April 2023

…infection-derived immunity not just lead to the next generation having to start all over again, with severe disease? That’s not how colds work. 2/2

You’re not and never can be free if a lethal virus is circulating in the community in an uncontrolled way, and not even your own 4 walls keep you safe from it. The same people who did this described restrictions on *social* activity as oppression. But the violation of…/2

…the sanctity and safety of peoples’ own homes goes without comment. The astonishing hypocrisy of this too, from a political belief system that says social things don’t exist anyway, and then described the restriction of them as oppression. 3/3

…as just an address. A point on a map. Location, location. Real estate. But households are not just societies in miniature, they’re universes too. They’re a cosmic as well as a social order, peoples’ beliefs make their homes as much as walls do. /2

Economically household income is also the main determinant of wealth, not individual salaries. The reason political budgets get such resonance is that they were deliberately dramatised to be like a household budget (even though they’re nothing like them). /3

The household is society’s reference point, on all things. Also why the homeless are so marginalised, whereas in economic politics they’re just another potential worker. Understanding households as society’s atoms I think is key to fixing many of our problems. ‘Go households’…/4

…fixed the GFC in Australia. Australian households have re-built our energy generation system, with solar panels. Electrifying households, including their transport, is the likely fastest way to address both climate change and cost of living. Etc. /5 https://t.co/SpomF55veh

Our experience of ‘society’ is overwhelmingly our household, with excursions to work, social events, travel etc. giving us experiences with people from other households. A household is a way of framing all of existence itself, where we learn how to live, our beliefs, how to…/6

…view the universe as a whole. It’s our HOME. And it’s that idea which the economy, that great modern fiction, will not allow. Home. We’re so trapped in the framing of the economy that I don’t think we see this as where everything matters. We think ‘society’ is lots of…/7

…little independent pieces, individuals or households, added together. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle. That’s fundamentally wrong. Every piece of the jigsaw puzzle of society, households, is all of the puzzle, in every piece. Our homes are where we are grounded in *all* of our…/8

…existence, in every way. Economically, socially, emotionally, cosmically. The reason economies so resist ‘working from home’ isn’t about the practicalities of work. Those are all able to be managed. It’s about control, about the locus of your life. The economy cannot allow…/9

…that to be your home. It must be the job. The job is the true atomic unit of economies. It’s a locus of control. Jobs are what decoupled our lives, from our work. Jobs, jobs, jobs, as economy politicians openly say. What drained our communities of their expertise and…/10

…energy, commuting along ever wider freeways to and from jobs. Our homes became garages, with living quarters attached. The passion, obsession for transport that economic politics has. This is what the market they believe in does, strips away all agency based on location,…/11

…in favour of ‘globalised’ movement of people and resources. Really just ‘supply chains’ to continuously top-up mountains of gold the people at the centre of these chains rest upon. Meantime travel became the booming industry, as people displaced from the ground under their…/12

…own feet, travel obsessively to try to rediscover some sort of connection to place. Every point on the globe becomes just another place to ‘see’. Rather than to be grounded in. We’re not grounded, we don’t even understand what that word means now. When Indigenous peoples…/13

…are displaced from their land, it’s not just a change of address. It severs the basis of their entire existence, their connection to land. That connection isn’t ‘local’ or even ‘global’. That binary is the false one the economy invented, to justify stripping households and…/14

…their communities of things, in favour of ‘globalised’ economies. That connection is cosmic, it’s the root of all existence. European Australians don’t understand this, huddled on the shores for the past 200 years, nearly falling off into the sea, anything to avoid…/15

…actually connecting to place in some way, the vast majority of a vast continent confined to being some wanky mythology of ‘outback’ Australia, ‘the bush’. If we’re going to take societies back from economies, we need to understand home again. Our societies are where all…/16

…of our homes overlap, each one of those homes the entire world and universe, refracted in one specific way. Not one tiny Lego ‘part’ to make up a ‘whole’. Australia isn’t a little bit of the Smiths down at 23, plus a bit of the Singhs at 47, and so on through millions of…/17

…households. Each one of those households is all of Australia, refracted in one specific way. The most revolutionary act you can undertake is to make your home the centre of your existence again. Not in a prepper or gated community way (that’s the local/global nonsense). /18

We don’t want to go ‘off-grid’, nationally. The grid (in everything meaning of that term, not just energy) is fantastic, a huge distributed and shared resource. We want to re-prioritise the nodes on that grid, our homes. The people who are cavalier about Covid don’t seem…/19

…to mind it being brought into their homes. Because they have no real sense of that being a violation. Many loved lockdowns because it put their homes at the centre of their existence again, they stopped just being overnight resting points for their commuting job-lives. /20

Societies that are more resilient, economically, against pandemics, or whatever, are societies where the home is the fundamental reality. Strong homes are resilient societies. Society is nothing but the overlapping universes of every household in them. /end

Think about it. How will the problems facing society today ever be solved by the fracturing and dilution of attention and effort across millions of different jobs and careers? What could ever coordinate all of that fractured human activity? Only one thing can. The State. /2

The thing those who made the job the centre of social life despise the most. The thing humans invented to provide the coordination that individual jobs can’t provide. The job people think the ‘invisible hand’ of the market can do it. They don’t even pretend it’s real. /3

It’s invisible. Because it doesn’t exist. Pretending that societies run themselves if you just free everybody up to do whatever they like (the market) only means those with power and wealth face no resistance to consolidating their advantage even further. /4

Try going onto Linkedin and asking everybody how they feel all of their splendid individual careers will somehow magically coalesce into urgent action on climate change, or Covid. It’s like farting in an elevator. They’re too busy focusing on building their careers,…/5

…the economy’s substitute for social aspiration. Jobs allow social wealth to be parcelled out to feudal employer barons to apportion however they like. You can make a fortune manufacturing rubber ducks, while the world burns. /end

Given that the parents are being infected too. Um, often they can’t remember having these infections in 20+ years. And their kids also either may never have had them, or it’s been years. I asked why a few months of lockdown , when they didn’t have these infections,…/2

…was somehow different to years of not having these infections? No answer. They also weren’t even aware that infections with these bugs doesn’t usually create immunity anyway. The whole thing is farcical, it’s difficult to think of any regular infection at all that leads to…/3

…meaningful immunity, rather than just sickness. Not colds, not flu. Not conjunctivitis, not tonsillitis. Hand, foot and mouth disease (also prevalent now) yes, but then earlier infections are supposed to confer some immunity, but now they’re not. Some see it, others…/4

…don’t want to. This constant propaganda of infection to stop infections, with almost zero empirical examples of it actually working, anywhere at any time, for any pathogen. And where it does work, it’s now not working. Basic questions that journalists again don’t ask. /end

…institutional framework of society, to keep everything running. Expertise across every area of life, guiding and building. Now replaced with mass stupidity, mobilised by social media led by influencers, using popularity as the only currency. Social media companies…/2

…themselves, like the IT industry they grew from, express this libertarian philosophy openly. The explosion of cybercrime is just another symptom. IT and social media are the way the political libertarians, often from the US, remade the world in their own image. 3/3

…find definitions of immunity in reputable texts that extend its meaning to ‘making disease less severe’. You’re either immune, or not-immune. Not half-immune, like half-pregnant. Yes you can have a whole variety of immune *response*, some of which makes you less sick. /2

And the symptomatic disease you experience is often your actual immune response to the pathogen, not the pathogen itself. So by dampening the immune response, you can have less severe disease. But in a way that’s a weakening of the immune system, *less* immunity. /3

I’ve seen some experts question whether the suppression of our Covid immune response (via the current vaccines) is in fact providing greater opportunity for the virus to set up reservoirs throughout our bodies. Again, immunology is a highly complex field, and I don’t know…/4

…whether that’s what’s happening or not. But anybody can check the meanings of words. Our CMO this week again published opinion showing that he’s leading a response to Covid that is not about providing immunity from disease at all. He attributed…/5 https://t.co/vAqVFFkqw6

…lower levels of severe disease to ‘hybrid immunity’. Suggesting that people being vaccinated and infected is making them less sick with each new infection. That may be the case, but is it immunity? Isn’t it just an immune response, at best? (And maybe a dangerous one?) /6

Hybrid and herd immunity are also mixed in these announcements. Herd immunity isn’t always mentioned, but the clear implication is that all of this supposed hybrid immunity is building towards herd immunity. The more we all get infected, the more ‘immune’ we’ll get, and thus…/7

…the herd will become more resistant to spread. But there’s no evidence or even mention of all of these infections preventing infection itself, just severe disease. You get no herd immunity at all if everybody is still getting infected. Again, hybrid immunity seems the exact…/8

…immunological equivalent to being half-pregnant. Political spin retrofitted back into health science. To finish, what’s delicious here is the etymology. The origin of the word immunity is the Latin ‘immunis’. Which meant exemption from public responsibilities, like taxation. /9

That meaning is still used in legal and financial circles, as in ‘immunity from prosecution’. But I find it hilarious that the politics of Covid minimisation, which derives from those who oppose ‘public’ anything, the anti-State/pro-market folk, has eagerly adopted immunity…/10

…as our supposed way out of this pandemic. They know all about immunity, it’s the centre of their belief system. ‘Freedom’ from public responsibility, for anything. /end

Reading some more on this, ‘partial immunity’, leading to reduction in severity of disease, is a concept in use. As is this leading to full immunity, in some cases. The question still is, does this work for SARS-Cov-2?

All of the different -isms (capitalism, socialism, communism, liberalism, neoliberalism) are just gang names, in the same social turf wars that start in school and don’t end throughout life. They’re grown-up names we give to the same process, pretending that grown-ups move…/2 https://t.co/4Ft9Mq3rDG

…beyond social status games and pursue disinterested political beliefs instead. It’s not true, and we also shouldn’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s the beliefs that are simplified nonsense, completely ignorant of basic social psychology. You can call society a market, or a…/3

…State, or some ‘fasicist’ worship of a Great Leader. All will be exactly the same thing, social status games, the constant creation and maintenance of social hierarchies. If we recognised this, that society is social and not political, we might be less stupidly disappointed…/4

…when ‘politics’ fails us and each elected party degenerates into battles for social status. Which is all any of them ever are, or can be. We need to embrace being social creatures, because it’s what we most fundamentally are. The only economic thinker who ever understood…/5

…this was Gabriel Tarde, who laughed at all of the different political -isms and their economic theories. Instead stating simply that society is social, and what drives all social activity is one thing. Desires. Desires we hide behind our pretend ‘objective’ economic…/6 https://t.co/uo8TFtSVGo

…and political theories. Tarde said economic activity was only the pursuit of desires. How could that not be true? A fundamentally social and human act, to desire and to pursue that desire. What did Tarde see as the driver of all ‘economic growth’? Conversation. /7

It’s conversation between people that circulates and magnifies desires, as life in our social media age is shouting out at us every day. Desires ‘go viral’, which in turn drives what we stupidly call ‘economic activity’. It’s human social activity, the pursuit of desires,…/8

…through the same social mechanisms we learn in school. Building hierarchies of social status. Because what we desire above all else is to be recognised, to have status in the groups we live in, and in the wider society. To have the most ‘likes’. /end

There are so many complexities around using hybrid immunity as a route to herd immunity, which appears to be the current goal across most countries. The WHO mentions just some of those in its statement. (I’d still like to know if that approach has ever been successful, for…/2

…any disease). Mindful that it’s likely more political strategy masquerading as public health method. But even in the most basic ways, to achieve anything like herd immunity (another deeply problematic idea, in a hypermobile world), you surely need a whole lot of things…/3

…to line up, in ways that seem impossible. People need to be infected with the same variants, at the same time, that infection needs to spread evenly throughout society without missing key groups, that infection needs to provide some sort of lasting immunity, etc. /4

None of those things seem possible on current experience, or even from first principles. And vaccination programs are being wound down, so to what extent any immunity we’re seeing is even hybrid anyway is an open question. Also not to forget the fantasy idea of isolating…/5

…millions of ‘vulnerable’ people while all of this dance goes on. Something that isn’t even happening anyway. /end

The company is about to allow hybrids and EVs to be part of their fleet. Their discussion was around additional insurance in the case of the EVs catching fire. I asked why that would be needed. Incredulous look from both of them, that somebody would even ask that. /2

Apparently I should know that EVs catch fire, all the time. Except they don’t. Petrol cars are about 100 times more likely to catch fire. Their version of reality comes from EV minimisers on social media. Often funded and promoted by the fossil fuel industry. /3

And this matters, because it’s not just debating points online. This is actual serious policy, in organisations around the country, based on absolute bullshit from social media. It’s sinister, because it’s beneath the radar, unlike when social media impacts politics. I doubt…/4

…there’s a single part of our lives now that isn’t being shaped in this same way. Subtly, daily, bypassing existing hierarchies of hard-won expertise. Corroding society from the inside out, at a speed I don’t think is recognised. 5/5

That astronomical jump in GDP, for the first time in 2 millennia, was caused by the Industrial Revolution. Mostly, engineers. Most people know that. What’s not said though is why this caused such a massive jump in GDP. All of those engineering works beginning in the…/2 https://t.co/dJhHIPAM6m

…Industrial Revolution were fulfilling basic social needs that societies had for centuries. Mass production of textiles, food, water supply, transport, etc. Society understandably gobbled it up, why wouldn’t it? After centuries of the hard slog of subsistence living, the joy…/3 https://t.co/A1QTxyKKvG

…of suddenly having these basic social goods in abundance is one we can barely imagine today. That’s the key point, the Industrial Revolution *was an engineering response to social need*. It not only lifted the standard of living of much of humanity (yes, not all of it,…/4 https://t.co/m5AOnToM9J

…the politicians can never get that bit right), it created far and away the greatest ‘economic’ boom in human history. Keep those two things together, to me that’s the crucial thing - the massive, astronomical growth in the ‘economy’ was produced by two things. /5 https://t.co/CBGKssZubk

Social, human need. And engineering. Fast forward to today and I think this lets us reframe both Covid and climate change in a completely different way. While most of the social challenges the Industrial Revolution helped us mitigate hugely are now taken for granted parts of…/6

…ordinary life, societies now have new urgent needs, that require an engineering response. Covid, and climate change. The people obstructing that action are nearly universally doing it on behalf of ‘the economy’. But we’ve been here before. What sends economies into orbit…/7

…IS the engineering response to social need. We’re not seeing that the challenges in front of us are (as @EdConwaySky says) our new Industrial Revolution. Engineering solutions to climate change and Covid won’t just help fix those problems, it will be the basis of the new…/8

…economic boom for the 21st century and beyond. Our problem is we financialised societies, banks and other economic figures (including politicians) encourage us to gaze at endless economic data, divorced from the underlying material and human realities that create it. /9

Fixing material, human problems is what not only creates economies, it’s what supercharges them. We need the politicians, supported by the finance industry, out of the way, to let the engineers get to work. They’ll fix the problems, and also the economies. /end

…in politics, to pick our representatives in government. Not to run the government. Not to run societies. To give us a voice in part of that hugely complex process, that happens separately to it. That’s all. The objective realities societies face are nearly totally divorced…/2

…from this whole popularity orgy. I couldn‘t give a fuck what Albo said yesterday, or Dutton. Or whether the LNP’s internal culture is fracturing. It’s all soap opera, irrelevant. Go and read some AEMO projections of what’s happening in the electricity grid instead, or…/3

…immerse yourself in the Alice in Wonderland chaos of immunity theory, which will help you navigate the Covid debacle. Objective things. ‘But but but won’t that let politicians just get away with things?’ They already are. But completely ignoring everything they say and…/4

…focusing instead on the objective realities of our situation will shift them a lot faster than being glued to their tawdry irrelevant soap operas every day. Also more joyous for you, you learn things, the actual complexity underlying all of the political hot air becomes…/5

…known to you. It’s that complexity that will determine outcomes here, there’s nothing politicians can do to avoid that. The more we all focus on that, and not on them, the faster change will come. We need to deflate the popularity balloon. Starve it of oxygen. /6 https://t.co/AnfGwc18eo

Underneath all of this daily popularity anxiety, remarkable things have always been happening, and are still happening. Electoral popularity-politics is just getting in the way. Again, the more you ignore it completely, the faster it will disappear. It’s designed to get your…/7 https://t.co/zAfCt9oRSY

…attention, to activate that deep tribalism we all practise in high school, of hierarchy and social status. Social media massively magnifies this, peoples’ nervous systems are going berserk with the daily stimulation of all of this team sports. Shift to the calming world of…/8

…actual, physical reality. Learn what’s actually going on out there, underneath the facade of popularity hot air. Starve the pollies of your attention, which they feed off like vampires. Only that can remove the whole ridiculous popularity roadblock. /end

…body to do it for them, and can say, hand-on-heart, that it’s nothing to do with them. This is how a Centre for Disease Control should work. The authority to make decisions completely independently of elected politicians. Decisions that can impact the whole society. /2

If they think maintaining an economy is more important than maintaining the health of the nation, let them come out and say it. And they did, it triggered that tsunami of nonsense about needing to ‘balance’ public health action against the economy. They never demand the…/3

…decisions of the RBA or the Remuneration Tribunal be balanced against other priorities. This is the way they can make what they see as unpopular public health action workable. Vest authority for it in an independent body. Remove it from the political domain completely. 4/4

You see it most clearly in difficult ‘economic’ times, when the flow of cheap debt dries up and suddenly the whole con is exposed. They don’t know how to fix a single thing. ‘Great economic managers’ just preside over tsunamis of cheap debt, attributing the fake prosperity…/2

…people feel to their great leadership. They’re doing nothing at all. It’s all slogans and spin, a tiny veneer over the actual material reality of the societies we live in. Like a commentary on actual reality. I actually feel sorry for the better politicians, who come…/3

…to power with the noblest of aims, and within a week are so totally overwhelmed by the complexity they get briefed about by their officials, that they quickly retreat to the same slogans and spin as the bad politicians. I’ve lived this directly, on the inside. /4

Anybody who works in government, at any level knows the elected are figureheads who know almost nothing about how anything works when they arrive, and little more when they leave. They’re not dumb, it’s just that societies are way too complex for any small group of people…/5

…to ‘run’, even if they had terms that lasted decades. Thousands and thousands of people do that ‘running’. People whose entire careers revolve around mastering all of the complexities of what needs doing. The Chinese invented that model, the Brits adopted it, and we…/6

…inherited it from them. It’s the only way a complex society can ever work, with a vast collection of highly skilled civil servants to coordinate what needs doing. Decades of that same mechanism being weaponised as ‘bureaucracy’ has maybe fatally damaged the whole system. /7

Leaving us with what we see now. Elected people who seriously believe they run countries, coming to power and driving nations off a cliff, to satisfy the ideology of their particular team. We don’t need ideologies. We need engineering. To build and maintain things. /end

The second, where vaccination for anything other than personal benefit is described as a non-compulsory ‘personal choice’. Even mention of herd immunity, which is our strategy. But which is apparently only our strategy, if you feel like it. 2/2 https://t.co/vqT51x0Zj8

…the market. Again, that’s why these theories were invented. To give those people a disguised way to take control of entire societies, for their own benefit. Some of them actually seem to believe all the guff about setting people free of social and regulatory ties,…/2

…so that this glorious freedom will spontaneously build schools and airports, hospitals and broadband networks, etc. It never does, because how would it even happen? What would spontaneously make billions of isolated consumers in a global market get up on a weekend…/3

…(if they have the weekend off, which is increasingly unlikely), grab a shovel from the shed and head off to help build a new national highway, or a new local hospital? It’s hilarious these ideas ever got anywhere. The fall back is that ‘the economy’ (never defined)…/4

…allows us to ‘afford’ building all of these other things societies need. Let’s get that straight - we can’t afford to build things, unless we build things to allow us to build things. Who believes this stuff? None of this is ‘capitalism’ or ‘fascism’ or any of those other…/5

…debating favourites. No society has ever been organised enough to run any sort of -ism. People can’t even run a small club without it degenerating into tribal warfare within a few short years. But we’re expected to believe these complex -isms are running our societies. /6

Bollocks. Societies are run in the same way they always have been, and always will be. By the basic social behaviour of conformity, which produces hierarchies of trust. We’re not anywhere near clever enough to have transcended these basic social behaviours, which we use…/7

…throughout our entire lifespans. Right now they’re stuck in adolescent mode, for the majority of the lifespan, because the institutions which broke that circle have themselves been destroyed, by the same adolescent surge. Have Tweeted multiple times the only way those…/8

…institutions were ever allowed to even exist. Catastrophe - wars, plagues and massive natural disasters. That’s all that ruptures our underlying social behaviours. Our institutions came out of those catastrophes. Public health was one of them, now terminal. Public education…/9

…and broadcasting and infrastructure and parks and transport etc. etc. etc. were already terminal before Covid began. The public existed for less than a century. from the late-19th to the mid-20th century, as a result of massive catastrophes. It was emergency action, not…/10

…planning or foresight. We were trying to save our arses. The second the threats seemed less real, we went straight back to jostling for social status, in our social hierarchies. Back to high school. For many centuries before that religion filled that institutional role. /11

It’s trying really hard to be that agin, but I think that game’s over. To me our only hope is if the sheer complexity of the social-technical world we’ve built forces us to change, to prevent it collapsing. There are no subjectivities or identities that can keep that whole…/12

…complex social machine running. Engineering can. You can have those engineered mod-cons, or you can have endless adolescent debating games. Not both. /end

He genuinely does, it’s one thing to hate everything he stands for. But the much more important thing is to understand how he did it. SKY News Australia is a good example. Nobody really watches it, in numbers terms. Most of ‘the people’ certainly don’t. But it survives in…/2 https://t.co/kGcxM15Gu0

…a world where bad ratings usually mean game over. It survives because its purpose never was to be popular, despite it selling a constant stream of populism. Its purpose is to target the 5% of society who actually make the decisions. Politicians and other powerful figures. /3 https://t.co/PBVWNoLGAS

It’s well known that SKY News runs all day in some or even many LNP offices, in parliament. It’s their baseline reference point for the job they do. (Also why they feel increasingly confused when they get smashed at elections, when the drivel SKY feeds them turns out to match…/4 https://t.co/bMTrvJMXrD

…nothing in the wider community). It is true that to be successful in politics, or in anything, you eventually have to get widespread community support. But you don’t START there, trying to convince 25 million Australians to change. You shift the narratives the 5% use, and…/5 https://t.co/nHXB6o9R5f

…let them shift the community over time. As I often say, communities do not lead themselves. All change is led, in all groups, of whatever size. The secret to power and change is to own the narratives the ‘elites’ of society use to guide their decisions. That’s what Murdoch…/6 https://t.co/ZEjsdKEQZV

…has always targeted. It’s what the church did for centuries to coordinate and control societies. We’re poisoned by decades of nonsense about politics being a ‘grassroots’ thing. The Murdoch press often talk of the grassroots, portraying themselves now as the champions of…/7 https://t.co/YykYc5tHyu

…the poor, the battlers. That’s to scare politicians and other leaders, not because they have the slightest concern for the poor. To make them think millions of potential voters might be lost. I think the power of Twitter is not as a mobilising platform for the wider…/8

…population, which seems the dream of many. That can only lead to destructive chaos, as social media more generally shows, where ‘influencers’ supplant all of our traditional leadership hierarchies with their connection to expertise, with people selling coffee enemas. /9

Because social media really is managing to get ‘the people’ running countries now, and it’s a disaster, no other word for it. The big lie that this is what democracy is, now in plain sight, every day. Even the Murdochs of the world are succumbing to this spin they themselves…/10

…created. We’ve unleashed the mob, not democracy. Where the mob is a society completely decoupled from any of its historical expertise, or the institutional hierarchies in which it lives. Not because people are stupid, but because it doesn’t matter how small or large your…/11

…group of people is, roughly 5% of them will ALWAYS lead, and 95% will then follow that lead. It’s how social groups always work, and I’ve Tweeted many times how this conformity is not ‘sheep’ behaviour either. We need to delegate responsibility to people in everything we…/12

…do, because none of us can know everything or have the time to do everything. The power of Twitter is being in the same tent as the existing 5%, for the first time, without having to run through a media network to get that access. To be able to shape the narratives. /13

It’s a high-wire act, because at the same time millions of others use the technology to create brand new hierarchies of influencers, with no clue how to do anything at all in terms of running a society. On balance I suspect it’s a game we can’t win, that social media is the…/14

…libertarian Trojan Horse undermining all of our societies every day, unstoppable. It’s even destroying the libertarians, they don’t understand the carnage they’ve unleashed. It’s implementing their perverse belief system, and showing that it means nothing but destruction…/15

…and chaos. It’s the experimental proof that they’re pathologically crazy. Many Republicans in the US look on as trump steals their party. They thought the Tea Party would do that, Trump swept them away too. But ultimately not even Trump can triumph here, because populism,…/16 https://t.co/25SEF0mcQH

…rule by ‘the people’, cycles new leaders or influencers in a day. Nothing but fads and fashions. Libertarian beliefs destroy everything, including the libertarians. I often get asked to help mobilise people to causes. I never do it, and this is why. It’s the problem, not…/17

…the solution. Democracy isn’t about mobilising people, it’s about managing things so they can get on with their lives without paying much attention at all to running the country. The alternative is a population constantly enraged, by everything. Tell me that’s not what…/18

…you’re seeing. Angry mobs. My time here is about shifting framings and narratives, and learning from expertise in all sorts of areas. Not about mobilising anything. /ending

Apologies for the number of Tweet-breaks in this thread, thanks to those who provided that feedback. I’m mindful of that when writing, but often bash the threads out while eating breakfast and before running out the door to work! Will try harder on the formatting.

Ewald believes chronic or ‘stealth’ infections may be the causes of nearly all of our chronic diseases. I’ll use his words, several passages from his excellent “Plague Time”. In a nutshell, we need to stop being so blasé about infection, of any kind. /2 https://t.co/75kn84RcO9

“Medical research is consuming far more funds than it was when the health sciences were making breathtaking advancements in the quality and quantity of human life…When it comes to the control of disease, medicine gave us much less for much more money as the twentieth century…/3

…progressed….Little in the control of disease during the last half of the twentieth century involved fundamentally new approaches, in the same way that antibiotics are fundamentally different from vaccination, which is fundamentally different from hygienic improvements,… /4

…which is fundamentally different from surgical removal of diseased tissue. Rather we are recycling each of these solutions. The major advances during this period were vaccines and antibiotics. The payoffs from vaccination dwindled from the successes against polio, measles,…/5

…whooping cough, and mumps during the 1950s and 1960s to the more sporadic successes of the subsequent three decades…In spite of this declining return on investment, one fact stands out. Though there has been much investment in studies of genetic causation of disease,…/6

…the most significant returns were generated on the investments in studies of infectious diseases. Polio, measles, hepatitis, liver cancer, ulcers, and cervical cancer were all controlled or shown to be controllable during the last half of the twentieth century through the…/7

…control of infectious agents…[speaking of chronic infection from reservoirs in our bodies now] we need to remember that our expectations are biased by minds that tend to visualize threats as invaders coming from beyond our borders. Perhaps the experts are looking in the…/8

…wrong place. Perhaps the most menacing infectious adversaries are already here.” /end

Some effort with renewables and climate change, but manageably popular effort at best, nothing groundbreaking. Trying to be good little 'economic managers', not seeming to realise that's them being puppets to LNP framings. The LNP are never good economic managers,.../2

...that's not how they ever got the label of being good at it. They're good at slogans and spin, that's how. The ALP are the polite and relaxed, 'non-divisive' economy puppets. Manufacturing small target policies that don't offend LNP framings, in fear of losing popularity. /3

That dreadful Mr Keating, so rude! Politeness is the Albanese mission. And massive tax cuts to the rich, mass and repeated Covid infections, nuclear submarines, and screwing students with higher HECS-HELP debts. LNP-lite, as some say. The grown-up government ./4

As the journos say. Again convinced Australia's problems are mostly reducible to manners. The ALP had years in the wilderness to counter all of the framings they're now stuck inside, and came up with not much more than 'be nice'. /end

Incidentally I think the young are wrong on this. But politics is about numbers. They were sold 'it's over'. It was an effective marketing campaign.

Apple sort of got that from the start, but much of the rest of the IT industry was in such a headlong rush to disintermediate existing social transactions that the function of society itself is now beholden to their flimsy and complex products. /2

Buying IT should be like buying a washing machine, you take it home, plug it in, and turn it on. No training needed. That’s obviously aspirational for IT, but the underlying principle of targeting the social transaction rather than trying to replace…/3

…it with a monetised IT version dependent upon your product is sound. There are so many examples of the opposite. Filing, for example - records. The absolute cornerstone of organisational competence. Done astoundingly badly by maybe the majority of organisations. /4

They outsource it to software, as they do many other business processes now, relying upon the software to almost entirely run entire business functions. It never works, they ditched the filing clerks whose job it was to make sure these things happened properly. /5

They replaced a social transaction with a third party transaction, now dependent upon the vendor’s product, which has all the bells and whistles, but which most people don’t know how to use, if they had the time anyway. /6

As Douglas Adams said, if you’re calling it a ‘technology’, you’ve already failed. It’s a social transaction, not a technology. So many IT products are like consultants, paid to come into your organisation and tell you the time off your own watch. /7

All of the delicate ecology of trust in social environments, including businesses, replaced with a parasitic relationship with software and hardware suppliers. IT needn’t be like this. But it will be, while it ignores that everything is 100% social. Transactional. 8/8

Music is no more subjective than anything else. There are all sorts of ways to understand what’s good and what’s bad music, or at least what’s better or worse. Just as you can for painting, or plumbing. Art deals with reality, not fantasy. /2

Artists generally have the most acute and powerful insights into what’s happening in a society. It’s not an accident that the value of that art was forced to be purely a matter of personal opinion. Just as personal opinion has replaced expertise everywhere else now too. /3

But I think it happened in music first. That softened us up. To sell records, that’s why it was invented. To decouple evaluation of music from anything except whether somebody ‘likes’ it. Social media is driven by likes. It’s the endgame, the Top 40 was the starting line. /4

It’s very simple to say you don’t like a piece of music, but to also recognise it’s probably a great piece of music. As Wilde I think said, Wagner is apparently not as bad as he sounds. This might seem like a trivial topic, but it really isn’t. /5

If you want to understand how we ended up living in societies where no expertise is allowed to determine anything, our personal opinion is the only sovereignty, you have to trace where that rot started. Popular music was the breeding ground. /6

It’s still one of the main ways we maintain the millions of fractured tribes that replaced the public. Their music is a key totem, for each tribe. Try telling a friend that their favourite artist is crap, and see how they react. Adolescents territorialise with music. /7

It’s one of the only territories you have, at that age. But now it’s migrated into adult life too. People well past middle age whose response to a pandemic for example is to go to gigs. Society is stuck in adolescence. Driven into reverse by economies. /8

Economies are ‘free markets’, meaning each to their own. Personal opinion rules. It’s the same mechanism. I can’t imagine my own parents having a favourite band. They had them growing up. Then they grew up. Now people into their 60s or beyond are like groupies. /9

The economy replaces society with a giant high school, as I’ve Tweeted about a lot. Not capitalism, none of those -isms. Socially we no longer develop after high school. The same platforms teenagers use to transact their social lives are used by their parents. /10

The mess many perceive around us is not the terrible force of capitalism, which doesn’t even exist. It’s social stagnation, retarded development. What used to be a circle of life is now just a flat line. An eternal lifestyle present. Teenagers forever. /11

If you look you’ll find teenage behaviour in everything adults now do. Eating out multiple times a week, huge amounts on booze and recreational travel. Faced with the option of solar panels or double-glazed windows, they’ll buy a boat. Politicians live for selfies. /12

Covid is a social phenomenon. Not political, not medical. Because all things in a society are social, it’s what societies are. If we want to fix the mess, we have to understand how humans behave, socially. You have to remember high school. Because that’s now everywhere. /end

Here’s their chart showing the relative contribution of infectious and chronic disease to mortality rates, over that century. (I used the aged-standardised chart to shield myself from the actuarial glare of @KarenCutter4.) /2 https://t.co/g5OE08ow8q

There’s no doubt at all that deaths from acute infection with various pathogens plummeted in the 20th century, much of it in children, but also more broadly. But look at the explosion of chronic cardiovascular disease, at the *same time* infectious disease was falling. /3 https://t.co/FCWJ2q165i

Nearly always people will tell you that was due to smoking, and poor diet. But the timelines don’t really add up. Smoking peaked in many Western countries, including Australia, in the 1960s, and then went into steady decline. Like heart disease, so it’s suggestive. /4 https://t.co/hNB2cyY0EC

But it would normally take many years for smoking to cause heart disease mortality. (This in no way is a defence of smoking, which is a public health catastrophe. I lost my own father to smoking.) It doesn’t seem causal that the smoking curve and heart disease curves align. /5 https://t.co/Z01KmTj7xA

A big decline in smoking would, I assume, lead to a ‘pipeline’ effect of significant heart disease flowing through after that decline, for some time. Similarly the onset of mass smoking should lead to a gradual, lagged increase in coronary disease. /6

Neither of those are what the data seem to show. Similarly with diet, the saturated fat/cardiovascular disease hypothesis doesn’t match that it was a staple in human diets for centuries, but cardiovascular disease was (it appears) not an epidemic until the 20th century. /7

Which leads to the infectious origin of cardiovascular disease hypothesis, which is an area of research. Some even target the Spanish Flu pandemic as the major trigger of the cardiovascular disease epidemic in the 20th century. The chronic phase of that pandemic. /8 https://t.co/CdoVrHLzec

The timing matches better than the smoking hypothesis. A massive climb several years after that pandemic, rather than at the same time as the pandemic. And then a decline when the younger infected from that pandemic gradually died, from the 1960s onwards. /9 https://t.co/62MdUCcnZX

Interestingly, the AIHW report lists the usual explanations of that decline in cardiovascular mortality from the 1960s onwards: better treatments, declines in smoking, better diets. But those gains have plateaued, and as I’ve highlighted, “The reason for this is unclear”. /10 https://t.co/2ur9WYIAC7

It’s clearer under the chronic infection hypothesis. Whether its Spanish Flu or other influenza, or some other infectious cause, the diminishing gains against infectious disease as the century went on would also translate into persistent (lower-level) cardiovascular disease. /11

Cardiovascular disease in the 20th century follows an epidemic pattern. An infectious disease pattern. Ewald’s chronic infection as the great sleeper in health hypothesis. There’s also another way to assess this, in general models of the body. /12

Traditional health models have tended to favour a physical-chemical model of how the body operates. Heart disease happens when fat ‘clogs’ arteries, like a blocked pipe. The heart is a ‘pump’. Too much cholesterol (chemical) causes the fat deposits. Etc. /13

More engineering than biology, in the assumptions. The rapid growth of research now though on the microbial origins of much life suggests that the ecology of microbes might be a more powerful way to understand disease. The overwhelming focus on acute infection misses this. /14

We know microbes often like to linger, for years. Through reservoirs, or whatever mechanism. But once we’ve cleared that acute infection, we rush to assume we’re back to normal health. It seems extremely naive, given even a basic knowledge of how microbes operate. /15

Adding to this hypothesis is the now semi-regular revelation of an infectious origin for known chronic diseases. Those revelations are growing. We’re much, much too casual about infection. All infections. /end https://t.co/nXH8YgdPgf

…earlier in life, which are increasingly recognized to contribute to adult CVD risk and events.” h/t to @redpoint511a Like a P.S. to my earlier longer thread. /end

@NjbBari3 like a P.S. to the longer thread.

Only this allows shifts in the status quo, an interruption of the traditional social hierarchies of status, based on conformity. It’s why movies show the persecution of the ‘nerds’ at school, who don’t fit in with the social hierarchies there. But something has changed. /2 https://t.co/UnDzRggqdj

The ultimate destination for the nerds at school (ridiculous term, but it captures the cultural aspect) was the institutions that ran our societies. Their induction into fields of knowledge stretching back millennia, at school, prepared them for this work. /3

But as populist politics began to attack all of these institutions, calling them ‘unelected’ (the worst insult for a populist), the tension between the jock and nerd cultures of high school in wider adult life became an overwhelming dominance of the jocks. Trump is a jock. /4

It’s one of the reasons I criticise elections. They’re not some noble democratic invention. They’re the translation of high school popularity culture, into adult life. Populists - the jocks - worship elections, convincing most they’re the essence of democracy. They’re not. /5

Democracy is thousands of years old. Mass elections are only 100 years old. There is really no such thing as ‘politics’ or ‘economies’. There’s the same cultural, social life we grew up in, in schools, carried over into adult life, but called different names there. /6

This isn’t an analogy. This is saying that what we take to be political and economic life, is what all human life always is. Social life. Cultural life. Humans ALWAYS act socially, in everything they do. /7 https://t.co/7WIbTchllq

This isn’t to criticise that either. We’re social creatures, to act socially is to be human. And conformity and status allow massive delegation of effort, so not everybody has to know everything. You follow leaders in all areas of life, who guide you in what to do. /8

Schools introduced historical, institutionally embedded knowledge to this process, to allow human groups to steer this social conformity process in new directions. The nerds suffered, but society also progressed enormously, through them. Elections changed all of that. /9

It’s why they’re so dangerous. They’re the way the jocks own everything, all through school, and now all through adult life too. If it’s popular now, it’s allowed. There’s no moderating knoweldge-based counter to it, as we’ve seen with climate change and Covid. /10

We’re electing ourselves to our own destruction. Popularity can never, ever, be a way to run a society. Far too much of what needs doing will never be popular, or should never need to be made popular. We can’t get schools ventilated, because nobody has made that popular. /11

They shouldn’t have to. All of these basic engineering projects society desperately needs are held hostage by the chokepoint of electoral democracy. We live this fantasy that all of ‘the people’ need to be ‘informed’ about everything. Have you ever worked as a teacher? /12

It’s hard enough getting the entire population to learn their times tables. And we want them to understand complex transport and energy networks, water and sewage, communications, defence, environmental design, etc. etc. Popularity-based politics creates this nonsense. /13

Here in Oz a historically ‘Left-leaning’ party now holds government. But does almost no Left-leaning things at all, out of fear they’ll be unpopular. Popularity is the enemy here. Trump has shown how irrelevant traditional political categories now are. /end

Covid-humans is not a commensal relationship. We as the hosts are clearly harmed. There’s also amensalism (not shown), where Covid would neither benefit nor be harmed, but we would be harmed. We are harmed, and SARS-Cov-2 seems to benefit, so that’s not it. /2 https://t.co/o6ztKkl6Ik

And it’s clearly not mutualism, because what possible benefit is SARS-Cov-2 infection bestowing on us as the hosts? So that just leaves parasitism. Politicians and Covid minimisers clearly think we’re creating a commensal relationship with SARS-Cov-2. /3 https://t.co/WOiUbUNO1L

But there’s far too much harm to the host for that to be anything but laughably aspirational from a public policy point of view. We’ve invited a parasite into our lives and bodies. The reason I keep referring to the work of Paul Ewald is that this is his focus. /4 https://t.co/npBZDOUeqL

Acknowledging that we will always be vastly outnumbered by microbes, he believes the only sensible way to ‘live with’ them is to modify the ecological relationships we have with them. Which in turn can then help shift an evolution towards lower virulence. Towards commensalism. /5

Or perhaps even mutualism, depending on the case. The problem with immunity as a conceptual model, as we’re using with Covid, is that it’s fairly blind to these ecological relationships between organisms. ‘Herd immunity’ does try to capture it. But it’s not very useful. /6

Herd immunity has no consideration of virulence, simply amassing enough infection in a population to hopefully prevent further spread. And of course ‘living with’ Covid and at the same time saying we’re aiming for herd immunity are mutually contradictory strategies anyway. /7

Shifting the focus to the ecological relationships between the virus and ourselves allows for a whole range of possible interventions, many of which are spoken about. Changing the environment of that interaction, such as through modifying air quality. /8

Ewald’s research shows how the environment or context of infection an have profound impacts upon virulence, how the ‘vector’ can in turn shape the virulence. Mosquito-borne disease is often highly virulent for example, because the pathogen pays no price for damaging the host. /9

The mosquitoes will happily transport the pathogen to another host if the first one dies. A water-borne pathogen though can evolve to milder virulence if its ‘vector’ - the water - is cleaned up. When that happens, it’s in the interest of the pathogen to keep a host healthy. /10

Without water to transport itself to another host if the first one becomes ill or dies, it’s left with just that host as a possible home. So evolutionary selection will favour milder variants. Simple public health interventions such as fly screens may similarly promote…/11

…selection of milder variants of insect-borne disease. It starves the pathogens of hosts. DIsease is an ecosystem, not a binary between pathogen and host, mediated by immune systems. Even the immune system is an ecosystem. /end

P.S. from an evolutionary perspective, our current strategy of letting everybody get infected all of the time is likely the worst possible ecological approach. There’s no cost to SARS-Cov-2 for higher-virulence variants. It always has fresh hosts available.

The government is not saying they're going to do anything any time soon to prevent Covid infecting millions more people, multiple times. So we have the perverse situation of a condition with a known cause, where little will be done to address that cause. /2

To unpack that even further, the clear calculus in play here is that we can sacrifice a certain number of Australians, nobody knows how many. Nobody really knows what Long Covid is, so we don't even know what we're looking for. /3

We'll throw some money at some research that might be of some use, some day. I say this brings us back to the beginning of the pandemic, because I and others made the point then that nearly every infectious disease on our current immunisation schedule had similar stats. /4

Low mortality and morbidity (sometimes in the single digits), but very serious and even fatal for some. That suffering and death was sufficient to trigger national action. This is where elections have again perverted democracy. /5

The public good has been replaced with calculable minorities and majorities. Electoral categories. Something gets action if the voting calculus says it might impact voting intention. Long Covid sufferers may be a minority, so nothing will be done to stop them getting Covid. /6

Take mumps as just one example. Between 167 and 1983, when the vaccine was introduced, 35 people died of mumps. About 2-3 per year. Tragic, but in terms of modern electoral politics where 'the people' = a majority, it wouldn't even register. /7

But at the time, the fact even a few people would suffer terrible morbidity and mortality with mumps was sufficient to prompt national, population-wide action. We were all vaccinated, and have been ever since. Now you could say we've done that for Covid too. /8

But the Covid vaccines don't prevent Covid, nor Long Covid. They're great, but not that great. It's a different public health challenge to having a 'sterilising' vaccine. The intent with mumps and other infectious diseases was to stop the rest of us catching them. /9

To stop us passing them on to those who would suffer the worst effects. To 'protect the vulnerable', as the current lip service goes. There was an idea of a public good, of the inter-relationship of all people. Not calculated minorities and majorities. /end

(That should say between 1967 and 1983.)

It's the job of politicians to think strategically about how to make necessary change. Not to pander to focus groups and what's currently popular. As Steve Jobs used to say, the job is to *make* something popular, not to surf the current wave of fads and fashions. /2

The only strategy the ALP came up with was 'it's time', and 'how bad were that LNP with their trillion dollars of debt'. Neither will allow them to make any significant change to the LNP legacy. 3/3

The economy, if we are going to use that idiot term, is the productive capacity of Australian society to produce things. If you do nothing to enhance that productive capacity, or even talk about it, then you're stuck as we are now only with debates about accounting. /2

About how much money is available, and how much of it will need to be borrowed or printed. If we focused instead on the longer-term ways that wealth is generated, the 'economy' would collapse in a puff of smoke back into society, and its productive capacity to do things. /3

Something that is hardly if ever mentioned now is the capacity of government itself to produce wealth or 'revenue'. The main revenue discussion is around taxation, which is libertarian framing. Governments can invest in productive capacity, they can make shedloads of money. /4

The politics of the economy doesn't like this, because 'the market' is supposed to generate the wealth, and governments are supposed to just help the markets. And taxation is then robbing those market entrepreneurs. It's nonsense. Look at sovereign wealth funds. /5

Harnessing public resources and pocketing the revenue for public use. Not allowing parasitic market operators to siphon it off for themselves and their shareholders. There's no reaosn at all that government can't be in the business of making their own revenue, of.../6

...supercharging productive capacity. (And yes MMT people, also of printing money, provided it matches actual productive capacity.) The tedious solemnity of State and federal budgets, the great religious ritual of the economy, is political. Not economic. /7

Designed to encourage the idea that there's a finite pot of money, produced by the market, and government has no role in that except to distribute it, and then only in a grudging sort of way. The whole fiscal-monetary tug of war is part of this same fiction. /8

In reality governments drive all economic growth, all productive capacity, not least because what we call 'business' is itself a creation of government. Yes we've had trade for centuries, but trade isn't business in the modern meaning of that term. /9

The Corporations Act creates business, in the modern meaning. Government also creates 'the market', through regulation. The whole dreary spectacle of reduction of society to an economy, or really a budget, and a handful of KPIs linked to that budget like interest rates. /10

It's all a political invention. Not economics. A lot of modern economics would disagree, because it benefits so much from the invention. It's like a mutual parasitism. 11/11

Empires accumulate places. They’re fundamentally un-grounded. It’s like collecting stamps, we accumulated territories, and then once the empire is in place we travel through these territories, accumulating ‘sights’. ‘Sight-seeing’. That’s what our travel obsession is. /2

“The Big Lap” is the domestic equivalent. Utterly unable to understand any relationship to land or place since the day we landed here, huddled on the coast where we fly in and out in increasingly obsessive amounts on OS holidays. We compensate by big laps, accumulating sights. /3 https://t.co/zneokQR3Cr

Thinking we can find some connection to place by seeing lots of places. It doesn’t work, zero multiplied by any number is still zero. I don’t think it’s remarked enough how much the Big Lap expresses our true malaise. The same malaise that makes us obsessive about travel. /4

Our empires became economies, which were really nothing more than a logical extension of the same process. To mobilise people and resources, allowing the accumulation in the centres of power and wealth. The global ‘market’ is an empire on steroids. /5

A market allows for no groundedness, no place or person is permitted any identity except as a ‘resource’ for the economy. For the market. That’s what ‘globalisation’ means, stripping away even nation states, in favour of ‘economic’ mobilisation. /6

Why does a person do a Big Lap, or travel OS continuously? They’ll tell you: to see the sights, to learn etc. Rubbish. I mean they are doing those things, but the true desire is much deeper and unsaid. Empires and economies have no concept at all of HOME. /7

The deepest concept in all of our history, which we transformed into an address. A point on a map, maps used to undertake the same mobilisation our empires and economies needed. It’s the same process. Travelling madly around the map won’t connect you to place. /8

We’ve seen this with Covid, the fight over working from home. The economy will not allow ‘home’ to have any real agency. It builds roads and other transport networks, obsessively, to ensure people cannot get attached to place. Home is the most revolutionary act, today. Place. /9

And therefore why place-making is interesting, as a shift. Place is back, we’re rediscovering it. Calling out the authoritarian world of the car, which bulldozes its way through every place and can only be resisted with a true fight. Reclaiming roads and streets for people. /10

Not as nowhere-spaces that act only as corridors to move people and resources somewhere else, for the economy. Watch the anger people feel even at basic roadworks, when their hurtling car is interrupted for a moment. The overwhelming desire to just move, to smash through…/11

…all opposition, that the economy induces in us. Children of empire, still infected by imperialism, disguised as travel brochures. Home is the revolution we need. To rediscover place. ‘Streets as Shared Spaces’, as Covid triggered even in NSW. /12 https://t.co/qYwK1ZgA3C

Even in the heartland of let it rip in Australia, the pandemic opened a window to this shift. Watch the fights in local communities as the forces of the economy clash with this new focus on place. And don’t be fooled by one other thing. /13 https://t.co/GWR8JSqIEW

The framing of this as about ‘local and global’. That’s an invention of empire, of the economy. Have Tweeted before that the distinction is a myth, the global is not added up locals. The economy invented that to minimise place. Remember Juukan Gorge? /14 https://t.co/ztR0fGwXfA

Notice that sacred Aboriginal places are not ‘local’ places. They’re universal places, that’s why they’re sacred. You don’t need to have 500 Juukan Gorge destructions to make it a significant event. Not 500 ‘local’ events. Local is just code for ‘not important’. /15

It’s the geographical equivalent of a minority. The global is the majority. Pure economic/empire politics. You’re all just insignificant places on a map. The same myth that drives people to think they need to accumulate lots of views, through protest or petitions. /16

To bring about change. The economy wants you to believe you’re just one tiny insignificant thing, that only by accumulating lots of other insignificant things can you even get its attention. Look at Juukan Gorge. Our own places should be like that. Not points on a map. /17

The most disgusting violation of this pandemic is the invasion of our own places, with a virus that was controllable. Now our own domestic universes are the scene of the fight with the virus. We privatised the lockdowns. Our greatest risk now is our own loved ones. /18

Children infecting parents and grandparents, partners infecting each other in shared beds. It’s the most outrageous violation, it should make us absolutely furious. Remember that SARS-Cov-2 itself was the product of the destruction of the places of other living organisms. /19

It’s a zoonosis. All of this is the same process, the destruction of place, of humanity’s most sacred foundation, by an empire-cum-economy. Watch this shift back to place-making. Be part of it. ‘Home’ is your most revolutionary act. It’s universal, not local or global. /end

All of them will easily outlive any of the human characters and their dramas. Like Sydney’s new Central Station. We make the infrastructure a backdrop, but you can reverse that prejudice in an instant. The making and maintaining of that infrastructure is fundamentally human. /2 https://t.co/f33ukOYGmP

How could it not be? Humans commission these structures, humans build them and maintain them. Humans’ lives are lived within them, for generations. The energy and effort needed is enormous. These structures have to endure, for generations. /3

It’s by building things that civilisations even exist. It’s all that gives them continuity. All of the chattering of daily news cycles and fads and fashions, of elections, is hot air by comparison. Disappearing into the void, every single day. /4

Accompanied the entire time by this much deeper human work, of building. Civilisation is engineered into being, not discussed into being. It’s only by building (in the widest meaning of that term) that humans cohere and agree, in historical terms. What they build binds them. /5

The labour of building and then maintaining the infrastructure of civilisation is not a matter of opinion. It’s stuff that needs to be objectively done. Our objects and structures bind us together, in the task of building and maintaining them. /6 https://t.co/H6myFhOBQE

Engineering is much more a social than a technical act. It directly weaves together the competing and conflicting beliefs of humans, into built structures, than then bind people. Nothing else creates lasting agreement. Why Roman civilisation endured for so long. /7

The parliament of Australia, the seat of our democracy, is also a building. The ‘seats’ of parliament are now occupied by entirely different people to this photo. The continuity is the building and the processes it houses. Human debate is usually boring, ephemeral. /8 https://t.co/xhlnzD1nJt

When I’m physically surrounded by it, in some social context, my attention is always drawn instead to the building and other infrastructure that is supposed to be just background. To marvel at the skill and effort that went into it, the invisibility of those who made it. /9

The greatest disempowerment of the ‘working class’ was to stop building things. The great fantasy of the economy shifted much of that work offshore. The skill needed to build things was a fundamental part of the social agency of working class people. /10 https://t.co/8ZopZ14546

It made them much more than just ‘workers’. It made them indispensable. We’re discovering how much right now, when their absence leaves us without basic social goods. Societies that build things succeed and survive. It’s the only path to longevity. /end

Being good little LNP-lites, railing against 'protectionism' and 'subsidies'. An earlier ALP understood that it was investment. As Joe Biden does. Watch the US fly now, whole industries considering relocating there. While we still worship the power of the 'market'. /2

Which doesn't exist. Even the people who invented the idea rely upon an 'invisible hand' to try to make the whole farce not fall over. That invisible hand is only invisible because it's usually a corrupt fistful of donor dollars. /3

Albanese to his credit is flirting with a sort of pseudo industry policy, with the focus on supporting onshore production again. /4 https://t.co/fTBhBXR82i

But I suspect it won't be a massive detour from the market, from the economy. The supermassive black-hole at the centre of all modern politics, from which no party of any persuasion can escape. Conservatives created it as a strategic tool, a Trojan Horse. /5

To replace electoral politics with permanent conservative hegemony. The economic KPIs that dominate news coverage 365 days of every year are that strategy working. Mistaken as some sort of 'objective' machinery underlying the nation. That was the con. 6/6

We have no AFFORDABLE housing. A completely different thing. Many Australians own multiple properties, while others can’t afford even to rent. Turning housing into a market led to accumulation of it, for profit. Every new ‘supply’ into that market is quickly gobbled up. /2

Not by first homebuyers, but by investors. Or first homebuyers willing to take on loans that cripple them financially for the rest of their lives. The industry of course calls for more ‘supply’, just as the gas industry does. More of what it sells. /3

Politicians are big recipients of donations from both industries. So that’s where we end up, another win for elections, which open the door to widespread political corruption. Popularity politics fails again, and will always fail. It’s not greed, as the anti-capitalists say. /4

Capitalism isn’t even a thing. It’s a label made up by theorists to apply to a society that has never once deviated from the basic social behaviours that have been with us for all of our history. Conformity, status, hierarchy. That’s it. No socialism or communism either. /5

Al of those -isms are idealistic tosh, assuming society could ever be organised enough to come even close to organising itself across its entire extent, with one set of ideas. We can’t even fix potholes in roads. Let alone faff about with all of the ‘means of production’. /6

Housing right now is a status instrument, as everything is, in a society. That’s why we accumulate it, not just to get wealth, but to achieve status. That’s what all groups do, of whatever size. There are only 3 things that ever interrupt this process, which I’ve said before. /7

Natural disasters, plagues, and regulation. Regulation only tends to work if coming on the back of the first two, otherwise the great (social) push is always to de-regulation i.e. unchallenged hierarchical status games. We need to regulate the housing and gas markets. /8

As with masks and Covid, regulation is not a restriction on activity. It enables social activity that violates existing social norms/hierarchies. That’s why humans invented the law, to short-circuit the social processes of conformity, hierarchy and status. /9

We are all ‘equal before the law’. In theory, as above, without a cattle prod up the arse from natural disasters and plagues the law also tends to be captured by the same social games. We know this, it was our high school life. The ‘cool’ people (high status) always won. /10

Societies that succeed in the longer term don’t change this basic social mechanism of conformity, hierarchy and status. (it can’t be changed, we’re social animals.) They re-purpose it, so that status accrues to those who do useful things. Difficult but not impossible to do. /11

Look at the Germans today, where engineering and trades are very high status activities. Germany is a fantastically pragmatic, can-do society in modern terms, relative to the free-market fantasies that govern most of its major competitions. Not perfect, because nothing is. /12

But they get stuff done, they build things. Lots of things. Lots of useful things, that are desperately needed. As do the Chinese, the world’s factory. Expertise has always attracted status in China, in modern times at least. In the West it’s now considered an ‘elite’. /13

Instead, in the West, we have social media now running countries, aggregating the moronic opinions of all of us on topics we know nothing about, acting as roadblocks to action in just about every critical area of need. Countries run by ‘likes’, by popularity. /14

By social media, by elections. You will never, ever succeed as a society hitching social status games to popularity. It’s impossible. Anything can be made to be liked, it’s just marketing. No matter how useless or even lethal. Even doing nothing against a pandemic virus. /end