June 2023

None of them focus their anger on the real issue here, which is ongoing mass infection. A community under assault from all variety of infectious disease. They can’t admit that’s the cause, because of months of proud ‘living with Covid’ nonsense. So the anger is privatised. /2

Some of them probably even log on to social media to vent their frustration there. That’s its job, to soak up anger that might actually lead to transformational change, and re-route it into endless daily team sports squabbles. Divide and conquer, the libertarians win again. 3/3

Because less than 40 years later, employers took the weekend back. Some businesses never stopped working on a Saturday morning, but in the late-1980s all of Saturday was lost. Then only a handful of years later, Sunday trading was back too. /2 https://t.co/lJ7dxvpfDB

Now weekend days are almost indistinguishable from weekdays. Traffic is even worse. This is the Covid link, the process of normalisation. Many workers want weekend trading, because they don’t have time during the rest of the work week to shop. /3

Just as they want schools to open until 6pm, for childcare in their busy work lives. Embracing their own servitude to the economy as ‘freedom and flexibility’. Why isn’t there more anger at this stolen weekend, which took more than a century of fight to give to workers? /4

The same reason people ‘live with’ Covid. Normalisation. Humans are social creatures above all else. If everybody else is doing it, it’s normal. Political campaigners understand and are passionate about things like 8-hour days and 4/5-day weeks. Most other people? /5

Will do what most other people are doing. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if many workers, if asked today, wouldn’t even be aware that shops were closed on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, only 40 years ago. All change is led, and by about 5% of the group, of any size. /6

The other 95% will follow the 5%, and mostly by emulating their friend and family networks. Violating those networks is worse than death to them. People can be seriously sick, even dying, around them, but of nobody else is taking precautions, that’s game over. /7

Normalisation is the process of embedding some decision, socially. Making it sticky, something nobody will challenge for fear of standing out from the crowd. All politics is really social. Everything is. Have a good weekend. I hope you don’t have to work. /end

Astronauts doing this in orbit are nearly always described as being ‘weightless’, in ‘zero gravity’. Neither of those things is even remotely true. Gravity in orbit is about the same as it is on the ground. And your weight in orbit is about the same as it is on the ground. /2 https://t.co/7Y2ATWFjTc

These astronauts are just falling. Like you do right here on Earth, if you jump off a building or out of a plane. The reason it looks like they’re floating inside that space station, is that the space station is falling too, at the same rate. So they don’t ‘land’ on the floor. /3 https://t.co/waf1Xe1Zc3

You get the same golly gosh when they play with water in ‘zero gravity’, it just floats there in drops! No it doesn’t. It’s falling, like they are. Water falls in drops. It’s what rain does, here on Earth. The whoa response is because we’re misunderstanding what we’re seeing. /4 https://t.co/lDyX3j66fT

When we see pictures like this, we imagine how cool it must be to be able to float like that. But you already are, here on the ground. All that’s different is that you’re resting on the ground, as you float. Again, the gravity on you is about the same as these astronauts. /5 https://t.co/jKeew1gGHF

They’re not feeling any weight. You may be, but not because of ‘gravity’. One of the greatest myths of being alive I think, is that contact with the ground then means you’re being pulled down, by gravity. That’s how we’re all taught it. We feel heavy. /6 https://t.co/Epp4KXj0TP

Like it takes effort to act against gravity, to move upwards in any way. Reinforced by everyday experiences like falls, where we ‘fall down’. Actually one of our biggest killers, and even Presidents aren’t immune. But again the astronauts are experiencing the same gravity. /7 https://t.co/zaOY9hw1Bb

They don’t feel heavy at all. The big smiles tell you that. Our (mis)perception of gravity as a pulling-down force only happens on the ground. Why is that? Well, to be clear, the force is pulling you in that direction. BUT, a huge but, alone that causes no feeling of weight. /8 https://t.co/eIs2nd43TO

The astronauts can tell you that. Only when on the ground do people suddenly feel weight. And that’s *not* because they’re in gravity, and astronauts aren’t. We know that’s false. Here’s something about the ground many don’t know. It pushes you UP. /9 https://t.co/hKrWQ9Nx7b

So many feel that contact with the ground as their ‘weight’ pressing down, on the ground. But that’s not what that contact feeling means. The contact feeling is the *balancing* of your weight, and the ground reaction force. That’s why you just stand or sit there, not moving. /10 https://t.co/WM4Bo4abD9

Your weight caused by your mass and gravity, is exactly balanced by the ground reaction force. By the Earth pushing UP, into you. Meaning there is no net pulling. You’re in contact with the ground, but it isn’t (in net terms) pulling you down. /11

You’re floating on the surface of the Earth a little like a boat floats on water, with the upwards buoyancy of the water holding the boat at the surface, balancing the downward force of the boat’s mass. How that feels is different to astronauts, but not in the way we think. /12

We’re not weighted, and they’re weightless. We’re both equally weighted. People who feel ‘weight’ on the ground are just out of balance. Like Joe Biden falling. They move off the upwards support of the ground, by tripping or leaning, and suddenly they ‘fall’. /13

But before they fall, they feel no weight. All the way to the ground as they fall, they feel no weight. When they hit the ground and lay there, they feel no weight. That feeling of ‘weight’ is purely about being off-balance, while on a supporting surface. /14

Take a classic example, ‘getting up out of a chair’. While on the chair you’re supported by the ground, so if you’re balanced, should feel no weight. But between sitting and standing, nearly everybody strains, they feel weight, as they (they think) haul themselves upright. /15 https://t.co/9PnBsTJ6VB

Lugging their weight up, against gravity. But if you stand a little like this lady, where you shift your mass from your bum as the supporting surface, to your feet as a new supporting surface before you stand, you will feel no weight at all. No effort. /16 https://t.co/vjrdatSpdL

It’s fascinating how the language betrays the misunderstanding too. ‘Sitting down’. But you were already on the ground, your feet don’t move. if you stay over the support of your feet when sitting, your body only changes shape. You feel no ‘weight’ falling into the chair. /17

Feelings of weight are always somebody trying to get to another supporting surface, from inside the supporting surface they’re already on. Dragging themselves from bum to feet, without transferring their body over their feet first. And vice versa. /18

Life is a blissfully free, light experience, when you understand gravity. That contact with the planet under your feet stops feeling like your dead weight pressing down, and feels like what it actually is. You floating, but the Earth coming up underneath you. /19

Both you and astronauts are ‘floating’, but they’re falling, and you’re more like a boat. Try that reframing, which is actually real, not an analogy. You’re as free as those astronauts, but in a different way. A different kid of floating. /20

It’s not just a metaphor to say understanding this removes ‘the weight of the world’ from you. You will feel no weight at all, once you get this, and practice it in everyday life. it’s probably the most liberating experience I can imagine. Understanding always sets you free. /end

For sure terrible things happened too in those ‘dark satanic mills’. Kids labouring. Terrible or absent WHS. Massive profits for a handful while many still lived in poverty. Etc. But there’s a much deeper story here that gets forgotten. /2 https://t.co/VDapzFS7fl

The reason this revolution happened at all was centuries of barely subsistence living, by pretty much everybody. While some today sentimentalise subsistence living, the amount of drudgery, death, injustice, starvation, child mortality etc. was not fun. /3 https://t.co/xr92YniBoe

We’ve had material abundance for most of our lives, and I think struggle to really understand what living without that is like. We can again sentimentalise it, from within that abundance, by living ‘off the grid’. But we know the grid is there. It’s fake. /4

To suddenly have things in abundance that previously you either didn’t have at all, or you had to work every hour of the day to have even small amounts of, must have been a type of liberation that again we can’t even imagine. /5

To have mass-produced beautiful textiles and yarns, that didn’t require you to find time to do your own spinning and weaving. Electric lighting, sewers, roads. We’ve lost touch with how extraordinary these things would have been. How much easier they made peoples’ lives. /6

Suddenly there were ‘department stores’, much larger retail outlets to cater for the explosion in consumer goods. We can’t even imagine the wonder that would have been, for people who had suffered centuries of privation. And yes, there were also still many in poverty. /7 https://t.co/IgNEVR4rbL

As Hans Rosling laboured to point out, this revolution had profound impacts on trends in poverty too. After centuries of feudal serfdom where the poor barely budged, suddenly massive shifts occurred in relative prosperity. And yes, the rich still got richer. /8 https://t.co/Uxxcd8mBI6

But there’s no way you could say the poor today are living lives that peasants and serfs lived. The rising tide really did lift all boats, profoundly. This is part of what I tweet about, the engineering basis of civilisation. Left to themselves, humans will just squabble. /9

They’ll play the social status games of the schoolyard, their entire lives. But inject engineering into society, along with natural disasters, wars and plagues, and that social gameplay does shift. Very often the engineering is the *response* to disaster. /10 https://t.co/kVcr3KDcop

So the point of this thread is this. The famous Industrial Revolution emerged as a response to real social needs, spanning centuries. Driven by men who wanted to be rich. But they got rich by addressing those needs. The idea of ‘balancing’ their work against the public good? /11

It would have seemed absolute nonsense to them. Their work was targeted AT the public good. That’s the only reason they were doing it, and why they got rich. People flocked to consume the output, freer at last from centuries of drudgery and death. So fast forward to today. /12

Many existential emergencies face humans, again. Climate change and Covid, just two of the most prominent. This is exactly the situation that was facing the Victorian engineers. That’s what drove the Industrial Revolution. Public suffering and need. /13

That created an explosion in ‘the economy’ that was unprecedented in history. It created what we call the economy, itself. The response to basic human needs caused that. Right now, we’re at another of those historical inflection points. /14 https://t.co/sHWTVcSf4l

We need another industrial revolution, to address our current social problems. It will drive ‘economic growth’ off the scale, this is the nonsense of talking about ‘balance’. It’s not two things here. It’s one thing. Human wellbeing IS what makes economies thrive. /15

We’re so obsessed with human-human interactions, with the social games of the schoolyard, dressed up as elections and ‘politics’ for adults, that we miss the tectonic plates underlying our societies. The engineering, to address human need. /16

Schoolyard culture will constantly appropriate this material wellbeing for select groups. But material wellbeing isn’t the problem, not ‘capitalism’ (which doesn’t even exist). The problem is the culture that beat up the nerds at school who went on to become the engineers. /17 https://t.co/E6A2X2skS8

Social media is the worst technology for this point in history, it entrenches schoolyard culture at every stage of life. All of our problems have known, objectively-solvable solutions. We can’t even get to the starting line through the fog of popularity schoolyard politics. /18

The ‘economy’ would boom if we got that tedious daily squabbling and jostling for status out of the way. The boring business-suited blokes in politics droning on and on about the economy don’t understand a thing about it. They’re parasites on the last industrial revolution. /19

They hoarded the wealth that revolution produced, and now don’t want it taken away by the next revolution. They’re dragons sitting on their gold. For the sake of the economy, we need to fight climate change and Covid, now. Brutally. /end

Over at the Torygraph, they maintain a campaign to ensure public health action will never happen again. Progressives should note how relentless these campaigns are - it’s why conservatives win. Say it over and over, and people will believe it, like hysteria over ‘lockdowns’. /2 https://t.co/MIjNl9TPT7

And finally, some warning that we may need public health action ramped up again sooner than we think. Clean air, anyone? I’m sure that mitigates against TB as well. 3/3 https://t.co/EzInUuOjQ0

Enormous thanks to Soheil Abedian for finally spilling the beans on this whole farce, from inside the industry itself. And in the process exposing the fantasy that the economy is. The supply/demand nonsense, markets etc. /2 https://t.co/KIVdi0Qi6z

As he describes so well, if you restrict that to just sale of houses, where there’s big demand and huge prices, it will look like there’s not enough supply. The PM has swallowed that rubbish from the property industry, all of them do. But that’s not the problem. /3

Everywhere along the chain of constructing the house has been making enormous money. Real estate agents, builders, owners selling houses, land owners, building suppliers, conveyancers etc. And they all want more, people always want more. /4

This is where the economy is exposed as a myth. All of this tight interconnection of multiple people and interests is a *social* phenomenon. The reason ‘lockdowns’ alarmed the economy people is because they exposed how profoundly, *socially* connected we all are. /5

The same people who peddle belief systems saying the individual is sovereign, and that markets are made up of billions of separate individuals. Now flattened by the scale of the social inter-connection between all of the elements of the supposed economy. /6

Look at the empirical evidence. Desperate demand for housing, but builders going broke, leaving houses unfinished. It’s not Ukraine, it’s not lockdowns. It’s an unregulated industry collapsing under the weight of what all lack of regulation produces - social hierarchy. /7

There is no economy, only a society. I don’t see us making that leap of understanding any time soon. But nothing will change until we do. We’ll follow the course of history, only the total catastrophic collapse of societies will trigger any change. One funeral at a time. /end

Now that there are no public health orders, people assume (and are encouraged to assume) it's anything goes. But PHOs are just one component of public health law. I Tweeted the other day as an example that you can still be jailed in NSW for not taking precautions.../2

...if you know you're Covid+. The national Covid-19 control guideline also requires a range of things that aren't being done. It's been knee-capped by politicians in multiple ways, but plenty of powerful public health still in it. /3 https://t.co/cehupSgkPW

The much more serious governance issue is how untenable it is to have your health departments strongly recommending things, that politicians then make non-compulsory, and even mock. That's populism, right there. Elected leaders actively sidelining institutions. /4

They'll say they're 'balancing' this advice against other important priorities. Bullshit. That line completely misunderstands public health, which was set up BY POLITICIANS to do that balancing. Notice that there's been zero balancing going on at all? /5

At every twist in the Covid road, balancing has meant 0% action against Covid, 100% action for the economy. Or what politicians see as the economy, in reality it's just people, and not doing the public health destroys the economy too. That's why THEY invented it. /end

We had a lot of decades where allowing each person to hold whatever view they liked was manageable. We could utter platitudes like ‘each to their own’, and get on with life. But we’re now at a point where those beliefs impact lives directly, and immediately. Dangerous beliefs. /2

One of my best friends is now a bitter enemy, because I told them their views are dangerous, killing people and a disgrace. I don’t care that it outraged them, it’s a line-in-the-sand time in history. My own family is being infected because of views like theirs. /3

We so often think of political battles as battles between us, the public, and politicians or government. But that’s not true. The reason the most insane things are happening right now is because politicians gamed our *social* behaviours. Like Tupperware-type parties. /4

Most of the work of destroying public health is being done BY the public, on behalf of these politicians. Social media is the secret sauce that insinuates itself into every household, opening the door to poisonous, lunatic beliefs. That’s how home-based selling worked. /5 https://t.co/4BBnO0Ea4Y

Companies recognised that the most powerful way to break down distrust and reluctance to buy was to have your own friends do the work for them. And that’s what’s happened with Covid as well. A small handful of anti-public health influencers drive the resistance. /6 https://t.co/1jrzVKXnrC

Right there in your own home, via social media. I think unless we’re challenging our own friendship groups directly, something people are understandably reluctant to do, we’re lost. The reason politicians aren’t listening is because your friends aren’t either. /7

And the politicians need your friends’ votes. The bastards have inserted themselves into our social networks, via these platforms, and now they’re flogging anti-climate action and anti-pandemic action to us 24/7, via our own friends. /8

Society is social, not political. We need to take social action. With our own friends. That stuff scales fast. Wailing at politicians goes nowhere. /end

As a P.S. the example of my friend might suggest I mean go to war with your friends. Not at all, they were just an extreme case that needed ‘blocking’ from my life. By ‘taking on’ friends I mean opening up discussion with them, on Covid.

It’s almost beyond belief that their slavish obedience to idiot ideas about the State comes above even preventing mass death, sickness and disability. That’s what a fundamentalist does, and that’s what they are, fundamentalists. As I say a lot, track it back, socially. /2

Despite all their rhetoric about individual initiative, about ‘having a go’, in reality they’re heirs to fortunes that they do almost nothing to earn, and many of them could barely boil an egg. They’re also vastly outnumbered by every other social grouping. /3

And yet they keep winning elections, because they game them, they make toxic ideas popular. It’s just marketing, something the empires they inherit have a lot of experience in. With Covid, after the emergency measures many countries took, which they call ‘lockdowns’? /4

(Great example of their rhetorical skill, that a basic process of quarantine as old as history was re-framed as locking people up.) After the dreaded lockdowns, we were told it was time to let it rip. Missing the obvious next step, rarely mentioned. /5

After emergency public health measures, we should have reverted to other public health measures, designed for daily ongoing life. And nearly all of these are WHS measures, in business. That’s why they didn’t go there, it’s their key constituency. /6

Any audit of WHS measures taken for Covid in business right now, and even public institutions like schools and the public service, would fill multiple Royal Commissions. Either nothing happening at all, or the odd empty hand sanitiser bottle, not refilled since 2021. /7

Any politician with half a brain, and I’m afraid you might look long and hard for one now, should realise that the way forward with Covid isn’t government-funded lockdowns and actions. It’s to make business take its basic WHS responsibility. And to PAY for it. /8

And all public organisations too, make them follow the WHS law they’re already supposed to be following. And audit the fuck out of it, and put people in jail, until they do it. Yet another ‘socialising the losses’ that we let happen, with nary a whimper. /end

Rising prices - inflation - mean the sacred market is failing. Demand and supply are out of whack, so central banks (the priesthood of monetarism, or market-based societies) will raise the price of money to suppress demand, to drive prices down. Or so the theory goes. /2 https://t.co/jxD1W8rHdH

A is excess demand. B is excess supply. A drives prices up, back to P0. B drives prices down, back to P0. Magic! No government or regulation needed, society will run itself, balancing supply and demand, with prices reflecting exactly the balance between supply and demand. /3 https://t.co/apR7eDEKQ4

Decades of all-out assault on the public has been driven by this one graph. Society will reach a lovey equilibrium, all by itself if you just stop anything coming between the self-balancing of supply and demand. Like government, and its regulation. /4 https://t.co/xNjvHaBJGs

Again this is why inflation is the most sacred emergency, for societies that have been conned into thinking they’re economies. In this lunatic equilibrium view of social life, rising or falling prices always mean (they say) that the graph has been interfered with. /5 https://t.co/0YDA46sS3s

Central banks will bankrupt people and businesses with rising interest rates, to drive everything (they think) back to P0. Back to the self-balancing market. You can’t address the actual supply of or demand for things, because that would be regulation. “Anti-competitive.” /6 https://t.co/j61i2CRwYV

Nope, you just fiddle with the money (why it’s called monetarism), via interest rates, to force the equilibrium to return. It’s staggering nonsense, all of it. An equilibrium that never seems to happen, without intervention. In a system that opposes intervention. /7 https://t.co/U2xifD3ntj

A self-balancing equilibrium system that never balances, is never at equilibrium, without heavy intervention. The only intervention the market loons still allow, with their ham-fisted bull in a china shop single tool of interest rates. Smashing lives and businesses. /8 https://t.co/wc5UXc2FXN

Of course professional economists add whole layers of Ptolemaic epicycles to this nonsense, to try to save it. Nash equilibria. Partial equilibria. Unstable equilibria. Dynamic equilibria. Etc. The key thing for the non-economist to recognise here is the equilibrium itself. /9 https://t.co/x96wb11tgY

The idea that societies self-regulate. No State regulation needed, except an ‘independent’ central bank. This was the con this single graph used to dismantle society’s institutions. Clear away everything, except the market. Except societies are social, not equilibria. /10 https://t.co/5dkdn83v3Y

Without regulation, they do one and only one thing. Always, and at every scale. They form hierarchies. Social hierarchies. Hierarchies driven by social conformity and emulation. The one and only thing that equilibrates those hierarchies is law. Regulation. /11

That’s why humans invented law and regulation. The very thing the market loons oppose fanatically. If you install a power point at home, does it provide you with a stream of electrical energy because we ‘competed’ for the best design? Electrocuting until we got it right? /12 https://t.co/KyfpomqoJK

No, we regulated a standard. Which was the most efficient way to give us not only safety, but also to dramatically accelerate the use of power. Efficiency, productivity. We didn’t allow social fads and fashions to determine it. Nor a fantasy market. We regulated. /13

Just as we regulated Covid out of our lives, through public health measures. And the stripping away of those regulations to be replaced with a privatised Covid market of personal responsibility has led to mass infection and death. A real-time test of the rival theories. /14

Regulation is the best thing for an economy, as well as for us, socially. Because there is no economy. Just a society. The equilibrium theorists are just using fancy concepts and maths to do nothing more than entrench a status quo. One they profit from. Look at how it works! /15

Every deviation from business as usual is bad. How stupid are we, that we fell for that? Completely self serving drivel. Without regulation you get hierarchies, driven by social behaviour. The economy/market is just another social hierarchy, favouring those who invented it. /16

These are the true battles of our time. Between regulation (and its associated State), and the market. Which doesn’t exist, except as a graph that never works. /end

The simplistic view would take some greeting card sentiment from this situation, about standing up for what you believe in. But lots of ignorant and wrong people do that too. Spinoza’s genius and legacy was to do something unheard of. /2 https://t.co/bxm5vNsznF

He made understanding, true knowledge, the foundation of all life. Separate to any individual or group. And while nearly everybody thinks the knowledge they have does that already, that it’s ‘objective’, it’s really not. We’ve seen it in this pandemic. /3 https://t.co/QPS4HZizJb

The same facts, entirely different interpretations, depending on the social group. Almost nobody really pursues a truth that would have them excommunicated from their own group. It’s always team sports. That’s what made Spinoza something unique. But he went much further. /4 https://t.co/4YjzExG1WX

We seem incapable of thinking outside the crowd, the group. We’re social creatures, that’s inevitable. We think to solve the world’s problems, we have to mobilise large groups of people. Always this obsession with groups. But say you get a group to all agree to something. /5 https://t.co/z5LwqgLvzy

How long does that last? Politicians use strategic tricks to try to get groups to think a certain way between elections. Usually within a term or two people turf them out, no matter what they say or do. What lasts, what has a much longer impact on people? /6 https://t.co/rHDE5qCpCO

True knowledge. When it was discovered cervical cancer was the result of HPV infection, people started getting HPV vaccinations, no questions asked. There was no need to play tricks or exhaust anybody ‘mobilising’ people. Stuff worked, so people did it. But there’s more. /7 https://t.co/gFObQF1Rhj

Because once you have something that works, that is actually true, arrangements have to be put in place to make sure that thing is available, readily and in perpetuity. And that’s where an institution is born. That’s what they are. Social structures that transcend team sports. /8 https://t.co/McuNt9cyO2

Look at any health department. Not set up like a football team, to support this or that group. Set up to organise and deliver health knowledge. That’s why it endures across generations, long after all the team sports squabbles have moved on. And this is Spinoza’s true legacy. /9 https://t.co/J6QKEYKcv8

When you despair of the seeming lunacy of our time, as Spinoza easily could of his, you don’t need to work to convince all of society to be better. That won’t ever happen, they will always turn it into team sports. Stick to knowledge, real knowledge. /10 https://t.co/IjYyI5XS66

That’s all that will change the world. That can change it. And by doing that alone, you are changing the world. It might not feel like it, because it’s not as immediate as mobilising a crowd. But that mobilisation is fleeting and rigid and dumb. Fads and fashions. /11 https://t.co/4oB0qEPLIJ

Spinoza even explained how to know when you had really understood something. A feeling of joy. Not anger, sadness, happiness - all of that meant you weren’t there yet. Still too attached to social organisation. Only joy indicates true understanding. /12 https://t.co/QY3Rw0raDG

Look at Spinoza in the painting. Calm, inquiring. As the crowd agitates noisily behind him. That’s the model for our times, and all times. It’s not individual, it’s not collective. Knowledge transcends all that. By genuinely knowing, the world changes. It can’t not. /end https://t.co/SrbcLV0QSW

The gas exporter contracts are hopeless for Australia, due to both congenitally and ideologically useless leaders, from both sides. High vis is like a flame to a moth, for modern popularity pollies. But business is here teaching us something critical. /2 https://t.co/RVim3JaVLc

It doesn’t want high prices either, for the things it buys. So it signs agreements, contracts. It regulates supply. In this case very well, and Australia has been more or less giving its gas away, due to idiot politicians. Started by the great anti-regulator, John Howard. /3

Read in Wright’s article, how Howard refused to talk about reserving supply for Australian use, for fear of upsetting the market. The same market the gas exporters completely ignored, in regulating supply and price via the agreements with us. /4

This idiot anti-State, anti-regulation ideology that has dominated Western democracies tries to convince us that the market and business can do it better. But the market and business regulate all the time. They wouldn’t function otherwise. Their gas price is low, and assured. /5

Ours keeps going up, driving prices up anywhere energy is crucial, which is everywhere. Because we *didn’t* regulate. But they did. This is the story of privatisation forever. ‘De-regulating’ just sets up new regulation, in private hands. Nothing functions without regulation. /6

By far the smartest way to regulate is to use economies of scale, and do it centrally, via democratic government. Which then cascades down through all of the nooks and crannies of society, including business. Creating standardised conditions for business. /7

if you don’t do that, and leave it all to the ‘market’, you’ll get a proliferation of competing regulation, all the contracts and agreements set up in private hands to provide basic public services. Each will try to create the best possible terms, for themselves. /8

Meaning prices will inevitably go up. Everywhere. Not because of greed or ‘capitalism’ or any of that nonsense. But for the simple, practical reason that nothing is being properly regulated. The anti-State folk like to paint regulation as oppression. /9

Without regulation, there is no business, no ‘economy’. Business employs thousands of lawyers, to do the regulation needed to keep business running. To create standardised conditions for business. They create controlled ‘supply chains’, to regulate their supply and prices. /10

It’s regulation, everywhere. But because elected fundamentalist nongs in politics think the market is a regulation-free zone, all of this regulation isn’t coordinated at the top level, so over time prices creep up, everywhere. Nothing about supply and demand. /end

…true evil for those who let it rip was the State itself. Not even damage to the economy. It was allowing the State to have any role at all that was the target. As it has been for 70 years, by these same people. 2/2

It has a section on ventilation, clean air, particularly in workplaces. Striking that we’ve come full circle, and have to argue again for basic cleanliness in shared spaces. Germ theory then and now re-medicalised what had begun to be seen as a social problem. /2 https://t.co/RUQPmfsxv2

Yes germs cause disease, but like all living things they live in an environment. The best science of infectious disease today collapses the apparent separation. It recognises that how germs behave and evolve is intrinsically linked to the environments they live in. /3

And that it’s a much less complex task to modify those environments, than it is to develop vaccines and treatments for germs. A more difficult task *socially*, but that’s the rub. Infectious diseases are damaged social orders. Not independent entities. /4

A pandemic is a society that is damaged. Fixing that damage fixes everything at once, including the infections and the economic and other social transactions. We’re biological creatures, everything we do is biological. /end

But having lived most of my life pre-social media, I can remember most of the time people didn’t bother. Knowledge was structured by the hierarchies of those who needed to know something, to do their jobs. Very few were interested in questioning outside their own domains. /2

They were happy for others to do their thing, in those areas, if they even knew about them, and just get on with their own lives. They TRUSTED that things were being done, without questioning it much. They delegated responsibility to others, as others did to them. /3

This is how social media has changed us, in dangerous ways. Objectivity in knowledge is social, not experimental. It’s about trust, you can attempt to reproduce others’ work as part of a peer review process, but over time you have to just trust they’re doing reputable work. /4

Otherwise nobody would get anything done, having to constantly repeat what everybody else was doing, to assure themselves it was legitimate. Institutions emerge as a result of this process, we black-box trust in institutions. The CSIRO - yep, they know science. Etc. /5

This is where social media became a wrecking ball. These platforms are not predominantly about social connection or the exchange of information. They gradually replace all of those institutional networks of trust. Authority and influence are separated from institutions. /6

People become more likely to believe a social media influencer, about anything, even the incredibly complex world of vaccine science for example. And this isn’t just them taking guidance from new people in established areas of knowledge. It’s much worse. /7

These influencers make them interested in a whole range of critical social infrastructure areas that they had no knowledge of or interest in at all, before social media. Vaccine science an obvious example, but you won’t find any part of our critical social operating system…/8

…that isn’t now facing a growing wave of social media ‘experts’, challenging its operation. This is stuff that if broken stops society itself from functioning. Ask anybody who works in public administration, the tsunami of bullshit and obstruction they’re now facing. /9

Societies are social, I say that a lot. And the glue that binds all social groups is trust. We imitate and emulate those we trust. Which creates hierarchies. If those hierarchies have no connection to established knowledge, we’re doomed. And that’s increasingly where we are. /10

I don’t think it’s alarmist to say social media needs to be shut down, for societies to survive. Despite all the good things many get from it, its negatives are so damaging and so exponentially fast in doing that damage, that the destruction is accelerating rapidly. /11

Imagine if it were shut down, overnight. If people had to either do the work again of finding things out, from reputable sources, or weren’t constantly fed information about things they have no interest in. How our existing structures would again be allowed to breathe. /12

How forcing people to do the WORK of knowing again would force a push back towards our pre-existing institutional trust mechanisms, the keepers of that knowledge. No populist idiots in social groups promising vast conspiratorial worldviews to short-circuit trust. /13

And no constant promotion of distrust across all of the critical areas of society that people not only trusted, but often had not even any knowledge of, they just enjoyed the benefits of work they knew nothing about. Social media is dissolving societies from the inside out. /end

Even in resisting the rampant adolescence of society (libertarianism, that’s all it is, in cultural terms, the expansion of high school culture to all of life), we don’t see that our resistance is framed by that same movement. /2

The kids at school complaining because the school bullies stole our lunch. How did that work out at school? Badly? Completely ineffective? Does it change anything if you’re on the pro-mask or anti-mask team? On the pro-ventilation or anti-ventilation team? /3

Notice how every issue is split into a neat binary, like team sports, with the teams defined by that split? That’s high school, still acting in our adult lives. Modern conservatives actively promote this, because they know it prevents action on anything, as people argue. /4

That daily team sports is mostly hot air, floating above social collapse. It’s also incredibly tedious to go from dawn to dusk each day policing whatever set of boundaries your particular binaries set up, seeing who is and isn’t wearing a mask in photos, who is or isn’t…/5

…promoting ‘lockdowns’, and so on and on. If you’ve taught teenagers, you’ll know that tragedy becomes more a platform for self-expression, of their own individual grievances. And that’s all of us, now. The pandemic is just more grist to the adolescent team sports mill. /6

Sportspeople wear black armbands now when the third cousin, twice removed, of some physio that works with the team dies. It’s symbolism everywhere, statements, causes, expressions of outrage and identity. High school. Exhausting and unremitting tedium. /7

Most of the problems we need fixed have very practical, simple solutions. We can’t get anywhere near those, through the fog of the team sports. The word ‘woke’ is thrown about with abandon, the hypersensitive outrage caused by symbolism of some kid, somebody used a wrong word. /8

All sides of these tedious debates are ‘woke’, in that way. All obsessively focused only on the symbolic, performative gestures that constitute their daily sport. Good luck if you’re somebody caught up in it, used as a punching bag by both sides in the sports. /9

Is it that hard to see that as the politics of high school, libertarianism, pulverised us into 8 billion independent islands, that the fastest way to make that even worse is to develop 8 billion separate grievance-driven teams? We have the collective institutions already. /10

To solve all of these problems. Unions, government officials, expert bodies, engineers, etc. All tied in knots by this daily adolescent team sports, that achieves nothing. Social media is the enabling platform for this. Why I often say we’d be better off without it. /end

What we can no longer do is have a calm, analytical, protracted response to disasters. Like pandemics. It bores us. An armband is great, because again it's about us. Our 15 minutes of attention, the focus is on us more than the tragedy. /2

But having to make sustained, long-term sacrifices, and calmly analyse what's happening and what needs doing? Not a snowball's chance in hell. It's not dramatic enough, not enough about ourselves. Symbolic gestures that last barely a news cycle, that's all. /3

It's why we have institutions, to have an attention span longer than a news or electoral cycle. An attention span crossing generations, decades or even centuries. All being dismantled by populism, by me politics, ephemeral fads and fashions. High school. 4/4

P.S. it's 'misled', not 'mislead'.

Institutions. I mention them a lot, because they’ve been maligned by decades of libertarian politics. But an institution is the same social groupings, *with knowledge added*. An institution forms around knowledge. Orthogonally to social status games. /2

Every time I mention institutions people pile on with examples of institutional failure, of abuse and oppression overseen by some institutions. As if there always has to be a utopian perfection. There are no utopias, there are just better or worse ways of doing things. /3

You will never, ever, create stable societies using only the social status games between people. The attention span of that sort of collective can be as short as a few minutes, as they cycle through endless fads and fashions. But an institution crosses generations. /4

Sometimes centuries, or even millennia. The Catholic Church a classic example. I’m not a Catholic or even ‘religious’ in the way that term is now used, but I can see there are no real institutions before the 17th century, that aren’t the Church. That’s our foundation. /5

Including science, which amazes many. As Michel Serres says, the monotheism of Western Christianity was the framework inside which the ‘objective truth’ of modern science grew. The positing of a single, virtual truth independent of our human, social affairs. /6

The same science-based believers today who mock the church use exactly the same framing of an independent objective regulator of all things. Whether you call it God or scientific truth, what matters is that its independent of social status games. /7

It was the church who set societies free of endless warring social status games, and on a pathway of institutional progress. They used God to do it. All of that is now hopelessly lost in the Enlightenment fog of whether you ‘believe in God’ as some being ‘up in the sky’. /8

But the introduction of that higher principle, no matter what it is, was the historical genius of the church. Science inherited that, centuries of taming of social status-driven chaos by religion. It brought even kings and nobles to heel. /9

And even more importantly, the nations we all live in today, which battle and war with one another, were descended from a universal Church, during the peace of Westphalia in the 17th century. We were international centuries before were were national. /10

The Church made a universal, international, global institution the foundation of much of the human life on the planet. If you want to know why nations can‘t agree now to act even with global catastrophes, it’s because you can’t unscramble an egg. /11

We have it backwards. Nations aren’t the fundamental unit of collective social life. They were gifts of the church and monarchy, which had lost control of warring parties and used sovereign allocations as appeasement. Only some sort of universal principle can unite us. /12

Knowledge became that, with the decline in belief of a God. It’s why our modern institutions are stuffed full of knowledge-based experts. The same institutions the venal have been assaulting now for the best part of 70 years. Labelling them as ‘bureaucracies’, with contempt. /13

Those bureaucracies gave birth to the greatest genius of all human history. ‘The public’. An entirely administrative construct, a sophisticated and nuanced continuous assessment of social inter-relationship. Not a ‘majority’, a mere count of hands. /14

That’s the nonsense elections have foisted upon us, making us mistake the public with an electoral majority. The public is the product of expertise and data, constantly assessed and analysed. You can’t see it anywhere, it doesn’t exist in that way. /15

It’s the study of how we interact, all of us, every last person. It’s not a number. (It’s lots.) Public health grew from this, the ongoing analysis of how those interactions shape health. Now cast aside in favour of electoral majorities keen to get back to annual ski trips. /16

Knowledge is our only hope. Hitched to our social lives through institutions. That’s all institutions are, schoolyard social groups but with knowledge added. You can find examples of individuals perverting institutional culture. It’s not an argument against institutions. /17

There are no utopias. But institutions give us continuity across centuries, not electoral or news cycles. It’s why the Chinese invented them too, to bring expertise into governance. And why we then copied them. The UN and WHO are often pilloried for their failures. /18

But they’re victims of our having this backwards, set up by nations, to try to create the international, from the national. Like trying to unscramble an egg. Without a higher principle or authority of some kind, nations will always just be large schoolyards run by bullies. /19

Come back to Spinoza, in this picture. He represents knowledge. The crowd excommunicating him in the background, in their social schoolyard status games. Give up trying to mobilise crowds, that only creates fads and fashions. Knowledge, coupled to institutions, is our hope. /20 https://t.co/iVsmwbFTEr

Social media decouples knowledge from institutions, so is a poison in this necessary shift. It mobilises belief in anything, untested in any way by centuries of accumulated knowledge and expertise. As do elections, where being popular is the only test of suitability. /21

We can’t vote our way out of our mess. Only knowledge can save us. /22

Once you do that tracing what people actually say becomes much less relevant, it's all positioning. It's the team sports I Tweet about, groups at school jostling for dominance. The groups extend out into wider life too, into formal institutions, politics, the media etc. /2

Most of the 'debates' we see here every day aren't about ideas at all, they're about building and sustaining these groupings. Any idea can be co-opted to maintain group unity. Why we've seen ridiculous things like questioning the use of masks for airborne pathogens. /3

Or made-up concepts like immunity debt, and 'living with' pandemic viruses. Etc. It's all positioning, maintaining the group in opposition to other groups, particularly those identified as enemy groupings. This is the social media business model. /4

It literally takes the social structure of the school playground, and extends it through every demographic. The anxious search for identity, allying oneself to this or that group to define who we are individually. The 'media' in social media is the wrong word. /5

It suggests a neutral transfer of information. Social media is group-building platforms, not information-sharing platforms. Information is always socially structured. It's why people are addicted, the information is more gossip than science. Even when it *is* science. /end

MO-1 is a magnetotactic (orients itself along field lines of the Earth's magnetic field) bacterium with an exquisite supramolecular motility machine to move it along. That's what this diagram shows. There's a tight bundle of 7 flagella (yellow) and 24 fibrils (green). /2 https://t.co/Uhq6Z8Y1mg

All encased in a sheath (blue). The flagella and fibrils rotate anticlockwise and clockwise, respectively, to minimise friction at high speed rotation. Extraordinary engineering. But the wider point here is the prejudice we have that says small things are simple. /3 https://t.co/WVBHF12Tk8

So micro-organisms are thought to be more simple lifeforms than macro-organisms such as ourself. (Of course we'd think that.) And a century or more of atomic theory, where atoms are seen as simple building blocks of larger more complex things, suggests the same. /4

But it's wrong. Incredibly this prejudice survives, despite nearly every empirical example proving the opposite. Micro-organisms like MO-1 have breathtaking complexity. And atoms after quantum theory are mind-bendingly complex, unfathomable things. /5

Zooming out to human societies, you can see this even more obviously. What 'macro' thing (an organisation, an economy) comes even close in complexity to any of the individuals that make it up? To make big things, you SIMPLIFY little things. Dramatically. /6

Humans in an organisation or even any group lend just the tiniest part of their extensive individual complexity, to that group. Their complexity as a person far exceeds any of the 'macro' characteristics of the groups they're part of. /7

We say that individual cases are 'anecdotal', and only complex aggregate patterns tell us what's really going on. Or that economies have macro and micro components, and only the macro is the 'big picture'. /8

But not only is this backwards - the small is always *more* complex than the large. There is also no small, or no large. (Bear with me.) An example, any modern nation. Our prejudice says the nation is the aggregate sum of all the individuals living in it. /9

Added together, like Lego blocks. But spend two seconds on this idea and it all falls apart. What Australia thinks about the Voice to parliament for example is not 1/25 millionth my bit, added to millions of other bits to form a whole. Any Australian has a *whole* view./ 10

Not 1/25 millionth of a view. The referendum will of course count our choices, but they don't add up to whatever the Voice ends up being (or not being). It's a binary choice between two *whole* or 'macro' views. Maybe easier to see with a crowd. /11

We attribute a 'macro' behaviour to crowds, like the people in them all follow some highly simplified script. But they don't, look at any photo of faces in a crowd, like this one from Alex Prager. Each person is doing what they're doing, for their own individual reason. /12 https://t.co/h5LnjcufgR

An individual reason that includes their entire global/macro view of how the whole world works. Not a tiny partial fragment of a worldview. An entire worldview. Each contributes to any 'emergent' behaviour for their own individual reasons, shaped by that whole view. /13

That individual macro choice is made at each moment, based on their constant re-assessment of what's happening, from inside the entire 'macro' worldview each has. I'm hoping it's clearer how micro/macro is a myth (but the prejudice is very deep, so maybe it's not). /14

When all of these individuals combine to produce an outcome of some form, it's not not now some separate 'macro' entity, made up of lots of little micro entities. Every individual is doing a macro assessment the whole time, the distinction isn't real. /15

The 'whole is greater than the sum of the parts'. Rubbish. The parts aren't summed at all, this isn't Lego. Each whole is a provisional dynamic achievement. Made by individuals, but thinking 'macro' things. There's no binary here. /16

Similarly when we all speak a language, the words are universal and individual *at the same time*. I didn't invent English, but when I use it the meanings are already universal the moment I say or type a word. I may do other threads on this, it's a tricky topic. /17

But to finish with Covid, and micro-organisms in general. Macro-organisms are likely created by micro-organisms acting a bit like people do in a crowd. All lending just one part of their expansive characteristics, to that organism. We're societies of microbes. /18

More on this later.../19

How is that relevant? If an A-380 crashes in China killing everybody on board, is it less of a disaster than if it crashes in Australia? Is the argument that it matters less that we’ll kill at least double the number of people with Covid, because we have ‘spares’ now? /2 https://t.co/QiNgZfLOLA

Or that we’re killing smaller proportion of the entire population? Minimising maths is disgusting, again how is that even relevant? Was the recent train crash in India less tragic than one here, because it killed a much smaller proportion of their population? /3 https://t.co/kVcgbjHrJw

We saw here this week that 10 dead in a bus crash can be considered a solemn tragedy, but 200 dead in the same week from Covid, not. It’s all selective attention, to fit a narrative. What’s ’disgusting’ is the selective attention, not the comparison. /4

Most damningly, we have pretty good vaccines for Covid, we had only rudimentary ones for Spanish Flu. And there were no widespread antibiotics to treat the secondary infections, which killed many. There were also few options for virtual work, and none for online shopping. /5 https://t.co/i7MFiJBbcg

For me the most damning comparison between that pandemic and this one, is the number of people infected. About 40% of the Australian population caught Spanish Flu. Prevention of transmission was a priority. Compare with near 100% infection with Covid, as deliberate policy. /6 https://t.co/0FlydXnE6P

And in fact even the 40% figure was high at that time, the UK and US had closer to 25% of their populations infected. What they would have made of our 100% figure we’ll never know, but their few descendants with lingering sanity are rightly aghast. /7 https://t.co/Mnzlds8XQ7

You could minimise this by saying we’re infecting everybody *because* we have much better vaccines, we’re aiming for hybrid immunity. But we’re on track to have easily double the death toll, which again can only be ignored using sociopath mathematics. /8 https://t.co/GMPkzRjmhB

There is one fundamental change between 1918 and now, that explains the difference. We had a public then. We don’t now. Humans invented the public between the late-19th and mid-20th century, in response to catastrophes, like infectious disease and wars. /9 https://t.co/dRkbVDWIub

That public was replaced with an economy. With a market. A global market, of utility-maximising individuals. (Of course that never happened, it’s just spin, but that’s the loon theory that justified stripping away anything with ‘public’ attached to it.) /10 https://t.co/mChdVemlK4

Spare us the pretence that what we’re doing with Covid is scientific in any way. It’s political. It’s the dominant anti-State, anti-public loons of the past 7 decades, celebrating their final victory. Over the corpses of millions of Covid victims. And counting. /end

Did you get a gong too @Mike_Honey_ ?

The Victorians are famous for their engineering. The Romans were a role model for that, as were the Egyptians. As the BBC points out here, there are myths surrounding Victorian engineering too, but they’re very instructive myths for today. /2 https://t.co/8I6g6wPsqk

Cultures that build, last. The reason is very simple. Despite our prejudice, born from decades of prosperous and easy living, that engineering is a functional thing, a ‘tool’, it’s actually THE most powerfully social thing humans do. /3

To build and maintain things takes massive social organisation. To train the engineers and workers, and organise their work. To build and maintain supply chains for the work. All of this is intrinsically social work, not ‘technical’. The distinction is meaningless. /4

Most of the unrest and ‘division’ I see in Western societies is traceable back to the fact that we’re just not building anything, any more. We’re bored and frustrated, and like old aristocrats, working on defining ever more refined forms of identity to pass the time. /5

Building things brings calm and discipline to social life. People are focused on an outcome, and finding ways to overcome the challenges to meet that outcome. Not on interpersonal squabbles, on the team sports of the schoolyard. /6 https://t.co/3BSGl6BPPG

Once built ongoing maintenance brings a level of social organisation that no amount of opinion-based politics can ever muster. You either maintain your infrastructure, or your society stops functioning. No opinion has currency in that conversation. /7

As @EdConwaySky’s marvellous new book talks about, we’ve forgotten the essential materiality of our lives. Spoiled rich societies that for too long outsourced this work to others, including slaves. But we’ve also been doing this work ourselves, and ignoring it. /8 https://t.co/Oo2zjhuD5p

The BBC article touches on why, and people who follow my threads will see overlap. A lot of Victorian engineering also failed, which we hear less about, and it failed mostly when it was driven by populist pollies and entrepreneurs looking for votes and a quick buck. /9

Here’s Mike Casson, who’s studied that time. The culprit? Popularity politics. The stuff Utopia satirises brilliantly again today, with modern infrastructure builds. It’s still going on. See that ‘rational calm’ of ‘civil servants’? /10 https://t.co/g5ftQymW95

That’s what populists take away from us, installing permanent high school popularity contests as adult life. Who remembers Bert? The old guy from the old Public Works department, who was breathtakingly competent and rational and calm. And therefore immediately sidelined. /11 https://t.co/eeaIFXBw9p

That’s our battle still today. Popularity as the foundation of authority in public life. Societies can’t and won’t survive, unless that changes. We’ll just have childish, adolescent eternal debates about this or that bit of our treasured identities, while building nothing. /12

We need a new industrial revolution right now, to fix our climate and Covid woes. The problem is the solution. Enough hot air team sports, who the fuck cares about our opinions. Reality doesn’t. There’s deep satisfaction in returning to building a better society. /end

I guarantee just about everybody you ask won’t have a clue what it is. Without this machine the world as we know and enjoy it would more or less cease to operate. It’s an EUV lithography machine, that ‘draws’ the ‘circuitry’ on the silicon chips we use in everything. /2 https://t.co/m3oUqJP8IL

One of the most complex and extraordinary machines ever built. Joe Biden recently regulated to try to ensure this technology wouldn’t be shared with the Chinese. (The Dutch make the machines.) Semiconductors (’silicon chips’) are easily the lifeblood of modern societies. /3 https://t.co/qoBqQJEs5s

Remember the long delays buying cars in the past year? A shortage of semiconductors was mostly responsible. Semiconductors are mind-boggingly difficult to make, and the Taiwanese make the most advanced ones. The dominant reason China and the US argue over that territory. /4 https://t.co/g5VBEHwGj5

We’re so saturated in political team sports, in high school culture, that we have no interest in the material reasons for conflict. But about 99% of what actually keeps our societies running has nothing to do with any elected leader. It’s engineering. /5

The modern world is a genuine scientific and technological marvel. What’s more, that all only works by ignoring most of the territorial team sports of politics. The supply and production chains for semiconductors for example cross the globe. This is our true social glue. /6

One of the great tragedies of the modern world is that genius and smarts in general make it happen. But politically genius has no real power at all. If all of the brilliant minds working on the operating systems of our lives refused to support…/7

…the political nonsense of our time, they could bring politicians to heel immediately. Worth pondering, why intelligence has almost zero political power, even though it creates that world and keeps it running. We need much smarter ways for the smart to operate. /end

Which its supporters say means freedom, because it’s a ‘free market’. They would say that, but as we see right now, most people only have freedom to do anything in an economy through taking on astronomical personal debt. It’s smoke and mirrors. /2 https://t.co/Ipey7N5My2

And this isn’t some ‘pro-China’ thread, fuck off with your adolescent team sports. Societies are all more or less the same under the hood, in that they’re social, not political or economic. I personally prefer living under Australia’s social arrangements. /3

Not because they’re capitalist and free while China is communist and authoritarian. All of that -ism stuff is nonsense, grown-up fairytales. Much of the authoritarianism we attribute to China is a society run heavily by custom and tradition. /4

Of course that’s going to look oppressive to us, societies that shredded all of that in favour of eternal adolescent lifestyle presents, where we slaughter our old in privatised aged care homes with Covid while barely batting an eyelid. /5

The whole point of the fiction of ‘the economy’ is to replace all custom and tradition and sovereignty with globalised markets. And custom and tradition in the Chinese style can also be oppressive, again I have less than zero interest in the team sports. But it’s all social. /6

Societies are social. It’s in the name. Not political, or economic, that’s just just social life re-badged in ways to disguise the true dynamics going on. In our case, those dynamics are the social life we learn in schools. The tension between knowledge and popularity. /7

The Romans experienced that too, and their engineers (knowledge) won for centuries, until the populist emperors and their circuses finally got the ascendancy, at which point the empire collapsed. All longevity is knowledge, all popularity is destruction. /8

Adding elections to our democracies only a century ago is destroying them from the inside out now too. We put popularity in the driving seat, as the Roman emperors did. We saw what happened there, it can’t not. Popularity cannot ever run anything that lasts. /9

Too much of what needs doing will always be unpopular. And it also ignores that humans are social creatures, they don’t individually look for things they like, to do, they follow what everybody else is doing. They will do what’s popular rather than survive. /10

That’s the great myth of popularity, that it’s about what individuals like. Popularity is conformity, fads and fashions aren’t about what people like. They’re about them wanting to conform to what others are doing. Like the current craze for puffy jackets. /11 https://t.co/Gzmz92qymV

These are functionally excellent jackets. But that’s not the main reason people are wearing them. They’re wearing them because everybody else is wearing them. That’s what ‘popular’ means, it’s divorced from functionality, from knowledge. /12 https://t.co/Jj5pxdMTo3

All human history is a battle between popularity and knowledge. We all lived it in the schoolyard. The Chinese are experiencing it now, as their young adopt a more populist outlook. We can’t beat Covid, because it’s been made unpopular to do that. It’s not ‘trending’. /13

Nothing to do with freedom, it’s the exact opposite. Conformity. The freedumbs are the most fanatically conformist of all social groups. Even now they’ve won (they think), they’re still here battling for the team. /end

Whether it’s banking or mass communication and media (etc.), the products of Silicon Valley have for decades disintermediated vast swathes of our social and cultural lives. They’ve not just transformed existing institutions, often they’ve replaced them. /2 https://t.co/3VfR9BKv6d

In US cultural framing, this is ‘innovation’. In reality it’s mostly the same American Dream of getting rich, quick. Where Silicon Valley has supplanted existing industries, it’s nearly always then gobbled up all of the revenue of those industries and pocketed it as well. /3 https://t.co/g4sezhRy9t

In its earliest days of genuine technological innovation, profound science exported from Europe during WW2 was given room to grow in the venture capital-type environment of the Valley. The same hybrid marriage that sent Americans to the moon, using German rocket science. /4 https://t.co/1QJpWRMof0

But look at Silicon Valley today, and for the past several decades, and the fake it til you make it hucksterism is now overwhelmingly dominant. Everything shifted to much cheaper and easier software, away from hardware, which is now mostly constructed in Asia. /5

Sure companies like Apple still release major hardware innovations. Almost none of it is built in the US. The US no longer has the facilities or even knows how. I think it’s not unfair to say it took that European legacy of advanced science, and just monetised it. /6 https://t.co/6F4TF8nZAb

The US of course also had its own great scientists, many of whom worked together with the European exports on the Manhattan Project at the dawn of this era. War tends to mobilise invention. But people have noticed during Covid that this is a repeated pattern. /7 https://t.co/d6SrreRPp6

Politicians (the popularity end of our knowledge-popularity see-saw societies) will use expertise when it suits their popularity-based ends. Otherwise they not only ignore it, they despise it. Oppenheimer was one to see that bitter truth, too late. /8 https://t.co/wJInXwGLYP

Silicon Valley was a watershed in the decoupling of expertise from social good. Its products today, including this platform, are so often constructed using the framing of disruption. Disruption designed to make people rich, not for social progress. /9 https://t.co/NkQYe1Xs35

Just how rich is historically unprecedented. And is a (not discussed) measure of just how much SOCIAL disintermediation this industry has produced. It’s vacuuming up our common-wealth, inserting itself into every nook and cranny of our lives. /10

That wouldn’t matter so much if it was just doing that because it was providing valuable tools for those lives, but again the hucksterism is easily dominant, has been for years. It’s about replacing that common-wealth with vast piles of concentrated wealth, in the Valley. /11

But this is where I think deeper, slower-acting realities will call all of this out. Take Joe Biden and Anthony Albanese now talking about re-homing advanced manufacturing in Western countries. There’s much to like about that ambition. /12 https://t.co/xqHAQlsZKV

But as the semiconductor industry, the most critical on the planet, shows clearly, you can’t now de-internationalise this. The supply and knowledge chains are now distributed all over the world. Nobody else can really make the most advanced chips except Taiwan, for example. /13

And as @EdConwaySky’s book describes so well, every part of that critical industry is now dependent on a whole multitude of different materials and expertise, spread around the globe. There’s no easy way to re-nationalise it, it would be physically impossible. /14 https://t.co/YUC4mxW74l

And this is where the knowledge-popularity tension I Tweet about shows something profound maybe happening. I spoke about it in this thread. Popularity-based cultural life has captured our knowledge-based life. But you reach a tipping point. /15 https://t.co/2Y7M7zJb5o

Societies become so socio-technically complex, that the lunatic dreams of libertarian populism of everybody ‘living their best lives’ comes up against the realities of keeping that life operational. /16

You either keep building and maintaining that vast social infrastructure, with its incredibly complex engineering and critical resources, or your society collapses. There’s no choice at this point. Nobody’s opinion will matter. It’s the materiality of our societies that wins. /17

Knowledge may have the final victory over popularity, over populism. Whether it can do that all by itself or whether we need new ways to mobilise expertise itself, against populism, is an open question. But knowledge is the only foundation of stable, long-lasting societies. /end

His driving passion is getting 3 terms in government, not actually doing anything. There’s a lot of tidying up going on, cleaning up LNP mess, all useful. But nothing even close to what’s required to turn us around. It’s always about the framing. /2

Labor won’t move on things that need doing because the LNP already framed everything in ways that prevent that. Anything meaningful will be seen as a threat to the ‘economy’, that fiction designed to protect the status quo. Progressives around the world are the same. /3

Unless they challenge that dominant framing of ‘the economy’, the status quo will remain. But they won’t challenge that, electoral politics won’t allow anything that threatens a vote. We’re stuck in the bog that popularity politics made for us. /4

You can’t address serious issues if you have to do it through the detour of popularity. Imagine running a business or raising kids that way, where nothing was allowed that wasn’t popular. Insanity. As always, we have existential emergencies to deal with, and we won’t. /5

Because standing in the way is that tiny veneer of populism that we call democracy. Elected politicians. If you put them all on a cruise ship and sent them away for 2 years, we might get somewhere. Put our democracy in extended ‘caretaker’ mode. As we do during elections. /6

Notice how the country ‘runs’ just fine during caretaker mode? How do we not notice that’s because politicians NEVER RUN IT. That’s a lie. Their function is as a liaison point with the community. Their delusions of actually running anything creates Trumps. /7

I often argue for reality-based politics. It’s coming at us like a B-double at speed. None of our popularity-based politics has the faintest chance of doing anything about it. We have the climate threat that could end civilisation itself, and what do we do? /8

Our populist pollies infect us all with a pandemic virus, over and over. That should help, hey? I think we’ve already reached peak populism, societies are falling apart. Fuck off with all your Left and Right and other paraphernalia of populism. Only one thing will save us. /9

Actual knowledge, applied immediately. The mechanism to do that? Who knows, we might be screwed. But actually an extended caretaker mode, where the thousands of knowledgeable officials could actually get on with doing practical things, might be our best hope. /10

But the populists will never allow it. In our high school societies, the cool folk will never give up power. History will repeat, only complete catastrophe will bring about needed change. /end

Jack Grimm was a Texan millionaire who funded a mission to find Titanic. Good on him, but where the story gets delicious is the method he'd proposed to find the wreck. He had a trained monkey, that would point on the map where it believed the wreck to be. /2 https://t.co/lnc22iyPm6

The scientists on the mission reportedly gave Grimm an ultimatum. "Us or the monkey". The monkey was left behind. The name of the monkey? Titan. /end https://t.co/Sfy5EBFeWi

And it’s insidious, because those chronic deaths won’t resemble the acute phase. So few will make the link, until it’s too late for whole generations of people living shorter and sicker lives. Heart disease in the 20th century seems likely to have been this mechanism at work. /2

We spent most of that century thinking diet and smoking caused it, and/or lack of exercise. Your doctor today will still advise on all of those things as prophylactics. We tend to use physical and chemical models for the body, like it’s one of the machines we make ourselves. /3

But it’s an organism. And as we’re discovering, fundamentally microbial perhaps in every aspect of how it works. All life on Earth began as microbial life, why would it ever cease? It built the ‘macrofauna’ too, it likely IS that macrofauna. /4

Human bodies and other living organisms are microbial cities. None of us living in a city think the city itself is some distinct thing from the people living in it. We know people make cities and make up cities. That’s likely all every living thing on the planet is. /5

A ‘city’ of microbes. Microbes can also be effectively immortal, our own mortality is them building something new, some new trial. ‘Sydney’ is potentially immortal, the buildings within it are mortal. We’re all just microbial experiments, made by microbial property developers. /6

And our prejudice and misunderstanding of scale assumes that microbes are simple life, and we’re complex life. Microbes do things that we would have no hope of ever doing. They built the atmosphere, the only reason life exists on this planet. /7

It doesn’t take a lot to see ‘macro’ anything as a highly *simplified* creation of micro something. The Sydney built environment is no match for the sophistication of the biology of your body, and that body in turn is a much simpler thing than the microbial life that made it. /8

While most now agree processes like endosymbiosis lead to this sort of microbial construction of macro organisms, at the ‘micro’ level, some or even many would draw a line at taking that right up to the full macro level of the macrofauna we know. /9

But why would it stop at the micro level? Why would billions of years of microbial proliferation, still with us today underlying all life, need some distinct ‘macro’ process to sit on top of it? Just look, macro things are always pretty simple, relatively. /10

They have clear boundaries, identifiable shapes and behaviours. Non-living objects the same. But head towards the microscopic level, even of atoms, and shit gets weird spectacularly fast. We still haven’t accepted that lesson from quantum science either. /11

A ‘macro’ object is not complex, it’s simple-as. Compared to the quantum soup it emerges from. Anyway, far too much for a Twitter thread. To return to Covid, infection is dangerous. Infection with anything is dangerous. Microbes are constantly doing property development. /12

To them the killing of a human is like us bulldozing a building to make way for a newer one. They don’t lose any sleep over it. Infection is, I would still wager, the root of much of the disease afflicting humankind. That’s how microbes roll, it’s them building. /13

And again, the longer term disease state will often not resemble the on-ramp of acute infection. That’s how they get away with it. From the overall perspective of life on Earth, it may not matter if humans end up swept away by their gullible ‘living with’ infections. /14

But it does matter, if you’re human. There are smart ways to sustain this ‘macro’ form for a lot longer, if we’re much more careful about infection. The immune system we’re now happy to make the frontline of this fight evolved *because* of the constant microbial threat. /15

To now celebrate immunity as some ‘natural’ process is like cheering on wars. Your immune system is the legacy of millions of years of microbial war. It quite likes not having to be constantly fighting threats. /end

There’s something important about our culture to be understood here. Want to see Uluṟu? Bang, within seconds, you can see it. And you can see it from angles and heights you can never see, if you go there. You can travel every single route to and from there, in moments. /2 https://t.co/BnPh0uFpm7

You can pick any point in Australia’s vast inland, points that early explorers lost lives trying to reach, and again be there literally in seconds. You can look at every tree, watering hole, track, rock. Anything. It’s something our ancestors would have found astonishing. /3

I do still find it astonishing. I can spend hours zooming around the world seeing things. Here’s me at the top of Mt Everest, moments after being at Uluṟu. Many die seeing that point. I’m on a comfortable couch drinking a cuppa. Of course there’s an obvious response to this. /4 https://t.co/PYOMxrcA16

That ‘it’s not the same as being there’. Of course it isn’t. But what do people do when they go to these places? Today they spend a lot of their time taking photos, of being there. “Here I am, at X”. Being there is different, but how much different? /5 https://t.co/MRrH0P2P7C

People go to ‘see’ these places. But you can see them from your lounge room, and see a lot more of them from there too. You don’t see more, being there. You see less. Much less. Which leads to the next common response, that people go to ‘experience the culture’. /6

But the culture you’re going to experience there is the culture of being a tourist. You don’t live there. You may run into people who do, and talk to them and sit in their restaurants etc. Some even try to ‘go native’, thinking that’s a more authentic tourism. /7

The locals are heartily sick of that too. They can’t even get into their own local haunts, previously free of tourists. The Venetians are so tired of it that some projections say there won’t be a native population there by 2030. Only tourists. /8 https://t.co/aqYM5TvVMf

There’s something really profoundly weird about all of this. You can see anywhere in the world right now, from the comfort of your own home. Even the most remote places, in an instant. There’s no need to go there, to see it, burning tonnes of jet fuel. /9

And this hypertourism is getting worse, not better. There’s something profound about our culture to be understood here. I suspect this is really about our total loss of understanding of what place means. We replaced place with space. With maps. /10

That pathological obsession for the most ‘authentic’ experience of somewhere else is (I think) the mourning of that loss of understanding. We know the places we live don’t have that sense of magic for most that these tourist places have for them. /11

We’re circling the globe every day to try to find that sense of place again. To accumulate places, like quantity will break through that barrier. (It won’t.) Or feeling like if we’re actually there, in Paris, we’re closer to the authentic ‘Paris’. /12

But it’s a hall of mirrors. You can live in Paris, go native. But then you’re not travelling, you’ve moved. The reason the places we go to see seem amazing, is that the people who made them understood place. They knew how to make place a magical, sacred thing. /13

We don’t know how to do that now. Our suburbs are giant car parks for commuting wage slaves. Place has become an address, a point on a map, connected to every other point, so workers can ‘commute’ to anywhere they’re needed. We’re a culture of movement, not place. /14

Of displacement, of people and things. It’s our old Imperial DNA, still expressing itself. We don’t want to be in place, we want to accumulate things in great spirals of travel out and back. Including tourist sights and experiences. We’re even tourists in our own land. /15 https://t.co/BpRPwOELcA

Isn’t it beyond strange that our relationship to our own country is the same as the relationship we have to all the places we travel through overseas? We’re tourists at home, AND abroad. Always just ‘seeing the sights’. Sights we can see from our couch, any time we like. /16 https://t.co/RR7pQBq1Hh

In the meantime Indigenous Australians have been telling us the whole time we’ve been here that place, the land, is the centre of their lives. We’ve never understood that, and we still don’t. To us Uluṟu is like the Eiffel Tower, or Venice - a tourist attraction. /17

Something to see, to have a selfie in front of, to prove that we were ‘there’, to show others. It’s a pissing contest, who can accumulate the most sights, like collecting stamps. Meantime our landscape increasingly lies in ruins, because we have no actual connection to it. /18 https://t.co/9lDVvCdiLb

And it’s not an easy connection to put back. We have no idea how to make place. Both science and New Age mumbo jumbo try, but miss it entirely. How to be grounded, in place. That’s our problem. We could try to learn what it means from Indigenous Australians. /19

The now famous culture stretching back tens of thousands of years, a culture most fundamentally of place. You’d think that would be the most important thing to understand, anywhere on Earth. But we sentimentalise it, mock it, scientise it, camp in it, make it numinous. /20

All of that is just us using our misunderstandings to try to get understanding. To try to recover a void in our cultures, of place. Look at how easily politicians weaponise sovereignty and borders, we know our place is fundamental in some way. We just don’t understand how. /21

It has nothing to do with borders or sovereignty, more rubbish imperial DNA still trying to assert itself. We’re still children of empire, we haven’t figured that out yet. I mostly hate travel, because I feel that acutely, that imperial accumulation of meaningless sights. /22

My most sacred place is my home. My place. It’s not an address, a point on a map. It’s where I experience the universe. It’s not local, or global, all that nonsense is imperial baggage that won’t go away. I’m grounded, at home. That place ‘the economy’ despises. /23

Unless it’s real estate to be sold. You need to stop moving, to just be in a place, to start to feel place. Once you do, the universe comes to you, you don’t need to go to it. /end

These are the inaugural heads of the Australian Public Service, the APS. Pictured in 1901, at Federation. Public or civil service, the name tells you what you need to know. A large body of expert people providing service to the public. They invented the public in Australia. /3 https://t.co/HFYNNN3qZv

The public is not an enumeration of people, it’s an analytical, data-driven construct, of human interaction. It’s not visible, except in the data. The APS has ‘run’ Australia for over 120 years. Not politicians. The expertise and accumulated knowledge is staggering. /4 https://t.co/1VbA2MS4tS

It’s thousands of experts, dedicated entirely to running the country, for the public. It’s all that provides our historical continuity, from one generation to the next. Elected politicians can be furniture salesmen, the idea they know how to run a country is ridiculous. /5 https://t.co/hHGXLaxReu

They couldn’t say a single sensible thing without the briefings from the APS. I Tweeted this only because I see people puzzled every day about why throwing profound Covid expertise into public discussion doesn’t change anything. We’re talking to the wrong people. /6 https://t.co/7edMDIaeCP

Elected politicians from both sides have been working for decades to sideline the APS. You’re honestly wasting your time asking politicians to do things like public health. Most of them don’t even know what it is. Our modern tragedy is an institutional one. /7 https://t.co/CILFBMcZXD

Politicians have NEVER been interested in knowledge. Those who are would always put popularity first, if push came to shove, because that’s how they keep their jobs. Democracy and the public (and public health) are creations of the public service. /end https://t.co/mtKyw5otAV

A 77-year old artist playing at Woodstock would have been born in 1892. That would be the equivalent of Louis Armstrong or Jelly Roll Morton playing there. We have artists at Glastonbury this week approaching 80 years of age. Why I think this matters. /2

None of this is ageism, I should add. If people want to keep playing into their 80s, good luck to them. But we’re talking about headlining music festivals, festivals predominantly (like Woodstock) designed for the young. To me this means unhealthy things. /3

What’s rarely said about the counterculture movement of the 1960s was that it was profoundly anti-establishment. Today the closest beliefs are labelled neoliberalism. It’s strange the bedfellows beliefs keep. And who invented neoliberalism? The same boomers. /4 https://t.co/WrIXCRK1RZ

That was the same movement, as it morphed into a highly profitable middle and old age. The richest generation in all of history, by a mile. Anti-establishment beliefs were great business, the boomers dismantled many of society’s institutions, and then privatised them. /5

Most of the corporate behemoths that now dominate our lives in our ‘neoliberal’ societies were set up by boomers, who also profited the most from them. They monetised the wreckage of their earlier anti-establishment assault. I don’t think people see this clearly at all. /6

The wealthiest demographic in our societies, again by a staggering margin, are the boomers, now retiring or retired. That’s a social obscenity, which would have been seen as that by previous generations. If your working, child-raising generation isn’t your highest…/7

…earning generation, your society is toast. We’re all living that perversion now, with young working people not even able to afford (or find) rental accommodation, let alone owning a roof over their own heads. And their wages and savings have been in free fall for decades. /8

So when I see near-80 year olds take the stage at Glastonbury, pardon me for feeling disgust that this particular generation won’t make way for those who came after them. The Peter Pan generation, desperately clinging to their adolescent lives. An eternal lifestyle culture. /9

It’s the clearest way to see the total collapse of a previous progression from child to adult life. Everything has been stalled at adolescence for decades. Society is a high school, as I Tweet about a lot, it’s not an analogy. This is what we’re seeing, right now. /10

This is the generation who did it, still trying to dominate all the adolescent things that they’d have been horrified at their own parents doing. High school was the culture they knew, and they remade the world in its image. They won’t accept ageing, and succession. /11

They vacuumed up nearly all of society’s wealth, and intend to live their adolescent lives to the glorious end, gorging themselves on it. Boomer musicians have been touring the world for the past 10-20 years, vacuuming up tens of millions for a luxurious retirement. /12

This is a social and cultural fact we’re seeing, not my personal gripe or opinion. Elderly people, easily grandparent or great-grandparent age, are headlining music festivals. Stop and think how perverse that is, historically. The total lack of adult stepping aside in play. /13

This topic also elicits howls of protest from boomers and others about them being good people, who’ve done good things. All true, but then that’s true for every generation. But it’s not about how nice they are personally, it’s about intergenerational equity. /14

I think I’m a nice person, but I’m very happy to admit that my comfortable life is also bought at the expense of generations of imperial colonisation and oppression. I can hold those two facts in my head at the same time. I don’t personally oppress anybody. /15

But the culture I live in did, and I benefited hugely from it. So I support everything sensible that culture now does in reparation. Do I see boomers lining up to address the unprecedented intergenerational inequities we see right now? No. This is the cultural bit. /16

This is what the high school culture I talk about looks like, in real time. Adolescent framing of life itself. Living your best life, an eternal lifestyle-based present, denial of ageing and succession. A politics of libertarian obsession, with freedom (teenagers, anybody?). /17

You can watch Glastonbury (stage and crowd) and see the collapse of the distinction between different age groups, right there. I’m sure some will celebrate it as some fight against ageism. I don’t think it’s anything of the sort. There comes a time when you must stand aside. /18

That’s what the circle of life means. Each stage of life is a necessary phase, making way for what comes after. But it’s not the world we live in now. That circle has been completely flattened. In favour of Peter Pan eternal adolescence. Why we won’t fight emergencies either. /19

Climate change and Covid action upsets these adolescent living your best life lives. It can’t be tolerated. We must get back to gigs, to travel, to eating out. To lifestyles. It would take just one prominent boomer musician to say ‘fuck Glastonbury, what about the virus?’ /20

You won’t hear it. Those masses of people can all be infected, so the boomers can soak up the adoration and cash one more time. No leadership, no grown ups. /end

It was a classic case of the measurement of something gradually replacing that thing. There’s no doubt there are ‘economic’ transactions happening in societies, things being bought, sold, traded etc. That’s what GDP tried to capture. But it was what happened next that matters. /2

Those numbers were then called, as the link describes, ‘the economy’, a new entity. A complete flip from measuring existing social activity, to describing a rival for that activity. Like we have society, *and* an economy. /3 https://t.co/ipigIzxWWC

It’s exactly like saying measuring temperature, rainfall, wind speed etc. describes a new separate reality, rather than just characteristics of the one we already live in. Like weather exists separately to the sun and air and water. I don’t think that sleight of hand is seen. /4

Everybody, all politicians, all journalists, members of the public, now talk about ‘the economy’ as if it’s an actual thing. It never was, it was a bunch of measurements of SOCIAL life, one small component of social life. Extrapolated to become a replacement for that society. /5

You might think that’s over-egging it. I’m sorry, but history tells us that was exactly what happened, up in lights. The people who did it don’t even deny it. They removed society entirely. And replaced it with a ‘market’. A ‘market economy’. This was NOT an economic shift. /6 https://t.co/rbuOCIt5DH

It was a social shift, all things humans do together are social. It was these people doing politics, by other means. If you can redefine society as no longer even existing, you no longer have any obligation to do any of the social things. How is it not obvious? /7

That’s the world we’ve lived in for the past 5 decades. The stripping away of everything social or public, in favour of an economy. A market. Of apparent separate individuals, who do well or not depending on how hard they try, in the market. All complete nonsense of course. /8

Many who promoted this shift don’t even believe it themselves, it’s just spin that allows them to vacuum up all of society’s wealth and authority for themselves. But there are true believers too, who believe this lunacy. And the genius of it, as politics? /9

If you take measures for how one tiny part of society is operating, GDP for example, and expand them to replace all of society, then those who are involved in that part of society win everything. ‘Business’, mostly, and those who own it. /10

It’s a hugely effective way to entrench the status quo. You’ll notice that today, where ‘the economy’ won’t allow anything at all that doesn’t just mean the continued operation of the business-led status quo. We’re ‘living with’ a fucking pandemic, because of ‘the economy’! /11

It was the greatest political strategy in all of history. People can completely dismantle centuries of custom and tradition and social life, and say they’re doing it purely because the economy demands it. An ‘objective’ thing, not their doing. Total bollocks, but they won. /12

Everybody now believes this nonsense. Like societies can’t do a thing, unless the economy allows it. Snookered, checkmate. I Tweet a lot, you won’t defeat climate change, or Covid, or any other modern malady, unless you attack this ridiculous concept - ‘the economy’. /13

Humans do not live in markets, they live in social groups, and behave socially. They always have, and always will. Nothing about market economics is true, it’s wilfully ignorant of social psychology and social anything. It doesn’t care, it’s a strategy, not a theory. /14

The global economy is tanking again now, as it does regularly. Because it’s nonsense. The nonsense gets a bit of a head of steam, usually with cheap money, then it all falls in a heap. And nobody questions whether the framing was the problem. It’s the SAME problem as Covid. /15

Or climate change. The problem of refusing to govern humanity socially, and substituting a ridiculous abstraction that has no connection to how humans work at all. All the economic things that happen are social too, the fads and fashions and booms and busts. /16

The ridiculous fantasies of the economy will tell you those are ‘objective’ phenomena, inelasticity of supply and demand etc., they’ll even draw you graphs. All meaningless mumbo jumbo. Humans act socially, in everything they do. Including when they’re acting ‘economically’. /17 https://t.co/SExwoxCAfh

If you don’t challenge and dismantle this lunatic concept, humanity will not survive. We’re at that stage of seriousness. Societies are collapsing. The Earth’s climate and its living things are in disarray. It’s not ‘neoliberalism’, it’s the economy. It doesn’t exist. /end

These are standard power plugs. Regulated standards. We regulate in building and engineering not to oppress anybody. We do it because it makes the building and engineering a lot faster, safer, cheaper and easier for everybody. It creates a foundation for action. /2 https://t.co/5G0Gdo9Myb

You can go to a hardware store and buy parts and tools that you know will work, because they’ve been standardised, by regulation. That’s all regulation really is, social standardisation. Not to oppress anybody, but to create MORE freedom for everybody. /3

It frees them from having to do constant negotiations over things, to get things to work together. You don’t have to reinvent the world every day, you standardise as much as possible so that becomes a new baseline for everybody to work from. /4

It’s why humans invented legal systems. Again, not to oppress everybody, but to FREE them from constant social battles. It’s an entirely practical, physical, logistical thing. You’ll always find examples of apparent over-regulation. Even in a workplace with too many policies. /5

But that’s not the fault of regulation. Nearly always that’s because the place is already dysfunctional, and people are madly writing policies to try to tame the dysfunction. Regulation needs to work with the practical situation, negotiated compromises. /6

We’ve seen all of this with Covid and public health. Our societies (in Australia at least) functioned at near-normal levels, in the middle of a pandemic, because of targeted public health regulation. Don’t listen to the liars who say we were ‘locked down’ for 2 years. /7 https://t.co/eloOTsEoBr

Even the word is offensively stupid. It’s the same anti-State, small government libertarians poisoning societies with their usual propaganda. The old bullies from high school trying to paint themselves as victims of rules and authority. /8

Rather than as what they really are, anti-social bullies. The only freedom they care about is their own, they’re freeloaders on the rest of us, happily gobbling up all the amenities of modern society, while undermining and destroying it with their beliefs. /9

If we want to beat climate change, Covid, poverty, shortage of housing, environmental destruction - any of the big social problems - we need to regulate. It’s fast, it’s the only thing that applies to all of us equally, and it’s fair. The symbol of law is all about balance. /10 https://t.co/4F8XjleaSj

The offensively stupid use of the word ‘balance’ by modern politicians is a long way removed from what it actually means. The whole rationale for law and regulation is to create balance. The scales, right there in the image. Justice is also ‘blind’, independent. /11 https://t.co/TtvMIC6erO

It will call out injustice and corruption, wherever it finds it. Including in ex-Premiers, no matter how much they cling to how popular they are to try to escape it. Like the schoolyard bullies they are. It’s time to regulate. It’s what we elect people to do, in parliaments. /end

…a puff piece on buying Taylor Swift tickets. Society is a high school, our concerns are the concerns of teenagers. Much of the nation fixated on tickets to a teen-focused pop star, all week. 2/2