September 2023

"So just to clarify, how far in is it now?" "It's about 180m in." "So it was 150m in, and now it's 180m in." "Yeh, of that order, yes." "So it's only moved 15 kilometres." "Err, it's only moved a few tens of metres." /end

Thought you might enjoy this one @Jason_gasdive

This is the real reason we don’t fight climate change or Covid. It’s nobody’s job to do it. Our jobs are about making coffees and stacking shelves. Also why public health action was quickly shut down against Covid, it disrupted the job-economy. /2

There is no ‘public’ in a job-economy. Just a market of individuals. The only power is ‘business’, the employers of jobs. Societies’ entire collective energy and focus is stolen from all collective problems and projects and redirected to ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’. /3

When conservatives use slogans like that, some think they’re preaching a boon for societies. Employment for all! It’s actually a social-political rallying cry, a fundamental shift of social authority to business. There’s no necessary reason society’s labour and resources…/4

…need to be harnessed to what employers want to do. To stacking shelves and making coffees. Those same resources and energies could be used to restore degraded land, and stop pandemics. But there’s no ‘job’ in that. The economy is a trick, a hijacking of our societies. /end

We’re European tourists in our own land, still. Most of Australia is classified as ‘the outback’. A meaningless concept, when you unpack it. For us most of our continent is a Crocodile Dundee theme park. Here’s the true genius of Aboriginal Australia, the ‘gap’ to close. /2 https://t.co/86tJKghEve

The paternalistic interpretation of how they managed to live here for tens of thousands of years (!!) is that they were ‘hunter-gatherers’. In other words, they did little and just foraged for berries and ate the odd kangaroo, and nature provided. /3

Ironically this paternalistic rubbish is OUR model for now managing this continent. We leave most of it empty, that fabled ‘bush’ or ‘outback’, and what happens? The whole thing collapses, rivers clog and run dry, the flora explodes into catastrophic fires. /4

It’s the clearest empirical proof that Aboriginal Australians actively engineered the landscape. The entire continent. It was a dynamic, engineered equilibrium. Stripped back to the basics, here’s the genius. We only exist because of our land, it feeds, waters and shelters us. /5

We do the feeding and watering thing the same way we do mining. As an extractive industry. Most of our farming is soil and water mining. In historical terms, that quickly leads to total depletion of the ‘resource’, as we see right now. And then what? We have no idea. /6

It’s like a madonna-whore complex, for landscape. We either fence it off as ‘pristine nature’, in national parks, or treat it as a mine. The true genius is finding a way to both get sustenance from the landscape, *and* enrich it for everything that lives in it. /7

That’s what Aboriginal Australians did. It’s the greatest achievement of all human history, tens of thousands of years of achievement longer than any other culture. Nothing is more complex or sophisticated. Our ‘technologies’ are childishly simple by comparison. /8

I strongly encourage everybody to read Gammage’s book, for a window into what that looked like, before we turned most of the continent into a quarry for food stuffs and minerals. It is THE most remarkable story on Earth. Firsthand accounts of what Europeans found here. /9 https://t.co/oPzafjYrDO

What they found was nothing like what we call ‘the bush’ today. The bush and the outback are that same beautifully engineered landscape left to wrack and ruin. Read the settlers’ own descriptions of the astonishing Eden they found here. /10

They were too prejudiced mostly to understand that the Eden was MADE. They thought it was a ‘natural’ wonder. Within only a handful of years of them treating it as a mine, the whole thing started to collapse. We’re living in the ruins. /end

The messaging is pitched at this sort of voter, who's normally not engaged at all, or is very disaffected and angry with society in general, and/or has deep prejudices they don't normally share, etc. The messaging gives them permission to express all of their anger. /2

But the surface level of the language sounds polite. The message to the angry is sub-audible to the polite, normally. Like a dog whistle. So both the polite and the angry (and the downright disgusting too) all now have permission to act. The dog-whistling sweeps them all up. /3

If you find the video above repulsive, but you're voting No, a very important question is how you ended up on the same team. Nearly always it means you're deaf to the dog-whistling, even though you may have the greatest intentions. And No may also be a very valid position. /4

But I'd suggest you need to be really sure you haven't been conned here, have a look at the company you're keeping. Does it seem weird you'd be in bed together? It likely means you're not hearing the dog whistle. /end

Am increasingly thinking this must be both businesses and households using a lot of solar during the day, and the solar production peaking around 1-1.30pm. Does make me wonder just how many people are working from home.

It’s decades of propaganda. The real function of supply and demand is to act as the ‘invisible hand’ in the market, guiding societies without the need for government and regulation. It’s a 100% political concept. It’s failed everywhere it’s been tried, because it’s a fiction. /2

Human desires determine how societies look and function, not supply and demand. Every industry that gets privatised to let the supply and demand market run it becomes more expensive, less efficient, and eventually needs bailing out and regulation. /3 https://t.co/cJPPbN7jIy.

Regulation is not a restriction on societies, it creates them. The same dimwits who parrot slogans about the economy then talk about the ‘rule of law’ to run international politics. The economy is a con. Not only do markets never work, they never actually existed. /4

Regulation is buried deep in every market, to get it to operate at all. Standardisation and contractual certainty and all the things that make markets function are brought into being by regulation. Regulation is also the only way to defeat Covid. /5

The fastest, cheapest, fairest and most powerful way to beat it, to do anything social. We already have public health acts and workplace health and safety acts. They’ll do it. They’re being deliberately sidelined. Regulation or law is both local and global, at the same time. /6

That’s why it works. It makes your individual action global action, and vice versa. Like a speed limit, which not only protects you individually from harm, but also regulates the flow of all traffic, at the same time. Public health orders give every individual permission…/7

…to act in ways that protect both themselves, and everybody else. Without them people won’t do either, regulation is the way humanity invented to give individuals permission to act socially. Which is also the best thing for them, individually. It’s not a binary. /8

That’s what the libertarian nonsense simply doesn’t understand, with its talk of regulation being oppression. Regulation is all that has ever made people free. It’s why we invented it, to short-circuit social status games and provide a framework for collective action. /9

Which then in turn provides enormously greater freedom for individuals, who no longer need to negotiate every single social transaction themselves. How much freer did responsible people free while public health requirements were being enforced? Astronomically. /10

Now they’re trying to do it all themselves, needing enormous energy and costing them a fortune in PPE and other mitigations. We privatised the pandemic, that’s what ‘living with it’ means. We turned it into a market. Like all markets, it’s a total failure. /end

There are two ways societies actually progress, and neither has any connection with what we call politics. One is catastrophe, like natural disasters (including pandemics) and wars. Catastrophes upend existing social relations, they’re societies’ on/off switch. The reboot. /2

They have the power to overcome entrenched social status. Debate never does. It’s a terrible mechanism, lots of people are maimed and die through these catastrophes. But after they clear the decks, actual change often does occur. Like we saw from the mid-20th century. /3

After a world war, a pandemic, and then another world war. It gave society a good kicking, and huge social progress followed, as entrenched interests were pushed to one side for long enough to allow genuine change. The actual idea of ‘the public’ took off at this point. /4

Have Tweeted lots about how from the 1970s onwards, the old elites that had been pushed aside earlier in the century began to reassert themselves. An all-out assault on everything ‘public’. Today that assault is called ‘the economy’. Markets, nothing but individuals. /5

Have also Tweeted about the second way progress happens. When enough knowledge is embedded in a society, through engineering, science and other knowledge, that the society can only function when that knowledge is maintained. No amount of debate or opinion can do it. /6

I think a lot of what Rosling mapped in his presentations was this. The push for improvement driven by established expertise and knowledge embedded in institutions, which no team sports could really touch without breaking important things they were reliant upon as well. /7

I don’t want catastrophe to fix our current problems, I’d much prefer the incredible socio-technical complexity of everyday life now to do that. But I do know ‘politics’ won’t, which is why I doze off with all the daily team sports. /end

The Snowy Mountains Scheme did something remarkable that wasn’t about electricity, or even water. Something global. The scheme itself by the way was never really about electricity, it was the usual European Australia harebrained fantasy of ‘turning water inland’. /2 https://t.co/zU6l5vk0WR

Of redirecting the Snowy River mostly into the Murray Darling basin, so it could be used for irrigation. If you wonder how successful it was, well, no. The Scheme is a white elephant. But something it did achieve is much more important. /3 https://t.co/j7EpJxH3y9

It brought about 65,000 migrants to Australia, mostly from Europe. Refugees from a Europe pulverised by WW2. SBS is running a brilliant doco series on the Scheme right now, I highly recommend it. That influx built post-war Australia, *socially*. /4 https://t.co/UOn8hwI9GQ https://t.co/wLvoKrCR81

These were the same Europeans who just previously had been at war with each other, who’d blown much of their cities and landscapes to smithereens, killing millions. When they arrived here they could barely communicate with one another, and there were remnant hostilities too. /5

But over the next 25 years of building the Snowy Hydro together, that act of building brought them together. And welded a new Australia together well outside the Scheme, socially. Some of my relatives worked on this Scheme, I experienced that social shift firsthand. /6

There’s profound historical symmetry to what actually happened here. After 6-7 years of territorial warfare in Europe and Asia, with the destruction of so much social infrastructure, suddenly these same cultures were living harmoniously again here in the Snowy. For one reason. /7

They were building things. That act of building transcended all of the cultural differences and hostilities. You can’t engage with reality in that way, to build things, hard things, without putting your usual differences to one side. This is the story of all civilisation. /8 https://t.co/2Y7M7zJb5o

I Tweeted about how this was the main lesson of Roman civilisation, that we don’t usually see. Rome survived for so long, because it built. The act of building is the glue that holds societies together. A a bonus you get the things you build, to make your life better. /9 https://t.co/2Y7M7zJb5o

Aboriginal Australia was the same. Bigots see it as tens of thousands of years of ‘hunting and gathering’, as primitives engaged in a sort of continent level scout jamboree. But Aboriginal Australia was building a continent, and modifying that building that whole time. /10 https://t.co/2DIQQtMz5j

How do you have a culture that lasts 60,000+ years, when other cultures manage 5000 at best? You focus your social lives on the continuous building of things. In the First Australians case, on the continuous enrichment of an entire continent. Fast forward to today. /11

With us here on social media, ‘debating’ (really just team sports), producing nothing except hot air, and billions for the platform owners. Having long outsourced most building of things to China, which we now engage in chest-beating sabre-rattling with. /12

And wondering why our societies are falling apart. It’s simple. Because we don’t build anything. /end

It’s simple to challenge the great economy con. If the public (customers) are all cashed-up, anybody can run a successful business, because customers have money to spend. If business has all the money, it has no customers. How is this not obvious? /2

The tedious econo-waffle we have to listen to every day about inflation and fiscal and monetary policy and blah blah blah. All political fairy tales. ‘The economy’ was and still is a ruse to strip common-wealth from ordinary people, and shunt it to business. /3

Give ordinary people that wealth, and business will thrive. It’s win-win. You have to be some kind of stupid to not see it. But then that’s what decades of ‘the economy’ has done, it’s like a mass lobotomy. /end

That’s when you see how broken the social fabric is. Like right now. Debt (particularly personal debt) hides that, it gives the illusion that ordinary people are part of society, what by then is called ‘the economy’. As soon as that debt dries up, they’re living in cars. /2

Societies are ALWAYS social. They’re never economies. The economy is a trick to favour a tiny subset of society, by creating a fictitious mathematical construct that rationalises the status quo. Only debt ever makes that seem real. Without it the majority of the population…/3

…is suddenly revealed to have no stake in society at all. There’s a reason old religious traditions were so scathing about debt. We’ve forgotten why. Moneylenders and plagues, deep evils in multiple religious traditions. They knew what destroyed societies. /end

Social media is mostly American in origin, and carries a set of deep social beliefs that the platforms implement, about society emerging from the bottom up, with ‘the people’ aggregating all of their opinions into some democratic outcome. /2

The platforms are literal Trojan Horses, driving these underlying assumptions deep into other cultures. The explosion of paranoia and conspiracies, the constant mobilisation of incoherent hysteria. Locals opposing solar farms because the panels will be too shiny. /3

Communities who have lived for decades in the shadow of hideous coal-fired plants spewing filth into the air they breathe now appalled because pumped hydro plants proposed to replace them are unsightly?! It goes on and on. It’s not just that these platforms spread bullshit. /4

Much more damaging is that they encourage people to have ideas about things they’ve never had ideas about before in their life. Things they used to TRUST others to do for them. That’s what representative democracy is, a delegation of most things to other people, through trust. /5

As a kid I remember people felt genuine affection for places like the CSIRO, and innovations that emerged from it into our societies. Now the pathological distrust of all institutions that has characterised much modern US history is pumped into our society every day, here. /6

Through social media platforms. We’re allowing the dissolution of our society, from the inside out. That may sound strong, but if you’ve worked at the front-lines of where these platforms are at war with basic Australian governance, it’s actually an understatement. /7

It’s genuinely frightening to see the fraying of Australian democracy, accelerating every day, through these platforms and their impact on our historical institutions. My hobby horse, societies are social. The engine of social relationships is trust. Platforms destroy it. /8

It’s in their DNA to do that. Representative democracy has *never* been the aggregation of millions of individual views. It’s been the election of a tiny handful of people to represent us, to do the work of government, aided and assisted by thousands of skilled officials. /9

Like all social arrangements, it’s an ‘economy’ of trust. Of trusting people not just to govern us, but to do our science, build our technologies, forecast our weather, manage our natural emergencies, etc. etc. Freeing us up to live our lives in other ways. /10

Social media weaponises the destruction of this entire system. It thrives on assaults on trust. That’s what all the conspiracy theories are. What all the celebrity Covid minimisers do, when they bypass centuries of public health expertise and experience. Trust us, and we’ll…/11

…monetise your likes. It’s this war on trust that really defines the danger and damage these platforms represent. When a society decouples its information and communication systems from all existing hierarchies of trust (its institutions), it’s committing suicide. /end

Everything ‘private’ is made that, through regulation. Societies didn’t start private and then have regulation added. Societies are (I say it every day ) ALWAYS social. That’s all they are, 100% social. -isms, politics, Left and Right…all of it is just social groups. /2

Teams, with different names, using the same underlying social mechanisms humans have used since the moment they evolved. ‘Capitalism’ is a team, not a thing. Communism is a team, socialism is a team, Left is a team, Right is a team. Not realities. They’re social groups. /3

They’re the way different groups carve up actual reality, for debating purposes, to define their team in the daily team sports. None of the ‘ideology’ of these groups has any real relationship to reality at all, it’s all just banners to rally the troops under. /4

My reality-based politics is a recognition that reality will always determine outcomes. All of the team sports will at best delay what those outcomes will be. A particular team can go along for a while thinking it’s super clever, because its team is winning. /5

It can bring a lump of coal into parliament and have a merry chuckle at the other team. And then barely a decade later peoples’ homes are unable to be insured, or the premiums increase from $1000 to $30,000. Thats reality-politics. Reality will always win. /6 https://t.co/W0bdOaa4jp

Same with this tedious Yes/No referendum, which the No side strategically turned into team sports, as they do for everything else, be it EVs, refugees, the Chinese, etc. They may get a victory here, and thump themselves on the back. The reality of the ‘gap’ we need to close? /7

It isn’t which team wins. It’s the collapse of an entire continent, that we have no idea how to manage. Aboriginal Australia could tell us how, but we have the laughable idea the ‘gap’ is them not enough progressed towards our meaningless, empty recreational lifestyles. /end

In very rough average terms, in many if not most communities, household expenditure on personal recreation is as high as 25% of weekly income. Expenditure on local civic infrastructure through rates is about 5% of that weekly income. That’s a HUGE social/cultural stat. /2

Think about what that shows, the shift in our societies towards individual over collective. People pay far more on take away food, booze, dining out, recreational travel etc. than they do on maintaining their local roads, parks, libraries, museums etc. /3

You can’t get a much clearer view of ‘society is a high school’ than that. Recreational lifestyles are adolescent lifestyles, now embedded across the full age range. We should see these financial crises facing local government as the cultural and social crises they are. /4

This is where the rubber of increasing anti-social libertarianism hits the road in our communities. State and federal governments can play low-tax games because particularly in the latter case they have far more revenue-fat to play with. There’s no luxury of that, locally. /5

It’s the only tier of government with a tight geographic link to where people live. Where the accountability for public utility is right in the face of the local community, governed by it. Vertical fiscal imbalance means the vast majority of revenue goes to the federal level. /6

Where it’s spent on extravagances like nuclear submarines and tax cuts to the wealthy. Meanwhile ordinary Australians in their communities are facing massive local rate increases, just so the maintenance of basic social infrastructure can be maintained. /7

It’s Ground Zero of the major shift in Australian society over the past decades, towards a more libertarian model, mostly derived from the US, where individual freedom and lifestyle is given prominence over collective goods. Even more resonant is Covid. /8

Local government was shaped by public health. Water and waste and sewer - all introduced as public health measures. You can play symbolic team sports at the federal and even State level, as politics. But there’s nowhere to hide the reality of public life at the local level. /end

The ‘gap’, no matter how many nice ways it’s contextualised in the agreement, is clearly conceived as Aboriginal Australians being ‘behind’ in some way. And of course by the ‘all Australians’ majoritarian metric (such a repulsive thing), they are. /2 https://t.co/rSGafyZUbj

‘All Australians’ is populist code for the Australia invented in 1788. The one in the Constitution. Why the No case uses the phrase so often, pretending that document was some sort of group hug warm embrace of everybody living on the continent. /3

We won’t understand this issue or even survive, until we flip the idea of the gap on its head. Until it’s not just a laundry list of European and US cultural norms like finishing school, going to university, having access to great health care, etc. Here’s the flip, again. /4

The continent is collapsing. Rivers drying up or already dust. Topsoil washed and blown into the sea. Massive species extinction. We call these ‘environmental’ problems (image is from the ‘State of the Environment’ report: https://t.co/x9wWQ50ckl) /5 https://t.co/embpHlne9N

‘Environment’ is another nothing word, like ‘economy’. Meaningless, but said so often that people come to believe it must refer to something. Always a giveaway is that it’s yet another thing we’re supposed to ‘balance’ against the economy and jobs. Balance always means ignore. /6

We’re biological creatures. Without our landscape, we’re dead. It’s that simple. No marvellous modern technologies can change that equation. None can fix the landscape either. The landscape is broken and collapsing because we *have no relationship with it*. THAT’s the ‘gap’. /7

We either use it as an extractive industry, either mining or farming mostly, or we lock it up in ‘pristine’ national parks. Both abominations. We’re about to enter another dangerous fire season, where huge parts of the inhabited parts of Australia might explode into fire. /8

Why? Because we don’t live in or manage that landscape. We huddle the coast and fly in and out on recreational travel. The few non-Aboriginal Australians who live inland are nearly all remnants of early extractive industry, again usually farming or mining. /9

Until we - and it won’t happen, I’m pretty sure - understand that the gap is the gap non-Aboriginals have in understanding the land under their own feet, the country will continue to decline. And our civilisation will decline with it. You can’t eat dirt. /end

Hmmm: https://t.co/rWbwr40AoH.

The moment we can go anywhere easily, is the moment every location loses any agency it has. The moment place becomes space. The moment a cultural attachment to land, built up and enriched over generations, becomes just a line on a GPS. Our attachment to land is our freedom. /2

Everything else is spin. The place you will always be most free is in your home. The people who are the least free - refugees - do nothing but travel, to find somewhere to stop moving. To find a home. To become re-attached to land. /3

Work-from-home is a hot topic politically because it challenges the foundation of what we call ‘the economy’. The function of the economy is to separate people and resources from their locations. To create a ‘global market’ of ‘free trade’. /4

Including in people. Where nothing can stand in the way of unfettered movement of people and resources, mobilising them towards large centres owned by a tiny handful of people, who accumulate the wealth this mobilisation creates. It’s the old empire method, with new branding. /5

Wales is changing speed limits. It’s sent the economy crowd into fits of rage. Anything that restricts or slows movement is the enemy. We stopped fighting a pandemic because it restricted the shrine loyal workers for the economy worship at - travel. /6 https://t.co/ucHi82MvfH

We need to flip this. Our greatest and only freedom is the freedom to be attached to some piece of land. To not have to go anywhere. There’s a physical thrill that movement creates, no doubt, but underneath that it strips away any agency we all have, it takes away our homes. /7

In the deepest sense of that word. Not the economy version, ‘real estate’. Our place on the Earth. Ask a refugee how excited travelling makes them. Only those with settled homes can enjoy travelling. Somewhere that is theirs, to return to. Nearly all of our trips, for work…/8

…or pleasure, are circular. Return trips. But let that shift to mobility happen long enough, and even that breaks down. People now live in their cars. Which reveals the true function of all of that movement, of all of those roads. /9 https://t.co/Ybpj7A2HhK

To gradually separate us from our places, our homes, so they can join the other vast accumulative mobilisations, towards that tiny number of centres of accumulation of wealth. As we get close to this idiot referendum, it’s worth remembering this. /10

That its really a battle between two cultures. One of endless displacement and mobilisation - an economy - and one of the sacredness of place. Of land. Between servitude, and freedom. /end

We began the pandemic with risk management, with caution. The infamous national ‘lockdown’. But this also taught the world something vital about Covid. Who remembers overdispersion? /2 https://t.co/WrFEelUfQL

Australia wiped Covid out. It didn’t just ‘flatten the curve’. It killed Covid stone dead. Complete flatline. It showed that unlike influenza, you didn’t need to restrict spread everywhere. You just needed to jump on outbreaks. ‘Superspreading’ events. /3 https://t.co/5Nsq8uh0ug

Life was pretty normal for much of the first 2 years of the pandemic, for Australians. We weren’t ‘locked down’ much at all, all that white space was normal life. International travel restricted, but we did that for 7 years during WW2 (and hardly anybody did it anyway). /4 https://t.co/hC5oKAPKUj

We’d cracked the Covid code. Take basic precautions to restrict spread of the virus, and jump on any outbreaks. No need to lock everybody up, which fevered imaginations think happened, but simply didn’t. Do what we already did for most serious infectious diseases, forever. /5

And then came end-2021. Led by NSW, with a Premier heavily pressured by libertarian wingnuts in her Cabinet, Australia decided to let Covid rip. We exited pretty normal life, and rushed headlong into the mass infection and death we’d seen in the US and UK. /6

This was the beginning of the public health disaster, the greatest in our history. 2022 was a public health slaughter. 20,000 died. People should be in jail for it. Why did this happen? You don’t need an enquiry. Because public health was stopped. That’s it. /7

By a politics that rejects the whole idea of ‘the public’ itself. Of society. The disciples of Maggie, who’d been dismantling every vestige of the public they could manage, since the 1970s. We were told public health would be replaced with ‘personal responsibility’. /8 https://t.co/nsVqhQIzSj

A public health oxymoron. The next step Australia needed to take was to transfer emergency government control back to the community and businesses, to implement Covid mitigations through already legislated WHS. It never happened. /9

Instead each was on their own. Personal responsibility. Like saying you can fix traffic jams with your individual driving. Outrageous nonsense. WHS law has always been one of the strictest in the country. It’s been AWOL in this pandemic. Unions have been accomplices. /10

Instead we were constantly told the country couldn’t afford government to keep paying the nation to be locked down. Except it wasn’t locked down. And business was already required by law to manage infectious disease threats. Except nobody is enforcing it. They’re freeloading. /11

And that’s where we are today. That’s the review, the end. 12/12

We create groups to allow us to be individuals, to delegate effort and free up space and time. It’s all individuals, acting sometimes individually (one ‘phase’), and sometimes collectively. We all know this, we’re in clubs and other groups. /2

We know we’re an individual when we’re in those groups. But also that some of our effort when in those groups is loaned to the group, for collective reasons. It makes life better and easier for us and everybody else in the group. /3

If I help out at the local netball club, I’m still the individual doing individual things elsewhere in my life. Nobody is oppressing me, I choose to do this because it enriches my life, as an individual. Even when working with the club, I’m still an individual. /4

Again, individual and group are different social ‘phases’, in the physical science sense of different ways the same entity behaves, at the same time. Not opposing forces, that’s nonsensical. Another example, renewable energy. I have solar panels. They help me, individually. /5

They wiped out my power bills. But I also export some of the energy, to the grid, for others. The panels allow me to be individual and collective, at the same time. There’s no binary here. The binary is a debating trick from politics, not a reality. To define two teams. /end

The word ‘popularity’ conveys a feeling that it means everybody being happy, because we assume that what is popular is what people like. That’s absolutely not true. Nothing makes people more miserable than a culture of popularity. It is THE most brutal of all social systems. /2

Only the tiniest handful will ever be popular, in any group, of whatever size, right up to the scale of societies. They will be those everybody else emulates or imitates, in imitative rivalry. Watch that entire economy of likes play out right here on social media. /3

Not even that tiny few, the ‘influencers’ and political leaders, are happy. Their entire lives are re-routed towards continuous maintenance of their popularity. The whole globe will be infected with a pandemic virus, rather than lose votes/likes. /4

We’ll incinerate an entire planet, rather than be unpopular. People would rather die, than do something different to what everybody else is doing. None of this makes people happy, it makes them miserable. The constant attention to being noticed, by not being noticed. /5

That’s the hilarious dilemma of popularity-culture. You will only get ‘recognition’ in that culture, by being the same as everybody else. Be different and you’ll get noticed, but just long enough to be ‘blocked’. It’s a ruthless, rigid conformity. But another trap here. /6

Because conformity, emulation/imitation are unavoidable, the root of all social life. They’re not the problem. It’s a good thing that we look to emulate others, it saves vast amounts of time. Without trust we have no society. The danger is the emulation process being hijacked. /7

That’s what social media does. It destroys trust, it dissolves all of the existing hierarchies of trust, which protected societies by identifying over generations which knowledge and behaviour has positive social outcomes. Which we should emulate, who we should trust. /8

Elections got there first, they shifted from being a simple sorting mechanism for leadership, to being the only rationale for political action. Now parties win elections, so that they can win more elections. Popularity is now both the means and ends. All of life is a school. /9

Culturally, that’s what happened, I’ve Tweeted about many times. The moment we decoupled schools from adult life, we created a new school culture that reproduced itself throughout all life. Children knew no other culture, so they remade the adult world in that image. /10

That’s why our politics now seems so hopeless. Who ever saw the popularity wars at school resolved? Where the bullies and influencers got their comeuppance? It never happened, there was nothing there to make that possible. Only leaving school was an escape. /11

Into the adult world. But now that world has been remade as a giant school as well. So there is literally no escape. Even in schools now teachers struggle to maintain any sort of actual control of what’s going on there. Many kids find school absolutely meaningless. /12

The battle between playground and classroom, which defines not only school but all of life now, has been won decisively in favour of the playground. As I’ve said a few times, only two things can save us. Total catastrophe, to upend the current popularity games. /13

Wars and plagues, historically. People would honestly rather die than go against what everybody else is doing. And the other is the extreme social-technical complexity of our lives now. It can’t be run or operated with popularity. The Roman model. /14

A society glued together by building things and maintaining the things it builds. That’s my best hope for our future, that we will be forced to become that society, or the lights will simply go off. /end

@DavidJoffe64 this is a specialist area for you? What’s your view on Daylight Saving and circadian rhythm disturbance? Probably more measured than mine, though the science seems increasingly to be very against doing this?

The more we can’t find people to teach these subjects (well), the fewer people will leave school with any intention of doing anything science or maths-related. So it’s getting continuously worse. Not helped by decades of a shift of educational focus to ‘job-ready graduates’. /2

I’ve had to teach my own kids a lot of their science and maths, because what they were getting at school was so appallingly bad. Nothing to do with teacher quality. and everything to do with a culture that pays little attention to these subjects. Business studies is booming. /3

Meaningless job-ready subjects that provide about as much educational value as eating cardboard does for you nutritionally. Kids actively encouraged to drop ‘hard’ subjects like science and maths, to ‘protect their mental health’. It’s an ocean of dumb out there. /end

Firstly the game is given away by the fact that they even use the words ‘labour market’. It’s the same economy framing, Once you’re in the framing, everything else you do inside it makes no difference. But education is the most interesting thing here, for me. /2

Lots of talk at the release of this White Paper about making the education system up to the challenge of providing skilled workers for the labour market. This is the point where it pays to zoom out and look at the framing. (It always pays to do that.) /3

The assumption in the framing is that it’s the role of education to supply skilled workers for the market. To provide ‘job-ready graduates’. There will always be a need for that, no doubt. But the emphasis, the framing, gives a lot away. /4

The clear assumption is that the adult world of work and jobs leads social progress, and education needs to respond by providing skilled workers, for that adult world of work and jobs. The problem with this is it’s completely backwards. /5

As ‘the economy’ as a concept was designed to do, it’s just a way to reinforce the current status quo. In REALITY, what drives both social and economic progress (same thing) is education itself. Knowledge. The cutting-edge businesses use cutting-edge knowledge. /6

School isn’t there to ‘prepare you for life’ (of work and jobs). It’s there to seed a new world, of work and jobs. To change the world, through new ideas. It’s education that should be driving what we call the economy, rather than the other way around. /7

It already does. Innovation is education, it’s new ideas. Knowledge. That’s what makes businesses rich. If you harness education only to provide job-ready graduates for an existing world of work, all it does is entrench the status quo. Exactly what the economy folk want. /8

Right now Australia could be becoming fabulously wealthy by developing its immense renewable energy potential, using technology largely developed in Australia. It’s not, because those who profited from 150-year old innovations in fossil fuels don’t want to lose money. /9

What supercharges all societies and therefore economies is knowledge. Education. This is already true, what we call the economy is just a rearguard action to try to restrain and harness that innovation to protect older innovations. That’s what ‘the market’ is, always. /10

Markets just mean unregulated social/economic activity. Which means those with existing power and wealth dominate. It’s not rocket science. /end

Source: https://t.co/wU7EHx6F9K

WW2 had created huge industrial capacity that had to be re-purposed when the war ended. Some of it went on to create industrial agriculture. Jet engines were developed in the same war, and commercial aviation seemed an obvious spin-off. And here we are. /2

Here's where you can have fun with the usual supply and demand nonsense. People of course travelled internationally before we had jets. They mostly used boats. But very, very few bothered. Tiny demand. It was a hassle, and you needed months of free time to make it possible. /3

Supply creates demand. True for roads, true for water, and here true for travel. It wasn't that the jet airliner finally satisfied 'latent demand' for international travel. There was no latent demand, you can't desire something that doesn't exist. /4

International travel was and is an *invented desire*. A real desire now, but invented. Not some intrinsic thing about humans. Again it had about 99% to do with re-purposing industrial war machinery, and 1% with tourism. /5

And look at the graph. Who's doing this travelling? Overwhelmingly it's Europeans, still today. Growth in other areas, but this shift to global culture has been heavily driven by Europe. Only about 2-4% of the world population actually do this. /6 https://t.co/Yxwc7fUxO0

It's a highly elite activity, whereas the travel fanatics will have you believe this is some great latent nomad fantasy shared by all the world's people. Nearly everybody in the world isn't doing it. A fine definition of privilege is people not even knowing this. /7

The Europeans also invented territorial culture. Look at a map of their territory. Most of their history is fights over those borders, over territory. Their wars are nearly always about territory. Most modern empires came out of this place too. /8 https://t.co/d0QuQSHKo3

These (mostly tiny) countries have always looked to expand by accumulating territory elsewhere. Travel is that old passion now transformed into recreation. I don't think we can or should ignore how deep this obsession with accumulating territory has been, for Europeans. /9 https://t.co/t5igptartj

And nor should we ignore this origin of our own passion for travel. This desire is being exported to more and more parts of the world. To me it's the worst aspect of European culture, now spreading globally. To possess places, locations. To accumulate them. /10

A promiscuity of place. Place is a relationship, not an experience. It's peoples' HOMES. We're masters at dispossession, we did it in empires and wars, and now we do it for recreation. You may think that continuity is forced, but look at the number of nations now dependent.../11

...on our 'tourist dollars' to even survive. They've had to turn their original dispossession, through empire and wars, into income. Just one more layer of dispossession. The West will not understand itself until it understands its perverse relationship with place. /12

Always taking off, never land-ing. Never being grounded, anywhere. Trashing its own lands and now everybody else's too. Driving all the other lifeforms who share place to extinction. Until it makes PLACE, its OWN and others', sacred again, it will be a curse on the planet. /end

A home solar system is not ‘local’ and not ‘global’. It’s both, at the same time. Your individual energy production is plugged into and feeds the grid, which you draw from as well. You don’t need to aggregate millions of solar householders to have a ‘global’ effect. /2 https://t.co/fvE8BLG1Pu

Societies are not made up of isolated individuals, operating in markets. Never have been, never will be. The whole local/global distinction isn’t even real. We are all, each of us, all of society, refracted in one particular way. Society isn’t the adding up of all of us. /3

I don’t have 1/25 millionth of the view of what makes up Australian society, for example. I have a view of the whole society. Of course that view will be lacking in detail in so many areas than those who work in those areas, and the same applies in reverse to them. /4

We’re not adding up 25 million parts to create a whole. We have 25 million wholes, interacting. Where we act ‘collectively’, it’s because those wholes overlap, a very different physical process to adding up. When two or more people’s *whole* worldview align in some ways. /5

They can never fully align, which is why agreement on anything is only ever provisional. There are too many other aspects of each person’s view of the whole society that won’t align. Studies of voters show this. Most political coalitions too. /6

The Beatles broke up for the same reason, clashing worldviews, whole views. All human groups are the same. Why does this matter? There are enormous implications for swapping the idea of groups and societies being aggregates of individuals, for them being overlapping wholes. /7

Change comes from a change to a whole worldview. Only one person needs to do that, for others to then ‘overlap’ with. You don’t need to mobilise millions. The reason the ‘neoliberal’ (really just high school) worldview wins right now is that it’s a worldview that resonates. /8

We all went to high school, so all of the social and cultural aspects of that worldview resonate automatically with most of us. Popularity must be a good measure of how to do things, because that’s what happened at school. Etc. /9

Being part of a team or group the same. We all had our social teams at school, who we hung out with. Adults swap those now for political parties. The idea of a self-regulating ‘market economy’ gets traction because as adolescents supervision is anathema. And so on. /10

You can change the world yourself, as solar shows. You don’t have to mobilise millions of others. Your home is already all of the world, refracted in one way. Your actions there are simultaneously global, via the grid. /11

Targeting households, as Saul Griffith says repeatedly, isn’t a ‘local’ solution to our energy problems. It’s a global solution, and a much faster and more efficient one, at the same time. Believing those are two different things is what’s stalling the change. /12

The same applies to Covid. The ‘grid’ in that case that makes your individual action also global action is the chains of infection the virus creates. If you cut those off, individually, you’re also cutting some of them off, globally. It’s also an overdispersed virus. /13

Which magnifies the potential ‘global’ effects of your individual actions enormously. If you prevent a superspreading event, you can be creating fundamental change to national Covid outcomes, by yourself. /14

Never believe society is individuals. Believing that is what the bad people want. It’s how they win. /end

You won’t get that on X, it’s going in the opposite direction. It’s like paying to be harassed and bullied, and to have your personal data farmed out to all bidders. You already were the product here, now you’ll even pay for that. Libertarian lunacy. 2/2