April 2024

Thanks to all, of course the political reality of doing it is another question. But just curious what the prescription would be, under that different set of ideas.

The people isn’t a thing. Groups of people, no matter what size, don’t ever self-organise. They will always follow the lead of some small number of people within that group. Representative democracy was designed to make that small number beholden to actual expertise. /2

Checks and balances, accumulated experience. Departments of health and roads and defence and social security, etc. Not the most popular influencer on social media. The fact we even allow social media in its current form to operate reflects that we don’t understand this. /3

Its whole schtick is ‘power to the people’. It’s a corrosive wrecking ball eating the core of societies, from the inside out. People will defend the great things they get from it (I get those too). It’s not the point. Of course networking is powerful. /4

But networking without checks and balances is again, inevitably, just gang rule. It’s NOT just exchanging information, it’s *organisational*. It *mobilises*. Thousands of competing gangs battling for dominance in what used to be a democratic society. /5

One place I encourage everybody to look is local Facebook groups. Every town has at least one, where increasingly nearly *all* social activity in the town is transacted. Not only does this mean Meta has its tentacles deep into every community, it gets much worse. /6

These groups increasingly run the towns. They mobilise gangs and mobs to obstruct often critical local logistics, they allow fast introduction of often toxic political narratives from far-Right groups on the other side of the world. The groups begin looking entirely different. /7

Harmless, community-spirited sharing of information about local events, help during bushfires, community information and swaps. But they’re rapidly shifting now to something much more sinister, this belief that they in fact run the towns. /8

This is the libertarian philosophy built right into the coding of these platforms. Their owners openly express it, regularly. And we just allow it to operate, dismantling our democracies every single day. /end

And many millennials or others who inherit wealth from boomers will spend most of it in health and aged care, for them. Societies are fractal, the same patterns repeat locally, regionally, nationally and internationally, and within generations. 2/3 https://t.co/LcwcAoaJBN

Which doesn’t change the fact that Western societies like Oz concentrate their wealth very heavily in the old. Even outside those hubs, the amount of super pitched as needed in retirement for all people is way beyond any historical precedent. 3/3

"But there is a theme that threads through and ties together all the strands: many of the most talented, driven Americans used what makes America great–the First Amendment, due process, financial and legal ingenuity, free markets and free trade, meritocracy, even democracy.../2

...itself–to chase the American Dream. And they won it, for themselves. Then, in a way unprecedented in history, they were able to consolidate their winnings, outsmart and co-opt the forces that might have reined them in, and pull up the ladder so more could not share in.../3

...their success or challenge their primacy." Boomers *consistently* voted for political libertarians in the past 50 years, in much of the world. It appealed to their worldview. For Reagan, and Thatcher, and John Howard here at home. With minor flirtations with the 'Left'. /4

Bob Hawke may seem the exception in Oz, though the Hawke/Keating government was also heavily modelled on what some call the centre-Right. So more libertarian-lite. There's something in those beliefs that appealed to this generation, and they won't come to terms with it. /5

It's one thing to note, as I often do, that the people who lead change in the world are tiny in number and should carry most of the weight of responsibility for the outcomes. The world is networked. /6

But even though their true colours have been visible multiple times in the past 50 years, that same massive voting bloc kept returning to them, like a dog to its own vomit. Something in those beliefs appealed. This generation began with strong anti-establishment beliefs. /7 https://t.co/F5Zpo4exIj

To me that was the origin of this 50-year record of consistent support for political libertarian causes. What began as legitimate criticism of the way existing mechanisms were operating in the 1960s, became an all-out assault on *all* establishment mechanisms. /8

And I don't think even today people realise how deep that instinct still is. That level of distrust in institutions. Even an innocuous-looking thing like freedom of information, everybody lines up to cheer it on. It's that same anti-establishment distrust. /9

Covid made clear that it was even worse than this, that many had no idea these institutions existed at all, never mind what function they performed. They've been erased from the collective memory. Huge numbers of people think societies are run by politicians. /10

Facing off against an amorphous 'public', that doesn't even exist. The public is made, continuously, by public institutions. It's an act of analysis and ongoing action. This erasure from collective memory left societies wide-open to the seductive con of social media. /11

Seen as a great tool to mobilise populations, democracy in action! As if democracy ever operated in that way. Social media is a massive accelerant in the destruction of what's left of our public institutions. Trump took the US Presidency and sacked the Capitol with it, ffs. /12

Just because beliefs have unintended outcomes doesn't make them innocent. Adolescent rebellion became an adult culture. We're still living the consequences. /end

And this isn’t just the ‘rusted-ons’ either. I’ve seen this same behaviour in every group I’ve ever had to mix with, of even the best-intentioned people. It’s often subtle. Once debates continue on for long enough, it shifts to defending territory for the team. /2

Spinoza and the Rabbis is still one of my favourite works of art, because it shows this process so beautifully, and this was Spinoza’s life. One of the most fearless thinkers of all time, almost completely oblivious to the social pariah it made him. /3 https://t.co/lSerGMf8JW

I guarantee that just about everybody falls into this trap, of thinking they’re just prosecuting a good cause, just following the facts. But actually playing team sports. It creeps up on even the best people. Lists of team enemies, to be brought down. /4

Nothing drives passions more. This year is an international election orgy, and all of this will be on heightened display. The elections themselves will result in no meaningful change, because they never do. But that’s always forgotten in the heat of the team sports. /5

One marker of how infected you are with team sports is how important it is, to you, to maintain friendships. Because as Spinoza found, a person really committed to seeing reality for what it truly is has an uphill battle with friendships. /6

Often contrarians are seen as on the Spinozan path. Deliberately going against accepted and popular truths. But they’re even more infected than everybody else. The team sports is an absolute obsession for them. Their entire focus is the social team mechanism. /7

Inside which they’re only trying to create some sort of product differentiation for themselves. It’s the most difficult thing in the world to reject all of that. To really only care about what’s true. To be able to say to a friend, ‘yeh, nah’ about their deepest beliefs. /end

For example, say we have a peak in drownings, 50 in a year. And then we implement some strategies, to reduce it to 10 a year. Within 5 years we're back at another 50 dead, just spread out more. The same outcome. Public policy is about the long-term. /2

I share Christina's happiness that right now, in the present, most of us don't need to fear dying of Covid, or in many situations (such as a declining wave) even catching it. But public policy isn't about right now. Kicking a can down the road isn't progress. /3

Suppressing the acute impacts of Covid is tremendous for people living in 2024. Unless that suppression leads to an end to the waves of infection though, we're just kicking the can down the road to future generations. As we do for many other things. /4

Our culture is now incapable of thinking in the long term. A catastrophe is still a catastrophe, if it happens over many years, or even multiple generations. It's why we developed vaccines for childhood diseases that killed very few people each year. /5

Because very few each year, multiplied by a lot of years, is a lot of children dead. We build some roads that last 35 years, because fixing them every year is a false economy. Maybe Covid is on its way out, and that's what we're seeing in the data. /6

The famed hybrid immunity. If it isn't, from a public policy point of view, progress has been near-zero. If anything, the task is bigger because there's widespread public apathy about doing anything at all, in the long-term. /end

They don’t need to be ‘sterilising’ to do that, they just need to reduce viral load in individuals, which slows transmission. If that slowing achieves Rt<1, the pathogen is toast. Maths does the rest. If transmission is too high, the pathogen can evade the vaccine as well. /2 https://t.co/1PfItnXnjd

It’s all one thing. It’s not two things. Individual immunity and collective spread of infection are the same thing, viewed in two different ways. /end h/t @DrPieterPeach Source: https://t.co/xmx7ZYC7ed

Source: https://t.co/qkAHtEGNcR

Reality transformed into endless arguments, that obstruct all resolution and action. That’s completely deliberate, ‘flood the zone with shit’ politics. All of these pointless debates are specifically designed to tie us in rhetorical knots, so that nothing gets done. /2

We’re encouraged to think social media is this, democracy in action. Daily arguments over the most bleedingly obvious things. It’s political strategy, to not only stall emergency action but to monetise that stalling at the same time. /3

Platform owners and their shareholders get obscenely rich from these cesspits of artificial debate. Nothing is more a waste of your time than trafficking in peoples’ opinions. We had mechanisms to process opinion, through our institutions. To filter the wheat from the chaff. /4

There are no mechanisms on social media for that. Total irresolution is encouraged, it drives engagement, and from that profits. This is the danger of the lie that democracy is driven from the ‘bottom up’, by what everybody thinks. It’s not, and never has been. /5

All human groups, including societies, are led to think and act in certain ways. That’s not a sinister process, nobody can know everything, we all ‘follow’ people we trust to know what to do, in every area of our lives. We NEVER spontaneously, collectively, as a group,…/6

…all suddenly agree on something and act in one spontaneous direction, as the mythology about democracy suggests. We follow the leader, on wherever topic. And there’s a hierarchical cascade of that leadership. Despite the libertarian flavour of our political rhetoric. /7

Our political leaders absolutely are top of that hierarchy. They’re most peoples’ foundational framing of everything else. Doesn’t matter what the topic is, they will defer to what political leaders of their team or party say. No amount of science or ‘facts’ will alter this. /8 https://t.co/r6vxhbhhr2

The most social, group-like of all are the political libertarians, who tell us nothing else matters except individual freedom. The most cult-like in their obsessive teaming. The libertarian ideas are just the currency of that group, the social glue that holds it together. /9

Some of them may believe the freedom rubbish, but many are just cynically throwing it out there as political clickbait. They absolutely don’t act as if it were true, they’re the most ‘authoritarian’ in policy and action. /10 https://t.co/3DULl6MCp1

Humans are social, societies are social. That’s ALL they are. There’s no ‘politics’ on top of that, no ‘economy’. Even science is 100% social. It progresses one funeral at a time, as Planck said. Until we start understanding it’s all social behaviour, we won’t change it. /end

It's not clear if it's meaningful to use the concept of hybrid immunity for what's happening. Nobody is getting vaccinated now, here's UK data. Unless original vaccinations are still providing substantial immunity, but data throughout the pandemic has suggested they don't. /2 https://t.co/IaQJIvDnZj

The UK data suggests this is still the case. From: https://t.co/3MMtNSkCcJ /3 https://t.co/MiomUtqQGL

These are the crucial questions I think, if we really are going to try to infect our way out of a pandemic. We'll need a measure of infections to do that, because a pandemic is STILL defined by number of infections, not hospitalisations. /4

For the very good reason that past a certain threshold of infections, immunity gets evaded, from either infection or vaccination, or both together. Unless the pathogen rarely mutates, which seems absolutely not to be the case of SARS2. /end https://t.co/bg2gEM3UQk

You get a few cents variation here or there at the margins, like soap powder manufacturers putting the same powder in different branded boxes and altering the price by some minimal amount, to create the illusion of choice. The average doesn’t lie, it’s nothing but up. /2 https://t.co/gxWvo6zf2g

I’ll add a new definition of ‘range’ for vehicles, one of the battlefields of idiot social media debates about ICE vs EV. The range is ‘how far you can actually afford to drive the vehicle’. Much more sensible and real. Reality politics, BS beliefs eventually find reality. /end https://t.co/kSLPCdzCv3

When you track what happens with many of these off-grid homes, they’re often re-sold years later at vastly inflated prices. The off-grid communities become gentrified boutique lifestyle locations. Here’s an example, Crystal Waters Permaculture village. /2

I spent some time there in my 20s, doing a Permaculture design course. (I grew out of it.) Current listings there are a block of land, mostly steep, for $450,000. This is the story of our entire ‘country’ areas. We don’t have city and country. /3 https://t.co/2aulxC8rlq

It’s one model. What we call the country or bush is just the seeding of new urban life. With more space and fresh air etc., but left to run it soon reproduces the city form it pretends to be escaping from. It plays out in every country town. To go off-grid, you need a grid. /end

A small number, about 5% of the group, is *delegated* authority to lead, by the remaining 95%. It’s not necessarily written down or even spoken, though it’s that as well in more peaceful situations. Voting is a delegation, for example. /2 https://t.co/JI6vqRloSs

The critical point is that this creates no ‘top’ to the group, or ‘bottom’. It’s perfectly flat, there are no levels. But there are delegations. The 5% can act as if they’re at a different level. But when they do act, it’s the actions of the 95 % that actually act. /3 https://t.co/AV5QRvirRk

They grant ‘power’, and they enact the decisions of that power. The actions are certainly led, by the 5%, but if you forget the delegations that put them in that position and keep them there, you quickly fall back into top/bottom ‘power’ thinking. /4 https://t.co/2rYCwlAZSH

It also doesn’t mean that the 95% really lead. ‘The people’ (our democratic myth). Without the 5%, the 95% do what the POWs did, when the Koreans removed their leaders. Nothing. Over 40% of them just died. There was no great insurrection, led by the 95%. /5 https://t.co/C5DBIgjSOc

It’s easy to say things are bad because ‘power’ prevents the good. Goodies and baddies. Humans are social. It’s pretty much all they are. Any group’s configuration is a product of the *entire* group. A small number can’t impose it on all the others. Power is never ‘held’. /6

It’s granted, delegated. With conditions often not spelled out. Until the ‘powerful’ suddenly discover those limits, and then they’re gone. Often brutally, as the 95% terminate them. But again, not because the 95% are really leading. Without the 5%, they do nothing. /7

This social process is the centre of all human society. ‘The people’ is a non-thing, groups don’t have agency in that way. They do nothing, unless led. And *they* also create the leadership. But without it, again, they do nothing. /8

So how do we effect change? You have to play these status games. No ‘the people’ will rise up to change anything. No appeal to the current 5% will create any necessary shift. You have to find ways to give the change you want status. To make it the new 5%. /9

This is network politics. The 5% are the human ‘hubs’. The 95% are the networks they’re part of. Networks don’t have up/down topology. They’re completely flat. Power is persuasion, ‘bringing the people’ (95%) along for the ride. /10

After which, history shows, they will likely scapegoat you and terminate your 5% status, as desires and corresponding statuses shift. It’s a mug’s game. But it’s how it all works. /end

Because the stock of housing is regulated, it’s law that both defines ‘land’ and makes it available, property is in reality a monopoly good. Owners of property are better thought of as franchisees, of this monopoly. You have to buy into the monopoly to even begin ‘trading’. /2

If you’re selling cars, capsicums or carrots on the other hand, you can create fresh product and trade it in a market. Nobody can create fresh land though, except government. It’s a monopoly good. /3

And this doesn’t mean we should all rush out and become illegal settlers or occupiers of vacant land either, to fix things. It just means we need to stop thinking that property sales operate as a market that will drive prices down. /4

Nobody expects a new McDonalds franchise to drive down the prices of Big Macs. That’s not what franchises and franchisees do. /end

This stuff needs to be identified quickly, targeted and shut down. Society has to be protected. You can do the same thing with your social media networks. It can feel like it’s an ocean of idiot trolls. It’s not really, it’s a tiny handful of organisers, who you can block. /2

That will do most of the work to free up your social media life. If you approach it as a networked topology, which it is, it’s like the Wizard of Oz - mostly a tiny number of pathetic anti-social individuals, acting as hubs. /3

Their followers soon lose interest if cut off from the mother ship. Reduced to screenshotting what you Tweet to feed back to the moronic hubs for their ongoing bitter self-flagellation. /end

And when you peel it back is really just a boost for the market philosophy of social life, that competition drives optimal societies. Humans don’t compete, they imitate, they form status hierarchies, based on that imitation. That’s not a bad thing either. /2

We imitate because we can’t all know or do everything. So we look to who to trust to do all of the things we don’t do ourselves. And then we emulate/imitate them. Which creates a hierarchy. Which in economic terms becomes a ‘monopoly’. It’s unavoidable. /3

It’s also the most efficient way to do business and run anything. The problem with hierarchies or monopolies isn’t their size, economies of scale is what we want. It’s the refusal to regulate them, under the umbrella of an over-arching hierarchy of public government. /4

As Cory says in this latest thread, public ownership of journalism for example is probably the model we’re being forced back to, as the only one that actually works. The same is true of any essential social service. Decades of libertarian privatisation has failed. /5

The answer isn’t more competition, to bring down all monopolies, destroying their economies of scale. That’s the same libertarian schtick. It’s to restore the fractal order of hierarchy, the ‘public’ level of hierarchy that all other (unavoidable) hierarchies operate inside. /6

To restore a common world, a public space, as our baseline for social life. Not to all go out and compete in frenzies of individual innovation, hoping it will all magically agglomerate via some invisible hand into collective society. It never will. /end

h/t @DALupton

Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan terms that is deep in our collective psyche now. But what does it even mean? /2

Asking that question gets you blank looks. Because, again, it’s a slogan that is now so deep, that people feel it’s like somebody asking if the Earth is flat. A close sibling is the idea of ‘supply and demand’. /3

Count the times people bring that hoary old chestnut out to explain something, without actually explaining anything. Housing is expensive because we don’t have enough supply! A current favourite. /4

And a closely allied term is ‘competition’. Competition in the market drives the supply and demand, and creates optimum outcomes. APPARENTLY. /5

All sides of politics embrace the competition thing. Like with supermarkets, those evil duopolies are anti-competitive! Nobody seems to be peeling back what any of this actually means. /6

We have a competitor to the evil duopoly. Aldi. Been there for years. Has it changed the grocery ‘market’? Not much. Certainly cheaper in many ways, but not driving swathes of Coles and Woolies customers to shift allegiances. /7

Economics used to be called political economy. There was recognition it was an intrinsically political field. Markets, supply and demand and competition are all political ideas. /8

They’re easily traceable back to a desire by some to replace what they see as an intrinsic evil. The State. If humans can regulate themselves through supply and demand competition in markets, the State is redundant. /9

That was the origin of these terms, either explicitly or implicitly. My university professor friend believes this, but rarely says it. It’s why our conversations go nowhere. /10

Like all public discussion now, it’s just team sports. Dressed up as factual debate. People batting for their team. A person’s ‘politics’ is their foundation team, most of the time. Or it can be their religion. What I call Ur-teams. /11

The team they take their most fundamental cues from, even if they join sub-teams in other areas of debate. I once wasted 2 years arguing with a chiropractor friend. About the science of the body. Like many modern debaters, he would say ‘let’s just stay with the facts’. /12

Meaning he didn’t want to actually reveal his true motivations for the arguments. Said that was irrelevant. None of the subsequent ‘debate’ meant anything, I realised later. It was only him promoting his team. /13

A team led by a whack-job theorist from the 19th century, which the friend unsurprisingly never mentioned, because the thinker was a whack-job. I now block him from my life. A parasite on my time. A cold-eyed zealot disguised as an ‘open mind’, looking for ‘discussion’. /14

And this is where all market conversations go too. For example I’ve been talking about EVs and the enormous role of China in driving their prices down. Professor friend, ‘that’s the market’. I ask, ‘what market’? The Chinese did all this before they started trading EVs here. /15

The costs came down because of massive Chinese investment, over many years. It’s engineering, not economics. ‘No, it’s the market at work’. The conversation never progresses past this. It’s an article of faith, for market believers. /16

Asked to demonstrate what a market is, they often describe ancient trade markets for food and other goods. Except that’s not ‘the market’, in modern economic theory. That’s just trading. /17

The modern economic market is a sentient being, that optimises social relations with the ‘invisible hand’ of supply and demand, of competition. /18

APPARENTLY. Except what optimises those things seems quite clearly to be engineering new ways to make things more efficiently, at scale. Engineering, not economics. /19

Like Henry Fred’s innovations. Engineering innovations. Not market innovations. There was no widespread buying and selling of cars, then. Australia is another good example. /20

Tragically ruled by free market zealots for much of the late 20th and early 21st century. Closed the car industry. Removed ‘protections’. Freeing the market to generate new prosperity for the nation! So, what does Australia produce now? /21

Um, not a lot. A big quarry, with some agriculture thrown in, our old staple. A continent transformed into raw materials, for countries that do build things. That’s what the market did for us. Nothing. It doesn’t exist. /22

The Chinese are dominating with EVs because they bypass all that stupidity and invest and build things. With engineers. The market is a fantasy, of privileged peoples too lazy and complacent to do the hard graft of building things any more. /23

So used to cheap things in the stores that they think they somehow just magically appear there, through the market. They don’t. They come mostly from Chinese factories. Stuff has to be built. Investment is needed. /24

You’ll never convince the market folk of this. That it’s engineering we need, not markets. That violates their team rules. Their real enemy is the State. Praise government and you’ll discover that, really fast. /end

Hmm, obviously that should say Henry Ford.

Australians have heard of Fannie Mae, and its sibling Freddie Mac, through the clusterfuck of the GFC, where they were top billing. (There's also Ginnie Mae.) These government-created institutions have their origins in the Great Depression. /2

FDR got the ball rolling. The basic idea is that these government-sponsored enterprises buy mortgages from traditional lenders, to securitize them. This frees up the lenders to offer even more loans to buyers. /3

Including low-income buyers who would normally not qualify for a mortgage, because the loan would be considered too high-risk. It's a type of socialism (😲) really, hidden behind financial instruments. /4

Basically it's a nationalisation of housing finance, of Soviet proportions. Fannie Mae for example is the largest company in the US, and the 4th-largest in the world, by assets. But having controls on the finance also introduces significant controls on the 'market'. /5

If it even makes sense to call it that, because really government is heavily steering what goes on here. Like I say, Soviet-level socialism. (Not a critique, just an irony.) Fannie, Freddie and Ginnie get to say which mortgages they'll buy. /6

Because of course they're not going to agree to allow banks to offload unaffordable high-risk dross onto them, if possible. So this means they help control house prices. By some control over the size of mortgages. /7

That's about it really, in my understanding anyway. That's how houses are significantly cheaper in the US. Massive government intervention in the 'market'. Hidden behind proxy institutional government enterprises. /8

Does Australian government have the appetite for massive government intervention in the housing market, to fix it? History suggest it's all that ever makes housing widely affordable and available, anywhere. Not 'supply'. /end https://t.co/yfy0nB2udT

Economic transactions only happen at all because of VAST numbers of regulations that standardise trading and activity, making economic activity possible. That’s without even pointing out the massive government subsidy for existing industries like fossil fuels and agriculture. /2

When I say there is no such thing as ‘the economy’, this is what I mean. The entire economic transactions of any country are really nested hierarchies of vertically integrated activity, with governments at the top of the nested hierarchy. /3

It’s a non-debate. It’s not ‘picking winners’ or ‘letting the free market decide’. There is no free market, the whole thing is a political illusion, made up in reality of regulation and legislation and standards. /4

This is why economic superpowers are driven by massive government activity (not intervention, they create the ‘market’ too), of planning and investment. The free market fantasy detour Western nations took since the late-1970s was an illusion sustained by one thing only. /5

The fact that it got China to do all the building of stuff it uses, for it. That’s what allowed us to think we were living lives of free market consumer choice. All made possible by astronomical levels of government planning and investment, in China. /6

We outsourced our government economic planning and investment, to them. So we could play the team sports of electoral politics, pretending ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ were actually arguing over the relative role of the State. But the State was still driving everything. /7

It was just offshore, doing all of that economic work for us, in China. /end

It’s an illusion created by outsourcing most of our manufacturing to China. That’s what allows us to have endless, pointless debates about ‘the role of the State in our economies’. The State IS our economies. It creates all economic activity. There’s no binary here. /2 https://t.co/wmNro7SlUc

We just don’t see it because the huge levels of State planning and investment needed to sustain a modern society is being done by China, FOR us. So we can sit here awash with cheap consumer goods they make for us, pretending we’re living ‘freely’ in a market. /3

With ‘supply and demand’ then magically replacing the need for centralised State planning or investment. Except our demands and subsequent supplies *are* centrally planned - by China, as their industrial megastructure responds to our consumer needs. /4

That’s what keeps the delusion of market economies afloat. By removing most State activity at home, they can pretend the State is irrelevant, or plays only a minor role. That it shouldn’t ’pick winners’. /5

But when we do then pick winners, as a ‘market’, the vast Chinese megaState-driven industrial complex whirrs into action to supply our desires. Running a society needs massive planning and investment, coordination. It’s all still happening, just hidden offshore. /6

We desperately need to ditch the pathetically thin gruel of our political ideologies, and return to some basic material understandings of how societies are actually maintained. We’re exactly like the old aristocrats, who had no idea how their lifestyles were maintained. /7

We’re rich societies, we ARE the new aristocrats. All of our Left v Right politics is a laughable team sport almost completely divorced from the material realities of making a modern society run. Societies, to use a business term are *always* ‘vertically integrated’. /8

There are no flat markets guided by the invisible hand of supply and demand. All that we’ve done is beheaded the top of our own material vertical integration, the ‘factory’ feeding our social lives, and transplanted it in Asia. Our megafactory. /9

They’re now re-purposing it for their own ends, leaving us flailing with now unfamiliar ideas like industry policy. With the market economy folk bleating about the dangers of picking winners etc. /10 https://t.co/vwjlEMHpoN

It may in fact not be possible for much of the West to re-industrialise. As some commentators have said, it may be too late, we’re now so far behind Asia. Covid unveiled this whole mechanism, when we in the West suddenly realised we barely make anything ourselves. /11

Our ‘supply chains’ collapsed. But only building things brings long-term stability to societies. So we better at least try, if we’re to survive. And dial down the Yellow Peril politics at the same time, the ultimate way to cut off our nose to spite our own face. /end

The ‘cool’ kids, the alphas in school popularity status hierarchies. More importantly, often the kids whose lives then arrived at the adult world and floundered. And often cars were their escape route from academic work at school, that they had no interest in or aptitude for. /2

It’s this group you’ll find heavily represented in the anti-EV push today, particularly on social media. EVs are taking away the lynchpin of their social lives, a way in which they maintained some of that school dominance in adult life. /3

And it’s networked, all power is networked. The anti-EV push is mostly hot air, from this small, loud minority who form hubs on social media. Like Covid cookers. In reality the combustion vehicle is over. Sales data tell the story. /4 https://t.co/dovODm90RH

But as with the Covid cookers, they have influence only insofar as their bluff is believed. Target their hubs and it’s game over for them. Most bad things in politics are the same, they could be shut down with precision targeting of hubs. /5

It’s how those same bad things became prominent, by precision hub formation. They didn’t try to convince everybody, they fired up their ‘base’ and then used networks to give it an appearance of wide impact. Shut down the hubs and the lot falls over. /end

I think it pays to really think about what this means. How our actual communities are run on platforms owned by billionaires. Everything from local commerce, to the most intimate of social interactions. In full public view as well, interactions that would normally be private. 2/6

Not just a story of corporate takeover of community life either. It means something *socially*. A profound cultural shift, about how we see our lives and societies. It’s clear that many who use social media see it as a public space. As THE community. That matters. 3/6

A lot. That our ‘public’ is now social media platforms. Where we can freely surveil each other, 24 hours a day, and become captured by the imitative rivalry of continuous comparison. Not Big Brother, much worse than that. We’re doing this to ourselves. 4/6

The glorious breathing space a traditional, official hierarchy would bring to these social transactions! To not have to constantly negotiate the most basic, practical actions, through the slurry of opinion and comparison. 5/6

To just have people getting on with things that they know how to do, without having to fight the million others who don’t have a clue about it arguing for a different way. A society of gossip and opinionated, uninformed sniping. /end

In both stories social media was the driving force. Clearly in what happened to Benjamin Cohen, and beyond that in that case look how easily a handful of anti-social wreckers were able to co-opt public narratives, quickly and destructively. /2

The court case may seem less serious. It isn’t, every party to that action should be ashamed. The judge certainly made that abundantly clear, in a judgment few of the culture warriors will even read. /3

It wasn’t a victory for anybody, it was another disaster for civil society, sophisticated legal reasoning was immediately ignored, as every ‘team’ battling in this debate jumped all over the judgment to make it say what they wanted it to mean. /4

Regulating social media is seen as a Herculean task, processing every individual transgression of basic human decency. But it’s a NETWORK, it’s easier than that. There will always only be a relative handful of hubs driving the sewer. /5

Just shut those accounts down. Let them bleat rubbish about ‘free speech’, without the platforms nobody will be listening to them anyway. Yes that will be a continuous process, but again it will always only be a handful of accounts driving the sewer. /6

Twitter under old management gradually realised that, when it shut Trump down. But it needed to do that much more widely. Many could immediately identify the main anti-vax/Covid wreckers for example. It’s not rocket science. Like the GBD folk - just shut all of those accounts. /7

It’s not tyranny to do it, we were never allowing open mobilisation of anti-vax/anti-public health bullshit before social media. It’s basic, adult regulation. /end

Not to implicitly say ‘things appear to be going well’, giving implied support to a hybrid immunity fantasy strategy. Enough damage and enough death has been done to arrive at this point. Public health can step in now and eliminate this pathogen from wide community spread. 2/2

In environments that combine both degrees of contact, such as schools (regular = kids who mix in the same class each day, random is mixing of all classes in activities such as assemblies), it’s the random larger events that do the most damage. /2

Most obviously because that’s what gives any infected superspreader access to the most hosts. We knew this earlier in the pandemic when restricting things like sporting events, concerts etc. This has profound social implications. /3

Covid thrives in a society of strangers. Of hypermobility and mixing. Ecologically this isn’t surprising, organisms and their pathogens live in ecosystems. They have niches. Constant disruption to this groundedness of organisms is dangerous. /4

It’s the persistent mixing of people that makes Covid almost impossible to control. But socially, mixing is dislocation. It’s the continuous displacement of people, of never allowing things to settle. Covid does not survive where people live settled lives. /5

That settled life was called ‘lockdowns’, but that’s a term defined by contrast, to hypermobility and mixing. There is nothing objectively necessary about either. It’s a choice. A choice a culture obsessed with displacement and travel refuses to make. /6

If you choose to live in ecosystem of continuous mixing and displacement, you will be preyed upon by pathogens. Pathogens created by that same dislocation. Zoonotic organisms for example, created by the destruction of ecosystems of other living things. /7

This is where the fight over working from home is interesting. A deep desire by people to be more settled. To cut back on the continuous displacement of commuting. That hypermobility, made up mostly of round-trips. /8

Most of our journeys every day begin and end in the same place. Home. That place portrayed as a type of prison, by the anti-lockdown hysterics. But people like home, it turns out. I’ve never seen people sad to go home at the end of a working day or week. /9

This is the nonsense we’ve been sold with the dismantling of Covid action. That we’ve ‘freed’ people up by setting them back on the hypermobility and displacement path. In reality life in an economy needs that continuous dislocation and disruption. /10

As I’ve Tweeted about a lot, ‘the economy’ is really the old empire, in disguise. Empires dislocate, they disrupt, to ‘free’ up people and resources. So they can be accumulated in centres of power and wealth. An economy is fundamentally in constant war with geography. /11

Any settling, a priority on ‘home’, is a critical danger to an economy. Why modern economic politicians LOVE building roads and other transport links. Few stop to ask, would it be better if we moved LESS? /12

Well, to be fair, ideas like 15-minute cities ask that question. Very quickly set upon by weaponised social media zombies sponsored by the economy crowd. The economy crowd know their enemies. /13 https://t.co/aCGttAI1yq https://t.co/TTxdyyQioX

Lockdowns were an existential threat to them. Not only was the disruption that generates economic ‘growth’ interrupted, people even began to get a share back of the common-wealth of societies, through pandemic payments. And they began to get a taste for home again. /14

So the economy crowd went to the trenches. Massive and sponsored social media campaigns of hysteria about freedom and control. It’s not a goodies and baddies thing either. People also LOVE travel, they love displacement. /15

I’ve always felt an outlier, when I travel. Like I’m constantly barging into other peoples homes. Which is what travel is. The beautiful places we travel to are beautiful *because* they were previously made that. By people settled there. /16

Not in the economic way of settlement (dispossession), but in the home way of groundedness. Travel and its economic settlement is destroying those places, at an increasing rate. And we’re all culpable. /17

Nothing is more difficult than convincing Western people to not travel. To stay home. To be settled. They don’t want to do that because it forces them to confront the world, without continuous distraction. That may seem the opposite of what I’ve said above. /18

But Westerners love travel *because* they can come home after it. Just as they love coming home from work. Very few live lives of continuous displacement, with no home-base. That’s what refugees live, it’s an appalling life. /19

Our supposed passion for ‘seeing new things’ is fake. It’s just distraction. Like all peoples and organisms, our most fundamental passion is to be grounded. To have a place to call home. /20

We have shit jobs, and travel allows us maximum distraction from that basic reality. It’s why it’s so popular. If we had to sit at home contemplating our lives, we’d be much less happy with our work. And the economy loves this, because the more we dislocate and move? /21

The more money it generates. The more new people and resources are freed up to feed into the great centres of accumulation. As the cliche says, we’re not human beings now. We’re human doings. Always busy, always moving. Never settled. Children of empire. /22

But deep down, it makes us unhappy. Deeply unhappy. When the movement stops, like in musical chairs, we get confronted by an existential emptiness through lack of groundedness. Home is that groundedness. As our Indigenous peoples say. Land is the most sacred thing. /23

Place. Not space. Space is what a travel culture does to place. Everything becomes just a location on a map, an address. To move through, to ‘see’. Now our young can’t even afford an address. Let alone create any form of place. /24

It’s time to settle again. To reinvent place. And stop destroying every other organism’s and peoples’ place, for our distraction. To re-route our desires towards groundedness. /end

The ‘case’ dissolves the distinction between specific and general. Every case in its minute specific detail is at the same time universal, can form a precedent for all other cases and be examined through other precedents. 2/3

Reading great judgments is the best way to escape the daily team sports life of social media, that has become our entire social lives and societies now. Bravo, @annabelcrabb. 3/3

Fundamentally the paper talks about the importance of ‘epidemic history’ for a given population, the particular and unique exposure to infection and vaccination. One of the challenges to even the idea of hybrid immunity is the hypermobility of many populations. /2

Even if (a big if) a given population was isolated from other populations, the idea of hybrid immunity requires a near-miraculous alignment of ‘epidemic history’ amongst members of that population, to create anything like population-level immunity. /3

Individual immunity within that population will be highly variable, dependent upon the personal history of infection with the virus, and vaccinations. One of the fundamental requirements for population or herd immunity is coordination. /4

Having lots of people with about the same (high) levels of immunity, *at the same time*. That synchronic element is often missed. Why only vaccination has ever created herd immunity, in practice, where you can coordinate the timing of immunity for masses of people at once. /5

Leading to a question I’ve asked before and never seen answered, whether those who advocate for hybrid immunity are talking about individuals, or populations. Are they saying hybrid immunity will create herd immunity? /6

Or only that each individual will get enough immunity through infection and vaccination to protect them from ongoing severe disease? Nobody seems to want to say. The former seems impossible (the synchronic element). The latter profoundly irresponsible. /7

The paper also (wisely) targets immune-escape variants, the ones we’ve been living with. Clearly immune-escape is a problem for any lasting immunity. A powerful paragraph here about ‘natural infection’. /8

“For scenarios where the past attack rate is higher than 50%, we observed that different vaccination coverage levels have noticeable effects…If vaccination coverage is only 20% then a high past attack rate is insufficient to ensure a low future resurgence of of infections…/9

…with the same variant. This is most likely due to the high intrinsic disease spread which caused the high past attack rate and similarly caused the high near-future attack rate, as well as *the short-lived nature of immunity derived only from natural infection.” /10

(My emphasis there.) ‘Natural’ infection with low vaccination, which is pretty much most countries now, creates only short-lived immunity. Meaning forever-Covid, the endless pandemic. Not endemic, PANdemic. Wave after wave of mass disease. /11

Importantly the authors also note the benefit of vaccinating low-risk groups, such as children, as modelling shows vaccinating only high-risk groups made little difference to population severe disease outcomes. /12

Just as critically the modelling showed that for immune-escape variants, pst attack rate had a linear relationship with future attack rate. Or in other words high prevalence led to not just high prevalence in the future, it led to even *higher* prevalence in the future. /13

We can’t infect our way out. Infections breed and multiply infections. (None of this is surprising.) To quote: “We find that high vaccination coverage makes a noticeable difference in reducing the number of infections and severity outcomes in populations. Additionally,…/14

…a population with a high past attack rate - reflecting a society with certain mixing and environmental factors that increase disease spread - is likely to have a high future attack rate and will benefit from higher vaccination coverage.” And to continue…/15

“We also found that high vaccination coverage can *delay* the emergence of a second wave. This delay is important because a longer time between waves allows more time to vaccinate populations, fewer infections and deaths across the same time frame, less economic disruption,…/16

…and so forth.” And finally, “Our results suggest that populations with low vaccination coverage and high past infection rate should still consider vaccination if public health measures are not enforced or social mixing is not reduced…our work suggests that populations…/17

…with high past infection rates will likely continue to have high future infection rates, if nothing were to change”. There it is, in black and white. Hybrid immunity skewed heavily to ‘natural’ infection is a sham. That’s most populations now. /18

Vaccination rates have flatlined. Hybrid immunity is just code for continuous infection. For doing nothing, in other words. A recipe, as the modelling shows, for not just eternal Covid but for *increasing* Covid. The solution is to vaccinate. Lots. /19 https://t.co/pOvyjXXv4P

And to take public health measures, though cooker activists seem to have spooked politicians beyond that now being possible. The anti-vaxxers may also have achieved that with vaccines. But as the research shows, vaccines just need to reduce viral load to end a pandemic. /20

They don’t need to be ‘sterilising’. Ongoing and continuous mass vaccination may be our best hope, politically. Though with politicians uttering cowardly inanities about ‘vaccine fatigue’, hope is also heroic. Either way, hybrid immunity is nonsense. /21

And without significant increase in vaccination, offensively stupid nonsense. /end

Link: https://t.co/UdW1aeh5Kv

This is true even for the most serious of issues. It's all social contagion, all people imitating role models at the hubs. The hopeless term 'the people' doesn't capture this clumpiness in anyway. /2

It assumes a homogeneous mass of distinct points, one for every person living in a society. Societies never work like that. There are always a handful of 'influencers', in every part of life, about 5% of the group, that the other 95% imitate i.e. follow. /3

Also how infectious diseases tend to operate, particularly those with the dispersion characteristics of Covid. It's a grave mistake to assume 'Covid is everywhere', even though it may be. /4

It's everywhere because of the hubs. No need to target everywhere, just target the hubs. The same applies to any public issue. These platforms have the same topology. /5

The spread of Covid matches the spread of ideas about Covid, on a platform like this. Humans are the hosts. How they act in relation to the disease is the social contagion of following their favourite influencer-hub. /6

The good news here is that it means most problems that seem gigantic and insurmountable are really quite tiny. You just have to find the hubs, and deal with them. For any social problem. /7

'Free speech' advocates want us to believe the millions of tiny independent dots 'the people' view of society. In reality those advocates are hubs. People with vast audiences already. While most of us have no audience at all. /8

Most of our social problems could be fixed quickly, if we understood them as networks. If we understood society socially. Humans imitate. They follow fads and fashions, led by a tiny handful of hubs. /9

It's why conservatives for example spent decades setting up 'think tanks', hubs to spew forth propaganda 24 hours of every day. Tiny numbers of people are in these hubs. /10

They also generate all the spin about free speech and 'authoritarianism' to prevent the really pretty easy task of shutting them down. The whole thing is a con, using a good understanding of how humans behave and think. /11

Tiny numbers of bad people use networks to hijack democracies. Good people think the outcome is 'the will of the people'. Which it sort of is, except it's really the will of the hubs. /12

All outcomes are led, by hubs, and retrospectively attributed to 'the people'. Or to 'the market', in today's terms. Churches are hubs, it's where conservatives learned these techniques from originally. /13

It was a partnership. Churches have millennia of experience at mobilising populations. And that's not a criticism. Getting the 'good word' out was key to creating Western civilisation. /14 https://t.co/rzokcqKXnU

Church v State is the team sport at the centre of our entire civilisation. it never stopped. Gaza, today. And the various alliances being brought into the light. /15

Underneath all of our 'modern', secular' societies are much deeper, tectonic currents that never stopped operating. All about who will control societies. Churches or States. /16

I'm agnostic as to which team to back there. Secular States have a woeful record of failure on many metrics. Over 100 million people died in secular wars in the 20th century alone. /17

And the US now feels a bit like The Handmaid's Tale, absolutely. Those deep currents are resurfacing. Social media of course is a master of networking too, and doesn't necessarily have skin in this old battle. /18

Which is why it's so dangerous. Both churches and States at least have centuries of experience in the complex issues societies face. Social media couldn't care less about any of that. /19

It takes the basic social contagion model and strips it right back to naked and goal-less popularity. Which it then monetises. Our societies are increasingly transacted on these platforms. /20

Without any of the checks and balances big institutions like churches and States spent most of our history developing. We mostly don't end climate change and Covid because of social media. /21

Existing State (politicians) and Church-based people have successfully piggybacked off this new networking methodology. It will eat them both alive. Naked populism believes in NOTHING. /22

It's social contagion harnessed purely for wealth and power. Why you will see social media platform owners fight tooth and nail against any regulation. /23

These platforms are a corrosive destructive force now at the heart of our democracies. And yes, I'm using them. You can criticise bad driving, while still driving a car. /24

As Edmund Burke spent his whole adult life trying to show, it's our institutions that protect us and give us longevity. Not leaders. Not the hubs. The old-fashioned basics. Church and State, and their associated sub-institutions. /end

Social media is dangerous because of one key thing. It pretends that the mythology of societies being ‘the people’ is true. It links everybody together so that their interaction can supposedly lead to an emergent collective society. /2 https://t.co/ZzsKQZOQJe

But as the POW camps in the Korean war showed so brutally and clearly, that’s not how human groups operate. Ever. They are ALWAYS led, by about 5% of any group. /3 https://t.co/tTUuRcJRDC

Once the 5% of American POWs who led the other POWs were removed by the Koreans, what did the rest of the POWs do? Nothing. They sat down and died, basically. Societies are networked, the 5% are the hubs. /4 https://t.co/9GMSyXfmV6

They look like this. Not millions of individual ‘sovereign’ dots representing each person. A tiny handful of hubs, vacuuming up all the rest. What social media does is strip away society’s *existing* hubs. /5 https://t.co/eDHRbjZ5HE

And replace them with itself, at society’s centre, as mega-hubs. That’s why ‘cookers’ are increasingly running the world. Any deranged halfwit who can cobble together likes on these platforms now has immense power. /6

Trump stole the leadership of the free world using not much more than Twitter. People always react to this by saying ‘I couldn’t function without social media’. /7

They need it to get vital information, and to connect with colleagues and friends and sources of knowledge. But that’s a symptom of what social media stripped away from them. /8

People didn’t need to know much of what they now come here to get, before social media existed. It was embedded in the operating system of societies, its institutions, doing the invisible work of keeping the lights on. /9

The fact people so desperately need these platforms IS the social media business model. The platforms are monetising the wreckage they themselves cause elsewhere. /10

Replacing hierarchies of expertise in EVERY part of life with hierarchies of ‘likes’ on social media. Now ‘influencers’ even say what reality itself is. /11

How do we not see this? Without social media the idea of ‘living with’ a pandemic would have been laughed out of existence. But on social media, if you can generate the likes, any nonsense becomes reality. /12

As Arendt and Orwell said, if you want to understand authoritarianism, look at where facts become opinions. That’s right here. On these platforms. /end

Your autonomic nervous system regulates things like your blood pressure, breathing, heart rate, digestion and sexual function. These are things you absolutely need to be running automatically, without your help. /2

Imagine having to manually control all of those things yourself. You’d be dead in minutes. Over millions of years your body developed an automatic system to deal with all of this for you. /3

If we cross over into the social domain of human life, and not just by analogy, societies also have autonomic nervous systems. Their institutions. Edmund Burke is probably the guru in understanding those, the great 18th century statesman. /4 https://t.co/WR8Ww1SxN9

When we talk about institutions today, we look through a lens or framing generated by vicious anti-institutional libertarian propaganda. We see them as ‘bureaucracies’. ‘Red tape’. Political libertarians have been hammering that framing for decades. /5

But as Burke explained, institutions are really just the emergent outcome of ‘what works’ in a society. They’re the practical, operational mechanism that actually ‘runs’ the society. /6

They’re not just organisations or bureaucracies. They’re things like customs, and traditions, and beliefs. What Burke called the ‘latent wisdom’ of a society. They’re not created by some individual or group in the present day. /7

They emerge over generations, from the outcome of lots of trial and error, focused on what works to keep society running. And in that way they are EXACTLY society’s autonomic nervous system. /8

It’s they, and not politicians, who really ‘run’ societies. In the same way your autonomic nervous system keeps you alive by running your key bodily processes. They’re mostly invisible to us, because like your autonomic nervous system, they run automatically. /9

The complexity of a society far outstrips the capacity of any individual or group to actually run it. This obvious point seems to always be missed in our laughable idea elected leaders run anything at all. /10

A society is the most complex human thing we have. Nobody has a clue how it all works really. But institutions know. Our social autonomic nervous system, that evolved through generations of trial and error. /11

And this is where populism is so lethal. Its main enemy is these institutions. It’s social dysautonomia. It’s leaders saying they should run things like pandemics, not their public health institutions. /12

They of course don’t have a clue how to do that, nor any actual intent to do it. As we’ve seen. It’s like you trying to ‘run’ your own blood pressure, heart rate, digestion etc. You’d be dead in minutes. /13

And that’s why our societies are in an accelerating rate of collapse, under populism. And kind souls think if they just elect somebody better, things will be fixed. /14

I’m sorry, but no individual will be better at running your blood pressure and heart rate and digestion. Only your autonomic nervous system knows how to do that. /15

If you fuck with institutions, societies die. It’s that simple. A symptom of social dysautonomia is how knowledgeable we all are now in things like epidemiology, and virology, and PPE. /16

Isn’t it wonderful, the things we’ve all come here to learn? To try to survive. It’s not wonderful. It’s an unmitigated disaster still unfolding. Our institutions, our social autonomic nervous systems, used to do that stuff for us. /17

Us trying to do it ourselves is, unsurprisingly, not working. Covid is winning, smashing us. Populations trying to individually do the things their autonomic nervous system (institutions) used to do for them? /18

That’s like you trying to run your own digestion and sexual functioning, breathing and circulation. It’s a terminal condition. /end

Exactly this. The meaning of the day has been transformed. We forgot. https://t.co/WaJglIVL4E

The places themselves are famous, in the same way. We want to ‘meet’ them in the way people want to meet celebrities. Guess what obsessively trying to meet celebrities is called? 2/8

It’s called stalking. Not respecting their right to their own space. We have relationship with place just as we do with people. 3/8

Just as we may find thousands of people attractive, but only have a relationship with one. Places are the same. We can find them all sexy AF. It doesn’t give us the right to visit them. 4/8

We don’t understand this, as our own Indigenous peoples will happily tell us. For them place itself is sacred. An ongoing relationship. For us it’s somewhere to ‘see’. 5/8

And rusted-on travellers will invent all sorts of more ‘authentic’ ways (they think) to do it. To ‘respect the culture’, to get to know it better. They’re not understanding. 6/8

Instead of trying to fuck a friend’s wife, I could ‘just try to get to know her better’. But that’s not an improvement. I need to focus on my own relationships. At home. 7/8

Places are NOT there for our viewing pleasure, just as celebrities and ordinary people we meet aren’t. Place is a relationship. It’s not ‘seeing’. Seeing is porn. /end

Now find one public ‘issue’ today that isn’t that business model in operation. I’ll wait. 2/2

The idea of drawing a line around a piece of land on a map, and saying ‘this is mine’. Partitioning just adds more lines, and hopes that settles people down. We won’t confront the deeper connection to land. We don’t understand that. /2

This was a shock to European Australians, when Uluṟu was closed as a tourist rock-climbing playground. The idea of being denied access entirely still doesn’t compute with many. We’re a travel/tourism culture. /3 https://t.co/3Mx7KflVop

The world is our playground. We believe we should have the right to travel and ‘experience’ anywhere. At home our land is framed as real estate. Property. A saleable address. Location, location. /4

Property that we now exclude many of your young from ever owning. Every home to them is now Uluṟu. They’re forbidden access. By the rest of us, the travel junkies. Happy to consume others’ homes for recreation. /5

‘Seeing the world’. (‘The world’ is other peoples’ homes.) The world is now increasingly sick of being this theme park, for our enjoyment. /6 https://t.co/nxDnEgCWCK

Art speaks truths. One of our most beloved movies shows a man apparently unhinged. Because he loves his connection to place. Even though in real estate terms, it’s a stinker. /7 https://t.co/JgyksvaD2O

Good history sees it too. One of the most powerful analyses in Gammage’s book is about ‘farming without fences’. Indigenous Australians don’t fence land. Fences are how we enforce our ‘sovereign territories’, on maps. /8 https://t.co/jKM6RNG9Wr

Instead they enrich the land for both themselves and the species they want to farm or hunt, attracting prey while enriching the landscape, for all. Everybody wins. The landscape becomes the existential focus. /9

It’s not conceptually difficult to understand that land is fundamental to all living things. Their piece of the Earth. Lovingly crafted, and from which all emerges and returns, as religions say. /10

But we’re still infected with our imperial conquering past. We want to accumulate sovereign parcels of land at home, while trampling all over everybody else’s OS. We won’t settle. We won’t allow ourselves to be grounded again. /11

Whether a long weekend or annual holiday, we’ll pack the car and van, or jump onto planes. We can’t stay home. We have no real home, just addresses. Nobody travels to see our suburbs. /12

They’re car parks for commuters. We don’t feel the bond with that land that Indigenous Australians feel for Uluṟu. Our quarter-acre (if we’re that lucky) is a ‘step on the property ladder’. /13

The late architect Christopher Alexander called the English countryside humankind’s greatest ever creation. Read Gammage and you’ll know Australia is actually that. But for the same reason. /14 https://t.co/02Km2l95M6

Because the landscape was lived in, for generations, worked and tended and loved, and enriched. It sustained us, and we sustained it. A mutual relationship. /15

We have no conception of that now. It’s all just real estate. And we travel to find the beauty we’ve forgotten how to make at home. We don’t understand ‘home’. That sacred relationship to place. /16

We know it’s missing, various reactionary ‘sovereign’ movements are trying to grasp it. But that’s just more sovereign ownership rubbish. Not a mutual relationship with landscape. /17

The Earth beneath is all that ends war and violence. Being in relationship with landscape. While we choose to live inside maps, we won’t understand this. /end

Hash-tag (kiddult) society identifies a problem. People rally around the problem, with hash-tags. They form teams. Often opposed to other teams mobilising around the problem, with different hash-tags. /2

# MeToo vs # NotAllMen, for example. # ZeroCovid vs # SmilesareBack. Etc. When you look the teams proliferate around every issue. They thrash it out for a while, even a long while. They hit the streets and the column inches in national media. /3

Sometimes this leads to wider action of some kind. Some teams claim victory, others blame the ref, others disappear. You could say this is democracy in action. /4

Except, as we see with domestic violence and Covid, if the actions don’t reflect actual causes, little actually changes. The victory is a momentary victory for one team. Reality doesn’t care about any of them. /5

If I have a leaking tap in my garden, and invent # Leakytaps, then march in the streets demanding leaky taps be a thing of the past? In today’s world I will certainly get a counter # group, like # Livewithleakytaps. /6

And my # Leakytaps group may prevail. Victory! But my tap is still leaking. /7

How would I fix the tap? Two ways. First, understand why taps leak. Then, fix it. No teams required. /8

Knowledge. Then action. This is why the Brits, following the Chinese, invented public/civil services. To bring expertise to problems. And then to fix them. /9

Social media world has no conception of that basic process at all. It will just continuously turn all problems into team sports. /10

We love team sports. We’re less good at recognising it’s increasingly *all we do*. So, how do we fix domestic violence? /11

I’m wary to even get into these debates because you’re immediately shunted into one of the teams. I’m not on any of the teams. But I do wonder if we focus enough on the D in DV, as well as the V. /12

Wherever debate and action goes from this point, I will bet it will be just more team sports. Little analysis, little action. Plenty of performative symbolism, by the different teams. /end

The expression ‘making the perfect the enemy of the good’ applies to public health too I think. There’s a constant conflation of individual and collective measures. /2

A perfect fit-tested mask example is a must for a health professional in a high-risk situation all day. For others, even if everybody wore poor masks, we would make massive inroads against Covid. /3

The key to beating any infectious disease isn’t in the protection we can devise for individuals (though that’s always desirable). It’s in how much we slow transmission. Which we do by reducing (only rarely eradicating) viral load in individuals. /4

You just need to reduce transmission enough that Rt < 1. Then exponential decay will do the rest, for us. A sub-optimal mask worn widely is a powerful weapon to help achieve that. As is a sub-optimal vaccine. /5

‘Sterilising’ vaccines are that individual focus again. Most vaccines that end epidemics and pandemics are not sterilising. They don’t need to be. They just need to slow transmission to Rt < 1. By *reducing* viral load in the unfortunate infected. /6

Then maths does the rest, for us. And with a virus like SARS2, with its dispersion characteristics, this is even easier. Because most people aren’t spreading the virus anyway. /7

Just a handful of superspreading hubs. Again, we don’t need to track down and eliminate Covid everywhere. Just to slow spread from the infected, in this case in hubs. /8

Maths will do the rest. We make the perfect the enemy of the good when measures get sucked into the team sports of society. Imitative rivalry. /9

Social media groups on efficient housing are another example. Those groups are often obsessive about turning every home into some sort of frightening self-contained utopia. The individual focus. But we only need most people to be quite a bit more efficient. Not perfect. /10

Similarly cycling groups often rapidly escalate into the imitative rivalry warfare of ‘gear’. Bikes, suits and helmets worth thousands. Who can have the coolest gear, etc. /11

Social media accelerates and encourages this sort of imitative extremism, leading to utopian metrics. But again, collectively we mostly just need to all be a bit better. Maths does the rest. /end

P.S. this *absolutely* applies to air purifiers too. They don’t need to be the quietest, to have the most efficient HEPA filters. They just need to reduce transmission. Maths does the rest. Maths and time, just keep them running a bit faster and longer.

h/t @luchioluli

Ventilation would be a better long-term solution, but this basic, incredibly sane and healthy desire to simply not be sick? Why do people embrace being sick? Because they’re too scared to go against the crowd. At a time the crowd is led to reject masks. 2/3

Mask-wearers are now the majority of the world’s population. You’re in good company. The minority is very loud, very stupid, very aggressive. And always sick. /end

h/t @Mike_Honey_

With Covid, our ‘living with the virus’ is dumping ALL of the risk onto the highest risk groups. While allowing the majority to do nothing at all to mitigate risk. /2

Even the idea of ‘focused protection’ is not the pooling of risk. (And there is no protection anyway, it’s a slogan.) Focused protection again allocates all of the risk management to highest risk groups, and zero to everybody else. /3

To pool risk for Covid would mean to accept that catastrophic outcomes from Covid could happen to anybody. As with insurance, nobody knows in advance who ‘the vulnerable’ will end up being. We ALL try to insure our cars and houses, for example. /4

Because any of us could lose them, to fire, flood or accident etc. You don’t pre-determine *where* the highest risk lies, because mostly you can’t. So you pool the risk. Everybody accepts some of the burden. /5

Knowing that only a few will be catastrophically impacted. And when they are, the pooled risk looks after them. We should ‘insure’ against Covid by all mitigating spread, for example. The costs of that are then pooled. /6

So everybody pays some cost. But those who might be catastrophically affected then have a much lower risk. Because we pooled the risk. /7

None of this is oppression or impinging upon peoples’ freedom. It’s insurance, a key plank of economic life. /end

It also supports the idea that violence against women is often economic in origin, due to economic forces on relationships. We should completely reject the framing of ‘lockdowns’ we’ve had in the pandemic. /2

As some sort of restriction on peoples’ freedoms. Or as some sort of unaffordable welfare scheme. Lockdowns were societies for the first time in many decades redirecting their wealth to help ordinary people. /3

Just as they did during world wars. Leading to decades of post-war prosperity. It was the flat rejection of trickle-down politics. /4

As Nick Hanauer says, business thrives when customers have money. Redistributing collective wealth towards customers (i.e. ordinary people) during ‘lockdowns’ was a reversal of decades of them being strip-mined by N=1 politics. /5

‘Neoliberalism’, political libertarianism, free market politics, small-government politics. All the manifestations of historic elites reversing the post-war construction of a public sphere. /6

Lockdowns were much more than emergency action for Covid. They were a rejection of over 50 years of political and economic bullshit. /end