October 2024

Tourism, transport, petrochemicals, fashion…just some of the ways the status quo is dependent on fossil fuels. The status quo is a social creation, maintained through the networks that form our societies. Would that it was as easy as shutting down just one industry. 2/5

As @EdConwaySky describes, the new industrial revolution needed to save us means re-building nearly everything, all of these networks. By focusing only on energy we’re missing the intricate complexity of the status quo. 3/5

It’s that complexity which makes the status quo pretty much impossible to shift, without catastrophic disruption. Resistance will come from every turn, as we’re finding. A society has all its habits and rules at once, I think Rousseau said. The status quo is that knot. 4/5

It’s why meaningful change historically has only come from the destruction of an existing status quo. Not through any gradual planning process. Catastrophe. /end

When confronted with a view like this (photo: https://t.co/es4zEK9YPw), what’s the appropriate response? It brought into sharp relief that Australians, like many developed peoples, are tourists in their own landscapes. /2 https://t.co/ONMY2fysiZ

We treat them as ‘sights’, to be seen. Large landscape paintings. Like 18th century aristocrats, who would go so far as to have the landscape created to suit an ideal form, by luminaries such as Capability Brown. /3 (Photo: https://t.co/nIM8szjMqo) https://t.co/yr7ZbNBDr6

And the Australian landscape is also largely constructed, not ‘natural’. Either by deliberate intervention, by farming and forestry, or left to grow ‘naturally’, itself an intervention, removing thousands of years of human interaction with the landscape. /4

Many of these glorious views are landscapes in a lot of trouble. I noticed a lot of incredibly straight trees growing very close together, where I was visiting. I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that reflects disturbance, young trees in competitive regrowth. Young, not old. /5

And of course Gammage’s magnificent exploration of just how landscape-d the Australian landscape is, by Indigenous Australians over tens of thousands of years. Much of what we see today is that thousands of years of work lying in ruins. But it looks pretty. To a naive eye. /6 https://t.co/VytYVTsaJI

Which brings me back to place. Australians, like much of the developed world, have a Madonna-whore relationship to place. Either ‘working’ the landscape, usually to monocultural farming, forestry and mining ends. Or admiring it as a sight. Tourists in our own land. /7

And this is what I mean by saying Western cultures in particular no longer have an understanding of place. We literally have no idea how to live in our landscapes. Even calling them landscapes reflects that. No idea how to be in *relationship* with them. /8

Either using them as resources to be farmed and mined. Or views to be admired. Or locations for our Crocodile Dundee back to nature fantasies. Dundee is our own Elvis, the white (admiring) appropriation of a black culture. Look at the team sports this confused mess produces. /9

We either shoot kangaroos for pet food, or put them in TV commercials to celebrate their quirkiness. To get the tourists in, including ourselves. We have no idea how to have any sort of meaningful relationship with any of our flora, fauna or wider geography. /10

That’s the existential void that drives us to travel, obsessively. Thinking that by accumulating more and more sights, we will somehow close that void. That absence of any sense of place. Of home. Home to us is an address. A node in a wider transportation network. /11

The roads in our suburbs aren’t places. They’re no-places. They’re a space designed entirely to take us to other spaces. All our roads connect. You can get from anywhere, to anywhere else. That’s the point. The highways in northern NSW are fenced. /12 https://t.co/qUTda9F6dT

A road profoundly disrupts a landscape, cutting through it oblivious to any ecological relationships. The fences are there to stop the fauna stumbling into the path of cars and trucks. To lessen road kill. Stand in the model for the road outside your house. /13

Notice that it’s a no-place. Its entire function is defined to be separate to where you actually are. To take you somewhere else. It runs right through your suburb. Its function is to never allow that suburb to become a place. A home. /14

This is the root structure of societies as economies. Mobilisation and displacement. Never settling. Moving people and resources around. The biggest champions of the substitution of societies with economies LOVE roads. /15

This isn’t to promote some bucolic fantasy of a landscape idyll either. It’s nowhere near that easy to rediscover place again. Even those who reject replacing societies with economies have no idea how to live meaningfully in our landscapes. /16

It’s not back-to-nature. There is no nature. It’s not living off the land, or going back to any simple life, or rejecting modern technology, etc. Not a return to a golden anything, that never existed. It’s rediscovering place. What it means. Far before being anywhere. /end

He believes that the change needed will come when the market is favourable. Meaning when the shift needed is the cheaper option for people to choose. When EVs are cheaper than ICE vehicles, for example. 2/7

I responded by saying look at groceries. Already cheaper at somewhere like Aldi. But most people don’t shop there. Prices don’t drive societies, just as information doesn’t, two tenets of economies-as-societies. 3/7

The example I gave next was flying to the moon and the world wars. Did we achieve either of those things by making prices cheaper for everybody in the ‘market’? It’s ridiculous to even say it. But this is the rabbit hole market-based fantasy leads us down. 4/7

The change needed won’t be gradual, it won’t come from little tweaks to prices. It will be government-sponsored cataclysmic shifts to the way we live. A breaking of our status quo. Just as the Chinese are currently doing, and their industrial output has been doing TO us. 5/7

The Chinese coupled the massive disruption to their status quo. Just as the Victorians did in England, in the 19th century. Here in the West economy fantasies won’t allow it. So we’ll be the ones smashed. 6/7

My economy friend won’t budge, the status quo never does. It’s his team. We’re still great friends. Teams shift when they’re led to shift. By massive disruption. Fighting world wars was catastrophically disrupting. But that fight was led. /end

Of course people don’t wait for retirement to get out there and travel. It’s an obsession now for all ages. But retirement is treasured because it can then become a near perpetual activity. It’s always our most common, habitual things that hide our deepest secrets. /2

I’ve Tweeted a lot about travel, how I think it’s a desperate search for something we fundamentally don’t understand. A search for place. By a culture still framed by old imperial categories of space, a very different thing. /3

Empires accumulate places, as spaces. As literal areas on maps. They live inside maps, not inside the places they accumulate. In the West we’re still driven by desperate desires to accumulate places. What we as travellers call ‘sights’ and ‘experiences’. /4

Feeling that by visiting somewhere, we’re somehow experiencing it in a more authentic way, and it’s shaping us in turn. That it’s broadening our minds. If this was true, the growth in travel in the past decades should have introduced transcendental levels of mind-broadening. /5

I’m not seeing it. If anything the world seems more stupid today than when the travel obsession began. And that travel is trashing locations, destroying them. That’s because our itineraries are mostly in our own heads. We travel through our fantasies. /6

Fantasies spawned by our imitative social lives. We travel mostly so that we can tell and show other people, that we’ve travelled. It’s another status game. The number of off-piste travel experiences proliferates, to differentiate the status of the ‘seasoned’ traveller. /7

All a wank. There is no more authentic travel. None that brings you any closer to where you’re visiting. You’re always just a visitor. Last week I saw suburban streets with signs saying ‘only locals allowed’. That’s where we’ve arrived, as a culture. /8

People simultaneously obsessively driven to travel with every spare moment, and furious that everybody else is doing the same thing. It’s stupid layered upon stupid. Because we’re not diagnosing this desire. /9

We feel compelled to travel, to try to fill an existential void in our own culture. The absence of place, of any understanding of what that means. The incapacity to just BE. The desperate need for distraction from that void, an insatiable hunger for titillation. /10

Empires are never satisfied with their lot. It’s why they’re empires. They always want to expand, to accumulate more. We’re still culturally infected by that desire, even though our empires are now crumbling. /11

We see the pinnacle of our life’s work now as the freedom to finally travel full-time. To become full-time tourists, not just in other lands, but even in our own. Tourists in our own land! It’s absolutely, perversely bizarre even as an idea. /12

We’re accumulating more and more sights and experiences, trying to fill that simple void. That satisfaction of just being, which needs for nothing. There was a time when a special place was accepted to be just that. Special. To be left alone. Make your own special place. /13

Now we must possess it, have it. Like geographical stalkers. Believing that if it’s beautiful, we MUST be allowed to have our share of it. As a kid we looked at pictures of beautiful places. That was enough. Just as one human is usually enough, in a relationship. /14

You make your own place beautiful. And look at pictures of others. Those places are only beautiful in the first place because those cultures made them that. They understood place. We won’t fill the void by accumulating more sights, more experiences. /end

These men have had to endure people doubting what they even did. Moonshot social idealism is now paranoid individual libertarianism. It was WW1, WW2 and the Cold War they spawned that sent us to the moon. Catastrophes liberate us to dream collectively. 2/4

Now space travel attracts less interest than Oasis touring. Status is back in the driver’s seat of societies. The battle of teams, for status. A bewildering proliferation of teams, through social media platforms. Many completely insane. 3/4

Humans will always revert to the fight for status. Unless societies have stable status hierarchies. Like the Victorians did, in the first Industrial Revolution, through into the 19th century. Our world will be insane and catastrophic until we stabilise status again. /end

Populist politics won by substituting the idea of a public, with the idea of minorities and majorities. Voting categories. Popularity categories. Populism. This is what it is. If ‘the majority’ say something, that’s reality. /2

Similarly, something is only a problem, if it’s a problem for the majority. So despite the fact Covid is lethal to quite sizeable numbers of people (record numbers in fact), because it’s not killing the majority of us, it’s classified as a complete non-problem. /3

We also shouldn’t be fooled that the populists who ply this sleight of hand actually believe it. Take the current conflict in the Middle East. A reactivation of old religious-cultural war. The people who still identify with these religions in Australia are in free fall. /4

Have been for years. Supporters are a clear minority. This is their war. The minority clearly leading the agenda here. In reality status drives everything in societies. Not the numbers. That’s a con. /5

‘The public’ is NOT, and this is so important, a majority of people. It has nothing whatsoever to do with counting numbers. That’s how bad faith actors have destroyed the whole concept of the public. The public is also not ‘who wins elections’. /6

That’s another con. The public is independent of who wins an election. It’s an administrative construct, invented in the last 2 centuries, an ongoing continuous calculation of the ‘public good’, for decisions. Officials do that calculation. It’s their main job. /7

To assess everything that happens in a nation, to see whether the outcome will be the best outcome for everybody. Not for a majority. For everybody. /8

Any time you see minority and majority thinking, you’re dealing with populism. We’re ’living with’ a pandemic because of populism. Because the majority aren’t being killed by Covid. (Yet.) This has never been the calculus of public health. /9

None of the vaccinations in the childhood vaccination schedule that has fundamentally transformed our lives was needed to stop a majority of us from dying. That was never the reason we did it. The pathogens were lethal for SOME. But back then, that just meant lethal. /10

Because we didn’t divide our communities up into majorities and minorities. What was lethal for some was seen as a threat to the entire community. There was a clear understanding that ‘a chain is only as strong as its weakest link’. /11

It wasn’t that we were more caring or moral. It was that we saw that practically, logistically, if you allow even a minority of people to be impacted, the whole edifice of community will come tumbling down. Societies are networked. Everything is connected. /12

Populism has destroyed that deep understanding. Now you do whatever you can get away with, whatever you can cobble together a majority for. Voting did this. It’s how it works. Majorities ‘win’. Elections are destroying us. /end

"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled...more and more scientists have begun to research the possibility of societal collapse." 2/3

You can't gradual this away. Not by targets and plans plugged into normal life. Normal life has to be stopped. Like in the wars. It won't be. Adopt the brace position. /3

Numbers winners of elections then transform into any ‘will of the people’ words they choose. Why it didn’t occur to us at the time that using popularity as the mechanism to select for ultimate power would end badly, is a mystery, to me anyway. /2

It’s surely obvious that if something has to be popular to get done, most important things won’t get done. And eventually the whole system was gamed anyway. What began as a means, quickly became an end. /3

Now the purpose of winning elections, is to win more elections. It’s as empty as that. Little changes after elections. The people elected mostly don’t have a clue how anything works. They’re just popular. They bring a smorgasbord of lunatic ideologies to power with them. /4

None of which match the actual material reality of how societies work. People honestly believe now the world is divided into things like ‘capitalist systems’ and ‘socialist systems’. Into ‘States’ and ‘markets’. None of those things are real. Societies never changed. /5

They always were and always will be just people, acting *socially*. Not politically. Not economically. Socially. Predominantly fighting for social status, in assembled and ever-shifting teams. /6

The leading teams are the political parties themselves, which cascade down through a proliferation of sub-teams, on every topic imaginable. Elections enable this transformation of societies from top to bottom, into popularity contests, on every issue. Team sports. /end

The deeper cause here is no stable status hierarchy in society. So people slug it out in their teams, to try to achieve dominance. In Victorian England they just built stuff. Amazing stuff. China right now too. Because the status hierarchy is aligned with the innovation. /end

A field of study now, not just my idea. Sometimes abbreviated as PET - Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. I add various other layers to it though, for example I think this theory is true because of some basic social facts. /2 https://t.co/aWxSFKjLeP

Most importantly, that social life is governed by status. All the things we use to explain it, like politics and economics, are really just status re-badged. That’s also why the main mechanism for social life is imitation. Imitative rivalry. /3

Each group following some leader aims to promotes its status over others. That brings it into rivalry with other groups doing the same. What I call ‘team sports’. I like the word teams, it captures much better the essential rivalry this is about, more than groups. /4

Imitative rivalry was the core of Rene Girard’s work, when he invented mimetics. Girard saw that this rivalry never ends, history shows that to be empirically true. In his view all that ever mitigated it (in the West) was Christianity. Because it did something novel. /5

It replaced the status-driven rivalry with a transcendent status (God/Christ), that provided an arbiter separate to the battling teams. Of course this required the creation of institutions, churches, inside which the rivalries re-surfaced. There are no utopias. /6

But it’s not an accident that this model led Western culture for millennia. Our modern secular idea of letting all the teams slug it out in ‘markets’ is barely a couple of centuries old, and is floundering. That’s all market ideas and ‘the economy’ are, literally. /7

Inventions to re-assert status battles as human life. To never allow a restriction on that rivalry. ‘Competition’, the buzzword of this whole stupid system. It leads to nothing but eternal violence. Sociality not tempered by a status hierarchy is just rivers of blood. /8

These platforms implement that same stupid model. Which is why they’re a sewer. Thousands, tens of thousands (or even more) of battling teams, more every day. We’re freedom fundamentalists. We don’t want to accept one basic truth. /9

That human life is hierarchical. If you don’t provide healthy hierarchies, humans will invent unhealthy ones in the void that remains. That’s how we got Trump, from years of market politics ripping down our established institutions. /10

The PET work is also why I say only catastrophe shifts any of this. Without it (or the approach Gerard said Christianity pioneered), humans just battle for status. It’s all they do, all day, every day. The battle for their identity, the same thing. /11

We all lived that battle at school, we just failed to recognise it continued unabated into adult life, until death. The post-WW2 world most of us grew up in provided some breathing space from these status games. /12

Those mega-catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century, WW1, the Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2, smashed our status hierarchies comprehensively. Allowing a focus at last on basic social provision. ‘The public’, in education, health, housing etc. /13

We re-built societies, with that public focus. When that work was largely done, in the 1970s, the status games fought back. The shift to economic politics of free markets in the 1970s. A cultural shift. To re-assert imitative rivalry - status games - at the centre of life. /14

Every time every side of politics and commentators drone on about ‘the economy’ today, they’re really regurgitating this resurgence of status-driven life. It’s why our public infrastructure and culture has collapsed. /15

You can’t build a bike rack now without ‘mobilising’ thermonuclear team sports. Look at it online every day. The tedious, never-ending whining and toxic argument and assault. Without a healthy status hierarchy coupled to actual social good, this will be our world. /end

I think semi-autonomous and autonomous driving is a big part of the future of road transport. Most major brands have adaptive cruise control already, which can do a lot of driver-assist. So I can believe Tesla is targeting a potentially big market here. /2

But Tesla needed something that will excite investors and buyers right now. These cybertaxis I think won't be available until at least 2026. The Robovan probably even later. And the robots, probably even later again. /3

The Model Y refresh is apparently imminent, that's a smart and long overdue move. A brilliant car, deserving of being the best-selling car in the world. But not one mention of it today. And not (as was hoped) any mention of a small car offering. /4

It beggars belief that Tesla hasn't produced a car for the small segment yet. One they could have a hot hatch variant of as well. Something at the cheaper end of the market. BYD can seemingly churn out a model a week, and major refreshes of existing models as quickly. /5

To be fair they're already something Tesla isn't. A mass market car maker. They can already do huge volumes. They have phenomenal toolmaking resources to bring product to market almost unbelievably quickly. /6

Plus their vertical integration means they can do all of that at a cost no Western carmaker can match. Ignore all of the parochial rubbish about the Chinese State interfering with the 'free' vehicle market. /7

The Western car industry wouldn't exist without a century of massive subsidisation of ICE and fossil fuel technology. And don't forget they've also had over a century of almost cost-free pollution. Nobody has been paying those 'externalities'. Except the global climate. /8

I'd encourage anybody to own a Tesla vehicle. Again, the engineering is superb, a lot of brilliant minds. The software is world-leading too. I know many will say 'I can't because of Elon'. I'm watching a superb coverage of the Bathurst 100 right now run by Rupert Murdoch. /9

Just give up the team sports (I know you won't). Also, many corporate launches now copy Steve Jobs' brilliant format. Tesla has no idea how to do that, the pacing was embarrassingly bad today. /10

Mumbling, key features missed and no emphasis given to critical releases. The very interesting self-cleaning functionality of the cybertaxi wasn't even mentioned, only briefly shown. /11

I'm an ex-teacher, the presentation made me wince. Ultimately I don't care, the details of the products are important. But it seems inexcusable for a company of this size. /end

We should absolutely expect public-focused governance to be the norm. Though we’ve never done very much at all to extend that model to the rest of the world, who must look on right now and chuckle. Welcome back to humanity, they might say. And rightly so. /2

I won’t labour the chronology here, people know that I think ‘the public’ was invented after WW2, to re-build societies after 4 major catastrophes in quick succession. WW1, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2. /3

Only that comprehensive destruction and disruption suppressed our usual status games for long enough to make the focus of our collective activity the good of all of us. We’re now back in the only world most humans who have ever lived, including today, have ever known. /4

A world run entirely by status. For millennia it was Kings and Popes topping the ordering status hierarchies. We had a bit of a stab with elected leaders in that post-WW2 period. It’s failed miserably. Popularity contests decoupled from social need. /5

I think about this every day. I don’t see a way out except for more catastrophes to sweep away the status hierarchies we have now. History shows time and again this is all that produces change. We’re all implicated here. Status is the currency of all of our lives. /6

It’s not convenient cartoon baddies like socialism or capitalism or Big Corporations, or MSM, or any of those other adult fairy tales. Humans live by status. We don’t even recognise it. Will Storr does though. /7 https://t.co/kSqHU7DNy6

For me, maybe humility is the way forward. Instead of whining like entitled privileged people who’ve had their lollies taken away, we should as a minimum recognise that this is how we’ve always happily allowed most of the rest of the world to live. /8

It doesn’t fix our situation, but it reframes the way we think about things. Right now I see people just getting more and more angry, white hot with rage inside their battling teams. It’s not getting us anywhere. It’s just making these platforms rich. /9

I think the catastrophes are also already here, in their early stages. It’s bizarre to think of that as a thing of hope. But I’m absolutely certain nothing else will shift us away from status games. Come across to reality politics. To a focus only on material realities. /10

Away from all debates, I’m sorry but they don’t ever achieve anything. They’re battles for status, dressed up as logical games. There’s real joy and calm in focusing only on material realities. For example I love my daily dose of @DavidJoffe64 and @ejustin46 on Covid. /11

None of it is good news, but it’s at least about the material details of this pandemic. Away from the pointless team sports. Reality will eventually win. It always does. /end

You can see here Turchin recognises that it’s catastrophes, ‘violent end times’, that shift societies. The exception he gives in green isn’t an exception, I think. It’s just that the world had 4 mega-catastrophes in quick succession. 2/8 https://t.co/C46p61a501

As he says elsewhere in the interview, those golden 30 years post-WW2 started to fray in the 1970s. Exactly the time I often say when status-driven societies returned. What I find particularly interesting about Turchin’s work is the elite overproduction idea. 3/8

Namely, that when societies get too many people vying for the top rung of the status ladder, such as the US with its proliferation of billionaires, the team sports between these top aspirants drives a society into chaos. It’s the same team sports as the rest of society. 4/8

But focused at the top level of status. I’ve Tweeted before, peaceful and prosperous societies are ones with stable status hierarchies. Kings and Queens and Popes used to provide that. Billionaires never will. 5/8

Kings, Queens and Popes had cascading, nested sub-hierarchies, their royal courts and the various levels of status/authority within churches. That allowed the status hierarchy to operate effectively throughout society. 6/8

Billionaires have none of that. No noblesse oblige. Just big vacuums, sucking up wealth and status for themselves. The ‘wealth pumps’, as Turchin calls it. Our current social collapse and chaos is that status war between billionaires, playing out. 7/8

None of them will win. Wealth pumps can’t run societies. I don’t agree with Turchin that we could choose another golden post-WW2 period. That was the result of mega-catastrophes, in quick succession. Catastrophe(s) incoming. /end

Thanks for the many suggestions here. David and Emmanuel shared the science of what’s likely happening, well worth peoples’ time reading.

The status quo is the sum total of what is customary. Habitual. It’s why it’s impossible to really shift, without massive disruption. The majority of people do not like massive disruption to their customary lives. /2

This was the reason it was easy to weaponise anti-lockdown narratives. Lockdowns disrupted customary lives. The opponents of needed change will be all of us. Our lives are structured by the status quo, in every detail. /3

Even where we would like major change, we’re very often unprepared to completely upend our customary lives to bring it about. This is why status is an impossible nut to crack. It’s not just about taking preening status whores down a perch. /4

Status is the glue that holds *everything* together. Changing status uproots everybody’s customary lives. Why we can’t gradually defeat climate change, for example. /5

It requires revolutionary change to how we live. Not just planning and KPIs. Many of us would need to surrender hard-won status in our lives. The status quo will never do that. History shows it only shifts that much with catastrophic challenge. /6

And it won’t be just baddies preventing the change. It will be the massive inertial resistance of all of our customary lives. Just one more reason popularity-based governance is worse than useless. The change needed will never be popular. /end

The Shark is to be released this month in Australia, with deliveries reported to begin in early 2025. This (hybrid) ute is a missile aimed right at the heart of our lazy status quo. Some motoring journalists believe it could destroy every other product in the segment. /2 https://t.co/f9D46dRju0

The Shark has almost twice the power of other leading utes. It has the fastest acceleration. It has almost twice the full-electric range of other ute hybrids. /3 https://t.co/CFAjvKQ7Gk

It has more luxury on the inside than any other ute in Australia. It has a larger tray and interior than other leading utes. It's underlying chassis is bespoke engineered as an EV platform. This gives it far greater engineering sophistication than competing utes. /4

And here's the rivals-going-pale kicker. It could be anything from $10K to $30K CHEAPER than every other dual cab ute in the country. Existing carmakers and their political chums invent various versions of the old Yellow Peril to try to counter these status quo missiles. /5

It's the Chinese government sponsoring anti-competitive behaviour! Etc. Bullshit. Western governments have shovelled trillions in largesse towards ICE carmakers for a century. /6

It's China doing what the rest of us refuse to. Building EVs, at scale. Affordable EVs. Exactly what the entire world needs right now, in emergency numbers. I often Tweet that China is the only catastrophe I can think of that may save us. /7

This to me is a perfect example. Nothing embodies the cultural arrogance, laziness and populism of Australian and US life in particular more than these wankpanzer utes. They're totemic. China has issued a massive 'fuck you' to that. They're saving us from ourselves. /end

The end isn’t always as physical as that. But no crowd or mob ever forgives their populist leader, when their popular fantasies are exposed as fantasies. The retribution is brutal. Politicians used to agree to never use populism, for this reason. /2

But generations pass, and people forget. And now we’re back again, with politicians using populism to attain quick, total power. It will end as it always ends. Brutally. /end

I explained it was just one reason I'm still masking. That it was better than risking brain damage. They said, 'yeh, I guess it's swings and roundabouts, I'm not putting a mask back on.' /end

(This is not to say smoking isn't bad for your heart or for you in general.)

It’s a classic public health tale. Collective action only follows from catastrophic consequences. The people happily ‘living with’ Covid today will be the same people demanding action when their brains stop working. Leadership means not waiting for that point. /end

Societies have never run on information. People who follow me know I believe they run on one thing alone. Status. The status (and thus identity) of people, generated through their membership of ‘teams’, in competition with other teams. /2

With that alternative framing, what has religion been for us, as a culture? Something very different. Of fundamental importance. Religion managed status games. /3

To take the perpetual violence of our status team sports, and short-circuit it by displacing our status hierarchies. By making status transcendent, inaccessible to any team. By taking away any argument as to the pre-eminence of any team. /4

By making ALL teams equivalently void. That’s what the ‘Gods’ have always done in cultures. Short-circuited violence. Suppressed the team sports. I know that immediately some will regurgitate another Enlightenment trope here. /5

‘Religion is what causes all of the violence!’ They see wars between competing faiths, and forget that in the 20th century alone entirely secular States slaughtered over 100 milllion people, in wars. /6

They blame religion for this because religious people and cultures seem to have strong beliefs, that lead to conflict. Those opposing them believe themselves to have open, ‘free’ belief systems, a perpetual contestation of ideas. /7

I often quote Planck’s observation that science itself only progresses when an existing generation of scientists dies, as counter-evidence. Humans will play status games, team sports, unless they are forced not to. /8

Religion is the only human activity that has ever regulated status games for meaningful lengths of times. And yes, it’s failed at doing that in all its own ways as well. Churches reintroduce the status games, internally, for example. /9

There are no utopias. But if your underlying framing is that no human or their team can ever achieve the highest status in life, you’re doing as well as can be done. The Enlightenment loved to believe ‘facts’ could play this role. /10

Planck was just one of many who discovered that facts never speak for themselves. Science is intensely hierarchical, as status-driven as any other human activity. This brings me to period dramas. /11

I was trying to understand why these can be such compelling viewing, even today. For me it’s something quite specific. They remind us of a time when language had power. What you said in those earlier times was both intensely considered and could have immediate impact. /12 https://t.co/ikOmDkUnf7

Calling somebody a fool was a profound social act. Today in our ‘free speech’ era, language is almost completely powerless. We’re all increasingly free to say whatever we want. None of which will have any impact, on anybody. /13

That’s because language only has power to the extent it’s used as part of a stabilised status hierarchy. That gives you ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘scandalous’ things to say. It becomes an actual currency of life. Good period drama shows us a world we’ve forgotten. /14

Characters in period dramas are hesitant in what they say. They consider each word carefully. That underlying hesitancy of culture itself is now gone. That hesitancy was the continuous negotiation of status, within a stabilised hierarchy. /15

A hierarchy that also embodied a clear set of ideas around what were good and bad things to do. That’s what religion brought to our earlier societies. We can argue about the relative merits of those good and bad things, that’s a distraction. /16

The particular moral codes. Often hijacked by human status games, within churches and communities. But what mattered was the interplay of moral codes with social life, through status hierarchies. /17

The whole idea of ‘manners’ was part of it. Often mocked today as some sort of artificially stuffy formalism, imposed on people. But really a sophisticated set of social mechanisms to facilitate social life. Again interwoven within status hierarchies. /18 https://t.co/5lmhFNrEQd

This platform is a perfect crucible of a world that arrives, when manners disappear. A world without stabilised status hierarchies, based on at least some assessment of what is good and true. /end

Social media is the culminating triumph of this insanity. On it society itself is organised around beliefs, rather than around basics like education, health, roads, water, electricity etc. Before social media you lived amongst many who had fundamentally different beliefs. 2/5

Because the material work of your everyday lives, keeping the lights on, overrode differences in opinion. You made allowances. On social media, beliefs *are* territory. Nobody has to negotiate basic material realities of community life there. 3/5

It’s by transacting society itself through these platforms that we destroy it. I’ve always absolutely refused to use the platforms in this way. No ‘morning all, I’m having my first cup of coffee of coffee’. Etc. 4/5

The moment we surrender our everyday social lives to these platforms, it’s all over. The moment we think of them as ‘communities’. Communities solve complex material problems of co-existence. They don’t form teams around ideas and battle other teams. /end

I’ve lived a fairly normal life, without catching Covid, for the entire pandemic. That’s because social life (including travel) has never been a great desire. I’m not a hermit. I have lots of friends. But I don’t crave social events. /2

I have kids, who have had to go through school and now university, during this pandemic. They’ve also even able to avoid Covid, except for one who caught it at university. They masked to do this. So we did find a way to manage that high-risk situation. /3

We’ve also socialised with friends. But in controlled situations. Always outside. It can be done. No doubt we’re socialising less, because we’ve excluded indoor things. But life is still good. I’ve always been a person who likes their own company. /4

I’m inviting a partial reframing of this pandemic here. That sees the worst challenges of it as being partly also of our own making. The number who seem to desperately need continuous social connection. To involve themselves in mass gatherings. To travel, above all. /5

It’s a criminal disgrace that we’re allowing Covid to spread. But in a way Covid is attacking that part of our lives that was already *hypersocial*, unhealthily so. You can see it in all the stories about ‘loneliness’. How ill-equipped many are to be alone. /6

As if continuous social connection is the default state for human health and happiness. To me that’s a mistaken idea. Social connection is violence. Driven far more by the desire for conformity, than by individual happiness and health. /7

Our ‘mental health’ has never been more fragile than since the introduction of social media, vastly accelerating our supposed connection. In reality imposing a relentless, unending, anxiety-producing game of social comparison and conformity upon us. /8

What I sometimes call high school life, scaled up to all life. The continuous battle for identity in groups/teams, in battle with other teams. Who wants that shit? Not me. I similarly have minimal stress on this platform, because I simply refuse to play the team sports. /9

Reality acts in mysterious ways. As much as anybody I want Covid gone, so the full range of life is available to me and my family. But even then, I would still be very sparing in the social side of that life. Human development uses sociality as a stage. /10

A pathway to individual self-knowledge. You’re supposed to need friends and sociality less, as you age. Not more. As you come to mature self-understanding. You need people less. You’re placing less burden on them. You still have family and friends. But you *need* them less. /11

That’s what the saying you’re born alone, you live alone, and you die alone means. Not that you’re a hermit, but that you’re always existentially alone, really. No other person can ever really understand what being you is. Nor should they, they have themselves to understand. /12

Friendship and our loves are encounters, between strong independent souls. Or they should be. Not the team sports of trying to find an identity in a status hierarchy, through eternal social events. It’s a false binary to say being less social is being more ‘anti-social’. /13

There’s always a silver lining. Covid is attacking our hypersociality, our culture infected by conformity and comparison. Those pretending to love ’living with’ Covid are destroying themselves, doing it. You have some power here, to choose less social life. /14

And thus much less Covid. Perhaps even none, depending on your circumstances. Pandemics reboot societies. This one is doing it right now, we’re just very short-term in how we frame it. /15

Alongside the horrendous toll it’s taking on those who can’t avoid it, it is also at the same time attacking the worst aspects of our cultures, too. The smug status quo is being eaten away from the inside. It just doesn’t realise it. Yet. /end

In a nutshell, it’s the humility of knowing that how things turn out is rarely in our (humanity’s) control. Reality determines outcomes. This is pretty obvious really. Most of our political and even social life is hot air floating above underlying material realities. /2

Material realities that don’t care what we think or feel. We waste so much energy and emotion over what other *people* think and feel, every day. None of that really matters, over time. Reality isn’t determined by what we think or feel, mostly. /3

In the short-term it can be *shaped* by human belief and emotion. Choosing to do nothing against Covid, for example, seems to kind of work, for a while. Until it doesn’t. All our daily human team sports can do is either accelerate or delay an encounter with reality. /4

You can argue all day over whether there’s a leak in your roof. All that does is delay checking if there is. Extend that delay, and if there is a leak, your roof will collapse on you. That’s reality. Your argument made not the tiniest difference. /5

So here’s a challenge. Reframe how you see this pandemic. Right now I guarantee for most of us, it’s seen almost entirely as the battle of opposing teams. And a perception of which teams are winning. On masks, ventilation, vaccines etc. Try this instead. /6

SARS-Cov-2 is like that leak in the roof. It doesn’t ultimately matter what your opinion or feelings are about it. It isn’t even aware of what we think about it. It doesn’t care. Those who ignore its actual material effects will ‘lose’. /7

Their roof will cave in. As it has tragically already done, for millions. It will come for the rest of the deniers. Not always straight away, human-centred politics celebrates many short-term apparent victories over material realities. /8

But like the rivers and waterways of the UK piling up with human excrement show, following the team sports of privatisation there, the meeting with reality always arrives. It’s why I argue to ditch elections entirely. /9

This ludicrous charade of running popularity contests with material realities as the stage. Contests that do absolutely nothing to shape those realities in meaningful ways. Nearly everything we need doing is simple and independent of our team sports. /10

Practical, calm, some would say boring, ‘keeping the lights’ on stuff. Building and fixing schools, roads, sewers, hospitals, water supplies, removing garbage etc. THAT’s the material reality of any society. No ideology has any relevance, to any of it. /11

Give up thinking progress would be beating some other team, or even persuading them to switch teams. That’s hot air piled upon more hot air. Reality always wins. That’s the only team to join. It brings great calm to your life. /12

Of course human team sports will delay us reaching that point, always. It always has. But the more people tune out of those team sports, the more they empty the stadiums, the faster that idiot system might collapse. /end

Between 1945 and the late-1970s, we all had a status as members of a collective, called 'the public'. An adminsitrative construct, used to re-build societies after the last world war. The politics of 'the economy' post-1970s restored status to the centre. /end

‘No fuel costs. Virtually no maintenance. No noise, no smoke. Far greater amounts of grunt, at every speed, without having to rev the crap out of the thing.’ Him: … /end

It’s more an assumption than an idea. That a few people telling lots of people what to do is an intrinsically bad thing. Except it’s how all societies work, and have always worked. At all scales. If I get an electrical fault in my home, I call an electrician. /2

For electrical work, they’re a thoroughly welcomed ‘autocrat’ when they arrive. Nobody should do their own electrical work. Many of us *could*, if we trained. And if we wanted to. But most of us don’t want to. /3

The electrician isn’t oppressing me or restricting my freedom. They’re giving *me* the freedom, to not have to understand or do electrical work. My life can do other things, because of electricians. Extend that to any trade or profession. /4

The more we surrender our agency to do everything ourselves, the freer we get. Go figure. Now shift the same idea, to what we call politics. Representative democracy, what we in the West mostly live with and misunderstand. /5

Representative democracy is strongly hierarchical. Autocratic, you could say. Officials and elected leaders ‘run the country’, for us. Every few years we cast a vote. Not to run the country. But to choose the people we want to do it, for us. /6

We happily surrender our freedom to do that, because we don’t know how, and we’d rather be doing other things anyway. Politicians are political electricians. And really it’s their officials that are, politicians are only a liaison point between them and us. /7

Those who see elections *as* democracy are (sorry), just populists. Wedded to the idea that we all are, literally, running the country every day. With social media populism is a wildfire out of control. Now we’re all experts, in everything. And we call it democracy. /8

People trained in public health know nothing, now we can go to influencers on social media, who without any training or experience can lead the global response to a pandemic. Which will be no response, unsurprisingly. /9

Find one area of life now where the ruthless ‘autocracy’ of expertise hasn’t been damaged or destroyed, by this explosion of DIY society. By a proliferation of pseudo-experts peddling things that are completely bananas. /10

The status hierarchies I Tweet about are these same autocracies we want to be (apparently) rid of. Except really our particular team just wants to be top of the hierarchy. This is the double-edged sword of status. Status, or trust, is how societies work. /11

The widespread delegation of responsibility to others, with expertise, to do things for us. To free us up to have richer lives in other ways. When you destroy the coupling of that status to actual expertise, it’s the end of your society. /12

Elections do that. There is not one single test an elected leader needs, to win, except to be popular. You wouldn’t hire even a junior staff member, using that metric. But we use it to run societies. And wonder why they’re spinning into the toilet. /end

Take the modern Oz or US ute. A fundamental lynchpin in understanding our culture, our social relations. Functionally, hopeless as utes. Hopeless as passenger vehicles (which is what they’re mostly used for). Hopeless in the driving dynamics sense. Hopeless aerodynamically. /2 https://t.co/R8mZIiMzCD

You would think this laundry list of uselessness would give the game away. The modern high-spec ute is not really a functional object. Or it is, but the function is social. It’s a grown-up GI Joe toy. (Why I began this thread with Joe.) /3 https://t.co/L7E0mTh8DZ

It allows the people who buy them to establish an identity, in the community. They’re a Hilux man, or Navara man, or Ranger or F-150 man. Or RAM man. (It’s usually a man, but yes could be anyone.) These are social groupings, not functional/technology groupings. /4 https://t.co/JF7GPlFwNM

Just as growing up our toys allow us to differentiate our identity as kids, collecting the various add-ons and carving an identity for ourselves within a particular toy’s community. Look at all these GI Joes. The proliferation isn’t technical. It’s social. /5 https://t.co/zk5cVyMFsY

This isn’t about analogies. How we buy utes is not analogous to how we bought GI Joes as kids. It’s the *same* social process in operation. We formed teams, around objects in this case. And the stronger our team grew, the more differentiated those objects became. /6

One of the biggest components of modern ute culture for example is how users ‘spec up’ their ride. There’s a vast third party industry in ute add-ons. This is all the same process. Team sports. I know guys who buy a new ute each year, because fashions have shifted. /7

Every day most of my Tweets here are about returning our framing of societies to what they really are. Social. They’re societies. They’re not economies. They’re not capitalist or socialist ‘systems’. They’re people, acting socially. /8

In the exact same ways they acted socially as kids, just with new names and new objects added to the team sports. People who believe in economies for example are just a social team. Ditto for socialism, or capitalism. Just teams. /9

The world isn’t made of economies or political systems or technologies. It’s made of our social relations, with each other. We see it with Covid, and vaccines. People don’t argue about vaccines as technical objects. /10

They’re social objects. Team pro-vax VS team anti-vax. Yes vaccines have an objective reality, they stop us getting diseases. But reality is always just grist to our team sports mill. We would rather be right (i.e. our team ‘wins’), than effective. /11

If you want to shift what happens in the world you have to understand sociality, and you have to be able to work with that understanding. Most fundamentally you need to understand status. And flowing from that, the *trust* that actually binds us. /12

Societies have always been built on trust, that binds people to each other. We trust plumbers to do plumbing, or pilots to fly planes. That trust comes from the status of those we trust. We want to be high status, and to associate ourselves with those who have it. /13

We emulate or copy them. Imitation is the root social act. It’s why everybody is out there buying these functionally useless utes. They want to belong to a team, to have status and therefore identity. /14 https://t.co/LBFgwD4Dyh

Those who have destroyed public health in this pandemic similarly just want to be part of a team, to have status and identity as part of that team. If they can’t get status in the traditional teams, the teams that actually fought pandemics, then they’ll invent new ones. /15

Teams espousing the most ridiculous anti-vax, pro-infection nonsense. But the content is always irrelevant. Remember reality is just grist to the team mill. It’s absolutely pointless to argue the ‘facts’ every day. That’s just the social differentiation process. /16

The more you do it, the stronger the opposing teams become. You’re helping them to strengthen and expand and further differentiate their team. They log on every day hungry for your counter-arguments. It’s what drives them. /17

How do we step outside this social differentiation process? People know I follow researchers who study that. And alas, we usually don’t. We wait for the catastrophic violence of the team sports to destroy everything. Or a natural disaster. /18

Only then do the status hierarchies stop. For a while. Allowing an appearance of ‘unified’ human life, as we re-build. A ‘public’. But it doesn’t last. The teams come back. Status is a bottomless well. /end

They were of course hugely successful and lauded tours. But objectively, musically, Mercury had changed. Some estimate Mercury contracted HIV in 1982, during the band’s world tour. Listening to Mercury perform between 1980-1982 is a revelation. 2/5

Full of energy, hitting lots of high notes. But the 1984 and 1986 tours were different. Still lots of amazing performances. But Mercury sounds much more tired. And that higher range is nearly always missing. 3/5

For years I’d attributed that shift to him ageing. But it was only 2-4 years since the 1982 tour. He was only 39 on their final 1986 tour, still a young man. I now wonder if he was battling the impacts of HIV infection. Of course, 5 years later, he was dead. 4/5

This is the seductive trap of chronic infection. Life seems to go on as normal, even for years. But in the long-term, it kills you. And that long term can be only a handful of years. It’s not a good idea to live with viruses. /end

But it’s a perfect example of what ‘the economy’ really is. Because in economic politics, this is portrayed as a threat. The economy’s role is to protect the existing status quo. Existing car makers and fossil fuel interests, and the status hierarchies they make rich. /end

Of course America is polarised. They like most of the rest of us run a governance system that uses the exact same mechanism as Premier League football. Elections. A battle between teams, for victory. Just as football fans become ever more fanatical, so will politics. /2

How do we not see that running a country like a football league leads to rival teams becoming ever more passionately unhinged? When victory in the contest becomes the only metric? This is so easy to explain, historically. /3

Universal suffrage (i.e. not just wealthy and powerful men voting) was invented as a mechanism to select leaders. But because voting and elections are really indistinguishable from sports, that’s what government became. Sport. /4

The actual task that needed doing, running countries, solving practical problems of education and health and transport and communications etc., faded from view. Elections tapped into our deepest social behaviours, in disastrous ways. Our drive for status. In teams. /5

Suddenly what was a means, a mechanism to select leaders to do the boring practical work of running societies, became the ends. Everything is now the daily battles to win elections. We’d grafted sports and wider social life, onto politics. /6

Ask a local council area that has been put into administration, with all elected representatives sacked, just how much better their town suddenly ran. Without everything having to be re-routed through the popularity team sports of elections. /7

We don’t raise families using popularity. We don’t run businesses using it. Why do we not see that running countries using it destroys the countries? Why is that so hard to understand and see? /end

Friends and work colleagues are in a state of health you might normally only see in hospital wards. Workplaces have become hospitals in the home. Horrendous coughs that never go away. So much MCAS, with rashes and red eyes, hives, wheezing. /2

Previously young and healthy people in hospital with arrhythmias, strokes, pneumonias, POTS. Bodies ravaged by shingles, with horrendous rash that persists for months. Nobody heals, or they heal incredibly slowly. And often they’re sick again before that’s done. /3

A colleague who previously wore contact lenses has been in glasses again for a year now, because the (likely MCAS) he’s suffering from irritates his eyes so badly he can’t put contacts in. Doctors and optometrists suggest anti-histamines. It doesn’t fix anything. /4

Minimisers safely working from home or already retired pontificate here or elsewhere every day about how this is all healthy boosting of our immune systems. Useful idiots. Human shields for their political masters, who would happily run them over if there was a vote in it. /5

The idea of hybrid immunity is simple. We’re going to make you all sick, repeatedly, so that you then won’t be sick any more. A more stupid and criminally disgusting abdication of human reason and basic care has probably never existed. /6

Infections to beat infections. Even pre-Covid researchers were working hard to fight things like colds and the flu, to try to remove the need for frequent infection by them. Those ‘everyday’ infections were never considered healthy for us. /7

Not once in my life pre-Covid had anybody ever suggested me getting colds and the flu was good for me, and necessary. It’s all so obviously a political con. It’s the status quo, inventing lethal and hilarious fantasies to obstruct any action. Slogans. /8

We can sit here all day describing this collapse in the health of the public. The status quo will do nothing, if they don’t feel threatened. That status quo is not just politicians, or corporations, or ‘capitalism’. /9

It’s everybody who wants to continue living in the way many of not most now like to live. With ludicrous amount of recreational travel. Continuous socialising at gigs and shows and restaurants. ‘Living our best lives’ societies. /10

The exact opposite of Shaw’s society here. No higher purpose for anything. Just fun lifestyles. As if life is organised by travel agents, packages of fun times. Nobody builds anything, nobody has a great purpose. Not in the West anyway. Asia still does. /11 https://t.co/MighxtRoLL

We’re living a very common pattern. We’re end-of-empire societies. Like Rome during its collapse. Bread and circuses. Treating life as one long recreational adventure. Taking on no meaningful challenges. /12

Elections and ‘the economy’ both ensure nothing of any seriousness or challenge is ever done. It would lose you votes, or ‘upset the market’. Grown up life is solving problems. That’s genuine, existential fun. Not trips through Europe. Not gigs. /end

This is the exact equivalent of saying that a landslide election victory for a certain party means it’s ’unlikely Australians will ever vote for another party.’ Inside 3 years societies will often vote for a party that is fundamentally opposite to their landslide choice. /2 https://t.co/K1j4yTGIBJ

Australians embraced strong Covid measures. Until they were led to not support them. Although even then, few actually tested it. Very loud minority voices in opposition to those measures were simply allowed to become ‘what Australians want’. /3

This review has not only given victory to those loud, often violent voices, it has in the process given support to the ongoing destruction of a public health system that was the envy of the world. /4

There isn’t an anti-vaxxer or political libertarian who wouldn’t have been grinning yesterday, when this review was released. The icing on the cake of their democratic vandalism of the past 4 years. /5

Public health has *always* been the hard work of going against our natural inclination to do nothing. It’s like missionary work, with vaccines. Now that inclination to do nothing, to stick with a sick status quo, has the seal of government review. /6

This victory has profound implications across every aspect of our lives. Now bad faith actors know they just have to create a violent fracas, ‘flood the zone with shit’, and what’s left of our public life will go weak at the knees. /7

Imagine these same jellyback politicians ever saying ‘Australians will no longer support strong measures against terrorism, or inflation’. They continuously LEAD strong action against those things, they *make that action popular*. /8

There is no natural inclination in the Australian community to do either of those things, fight terrorism or inflation. Those fights are a pain in the arse. But ongoing aggressive leadership maintains that fight. Never mind that both are largely confected problems anyway. /9

The point is ‘people’ will do whatever they are led to do. They vote for Donald Trump, ffs. Public-based governance is dead. Only complete catastrophe can now restore it. /end

Activists from the anti-State crowd who have been hard at work since the 1970s, to undermine and bring down all public governance. Often together with Church interests, engaged in centuries-old Church v State battles. /2 https://t.co/C5envpGQ3S

It's they who invented the idea of 'the economy', a magical fantasy of societies who run themselves by the continuous 'competition' of everybody against everybody else. They don't even believe it themselves. It was always a con, to facilitate destruction of the State. /3

I Tweet a lot about how societies are not economic, or political. They're 100% social. They run on one thing - status. Status that then creates trust. The assault of the past 50 years on trust is so obvious today. /4

All expertise is called an 'elite', to be demonised and sidelined. You can spot these populist tricks by frequent reference to 'the people', a ficitious entity that the trust-smashers use as their authority for what they do. /5

Groups of people, of whatever size, from tiny through to whole societies, do not, cannot, ever act as a collective unit. They follow a tiny number of the group, who have status. Destroy trust and status and you can replace it with some of your own making. /6

That's what 'the economy' is and always was. A ruse to replace our existing institutionalised trust infrastructure with one owned by the smashers. Destroying public health action against Covid was done with a now very old playbook. /7

Claim 'the people' wouldn't support it. While demonising all the expertise who could end a pandemic for us. Entire nations, including Australia, have a pandemic strategy written by a libertarian free market think tank, ffs. /8

We don't need to build trust with anybody. We need to identify and sideline the people who destroy trust for a living. /end

In a week where again we’ve all been asked to believe that ‘lockdowns’ angered and damaged us. Let’s call out the BS, every day. Never in history have people been damaged by having time off work or school. 2/2