July 2024

It’s also the Supreme Court effectively rendering themselves void. The law is now nothing, it has no meaning. It came into being as a check on royal and executive power. If that power is unlimited, the law is dead. And the courts with it. /2

The US is a far greater danger to the world right now than China is. Four Corners last night looked at how Western democracies are being dragged into a strong State Chinese model, because it just works. Western idiot ideas about ‘markets’ running societies are a disaster. /3

All that’s done is gutted all checks and balances and leadership, leaving the field wide open for pirates to hijack democracies. And nations such as China to assume a global domination that they will thoroughly deserve, having never given up the idea of leading change. /4

Without a State, there is no democracy. There’s just autocracies and theocracies. Kings. The ‘economy’s all-out assault on the State since the 1970s is reaching its apogee. That’s what we’re living right now. Where democratic States won’t fight pandemics, or climate change. /5

And restoring Kings with absolute power, above the law. Our ignorance of history has meant we’ve failed to see this pattern recurring, after more than 800 years. /end

This goes to my Tweets about how the most basic social behaviour of humans is hierarchical. Humans act and unite, and have peace, when they are led well. Rome showed it. The Pax Romana, when it relinquished its ‘democratic’ republic in favour of emperors. /2

Still one of the most sustained periods of peace and prosperity in all Western history. Marcus Aurelius (shown here in the film) was the last of the 5 Great Emperors of that period. Trump is no Marcus Aurelius. He’s more a Commodus, the disaster that followed Aurelius. /3 https://t.co/6NRrZ5fMsQ

But the fundamental challenge to our modern beliefs is really a question. Do people really want a democracy, understood as we currently do? As them running the nation? History says absolutely not. They rush to restore leadership whenever it’s removed. /4

All of our claims about ‘authoritarian’ nations like China and Russia misunderstand this. Strong leadership IS history. If you don’t provide sane strong leadership, insane strong leadership will fill the void. Because humans are social. This is basic social behaviour. /5

Why I’m so critical of the idea of ‘the economy’, this laughable fiction that people all left to their own devices will spontaneously create optimum order in societies. It creates nations run by violent gangs, who rush into the vacuum left by our beliefs about democracy. /6

I’m against elections not because they produce leaders, but because they set the bar lethally low for selection of those leaders. Whoever is most popular. That just leads to bread and circuses. Like Commodus in the film. Pandering to the crowd. /7 https://t.co/meI23TNHVs

If we don’t stop interpreting politics politically and start interpreting it socially (and historically), we won’t understand a single thing we’re living right now. America is a failed State. Because it WANTS to be. That’s in its deepest DNA, to remove the hated State. /8

It wants a king back. All people ultimately do, all leadership in the world is re-converging upon that timeless model. But there are of course great kings, and disastrous kings. Marcus Aurelius, and Commodus. /end

Both made their respective parties more 'electable', over a period of a decade or more. What that means is they took all of the strategic framings and barbs their opposing conservatives used to paint them into a corner, and tried to address them as if they're actually real. /2

Now they're proud to be as good 'economic managers' as the conservatives. But conservatives never do any economic management. They ride the upwaves of economic cycles, claiming it's all their doing. Then lose when the debt bubbles that fuel them explode. /3

Leaving a hapless Labo(u)r Party to come to power to try to repair the mess, while being blamed for the explosion. Making their parties electable just means trying to prove all the mean and nasty things conservatives say about them aren't true. /4

But by doing that, they already lose. They accept the underlying framings, which are all BS. 'See, we ARE good economic managers!', they beam. Good little boys and girls. Again, conservatives never do ANY economic management. Labo(u)r are fighting shadows. /5

Rather than devise strategies to completely screw over the conservatives, as the conservatives do to them, they spend all their time trying to respond to the conservatives' fictions, about them. And they advocate for a 'nicer' politics. Spare me. /6

Like the problem with politics is people arguing. People arguing IS politics. People LOVE to argue. That's the team sports I write about all the time. What has Peter Dutton done to get himself in contention for the next election? He's picked fights. /7

Started arguments, on everything. As Abbott did before him, and which Johnson and Trump are masters at too. They know nothing fires up the team better than a fight. To campaign on a kinder, more gentle politics is utterly clueless. /8

Good people lack backbone, and strategic nous. They lack the will to fight, and fight hard. To strategise. They think good ideas will implement themselves, simply through the power of logic. They need to teach in a feral high school for a while. /end

A fascist leader is just a monarch, without robes. One supreme authority, without checks and balances. The idea of a ‘Big Brother’ watching you is absolutely not what fascism is. There are no -isms, of any kind. /2 https://t.co/eHXAcbrXhV

There’s no capitalism, socialism or communism either. These are just team names in our team sports. All peoples of all countries are playing the same game. They don’t have different operating systems, where somebody plugs in a different -ism. /3

All peoples of all nations just exist socially. Using the same basic social mechanisms. People imitate one another, in following or emulating a high-status individual. That’s as true in science as it is in politics. That’s what peer review is, for example. /4

In our supposedly ‘capitalist’ societies, nobody acts like they’re living in a ‘market’ at all. It’s a complete fantasy. Things trend, they go viral, our nations are driven by influencers, which is then described as an ‘economy’. /5

There is no economy either. There are just people, acting socially. That’s all societies EVER are. Everywhere. The communists in China are just their influencers. Go and find me the input port where you can plug the ‘communism’ USB in. It doesn’t exist. /6

Ideas like ‘authoritarianism’ are the same. The MAGAs and their Supreme Court have just this week pulled off breathtaking acts of suppression that would make the CCP blush. It’s all just social games. The same social games, everywhere. People and groups battling for status. /7

We label these groups with names that hide the same underlying mechanism. All of those lazy -ism words. Cultures are teams of ever-varying status, battling for supremacy. Team sports, as I call it. It’s why we love actual team sports. It’s our culture. /8

All of these supposed analytical categories, the -isms, are just ways to generate team sports. To pretend Chinese people are somehow fundamentally different to us, for example, so we can fight them in our teams. Now Western nations are emulating Chinese Big State economics. /9

But Western economies have alway been Big State too, there are no economies without States. The pretence of out time that the State gets in our way has just driven the essential SOCIAL ordering role of the State, to China. Its Big State is doing the work we won’t do. /10

It’s building our cheap renewables technologies, and EVs, so we can continue our team sports at home on those issues. If we would just recognise that all people, everywhere, are only humans, doing very human (social) things, the world would be much clearer to us. /11

Rather than our daily cops and robbers, goodies and baddies team sports, with ‘fascists’ and ‘authoritarians’ and ‘liberals’ and ‘terfs’, etc. All childish comic book games. We need to grow up. /end

Many countries are seeing a surge in independent candidates, and success for these candidates. Democracy in action! More like democracy inaction. Independents rarely achieve any meaningful outcomes. Still the same team sports, just with more teams. /2

It’s like Formula 1 racing, a couple of teams keep winning most of the races, but you get a slew of minor teams following the winning teams around the track every week. The hope in politics is, if you elect enough independents, you’ll get real democracy at last! /3

Actually you just get Italy. Parliamentary chaos, as national, collective goals get pulverised into ever smaller grievances and their barracking teams. The solution to team sports governance isn’t adding more teams. This is humanity’s biggest challenge. /4

How people act socially is completely unfit as a mechanism to run their societies, materially and practically. It’s why history shows that significant change has come only when catastrophe has forced that change. When those catastrophes interrupted the team sports. /5

Despite the modernist bad press, as Girard saw Western societies only ever found one way to bypass this fact. Through Christianity, where the essential scapegoating mechanism of team sports was de-fanged by absorbing that mechanism within a transcendent God, made flesh. /6 https://t.co/EpbFYMgIhS

Or in other words, through a tradition that said stop all of that ridiculous gameplay between your groups. Nobody is the winner or the scapegoat here, I’ll be that for all of you, up here on this cross. You don’t have to be ‘religious’ to understand this innovation. /7 https://t.co/VPBktIMDfu

To suck the life out of the team sports, by redirecting it to a transcendent principle/person, a God made flesh. Now there was an arbiter of our team games, that wasn’t any of us. It worked for centuries, we made slow progress at last. /8 https://t.co/UYKqyrFHCU

Today of course that innovation is much less powerful, that message not just less effective but even unknown by many. Very many don’t grow up with that tradition, and like everything else it’s been transformed into team sports. What might replace it? /9

The planet might. Its refusal to support the basic conditions that allow us to live, through climate change disruption. We either adapt, or we die. As Michel Serres once said, morality has become objective. The right thing to do has become the thing we must do, to survive. /10

Unfortunately that will be more catastrophe-led change, the type that history shows is all that ruptures our team sports societies. Maybe there’s a version of planetary crucifixion that could step in to ease the shift. /end

Followed by 4-5 years of endless commentary and analysis on why what was promised at the election hasn’t happened. We go through this ridiculous charade every 3-5 years internationally. /end

The teacher sent the child to sick bay, who would normally ask the parents to come and pick them up. The principal intervened, asking the child 'do you feel well enough for school today?' Child nods. Principal sends the child back to class. /2

Refusal to follow even the laughably pissweak 'exhibiting symptoms' NSW Health guidance. I've advised the teacher to lodge a formal WHS complaint. /end

No matter the flows of popularity that we call modern politics, through its polling and elections, Brits love Queen and country. Social status is a national obsession. The honors, the titles, all of this is the engine room of UK society. As it for all societies. /2 https://t.co/LvQoXMeFT2

Others just disguise it better, behind more modern names and cultural practices. UK Labour will feel this is some sort of new dawn. But the numbers don’t lie. Long-term power in the UK is only ever given to conservatives, who protect status hierarchies. Topped by a monarch. /3 https://t.co/Mhu6i8oQc2

Labour or other progressive parties win elections only at times of national crisis, catastrophes are all that allow the weakening of status hierarchies. They’re allowed a very short time to try to repair the basic infrastructure of societies. Then the hierarchies return. /4

Feudalism is humanity’s easily most dominant form of social organisation. Because it implements basic human social behaviour. Imitative rivalry, the battle for status between groups. What we call politics is just this social process, disguised by other names. /end

Elections are performative theatre. A platform for existing social groups to pursue status. But even that’s misleading. Because the existing social status quo at any time is never going to willingly give an opportunity for others to replace them. /2

In most countries since universal suffrage began, conservative parties have dominated. That’s because they represent the existing status quo. Universal suffrage was only ever allowed, by this status quo, in response to perceived threats. They threw the threats a bone. /3

Quite confident that this wasn’t offering any meaningful challenge to competing status groups. And election results bear that out. Taking the Anglo countries of the US, UK and Australia as examples. Non-conservatives have won only 35-40% of elections. In the UK it’s 12%. /4

The UK is the origin country for both US and Australian democracy, so its status quo is more powerful, with the colonies opening up a little more space for alternatives. But not enough to even get close to winning half of the elections. /5

In Australia the Queen’s representative even removed a Labor government. Elections are a sop to a perceived threat, tolerated only insofar as they don’t meaningfully prosecute that threat. Societies have never stopped being social status hierarchies. /6

The existing status quo even invented a political tool to ensure this remains true. What’s now unquestioningly called ‘the economy’. Strip away the econo-bollocks and the economy is just a weaponised idea to prevent all action against the existing status quo. /7

The idea that societies are markets, run by invisible hands (i.e. by nobody). All designed to neuter governments, to make them puppets to a handful of statistical indicators, that enshrine the status quo. Elections are a sideshow to all of this. They change nothing. /8

I Tweeted earlier that on those rare occasions a party not representing the status quo wins, it’s because that status quo is floundering. Its grasp on material reality is so flimsy that a society is beginning to fall apart. Only then will a ‘progressive’ party be allowed. /9

For just long enough to fix enough things to allow the status hierarchies to get back to competing for status. Then they’re out on their ears, into opposition again. For long periods. /10

If you zoom out from all the hoo-ha of elections, you’ll see that societies over longer times are not battles between two teams. They’re a status quo, occasionally allowing some repair action. That’s what gives the impression of two competing teams. /11

With ‘the economy’ now holding even those occasional repair teams to a strict conformity with the status quo. /end

Change only happens when the existing status quo is so threatened that it’s forced to change. And that status quo isn’t capitalism or neoliberalism or corporations or Murdoch or the CCP, or any of our other favourite baddies. 2/4

It’s the SOCIAL hierarchy that is currently dominant. And made dominant by all of the people IN the culture. It’s not imposed on them. Everybody clamours for status. These hashtags do as well. Everybody can’t resist the team sports battle, for this status. 3/4

Coming here every day to pitch in for their team. Then confused because nothing actually changes, in reality. Of course it doesn’t. This social mechanism isn’t about changing anything. It’s about creating and maintaining social status. /end

The idea to create platforms run by popularity was business genius. To tap into humanity's deepest desire, to conform, to be popular. Social connection is driven by this same desire, painted as some warm, cuddly togetherness. 2/3

It's the most anxiety-producing state available to humans. Whether they fit in, ot not, and whether they therefore feel supported. Just some thoughts after a whole morning discussing the idea of these platforms as some sort of warm bosom of togetherness. 3/4

Rather than the pulverising technologies of division that they really are. The rampant, viral proliferation of battling teams. I'm sure people within those teams feel a camaraderie. Society is everybody feeling that, not teams. /end

A brilliant and lethal business model. Target our most fundamental social behaviours. We can’t resist. When discussing social media, you must discuss the full business model. Not just the bait. Many will rush to defend these platforms, because all they see is the bait. /2

To go back to @CoryDoctorow’s definition of enshittification, a succinct summary of the full business model. I’ve highlighted the ‘bait’ part. We’re already well advanced on the switch. Where your ‘connections’ are monetised. You are the product that platforms on-sell. /3 https://t.co/fMMqYg2UDm

And many smart people will say, yes, we know this, but we’re using the platforms for our purposes, not theirs. That’s our modern libertarian tunnel-vision, where everything is only ever refracted through the personal. /4

The much more important thing happening here is the capture of our personal and social lives. These platforms have become the obligatory passage point not just for business (ask the newspapers they’ve destroyed), but now also for transacting our most intimate lives. /5

Which company now doesn’t have people full-time doing ‘the socials’? That’s what an obligatory passage point means. The platforms have swallowed our social and economic infrastructure. Families now interact more on social media than they do in real life. Ditto for friends. /6

The platforms have become our personal and social spaces. The places people scroll all day and night, to maintain their friendship and family lives. That’s the switch. The bait got us in, now the switch uses our capture to monetise it. And it does that by encouraging fights. /7

Turning all of our social interactions into fake ‘debates’. Team sports, as I call it. Nothing generates likes as prodigiously. Imitative rivalry - the battle between teams - is the root of all human behaviour. Most of us know families now split over these debates. /8

That’s what surrendering our social and personal lives to these platforms will do. Pulverise our social relations into monetisable bits. Mention Aunt Martha’s prolapsed haemorrhoids, and suddenly your feed is full of ads for haemorrhoid products. /9

It really amazes me that people can’t see that these platforms are doing this, taking over all of our work and personal and social lives. Vacuuming up profits by monetising older social structures. And let’s talk about what connection really is anyway. /10

Portrayed as this lovely warm and cuddly thing, people connecting. How could you criticise that? Except social connection is that same initiative rivalry I mentioned, that Rene Girard analysed so brilliantly. The root of all social connection is rivalry. /11

Trying to ‘fit in’. To be accepted by some group. An act of anxious desperation, to not be an outsider. To not be ‘lonely’. Humans are social animals. But sociality is brutal, a never-ending rivalry between people, for acceptance and belonging. /12

It’s why these platforms make a fortune, turning everything into debates. That’s our social DNA, rivalry. Yes you can connect with people on here and form a group. That sounds lovely and ‘social’. Except maintaining your membership in that group is a continuous process. /13

And that’s even before the rivalry of that group with other groups begins. Then it’s just every minute of a day in battle. It’s why people have social media breaks, it exhausts them. Constant comparison and rivalry. /14

And what does all of this glorious ‘socialising’ and networking produce? A society? No, lots of hard-shelled groups, set up in opposition to other groups. Neil Finn the musician made a very insightful comment about societies. /15

He said he feels closer to the mix of people in a country town, than he does in a city. That in a country town you’re forced to mix with everybody, whereas cities tend to have enclaves for social groups. Social media groups are enclaves. Little self-contained universes. /16

A society isn’t made of millions of little enclaves, aggregated into a sum. A society is mixture, of everybody, forced to confront each other’s material realities. Exactly the thing that social media can never provide. It would break its business model. /17

It needs competing groups to generate likes and follows and revenue. /end

Only catastrophes create collective focus on fixing social problems. So many ask 'why aren't we stopping Covid?' There is no we. Too much time has elapsed since the last major catastrophe. /end

There are two critical things that we are, as a society. (Speaking as a rich Western country.) 1) Post colonialists (where we are the colonisers), and 2) post-war. War being both WW1 and WW2. /2

Because we’re colonisers, our history is immersion in material abundance, and cheap imported labour. We have no experience ourselves of being colonised. Our lives are coloniser’s lives, even though the most visible and explicit violence was well before our birth. /3

We’re used to having most of what we need, and most importantly of there being an alignment between our individual needs and collective action, to meet those needs. It strikes us as outrageous when an individual need is not being met. Even bewildering. /4

But needs not being met, and no alignment between individual need and collective action, is life for most of the people who have ever lived in history, and who live today. It’s the overwhelming historical norm. The default experience of most humanity. /5

That shock many of us feel now, of obvious things like pandemics not being addressed, is us re-joining the human race. It’s appalling, but then it always was. I’m sure the rest of humanity would affirm. And those within our own societies who have always been marginalised. /6

Our coloniser’s escape from that life is now over. And then at the same time, what made our coloniser life so peaceful and prosperous and easy, was that post-war period. When we had to re-build broken societies. That re-building made us focus on collective need. /7

Because we were re-building a collective thing. That’s what linked our individual need, with collective action. That’s when we got used to that always being a linkage. Except now it isn’t. Now ‘personal responsibility’ is the mechanism. Like the rest of humanity, forever. /8

We’re coming back to the pack. It’s that coming back that I think isn’t widely understood. We’re astonished that the direct line of sight between what we individually need, and the collective satisfaction of those needs, is now gone. It seems like that’s some baddie at work. /9

But it isn’t. It’s the end of colonialism, and the end of that post-war collective focus. It’s us returning to the rest of humanity. And no doubt, that’s a much less fun place to be, than being the looked-after colonisers. /10

I see on social media platforms every day the anger and outrage and disbelief, that collective things aren’t being done, and individual needs are ignored. To me it really matters that we understand this in historical, cultural and social ways. The history above. /11

It’s a brand new culture we’ll have to learn. Unless catastrophe strikes, which is increasingly likely (we’re living with a pandemic, ffs). That might restore at least the collective focus. Asia will probably run the next empires, not us. /end

It very quickly becomes just more team sports. The thing we want changed just becomes fuel to feed the social media teams and their solidarity and debates. Meanwhile the problem being discussed remains mostly unchanged. /2

So the platforms allow the mobilisation and organisation of groups, around an issue. But they don’t really create any lasting change for the issue itself. And then perversely the groups become dependent on the issue NOT being resolved. /3

Because to resolve it would dissolve the basis of the group’s existence. This is exactly like how we can’t get a rapid shift to EVs, because too much of society is so dependent on fossil fuel vehicle networks, for their (social) existence. /4

We become socially addicted TO problems. We become perpetual victims, because that creates and maintains our social cohesion. To go back to why I dislike the term slacktivism. As if there’s a better activism. Activism exists within a wider model of how society works. /5

Which I Tweet about a lot. It assumes some nebulous thing called ‘the people’ drive social change. Except ‘the people’ doesn’t exist. No human group, of any size, acts as an agency in that way. No group ever spontaneously all decides to suddenly agree or do something. /6

It’s always led, by a small number. About 5% of the group, history suggests. The whole idea of activism is flawed. It’s correct in that it recognises that all change must be led into existence. But wrong in thinking that’s about ‘mobilising’ the change. /7

As if getting everybody informed and energised will bring about change. Ask those in the ‘third world’ about that. They’re informed, and energised. It’s never helped them. We forget status. Only social status actually mobilises things in big ways. /8

That, and my broken record. Catastrophe. Only catastrophic disruption to existing status will shift what we’re all doing. The ‘puncture’ of our social equilibria. Sadly usually that’s mostly natural disasters, or massive wars. /9

And most of all, we forget that most of the problems we currently want to shift, are in large part caused BY THESE PLATFORMS. Their relentless assault on the social institutions that used to do all of the things, that now aren’t being done. /10

Social media implements a libertarian political view. Not by accident, the founders are crusading zealots, for that political philosophy. These platforms now absorb our anger at that stripping away from society too. A stripping away they largely do. /11

They absorb it, and then monetise it. They get rich first destroying society, and then monetising our anger at that destruction. They win at every point. Why am I still here? Because the platforms vacuumed up what used to be called ‘society’, into here. /12

You can be a dissenting voice, to that vacuuming. That’s real activism. /end

Contrast these two shots. On the left, a concert pre-mobile phones and social media. On the right, a concert today. An incredible window into a profound cultural change. The 1980s concert-goers are sharing a space. Their attention is shared, and focused on the same thing. /2 https://t.co/7karQNLYmd

The social media era concert has people all in the same space. But their attention is fractured across thousands of individual virtual spaces, their online feeds. They're not really 'there'. They're in their feeds. They're looking at the phones, not the act. /3 https://t.co/8OHCIJDNhd

And the crowd they feel a part of most is the virtual one of their online group of friends. Social media is not just networking. That's the bait, in the bait-and-switch. The switch is the substitution of their physical location, with a virtual one. /4 https://t.co/ljzduzOK0R

They're living inside social media networks much more than they're living in the traditional spaces of their everyday lives, with other people, often strangers. That's important, they may have many more connections this way. But they're people they KNOW. Enclaves of friends. /5 https://t.co/mubec1vsNk

I suggest this 1980s image captures 'society' as we used to mean it. A mixture of strangers, co-inhabiting a space and sharing experiences. A forced negotiation. What we call connection today is something fundamentally different. /6 https://t.co/rgUjOBXne2

It's a collection of enclaves or bubbles of hand-picked 'friends'. Usually of like mind, and interests. Whereas previously we may not have had a lot in common with the people we shared our lives with, now we can 'network' with people much more like us, anywhere. /7

Do all of those self-elected bubbles of like-mindedness constitute a 'society', when added together? Or rather do they constitute a proliferation of non-communicating, competing tribes? /8

I think it's definitely much more the latter. With social media our human shared interests can be pulverised to almost infinitely small levels of granularity, to constitute a social group. The connection is only within the bubbles. Not between them. /9

No doubt at all this has helped marginalised and vulnerable people to find support that they didn't have before. But social media networks are not neutral connecting technologies. They're organised around likes, and algorithms which convert those likes to dollars. /10

This perverts the connections you can even see there. What you see on social media, outside but even within your bubbles, is entirely at the whim of the algorithms. Those algorithms are written for shareholders, not for you. /11

The platforms also then enable the linking together and empowering of extraordinarily toxic anti-social ideas and behaviours. Ideas and practices which previously could gain little purchase in a community, the diversity acted as a filter. /12

I asked the other day, if social media enables this, why does enabling other more positive things excuse it? Isn't that like an NRA argument for good gun owners versus bad gun owners? /13 https://t.co/6xy10uQXF4

Societies are not and have never been about widespread connection. In fact they're the opposite. The deliberate, nuanced and complex filtering and structuring of connections. Hierarchies of experience and expertise. Sifting of the good from the bad. /14

That's what our institutions were for. Evolving from generations of bitter experience, to regulate societies' connections. Now it's open slather. And not even that, it's equally as controlled, except now the only control is the algorithms. /15

Those algorithms ARE our society now. And what's their purpose? As I said above. To maximise revenue for the shareholders of social media platforms. The complex multiplicity of social filtering, in layers throughout society, now all replaced by algorithmic revenue software. /16

We're seeing the collapse this is causing in our societies off social media. We bizarrely rush to these same platforms to try to repair the social fabric. The algorithms just monetise that same rush back. /end

All that social media does is replace existing social status hierarchies off the platforms, with new ones on the platforms. Often the hierarchies off the platforms simply use the platforms to reproduce their dominance. But over time that fails. /2

Because social media’s engine room is naked populism. Anything off social media that doesn’t run on pure populism, will eventually fall to ‘influencers’ on social media, who do. Politicians have discovered that far too late. Look at Trump. He’s trumped the lot of them. /3

He will also fall though, eventually, as all populists do. What people loosely call ‘fascists’ (really just populists) always reach the wrong end of the crowd’s anger. That’s because popularity has zero loyalty, to anybody or anything. It’s fashions, fads. /4

Nothing and nobody can ever remain perpetually popular. Look at those on social media who have large followings. How does conversation go, with them? /5

It doesn’t. You might get the occasional crumb from their table, but practically there’s not a single way they can engage with even a fraction of their followers. They’re using social media as a publishing platform. Not as conversation. Which is the traditional media model. /6

Reproduced here, together with hierarchical structures. Social media is a con, its main function is to replace existing hierarchies with new ones, under cover of fantasies about world conversations. It’s a strip miner, of status. Removing status from existing stats holders. /7

Exactly what ‘the economy’ is as well. A mechanism to achieve status, by pretending to eschew it. An ‘objective’ mechanism of allowing ‘the people’ to create their own order, in ‘markets’. Except they don’t. The fictitious markets just magnify status hierarchies. /8

I’m not sure it’s seen just how equivalent ‘the economy’ is, to social media. Both use the same beliefs. Both sell themselves as liberators, of the people. Except the people don’t exist, and nobody is liberated. It’s an attack on hierarchy, by other hierarchies. /end

(Incidentally I know some may rush to defend social media, because they swallowed its bait and it made them a new home in the world. They’re like social media’s own in-built immune system, rushing to attack threats.)

As Spinoza said, only knowledge really sets us free. We can construct straw man baddies, like capitalism or communism, or MSM, to explain why things are going badly. Things go badly when we don't understand them. It's the ONLY reason. 2/4

McLuhan saw that the greatest transformations to our cultures come with the change to communications media. Print in the 15 the century changed everything. Social media is a massive revolution. We're using it with the understandings taken from print and broadcast media. 3/4

McLuhan saw that it's not the content of media that's important. It's the way the media reshape how humans perceive and connect. Social media is a fundamentally new way of social life. It needs to be understood. Right now it's literally breaking centuries of civilisation. /end

The fight between what is true, and what is popular. What is popular being what allows you to fit in, to be accepted, by a particular group. That’s all peer review is, as well. Science does not escape this. Real truth risks actual excommunication, from a community. /2

‘Speaking truth to power’ is an affectation. It’s much more difficult to speak truth to friends, and family. Real truth will offend all of the teams. Not just create a counter-team. It’s not contrarianism. It’s knowledge that will challenge the very way we all live. /3

As Spinoza said, there is only one metric that reveals truth. Real truth brings joy. Everything else is team sports. The joy of ‘ah’. Of revelation of how something really works. An actual, physical sensation of liberation. /4

Liberation in understanding, but also liberation from the stifling oppression of group conformity. I’ve been invited to collaborate with multiple groups, in this pandemic. I always politely decline, or simply don’t show up (virtually or otherwise). I know how groups go. /5

The focus always becomes maintenance of the group, over where the truth of a situation may lead you. ‘Solidarity’, ‘connection’. Uttered as inherently good things. Both give me the chills. I’m not anti-social. I love friends as much as anyone. But not teams. /6

I had a good time at high school. But I also saw the brutality of the sociality there, and I see it now in adult life, everywhere. Particularly wth the explosion of social media. The technology of ‘likes’. Naked, thermonuclear popularity. Disguised as connection. /7

Creating ever more rigid conformity, as teams harden their defences in battle with other teams. Sociality is the glue that holds societies together. We need it. But it’s not benign. It’s also our most lethal foe. /8

Right now people would rather die (of Covid), than not conform with their teams’ rules. But the teams who oppose doing nothing for Covid are also rigid. They rally around performative things, like wearing masks or ventilating air. Both crucial public health activities. /9

But once sucked into the vortex of team sports, every post here just energises the teams (for and against), and fires up the likes and counter-Tweets. And makes the platforms even richer. Every click. It’s what the platforms are for. To monetise the clicks. /10

Social media is where truth goes to die. Where an ‘influencer’ can be spouting the most insane bullshit, and be worshipped as a revealer of truth. There are flashes of genius here too. Glimpses of actual truth. But the vortex of team sports will swallow those too. /11

That’s not to say don’t be here. Come here for those occasional flashes of genius. But don’t build a team around them. Being in a team will make you rigidly refuse to see anything. /end

What the team sports of social media has done, again (and again and again) is turned a highly treatable problem, with minimal disruption needed to most peoples’ lives, and turned it into a universalist narrative. A battle between rival teams. 2/3

Just as progressive politics loses every time it references ‘the economy’, those who want Covid gone lose every time they adopt the framing of ‘Covid is everywhere’. ‘Y’all’. We need to shift the framing. Not emote inside the minimiser framing. /end

Ironically, depression and loneliness drive many to the platforms, which the same research finds are dramatically amplified, by being on social media. Sociality is not an intrinsic good. It can be extremely damaging, because at root sociality is violence. 2/4

This was the core of Rene Girard's work, the fundamental social violence that he saw as the default state of all societies. Any tool that amplifies sociality, will amplify violence, both physical and mental. 3/4

And to the absolutists, no this doesn't mean throw it all away. It means question the benefits of hyper-connection. And thoroughly interrogate technologies that hyper-socialise societies, for enormous revenues. /end

We’re fundamentally transforming our cultures, and with them our own emotional and psychological lives, with our communications technology. We’re acting as if the platforms are neutral locations to transact our pre-platform lives. But the platforms are changing us. 2/3

And we’re not in control of those changes. Algorithms are. Algorithms written to maximise returns to platform shareholders. Algorithms that maximise connection and therefore conflict, to generate traffic. /end

The ‘censorship’ Elon is talking about here is basic regulation, which all media has always had to subscribe to. These platforms are libertarian attack weapons. It’s why Elon bought Twitter, to pursue those political views. The entire IT industry has always been this. 2/2

The cultures criticising it today are a bare fraction of the age of Chinese culture, and aren’t doing well. Our Western cultures, doing the criticising, through the overwhelming majority of our histories were led by authoritarian Kings and Queens. /2

The heavy restriction on social activity and connection that we now call ‘authoritarianism’ is maybe a deeper historical recognition of what Rene Girard discussed in his career. That sociality is really violence. The default state of all societies is violence. /3

Not because humans are naturally violent. But because humans desire, and it’s the clash of conflicting desires that produce violence. Cultures that last clearly have learned something about this, and we’re not very interested in learning what that was. /4

I’ve written a few threads on how what we call modern Western democracy is likely just a holding pattern, between more authoritarian forms. But it’s a loaded word. That authoritarianism may in fact be cultural restriction on sociality. To prevent violence. To rein in desire. /5

Populist leaders who run the course with populism become ‘fascists’. Fascism is just the endgame of populism. Then they become brutal, because populism solves no problems, and they need coercion to maintain control. /6

Today we’re in the middle of an experiment that runs counter to these deeper historical movements. We’re giving sociality free rein, through our communications platforms. /7

It won’t end well. I don’t care that people may love the ‘bait’ of the bait-and-switch these technologies use. It won’t change the outcome. /end

I once compared this to bicycle groups in towns, which begin as social outings, and become a pissing contest over gear. Suddenly everybody has the $15,000 platinum-titanium bike and $500 drink bottle and $2000 glasses and low resistance suit. /2 https://t.co/cewzT9SuJI

I’ve watched this happen with both masks and ventilation, for Covid. And also on house efficiency groups. Quickly the process becomes a near-fanatical pursuit of the ultimate top-tier system. No virion or joule of heat can be allowed to escape. /3

The history of infectious disease suggests something I’ve done a few threads on. We don’t need to stop Covid all by ourselves. We just need to slow it. Exponential decay will do the rest. This reflects an ecological understanding of pathogens, who live in ecosystems. /4 https://t.co/mm5d0So20I

It’s not just us and our immunity and protections, and them. It’s that and a whole lot more. You can make that whole lot more work for you. But the team sports of social media will battle it out over the status of various interventions. /5

We need good enough ventilation. Good enough masks when required, not necessarily fit-tested. Good enough vaccines. All of that will slow spread. Reality does the rest. Not sterile environments and sterilising vaccines. /6

One reason I criticise social media as a mechanism for solving problems is this. It will transform all problems into status-driven team sports. Suddenly people in a high-risk hospital ward and a local shopping centre will both be in FFP3 masks. /7

And true believers will police compliance. On both sides of a debate. It’s team v team. Sensible slowing of SARS2 spread can eliminate regular community spread. And is the only approach likely to be sustainable, longer term. /end

Social media platforms take the shit flooding one step further. They make it possible to make money from the flooding, while diverting collective anger into interminable fake ‘debates’ between teams. /end

To take ordinary people and their lives and weaponise them into fights. Fight, fight, fight. In teams. The ‘Far Left’ as just one enemy. /2 https://t.co/f4aUSHAHlN

The politics of climate change, renewable energy, EVs and Covid is *exactly* the same business model. Start fights. Because fights create and energise the teams. Mostly on social media now, because that’s what it’s so good at. /3

Using humans’ most basic social behaviour, against them. Imitative rivalry, transformed into a money-making, power-gaining machine. It allows bad people to bypass all of societies’ checks and balances, set up over generations. To cast those as ‘elites’. /4

Replaced by naked populism, the economy of likes on social media. Convince people they’re in a constant state of war, so that their team goes hard at it day and night. To fight for status, against other teams. This Tweet went up almost straight away after the event. /5 https://t.co/F6nSfxVO7g

The medium is the message. Yes before social media cable networks and debased newspapers pioneered fight-politics. But it was social media that gave us the team structure that sent it thermonuclear. Now everybody can roll up the sleeves and fight for the team, all day. /6

The absolutely fanatical response humans have to literal team sports should be telling us this is the deepest passion in our culture. Social media has transformed all of life, into team sports. It will destroy us. /7 https://t.co/7XlSBIGT9w

Societies are not really more ‘polarised’ or ‘divided’. That’s just the social media business model, transforming them into monetisable battling teams. Until we address the medium instead of the message, populism will end as it always ends. With fascism, and deaths. /end

It goes the other way. It makes every single opinion acceptable. But corrals all of them on platforms where they’re incapable of being translated into any meaningful action. Populists then vacuum up followers, united behind enraged opinions. /end

Not as ‘content’, on social media. Not mis- or disinformation. But by exporting a technology to transact personal and social lives independently of collective regulation. That’s what social media is. It’s built into the design, explicitly. It’s a libertarian attack weapon. /2

This is what I mean by ‘the medium is the message’. The medium has a model of social relations built into it. Where it’s used, that model becomes the model of social relations, for that society. You can see it every day. /3

Where I live the local council, which for decades has done the quiet and mundane work of collecting peoples’ garbage, fixing their roads, providing their water and sewer etc., has been under assault for a couple of years. Assault from social media groups. /4

The groups have imported libertarian ideas and rallying cries directly from activist groups in the US. These platforms have given those groups not just a foothold into Australian life. They’re plugged right into its core governance. Some may win upcoming council elections. /5

All of their activity - ALL of it - is carried out via social media. Feeding conspiratorial diarrhoea into the community every single day, ‘mobilising’ ordinary people around imported toxic ideas. You can see the same in the continuous community opposition now to renewables. /6

And solar and wind farms, and EVs. When I was a kid nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to the energy system. It just was, we plugged things in and got on with life. Now like everything else, it’s been weaponised by these platforms as a daily fist fight. /7

Not accidentally. It’s what these platforms are designed to so. Not just ‘network’ us all socially, that’s only the bait in the bait and switch. But to replace our societies, WITH those networks. That’s the switch. Accelerating rapidly. /8

The IT industry has been doing this even before social media was an idea. The great IT leviathans all have libertarian life philosophies, which they build proudly into their products. Their products have been disintermediating societies for decades. /9

Collapsing old social structures and replacing them with their products, which ‘automate’ the old social structures. Vacuuming up the revenue this substitution creates, to send back to the leviathans. The US has been exporting libertarian attack weapons our entire lives. /10

Look at the revenues going to these older IT leviathans, and now to social media platforms. Enough to make them small nation States. Silicon Valley culture is US culture, a society constitutionally at war with itself through its libertarian hatred of all regulation. /11

A hatred it brought with it, as Puritans expelled from Europe. Never again were they to be ruled by what they saw as tyrants. You can read the whole history of the US as that ongoing eating of itself. And now it exports the model everywhere. Every day on these platforms. /12

Older IT at least had to try to exist alongside existing collective regulation and government. Not with social media. Social media is the tool to replace government. It’s ’the people’ set free at last! It’s right there in the Tweet. /13 https://t.co/d4bsbbQ6vF

Only shutting these platforms down can save democracy. Which won’t happen. So prepare for King Trump and King Dutton. Because as I also Tweet about, because libertarianism is. a fantasy that ignores basic human social behaviour, all it really does is restore monarchies. /14

Feudalism. History’s most longstanding social form. But it kinda matters who your King is. Or your emperor. We need a Marcus Aurelius, not a Commodus. Meanwhile, people ‘express their opinions’ on these platforms every day. Thinking this is ‘the people’ at work. /15 https://t.co/qt6N8Ie61G

Thinking this is democracy in action, and they’re supporting it. It’s hilariously tragic. We’re setting fire to democracy every day, networking and mobilising away the social infrastructure that kept us peaceful and healthy and prosperous for decades. And yes I’m here. /16

Because society is now here. it was kidnapped and is now trapped here. I live in society, where else is there to go? /end

Societies are explained socially. Not economically, or using individual psychology. I think the US has so many mass shootings because people there are using violence, the currency of US life, to try to re-create a public. Mass shootings create public attention. /2

When a nation does everything it can to pulverise collective things into individual freedoms, those collective things return through a deadly, perverse back door. So often these shooters are deranged souls who feel alone, with no collective who recognises their pain. /3

In a nation that so often doesn’t recognise anything public or collective, mass shootings generate a collective attention. They create a perverse public, of sorts. It’s a completely lunatic way to do that. But when violence is the currency of life, it’s what people use. /4

The US and any other nations that embrace the ludicrous opposition of individual and collective life ignore the most basic, practical fact. That these aren’t two things. It’s no use others trying to defend collective life over individual life. That just feeds the fallacy. /5

You only HAVE individual freedom, by it being collectively enabled. Otherwise you’re doing everything yourself. You’re certainly not using a device to post here, unless you have a semiconductor factory in your backyard. But that’s not to make the collective primary either. /6

Because the collective *is* just individuals. Acting in collective ways. There is no group mind or agency. There’s no binary or duality here. If I chip in at my local sporting club because I want to play, it’s the same me playing, and working for the club outside games. /7

I just wear different hats, depending on what’s task I’m doing at the time. Playing, or running the club. I help run the club because it enables me to play, individually. There aren’t two entities here. It’s the same people, acting in different ways. /8

All of our Left v Right nonsense politics ignores this basic fact. The Left champions collective things, the Right individual. They’re not even two things, to back. They’re one thing. /end

The people whose interests were now being deliberately excluded, were allowed to feel they were part of things by taking on enormous amounts of debt. They borrowed their way into the returning social hierarchies. 2/3 https://t.co/iI1sPDVMEV

Once those debts became unmanageable, we reached a ‘cost of living crisis’. That’s today. A crisis revealing the true social activity in play. The restoration of social hierarchies. /end https://t.co/kqzdPBdPAj

Also described in punctuated equilibrium theory, the equilibrium being social status hierarchies insulating themselves from internal threats, and only shifting when threatened by catastrophe from external threats. Where are we right now? 2/5

I think we’re on the brink of a shift. The social status hierarchies are using populism to cling desperately to their positions. But the threats facing us are existential. Reality will prevail. It always does. The social status hierarchies will fall, again. 3/5

Populism is always the last gasp of an old hierarchy. Bread and circuses. You can see modern leaders drunk on the apparent power populism provides, ‘politically’. It won’t last. Feed your kids ice cream to placate them every day. See how that works as a long-term strategy. 4/5

The sugar rush of populism is making modern leaders feel like masters of the universe. Rather than the rush to their own oblivion, which is what populism always is. As Nick Hanauer says, the (metaphorical) pitchforks are coming. Populism is not patient. /end

Aided by the fantasy we call 'the economy', the headless corpse of society, the delusion societies will run themselves optimally if we remove all of their planning and let everybody just argue all day every day. But this isn't China v The West either. That's far too simple. /2

Because China is also the West's factories. It builds the stuff we're too lazy to build ourselves. Its strategy is our strategy, for us, it's doing the strategic thinking and investment we refuse to do. /3

That's why the cost of the renewables we use as well is still plummeting. China's strategic thinking and investment. Yes there are all sorts of problem with China, this isn't just a thread of praise. Team sports has zero interest for me. /4

It's just to point out basic 'top-down' planning and investment and building is what societies always need. There is no economy, there are no markets. The basic logistics of running societies need to be done. /5

Because so much of what we do is internationalised, in many ways the massive Chinese State is the State for all of us now, given our own are increasingly being dismantled by libertarian zealots. And settle, team sport warriors, I have no desire to let China rule us all. /6

In many ways it already is, because it's doing the practical work of keeping our societies running, for us. Our politics is all hot air, decoupled now almost completely from any practical outcomes. Team sports, like a perpetual State of Origin game. /7

We had an Industrial Revolution over 250 years ago. But we haven't noticed the next one began mostly in our lifetimes. In China. The factories there are a wonder of the world. (And again, team sport warriors, yes there are problems there you can use for your team sports). /8

We're free at any time to go back to actually planning and investing and building things. But we won't, we're trapped in a populist social media 'debating' bubble now. Freeloading off the Chinese factories. All tactics, no strategy. /end

(Aranet sitting on top of one of our 3 Starkvinds. Love the Starkvinds, thanks to @DrPieterPeach.)

@DrPieterPeach Aranet from @CO2RadicalAus

Not only has flexibility disappeared from the conversation, the workplace is actually now worse than it was, pre-Covid. The catastrophe was used to actually reverse previously-won gains. For example the old baseline of acceptable time off for sickness has been shredded. /2

People are now working sick far more than they ever did previously. They have no choice, they’re so sick that any sick leave they have is quickly exhausted. Only catastrophes shift societies in lasting, meaningful ways. The catastrophe of this pandemic? /3

Now diverted by existing status hierarchies, to further entrench their pre-existing dominance. As the world wars showed, you need complete social collapse, the threat of extinction, to change this. Those threats are building, from Covid and climate change. /end

Driven by the deeper social malaise in the US, where everybody wants to get rich quick, to escape the public squalor imposed by libertarian oppression. The US has been exporting libertarian attack weapons for decades, dismantling societies like dominos. /end

A small treat. Except now I often can’t. The local bakeries and cafes and restaurants are full ALL DAY. People queued out the doors. Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Does nobody ever eat at home now, or bring food to work? /2

It does feel like just one more facet of our rampant adolescent culture. Local events are dominated by food and coffee vans. I’ve seen complaints when there aren’t enough food vans. We of course know how much pressure came on public health measures, when all of this closed. /3

But that’s our culture now. Endlessly travelling, endless eating out or take-away. The mass rush away from any semblance of HOME, as a thing. Meanwhile I’ve never seen home gardens in such a disastrous state. People barely bother to mow, let alone grow anything. /4

‘Economy’ culture is a fundamental assault on place. On the concept of home. You will see it refracted everywhere, including in food culture. /end

About 25% of weekly income goes to discretionary spending on eating out, take away food, and recreation. That’s enormous, and reflects a real social shift. The one I Tweet about often, the extension of adolescent culture to the entire adult lifespan. /2

Adolescents prioritise these areas because historically that’s their lives, they don’t own homes, they don’t pay rates or raise children. But now that’s all of adult life too, in the numbers. And those adults increasingly don’t own homes either, or have children. /3

By comparison, and here we see the power of social media to transform the world into a US libertarian fantasy, their expenditure on local PUBLIC services? About 3% of weekly income. SM-mobilised groups, hitched to libertarians in the US, are going to war on local councils. /4

Over that 3%. Never mind the 25% on ‘lifestyle’ lives. The 3% is the problem, apparently. Many won’t believe social media is dissolving our societies from the inside out. They love it too much. /5

But social media is a model of society. Not a source of information. An adolescent model of society. A high school. Which we now never leave. High school culture is now all of our culture. Popularity-driven status. /6

No past - no custom or tradition is allowed to survive. No future, no planning for critical emerging threats. Just eternal lifestyle presents. ‘Living our best lives’. Fighting a pandemic? Where can we get good coffee! Fighting climate change? What about my trip to Italy! /end

Foresees total collapse in provision within 5 years. Only 20% of the local population is of working age. There’s an intersection of two dangerous social trends in play here. One is demography, the rapid ageing of the existing population. /2

The other is the cultural model that ageing population have endowed society with. In a nutshell, we have an ageing population, which refuses to age. Leaving in its wake a culture of adolescence that has replace previous distinct life stages. /3

It’s the second trend that is the much more dangerous threat. We have literally, as a culture, forgotten how to act as adults. The boomer demographic surge in population coincided with the incubation of a separate adolescent culture through high schools. /4

That combination has completely transformed societies into a single stage of human emotional development. Adolescence, at all ages. It’s why our elections now are like the Superbowl. Adolescent life uses popularity as currency. Our electoral democracies seem insane now. /5

It’s because popularity, as a selection mechanism for leadership, has been decoupled completely from the empirical requirements of leadership. Our adolescent culture seized upon the bit it recognised, popularity, and made it an end unto itself. /6

Borderline sociopaths win elections because winning at popularity is what high school rewards. We know nothing else. It’s absolutely obvious that fixing the practical problems facing societies requires no routing through popularity. It adds nothing to that work. /7

But we refuse to see it. Look at the multiple elections underway around the world right now. We can’t look away, who wins these elections is life and death to us. It’s irrelevant to fixing a thing. All the winners will do is focus on winning the next elections. /8

It’s a terminal self-referential loop. We don’t see it, we won’t see it. Rock stars well into their 80s are still packing the stadiums. Nobody takes responsibility for anything. Each age group is now maximising its happiness, living its best life. /9

There’s no specific delegations to each age to perform necessary social functions. Just ‘fun’ maximisation, for all. Like a metastatic utilitarianism. We have no memory. All of the knowledge and experience we’ve accumulated is ruthlessly suppressed. /10

Populists of other times, like in the mid-20th century, capitalised on massive social disruption to bypass the checks and balances of civilisation. This time the checks and balances themselves are as populist as the populist leaders. The whole culture is populist. /11

Experts employed to lead critical social responses now go rogue and establish massive social media followings instead, peddling complete nonsense to fire up the likes. /12

Social media is a wrecking ball, replacing media itself, but also administration, government, and every accumulated institutional framework developed over generations of bitter learning. It’s the key that unlocked and switched off all of our protections. /13

The final piece of the populist hegemony. Because everything is social, including economics and technology. Shifting our social relationships to these platforms handed the keys to everything, to their owners. It’s difficult to see how we get back, this time. /14

After the world wars the victors came from nations that hadn’t succumbed to populism, so their institutional memories kicked into gear to repair the world. Social media has replaced those institutional mechanisms now. We’re not seeing the disaster that it is. /15

Nobody did this, no baddies. We always want there to be baddies. That’s our adolescent culture too, like we’re watching Star Wars. It was the coincidence of those two social trends, of demography, and high schools decoupled from adult life, that created toxic sociality. /16

I don’t know how it ends. It may be our extinction, right now. Catastrophe will break the current social (popularity) hierarchies, but again this time we may not have the institutional reserve to rebuild from the wreckage. I sincerely hope something offers us a way out. /end

The way we’re approaching our problems, is itself the problem. Sociality has hijacked these problems, inflating them in the imitative rivalry of our toxic social games. Inside these toxic social bubbles we’re both impotent to act, and prey to continuous inflation of emotion. /2

It seems strange to describe sociality as toxic. We think of sociality as an unalloyed positive, it carries associations of togetherness and warmth. But sociality is always competitive. A game of social status, through imitation. The battle for belonging, in groups/teams. /3

It’s very hard to see when you’re in the thick of it. Going out to a meal or for a drink with friends just seems a happy time. And there is happiness to be had in those experiences, no doubt. But it hides a brutal process. We know social comparison is always going on. /4

Who doesn’t bitch at least a little about friends as soon as you get home from a social event? The things that annoyed you, the comments on things people are doing in their lives. We are always comparing ourselves, to others. Assessing and curating our status. /5

The student in the first Tweet of this thread knows it. Social media takes this process and entrenches it inside our lives 24 hours of every day. It’s why it’s so toxic. And why we’re not solving any of our major problems, because sociality never solves problems. /6

Proust called it the most empty of all human activities. That didn’t make it unimportant, just devoid of content and purchase on material reality, outside our social relations. We won’t solve any of our problems, with sociality. It will make them MUCH worse. /7

We shouldn’t need to steer obvious solutions to our problems through the maze of toxic social battles. To try to make those solutions popular, the only currency of sociality. They never make it through that maze. They can’t. /8

How do we save the world right now? We turn social media off. I think it’s as brutal and simple as that. Just do it as a thought experiment, imagine what would unfold in the weeks and months that followed that decision. /9

Yes those who have become dependent on these networks for social connection may suffer. But monetising and weaponising their social relations on revenue-devouring platforms was never a solution to that disconnection. /10

Others say these platforms are vital for getting information that they can’t access elsewhere. But that’s a problem these platforms also created, people needing the information. Turning the platforms off will give the previous homes of that information room to breathe. /11

No longer will sources of expertise be in constant competition with social ‘influencers’ to circulate information to a public. That same public will be forced to go back to those traditional sources of expertise, for information. /12

The easiness of access to information here, unfiltered, is what makes social media so dangerous. No checks and balances. Societies do not function with hyper-levels of social connection. Sociality is violence, competing desires. /13

How many of your friends are ‘with you’, fighting Covid? I bet hardly any. Even members of your family. Sociality solves no problems. Social media has taken sociality to toxic levels of connection. It’s pulverising our societies, explosive and proliferating violence. /14

We need to turn it off. To go cold turkey on our addiction. To allow the relative sanity that preceded it to re-emerge. /end

A few asked the vax status of this friend. Has been vaccinated 6 times, the most recently 2-3 months ago. And no, it’s not the vaccines that did this. It’s Covid.

I had to screenshot the actual headline, because platforms in their enshittification process also bait-and-switch journalism. Baited media companies by selling them us, previously baited. Then gradually stripping the capacity of these companies to post here. /2

That’s the switch. Our switch was to be sold as an audience, to these companies. Advertisers to these companies were then baited, by offering them both us and the media companies. They will be switched by making these platforms increasingly the only place to advertise. /3

This is the side of social media that is now taking over the entire world. Because our world IS social. All of it. It’s not just our ‘social lives’ these platforms take over. That’s us still hypnotised by the bait. Everything we do, in work and politics too, is social. /4

By not understanding that sociality is the organising principle of everything humanity does, we’ve handed over our entire societies, to these platforms. That’s why we now have what I call toxic sociality. Our own sociality used against us. /5

These platforms are now the obligatory passage point through which you have to transact everything. Be it politics, business, or even the most intimate parts of your personal life. It’s a bait-and-switch. The bait seduces us to join and stay. The switch screws us. /6

And sociality is not togetherness and connection. It’s violence. We crave connection not out of love for other people. We crave it because of our imitative rivalry. We compete for status. That’s what social life is. The more social a society is, the more violent it is. /7

It’s a total myth that we live in a time of ‘individualism’. We live in a time of toxic hypersociality. The complete opposite. Those who sell libertarian individualism are the most toxically social of all. They’re cults, gangs enforcing rigid conformity. /8

Have you ever met a libertarian who is casual and gentle in their beliefs? Whose ‘freedom’ for sale isn’t just an authoritarian set of rules to be followed, defined by them? Toxic sociality is not just a problem. It’s our ONLY problem. /9

These platforms trap us inside bubbles of relentless imitative rivalry, team sports, where the problems of the world are transformed into fake debates. They then monetise those debates. Every hash tag and like makes them money. /10

Everything that gets ‘debated’ here has known solutions. Those solutions disappear off into the asymptotic distance, the more we debate them here. Pulverised into a proliferation of teams, at each other hammer and tongs. /11

The platforms, perhaps originally unknowingly, tapped into humanity’s deepest mechanism of operation. It’s why i say they will destroy us. We’re breaking human civilisation. Sleepwalking to our own destruction. Because we’re so well baited. We can’t resist the sugar hit. /end

Also in today’s Herald, a piece on the continuing free fall of birth rates. People ‘can’t afford’ to have children, the cost of living is too high. I want to draw these themes together, as a window into what we are now, socially. /2 https://t.co/iNWCuZ3q4M

The boomer flight from any role except ‘cuddles’ with the grandchildren, and towards recreational retirement reflects a generation that led the charge in the now rampant adolescence of all culture. But at the same time a grandparent role shouldn’t be ‘childcare’ for workers. /3

They’re right to reject that. We put both children and the aged in ‘care’ because only healthy adult life is now legitimate. Workers for the economy. Get everybody else, young and old, out of the way, so people can work. Both parents. /4

This is the collapse of any sense of a circle of life in a society, of the sophisticated interplay of all age groups. Babysit the young and old. Keep them out of the way of the economy. Infect the kids at school and elderly in aged care with Covid for the same reason. /5

Keeping both the young and old healthy requires commitment to a family and home, rather than just a job. An economy can’t allow it. The job is the only social unit of measure that has validity. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’ some politicians proudly say. /6

Going back to the plunging birth rates, described as a cost of living crisis. Just think about how arse-end about that framing is. We can only have children as a species, when ‘the economy’ allows it. We can’t ‘afford’ to reproduce. That’s extinction thinking. /7

Life is reproduction, before it’s anything else. It exists to reproduce. If that’s not the centre of any society, it’s a dead society. If your social system makes reproduction dependent on ‘affording’ offspring, again you’re on a fast-track to extinction. /8

This should be reframed every day as ‘we can’t afford to have kids, the economy is broken’. Not ‘when the economy improves, we can have kids again’. ‘The economy’ is econo-babble wrapped around a status quo. The sidelining of complex social life, in favour of a social group. /9

This isn’t to suggest a return to older social models of large families all living under one roof, though interestingly cost of living is forcing that model back upon us anyway. There might be other ways to make the young and old vital social roles again. /10

Rather than dumping them into ‘care’ i.e. getting them out of the way. As I Tweet about often, it was getting kids out of the way in separate high schools that generated our adolescent culture in the first place. Adolescents don’t generally want responsibility. /11

They want to have fun. That’s their stage of life. Except that’s now every stage of life. That’s the social structure ‘the economy’ protects. Not capitalism or MSM or all those other ridiculous pantomime baddies. /end

Apologies that this appears to have posted twice.

And right now you see the sort of ultraconservative hubris that Howard's later years were infected with, here in Oz. The triumphalism leading to collapse. Project 2025 is a measure of the confidence. So often in politics, it precedes a fall. /end

No Left. No Right. Ideology warriors can retire to coffee shops to have their juvenile debates over bodies of ideas often centuries old and irrelevant. Just fixing problems. Rather than using the problems as fuel for team sports. /2

Reframe how you see democracy. As a populist, unneeded barrier between problems and their resolution. A barrier of having to make something popular, to get it done. As if that matters. /3

Popularity is not a means to an end. It’s an end. Feeding only itself, in increasingly hysterical cycles of fads and fashions. Fuelled by the idiot DNA of these platforms. There are simple, calm solutions to all of our problems. Known solutions. Sitting there in the shed. /4

While we play team sports here every day. Thinking the winning team will go to the shed and get the solutions. They never do. They celebrate victory in the team sports and prepare for the next popularity Superbowl. /end

That doesn’t mean be a hermit. It does mean sociality is a stage that you’re supposed to try to move beyond. And that’s life’s toughest challenge. It’s easy to see this challenge when it’s the ‘enemies’ on opposing teams. It’s much tougher when it’s those closest to you. /2

For those who see this as some sort of alarming pessimism, it isn’t any form of -ism. Just confronting the truth of our lives head-on. It’s much more ridiculous to think human social relations are more important than reality. Reality literally kills those who think that. /3

Both individually and collectively. As those who train young drivers know, one of the clearest things you can do to keep them alive is to separate their driving from their social lives. They’re not permitted where I live to carry friends in the car in certain situations. /4

We know that sociality is dangerous. That the right thing is never the most popular thing. It’s almost the most reliable test of the truth of something, its popularity. The truth isn’t unpopular either It’s neither popular or unpopular. It creates total incomprehension. /5

Genuine truth-tellers are not admired or reviled. They’re simply ignored, what they say doesn’t even register amongst our social teams. They’re using an entirely different currency for life. Knowledge. Don’t think for one second science or other fields escape this either. /6

If anything the social team sports is even stronger there. I spent a lot of years helping to govern academic work. It’s brutal team sports. If you choose the path of actual knowledge, it will be mostly a solitary life. Why this remains the picture I decorate my profile with. /7 https://t.co/QQ14t4PXUu

Spinoza’s life was that. He was excommunicated from his entire community. He wasn’t a contrarian or polemicist. He had no interest in team sports at all. Only in knowledge. We don’t understand just how anti-social that really is. /8 https://t.co/ragpdECkp4

Unavoidably and necessarily so. The truth cannot survive the imitative rivalry of team sports, at some point you’re always forced to make concessions, to keep group unity. Only very, very few people can truly live in a way where that doesn’t matter to them. /9

Even those we champion as leaders of thought, in any age, are usually deeply involved in social group dynamics. We don’t see truth because those dynamics are the bedrock of human life. Spinoza said only the feeling of true joy reveals truth. Everything else is team sports. /10

The feeling of actual revelation, of the truth of a situation. It will always be joyful. Nietzsche sensed this too, writing brilliantly of the resentment that dominates most of what we call knowledge. The bitter rivalries. /11

Right now in a pandemic, for example, you are certainly closer to the truth if you’re avoiding infection, wearing a mask and taking other mitigations. But that’s become teams too, injected into the team sports. We’re such fundamentally social creatures that we don’t notice. /12

Most who follow that path are not experiencing much joy, in my experience. (And I’m following that path.) They’re absolutely doing the right thing. But it means the truth of our current situation is still hidden. We’ll know we’ve found it when we feel joy at the revelation. /13

The truth always sets you free. It’s the only thing that will. All the other war cries around freedom today are just more team sports. I feel genuine joy in my life, even in these ridiculous times. Persisting with thinking through our situation has done that. /14

To go well beyond the public health framings, into understanding why what we’re living is some pretty basic social dynamics shared across all ages of history. Once you know that, you can’t see things the same way again, in my experience. It brings actual joy. /15

It doesn’t resolve things in the here and now, straight away. But the truth will, eventually. Because it’s reality speaking. And nothing can beat reality. If you play the long game. That’s another joy-giving truth, the humility of understanding the long game. /16

Of genuinely not caring as this or that person or group has their petty little teams sports victory in the here and now. Yes people are harmed or even killed by the team sports. There are no utopias, ever. But in the long run, only reality ever wins. /17

If you align yourself with what I call reality politics, you always win. Even when it looks like you’re losing. Time will correct the ledger. The humility of playing the long game. There’s real joy in that. Because reality is on your side. /end

When the entirety of our social lives is transacted on platforms that weaponise and monetise this same process, conformity grows exponentially. Because it’s not just conformity that is the root of social life. It’s competing conformities. Groups, or I prefer the word teams. /2

Teams captures the competitive process better than groups. Imitative rivalry, as Rene Girard called it. So we end up with an exponential increase in both conformity, and a proliferation of teams. A cesspit of proliferating and competing conformities, plural. /3

Which, as Girard showed, always produces the same thing. Violence. Both physical violence, and violence to what today we call our mental health. Nothing creates more anxiety in humans than this process of trying to conform. To belong. We call it ‘connection’. /4

Which sanitises the brutality of what’s actually going on. We want to connect because we want to belong. To belong, we conform. To conform is just peer pressure. To be non-conformist, as above, is even more peer pressure, not an escape from it. /5

Often when I raise this topic, people will say something like ‘proudly non-conformist my whole life’. But that only makes a person even more wedded to and infected by this same process. Non-conformists are obsessed with conformity. It’s their whole raison d’être. /6

As Noam Shpancer says in the original link, when acting socially you are *always* acting for a group. The same is true for both conformists and non-conformists. Our whole lives use what we learn in high school. The continuous negotiation of group memberships. /7

What we call politics, or science, or any of our other adult activities, when stripped back, are exactly this same mechanism in play. Constant negotiation of group memberships and boundaries. The more social we become, the more intensely the mechanism runs. /8

And therefore the more violent and anxious we become. The answer to most of the world’s problems right now is to be a lot LESS social. To just let different jobs get done, without interference from sociality. To ‘mind our own business’, literally, again. /9

To let public health professionals fix pandemics, and climate scientists climate change. To not have to negotiate thousands of teams of ignorant foaming at the mouth zealots getting in the way, by transforming somebody else’s business into fuel for their team sports. /10

It’s like that old joke. To get directions to where we need to go, ‘I wouldn’t start from here’. Social media IS the trap that we’re stuck inside. It makes all of the problems we want to solve infinitely worse. Because social life is not a problem solver. /11

Use it as that, and your problems explode. I’m sure we’re all feeling that right now. Social life can rally people *around* solutions, to conform to them. But those solutions won’t come from social life. Only rivalry comes from that, between teams, battling for status. /12

If we want our problems fixed, and fast (and they need fast action), we need to turn social media off. Desperate times need desperate measures. We need to allow people to go back to minding their own business. To get stuff done. /end

It’s not actually the devices that are the key here, despite the popular narratives. It’s the social media apps on them. We use the devices to feed our social media addictions. Addictions in turn that access our deepest social behaviours. /2

We increasingly inhabit a bubble-cycle. As we feed our lives onto the platforms, it’s that return ‘feed’ from the platforms back into our everyday lives that is less noticed. Our lives are now a ‘feed’ as well. We’re transformed by the platforms. /3

As we plug our thoughts and desires and social relationships into the social media maelstrom, our lives are swept into the imitative rivalry that is the currency there. Those virtual selves are shaped while there, and then feed back into our everyday lives, shaping those. /4

People even end up having surgery, to transform their identities and appearances, to better fit with the imitative rivalry on social media. It’s a continuous circulating looping, mediated by the phone/device. /5

At the centre of those loopings are the algorithms. Tweaked to maximise return to platform owners and shareholders. It’s the algorithms that are now the structuring principle of our societies themselves. What do we know about them? /6

Almost nothing. Except that they deliberately stir up imitative rivalry between groups, because that drives attention and clicks, which in turn generates revenue. Which in turn transforms our lives off the platforms, seeding discord and violence. /7

I had to block a person this morning, somebody infected by the team sports of the platform, who jumped into a discussion about something completely unrelated to their cause célèbre. Within 2-3 Tweets, they were abusively claiming violations on topics with zero relevance. /8

When their own team has exhausted every permutation of righteous anger amongst themselves, they hijack other discussions to keep the fire burning. They NEED the battles. That’s the algorithms at work, transforming ordinary folk into cold-eyed crusading zealots. /9

@doctorow’s concept of enshittification beautifully describes the capturing part of these cycling loops. Where users, advertisers and publishers are captured by the platforms, before having their wallets emptied. I think it doesn’t describe the return feed as well. /10

We’re not all just having our lives strip-mined by these platforms, for revenue. They’re transforming our social relations. Reshaping how we think and feel and act. Transforming everyday lives into ‘debates’, into causes we have to become warriors for. Into violence. /11

I think we’ve lost sight of the way these platforms are now the way we transact life itself. Everything from our most personal and intimate life, through to our working and political lives. We’re living inside bubbles where ordinary life is transformed into team sports. /12

Because we didn’t understand that everything we do is social, even the most abstract or technical thing, or political or economic, we let these platforms capture *everything*. Our entire societies. The algorithms replaced the lot. /end

But that’s what social media does. They go looking for prey, to feed the team sports. We all see it with Covid too, the pile-on over masks, vaccinations, ventilation etc. Originally politicians developed the ‘pick a fight’ strategy to energise apathetic voters. 2/4

Social media institutionalises it. That’s its revenue model. Social life is not benign. It’s imitation and rivalry, the battle for status. The more we connect the world, the more violent it will become. And the more rigidly resistant to change of any kind. 3/4

Including any action against outright emergencies, like Covid and climate change. Social life/connection doesn’t solve problems. It makes them impossible to solve. /end