair elections’, as if that makes a country a democracy. Free and fair elections are a thin veneer on top of actual democracy. /4

If you zoom out from the daily team sports of popularity politics (including on Twitter), where the obsessive focus is on who wins, on getting your people up and criticising the other team. And the disappointment when an election doesn’t change much. /5

How could popularity *ever* be a stable foundation for government? There is no area of life that works using popularity. You couldn’t raise your kids or run your business with it. In fact parenting and business are fundamentally about managing what ISN’T popular. Otherwise…/6

…we wouldn’t need either, parents or managers. We’d just let everybody do what the majority felt like doing. We’re electoral fundamentalists, totally blindsided by this populist mechanism. /end

1) Who’s going to jail for spending a quarter of a TRILLION dollars to defeat a virus, only to now have it infecting more people per capita than just about anywhere in the world? 2) What investment is business now making to defeat Covid? What’s their ‘mutual obligation’? /end

*third of a trillion, not quarter.

...mechanism into the adult world. The horror people react with when you suggest abolishing elections shows how deeply populism has infected democracy, that it's now seen as synonymous with popular elections. That was how it did it, by substituting the many layers.../2

...of due process that make up democratic institutions with a single, homogeneous measure - popular election. They're marketing men, that's their dream, they can create and manipulate popularity at will. I see the despair people feel that nothing is done about Covid, or.../3

...climate change, international emergencies. And how they wallow in the populist framing, hoping if they could just elect a better person, things would be ok again. That's the populists winning, every day, they can make anything popular. /4

They say 'we have a mandate', or 'people won't tolerate more public health measures', all the time marketing these same outcomes, massaging the popularity to do their bidding. It took them only months to make basic public health measures, centuries-old, into unpopular.../5

...oppression. This stuff is easy for them. You can elect anybody you like to oppose them, when they don't win an election they then reframe all the needed action in negative ways, making it unpopular, as Tony Abbott did with the NBN, and climate. /6

They'll always win while we allow them to replace the entire complex edifice of democracy with a single popular vote every 3-4 years. They will use that 'mandate' to trash everything, as Scott Morrison showed. Democracy can only be saved by removing popularity as a measure. /end

Protecting the vulnerable is pure neoliberal ideology. For neoliberals society doesn’t exist, we’re a free market of individuals, and they’ll throw a few scraps to those who get left behind - the ‘vulnerable’ - as a sop to obvious suffering. But they see these vulnerables as…/2

…only free market individuals who will eventually come good, this support can only be temporary. If they aspire and work a bit harder, all will be OK. If they ‘have a go, they’ll get a go’, that sort of bullshit. They should bootstrap their own way out of entrenched social…/3

…disadvantage. Just as they should now bootstrap themselves out of mass infection. My first choice for getting us out of this compete mess is to get rid of all popularity mechanisms in politics, beginning with elections. The work governments need to do is not contested by…/4

…any fair and objective look at our current situation, it doesn’t need populist Gilderoys to hijack the whole mechanism for their personal promotion. Just put bloody administrators in place, like we do for local councils when everybody is fed up with the local show ponies…/5

…who run for election. My second choice would be for progressive politicians, if we must have them, to start reframing all of our problems. Rather than just meekly become a more compassionate-seeming version of conservative frames. /end

‘The public’ is emphatically not ‘a majority of people’. This is more neoliberal, libertarian, populist spin. Some definitions try to do better by saying the public is all people in a society. But that’s still about counting, and isn’t quite right. /2

The public as used in public health isn’t about counting heads, it’s about inter-relationships. It means the unavoidable connection between all people in a society, their mutual dependency. You need all of them in all of their diversity, for society to function. /3

As a corollary, if you don’t look after all of them, the impact will damage everybody. You can’t isolate some to protect the others, as we’re trying (well saying, not really trying) to do with Covid. All of them are connected, what happens to one eventually happens to all. /4

Neoliberal, libertarian, populist (N=1) politics runs the fantasy that society is millions of isolated individuals. The only way all of those isolated individuals can then do anything collective is by accumulating majorities. Minorities lose, bad luck. /5 https://t.co/fYLzMcmEhP

This is why I say elections will destroy democracy, despite the fact the N=1 crowd have seduced us all into thinking they ARE democracy. (They’re really, really not.) Elections are grown-up popularity contests, like we have in school to determine pecking orders. /6

Elections destroy the public by replacing it with the N=1 model of isolated individuals. The public’s will is then said to be what the majority want, expressed in polling and elections. Populist politicians say that’s their ‘mandate’. No actual issues are really voted for,…/7

…you vote for people. About 99% of what they will then do in government is never even mentioned in elections. But they will still tell you they have a mandate to do all of those things. Because they tricked us into thinking getting a majority of votes means they represent…/8

…the public will. It’s absolute, lethal nonsense. Good marketing can make any appalling idea and behaviour popular. Look at Trump. Until we wake up and remove popularity from democratic systems, they’ll continue to fail. And Covid will keep beating and killing us, because…/9

…bad people will make that killing popular. They can make anything popular. The obvious, practical public health response will not be activated, because popularity politics pays no attention to practical things at all. Just popularity. 99% of our government is the thousands…/10

…of expert officials who do pay attention to all of those practical things. They’ve been sidelined almost completely in the past 50 years, by the N=1 crowd, who imported their own house-trained advisers. Democracy is about 99% those officials. They’re never mentioned in…/11

…descriptions of democracy. Voting is mentioned, that’s about it. It’s a populist N=1 trick, another of their framings that people inhabit without even realising it. /end

(PAIS = Post-acute infection syndrome.)

That frame works for them even as they sit on the opposition benches. 2) The only way frames get their power is through popularity mechanisms, like polling and elections. Populism. They shift popularity preferences. /2

I’m a broken record, but get rid of elections. Put the focus on what objectively needs doing in government, not on who can sell ideology in the most popular way. Most of the complexity of modern societies far outstrips all of the populist ideologies elected politicians apply…/3

…to this complexity. We don’t need them. Imagine if government could make a decision without regard to how popular it is. This isn’t about authoritarianism, populism is one of the worst forms of authoritarianism. Anybody bullied at school by popular people knows it. /4

Getting rid of popularity mechanisms removes popularity from the equation almost completely. Decisions stop being popular OR unpopular. Like the decisions a pilot makes when flying your plane, how popular they are is a meaningless question. Whether they achieve an outcome…/5

…becomes the sole focus. And business and social science for example have far more sophisticated ways of testing public opinion and needs and wants than any of the simplistic, rusty populist political mechanisms we use. It’s not about ignoring the public, it’s about…/6

…using vastly more sophisticated ways of involving them than the mono-dimensional popularity contests we call elections, which allow bad people to weaponise popularity to do anything they like. /end

This data suggests it makes little difference if you were boosted, if AZ was your first 2 shots. Effectiveness against symptomatic disease near zero after 20 weeks in both cases. This was also the vaccine given to highest risk, older Australians. /2 https://t.co/oQx13FuSPO

Pfizer followed by Pfizer booster seems even worse than no booster. A little better with Moderna booster, but remembering again many Australians are still at 2 doses of any vaccine, thanks to the previous PM’s election campaign. And 20% effectiveness either way i.e. very low. /3 https://t.co/rPs0EVbn6a

Moderna fares quite a bit better, if boosted. (More on boosters in Australia in a moment.) Symptomatic disease has been consistently minimised as an issue, but significant impacts on workforce absenteeism and LongCovid are bringing attention back to it. Hospitalisations next. /4 https://t.co/FRo4ZTwfJl

Effectiveness against hospitalisation may be marginally better if you’re not boosted, after 6 months (but may reflect vaccination demographics - older people more likely to be boosted). A range from 60-90%, which explains significant ongoing hospitalisation numbers. /5 https://t.co/RhnjxUEpAk

Even at the upper end of that range, say 90%, with enormous infection numbers/transmission, that still translates into unmanageable numbers of people needing hospital beds. Now to bring the Australian context to this data, the herd of elephants in the room. /6

About 15% of Australians have not had even 2 doses of a vaccine, let alone a booster. Only just over half of Australians have had a booster shot, and only 15% have had 2 boosters. In a National Cabinet strategy of vaccination only, we’re not even doing that. /7 https://t.co/Ia3vCdsoI6

Even more seriously, by October (i.e. now) even boosted people are past the range of efficacy shown in the UKHSA data, which is 20 weeks. Both 2 and 3-dose Australians mostly had their final shots around April. So, what’s the plan? /8 https://t.co/PGKbAShO5Q

Heading towards Christmas with existing vaccinations - our only real strategy - well past their optimum efficacy date. And many Australians significantly under-vaccinated to boot. The only mention I’ve seen of updating the vaccination strategy is talk of getting boosters…/9

…with our annual flu shots. Up to 6 or more months away. Jane Halton mentioned there’s talk of only buying enough to match how many flu shots are given annually i.e. nothing like even a majority of the population. All of this suggests Australia is about to experience…/10

…what the UK is now experiencing. Significant increases in infection and disease, including severe disease and hospitalisation, caused by waning immunity and absence of other protective measures. The initial hopium of vaccinating our way out of the pandemic could only ever…/11

…last as long as those initial vaccinations lasted. We’ve not only arrived at that point, it’s probably already behind us. /end Link for UKHSA report: https://t.co/FY9TNPm2t5

I say not an analogy because this is actual anthropology, a comment about the cultural form and structure of our lives. We’ve had more than 50 years now of a politics that I call N=1 politics, to separate it from all of the hobby horses like ‘capitalism’, and ‘neoliberalism’. /2

Those other concepts have too much baggage. Best I think to stick to the fundamental fact, that it’s a politics that focuses on the individual, thus N=1. Or at least it says it does; it actually does nothing of the sort. Understanding the gap between the claim and the reality…/3

…is the key that unlocks the total mess we’re now living, I think. What the politics of the last half century has mostly done is strip away the customs and traditions of adult life. It hasn’t even denied it was doing it, down with the establishment was the proud rallying cry. /4 https://t.co/Nnv2lk5Gdb

Once successful in this ongoing war of society against itself, what’s left, for adult life? As my pinned Tweet describes, it leaves us with the only cultural model still standing. High school. That’s where we grow up, and that’s where we learn our social models. /5

It’s mostly grafted onto us subliminally, we don’t often consciously think about learning cultural and social norms at school. We think about subjects, and friends etc. But it’s obvious that we also learn about how people interact together, as a group, at school. /6

Did anybody else have to read The Chocolate War, while in high school? A brilliant expose of the DNA of high school life. Once we started remaking societies as high schools, all those old categories like socialism and capitalism and Left and Right became meaningless. /7 https://t.co/GnR70F9q96

What Cormier describes is how what we used to call ‘power’ in adult life functions, in a high school. And thus how our societies now function. It is power, but it’s much more accurately described as conformity. Individuals are not free and then restrained by various forms of…/8 https://t.co/GA4Av8fZLw

…power, individuals live in groups whose root method of operation is conformity. Which the Pythons pointed out, though it became a bit of a religion-bashing exercise, rather than a broader note that this is how groups behave. How does shifting to a conformity idea change…/9 https://t.co/10NqKsLDo8

…things? Back to the National Cabinet selfie. One of the not often mentioned things about selfies is that they don’t show your self at all. They show you as you appear to others. A sentence of text will show more of you than a selfie. Critically though they show you in…/10 https://t.co/7O3K7FMTX2

…a way you want others to see you. They’re about conformity, to the group. This curation of self is the hot zone of all adolescent life. But now the most senior leadership of adult life is doing them too. There’s no clearer indication of the shift to a high school culture. /11

What we call populism is just another word for this same shift. The currency of the conformity of high school life is status, and that status is popularity. Our own cabinet since late-2021 has let a pandemic virus saturate our country, entirely to try to win elections. /12 https://t.co/xM9Ci5v8dm

The previous PM did it in late 2021, and now NSW and Victoria are driving the stripping away of more Covid protections to (they think) make themselves popular leading up to their own elections. Cormier’s novel is brutal, because adolescent school life is brutal. /13 https://t.co/WOFlfNsYof

Don’t be fooled by the curated smiling selfies of adolescent life. As National Cabinet has shown, you can kill thousands of people to protect your popularity, nothing else will be as important. Populism is probably the most ‘authoritarian’ of all political systems, because…/14 https://t.co/NE44Ke2sB7

…it taps into the most basic mechanisms of group life. Conformity is self-policing, as we’ve all seen with masks and other public health measures, people won’t do them if it means not conforming with what everybody else is doing. Why I reject the narratives of evil…/15

…masterminds of commerce and politics driving the Covid death bus. This grinning, simpering selfie shot is driving. We’re still in high school, and social media is amplifying the conformity of high school enormously. It’s the way adolescents structure our world, once they…/16 https://t.co/PojxBHYyTz

…leave school and the old customs and traditions of adult life are gone. It’s all they know. There’s no need to ‘grow up’ now, because social media provides the infrastructure to perpetuate school forever. There is nowhere to grow up to, the old ways are mostly broken. /17 https://t.co/qA9wF8SvdV

And sadly, it means there is no easy escape from this grinning, curated hell of conformity. Once institutions are destroyed, as Bruno Latour once said, they can’t be put back. We will keep insanely trying to ‘live with’ a pandemic, because that’s what adolescents would do. /18 https://t.co/mi6TozAqAI

They’re immortal. Problems are a ‘drag’ and you should just ‘chill’ and ‘live your best life’ (to use some of the concepts of the past half century). N=1 politics may in fact be the creation OF this adolescent high school culture, because as Covid ‘freedom’ protests show,…/19 https://t.co/UXUVfSGgC9

…the old adult protections of public health practice are interpreted as a teenager being grounded by their parents for doing the wrong thing. And the more economic version we get from modern conservative politicians, and their obsession with destroying the ‘Nanny State’,…/20 https://t.co/hYcs7dHLAs

…is just their own private/elite school experience and upbringing, translated into adult life. The nanny is the only person in their life who has ever denied them anything. So they name the entire adult world as a nanny. They’re still in school, just different schools. /21

We need to get rid of populist politics, and thus elections, so we can start rebuilding adult ways of dealing with problems like pandemics. High school culture won’t do it, it’s an accelerant of disaster. We will conform ourselves to mass extinction rather than ‘stand out…/22

…from the crowd’, or be ‘the odd one out’. And it may not even be possible, we may be too far gone. Given that nearly everybody I know thinks elections = democracy, I hold out little hope of actual change. The adolescent framing of life is too entrenched, invisible. /end

When politicians and others say people wanted freedom back, from public health measures, they really meant they wanted society to go back to social conformity, and away from regulatory guidance. Removing Covid rules gives no individual freedom, it just shifts the regulation…/2

…from a considered, legislative and regulatory mechanism to a social ‘peer pressure’ conformity mechanism. Humans do not, ever, exist as isolated ‘free’ individuals. Those who delude themselves that they do are freeloading off society, and don’t recognise the work of others. /3

I tweeted a few months ago that laws and rules are the only true enablers of freedom, which is the complete reverse of libertarian fantasy politics. They give people *permission* to escape social conformity. School uniforms a classic example. /4 https://t.co/LHnNHQmrRZ

The function of school uniforms is to free people from the intense social pressure of what to wear. Kids and families. It also then saves everybody money, by not having to engage in continuously escalating games of fashion imitation. The political libertarians have sold us…/5 https://t.co/jhxANEF5Ho

…complete nonsense about the origins of society and how it works. Society is always groups of people, behaving, believing and thinking according to the laws of social life. Social conformity. It’s only the invention of law, regulation and religion that allowed humans to…/6

…be free of the rigid and oppressive conformity of social groups. Which is what my son was commenting on, he feels the pressure all day every day of not conforming. He knows surrendering to the groupthink of living with the virus would ‘free’ him from that pressure. /7

He also knows it might kill him, and others he would then infect too. We need to stop interpreting this pandemic as forces of freedom fighting forces of oppression. It’s a battle between forces of conformity, and freedom. Freedom is rational law and regulation, giving people…/8

…permission to do things that the group itself will never do. Why i always say society is now a high school, it literally is. It’s the law of the playground, overpowering public health law. /end

The key question was 'would you prefer that council significantly increase rates to retain basic services, or cut services to keep rate increases lower?' I said 'neither'. Silence on the other end of the phone line. Then, 'um, what would you prefer?' /2

'I'd prefer State and federal governments funded local government adequately to meet the basic needs of people who live in towns and cities, rather than piss away $250 billion in tax cuts to people who don't need them, and then expect ratepayers to pick up the shortfall.' /3

Chuckle at the other end of the line, and 'that's a good answer'. It won't go anywhere of course, and she has to act within the brief she was given. This is where though I think the average Australian knows very little about the corrupt way our federation is administered. /4

Nearly all the revenue powers and revenue go to the federal government, because originally they did the most things. But now nearly everything impacting the daily lives of Australians is administered by State and local governments. Leaving the feds with truckloads of money.../5

...to dish out any way they like. And because we're an election-driven, populist democracy, the way they like is nearly always in targeted grants that they can use to pervert constitutional responsibilities, for example by trying to impose ideological change in education../6

...or health care by 'tying' grant funding to KPIs they design. And of course to buy popularity in votes in electorates, and to give away to buddies, like tax cuts to the wealthy. All made possible by us vesting ultimate power in elected politicians. /7

Once you do that, popularity is the King of the country. Which decades of populist propaganda makes us think is the 'democratic' thing to do, even though we know that popularity is really just marketing. And you can market anything, it's infinitely manipulable. /8

If we're going to keep this ridiculous system of elected governance, let's have a party that stands for infrastructure alone. Nothing else. For the basic services in the community, schools, hospitals, roads, childcare and aged care, housing etc. The genius of infrastructure.../9

...is that it automatically commits a society to multi-generational things. Infrastructure needs constant maintenance and renewal. It bypasses popularity, it's mostly engineering. Get the skilled government departments to maintain a list of all key infrastructure and plan.../10

...what needs doing with it. Nothing else then gets done by any elected politician until those infrastructure needs are met. No ideology gets applied, just engineering and administration (engineering includes 'human resources', like ensuring a supply of teachers and carers). /11

The reason politics has become a bear pit of rigid ideologies is because it's a populist, election-driven system. Those ideologies are what's used to whip up popularity. Most of what government needs to do though is practical stuff, particularly now the world is more complex. /12

It needs engineering and administration way more than it needs any ideology. Notice the country 'runs' just fine in caretaker periods during elections, when public servants are running the country. That's because they always do, elected show ponies just get in the way. /end

In fact most of the public health practice that our modern populist pollies describe as oppression was developed in the 19th century, in the UK. A time in history when for much of the century, much less than half of the country was even allowed to vote. /2 https://t.co/JkODcJGaNR

The democracy of the time was a close partnership between monarchs and the upper echelons of UK society, seen here playing out in the House of Lords. It was this thin veneer of privilege which created enormously powerful and extensive public health reform. /3 https://t.co/qtj7eXq9C1

Today privilege is dismantling it. Why? Because it's forgotten its origins. The privileged in the 19th century UK invented modern public health because their society was being smashed by uncontrolled infectious disease. Their concern was less for the public than it was for.../4

...the ongoing survival of society itself. Nobody liked streets that were rivers of raw sewage, nor the deaths and stench it created. They needed their workers as much as the privileged need workers today. Unfortunately for us, the intervening time of highly successful.../5

...public health disease control has led to the delusion among today's elites that all of the healthy lives we've lived in their lifetimes happens somehow by magic. They're now engaged in the experiment of driving societies back to the early 19th century, and even earlier. /6

Mass infection and disease is now considered (by them) a normal way to live. Provided hospitals can cope, they've done all that needs doing. For the entire history of public health, this would have been seen as delusional insanity. Until the past 3 years. /7

Uncontrolled disease breaks societies, the gobsmackingly stupid idea of 'living with' pandemic viruses for example is akin to the Monty Python crack suicide squad. They need to remember public health was invented by THEM. Because without it, their societies collapsed. /end

@YouAreLobbyLud

Truss will be gone by Christmas. Populism cycles leaders in a last desperate attempt to fix the mess it causes by its belief that elected leaders actually know or do anything meaningful. It’s the high school playground, shifting popularity hierarchies. /2

We don’t even wait for elections now, leaders are replaced with shifting (popularity-based) polls. You can wish for a better leader to fix this merry-go-round, but that’s what populism wants you to believe. It wants us to try to fix popularity, with more popularity. /3

The actual cause of all of the mess we face IS popularity, as a foundation for running a country. You don’t hire employees or even CEOs using that principle, because unsurprisingly competence is seen as important. But we also shouldn’t be seduced into thinking all we need…/4

…is some new Great Leader. That’s how what some call fascism starts. It’s not the ‘Right’, it’s the endgame of all populism. Saviour politics. We need to get rid of elections and popularity as a mechanism for choosing who should run countries. /5

The actual expertise to do it is already there, the Victorians in the early 19th century set up what we now call the bureaucracy of government, to bring expertise to the complexity of running a modern society. Thousands of smart people, not beholden to popularity. /6

In fact the most UNpopular of all people. Because the populists have thrown them under so many buses over the past 50 years while clambering over each other to replace them with their own idiot politics of schoolyard popularity. Journalists are no better, nothing excites them…/7

…more than reporting the daily gossip and machinations of the popularity machine. They’re ‘insiders’ to this whole pathetic adolescent game. When they went to the moon, did the US say ‘ok who’s the most popular person in the country, we’ll get them to build the rockets?’ /8

No, they found people who knew how to build rockets. It’s time for expertise and problem-solving politics to replace all popularity politics. Try to think of just one current political problem that doesn’t trace back to some popularity-based process. Good luck. /end

…the good news is, it isn’t that at all. 5% or less of any group, at whatever scale, actually determines the direction the other 95+% of people will follow. You just have to target that 5%, to fix the problem. Not the 95%. Conservatives, themselves historically vastly…/2

…outnumbered by working people, know this very well. They know to target the leaders of movements that oppose them, they ignore things like mass protests. It’s what their tabloid media empires were actually set up to do. We could easily regulate to shut down most of the 5%…/3

…who create the impression of mass movements of freedom fighters. Basic media regulation, for example, standards in journalism that isn’t self-regulated. Strong regulation of social media platforms to do the same. It’s only a tiny number of agitators who create the mess. /end

https://t.co/8bwQLZGCHc and https://t.co/SNh2QpPJZp (The second will actually step you through the process and submit for you once done. ) Note there’s scope in the TOR even for those who haven’t had Covid or LongCovid. 2/2

…home when sick are the best way forward. I’d hope business could do a lot better than that, not least because WHS and disability law require them to. I think it was @RobynSchofield3 who made the excellent point in the same story that when we turn on a tap in a building,…/2

…we expect the water to be clean and drinkable. Building air should be exactly the same, healthy air, as Robyn said, we all breathe, we can’t not. As Pieter’s work has shown, you can also retrofit older buildings with portable purifiers for less than the catering costs at…/3

…a standard business lunch or function. There’s no excuse to not be doing some pretty basic OHS work here. /end

We’ve forgotten that model, populism now makes us think the entire population has to become expert at something to act in appropriate ways. We’re terrified of a hierarchy of expertise, populism makes us think that’s elitist. Horseshit. You won’t find a single area of life…/2 https://t.co/fOspuurXE0

…where there isn’t a hierarchy of good and bad. We don’t get on a plane and all vote on what the pilot should do next. This is the real cancer of populism, yes I Tweet about it a lot. The destruction of generations of expertise, embedded in public institutions. It’s not even…/3 https://t.co/gbSUGGV6Ev

…a hierarchy of present-day people. It’s a hierarchy of accumulated wisdom from multiple generations, overseen by a current group of people. Populism strips it all away, with its idea of ‘the people’ flying the plane. The people is a fiction. All that fiction does is allow…/4 https://t.co/1ZAhVc3ZcD

…nutters to mobilise whatever bullshit they like, and say that’s reality. A tiny handful of powerful people encouraged this shift, because they knew how to mobilise, and realised this was a way to bypass all of the institutional due process of actual democracy. You can spot…/5 https://t.co/pTXxbUdS3s

…them easily, they’ll talk about ‘mandates’ for what they do, meaning they marketed some crazy rubbish well enough that people voted for it. And that then became their licence to do whatever they want, and to describe it as ‘the will of the people’. /6

Get rid of elections, and all of our political problems disappear immediately. Only populism makes people think that would remove democracy itself, because elections=democracy is another of their mobilising nutter ideas. It’s the one they used to steal democracy from us. /end

…we didn’t toil much. All that white space. I’ve come to learn that toil here mostly means ‘weren’t allowed to hop on planes and travel’. What precious darlings we are, the awful humanity of denied recreational flight. Here’s a list of things many are actually tired of, that…/2 https://t.co/VlpGF8OG1e

…have gone on at least 10 years, often 20-30, or even more. - being grossly underpaid - having to pay astronomical amounts out of our own pockets in a universal health care system - having to fight to get our kids a decent education without taking out a 2nd mortgage…/3

- watching political Neanderthals bring lumps of coal into parliament and block modernisation of our energy supply - complete inaction on family and domestic violence - the trashing of the Murray Darling Basin - a string and tin can broadband network…/4

- continuous rorting of our money in grants schemes to buy influence and votes - a total absence of media regulation - the replacement of accountable and skilled public servants with hand-picked political advisers - giving away of billions in tax cuts while basic public…/5

…infrastructure decays and collapses - the weaponisation of refugees - leadership challenges - the destruction of the Australian car industry, and - the continuous increase in local rates to compensate for the starving of actual services of money, to fund election bribes at…/6

…the State and federal level. Vertical fiscal rorting. I’m too tired typing all of that, let alone living it. And there was lots more. Now I’m told I have to let myself, family and friends get repeatedly infected with a lethal virus, because I was too tired of fighting it. /7

Piss off I am. I don’t want every person I love to potentially have years taken off their life because venal business interests and precious, spoiled travellers didn’t like the interruption. Australians will fight what they are LED to fight. They did it for a decade in the…/8

…world wars. And now in under 18 months of not much more than social disruption for most, we’re apparently exhausted. It’s gaslighting, it’s what we’re told to believe. It doesn’t match any sane reality. /end

Schooling was also in the story. To my knowledge schools don’t rely upon imported labour. There, a combination of demographics and mass Covid infection has gutted the workforce. Society is broken. N=1 politics offers us nothing but ‘pretend we’re back to normal’ in response. /2/2

Yesterday’s discussion (actually at least 6 months’ old, but social attention waxes and wanes - it ‘trends’) was mostly about the top 5% of the Department of Health’s own Medicare pyramid of compliance. All public programs have this sort of compliance mechanism built in. /2 https://t.co/cNfIJSsI9o

Or at least the ones populist politicians aren’t allowed near, do. (Populist politicians sometimes try to turn the compliance into ‘robo’-driven public administration.) Why I’m so tired of populist politics, the steps to address compliance issues are already in the work…/3 https://t.co/tW0QnRKPd7

…public officials do, the second pyramid. Whether they’re supported or resourced in that work is another question, and in populist politics, the answer is nearly always no. Somebody has stolen the money for a novelty vote-buying cheque, somewhere. Because all of public life…/4 https://t.co/Pv1lmRdB22

…is now infected by populism, this issue yesterday quickly became the usual team sports, with people lining up behind their chosen team, and none of the specifics of the actual issue much discussed at all. For example, the response ‘the overwhelming majority of doctors do…/5

…the right thing’ is not only irrelevant to basic public sector compliance, it’s a carbon copy of saying ‘the overwhelming majority of people have mild cases of Covid, so it isn’t a problem’. We re-use all the same tired populist cliches with every issue. The issue isn’t…/6

…really about good or bad doctors, though there will be those, as there are good and bad (and fraudulent) in any field. It was about the basic public administration of a core public service. Are these existing controls being applied? Are they resourced? If there’s about a 5%…/7

…non-compliance rate, as most experts seem to agree, remember this is 5% of tens of BILLIONS of dollars. It bloody matters. Just as a small percentage of severely ill Covid patients is hospital and death overload, if there are millions of infected people. /8 https://t.co/9ldm3PMkrn

We need an issues/problem-based politics, free of populism trying to weaponise the issues and problems for political gain. We have thousands of brilliant public servants who can be the foundation of that shift. Let’s use them. (And replace elections with sortition.) /end

Look at this rubbish from NSW: "All students, staff and visitors to school sites are strongly encouraged to wear a mask, particularly when indoors or when physical distancing is not possible." The ludicrous situation where there's a known significant health risk to staff and.../2

...students, but the best NSW Health can do is 'encourage' some action against it, because their political libertarian masters are offended by basic public health action. There has to be consequences for this deliberate infection of the entire community, and for the .../3

...political hijacking of centuries-old public health procedures. CHOs demoted so that populist Premiers can take control of public health, to ensure their own electoral success. A National Cabinet that trashed all of the principles of federalism,.../4

...has no agenda papers and functions as a decoupling mechanism between leaders and their State health departments. All of this outrageous corruption, every last bit of it, is driven by populism. By the focus on winning elections above any public duty. These ex-student.../5

...politician zealot-halfwits have hijacked our societies and use them as playthings in their pathetic ideological undergraduate debating games. While we continue to believe popularity is a test of competence, nothing can or will be done. /end

The Chinese imperial examination was the model of our own civil/public services. The broader idea here is to find expertise and talent and utilise it towards the functioning of society itself. To act as a counterweight to imperial authority, which historically proved unable…/2… https://t.co/O5rf8S0pxI

…to maintain social functioning or stability. A mechanism to counter hereditary aristocracy with ‘scholar-bureaucrats’. Note that the Chinese saw civil service staff as scholars, expertise was treasured, these weren’t merely scribes to the emperors. And you can still see…/3

…the link back to this Chinese innovation in our own modern civil services, where bureaucrats are also called ‘mandarins’. Mandarin was the name for a bureaucrat-scholar. In the 19th century the UK and also US used this Chinese model in the development of their own civil…/4

…services, as their societies faced complexities of operation that forced monarchs and leaders of the day to look for help from expertise of all kinds. The complexity of societies forces this shift, it’s not a personal whim. Note also the unique blend of expertise and…/5

…authority this model invents. There’s no separation, no ‘keeping knowledge and politics separate’. The mandarins run the country, effectively, using expertise. Fast forward to today, with Covid, and we’ve had nearly 3 years of people despairing that politics is removed from…/6

…and openly hostile to expertise. A pandemic, civilisation’s greatest threat, is being processed using nothing more than popularity. But very few recognise that humans already solved this problem, more than 1500 years ago. They know how to blend expertise and politics. /7

It’s called bureaucracy. Something modern N=1 politics has conditioned us all to distrust and despise. And for good reason, that politics recognises it, as recalcitrant old emperors did as well, as its greatest threat. Modern politicians want popularity to run politics. /8

But that will fail, and is failing. We can see it, societies are on the brink of collapse. Because of 5-7 decades of constant propaganda against scholar-bureaucrats, most people i know see a bureaucracy as an intrinsically bad thing. As ‘paperwork’. /9 https://t.co/amkiUcwJDZ

Filling out forms. Something we all hate doing. What was conveniently excised from this picture was the scholar in scholar-bureaucrat. The bureaucracy is fundamentally about expertise, not paperwork. About expertise harnessed to social ends. It runs the country, caretaker…/10

…mode during our beloved elections shows that you don’t even need politicians to be there for the country to continue running just fine. And anybody who works in government sees this firsthand, how elected reps know nothing about how government actually works, and know…/11

…only a little bit more at the end of their terms. They’re the public face of government, but they’re not government. Mandarins are our government. We have tense global politics with China, calling them authoritarian, mostly because they don’t have ‘free and fair elections’. /12

We’re obsessed with elections. The DNA of our entire governments matches theirs to an enormous degree. Both are run by mandarins. It’s not a choice, it’s forced upon all human societies by the complexity of reality and of social life. Expertise needs to run societies, most…/13

…of the time. We don’t even see it, because we’re not taught it. There are thousands of mandarins in each of our capital cities running this country right now. With great expertise. Elected politicians are not even a sideshow, they’re bulls in a governance china shop. /14

So this is our only salvation. We know expertise is needed to fix our problems, like climate change and Covid. But we don’t need to co-opt scientists and other scholars from universities to do this, their expertise isn’t in government. The scholars we need are mandarins,…/15

…whose specific expertise is the using of expertise in the running of countries. Public administration, such a boring term, but the most extraordinary of all pursuits. @latingle wrote a superb and sadly neglected essay on this very topic, ‘How we forgot how to govern’. /16 https://t.co/IVsu3OGA3U

I recommend it. And give up the idea that if we could just elect a better set of populist ninnies, we could fix things. Elections won’t fix anything. Re-empowering our public services is our only path to salvation. Notice how National Cabinet deliberately sidelines them. /end

The crocodile tears about impact of lockdowns on education and mental health came from the same people who had less than zero interest in either, before the pandemic. They originally said the quiet bits out loud, that it was stopping employees from working. /2

Then realising that might sound callous, suddenly got the spin doctors to transform that into faux care for education and mental health. The same people who presided over the gutting of comprehensive education in this country, and who outsourced mental health to NGOs. 3/3

(Independent of evidence on schooling, to clarify. There is some good evidence on other areas discussed, in the report.)

The same processes that blocked action against climate change also blocked effective action against Covid, but you won't get that from this report, except in very general talk about the response being too 'political'. What's happened can't be understood as just some gaps in.../2

...public administration. It was an all-out assault on public administration, on the notion of the 'public' itself. By a political belief system that doesn't even deny that's what it was doing. 'Getting government out of peoples' lives'. 3/3

...you can be the person everybody wants, like the popular people you see, it just needs some work? Conservatives use script 2). Progressives use script 1).

(P.S. Boris is back in the running, because in popularity politics, he’s the most popular. He’s still a disaster, but because we think popularity is leadership, nothing will change.)

When our democracies start to fail we’re like a dog going back to its own vomit, thinking the answer is to elect better people. We ignore that trying to solve complex problems by picking the most popular person to do it has no actual logic. There’s nothing, not one thing,…/2

…that links those two things, expertise and popularity, in any necessary way. A footy team that’s popular but which never wins is a bad football team. Coming back to independents in politics, we get periodic waves of enthusiasm for independent candidates. /3

They appeal to the unpopularity of the existing populist muppets. It’s a shifting of our popular allegiance, like we shift brands of soap powder, or musical artists. Lots of talk of ‘representing the people’ better, but we should again be wary that what we might actually be…/4

…seeing is just one more basic piece of the populist machine. The constant shifting of popularity. Peter Andren was an immensely popular independent for the seat of Calare, as an example. Also a highly principled and competent politician. But the secret to his success? /5 https://t.co/8clUnbYCe6

He was the local TV newsreader in the seat of Calare for years before entering politics. People knew him, liked him. He was popular. Since his sad passing, Calare has reverted to a safe Nationals seat, showing no sign at all of any remnant passion for a different politics. /6

With the Teals, maybe cars are a good way to see how the European model of a greater number of independents is really only one more permutation of populism. Take the classic Oz duopoly, Holden v Ford. Like LNP v Labor. Blue and red. /7 https://t.co/d2FPLs3PHE

For years this was the shape of the Australian car market. Most Australians bought a Holden or a Ford. Not everybody, but most. Fast-forward to today, what are Australians buying now? A whole range of cars, from a range of manufacturers. /8 https://t.co/5lJRJBJd2a

There is no duopoly left. Popular choice has fractured across a whole range of different options. Like it has for soap powders and liquids, for example. Actually many of these brands are made by the same manufacturers, as is also the case with cars. And now also with politics. /9 https://t.co/35C26HIicF

One of the oldest tricks in the marketing playbook is to diversify the sense of choice, but to keep the same underlying ‘market’, so that people will feel like they’re driving the whole show through their choice of product, even if they’re all made by the same companies. /10

I’m not saying at all that what’s happening in politics is us being played, that some mastermind is ‘manufacturing consent’ by offering us a greater range of options to vote for, while leaving everything else more or less the same. We’re doing it ourselves. While we stick to…/11

…the idea that popularity is democracy, this will be the inevitable outcome. As it is in commerce, with soap powders and cars, also based on popularity. The expanded number of independents in a parliament doesn’t represent any fundamental shift in the way populism works. /12

It’s the natural evolution of all popularity-based processes. To diversify the popular choices available. To save democracy we need to bypass popularity entirely, not diversify it. As with Peter Andren, or before him Ted Mack, little lasting change is brought to politics by…/13

…brief flirtations with diversified choice of who to vote for. Voting is not democracy. Populism has made us think that, but it’s just factually incorrect. Democracy is rule FOR the people, not BY the people. Rule by the people is only a popularity contest. Eternal school. /end

Thinking we could somehow create islands of Covid-free space for the vulnerable is exactly the same as telling people who want to piss in the local pool to stay in their end. Totally childish, wilful ignorance about the critical inter-connectedness of modern societies. /2

And this is the libertarian fantasy, that society is millions of individuals all going about individual lives. Rather than millions of people all working together in groups, utterly dependent on those interactions. Not just socially, this is also how the economy works. /3

Mass infection is crashing economies because infected workers infect all other workers, in their inter-connected work. I’ve Tweeted before about how we see this laughable political philosophy up close in its ideas about freedom and regulation. That the absence of regulation…/4

…doesn’t create individual action, it reverts society to its default state, which is social action. Conformity, of groups. Like we learn at school. Regulation doesn’t oppress free individuals, it gives socially bound individuals *permission* to go beyond group conformity. /5

That’s why we invented regulation, to allow groups to shift their conformity towards evidence-based facts, rather than focusing only on internal group dynamics. Populism strips away all regulation, leaving us in the Trumpian world of naked popularity-based conformity. /6

I know so many despair at this state of the world. There is only one way out of it, and that is to end popularity as the mechanism used to create social hierarchies, to elect our leadership. It’s one of humanity’s most stupid ideas, and more so because it thinks of it as its…/7

…best idea. It thinks that’s ‘democracy’. The populist libertarians want us to think that, it’s the trick they use to hijack our societies. They can make anything popular, it’s just marketing. Even mass infection and death, as we’ve seen. /end

It’s not relevant. A society becomes civilised when it organises itself around the bad things, not the good things. The things there will never be ‘popular support’ for, that don’t ‘have the numbers’. Populism ignores of all these bad things in favour of majority rules. /2

It also then suppresses minorities, because they upset the status quo. That was why democracy was invented, to act against majority rules, by inventing the ‘public’. The public isn’t a count of hands, it’s the interplay of people of all kinds. Why elections destroy it. /3

Going back to public administration, that’s why whistleblowers are protected, they’re the minority who call out the fraud. Everything in democracy goes (or should) against the tendency to lapse into majority rules. Because the majority is already fine. /end

That playground/classroom binary is repeated right throughout adult life. The playground represents how we interact socially. The classroom represents humans’ knowledge, multi-generational. The latter is what drives civilisation forward. There’s a productive tension here. /2 https://t.co/6yrZnMZFG5

Too much of either breaks societies. A society run entirely with knowledge without regard to the social arrangements of its people breaks social bonds. And a society run entirely using the social laws of the playground has no history, no before or after. Bullies rule. /3 https://t.co/CT6NUPeh1r

Today in our populist age, the playground is dominating. Populism is just the law of the playground, applied to the adult world. Popularity-driven politics and life. Institutions representing ur knowledge and history (the classroom) are being dismantled and destroyed. /4 https://t.co/SR36sQuLqm

We’re living eternal ‘lifestyle’ lives, focused entirely upon the present and the individuals living in it. There’s no collective movement forward towards great social goals, just the continuous focus on individual self-fulfilment. The classroom is not there to shape social…/5 https://t.co/oz3EojJKws

…behaviour differently using knowledge accumulated over generations. We’re all stuck in eternal recess and lunchtime. Expertise is sidelined, in favour of popularity-based politics. The playground. These aren’t analogies, again our societies now take their social and…/6 https://t.co/8EILRld4iT

…cultural models FROM schooling. It’s all we know, because populism decoupled adult institutions from adult life. Look around your entire life and watch the law of the playground shaping everything. You can’t unsee it, once that frame kicks in. /end https://t.co/RCglqdvTsC

O’Neill took over the reins at Alcoa at a time when it was struggling. From the start he said his main focus would be worker safety. Financial and other analysts were incredulous, asking why it wasn’t more traditional business things, like cash flow and inventory etc. /2

The details are in the article in the first Tweet of this thread, and in Charles Duhigg’s great book on habit. But in a nutshell, O’Neill realised that organisations have ‘keystone habits’, things they do that connect through to everything else they do. There’s no need to do…/3 https://t.co/FVCBkxcbN6

…the usual thing of trying to capture the whole organisation with flow-charts, and ‘message’ change through every box on the chart separately. O’Neill’s genius was to understand that safety connected everything *already*. To work safely means to be doing everything else in…/4

…the business well. Focus on safety and by osmosis it fixes everything else. It also energises workers, who unsurprisingly feel prioritised, when their safety is prioritised. But it’s not just a ‘psychological’ thing, safe work requires a business to have all of its shit…/5

…together. Its procedures, its reporting lines, its focus on quality, etc. O’Neill understood this, and Alcoa’s profitability exploded as a result. None of the rubbish we’ve heard during Covid of needing to ‘balance’ safety with economic output. Worker safety should both…/6

…protect workers from Covid, AND supercharge the economic performance of the businesses they work for. That’s the Alcoa lesson that, as the article says, may still not be known widely enough. /end

…the fallacy of natural evolution to mildness? That greater transmissibility is as likely to cause greater virulence, because of the ready availability of fresh hosts? @TRyanGregory @Globalbiosec @CrabbBrendan @ArisKatzourakis 2/2

Or that should maybe be shipwreck.

They get away with it because elections gave them a way in. What we call democracy is really the complex public institutions that organise and run public life. Libertarians have convinced people democracy is elections. Elections were always only one (very recent) way to.../2

...elect leaders. A tool, not democracy itself, which pre-exists elections by thousands of years. Libertarians gamed this tool easily, it's just popularity - marketing. Once done, they then claim the 'will of the people' for their democracy hacking. /3

Only about 20 democracies even require people to vote, and of those only about half even bother to enforce it. So the 'will of the people' or a 'mandate' is a pretty tenuous construction. Most of what a government actually does is never even discussed at an election. /4

Once the anti-social hack is inserted into the democratic system, it infects widely, such as with privatisations, and now with public health. Libertarian politicians hacked the public health response for Covid, turning it into a classic libertarian 'freedom' campaign. /5

This isn't an analogy, this is the deliberate hacking of a system of governance. The vast network of think tanks and media interests the libertarians created and acquired do this as their core work. Weaponising issues every day of every year, you can see how during Covid.../6

...every advance by public health is immediately met by a new libertarian variant, hastily strategised and circulated. Slogans, strategies, 'living with the virus', 'just like the flu', immunity debt', etc. This is what hackers do, re-jig their code to maintain control. /end

All of these ideologies are mostly caricatures that human groups use as debating points. As the world gets more complex and inter-connected, the disconnect between the ideologies and reality is our greatest obstacle to progress. Take the ISS, as an example. /2 https://t.co/68VpnmPORC

The level of international cooperation required to build and orbit this thing is mind-boggling. It took 3 million person-years to build, the equivalent of 26 billion work hours. The US and Russia jointly started the project, and the Europeans form the rest of the partnership. /3 https://t.co/ZONaYBgMZF

If your view of the world is the news, you won’t get even the tiniest sense of this level of staggering cooperation between these great powers. It’s not even mentioned. To compare, it took about 400,000 person-years to build the Pyramid at Giza, and 100,000 to build the…/4 https://t.co/Rl2jOAyVAH

…Colosseum in Rome. One of the things the recently departed Bruno Latour always emphasised is that it’s the enormous amount of maintenance and upkeep that modern technologies require that is the real glue that binds societies together. They require enormous expertise and…/5 https://t.co/RyCZsjIP58

…ongoing maintenance to build and keep running. And the knowledge and skills required to do that are fully international. The Chinese space station uses the same basic science and engineering as the ISS. One of the reasons I agree with researchers who say elections destroy…/6

…democracies is that far too much of our civilisations now is ‘technical’, requiring expertise to function. No amount of popularity-based politics can ever come close to understanding how any of it works. What needs doing is increasingly not even debatable. /7

It’s engineering much more than it’s politics. And for those who might hysterically jump up and say ‘hey, that’s technocracy!’, meaning (they think) experts hijacking democracy, in my experience as an engineer this always just reflects a total misunderstanding of technical…/8

…things. Engineers don’t just deal with equations and nuts and bolts, any engineering project is intrinsically about meeting the needs of ‘stakeholders’ i.e people. Any project scoping is nearly entirely about that more than about the nuts and bolts. The upshot is, the world…/9

…increasingly doesn’t need vast, generic ideologies to drive it, all of them are about 30,000 feet away from the specifics of what needs doing. We need expertise to run the world, and no that doesn’t mean scientists pulled out of their labs and asked to be Prime Ministers. /10

Our public institutions were already the meeting place between those scientists and the political work of running societies. Bureaucrats, as the libertarians sneer. (A good guide of what is right and correct is if libertarians hate it). If you’ve worked in government…/11

…you know the illusion that our elected representatives run anything much at all is farcical. It’s not their job to run anything, their job is to be the public face and input to the actual running of countries. An important job, but one populism now mistakes with actual…/12

…operational running of countries. Populists politicians seem to actually believe it themselves, that they’re running the country. It’s a joke, they would struggle to organise a cake stall. Every wise-sounding thing they say or do is something their departments of thousands…/13

…of experts have explained to them. That’s the heart of ‘democracy’, those departments, our public institutions. Not the idiot popularity contest every 3 or 4 years to elect reality TV stars and other grifters as ‘leaders’. Twitter can be like that too, people here…/14

…every day arguing over what this or that politicians says or does, as if it actually matters. Populism has fooled us all into thinking that’s the important thing. Politicians come and go more regularly than droughts and floods. Doesn’t it occur to us that countries keep…/15

…running anyway? Who do we think is doing that? We think every new populist Gilderoy learns how to run a complex nation in the weeks between election and taking office? Please. /end

At 2:36. https://t.co/zbb1xNfsud

That idea will destroy democracy, and actually any society or system of government. Because it’s empirically incorrect. As I’ve Tweeted in relation to voluntary masking, without a group being led it reverts immediately to social conformity. To copying or imitating one another. /2

And even when led, conformity is always the mechanism, it’s just that it then conforms to what its leader desires. Social media mostly comes out of the US, with its particular and in many ways extreme form of individualism, libertarianism. It’s a technology that implements... /3

…that belief system. And by osmosis it then shapes other countries who use the technology in similar ways. Technology doesn’t determine, but it definitely affords. Social media is the libertarian Trojan Horse, transforming the world. Destroying it. Which sounds too strong. /4

But I don’t think it is. These platforms are fracturing all our established institutions, all of our ways of doing things that it took us centuries, even millennia, to develop and refine. And they’re doing it very fast. It made a reality TV star President and mobilised an…/5

…assault on the seat of US democracy. It’s true that the technology is enabling a social process of conformity that was always there, but the existentially lethal difference is that this process is now decoupled from our institutions. It’s naked popularity, with no…/6

…connection to any accumulated wisdom. Wisdom that it cost us a lot of suffering and lives to obtain. Replacing what we know with a million tribes, all following their favourite influencers, reinventing civilisation every day in waves of fashions and fads. Social chaos…/7

…and ultimately breakdown. Popularity is the weakest possible social cement. It’s stalling all social development at an adolescent stage of continuous jostling for status in hierarchies of popularity. It’s already forcing our previous popularity machine, elections, into the…/8

…background, with what’s ‘trending’ fracturing each electoral term into many mini-elections. 3 PMs in the UK in this year alone. I’ve also Tweeted that this is the real push to independents in politics as well, not any sort of fundamental shift but just a splintering of…/9

…popular choice. Like washing powders, or cars. If you look around every day, you’ll see this exploding libertarian fracturing and splintering of all of our history, our civilisation, into separate fragments. And social media is the accelerant doing it. /end

‘Fact-checking’ is also nonsense. It removes the ‘social’ from social media, pretending it’s just an information resource. It’s a platform where social groups mobilise. Fact-checking barely scratches that mobilisation. /2

The genius of the libertarians is to make arguments like this look like ‘he’s an authoritarian fascist Chinese sympathiser’, blah blah blah. Media has always been regulated, because knowledge and opinion can kill. We’re trapped in idiot libertarian frames. 3/3

…and no longer transition to that institutionally-mediated life, instead remaining on social media as the tool to mediate wider social life. It entrenches adolescence as the dominant cultural form, across all ages. If you want to understand why society won’t do something…/2

…basic like fight a pandemic, try remembering how hard it is to get a teenager to do anything, like clean their room. Not an analogy, society now sees public health action as being ‘grounded’, like a teenager. All of our culture is becoming adolescent, and social media…/3

…platforms are the enablers. /end

…rooftop solar that the real challenge is distributing it (the dimwits’ job). By 2025 (3 years) there will be so much home-grown energy in the system it might break the grid. One strategy that is much faster than fixing gas would be to subsidise community storage. /2 https://t.co/l5nguky5E8

That way the absence of new grid infrastructure to distribute this tsunami of pipeline energy will matter less, people can store and use it in the community in the interim. 3/3

The questions they should be asked are ‘Jane is a single mum with cancer, and two kids in school. She’s on chemo and getting Covid would be very dangerous for her. How should she live with the virus?’ Tabloid media knows specifics are where power is in politics. 2/2

…nonsense. Our lives to the left of that explosion of Covid in late-2021 weren’t ‘locked down’, as these same hijackers want us to believe. We were mostly open and free, and taking some sensible precautions, with the occasional outbreak to control. /2 https://t.co/ZXHLPK3zav

Those experts who help the hijackers by rationalising this shift from public health to politics as a ‘new phase’ of the pandemic will be mocked in historical scrutiny of what they did, even though they may feel empowered now by the gratitude of the politicians they helped. /3 https://t.co/aiSwtQKynE

That gratitude will be fleeting, they’ll be chewed up and spat out whenever they get in the way of some electoral success, which is all the politicians are interested in. And these same neoliberals will be swallowed by the populism they’ve used to gain power, as all of…/4 https://t.co/IEV53CAmb8

…Trump’s opponents in the GOP are finding out right now. Thinking they’re using populism to further the neoliberal cause, in reality populism is blind to all ideologies, except popularity. Including neoliberalism, which will be discarded with all the rest. /5

Leaving nothing but broken societies riven by continuous waves of fads and fashions, decoupled from any historical knowledge or experience. Social media will replace our public lives and institutions, that process is well underway. High school is now all of society. /end

In reality places like Australia solved these problems in an entirely different and pragmatic way. We historically focused our politics on the practical community-building activities of everyday life, like community sport. That’s where we learned how to live together, and…/2

…politics became just an extension of that. Our institutions were also historically ruthlessly pragmatic, completely uninterested in all of these ideology wars. They were like big community sporting clubs. Of course now we have our own libertarians, trying to graft US…/3

…cartoon democracy onto the Australian experience. Mostly they fail, in the medium to longer term, because the community-based focus reasserts itself. I only hope that continues, though the increasing mediation of community life by social media now (another child of cartoon…/4

…US democracy) makes me less confident the genius Australian model will survive. 5/5