November 2023

No obstruction to either aim will be tolerated. These platforms feed off the social destruction they largely create, they monetise the millions living in fractured societies who flee here to try to regroup. I will always argue to turn social media off, entirely. /2

Because socially and culturally its model is an abomination . An exponential machine to corrode the basics of all civil society in history. It seems so warm and fuzzy, because it allows ordinary people to connect and share information. The con is seductive. /3

It’s a con because people connecting and sharing anything IS what a society has always been. And if you do that while at the same time severing the connections those people have to the society outside social media, suddenly your society IS social media. /4

All of its institutions, developed over millennia, the emergent regulation of these shared interactions based on historical suffering and wisdom, are stripped away in an instant, replaced by an economy of likes. Popularity. Suddenly everybody is an expert in everything. /5

Suddenly anybody who can mobilise enough likes can do anything they want, no matter how vile and anti-social. They can become President of the United States, and then set their followers to work sacking the US parliament. They can demolish action against climate change. /6

They can cripple action against a pandemic, generating lunatic fantasies of ‘living with’ existential emergencies. If they’re popular, it’s all allowable. Nothing can stand in its way. We don’t see it, and so it will destroy us. High school popularity culture. /7

That’s all these platforms are. They perpetuate that high school culture deep into adult life, to all ages. If you feel the world has gone mad because the most brain dead bullies can get away with anything, it’s because that’s what high school was like. /8

It’s the same culture, which through these platforms is now increasingly our entire culture. And even worse, because there aren’t even any teachers or other structures to moderate the damage. It’s pure, unadulterated popularity culture. Not capitalism, not Left or Right. /9

Populism is sweeping all of those stupid team sports distinctions away, and at an accelerating rate. Only what is popular has currency. Politicians, given authority by our older popularity platforms - elections - are increasingly just roadkill to social media tsunamis. /end

Yes Starr and McCartney both use modern techniques to look younger, like hair dyes, possibly some cosmetic surgery, who knows. That's helped to create an impression that the Beatles era never really ended. That they're still a major force in modern culture (and they are). BUT. /2

The much bigger reason this continuity exists is that in many ways they took the culture along with them. The social and cultural explosion that was Beatlemania transformed all culture. It was a key milestone in the transformation of adult into adolescent culture. /3

Beatlemania wasn't just a very popular pop/rock band. It was a cultural shift. Music mobilised the masses in new ways. Suddenly rock stars were dominant players in modern social life. This was the 1960s, the famous 'counter-cultural revolution'. /4 https://t.co/CYzfmyFUoB

Freddie Mercury was once asked about some vexed political issue. He shrugged and said something like 'I dunno, I'm a musician'. That's a window into the culture that we've lived in since Beatlemania, that anybody would even ask a rock star about politics. /5

Mercury was rare in many ways, including his total lack of interest in politics. Historically that represents extreme sanity. But not in the era of Beatles culture, where rock stars are granted more credence than elected politicians. /6

And this is where no living Beatles will represent something a bit profound, maybe. It's quite difficult to imagine them not being here, because everything about our culture now discourages any meaning being given to the passage of time. Adolescence is immortal in outlook. /7

Look at that pic again. While other famous pre-Beatles musicians like Louis Armstrong passed on, it seemed the inevitable passage of time, sad but part of the natural order of things. But a world without a Beatle feels very different. Like how can this be? /8 https://t.co/X7zH2F5Aem

Many are flocking to the current McCartney tour for this very reason, to try to get that last physical connection with a Beatle. They're icons for an entire way of life, a culture. An adolescent culture. Now all culture, increasingly. /9 https://t.co/8iil1Ms85e

Lennon once joked The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, and while he copped a lot for saying it, he was making a social and cultural point. That they were invested with an importance and meaning far beyond what they were actually doing. They were/are musicians. /10

They'd stumbled into a profound cultural shift that even today we're mostly not seeing. The one I Tweet about all the time, the replacement of life as a series of stages of maturation, from infant to child, to adolescent to adult, with permanent adolescence. /end

The coal plants have to cycle up and down daily to cope with the tsunami of household solar. That stresses them mechanically, and they were already mostly falling apart. A distributed energy system is destroying an old centralised system, and not just technologically. /2

An economy runs on energy, and the politics of energy has been the politics of our economies for over a century. Being utterly dependent on fossil fuel resources, concentrated in relatively tiny locations globally, and providing dramatic imbalances across the world. /3

That old energy world is funding and organising much of the resistance to climate action, particularly to renewable energy. Not just because renewables will send it bankrupt, but because they could force a very different set of power relations globally and inside societies. /4

The ALP for example has been struggling to retrofit that old energy infrastructure with renewables, without treading too much on the toes of the powerful interests who still profit from it. That game is already lost. Households are smashing the old economy. That 2025 point? /5 https://t.co/5xa9vBohm0

That’s the point the existing grid could technically collapse, the minimum demand below which the existing grid can’t operate. The complete reversal of years of bullshit spin from politicians about ‘supply’ and ‘baseload power’. Supply is not the problem. Demand is. /6 https://t.co/UUxkk6LPlm

Nobody wants power from the grid during the daytime now. Prices have been negative for ages. But the old coal clunkers absolutely need to run all the time, day and night, it’s prohibitively expensive and damaging to turn them on and off. And it breaks them. /7

If the ALP want quick wins, re-focus on households. Fill the grid with storage batteries, that are much cheaper and faster than huge grid-level power stations and thousands of kilometres of new power lines. Support the work households have already been doing, for years. /8

This will also drive prices down for households much faster than waiting years to build new transmission lines and mega power plants. Any of those needed can follow afterwards. South Australia is projected to be full-renewables by 2026, day and night. It hit 99.8% already. /end

Societies area always just social. What destroyed it wasn’t capitalism or greed or corporations or money, all those grown-up bogeymen. It was the transformation of adult culture into adolescent high school culture. Through high schools as separate social spaces for children. /2

If you sever the social spaces of children from that of adults, when they leave school that’s the social space they will reproduce, in adulthood. It’s all they know. Social media dramatically accelerates this shift, which is why everything seems to be getting worse. /3

Now the same infrastructure of social life coexists across every age group. The platforms of likes. Itself a reproduction of high school life, in software. There’s no grown-up culture left, that we knew from pre-high school times. /4

Also why our politics has collapsed into rank populism. Populism is the culture of high school life, popularity is its currency. Why I say shut social media down, it’s pouring petrol on this adolescent fire. It’s popular to ignore pandemics and climate change now. /5

We won’t survive popularity as the mechanism of running societies. Too much of what critically needs doing will always be either unpopular, or easily made that. Trump is preparing for another populist assault on the US. It can’t survive that. But I think it’s too late. /end

That should say 70 years.

Everybody remembers the 2016 South Australia blackout. And how the LNP and its cheerleaders in the media tried to weaponise it as an anti-renewables message. We then endured years of praise of coal as providing 'cheap, reliable power'. Let's fast-forward 5 years, to 2021. /2 https://t.co/sYhxBol1XD

Reliability first. 'Load shedding' is when they forcibly shut down big users of electricity because of lack of supply. South Australia continued adding renewables at record pace after 2016. And what happened? It became the most reliable market in the country. See the zero? /3 https://t.co/mEuu5wNG6r

That's zero days of supply shortfall in SA, between 2018 and 2021. The record for the big coal-burning States? O dear. Adding renewables to the mix increases reliability. So what about price? /4 https://t.co/13bBaDQU6f

The wholesale spot market is superb viewing, every day. The purple line is wholesale price, the green is demand. Starting with NSW. Significant variability, due to the grid being in transition there to renewables. Weather shifts generation when you don't have enough storage. /5 https://t.co/BVDdmKJwjV

Same pattern in Qld, Vic, Tas. In all States demand (the green line) is low during the day now, due to the huge influx of renewable energy. 3.4 million Australians are already generating their own power, on their roof. That number projected to double by 2030. /6 https://t.co/OwgjKy9jlf

Now, South Australia. BOOM. Wholesale prices flat-lined at around ZERO. None of that variability you see in other States, because SA is rapidly approaching a mature renewables-dominated supply. This is the ultimate endgame, genuine 'cheap and reliable' power. /7 https://t.co/4qrnWllZKm

@simonahac is there an interpretation of the SA data that explains this in some other way? It does appear to represent the level of renewables maturity the rest of the Oz grid is heading towards. And there's more. /8 https://t.co/IBdY8D1QIT

In October South Australia also went a week sourcing 99.8% of its electricity from wind and solar alone. It's a staggering achievement, it should be national news. They may get to 100% as early as 2026. /end https://t.co/KAn45UKSHl

Thanks to @simonahac for elaborating that this may be a charting artefact, created by that one massive peak flattening the rest of the curve (charted using a linear rather than log scale).

@OrinCordus link is: https://t.co/zMXTHgRMSb

We have of course had to ENDURE some diseases, because they’re hard to control, have no treatments, etc. Colds, flu, TB, cancer, malaria, heart disease etc. But we’ve constantly worked to control spread of those, and develop treatments and preventions. /2

That’s what ‘living with’ has historically meant. Enduring something, while trying to prevent, control and treat. But the ‘living with’ slogan for Covid means something fundamentally and historically different. It means to do nothing. Just infect, repeatedly. /3

It’s not a fight against the disease, it’s a fight against public health itself. Funded by the same vested interests who have been assaulting everything with ‘public’ in its name or with a public focus. It’s an assault upon the concept of the public itself. /4

And again, no matter how much these vested interests deny it, this is also an open, declared campaign. And has been for over 70 years. It’s right there, ‘personal responsibility’ to replace anything public. Never before has this lunacy extended to disease. But it does now. /5 https://t.co/Xdd5L1NbHa

I don’t think enough have registered yet that once you remove all of the infrastructure of society in this way, all that’s left that binds people together is slogans. We live in a sloganocracy. ‘Living with Covid’ sits on top of an ocean of slogans, we’re neck-deep in them. /6

That’s what social media is like, wading through the treacle of competing slogans. Slogans are the only interpersonal social life that is now permitted to exist. ‘Stop the Boats’. ‘When the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow.’ Spend time listing them, it’s eye-opening. /end

The sunshine on one rooftop combined with now cheap solar panels is giving me enough energy to cross an entire continent, every week. In comfort. Continental crossings were once major productions, but now an individual can do it without much effort. /2

The point for me here is that we have the wrong view about how societies work. The political beliefs that dominate us encourage us to think of societies as millions of separate individuals, with tiny impact on anything that happens. We even think that’s what ‘democracy’ means. /3

But societies are NETWORKED. They don’t function as millions of separate individuals. The model of democracy as these isolated individuals that then have to be ‘mobilised’ IS the same political belief system that pretends societies are markets. That they don’t exist. /4

Running campaigns to ‘mobilise’ all of these millions of individuals is being trapped inside that same political framing of society, trying to build a ‘customer base’ for a cause. It’s the dead-end the proponents of these political beliefs designed to trap people inside. /5

Everything you do is already not an ‘individual’ thing. I made that point about Covid action, how every infection you prevent by simply wearing a mask and avoiding indoor crowds, can potentially prevent thousands, even millions, of other infections, and sicknesses and deaths. /6

Ironically a pandemic is showing us how connected, how networked, we already are. There is no local and global action, that distinction is meaningless. You are already ‘acting globally’ by being careful about Covid in your own life. Your life is networked to everybody else’s. /7

We spend too much time focused on political leaders, as if they’re an obligatory passage point for any action. The only way to ‘get things to scale’. The solar panels I had installed on my one modest home are generating enough energy for me to cross a continent, every week. /8

Energy is an excellent example of how our frameworks of belief can fundamentally change how we see problems and their solutions. As Saul Griffith says, we can make the whole country renewable much faster by just focusing on peoples’ individual homes. /9

Because those homes are *already* networked, to everywhere else. I generate enough power every day to power 3 or 4 other homes. And that’s where my power goes, when it’s exported. Like my ‘individual’ Covid action, my energy action is already global. Networked. /10

It’s a trap to feel powerless because your aims may not currently align with whatever popularly elected dimwits are currently thinking and doing. You don’t need to wait for them to pull their heads out of their arses to bring about even profound change. /11

And that doesn’t mean you exhausting yourself trying to ‘mobilise’ the entire population in a cause type of way. That’s the trap they set for you, to make you think you need to do that. Everything you do is already networked to everybody else. /12

That’s how a tiny group of conspiracy fantasists de-railed our Covid response. It’s all theatre, like Puss in Boots. They scared the elected dimwits, but it was a con. They used the networking tools of social media to create global impact. Most of us didn’t agree. /13 https://t.co/hVhNizgjL6

They just bypassed sensible people, because they understand how networks work. They didn’t bother trying to mobilise the rest of us, they took their lunacy to scale without us. We can do the same in reverse. Not necessarily by having mass, loud protests. That’s the con. /14

Most of the success of the cookers wasn’t the street protests, it was owning the social networking space, on social media. Everything they did ‘went viral’. Meanwhile good people wail into the social media void about how unfair it all is. That doesn’t go viral. /15

Or they tear their hair out trying to mobilise millions of people who aren’t even interested. Because they’re stuck in the trap the cookers made for them, in the idea democracy is millions of separate individuals. All people are already connected. /16

People act socially, they emulate and imitate. That’s what going viral means, thinking and acting in ways that assumes you’re already global, because you are. I don’t argue with cookers, I try to think of ways to make something that counters their bullshit go viral instead. /17

I don’t wait for elected dimwits to rebuild our electricity grid with renewables, like millions of other Australians, I started without them. They’re now having to respond to us, rather than the other way around. /end https://t.co/hTpgq7Me3j

They're unalloyed populists now, parties captured entirely by donors and running nothing but a constant stream of updated slogans to maintain that popularity, so that they can then act for the donors. There's no mediation, no policy. What was the last LNP policy you remember? /2

And they're getting away with it because too many are still stuck in the old Left v Right team sports, fighting an irrelevant old battle. Populism isn't of the Left or Right, or of politics itself in any way. It's entire focus is just what's popular. /3

And it doesn't take polls for that, it engineers popularity. It's just marketing, dressed up as politics. Complete regulatory capture. To this day LNP front-benchers still answer questions about our energy system for example, by saying 'pick up the phone to the gas companies'. /4

You can't get a clearer view of the complete regulatory capture in play, the gas companies have been phoning in our national energy policy for the best part of 20 years. So with this context, what Albanese is doing is utterly naive political suicide. /5

The referendum showed it in spades. He wasn't dealing with another political party (LNP), trying to build a consensus. The LNP did what they now do for everything, like the Republicans and Tories. They turned the whole issue into meaningless slogans, to wreck the process. /6

And try to build their own popularity. It's what all of the modern Anglo conservative parties do now, for everything. They're literally nothing more than shopfronts for donors. Populism is toxic, politicians always avoided it because they knew its sugar-hit is temporary. /7

Temporary and socially destructive. The 'don't go there' territory. But now these shopfronts pretending to be parties couldn't care less about any of that. All that matters is doing the bidding of the donors. The only exception, the religious culture warriors in the parties. /8

The ones there to wreck the State, because they never accepted secularism and work tirelessly to undermine it. Often the populist strategies are formulated in conjunction with churches, who are historical masters of mass persuasion. And good luck to them, not a judgement. /9

Secular States don't always have a record to be proud of over the past 2-3 centuries. Over 100 million people died in secular wars in the 20th century. But you have to at least be aware of what these people are doing. I think Albo is living a fantasy revival of the 1980s. /end

Perfect timing, thanks @BigBadDenis https://t.co/V9xeQTF0sv

Many if not most assume that's because those indicators represent a sort of bedrock of all social life. Rubbish. The whole of economics itself is not even that, it's like how physics often assumes it's the most fundamental science. Also rubbish. 'The economy' is not a thing. /2

'Economic' transactions are a thing, trade etc. But they don't take place in 'an economy', they take place in a society. The economy is the con that substitutes for society, so that only economic transactions get priority. A deliberate invention to bypass all politics. /3

So that those who benefit most from economic transactions also get to dominate all politics. No matter that those transactions are themselves just social transactions too. The conservative inventors of the economy can now do politics, while looking like they're not. /4

Like they're just following the 'laws' of economics, objective reality. It doesn't even occur to people to ask why we're not following any other laws, like the ones governing climate change and pandemics. They're as if not more objective than any econo-babble. /5

Until we ditch the idea that the economy is an actual thing, and not just a society with some economic transactions included, we will keep losing. At everything. That's why it was invented. /end

The economy/market was their invention, to rationalise doing nothing for the collective good of anybody except themselves. Don’t believe for a second they personally act in anything resembling a ‘market’. They employ widespread cronyism. Isn’t this fiction obvious? /2

They invented the idea of markets so that any attempt to do anything collective would be ‘anti-competitive’, would violate the laws of the market. Damaging the economy. They use equilibrium equations to say doing nothing will create the optimum equilibrium for society. /3

Again, it’s a SOCIAL invention. That doesn’t match a single thing humans actually do, socially. It’s a con. It sets up a fake binary between individual and collective action. But those are the same thing. We act as groups to make life better for individuals. /4

And they don’t personally believe it or act as if they do. Socially they do what humans have always done, they look after their social group. That’s what the economy was invented to do, to disguise that this is what they were doing. /5

They took a point in time in history where they were doing very well, and codified a group of statistical indicators that represented that advantage, and said ‘this is the economy’. Ever since no politics has been able to do a thing. /6

Humans are incinerating the planet and living with pandemics, rather than challenge this crazy fiction. Nearly everyone actually believes that societies can only function if ‘the economy’ allows it. Like an economy is our oxygen, food and water. Who believes this nonsense? /7

Pretty much everybody, the propaganda is so entrenched and embedded. /end

Just watch how the little collective action we have left is immediately bogged down in swarms of objections from people who see the change as violating some aspect of their identity-based agency. This is endgame political libertarianism, not freedom. /2

As Robert Hughes said in his The Culture of Complaint': "The self is now the sacred cow of American culture, self-esteem is sacrosanct." What we see as freedom is trapping us more every day. Nothing but angry carping and complaining about inconveniences to ourselves. /3

Like we're all just customers now of democracy, demanding the best possible products and services. Centred on our own constantly confected identities, role-playing fantasies drawn from the most obscure and ridiculous sources. /4

The terror of causing 'offence' across the entire political spectrum, nowhere more strongly than by those who claim to promote free speech without a care for the offence it might cause. They're the most easily offended of all. /5

We're all trapped in this. Fighting tooth and claw for some agency in the complete clusterfuck of 70 years of the dismantling of anything public or social. Team sports, between rival individual identities. /end

h/t @oskaandme

People use masks and Covid only as fuel for the team sports. You could trace many other members of this particular social grouping, and find them aligned on a whole range of topics. But those topics are also just fuel to maintain group unity. /2

Similarly those who oppose this team use masks and Covid to differentiate their team, from this other team. Yes it matters whether we use masks and do other things about Covid. But once the team sports starts, the chances of that happening are near zero. /3

If you oppose what Ben and Nick discuss here by saying they have the facts all wrong, that team likes nothing better. That’s mission accomplished. You’ll notice this team emerges into the public space every time another team has a win. When Covid action seems imminent. /4

But again, ultimately it’s not about Covid. It’s team sports. Just as footballers and their fans don’t actually give any thought to the ball itself. It’s just a means to social ends. It’s how teenagers act in high school, defining and maintaining their social groups. /5

As everybody who follows me would know, that’s no accident. Mass schooling led to a cultural shift where adult life was re-built as a giant high school. Social media dramatically accelerated and strengthened this shift. Listen to Planck, one of the greatest minds of all time: /6

‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ Bullseye. That basic social fact is now our whole culture. /7

A fascinating study showed this in action, in chemistry as a field. Where the death of a prominent researcher shifted the entire field in new directions. See: https://t.co/q0gbd0RrmZ /8

Science is like everything else, 100% social. Until we start looking at humans as social creatures first, foremost and exclusively, nothing else will make sense. All the political frameworks we use of Left and Right and capitalism and socialism etc. are fictions. /9

They’re names given to teams in this perpetual social team sports mechanism. A very simple mechanism to understand and work with. Instead we become depressed nothing changes because the continuous battle of our team against other teams produces no outcomes. /10

Know who understands this better than anybody? School teachers. It’s their job to short-circuit this mechanism as much as possible, to civilise people to a different way of acting. To teach us to bypass playground groupings, and add knowledge as a guide in our lives. /11

It’s no coincidence that teaching and teachers are one of the lowest status and ignored professional in our societies now. The playground has been victorious over them. /end

The LNP has done no meaningful public policy work in 30 years, as a result. Like the US and UK, their passion and intent is to destroy what remains of the public itself, as a methodology of democratic governance, and replace it with populism. /2

An easily manipulated well that never runs dry, as a pathway to ultimate power. It’s just marketing. Anything can be made popular, or unpopular. What are the LNP’s policy priorities? Nothing but populist slogans, designed to generate votes. /3

Right now they’re trying to reverse a catastrophic election loss inside a single term, by abandoning even any pretence of acting as an opposition on critical public issues. Nothing but spoiling, populist wrecking on the referendum, and on every other issue. /4

Older, wiser politicians like some on their own side, who resigned in disgust at this shift (Malcolm Fraser for example) know that politicians historically avoided the cheap power from populism, because its longer-term impacts are so damaging. /5

Not just to countries, but to parties themselves. Look at the US, where Trump is trashing his own Republicans, as they watch helplessly. All populism leads to cults of the Great Leader, like the fascists in the 20th century. Fascism is just populism left to run. /6

It’s laughable that people look on at this and still describe it in terms of Left and Right, the old categories of party politics. Parties are powerless against populism, it will sweep them away with a wave of the hand. Populism already derailed Australia’s Covid response. /7 https://t.co/asb6w6YNsa

Social media internationalises populism, most of Australia’s ‘lockdown’ protests were engineered from places like the US, using social media to weaponise local cookers. Popularity can not, EVER, work as a method for running anything. It is absolutely NOT democracy. /8

Our belief that democracy is what ‘the people’ (never defined) want, measured by the popularity of things, is what will destroy it. The people doesn’t exist, those who use the phrase are attributing their own desires to an amorphous undefinable mass. /9

Unless ruthless action is taken to counter populism, including by heavily regulating the libertarian attack weapons we call social media platforms, centuries of social progress will be lost. Bullies will run societies, engineering anything they like through popularity. /10

Alas we’re already there. The LNP here in Oz is drunk on the fast-power populism gives them to alter the constantly shifting waves of popularity, not content to spend any time in opposition building an alternative policy platform. It doesn’t want a policy platform. /11

It long since became a shopfront for vested interests, its donors and bedfellows in the modern conservative looniverse, with zero interest in government itself. They openly say it, they’re a ‘small government’ party. The enemy to them is government itself. /12

As if government wasn’t something humans invented to escape the bully-led chaos we’re seeing right now. Populism is completely ahistorical, it has no understanding of or interest in history. Unless we recognise popularity as the enemy, we won’t change anything. /end

…what’s missing for me is that a lot of the new institutions Murray talks about here are largely driven by social media. It matters HOW you generate trust. The process described here of people with existing institutional reputation using it to generate new networks? /2

The economy of likes of social media is nothing like older scientific institutions. You can generate a trusted following doing very little scientific anything, on social media. As we’ve seen with Covid minimisers, with little connection to historical public health precedents. /3

What’s painted here as a positive process to me is nearly always doing irreparable damage to our institutional foundations. For all of their faults, existing institutions at least have a diversity of methods for testing claims. Not just likes on social media. /4

I’ve worked in universities for many years and can understand how brilliant, maverick thinkers sometimes need to branch out to escape the existing social hierarchies. Planck’s point again about progress in knowledge, one funeral at a time. But social media isn’t the way. /5

If we shift our trust economy for knowledge to social media, we surrender it to nothing but popularity. Sure there are a diversity of brilliant minds there too, but popularity will quickly overwhelm everything else, as it does in politics. /6

The large follower base for key Covid and climate minimisers for example aren’t scientists or other people of expertise. They’re mostly ordinary folk with no idea about public health or climate science, attracted to the framing of these ideas in social battles they’re part of. /7

Like a friend of mine, with no scientific background, but fanatically anti-renewables and anti-EVs, and latching onto key minimisers on social media in both of those areas because they give him ammunition against ‘Greenies’, whom he hates. /8

It’s quick and easy to trace these social networks, just look at the followers. The same minimising names will crop up across a whole range of seemingly unrelated issues, because the real game here is the team sport of culture wars. That’s one good thing about social media. /9

It allows you to instantly trace these connections, to assess the real game being played. It’s how many of us already assess whether a claim we see here can be trusted, or whether it’s just fodder for some idiot culture war. /end

…the growth of social media is shifting the Australian culture more towards the US culture, of a belief that change comes from mobilising ordinary people (usually with social media). I think that’s a terrible shift, it’s the libertarian fantasy going global. /2

‘The people’ is not and never will be a thing. It is not an actor with agency, it’s just a collection of bodies and minds with no necessary connection at all. Government is ALREADY ‘the people’, expressed as a collective agency. /3

The binary between people and government IS the libertarian con. There is no binary, people invented government, to serve them, as people. Populists pretend you can bypass that and talk to the people directly, as some agency independent of institutional government. It’s a lie. /4

Those who use ‘the people’ politically never talk to any people, except their fellow cronies. They project all sorts of meanings onto things like votes that aren’t even real. It’s a trick, to replace our existing collective institutions with think tanks and social media. /end

When new coal plants opened, it was a community event. Hundreds flocked to the facility to marvel at the technology. There was no real community interest in how these plants came to be there, people assumed this was what we needed, engineers and others had advised. /2

There was widespread trust in the expertise of power generation, of something that some people were trained to know about and implement. A very standard approach in mid-20th century Australia, with public institutions packed full of expertise, towards social ends. /3

Fast-forward to today and of course we’ve all seen that now energy, like much else, has been turned into a political team sport. Rather than simply asking engineers ‘what would be the most efficient and cheapest way for Australians to have electricity’, and letting public…/4

…works get on with building it, now every new solar or wind farm (for example) attracts fierce community resistance mobilised usually through social media. Despite the engineers and the investors clearly choosing this as their cheapest and most efficient way forward. /5

What’s changed isn’t that now the public is fed misinformation and disinformation. What’s changed is that they have any interest in this at all. When the coal plants were built, they just delegated that to public works, assuming they knew what they were doing. And they did. /6

Societies operate on trust. Not on information. The shift to our culture isn’t about information, it’s about the erosion of all mechanisms of trust, the engineering of distrust and interest in key parts of our social operating systems. Things that shouldn’t concern most of us. /7

It’s not difficult to say ‘build us the cheapest and most efficient electricity generation system’. That will be renewables, it’s why all the energy providers are shifting that way. Instead we have to wade through an ocean of social media-driven bullshit, to get basics done. /8

Why is everybody so angry now? Because nobody is trusted, this is the libertarian fantasy come to life. Everybody is now just a customer of everybody else. It’s also exhausting, as individuals have to transact everything, through fake markets. /9

What’s their ‘best deal’ on electricity, or health care? Whole industries are set up to help them compare the options, most of which are impenetrably (and deliberately so) difficult to understand. All because we gave up on trust as the glue that holds societies together. //10

I think this is a legacy of both English and American historical baggage, of deep distrust in their own institutions, be it nobles and royalty, churches or government. Long European-based histories of conflict, carried forward into modern libertarian politics. /11

Australia managed to escape that baggage for much of its history. But our own conservatives have accelerated its introduction here now too, the all-out assault on public institutions. The corrosion of trust, of sane, distributed expertise, left to do what it knows how to do. /end

Obviously a hybrid is a combination of a combustion engine (usually petrol - an ICE), and one or more electric motors. There are multiple ways to hybridise these two motor types, but it’s more important to understand why it’s done. /2

Hybrids have been around for years, and the public focus is almost entirely on their high fuel efficiency. What should have been said more years ago, is that this efficiency comes from targeting the strengths of each motor type, to compensate for the weaknesses in the other. /3

Here’s a torque/power curve for a standard petrol engine. Torque is how good the engine is at providing rotational motion (what we need to turn wheels), and power is how quickly that torque can be provided. Notice the high revs (RPM) at peak torque and power. /4 https://t.co/sDmqmbjU8j

You need to really rev an ICE to get power and torque out of it. That’s why they have gears, gears allow you to rev the engine the right amounts at different speeds, to access that sweet spot of power and torque. Try moving your car from a standing start in 3rd gear. /5

Here’s a torque/power curve for an electric motor. What should stand out is that they have maximum torque from a standing start, from 0 rpm. That’s why EVs are painfully quick in acceleration. What hybrids do is blend or hybridise these two torque/power profiles. /6 https://t.co/dde582FsUu

A hybrid will prioritise the high torque of the electric motor at lower speeds or when accelerating, allowing the vehicle to use a lot less energy to achieve the same acceleration. You don’t need to rev the guts out of it, as in a pure ICE. /7

It will use more of the ICE at higher speeds, where the electric motor’s torque drops off a bit. You can see how the two engine types have compensated beautifully for each other’s weaknesses. But it’s what this means in practice, when driving, that is stunning. /8

When you drive a well-designed hybrid, unlike in an ICE where you get that surge and wane of going up through the gears to get up to speed, as revs go up and down, in a hybrid there’s a beautifully continuous feed of maximised power and torque at every speed. /9

It’s like the car is gliding along the road. It’s continuous torque and power, no matter the driving conditions, perfectly targeted at the driving conditions of the time. It’s sublime, you’d never go back to a straight-ICE after driving a good hybrid, or I wouldn’t anyway. /10

It’s more ‘grunt’ than an ICE, the image of the pure-ICE as being the muscle, grunt option, and hybrids the granny fuel-sipping option, is just engineering BS. ICE engines are puny alone, again you have to rev the guts out of them to extract power and torque. /11

And then transmit that energy (the 20-30% that remains after the rest goes street out the exhaust as heat, unused) through a ridiculously complex series of mechanical translations between engine and wheels. Hybrids don’t need to bother with any of that. /12

Formula 1 cars are hybrids. They became much more powerful and fuel efficient (they don’t re-fuel during races now) when they switched to being hybrid. If this had been the public story about hybrids from the beginning, we’d all have been driving them years ago. /13

The fuel and therefore also money we’d have individually and nationally saved would have been astronomical. And the transition to full-EVs would have seemed a much smaller leap than what we’re facing today. /14

More power and torque (more ‘grunt’), much less fuel, and much more refined driving experience. A real missed opportunity. (I’ve obviously had to heavily simplify a lot of the engineering here. Happy for mechanical engineers to finesse the argument!) /end

Tweeted earlier this week that the power/torque curve of a combustion engine means you have to rev the crap out of it it get any appreciable torque and power. That’s why ICEs have gears, to allow you achieve high revs at every speed, to keep in that tiny sweet spot. /2 https://t.co/OkC3ZE6iZ6

And electric motors on the other hand give you instant full torque from a standing start. We all know now an EV will leave an ICE standing at the lights, in a sprint. ICEs are tweaked to try to counteract this, mostly by using devices to suck in extra air to aid combustion. /3 https://t.co/ShgCJGhBbq

It very quickly becomes something completely over the top (and expensive) and unsustainable for most peoples’ everyday motoring. So that’s power and torque, the underlying physical realities of the ‘grunt’ of a vehicle. EVs leave ICEs in the dust. And there’s more. /4

Because 70-80% of the energy that enters an ICE in the fuel goes straight out the exhaust. What power and torque an ICE does manage to muster is bought at the cost of filling them with enormous amounts of energy in fuel, nearly all of which is wasted. But there’s even more. /5

A big part of of the mythology of the grunt of ICEs is how they sound. The roar of a V8, as we say. Unfortunately that sound is literally the car farting. Exhaust gases. Now each to their own, but I don’t see us judging the sexiness of potential partners by how well they fart. /6 https://t.co/3oLJIdedPE

But this is what the grunt crowd do for ICEs. They’re fart-fetishists. They worship engines that are puny, and hugely gassy. That may be their type, who knows, the puny guy who farts a lot. Again, each to their own. /end

When not challenged by natural disasters or war, things that overwhelm our standard ways of doing and thinking about things, humans live happy social lives. All of their reference points are social, they imitate one another, and form rivalries with that imitation. /2

‘I want to be noticed and accepted’ is the most fundamental human act. It generates our social hierarchies, of status and imitation/emulation. As Paul McCartney said, the lure of fame is not about being admired, it’s about being accepted for who you are, socially. Affirmation. /3

As I Tweet about a lot, this explains 99% of human behaviour. The status games of imitation, where 95% of any group desperately imitate what the 5% of ‘influencers’ say and do. It happens at school, at work, in science, in politics. Everywhere. It’s not stupid either. /4

None of us would get a thing done without this mechanism, we’d have to work everything out for ourselves, rather than TRUST others with expertise to do it for us. Trust is the social glue all of this imitative rivalry generates. But it also means dangerous things. /5

Because if you can pervert the trust process, you have total control of groups, or of whole societies. If you can develop ways to generate cheap and easy trust, you’re on the road to total power. I used the example of Tupperware parties previously, the genius of that method. /6

Where peoples’ natural distrust at being sold things was broken down by having their friends, who they naturally trust, do the selling for the company. What social media has now done to our world is made all of it a giant Tupperware party. /7

Now not just kitchenware, but everything, including basic science, has had its existing longstanding mechanisms of trust replaced with a simple process of popularity, on these platforms. ‘Influencers’ can be found for any topic. Politics, engineering, pandemics…everything. /8

This is why I’m so dismissive of the value of social media, because it’s an assault on the trust mechanisms that hold our societies together. Without properly managed trust, societies collapse. Look how quickly cookers have damaged longstanding vaccination culture in Oz. /9

You won’t find an area of life that hasn’t been damaged by this shift. It’s still accelerating. And this brings me to the deepest damage I mentioned in Tweet 1 of this thread. What this means for us, as individuals. /10

When the essential operating systems of societies are trusted, while we get on with our lives, we can have happy social and intimate relationships, safe in the knowledge that even if we disagree with those closest to us, the most important stuff is still being done. /11

But strip away that trust and therefore that enormously diverse and distributed expertise, and suddenly it really matters who not just your friends but even those you love in the deepest ways, trust to guide their lives. Their beliefs suddenly can even kill you. /12

They may buy the slogans about Covid for example being a sniffle, and recklessly infect everybody they know, repeatedly. They become a real and present danger to you, every day. No more luxury of ‘each to their own’. Our beliefs and who we trust now impact lives. /13

Directly, and sometimes catastrophically. And you then can arrive at a point where the expression ‘we’re born alone, we live alone and we die alone’ suddenly becomes clear. It doesn’t mean we stop having these friends or loved ones. /14

But it destroys what was always an illusion, that we were bound together by common understanding. We’ve always disagreed, and in love we’ve never really understood the other person, nearly all of it is a projection. But we could avoid those truths, while societies were ok. /15

Now though those illusions are falling away. People are recognising, even within their closest social groupings, their families, that they are alone. That their social ties always were compromises, not magical fusions of different souls. And not to misunderstand here. /16

I’m not saying previously we all liked and loved one another, and now these social changes mean we don’t. I’m saying that what we’ve always called friendship and love was not what we thought it was, and the social reboot of the pandemic is making that visible. /17

‘You think you know a person’, often said when somebody does something totally unexpected, like dumps you in a relationship. But you never know a person. Everybody lies, gentle lies, for social harmony. Until the social is removed, like right now. The operating system. /18

Replaced by nothing but popularity. That’s what populism means. When the only measure of value, of anything, is popularity. How alone did many feel at school, watching these popularity games from the outside? I think that’s maybe 95% of us. That 95/5 split, in all groups. /19

We never leave school now, not an analogy. Our adult culture brought high school culture across to adult life, because it’s all those who went to school knew. That feeling of loneliness and brutal judgement by peers is now much of adult life too. /20

We stripped away the old grown-up institutions and replaced them with social media platforms, whose only currency is popularity. Likes. It’s where the majority now get even their most serious news, and understanding on all things. To end then, this is the deepest cut. /21

What do you do, when the TRUTH of something is now at odds with even the people closest to you? Do you let the friendships and relationships survive, and live truths you know to be false to keep the peace? Many here have talked about the agony of that choice. /22

It’s why this picture of Spinoza still resonates so strongly with me, during this pandemic and the collapse of much of our hard-won social infrastructure. This was Spinoza’s life, excommunicated from his own community for refusing to bend to truths he could not believe in. /23 https://t.co/ma0FfiTrF8

Spinoza always said that the only freedom is true understanding. He walked the talk. Like Archimedes run through by a Roman sword while refusing to stop work even during an invasion, he refused to succumb to social pressure that had gone awry. /24 https://t.co/HgIsFZjgAT

Do you let friendships and even relationships fall away, in this world of populism? I’ve let many friends go in this pandemic, their trust now captured by lunacy and a direct threat to me and my family. It’s a difficult time in history, but not unique. /end

Also why range is more political spin with EVs than an actual practical issue. People have electricity already at home. A top-up model will replace a fill-up model, for most everyday consumer driving. Like topping up your petrol or diesel every day, with just a few litres. /2

Except of course you can’t do that for petrol or diesel, you have to go to a servo. But you can easily do it with electricity. Fast-charging stations will be mostly for long distance or other away-from-home trips. Slogans when unpacked are always empty. /end

This was existential fear by modern conservatives that the public sphere was reasserting itself, redistributing wealth, as it was originally designed to do. They’d spent 70 years trying to eliminate the entire public sphere, post-WW2. Thus the massive pushback. /end

It’s what they did for the referendum too, planted seeds of doubt. That’s all you have to do to win, in populist politics. Just make people uncertain, a feeling they hate, and then offer them the fake comfort of a ‘solution’ that apparently eases that feeling. /2

People always act socially. The facts of nuclear power make it easily the most ridiculous option to even consider for Australian electricity. But that’s irrelevant to a party that hasn’t written public policy in 30 years. It doesn’t even believe in the public as a thing. /3

When it wins it opens the doors of Treasury to its donors and chums, and when it loses it wrecks, to expedite access to the Treasury again. In opposition it does no reflection or new policy work, it just destabilises, hoping for quick and easy populist surges in votes. /4

All public policy replaced with quick, cheap and easy slogans. Nuclear power, like the referendum, is being seen by Dutton only as a way to get quick traction into the public mind. Miles behind in the polls after the last election, the LNP is looking for a quick way back. /5

‘Stop the Boats’ is back too, they’ll throw everything at it. Like the desperate Tories in the UK right now. And they can get away with this because under populism all that matters is who wins the votes. It doesn’t matter how they do it, if they get the votes, they win. /6

I saw somebody drunk on the slogans say yesterday that small modular reactors were worth thinking about, because we could have reactors ‘the size of a microwave oven’. How would that ever be a GOOD thing? One plus of nuclear currently being enormous plants is security. /7

You can at least put measures in place to control the operation. Imagine a world where every sociopathic loon could have a reactor in their own backyard. That’s progress how? But not to digress on the facts, because ‘having a conversation’ is how the LNP wins. /8

Everybody reporting on this has a responsibility to ask the hard questions now. To ask if these reactors even exist? To ask where they’ll go and where the waste will go? To ask what the costs will be, relative to using renewables instead? Not allow a fake ‘conversation’. /end

You're also often ahead in cash flow terms, even if you have to use finance. The rate you pay (and many offer interest-free) will still often mean that the money you're saving every week is greater than any repayment. So you're amazingly worse off if you don't install them! /2

Compare with the national strategy of replacing centralised generation with solar and wind farms, and then building new transmission lines to bring the generated power to buildings. That's a long lead time to bring household prices down. /3

We'll need new centralised generation and transmission, but we may need a lot less than we're currently projecting, if we start at the other end. After all a big part of the endgame here is to bring prices down for households and businesses. You can do that in 1-2 days. /end

If we were all the same, we wouldn't need to imitate one another, we'd all be doing exactly the same things. It was Gabriel Tarde who dared to be one of the only thinkers to ask - what if the root of all things is difference, rather than identity? /2

Most of our beliefs and knowledge revolve around some form of identity. A = B. 'This collection of things is actually identical to this one X'. Etc. Tarde asked what the world would like like if you didn't do that, if you allowed all things to be irreducibly different. /3

And that's when he realised the fundamental role of imitation. (Not just amongst humans, but in matter itself, a much bigger topic.) To use humans as the example, if we are all fundamentally different, the only way we have to create any order is to imitate. /4

Despite the prejudice we tend to have that to imitate or copy is to be derivative, Tarde saw that we do it because it's the only way you can respect each thing's individual unique character, while allowing it to work with others. Anything else is 'A=B', reductive. /5

'Imitation is the highest form of flattery' sort of captures his insight. To imitate is to retain your own individual sovereignty of self, but allow it to emulate what somebody else is doing, to create a pattern that extends beyond either individual alone. It's a creative act. /6

Again, the alternative is to say 'sorry, you're just a derivative of something else, an automaton whose essence is somewhere else'. This book looked at this from the other direction, exploring how everybody lies, all of the time. But it's not so much that they're lying. /7 https://t.co/PPEY4mkQ0U

They're imitating. Meaning they're pretending to be like somebody else, while recognising deep down that they're not. To create order, to create agreement. I've Tweeted a lot about how this imitation then becomes a rivalry, to create status hierarchies. Team sports. /8

A competition inevitably begins, to decide who or what will be the model to imitate. Which fashion, which idea, which trend, which 'influencer'. Humans never act individually, even those who embrace individualism are as fanatically social as everybody else. /9

They just want their team to be the winning team. To be what everybody else imitates. No politics of individualism ever acts in that way, amongst its fans. They're as hierarchical as anybody else, and desperately keen to impose restrictions on you, who aren't on their team. /10

Love and relationships the same, we imitate one another in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, until sometimes a day is reached where the charade becomes obvious. Where the person you thought you were closest to in the whole world suddenly seems a total stranger. /11 https://t.co/bblBzwtoUb

Why does this matter? It matters because every part of human life uses this same mechanism. Love, politics, work, family, friendship, science. All of it. All of it is about imitation. Where roughly 5% of people provide the model for 95% of others to copy and follow. /12

That 95% aren't zombies, they still choose who they want to imitate/emulate. Their loyalty can shift in seconds, as we see in fashions and fads. Right now 95% are imitating 'living with the virus', because it's what nearly everybody else is doing. Nothing to do with facts. /13

Or misinformation or disinformation. Humans don't use information to decide how to act, they use social rules about who they trust, to imitate. If everybody is doing one thing, that will be the reality. 95% of people don't want to stand out from the crowd. /14

That protects societies too, prevents us needing to reinvent civilisation every day. To figure everything out for our individual selves. We trust others to do all the things we don't have time to do ourselves. I wrote this thread to continue a suggested shift in approach. /15

To recognise that change comes from imitation, and if you want people to act and think differently, flooding them with any amount of information is useless. You need to provide them with something to imitate, to emulate. To persuade, to seduce. /16

That's what others who are winning already do, frame things in ways that makes even the most ludicrous behaviour and ideas something others will want to follow. Good people far too often just assume their good ideas will carry the day by themselves. /end https://t.co/i27aFh36KV

5) Eventually nobody alive remembers why the institution was put there 6) Institution dismantled in the name of ‘freedom’ 7) Catastrophe re-emerges. Go to 1). Institutions are the suffering of the past acting in the present. /end