December 2024

Democracy as we know it was never even designed to be ‘the people’ (never defined) running anything. Their role is to select others to do that FOR them. Countries are by definition ‘top-down’ and hierarchical. We elect representatives to help operate these hierarchies. /2

Very little is different between the more feudal societies that preceded Western democracies, and democracy as we live it today. We just added elections, to allow all of us to select who our lords will be. But they’re still lords. /3

At no point do millions sit down to undertake the daily operational tasks of running the country. Their elected representatives don’t even do this. Their officials mostly do. It’s their job, their specific expertise. The country runs just fine during ‘caretaker’ periods. /4

We live in a populist culture now, where the exact opposite of these civic facts is the accepted norm. We ‘consult’ with ‘the people’ (never defined) on things, like whether we should have nuclear power. Most of the people consulted don’t have any idea about nuclear power. /5

It’s as sensible as asking the passengers on a plane to fly it. As Walter Lippmann said, most voting boils down to a much more simple process. If peoples’s lives are going OK, they’ll tend to vote for an incumbent. If their lives aren’t, they’ll vote for somebody else. /6

The public aren’t running anything. They’re making a judgement, usually pretty simply, as to who should be doing that for them. What do I mean when I say ‘the people’ is never defined? /7

Also simple, what does the phrase mean? Obviously (I’m sure some would say) it means everybody who votes. But use of it in discussions of democracy always means more. It means a group with agency, in some way. That thinks, feels and acts. /8

So how does that work exactly? Because we all know that in a country, people think, feel and act in a whole range of ways. The moment you remember that basic point, ‘the people’ is over. All of us never think, feel and act as a group, EVER. /9

Instead what happens is, we vote, and then somebody counts all of the votes and *retrospectively* attributes a ‘will’, a thinking and feeling and acting, to that simple enumeration. They even call it a ‘mandate’, from ‘the people’. It’s a con. /10

This is what Sahlins and Graeber are on about, when they question what ‘popular sovereignty’ means. That’s our democratic ‘system’, popular sovereignty, with the sovereign (normally a King) replaced by ‘the people’. Except how does that work? As above, it doesn’t. /11

Groups never act as some simultaneous will, thinking and feeling and acting in a unified way. Popular sovereignty has always been a myth. We never stopped individually following people who we want to lead us. We never stopped having a sovereign, a King. /12

A hierarchy. Democracies aren’t flat, as opposed to hierarchical feudal societies. They’re all hierarchical. If you elect your King, they’re still a King. They still sit atop your social hierarchies. You didn’t suddenly become part of a group mind, acting with group unity. /13

It also means the expertise to do all of the things a society needs doing remains completely hierarchical. We don’t suddenly become capable of doing everything, as a group. We each have a specific job to do, and related expertise. Including leaders and their officials. /14

The sewer of these platforms every day, where we pretend otherwise, with people opining about the full range of expert topics in a society as if they have clue. They don’t have a clue. There is no ‘personal responsibility’ public health. Or anything else. /15

We’re not democratising the vast range of human expertise by letting everybody have an opinion on all of it. We’re destroying it. Particularly when platforms like these allow anybody to accumulate influencing power, around any topic. Even when they don’t know anything. /16

We don’t need to ‘consult’ everybody when we want to decide whether to have nuclear power, for example. They don’t have a fucking clue. They’ll build Homer’s car. We have people who know about power and energy. We just need them to do it. /17

Really what modern populism and these platforms are about isn’t the democratisation of anything. They’re about the strip mining of TRUST. To replace exisiting hierarchies of expertise and trust, with another one, led by popularity. /18

Where medical expertise can be replaced by a popular President asking us to flush our lungs with antiseptic fluid, to beat a virus. Where social media influencers can peddle nonsense about ‘living with’ viruses, and become famous and given top positions in government. /19

All enabled by the replacement of hierarchies created by expertise, with hierarchies generated by popularity. Populism pretends to be democracy, particularly in the form of elections. But it’s just a new, simplified, lethal hierarchy. /end

Elections (populism) reinstate the King or Queen, shorn of the checks and balances of public administration that we invented in the late-19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. These are not analogies. This is history, repeating its standard pattern. 2/2

But status channelled more towards productive ends. Innovation, material well-being. Imitative rivalry where the outcome is more about social progress. This was Victorian England more broadly. It invented it. Status coupled to social progress. 2/3

Today we’re slave to elections and social media, status coupled to nothing but winning popularity contests. Linked to no material outcomes, no social progress. An economy of ‘likes’. Virtue games, not success games. 3/3

To me it shows what I often say. That societies are 100% social, never political in the way we mean the latter term. Here’s the paradox libertarians can’t understand. It’s social restriction, that creates freedom. This isn’t even difficult to understand. /2

Take roads. If we had no road rules or other customs around driving, if we all just went out there every day and drove however we liked, how ‘free’ would those roads be? It’d be destructive chaos. A bit like former communist countries. That’s why they *look* ‘authoritarian’. /3

That authoritarian style at the top leadership level *is* the attempt to rein in the chaos of absence of social restriction elsewhere. This is how populism becomes fascism too. Populism pretends to just let everybody do what they like. /4

The ensuing chaos then requires stringent action by the populist leadership, to try to rein in the clusterfuck. Vested interests have been enormously successful in painting basic regulation as a restriction on freedom. But regulation IS freedom. /5

If you want a new power point installed in your home, I can guarantee it’s the strong and multiple regulations around power supply that will make that a simple and easy process. That will make you ‘free’ to use power. /6

Or take Singapore. A highly prosperous and pretty happy society. It has a degree of social restriction that would make libertarians wet their pants in anger. It’s the degree of social restriction that leads to the happy, prosperous society. This isn’t a contradiction. /7

Customs and traditions and regulation create a standardised baseline for social life that creates the freedoms individuals can then enjoy. We live in an idiot culture that opposes these things, to freedom. It’s just empirically wrong, and so simple to debunk. /8

The tragically hilarious bullshit we’ve all lived for over 4 years now, of saying that public health restrictions restricted our freedoms. No, they gave us freedom, to live without serious infection. That’s what public health does. It’s an OBVIOUS fact. /9

The politics that is destroying us is really a small social grouping, of powerful and wealthy folk, selling us nonsense about freedom to protect and raise their own status. Only restriction and regulation brings freedom. Everything else is life in an old communist country. /end

We don’t understand place. Get rid of cars and stay home, and there’s never any need to escape. 2/2

They know that by pretending societies run from the ‘bottom up’, they get to own everything. That the most basic way humans behave as groups makes a lie of the whole idea. They game that lie, every day. /2

This was the true origins of the idea of a ‘market economy’. The idea that societies didn’t need leaders, that ‘the people’ jostling amongst themselves would be a type of ‘invisible hand’ to steer societies. It’s why I say ‘the economy’ was a social invention. /3

To strip away existing status hierarchies, at that time embedded mostly in public institutions focused on collective need, and replace them with themselves. Under cover of ‘liberating the people’. From their own public institutions, like government. /4

It’s breathtaking really that this balls-out con ever succeeded. But here we are. They tapped into the status games humans can’t resist, and we’ve been flying at warp speed from any sort of collective sanity ever since. /5

Look at these platforms every day. At all the suffering people crying out that ‘we’ aren’t doing anything to fix clear and critical problems. That ‘we’ is dead. It was only ever those public institutions, which the market crowd gleefully burn. Replacing with themselves. /6

They monetise the smoking ruins. Services that used to be publicly provided are now user-pays, with the proceeds going to the market crowd. Silicon Valley society, you can’t do a thing without detouring through a Valley roadblock. Even pre-social media this was true. /7

Lower status people, which is most of us, can form our little groups here every day and think we’re fighting the good fight of ‘the people’, righting society’s wrongs. High status people watch and laugh. They invented these platforms to monetise our basic social lives. /8

All they produce is endless warfare between an endless proliferation of groups and sub-groups. All monetised for the benefit of the high status owners. Those owners now have positions at the top level of government. They’re creating ‘efficiencies’. More revenue for them. /9

We can’t avoid status hierarchies. But we can make them much more focused on collective good than Silicon Valley/financial quant status hierarchies. Success status games, where success is actual social good. Like the Romans and Victorians did. /10

Pretending ‘the people’ are running the show will just produce what it is producing. Wave after wave of ever-increasing violence, as groups battle for status, and thereby identity, in a social world stripped of it. /end

While progressive politics drones on about how unequal we are (which is true), with about as much appeal as an Excel spreadsheet, high status groups target status. They know low status people want to be high status people. People don’t want everybody the same status. /2

They offer them all varieties of fool’s gold to make them think high status is within their reach. That’s why they always win. While progressives wail about how unfair and unjust everything is. Which is true. /3

To fix that you need to make social change the high status thing to do. As the Romans and Victorian England did, with public works right at the centre of their cultures. The Crystal Palace was a like a temple to that social progress. Just think of an equivalent today. /4 https://t.co/MmloWACgjT

A temple of steel and glass, exhibiting the latest advancements in science and technology, aimed at improving the public good. Instead we all go out individually and try to afford Rolexes, and McMansions, and cook restaurant-quality food. /5

Status is the engine room of every society, every culture. There are no economies, no ‘systems’ of government. No -isms. Those are all just names for a particular flavour of status game. Unless your toor status hierarchy is coupled to social progress, nothing will be. /6

Without that you’ll get what we see every day, today. Thousands of competing groups, battling for status in societies. In our idiot political framing of societies, we call that the increase in ‘division’. As if we’re all just suddenly nastier people. /7

We’re not. We just don’t have a guiding, central status hierarchy coupled to our collective, social good. So we create and fight within all of our smaller sub-hierarchies every day instead. This is literally all social media is. /end

Nuclear power is one of the few industries in history with a negative experience curve, meaning that it gets more rather than less expensive as we build more of it. /2

The cost of nuclear power makes generous assumptions about decommissioning and waste management. Historically, these costs have been up to 100 times more expensive than originally budgeted. /3

/4 https://t.co/vhFBXG2WkC

/5 https://t.co/7YhHDwrWa0

All taken from: https://t.co/qzVoDeoboX

You can electrify your life almost entirely, right now, no matter which policy either of the idiot elected parties of government propose. I pay nothing for electricity, and we use quite a lot of it. In fact I make money from electricity, every year. /2

That involved some upfront investment on our part, all of which will be easily amortised well within the lifetime of the panels and battery. That investment gives me greater joy than any number of idiot selfies in front of world tourism landmarks. /3

Cheap energy *is* my bucket list, because nothing enslaves modern people more than fossil fuel status hierarchies. That includes their enslavement to perpetual fossil fuel-fed travel. Particularly that, our deepest obsession. /4

I can now drive, heat, cool - some of the biggest costs in ‘cost of living’ - for virtually nothing. I didn’t have to wait for any idiot party to win an election to do it. Over 4 million Australians now have solar panels. That’s a juggernaut. /5

Dutton’s nuclear plans can seriously fuck up those 4 million investments, with forced curtailment of their output to keep his fantasy nuclear steam engines running. He’s toast. It’s just a matter of time. In the meantime, liberate yourself from fossil fuel energy. /6

It will be action against cost of living, and the *entire* status hierarchy of our societies. That hierarchy and its sub-hierarchies are fossil fuel hierarchies. Nothing you can do will be more powerful politically than installing solar. /7

For *every* issue, this is what we don’t see. Undermine the fossil fuel basis of all our status hierarchies, and the lot crashes down like a house of cards. /end

Using traditional economic framings, enshittification is a flavour of monopolisation. The various tricks and devices to prevent competition. Because we’ve lived and breathed economic framings for social life since the 1970s, all sides of most debates agree to the framings. /2

Competition is said to be an unalloyed good, monopolisation an intrinsic bad. It surprises me that basic framing doesn’t strike us as weird. Most of my time here is devoted to reverse engineering these economic framings. To showing how bizarre they are. /3

To recap many threads, societies are 100% social. They’re not run by political systems, not by any -isms. They’re all functionally equivalent, in the basic underlying social mechanisms they use. More specifically, societies run on status. /4

We call the various ways different cultures and countries work with status by different political and economic names, which disguises that we’re all doing the same thing. Building status hierarchies. Humans’ deepest desire is to have status, because status = identity. /5

The work of Rene Girard talks about this, Gabriel Tarde’s earlier work on imitation as the root social act also (we imitate/emulate higher-status people, and that’s what creates the status hierarchies). Status is also neither good nor bad. But it can be gamed. /6

Status reflects that some things are better or worse than other things. A good plumber is hopefully one who does plumbing better, and therefore has a higher status. Our democracies are failing because we levelled all status hierarchies into a single master hierarchy. /7

A hierarchy of popularity. Elections destroyed democracy, bizarrely we define the latter now by the former. Democracy preceded elections by many centuries. Once you make popularity the key to ultimate power, all other status differentiation is toast. /8

Anything can be made popular. We learn the basics of this at school, popularity is the currency of all schooling, socially. It’s just marketing. Our governance became completely decoupled from objective, material reality. /9

Take Peter Dutton’s nuclear fantasy, announced in more detail yesterday for Australia. It’s seriously a criminal joke, as public policy. He knows it. He doesn’t care. He’s using it to fire up the team sports, imitative rivalry as Girard called it. To win votes. /10

To build and strengthen his own status hierarchy, in opposition to many generations of complex multi-layered hierarchies of expertise-driven status - our public life. Like any ‘influencer’ today, how you get the followers behind you becomes irrelevant. /11

Just lie, make up abject fantasies, provided it generates a team (status hierarchy) that in turn opposes existing teams and takes over their social position. Social media vastly accelerates this bullshitification process. An economy of likes. Popularity is the currency. /12

How does this relate to enshittification? Enshittification is the building of status hierarchies, using one set of specific modern network techniques. It’s the same social mechanism humans have used since there’s been humans. And here’s where economic framings don’t help. /13

Because that’s not in itself a bad thing. Status is unavoidable, it’s our root social act. It’s our identity. And we want hierarchies of that status, to reflect the basic quality of what’s on offer. Competition? That’s so obviously an invitation to do more team sports. /14

To set up more rival teams, to challenge existing teams, for status. What Will Storr calls ‘status games’, as the stuff of all human life. It’s not a solution for the destruction of democracies. It’s the opposite. It prevents stabilisation of any status hierarchy. /15

Sociality is intrinsic violence. Team sports, the (endless) battle for status and identity. All that stabilises societies is a structuring central status hierarchy at the heart of a society, to provide a level of control of the team sports. /16

This, I’m certain, is the historic reason religions and monarchies exist. They’re both mechanisms for the regulation of status. Take Victorian England, which I Tweet about a lot. Heavily dominated by both Church and Queen. /17

And yet obsessed with engineering the social good. It managed to harness status games towards collective well-being. It turned status games into ‘success’ games, as Storr calls them. As opposed to status games of virtue or domination. /18

Social media is saturated with status-virtue games. History is overwhelmingly about dominance games. But the Republic of Letters found a way to harness status games for material well-being of societies. Of course nothing is perfect. The raw material of status is desire. /19

There are no utopias. Desires always shift. But you need to stabilise status games, team sports, to provide fractalised control of the various status hierarchies in play. Enshittification is a crude attempt to do this. It won’t succeed, as Cory says, the platforms will die. /20

But we don’t need to replace them with lots of competition. We need new status hierarchies, playing status-success games again. Where status is coupled to material well-being. Like the Romans and Victorians. Even Asia today, in many ways. /21

Rather than the empty election-driven popularity contests, status-virtue games, that we currently call democracy. Monopolies are just successful, stabilised hierarchies. Not in themselves bad. But they can be gamed, as these platforms are doing. /22

A monarchy is a monopoly. As is a church. Or a State. Humans will always create them because they always create status hierarchies. And they should. There is no ‘the people’, some flattened cultural fantasy of no differentiation between levels in all walks of life. /23

The real task is to ensure that status games are success games. Not virtue or dominance games. And again, humans have pulled that off before. Usually by making engineering the core of their societies. /24

Without that, only catastrophes bring meaningful change. That’s all that can disrupt status hierarchies. There’s data to prove it. /end

‘Supply and demand’ is a social/political invention to pretend that societies will regulate themselves in the absence of government or other leadership. As you can see in this case, it’s complete BS under any sort of scrutiny at all. 2/2

The ‘status quo’ is a beautiful concept, rarely used analytically. It’s a rendition of the actual reason societies hold, or don’t. They’re a semi-stable equilibrium of competing status hierarchies. /2

Always shifting, as human desires and their associated status hierarchies shift. It’s extremely difficult to establish a lasting, stable status hierarchy, because of fluctuating human desires. /3

But once it’s there, nothing is more difficult to break. It’s the encapsulation of every part of ‘how things are done’ in a society. It’s all connected. Custom, routine, tradition. Like society’s autonomic nervous system, the automatic habits that keep society running. /4

To suggest a shift to the status quo is to eventually call for a disruption to how *everything* is done. A shift to everybody’s ’comfort zone’. As Rousseau I think said, a society has all of its habits at once, they’re all connected. /5

The reason we’re not acting on climate change and Covid is definitely driven by a handful of bad faith actors. But the magic sauce that allows them to get away with it is that status quo. /6

They know how to manipulate it, how to make any action appear a disruption to all of those comfort zones. Why ‘living with’ disasters is now their chosen narrative. Because it makes people feel their underlying comfort zone isn’t under threat. /7

We’re all therefore implicated in the non-action. Even if we’re not driving it. The extent to which we won’t disrupt our own comfort zones is the extent to which bad faith actors win. /8

For example I’ve asked here before, who would give up recreational travel to fight climate change? I’m not asking people to do that, I’m asking them how important is that habit, to them? It’s hugely important to millions. They don’t even deny it. /9

This is the reason only catastrophes really change societies. A status quo will NEVER change on its own. Never gradually, never in a planned way. It would mean people voluntarily surrendering social statuses they’ve spent lifetimes nurturing. /10

Our status is our identity. To surrender it is in many ways to surrender our very identity. And that’s why change mostly doesn’t happen. /end

Picture from RethinkX: https://t.co/UhiStCXKwN Renewables are changing power fundamentally - in the political sense. The hoarding and rationing of energy *is* political power today. /2

The capacity to generate energy almost for free, anywhere, and at any scale, including your own household, destroys our current status hierarchies. Those hierarchies are fossil fuel hierarchies. You don’t have to vote for anybody to smash those hierarchies. /3

That’s what they want you to think, they want to remain the obligatory passage point for power, in both meanings of that term. They’re already not that. 4 million Australians have already made them almost irrelevant. /4

This isn’t a call for ‘self-sufficiency’ either. We don’t want 4 million isolated micro-grids. The grid *is* our public. And for that we do need politicians to step up and adjust. But they won’t do that with voting. /5

They’ll just turn the whole thing into what they turn everything into. Team sports. Culture wars, status games. Because that’s’ our system of populist governance. Popularity wins ultimate power. /6

But thanks mostly to China, the technologies are already here for you to check out of most of that bullshit. The greatest pressure you can apply to those hierarchies is to generate most of your energy without them. Put it in your cars too. Again, thanks mostly to China. /end

Most of the material reality of the world will be completely separate from these violent status games/team sports. But being stuck inside the status games, the world will look like an apocalyptic battle. Test this against your own experience. 2/2

By segregating childhood off from adult life, we created places where children developed a culture of their own. School culture. That became their world. When we then universalised schooling, that became all of our world. /2

Because when kids leave school they take their culture with them. What else would they do? It’s all they know. And then they started transforming the adult world, into that same school culture. /3

Which is why we’re now absolutely dominated by populism. Because popularity is the currency of school life. Populism *is* school culture. So the kids remade our adult world as a populist culture too. Again, it’s all they knew. /4

Every day look at these platforms, the battling groups or teams, fighting for status for themselves and their ideas. It’s just the schoolyard. Literally, not by analogy. Status games, or team sports as I call them /5

We never leave high school now. Because adult society is just a giant high school. Elections elect our Prom Kings and Queens. Again, not an analogy. The actual cultural reality. /end

The most fundamental and disturbing thing about social media is the thing hardly ever mentioned about it. The capture of society itself. Because societies are 100% social, these technologies targeted society itself. It’s the greatest heist in history. /2

Because we think of the social as just one domain, alongside others like ‘politics’ and ‘economics’, we thought social media was just a fun way to ‘connect’, alongside the other activities of our lives. But societies are ALL social. Politics and economics are 100% social. /3

We surrendered everything, when we allowed these platforms to exist. Politics and economic activity are driven by these platforms as well. Every major business and politician now have staff to do ‘the socials’. It’s become the centre of what they do. /4

Hapless friends and family vomit the most intimate details of their personal and social lives onto these platforms, thinking they’re sharing in some ‘community’. There is increasingly no other community at all, apart from these platforms. /5

The bait was to offer people precisely that. A place to connect with friends and family and colleagues. How wonderful! That got everybody here. It’s what keeps them here too. To leave is to literally check-out of society itself. /6

The switch was to then progressively enshittify those relationships, to monetise them. And worse, to develop algorithms that would enflame every relationship, tribalising every public issue. To generate team sports. Status games. /7

As Will Storr brilliantly noticed, the algorithms here are literal slot machines, for status. You post, and then you wait to see who likes it, who follows you. How much social status it gave you. That’s the actual way slot machines are constructed. To feed that social need. /8

For status and identity. That’s what social media is, and the revenue from these social slot machines goes in one way only. To the platform owners and to platform shareholders. /9

You won’t convince friends and families of the outrageous heist that this is. They’ll be mostly so deeply addicted to these slot machines now, that they will have no way at all of distinguishing between them, and community life itself. /10

To them social media IS now society. All of it. They get their news here, they ‘do their own research’ here. They figure out what to buy, who to vote for, etc. It’s a literal heist. of our *entire* societies, and even of our most intimate personal lives. /11

People get great joy by this sense of warm community, all swapping Christmas photos and stories of what they and their families are doing. Not noticing that their families are increasingly being pulverised into warring tribes. /12

All enabled by our blind spot of not realising that societies are all social, in every detail. Technologies that target that root mechanism of all human life, will own all human life. /end

Something that seems one of those classic stories of ‘community’, people apparently making the effort to offer the community (whatever they think that means) something special. Christmas lights. How’d that work out? /2

It worked out the way all sociality and ‘connection’ works out. Badly. Because we have not the first clue about what connection really means. Connection creates the battles for status that I call team sports, and Will Storr calls status games. /3

Firstly, putting up Christmas lights is so often not the innocent community spirit activity it often seems. It’s a pissing contest, so often. People compete to outdo each other. That’s THE standard pattern, throughout all history of humans living together. /4

There may be a preliminary coming together, a connection. Some activity or idea that binds people more or less strongly, in a preliminary way. But as soon as they’re so bound, the team sports/status games begin. /5

Within the teams people compete for status, and then the team competes with other teams, for status. And then, as in this story, the overall bringing together of masses of people into teams creates friction and conflict. /6

In this case those that throw eggs at undecorated homes, and/or their empty alcohol bottles into yards. Not part of team lights, or team ‘family and kids looking at lights’. People who don’t feel part of either of those teams, so form their own loose coalition. /7

A team of spoilers, expressing their exclusion from the other teams. I work in the operational running of communities. I see this all day, every day. The contrast between ridiculously idealistic ideas of ‘the people’ and ‘community’, and what people actually do together. /8

There is no default state of community, no ‘the people’. There are only battling status hierarchies, which sometimes stabilise long enough to create a sense of happy togetherness. That’s always a fundamental lie. The more so now we have social media. /9

SM allows the rapid formation and expansion of teams, and facilitates their encounter with and conflict with other teams. As Will Storr says, take any public ‘issue’, and what you’re seeing isn’t a play of ideas or opinions. You’re seeing status games. Team sports. /10

The eternal battle for status. Because status = identity. Without status you’re literally nobody, in a society. Completely invisible. Vandalism like throwing empty beer bottles into Christmas light gardens makes some team visible, to the other teams. /11

I can promise you that anybody who works closely behind the scenes of keeping societies running, operationally, is neck-deep in this shit every single day. And likely deeply cynical about the dopey idealisms of community and unity. /12

Human societies run on desires. Desires are *always* shifting, and rapidly. There is no long-term stability. All that creates that impression historically is two things. /13

One is the cooperation forced on masses of people by their encounter with catastrophe. Wars, plagues, natural disasters, economic crashes. Those things can force most of us into a single team, Team Survival. For a time. It won’t last. /14

Once we’ve survived and ‘normal life’ seems possible again, all of that stirring unity is ditched as fast as we can manage it. The second is embedding our social relations into material reality. What gets called our ‘technology’ is really this. /15

Empires like the Romans or Victorian England did this, engineered vast social provision through public works, which in turn reflected back a stability upon people, who were forced to maintain this ‘infrastructure’, rather than just play status games. /16

The laughable idea social stability and social progress comes from the exchange of opinions in the team sports debates of normal times is unfortunately our default framing of most human life. It’s complete and utter bullshit. /17

Humans don’t agree or live together as happy communities, ever. Unless they’re forced to. By the two factors I just mentioned, catastrophe and engineering. Those who work at keeping society’s lights on know this. They’re vastly outnumbered. Merry Christmas :) /end

If we admire people, for example, we might look at them in the pages of magazines, or online. We admire them, from afar. If we camp outside their home to get a more ‘authentic experience’ of them, what’s that called? Stalking. 2/6

A violation of them. And yet we don’t see how exactly equivalent travel is, for place. Travel is geographical stalking, a violation of others’ homes. We have no right to invade other places to satisfy some need we have to be ‘there’. 3/6

Place can and should be admired from afar, from within places we make beautiful ourselves - our own homes and landscapes. These books weren’t just a precursor to a more authentic relationship with place. They *were* that more authentic relationship. 4/6 https://t.co/yJC8LyMLBQ

They respected place, the right of others to have their own places, and to not stalk them to satisfy our old imperial need for domination and possession. We don’t know how to make place any more, so travel to try to fill that void by consuming others’ places. 5/6

It destroys them. Like quantum theory, what we go to ‘see’ is fundamentally changed by us being there to see it. And then when everybody else does it too, that change becomes destruction, of that place. /end

That take every public issue and turn it into a multiplicity of battling teams, to generate likes, engagement and revenue. Society is not more divided than ever. That’s just the algorithms at work. 2/2

Lawrence’s critique of education bears little resemblance to any of the dominant educational narratives today or even of his own time. His greatest problem with education? That we massified it. /2

In a populist age like ours, immediately people will hear alarm bells of ‘elitism’ at that sort of suggestion. But Lawrence was making a pretty simple empirical argument, not arguing for the intrinsic superiority of some types of people over others. /3

For Lawrence, thinking is a skill. Which some are born with an aptitude for, and others not. Of course we all think to some degree, Lawrence is talking about school/book learning. Just as we’re not all born great at sports or singing, or whatever. /4

Nothing is more dangerous than ideas. Than belief. Ideas are so toxically seductive and dangerous that they need people with an aptitude and training to dissect them, to do that for the rest of us. Just like people with aptitude do every other job in society. /5

We don’t rally against plumbers who come to unblock our home toilets, saying it’s elitist that they do it when we could do it ourselves. Fuck that. We’re all mostly very happy to let somebody with expertise come and do that for us. /6

Lawrence’s views on democracy alongside his on education reflected the same basic understanding. That the idea of ‘the people’ as a thing was the death of not only democracy, but of civilisation itself. /7

The idea that we are all equal at all tasks, and that together we form some sort of magical collective mind. Codswallop. This is where Lawrence’s genius insight cuts right to the bone of the world we live in today. /8

Lawrence predicted that the idea of forcing mass academic learning on entire populations would lead to only one possible result. The utter contempt of most people towards ideas and those who work with them. /9

He brilliantly describes the experience of the vast numbers of students in schools who have little aptitude for school learning, and who then develop a visceral hatred for it and everything it represents. They feel humiliated. /10

Societies run on status, and the greatest wound to any person is the destruction of their status. Humiliation is the outcome. Forcing huge numbers to be humiliated by school learning leads to a mass movement of hatred for it. /11

And here we are, in a world dominated by social media. Where those we humiliated by forcing them to try to come to terms with knowledge they had no aptitude for, now rally on these platforms to ‘do their own research’. Really meaning rally in teams against ‘the elite’. /12

With that elite being those who succeed at schools and in universities. We brought this on ourselves with ridiculously idealistic and fact-free ideas about both democracy and thought. Try to mount an argument with anybody that thought is a specialised skill. /13

You’re violating their right to ‘free opinions’ even saying it. You will meet violent resistance. A person with aptitude and training for working with ideas is not a better person. Just as a plumber is not a better person than a hairdresser. /14

They just have a specific aptitude, and specific skills. Like we all do, in all of our jobs and other activities. That hierarchical ‘better than’ thing is the vicious hatred we inculcated in students who simply weren’t suited to school learning. /15

Schools now of course try to cater for a much wider range of aptitudes, but the cat is long out of the bag. Our passion for universal education was mostly our passion to get kids out of the way of adult life. /16

I’ve Tweeted about where that got us, the entrenched adolescence of adult culture itself, as children took their popularity school culture and rebuilt adult life with it. Including the contempt for learning and knowledge itself, and all those who work with it. /17

Social media is the enabling infrastructure for this destruction of adult hierarchies of expertise, replaced by the aggregating of likes and followers on these platforms. It gave the humiliated their chance to fight back. We’re living in the ruins. /end