May 2024

It’s a central myth of economy society, that small business is a great thing. Many push this myth because they affect to dislike big anything. Especially big government. But big business too. 2/7

And they hate it as a ‘duopoly’ too. Like the angst over supermarkets here. All sides of politics line up behind the idea that ‘competition’ between smaller organisations is the optimum model. 3/7

Except it’s all baloney. Scale is the key to all social progress. In business and everywhere else. It provides ‘economies of scale’. The larger something gets, the more efficient and cheaper it gets. 4/7

Government itself evolved because of this same basic fact. Government is vital because it provides economies of scale. To our lives in general. We invented it to *get away* from ‘competition’ between different social organisations, including businesses. 5/7

Socially, people ALWAYS produce scale in their interactions. They create hierarchies. Led by 5% of any group. This is why business always does the same. No matter how much we try to regulate it away. 6/7

They ‘control supply chains’, they ‘vertically integrate’, meaning they target economies of scale. Economy society is a fantasy. It’s just society. Following all the same social rules we use elsewhere. /end

As the Council says, summarising much research: “There is no single factor that can explain gender-based violence in our societies, but rather a myriad of factors contribute to it, and the interplay of these factors lies at the root of the problem.” /2 https://t.co/TptCaWq62n

Some experts in Australia said the same this week, trying to be heard above the usual social media mob rage. Absolutely models of masculinity are part of the equation. That’s the ‘cultural’ factors the Council refers to, circled in red. /3 https://t.co/oVez837B5j

But that’s only a quarter of the causation. The blue arrows show the other dimensions. Australian experts this week talked about these other dimensions. They were heard, but much less prominently. /4 https://t.co/f2x9QhhAb3

Like every topic now, this one is being used as fodder for social media team sports. Gender is a hot, toxic social media issue. And it’s that toxicity which itself creates much gendered violence, ironically. /5 https://t.co/etavBdsw7e

In addition the baseline for these discussions should surely be an assessment of the magnitude of the problem. Like the rate of domestic violence killing, in a week focused on deaths. Here’s the data. /6 https://t.co/FuZT3IV23c

That rate has more than halved, in the past 30 years. Which calls into question the overwhelming narrative this week that this is a spiralling epidemic. It doesn’t in any way minimise it as a critical issue. But it miscasts it in important ways. /7 https://t.co/nFbrunmRJV

We saw how social media team sports works with this issue earlier in the pandemic too. With the claims by anti-lockdowners that lockdowns would lead to vast increases in domestic violence, with victims locked up with their abusing partners. What’s the data say? /8

I shared it earlier this week. It shows the opposite happened. Rates of DV declined. Described as an ‘unexpected’ result. Unexpected because it contradicted the social media team sports narrative. /9 https://t.co/OaJmhEzF1V https://t.co/K1KKALxU1k

Why did it drop? Almost certainly because lockdowns inadvertently alleviated some of those blue arrow areas. Perhaps, as the researchers said, families getting quality time together actually made them happier. /10 https://t.co/JYmNt6d4HT

This is a topic I’m always wary to discuss, because of the toxicity of social media. You’re immediately shoehorned into one of the idiot ‘teams’. I’m not on any team. Team sports is wrecking our societies. /end

We're paying billionaires now to provide our actual societies. People transact their lives on SM now, and the platforms in turn shape their lives off SM. /2

They not only shape how we think and what we believe, they even shape peoples' bodies. The imitative rivalry that is the core of all social life is nuclear on SM. People's physical bodies are even shaped to take part in this rivalry. /3

Meanwhile business has shifted to the platforms, so that now our social lives are a seamless hybrid of personal and commercial. Every thought and feeling you express on a platform is now monetised. /4

Economics is now integrated into our most intimate personal thoughts and feelings and social relationships. Think about where our public spaces now are. /5

Where do people gather, socially? Day to day, apart from single events. On social media. It's become our public square. But also our 'economy'. And our politics. /6

And so does the public own it? I think we know the answer there. /end

By adopting the ‘doomer’ narratives of Covid minimisers, who successfully organise resistance to Covid action by painting that action as universal disruption. Covid is not universally present in the community. Just as HIV wasn’t. It *can* become very widespread. 2/5

At the peak of waves. But those waves are driven by a relatively tiny number of highly specific superspreading hubs. Both sides of Covid debates often share the universalising framings. 3/5

As do sides of the violence against women debates, portraying the problem as a universal issue with male culture. See the link in Tweet 1 of this thread for an excellent discussion of that mistake, for that topic. 4/5

Social media loves universalising narratives because they’re battle narratives. For the team sports that happen there. The more specific and analytical we are, the faster and easier we will solve problems. /end

Most of modern history is humans shifting to life inside maps. That basic physical fact is always ignored. For example, to this day we call the ‘international community’ the UN, the attempt to get sovereign nations to agree to things. /2

What we forget is that the international community *preceded* those sovereign nations. It allocated territories and sovereignties, to particular groups. That’s when the maps got going. /3

Trying to create an international community from sovereign nations is literally the same as trying to unscramble an egg. It’s completely backwards. /4

You can see the same misunderstanding at every scale. Take another byproduct, ‘local’ v ‘global’. As I look outside my ‘local’ window in Australia, cars from 2 other continents line the streets. I have American solar panels on my roof, using silicon processed in China. /5

The local is already global, thinking otherwise is like trying to have local sunshine or air. We’ve taken the team sports of our social lives and used them as a projection onto reality itself. /6

The countries on our maps are the remnants of older team sports, maintained into the present. Humans are absolutely obsessed with their own social relations. They’re a prison they struggle to escape, to let reality in. /7

The reason social media has been such an astronomical success is that it targets precisely this. Human social relations. Nothing is more addictive for us. Nothing makes us more blind to actual reality. /8

Not just our geography is now structured using these social team sports. Our whole social lives are, within countries. We’re in our various teams, battling other teams. /9

This week the teams lined up behind violence against women (itself a return game), next will be something else. The realities lost in all of the noise. /10

But it’s all the same water. What I call reality-based politics would ignore all of the team sports. And just focus on practical problems, and the practical ways to resolve them. We don’t actually have a choice, reality will kill us if we ignore it. /11

It’s just a matter of how long that death is delayed. But our team sports prisons make it highly unlikely we’ll see this. Only catastrophes have broken through those prison walls, historically. Natural disasters, massive wars. Climate change will be next. /end

h/t @silentanb

Sure, my immune system may have been defending me my whole life from diseases. As a scientist that would lead me to wonder why we allow such a continuous exposure to disease. Rather than do more to eliminate that exposure. 2/3

A bit like a person being used to being beaten up and bullied. Surely the thing to do is to eliminate the bullying and beatings. 3/3

We target everybody. Not only do we not know who's most vulnerable, they're also not able to be isolated from the rest of the community. 2/2

The idea of a ‘public’ is historically very new. As I’ve Tweeted about many times, invented in the 20th century. After two world wars. Wars that each killed between 2-3% of the global population, at the time. /2 https://t.co/lyfO5p19qy

The institutions societies created after those catastrophes had the task of re-building broken societies. To do that they had to re-conceptualise those societies. The old structure of those societies had been removed, by the world wars. /3 https://t.co/v4JxEBoC5j

So those old structures couldn’t lead new societies into existence. The structures were gone. We had to invent anew what ‘society’ means. And to do that, we invented ‘the public’. /4 https://t.co/dB1EHulyEm

The public as a concept is NOT the same as what today we call ‘the people’. A simple enumeration of everybody living. ‘The people’ is populist maths, Beloved of ‘fascist’ leaders. All fascism is populism. /5

Hitler for example eulogised ‘das Volk’ (the people). He saw the role of the State as only to serve das Volk/the people. Modern political libertarians say the same thing. When you lie down with dogs you get up with fleas. /6

The public is nothing to do with this populist sleight of hand. A symptom of how successful modern populists are is that maybe the majority of people you ask will say democracy is about ‘the people’ running the country. It’s why societies are collapsing. /7

The public is an *administrative construct*. It’s an ongoing, continuous *calculation* of the *interdependency* of all people. That’s what we invented, post-war. Because it was the only thing that worked, recognition of that interdependency. /8

No nebulous rubbish about ‘the people’, that’s what so many millions had just died on the altar of. The institutions we invented spent the next several decades implementing ‘public’ programs. Based on interdependency. /9

Programs that recognised that the fate of all people is dependent on the fate of every person. Because they’re all connected. All interdependent. As the saying rightly goes, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. /10

It’s not a sentimental or even justice thing. It’s logistics. If you allow even small parts of societies to become dysfunctional, that dysfunction will bring the lot down. Because it’s all connected. It’s why we started vaccinating widely, for example. /11

Even though most of the diseases we started vaccinating kids against killed very few of them. But when the public is your model, those deaths are an assault on ALL of us. If you critically injure an arm, you don’t demand it be chopped off because you have a spare. /12

Society as a public is interconnected and interdependent. Almost amusingly, ‘lockdowns’ showed this, and in doing so proved the exact opposite of what opponents of lockdowns say. Lockdowns disrupted because ‘economies’ are fundamentally interconnected. They’re hypersocial. /13

The libertarian philosophies of the market proponents of economies use are completely decoupled from economic reality. In libertarian/populist land, lockdowns should have been a nirvana. Finally, populations free of all social activity, shut down. /14

Except it crashed their beloved economies. Proving once and for all that economies are really just societies. Hyper *connected* societies. ‘Supply chains’ are really just social connectedness, utter dependence on our social relationships. /15

The toxic maths of minimisers takes all of this, and tries to replace it with minorities and majorities. Really just voting categories, imported into public administration. We’ve seen it with Covid. Painted as over, because it’s only killing a minority of people. /16

Record numbers of people, but because a minority, dismissed as insignificant. That’s the death of the whole idea of the public. And remember again how many died in the world wars? /17 https://t.co/IWAjyAhnHQ

‘Only’ 2-3% of the population. Even less in many countries like Australia, much less. A tiny minority, about 0.5%. Does that mean the wars were ‘just a sniffle’? That the record amounts of our GDP we spent fighting them was wasted, as opponents now say of Covid lockdowns? /18 https://t.co/CMRZSBEwlZ

You can see how toxic minimiser maths has been in this pandemic, the sociopathic nonsense it’s led to. By making us think only of absolute numbers, ignoring all of the interdependencies. By replacing a public with marketing concepts of segmentation. /19

Calculations of minority and majority, precisely aligned with projected voting impacts of various actions. That’s how sick populism is. And how it always becomes fascism, if left to run. Untold numbers will be allowed to die, provided it doesn’t impact popularity/votes. /20

Our own then-PM declared Covid as good as over in Oz, in late-2021, because he had an election he wanted to win in early 2022. More than 25,000 people are now dead as a direct result of that action. (And he lost the election anyway.) /21

The current State and federal governments won’t touch Covid now, for the same reason. They think it’s a toxic vote-loser. Think of that, if you’ve lost loved ones to Covid, or they’ve been maimed by it. That it was all because of votes. /22

Those who do that will comfort you by saying that only a minority of Australians have been maimed or killed. Like that makes it OK. Like the catastrophes of the 20th century never happened, and we learned nothing from them. /23

We’re breaking our societies with this nonsense. By sacrificing ‘the vulnerable’, thinking the rest of us can get on with life as normal. Except we’re all vulnerable. Because we’re all interconnected. /24

It’s a disgrace to the killing fields of the 20th century, so recent, that we’ve forgotten the lessons we learned there. We can’t vote out way out of that forgetting. Voting caused the forgetting. /end

She rang me very upset afterwards. The neighbour had told her the drugs the doctors were giving her are poison, and that she should remove the IV lines. And that she should get on ivermectin, and avoid the Covid vaccines. /2

I told her to ignore the neighbour, the treatment she's on is the best available. And if the neighbour tries to visit again, tell her to fuck off. /3

This is social media society. Everybody a fucking expert on everything, that they don't have a clue about. Society is collapsing. And platform owners are monetising the ruins. /end

Then a member of their team came to work, sick. You could see the immediate tension in the room. The fear that this might compromise the trip, if passed on. /2

‘I’ll KILL you if you make me sick!’ was the phrase, said jokingly but with real anxious bite too. So I offered them a mask. /3

They literally froze, for about 10 seconds. You could see the wheels turning, wrestling with the idea. ‘No, it’s fine, thanks.’ The thought of masking was more terrifying than wasting the thousands spent on the OS trip. /4

Social conformity is the most powerful of all forces known to humankind. The one rarely mentioned. Covid minimisers know it. They use it, relentlessly. /5

Most people affecting joy at taking no Covid precautions fear the virus deeply. But they dare not say it. They don’t want to go against the crowd. /6

All humans form teams, glued together by conformity. In everything they do. It’s what society is. It’s what makes these platforms rich. In network terms, teams are hubs. It’s the same pattern we see for viral spread. /7

Unsurprisingly. Because humans spread the virus. Viruses don’t go viral. Patterns of infection, including pandemics, are human social phenomena. To defeat them, you have to act socially, on humans. /end

Libertarianism creates a binary between individual and collective action that simply doesn’t exist. Those aren’t two separate things. It’s only by acting collectively, that we have individual freedom. /2

In everything we do *individually*, we’re acting collectively, at the same time. Even the language we use is a collective tool, that we shape individually. People who oppose individual freedom and collective action are usually aiming to just replace existing hierarchies. /3

With a new hierarchy, with themselves at the apex. You can see it right now. Trumpians for example have zero interest in letting us all individually do as we please. Much of their platform is ‘coercive control’. Just not of themselves. /4

They’ll rig Supreme Courts just to be sure that their view prevails. The freedom stuff is a sham. Often libertarians are opposed by people praising collective action, as an alternative. /5

My advice is not to fall into that libertarian framing. There’s NO binary here. And for Covid, this particular think tank’s obsession? /6

I and many others felt a shit-tonne more free when we were using the apparent ‘coercive control’ of basic public health practice. When public health action, and the pandemic itself, weren’t privatised. /7

Lockdowns never ended. We privatised them. People like my elderly parents have been sheltering in their homes for over 4 years, to stay alive. By libertarian philosophy, they’re much freer now. But that’s just offensive bullshit. /8

Like me they’re much less free to live the lives they had pre-Covid, unless they’re prepared to swallow repeated infections with a lethal vascular disease. They wouldn’t survive that. I might, at first. /9

Libertarianism is a con. And junkyard philosophy. It’s destroying the UK and US as we speak. We still have the chance to avoid that fate. /end

The general assault on culture itself, on inherited tradition and custom. Modern conservatives have forgotten Burke’s argument for conserving in the first place. Not to prevent change. But to recognise that what we inherit has been road-tested, over generations. /2 https://t.co/SCDNuyMSMX

Stuff that worked, through suffering and trial, and survived to be transmitted to future generations. Like your own body. It works because the stuff that didn’t work didn’t survive our evolution. /3 https://t.co/KSnW8cWR7F

Modern conservatives smash, they disrupt, for the purpose of replacing inherited custom and tradition with themselves. They’re not conservatives at all. Their main target is TRUST. “Trust between citizens and civil authority”. /4 https://t.co/B31Xxl235q

Yesterday I shared just one of the local think tanks, whose sole mission is that space. To destroy the trust in our civic institutions. In that case, public health. Social media more generally is a thermonuclear assault on this trust. /5

That’s what these platforms do. Strip away inherited customs and traditions, and replace them with a hierarchy of influence. Influencers replace custom and tradition. A recipe for total social collapse. /6

As I call it, it’s social dysautonomia. Like trying to do your own digestion, circulation and respiration. A society that destroys its inherited institutions is terminal. /end https://t.co/1BakAKPP1o

You often see stories about astronauts in orbit, with pictures like this. Claims about the fun of being in ‘zero gravity’. Even reputable news outlets and sometimes even science bodies do it. /2 https://t.co/6NoH20g2La

It’s a factoid. Completely wrong, but repeated so often it’s believed. There’s almost as much gravity in orbit as right here on the ground. These astronauts and their fruit and the space station they’re in are all just falling. /3 https://t.co/kE9MjwGEJJ

Continuously falling, and never landing. That’s what an orbit is. Falling downwards, and sideways, when added together, produces roughly circular motion. An orbit. Or you get images like this, look what water does ‘in space’! /4 https://t.co/rb8lLFIvZH

Except, again, this water isn’t in zero-g. It’s just falling. What does water do here on Earth when it falls? It forms drops. Raindrops, for example. The world of the factoid is social media world. A bizarre blend of narrative and fact. /5 https://t.co/poNIDG0leW

Where the narrative wins every time, the more shocking and tabloid it is. We’re seeing this now with AI, where most of the even serious narratives are really only some edited version of a Terminator movie. ‘What happens when the machines get smarter than us and take over!’ /6

Serious thinkers actually believe this nonsense. That people and machines are two separate things, facing off against each other. Because they’ve watched Terminator. Other serious thinkers counter with ‘a machine is only as smart as the humans creating it’. /7

Really? So the entire universe has only the agency that we humans inject into it? Tell that to the people who debug software, or troubleshoot network failures. Where they try to find the cause of a disaster that nobody actually programmed into the systems. /8

Factoid-life is knowledge shorn free of its institutional underpinnings. Where facts float freely in various types of social networks, ‘liked’ according to their narrative sexiness. Right now, we’re ’living with’ a pandemic. And ‘Covid is over’. /9

Two more outrageous factoids, completely decoupled from reality. But in social media/populist society, where popularity determines reality, these factoids are winning. Generate enough likes, and you now determine reality. /end

You come away from this show wondering how we all ever get food on our tables every day. Nobody anywhere in the world can make money, farming. That industry is dead. But we’re not even close to implementing an alternative. /2

And what does that impossibility mean? Maybe it means that the team sports of our political views and our economic politics are not reaching the realities that sustain us. Our landscapes and the food we get from them. /3

It’s not just that we don’t understand how to feed ourselves now. That’s a symptom. It’s that we have no idea *at all* how to live in our landscapes. How to shape them for the mutual benefit of ourselves and other living things. /4

We have urban and regional suburbia, farms and national parks. None are models for coexisting with the landscape. We’re not grounded. Hypermobile travel cultures that treat geography as porn. Places to ‘see’, not inhabit. /5

This is our specific toxic cultural disease. We’re still empires, we think imperially. We accumulate, everything. Including sights. We don’t form ongoing relationships with landscapes. /6

Clarkson’s opponents in his county want to maintain a bucolic fantasy of English country life, divorced from any practical means of sustaining it. A landscape itself created from bucolic fantasy, post-WW2. /7 https://t.co/zOTNgMfBDV

And Clarkson has no sustained appetite for the complexities of the same landscape. There is some movement on both sides, towards the other. But they’re playing team libertarian v team bucolic fantasy. Neither can win. /8 https://t.co/qejeGEIGlx

Even the longest traditions of farming that survive in this landscape are basically just soil mining, unworkable without supply of fossil-fuel generated fertilisers. And climate change is a major character in this Shakespearean tragic-comedy, laughing at us. /9

Flooding and scorching the same land. Crippling farming revenues along the way. We don’t understand how to live in actual relationship with a landscape any more. How to be ground-ed. /10

Our survival depends on us re-learning that, very fast. And the odds are hugely against us pulling that off. Here in Australia we have the world champions at doing that. We recently voted loudly that we don’t get that. /11

A brilliant show. It only hints at these wider themes. But you can’t miss them. /end

Because that’s now all adult life. We no longer think, we line up behind positions, in teams. It’s often so subtle we don’t even notice ourselves doing it. And the cold-eyed, often vicious zealous certainty it produces is poison to civil and civic society. /2

Social media obviously didn’t invent this zealous team sports. But it’s provided the mechanism to drive it deep into adult life. It’s an accelerant. Petrol on a democratic fire. /3

There are some issues I don’t discuss here, because I think discussion on those issues here is actually pointless. So infected by toxic team sports that it’s nothing but trigger words for mutual adrenaline and cortisol boosting parties. /4

We ask why we have ‘revolving door’ elected politicians. This is why. Politicians today were reared in this same culture of team sports. They look at an issue, and solving it is well down the list of priorities behind various forms of wedging of opponents. /5

Political expertise now is almost entirely methodology to turn any issue into a team sport. The LNP in opposition for example, as was the case in government, has effectively no policy platform at all. /6

Just a series of slogans, designed to fire up the team sports and vacuum people to their side who normally have nothing in common with them. Nuclear. Debt and deficit. Stopping the boats. All the drivel conservative parties worldwide have been sloganising for decades now. /7

They don’t want a policy platform because their main belief is that government itself is the problem. They don’t even deny it. They spend most of their time in government and opposition devising triggers for team sports. /8

And because this is brutally effective politics - populism is political heroin - all sides eventually converge on the same model. Social media is now more or less running societies. Look at the powerlessness of elected governments to do anything about it. /end

Epidemiologically I guess this is all about incidence and prevalence. Should we be using the average here, is it saying anything useful? As the cartoon says, you don’t want to know the average depth of water if you can’t swim. /2 https://t.co/EoQC48oXhk

SARS2 has a low dispersion constant i.e. a small proportion of people do most of the infecting. Given that, you would expect Covid will infect some people a lot more than others. Those in locations where superspreading is more likely. /3

Crowded indoor spaces like schools, for example. If you then calculate the average number of infections across the entire community, it may be quite low. But have you discovered anything useful by doing that? /4

A low-dispersion superspreading pathogen will likely always produce a low *average* number of infections, across the community. It means the pathogen is not being controlled. That’s how it behaves, when uncontrolled. /5

And given that on average a persons gets influenza every 10 years, we’re miles away from Covid being a public health problem even of that magnitude. It’s much, much worse. /end

That the outcomes from acute infection are never an indication of chronic, long-term impacts. Use EBV instead, for comparison. Seems relatively harmless, until it causes MS in later life. /2

Public policy is not a RCT. It HAS to use risk management. Anybody who tells you we know the long-term impact of SARS 2 infection, and repeated infection, is lying. /3

From the risk management point of view, we’re living a catastrophe. Because we’re infecting EVERYBODY. On a wish and a prayer. /4

Hoping they’ll all be fine. If they’re not, unlike HIV or any other virus, we’re in deep shit. Because we’re infecting everybody. /5

Imagine taking the same approach to that beloved economic factoid, inflation. We’re crushing people to fight that. Like it’s an existential emergency. This is what happens when you replace societies with economies. /end

This is a co-citation network diagram, capturing relationships between areas of study, in academic literature. The node size indicates the number of connections a node has, and the edge thickness represents the frequency of co-occurrence. /2 https://t.co/1ZwgNtTfYU

The color indicates articles belonging to the same community cluster (i.e., cited frequently together). (Description and diagram are at: https://t.co/wSufqvOxms)/3 https://t.co/yQ82DpjIWu

Our social world is also networked, in a similar way. But our public narratives often fail to recognise that. The groups (or ‘teams’ as I call them, to capture the rivalry between groups that drives the process) we’re all part of are the nodes. The circles. /4 https://t.co/kA1y4HdeJz

It’s critical to understand that each node is connected to multiple other nodes. And that those connections can *shift over time*. What this means socially is that for an individual, their ‘we’ as a sense of a collective is unique. Their connections are specific to them. /5 https://t.co/iDEnyyQWim

Political strategists know this for example. They know that any voter is never, ever, truly ‘aligned’ with them. That each of us is a shifting set of nodal allegiances. This is how ‘Howard’s battlers’ were won, for example, here in Oz. /6 https://t.co/aQkd0BjJNl

Traditional ‘blue-collar’ voters that historically voted for Left parties, who were vacuumed into the Right political machine by targeting other nodal allegiances. Their more conservative social views on things like immigration, for example. /7

Platforms like Twitter/X are exactly the same. Each has their network of people they follow and who follow them. Each of us is a node, with a constantly shifting set of connections. /8

Or take the current Israel-Gaza war and public debates about it. We think we live in the world shown by the map. But we never have, we live in networks. /9 https://t.co/4LLhmb79Oq

Networks have no location in the neat way a map wants us to have. The Israel-Gaza conflict is creating political ruptures across the globe/maps. A network diagram for that conflict would ignore the maps. It would include the nodal structures of that conflict, everywhere. /10

This is the reason for our disorientation in all major public issues of the day. We’re now living networks that look like the co-citation network. Open and fluctuating rapidly, with social media dramatically accelerating those shifting connections. /11 https://t.co/tWm70VqTsT

No sense of a ‘we’ that captures everybody, but rather a proliferation of teams with continuously fluctuating boundaries. And this is difficult, because what preceded this style of social network in our history was one with a very different topology. /12 https://t.co/01zt5doMod

Our societies have always functioned as networks, not maps. But the topology of those networks change. For most of us, the topology that has dominated our lifetimes has been a hub and spoke topology. A central node that dominates other nodes. /13 https://t.co/HxKgr6C25o

Since WW2, that central hub or node has been the State. We did that because societies were in ruins after that war, and needed emergency action. So a centralised node (the ‘hub’) drove and coordinated activity, across most areas of life. /14 https://t.co/P5eYdohfhJ

You can see the same topology in areas like transport. UK trains for example began life as a dispersed topology, like co-citation networks. But that created chaos. So they became a hub-and-spoke topology again. A ‘nationalised’ service. /15 https://t.co/KVsgRnkmhr

Which the Tories in the UK pushed towards a dispersed model again, in our lifetimes. Now possibly being reversed (again) back to a hub-and-spoke topology, to rectify the chaos. /16 https://t.co/Cvm8vQ1dw1

Still one of my favourite cartoons captures this merry-go-round well, at all levels of society. You may have lived it inside a business. It’s why you should ignore zealots who pitch only one side of this cartoon to you as a solution. /17 https://t.co/0zt0vhcMyr

They’re not a binary. ‘Small government’ creates more open networks, but those then create vast inefficiencies and disconnection. And that disconnection is also emotional and psychological. It’s the world we’re in right now. It’s why we can’t find a ‘we’. /18 https://t.co/bVtIgHYlIK

We’re in a period of history where our networks have fewer centralised hubs. We’re all having to constantly negotiate pretty much everything. ‘Personal responsibility’ society. Many freedoms in some ways. But also massive disconnect and inefficiency. And trauma. /19 https://t.co/Act3nPDIXy

I say a lot: society is social. Which means it’s networked, at every level. We will never understand it with maps or big containers like ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ and ‘the economy’. All map-terms. Neat boxes. Social networks escape all of these boxes every hour of the day. /end

While we’re all aware of the mis/disinformation dangers of social media, to me this other danger is more sinister. Transacting our actual lives on these platforms. Think about what that means. /2

That our social lives have been captured by tech billionaires. That we become dependent upon them, to transact our very lives. This really matters. /3

The same tech industry that is so often responsible for stripping away social life, now is monetising a seductive replacement. They break societies, then they offer personal networking as a lure to further monetise what they broke. /4

Criticising social media brings this shift to the surface, The number of people who will tell you stories of their utter dependency on these platforms. As if they’ve almost saved their lives. The narratives are often in the hallelujah genre. /5

Or sharing personal experiences as an illustration of wider issues brings immediate floods of personal ‘support’. But for me anyway that’s never the point of sharing those things. It’s profoundly uncomfortable and wrong to feel like platforms like X are a social home. /6

‘Over-sharing’ is the phrase sometimes used. When you tip over into transacting your personal life, online. I think more profoundly it’s a pathological shift in how we understand ourselves as individuals in relation to society. /7

I’d be the first to say the personal is global, even universal, that the distinction we make between individual and collective is fake. But that’s very different to supporting platforms which ‘share’ the personal. That become personal publishing. /8

Promoting curated online personas. We each become a brand, our personal lives swept up in games of imitative rivalry. This isn’t the equivalence of local and global I actually strongly support. This is libertarian hijacking. /9

We don’t become a more collective world by turning our lives into tabloid fodder for social media. We become that by sharing what is actually collective. Our shared concerns. /10

And using that sharing to progress action and thought on those shared concerns. Not by transacting our actual lives here, or an any online platform. /end

Robert Hughes saw this in his ‘Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America.’ “Thus the pursuit of the Inner Child has taken over just at the moment when Americans ought to be figuring out where their Inner Adult is, and how that disregarded oldster got buried…/2

…under the rubble of pop psychology and specious short-term gratification…The all-pervasive claim to victimhood tops off America's long-cherished culture of therapeutics…to be vulnerable is to be invincible.” /3

“Complaint gives you power - even when it's only the power of emotional bribery, of creating previously unnoticed levels of social guilt…In these and a dozen other ways we create an infantilized culture of complaint, in which Big Daddy is always to blame and the expansion…/4

…of rights goes on without the other half of citizenship - attachment to duties and obligations. To be infantile is a regressive way to defy the stress of corporate culture: Don't tread on me, I'm vulnerable.” /5

“The emphasis is on the subjective: how we feel about things, rather than what we think or can know.” /end

But we just need to do SOMETHING. To slow it. It’s built into the reality of viruses that they will fall over by themselves, if we just slow them down. Reality does most of the work for us. Targeted quite minor things will do all the slowing that’s needed. /2 https://t.co/ppmfAspDMy

Vaccines that are just good enough. Air that is just clean enough (not sterile) in places we gather in number and variety, like schools. All quite simple, inoffensive things. To be done calmly. Get that Rt < 1 and Covid is history. /3 https://t.co/nlJ2zitkoy

We do this multiple times every year, right now in fact. It’s what causes our waves of Covid. The virus IS slowed, multiple times per year. We just don’t maintain the slowing. Because politics makes us think in absolutes. /4 https://t.co/BOWTrGNDMd

Telling us we can’t stop Covid because it’s too hard. But we don’t NEED to stop Covid. We just need to slow it. And keep it slow. Doing simple, targeted things. We don’t have to shut society down. /5 https://t.co/IadFbc4iwF

That’s the Henny Penny of Infinite Covid minimisation, persuading us that if we don’t everything, we should do nothing. But reality was already going to kill Covid for us. We just needed to do something, to slow it. Exponential decay will do the rest. Fast. /6 https://t.co/Dq6l2G5fId

The repeated epidemic waves we’re experiencing are reality trying to do this for us. Life doesn’t ever allow any organism to win, all of the time. Every fresh new wave is met by reality, and suppressed. /7 https://t.co/P8F2aFkOYj

But we keep breeding the virus. By doing nothing. If we did something, we’d help reality flatten that curve for good. Social media societies exhaust themselves with absolutes. Zero Covid or Infinite Covid! Actually, we just need to have a bit less Covid. By doing something. /8 https://t.co/yA1yv8osMI

Reality will take care of the rest. It will give us the blue line. Thanks to @Globalbiosec for this final diagram, still too often ignored after more than 4 years. /end https://t.co/79wWVekwxR

Just as there’s no objective way Trump should be allowed to run a school fete. Let alone the free world. But placing our faith in popularity as a way to select leadership does this. Because that’s our culture. 2/4

High school culture. Elections are high school for adults. Where you get to choose who the most popular are. The most popular at school were often vicious morons. Populism is the end of every democracy. 3/4

The replacement of expertise (institutional)-led governance by socially-driven status hierarchies of popularity = populism. That’s what we’re living in. Not democracies. /end

I think Galileo’s “and yet it moves” can be the motto of reality politics. His response to sanctions for saying the Earth moves. Reframing what we call politics in this way gives it an entirely different appearance. /2

Once you accept that mostly the things we need to do are determined by reality itself, politics as we practice it just looks like what it is. The imitative rivalry of social life, using reality as a stage. Team sports, using reality as the stadium. /3

In a week where the cost of sporting stadiums is again in the news. Because team sports cost money. In REALITY. Our social games, of all kinds, sports or otherwise, attract a cost. In reality. /4 https://t.co/7Ro3pOaEUf

Right now the entire planet is the stadium for our team sports on Covid, and climate change. Where Team Left and Team Right battle for electoral supremacy, using reality as a football. /5

And yet, it moves. Reality DOESN’T CARE about Team Left or Team Right. They’re absolutely irrelevant to it. /6

Many think I’m crazy for suggesting we ditch electoral politics entirely. Like that makes me an ‘authoritarian’. That’s what teams in team sports think about referees. Or adolescents think about teachers and parents. Kidult culture wants infinite freedom to play team sports. /7

All day, every day. To play the games of imitative rivalry that Rene Girard identified as the foundation of all societies. Everything else will be seen as rain washing out play. But democracy was never elections. /8

It’s government for the people. Not by the people. Pilots still fly planes, not passengers. Elections were invented as one mechanism to connect the public to government. Not to *be* government. /9

The jocks of high school life have now gamed the process entirely. The Trumps of the world sweep to power on platforms of complete insanity. But they can, because we turned politics into team sports. Elections gave them their way in. /10

You don’t hire staff in a business based on how popular they are. You hire them for the competencies they have. And yet for the most complex ‘business’ of all, government, now we say the only metric to select leadership is popularity. /11

It’s destroying our societies. And much of the planet, as we play our team sports every day. Most of our critical, existential problems have known solutions. They’re mostly engineering-type things. /12

The facile ideologies of our political teams add *not one thing* to this process. They’re sterile remnants of debates that are 150-200 years old, at least. There’s no ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ solution to climate change. There’s just some engineering to be done. /13

Engineering we can’t get to because the team sports is always getting in the way. Turning the engineering into new footballs, every day. The same for Covid. Most pandemics are ended by engineers. They haven’t been allowed to say or do a thing, for Covid. /14

The teams saw the danger very early on with Covid, and shut down any chance at all reality politics would be used. Our modern societies are so materially complex that the old political ideology team sports fits them like using a plastic shopping bag as a condom. /15

It’s literally just hot air. Achieving nothing at all, except the promotion of the success of this or that team in the daily team sports. This is the high school culture I Tweet about. That replaced adult life, when we developed mass schooling isolated from adult life. /16

When the young grow up in that isolated world, the culture they experience and shape there becomes the culture they then re-make in the adult world, when they leave school. Social media pours petrol on this fire. It’s the shared infrastructure for social life for all ages. /17

And its operating principle is the same team sports. The economy of likes. Popularity. FB was developed in dorm rooms. It’s now where we transact most of our lives. Socially, economically, politically. A handful of platforms, owned by libertarian billionaires. /18

This should strike us as absolutely perverse. But it doesn’t. Team sports culture is all we know. It’s our deepest passion, as Girard saw. Just scroll through Twitter/X, and watch the teams. Every day. Without end. /19

Every time somebody tells you the pandemic is over, or that climate change isn’t real, you can use the reality politics slogan. “And yet it moves.” You will be excommunicated, like Galileo. And yet, it moves. Reality will out. /end

Education became preparation for life when schools became job training. Universities are that now too. We have this bizarre idea that leaving education puts us into the ‘real world’. But what if the real world needed to be a lot more like education? /2

What if the problem with the world is that what we learn *isn’t* being used? That a status quo has hijacked education, to make it about people being ‘job-ready’? Rather than freshly educated people being the way we smash that status quo and its problems? /3

To understand is the most fundamental way humans are distinguished from all other living things. Our whole lives should centre on it. We should see students as our saviours, the people coming through to blow wide open everything we can’t understand or fix. /4

When I say we flipped this, and it changed everything? By using a model of education as preparation for life, we paradoxically did the opposite. We created isolated locations where children lived a culture of their own. Decoupled from adult life. /5

And when they then leave school, what do they do? They remake adult life, as school life. Like I say, we turned all of reality into a high school. Not by analogy. It is literally that. /6 https://t.co/1stDMhnULh

Perversely, by excluding kids from adult life, and saying we were preparing them for it (we weren’t, we just wanted them out of the way), we broke adult life. They developed their own culture, and replaced ours, with it. What if we had done the opposite? /7

If we’d conceived education as the way adult life would be enriched by new knowledge, we would never have separated education from that adult life in the first place. It was separating it out, as childcare for workers, that has now transformed all culture to school culture. /8

And not a culture of learning. The culture of the imitative rivalry of adolescent life. The one we all lived in school. The one that dominated all attempts at learning. Sure many of us still learned. /9

And that used to be useful, when you left school. At school it might just get you mocked or bullied as a geek or nerd. But our adult life needed the knowledge, so it used to be an escape from that school culture. /10

But we let that separation of education from life go on for long enough, that that adult life then became a school as well. What else would kids do when entering adult life, except re-form it using the only social model they knew? /11

Right now, every day, try getting knowledge about anything - renewable energy, Covid, climate change - through the treacle of the team sports of adult life. You’ll be as listened to as ‘geeks’ at school. Because you are still in school. That’s our culture. /end

I know SO many people who still think that 2 doses was fully vaccinated. They haven't had a shot in more than 2 years. A fish rots from the head. 2/2

A desire line is a pathway generated by people all choosing a particular pathway, even if it’s a deviation from the existing path. Often a short-cut, a faster route. A ‘desire line’ because it’s created by the desire of people, in this case to get somewhere faster. /2 https://t.co/kspMv4CuD1

I say the term is misleading, because one of the things urban planners who study desire lines or paths discover is that the ‘desire’ in question is not always healthy. Sometimes the short-cuts are dangerous. Or are inappropriate for the old or the very young. Etc. /3 https://t.co/imYwb1jXrr

More generally though, it ignores something fundamental. I’m going to call a desire line any emergent unplanned social behaviour. What desire line research sometimes ignores is that the main reason people follow a ‘path’ others follow, is conformity. /4 https://t.co/wLEdLFsh4I

Human’s *deepest* desire is to conform. To imitate others, and to make that imitation into a rivalry. To form teams, in other words. Desire line research is making the mistake we make with our ideas about democracy. That ‘the people’ know the best way. /5

But all groups, of every size, are led. By about 5% of the people in them. The other 95% conform with what the 5% do. The ‘influencers’, in modern terms. The cow in the herd (there’s always one, ask a farmer) who leads the herd behaviour. /6

And this isn’t ‘sheep’ behaviour, it’s sensible. We can’t all know how to do everything, we follow others we think know better, on particular things. So, Covid? /7

When our leaders decided to cease acting against the pandemic, it gave the rest of us - the 95% - permission to do the same. So we did. We stopped acting. (And yes, not every single one of us did, I’ll come to that.) /8

BUT, and it’s a HUGE but, don’t think this means the ‘desire line’ of the wider community was to do nothing about Covid. Their desire line was to conform, with the people around them. Doing nothing. /9

Politicians will tell you ‘the community have vaccine fatigue’, or ‘people have had enough of Covid action’. No they haven’t. The community is simply following the lead of their leaders. And the leaders know that most of that is done via social conformity. /10

They know most of the work of compliance is to set up a common behaviour, and then let social conformity sustain it. Most of those non-masking ‘living with Covid’ happy types are very scared of Covid. You can find that fear in all sorts of ways. /11

I’ve seen ‘living with Covid’ types saturate a room with Glen-20 when a person who tested positive for Covid leaves the workplace. Or people in great fear of getting sick, but paralysed by the much stronger fear of non-conformance with the ‘living with’ charade. /12

Politicians are very good at what they do. Beneath their slogans about freedom, they absolutely target conformity. They know that mechanism will do all of the work for them, if they can trigger it. /13

And the most common way they do that is to make the conformity competitive. To make a binary, and set up opposing teams. To turn any issue into a game of public football. Humans find that scenario irresistible. It’s their deepest desire line. /14

To set the ‘Zero Covids’ against the ‘living with Covids’. The maskers against the anti-maskers. The ventilators against the anti-ventilators. People will literally fight to the death, rather than rupture the conformity of their chosen team. /15

Or as I sometimes say, people would rather die than stand out from the crowd. That fear of non-conformity is visceral. Once you know it’s there, you can’t unsee it. In what we think, feel, wear, drive, eat, choose as a travel destination. Everything. /16

There are of course a minority who resist. But sooo often they just generate another team, thinking that’s resistance. It’s not. It just turns it into a Premier League, rather than a fixture. We have a Premier League of pandemic teams. /17

True resistance is to reject the whole League. To tackle conformity itself, head-on. And also, history shows us something here. That only the entire League collapsing in a catastrophic way creates actual social change. The nuclear fission of conformity. /18

That’s what wars are. Team sports generate no real change, so eventually the team sport becomes a war. Our modern peaceful and prosperous democracies are only the intermission between catastrophes. /19

Brought into existence by the catastrophes of two world wars and an earlier pandemic. Catastrophes that finally broke the team sports social hierarchies. Allowing a re-build focused on collective good. The invention of ‘the public’ as a concept. /20

But those catastrophes are too long ago now. Add enough generations of people who never experienced them, and the lessons are forgotten. So now we’re heading towards the next catastrophes that might reshape our social hierarchies. /end

The Russian Revolution? We got the joys of Stalin, and now Putin. A century of ‘authoritarians’. Conformist social hierarchies opposed by non-conformists create…more social hierarchies. /2 https://t.co/1pFCvEltji

China exactly the same The dreaded ‘authoritarian’ CCP that’s the whipping boy internationally right now? Also the direct outcome of an earlier revolution. /3 https://t.co/qHuCvqe9Fi

Many respond to the fact that social conformity runs societies by assuming this means conformity is bad. In our political libertarian times, of course we’re going to think that. And we’re tragically wrong. /4

I refer to Rene Girard’s work, who made the study of conformity (now called mimetics) his life’s work. Gabriel Tarde before him was an even more profound thinker of imitation and conformity. /5 https://t.co/Qp4kIU729f

Imitation and conformity create our societies. It’s the most atomic or basic human behaviour. Tarde pointed out that those who are non-conformist are even more deeply conformist, obsessed with conformity. /6

The lessons of France and Russia are that humans not only want hierarchy. They cannot avoid creating it. It’s an ontological thing. Part of reality itself. /7

We imitate, in teams, copying our chosen hero in whatever area of life. Then our team comes into competition with other teams. Teams that worship other heroes. Imitative rivalry, as Girard called it. Non-conformists just imitate other heroes. /8

This merry-go-round is only ever halted by violence. Catastrophe. Either human-made, or natural disasters. Revolutions. Pandemics. But this just levels the playing field, for new hierarchies. New teams, new hierarchies. /9

Girard identified the circuit-breaker. Scapegoats. Behead the aristocrats! Vote out the [insert political party]! Clearing the field for more of the same. New hierarchies, new emperors. New teams to engage in team sports, thinking they’re creating something. /10

Regardless of anybody’s feelings about religion, anthropologically Girard saw that Christianity had done something remarkable. It targeted the scapegoating mechanism itself. Brought it into the light. /11 https://t.co/hBSypK1YEi

By making its central story the scapegoating and destruction of a clear innocent, it forced people to question the mechanism itself. Historically and politically, this single shift created Western societies. They can’t see it. /12

It was this shift that gave us centuries of accumulating social progress, through the institution of the church. You can’t really talk about this today, without today’s team sports around religion obstructing the view. /13

I’m not ‘religious’ in that modern team sports way. Not an adherent to any particular faith. But I see how the West in particular was built. By institutions that rejected team sports. That rejected mimetic violence and scapegoating. /14

That harnessed conformity in new ways. Rather than engage in dreary, bloody, endless wars of conformity versus non-conformity. What will be our next ‘Christ’? Many would like to think that Christian message has enough power for today. It doesn’t seem likely. /15

The planet itself is my guess. We will need to put aside the team sports to survive. Not out of some ridiculous hubris about ‘saving the planet’. It will survive without us. We’ll do it to save ourselves. Maybe. /end https://t.co/DBvI0BfB2C

Or take air purifiers and masks, for Covid. How we gravitate increasingly to only the most elite products, often overkill for a given context. Team sports culture is our default, and we don’t register we’re doing it. 2/2

My suggested shift in framing, which I think matches the actual reality, is that Covid looks more like this. In most places, R=almost zero, much of the time. But in some ‘superspreading’ places, it’s > 1. The infection hubs, like schools. /2 https://t.co/OTNf7qU874

Here are the competing narratives. “Covid is everywhere, we can’t beat it without fighting it everywhere, all the time (i.e. shutting society down)”. OR “Covid is hardly anywhere, except in some concentrated breeding hubs. We just need to do something, there, to slow it.” /3

Narrative 2 matches the overdispersed, networked nature of Covid infection. Narrative 1 is the politicised Covid minimisation narrative designed to stop all action. Narrative 1 is actually nothing to do with Covid. It’s really an anti-government narrative. /4

Used interchangeably everywhere the anti-government kidults want to shut public action down. They just re-ran their climate change script, for Covid. Then ‘flooded the zone with shit’ with bogus whackidemiology, to make us argue about ‘the science’. /5

EXACTLY what they’ve been doing with climate change for decades. We’re STILL arguing the science, for Covid. That’s what they want us to do. They know it bogs everything down in complete inaction. /6

We’re bringing a knife to a gun fight. Defeating Covid is a *specific*, relatively small targeted task. Ventilate schools. That’s all. Put the same HVAC in schools as other major public and private buildings have. I reckon that might just get Rt < 1, in an ongoing way. /end

For about 70 years post-WW2, the necessity of re-building destroyed nations fundamentally altered our politics. The world wars had stripped away our social hierarchies. Allowing us for the first time ever in history to deliberately design societies. /2

Rather than them be just the continuous exercise of the social dynamics of all human life. Imitative rivalry, leading to the competitive team sports of social hierarchy. Violence. Those team sports are *always* violent. Not because humans are naturally violent either. /3

But because humans are creatures of desire. And desires are both infinitely plastic, and fundamentally incompatible. That’s what drives the teams and their imitative rivalry. The specific desires they pursue. /4

Paradoxically, the most fundamental human act is imitation, *because* humans are all different. If we weren’t all different, with different desires, we would have lots in common, and naturally cooperate. But we each desire differently. /5

And so the violence of clashing desires is inevitable. We imitate others because imitation is the only way you can create a commonality where there isn’t one. You copy others, without becoming them. Copying retains the fundamental differences between people. /6

Also paradoxically, it’s only by recognising the fundamental violence at the root of human life that we can create peace. As we did post-WW2, where it was only because societies were in ruins that we got a temporary break from the imitative rivalry/violence. /7

We set up emergency institutions to re-build our societies. They then ran societies for several decades, leading to historically unique increases in health, wealth and peace. Then the happiness this produced blinded us to its origins. /8

We forgot the origins of this new happy life. We began to think that was the default, giving us licence to live without any care to the institutions that gave us these happy lives. Even worse, we made them the enemy. The ‘bureaucracy’. We replaced them with a ‘market’. /9

The market is an anthropological abomination. The idea that humans work best when left to their individual selves competing was a fast-track straight back to the violence. Ask South America. Many nations there now run more or less by drug gangs. /10 https://t.co/QDsZdvKGBJ

Without continuous attention and action towards collective life, all human societies will just re-form gangs. Teams. Teams that will then compete, leading to violence. A team can be a drug gang, a nation, a company, an anti-mask Covid group. It’s all the same mechanism. /11

So many are constantly bewildered at what’s happening in the world right now, mostly from rich countries who lived that post-war happiness. Poorer parts of the world don’t see anything except how they’ve always lived. /12

If we want those happy times back, unfortunately history shows time and again only catastrophe wrought by the team sports will tend to bring it about. Catastrophe large enough to disrupt the fundamental violence of the team sports. Another bizarre paradox. /13

Without catastrophic violence and destruction, there is only violence and destruction. Because desires will not be tamed. Girard saw only one thing that has ever escaped this paradox, at least in the West. Christianity. /14

By making the team sports of imitative rivalry visible through the story of Christ, Christianity built institutions that lasted centuries. Of course it wasn’t perfect. There are no utopias. But Girard saw this as a unique historical event. /15

The targeting of the violence at the root of our always clashing desires. And building institutions that made that competing violence the enemy. Just as we built institutions post-war. As Edmund Burke knew and repeatedly said, it’s institutions that create happiness. /16

Because they de-personalise, and focus on objectives that transcend any particular desire or lifetime. Of course institutions can be Kafka-esque too. Christianity coupled them to a specific target, the avoidance of imitative rivalry. /17

By crucifying Christ, who took upon his own body the scapegoating of imitative violence. By doing that it built Western society, over many centuries. Most of that has now been forgotten in religious team sports. /end

Because we live in libertarian (i.e. teenage culture) times, mention of conformity creates automatic negative associations. People behaving like ‘sheep’. But conformity is how societies are made, as well as destroyed. We would be long extinct without it. /2

We copy or imitate because we are all different. Not because we’re all the same. That seems a paradox. But if all people and things are fundamentally unique or different from each other, all we can do to link them is imitate. /3

We can only copy something that is fundamentally different to us. We cannot be that other thing. It’s that copying that then creates order. Because it’s a social process, we copy in teams. We copy to achieve and retain membership of our team(s). /4

We emulate those we admire and value. Baseliners in tennis might emulate Rafael Nadal or Bjorn Borg, while serve-volley exponents emulate Roger Federer or John McEnroe. This creates a ‘culture’, a social grouping. We don’t become Borg or Federer. /5

We’re all different. But our imitation shapes our social world, and thus our world more generally. Baselining or serve/volleying become things. Cultures. Even though we all do it differently. Or not at all, and that’s the crucial part. Rivalry appears. /6

The baseliners and serve-volleyers become rivals. Those two teams practice imitative rivalry. Each team imitates its style, which is then in competition with the other style. Those styles are social, they’re cultures. /7

You can extend this beyond tennis, to ALL human life. Even science, as I began the thread with. Most ‘thought’ is really imitation. We wouldn’t even recognise what people were saying if this wasn’t true. /8

Every idea or utterance would be so completely different that it would be unrecognisable to us. It must copy what came before, to be recognisable. All thought is a type of plagiarism. With usually minor variations, all baseliners are variations on a Borg theme. /9

This all matters because we’re trying to think our way out of emergencies, like pandemics and climate change. But the thought about how to do that has mostly already been done. By a relative handful of people. We’re not lacking the ideas. /10

We’re lacking the social process of emulating the right ideas, to create a culture that then enacts them. Our dominant ‘influencers’ aren’t interested in those right ideas. They understand imitative rivalry much better than people who think for a living. /11

They bypassed the thinking and went straight to hijacking and dominating the emulation mechanism. Once they captured that, they were free to pump it full of as much bullshit as they like. They ‘flood the zone with shit’, they openly admit it. /12 https://t.co/suv31ijnD0

Until we recognise the quite simple and fundamental social process in play in all things humans do, we’re puppets for bad faith actors. Until we see that popularity is that core process. Which when decoupled from thought and material reality, leads to endless violence. /13

I won’t repeat how this decoupling happened in detail, but in a nutshell we isolated children from adult life, in schools. The culture of schools is pure popularity. That’s adolescent life. When kids leave schools, they re-create that culture in adult life. /14

Over several generations, that process is now almost complete. Social media dramatically accelerated that shift. The entire basis of social media is this process of emulation. Of ‘likes’. The currency is popularity. Elections are high school life, for adults. /15

Meaning a social media and election world is a world of endless imitative rivalry. Of violence. Rene Girard’s world. Even things we call ‘market economies’ are just this same building out of an adolescent adult world. Look at its ideas. /16

The pulverisation of anything collective to be replaced with individually-focused consumer desire. That’s teenage life, right there. The fight to achieve your individual place in a ‘market’ of desires. /17

I also tie historical research into how this all ends. Because only two things have historically defeated this basic social process of imitative rivalry. One is catastrophe. Natural disasters, wars, plagues. Those destroy the social hierarchies of imitative rivalry. /18

Clearing a temporary space for a changed way of doing things. Like we did after WW2. It lasted about 50 good years. The other is religion, which creates a principle of life transcendent to our social team sports. /19

More or less well. Religion itself is captured by the same team sports, we know this. Religious institutions can share all the same problems. But there’s been enough transcendence there to eke out social progress over millennia. /20

You don’t have to ‘believe’ in the transcendences, to recognise the important role they play. That’s a tired Enlightenment team sport debate that survived into our era. It’s not about belief in things. It’s about having a transcendent principle of social life. /21

What we call technology also resists our team sports, because it creates a necessary discipline of knowledge and action to build and maintain. That’s how the Roman Empire was so successful, for so long. It put building stuff at its centre. /22

‘Likes’ aren’t going to help you build or maintain an airliner or sewage treatment plant. There is no ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ physics. But even that socio-technical world can’t resist popularity on its own. Catastrophes have sadly always been required to reboot societies. /23

Climate change is (in my opinion) the next catastrophe that will force us to ditch the team sports again. And it will be messy and lethal and destructive, like all catastrophes are. /end

As soon as you pick a team in that debate, you’ve lost. It’s pretending there *is* a meaningful distinction between private and public that is the problem. It’s the same with local/global. None of the cars or food or electricity or even water in my town is ‘local’. 2/4

Binaries are created to generate team sports. Our dominant cultural model. Here’s the news today, about ankle socks v no ankle socks. Fashions and fads - what’s ‘trending’ - is this same cultural model. Always comes with a binary. Two teams. 3/4 https://t.co/w9PyJOK6UT https://t.co/1ZD3mbmArK

What we call politics is exactly the same model, it’s not an analogy. Every day some new fashion or fad, which in politics we call an ‘issue’. With its binary teams, that we can back. All society is social. All of it. Even science, politics…everything. /end

Flooding the zone with shit is only secondarily about *what* information is out there. The real strategy is to allow the proliferation of information. To overwhelm the capacity of people to create a coherent narrative for public life. /2

This leads to perpetual confusion. Humans don’t like being confused. And that’s how bad people win. Because once you have people perpetually confused about what to believe, you have them doubting who they can trust. /3

And that’s what the people winning in the games of power today target above all else. Trust. To destroy the hierarchies of trust in our societies, and replace them with just one. A hierarchy with their chosen ‘Great Leader’ at its apex. /4

When a population no longer defers to distributed hierarchies of expertise in all areas of life, whether on what cars to buy, what foods to eat, how to deal with infectious disease - whatever. When those hierarchies are weakened and removed, then people will crave certainty. /5

And that’s when the Great Leader with their simplistic certainties pounces. To offer a framework of certainty in ‘confusing times’. The content of a platform like this is a distraction. Adding ‘fact-checking’ just adds even more information to digest, more confusion. /6

Social media is dangerous because its actual structure creates this confusion, by default. Scrolling through your feed here, what organising principle links every post you read? Nothing, at the level of content. What structures it all is likes. Popularity. Influencers. /7

That’s what the algorithms feed, and what structures what our eyeballs see. It’s the same process the Great Leader types use. Harvesting confusion by offering structure where there is none. This endless stream of disconnected thought bubbles. /8

None of it ever adds up to action to fix anything, despite the heroic projections people use. It’s not connected or coherent. It pulverises coherence, and by doing that pulverises trust. Vacuuming up that distrust behind the calming certainty of influencers and their teams. /9

Despite the gibberish ideas about democracy of this supposed plurality of views that we supposedly should celebrate, it’s the death of democratic society. Democracy is the purposing of hierarchies of expertise, towards the common good. Not the destruction of hierarchies. /10

The elevation of snake oil salesmen to world domination. Trump took the US presidency using this platform. When they booted him off, he created his own. We’re not paying attention. /end

What was the origin of the Russian autocratic regime, and the CCP? Both came from the same source. From social movements in the earlier 20th century. Social movements passionate about freedom. /2 https://t.co/92qxUFTjou

Both were populist movements. Set up to oppose perceived authoritarian tyrannies in each country. All authoritarianism and the fascism it can lead to has its origins in populism. It’s endgame populism. /3 https://t.co/Fj1P1X3OiI

What we call democracies are ‘freer’ places to live, absolutely. But we attribute that to the wrong cause. It’s not because we have a democratic ‘system’ that protects those freedoms. It’s because we have public institutions. /4

Those institutions are the checks and balances on populist power. Populist power unleashed *always* leads to authoritarianism, and then fascism. And those institutions of checks and balances are fragile. We only have them because of catastrophes in the early 20th century. /5

Two world wars, and a pandemic. That smashed our existing social hierarchies, our populist ‘structures’. Allowing space to re-build societies purely on practical terms, to survive, post-war. That’s what those institutions were for. /6

We’ve been basking in the freedoms these institutions provided ever since, attributing it to elections! Exclamation point there because mass elections only emerged in the 20th century as well. And they’re pure populism. /7

They’ve been gutting democracies from the inside out ever since. Allowing populism to hijack and destroy the same institutions that gave us our freedoms. What the fuck do we think this scene represents, if not that? Look at Trump’s re-election platform. /8 https://t.co/kssl5x0zLz

Where’s the ‘liberal, free democracy’ policies? Ha. It’s all spiteful ‘authoritarian’ revenge politics, about smashing what’s left of US institutions. Allowing the Great Leader to become the sole reference point for all things. /9 https://t.co/sCyPJQuSNO

It’s populism, freed from the institutional shackles that provide our freedom. Edmund Burke saw the same thing at the time of the French Revolution. How’d that end again? With an authoritarian Great Leader. /10 https://t.co/FSsxv12iKI

This isn’t rocket science. Governing using popularity as the main mechanism ALWAYS leads to tyranny. In the school yard, and at the national and international level. There are no systems of government, those are projections. Fairy tales. /11

There are people doing what people do. Living, socially, following some basic social rules. They imitate one another, they form teams based on that imitation, and then those teams clash. Imitative rivalry. The ‘politics’ we see is just that mechanism, rebranded. /12

The task of good government is a single task. To protect society from naked popularity. To do things that are the right thing to do, rather than the most popular thing. Like good parenting. Anything can be made the most popular thing to do. It’s just marketing. /13

That’s what these ‘autocrats’ are, schoolyard bullies who found a way, through revolutions and elections, to impose high school culture on the world, with them on top. Popularity culture. Populism. Culture/nation-agnostic. /end https://t.co/yoSoBsuQQf