January 2025

Dewey and Lippmann in their famous early 20th century debates on democracy more or less agreed on one thing. That people never spontaneously organise or agree on just about anything. They ‘come together’ only when they face a problem collectively that they can’t fix. 2/7

Once that problem is being effectively felt by people in their lives, they will band together under some form of leadership, to fight it. But that moment of recognition of a collectively unresolved problem also attracts the status whores. 3/7

Ambitious people looking for a way to ‘make a name’ for themselves. They see the collective attention shifting to a problem, and are attracted to that attention (not the problem) like flies to a pile of shit. 4/7

Having arrived at the pile of shit, they can’t just offer support to the most logical and obvious solutions that may exist or are being proposed. That gives them no differentiation from others, no leverage for their own status. So they’ll offer contrarian positions. 5/7

Often outrageous ‘solutions’. Because they know that will at least shift the already present collective gaze towards them, even for a moment. Which is what they crave. It’s important to recognise that they have ZERO interest in the problem itself or in its resolution. 6/7

What they’re interested in is their own social status. And the resolution of the problem would take away the stage that they’re playing their loon contrarian role on, a disaster. They revel in the problem continuing, because while it does, they can attract attention. /end

They’re not good change. They can sweep away existing status hierarchies. But they just replace them with new ones. Orwell’s Animal Farm was about that. Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution of that time were prescient too. What did that revolution lead to? /2

An even greater ‘authoritarian’ status hierarchy than the one it replaced. Napoleon. We have a harder time seeing this same dysfunctional pattern in our own Western societies, because our revolution seems more benign. /3

Some great new songs, mostly. Sometimes sung in ‘protest’. The Beatlemania revolution. This revolution was as destructive as the Russian and Chinese revolutions. It’s just taking a lot longer to play out. /4 https://t.co/04LwaqcfvD

Go back to that time, and it was a critical one for Western countries. We’d just undertaken a massive social re-build after WW2, itself the tail end of a catastrophic 50 years, with WW1, Spanish Flu, and the Great Depression. We’d invented ‘the public’ in that re-build. /5

A construct, a continuous calculation of collective good. We needed to do that as part of the re-build, on the ruins of the largely destroyed status hierarchies. Massive innovation and progress in things like public housing, health and education. /6

What did the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s do with this fertile soil of public life? It reinstated the old status game society. Now centred upon music in particular. This was a generation of adults coming to adulthood who only knew one culture. School. /7

I’ve posted a lot about that, the transformation of adult life into perpetual adolescent life, via the mechanism of universal schooling. Schooling decoupled from adult life. So graduates simply re-built the adult world,as a giant high school. /8

Beatlemania was part of that. Brilliant as their songs are, they’re not anywhere near sufficient to explain the magnitude of the ‘mania’ they caused. They were just riding a wave of cultural and social change. The forging of a new adult world. /9

A high school that goes forever. That’s why music became central to this adult world as well, to the revolution. It was teenagers reproducing what they knew. To this day this new social model is what we try to apply to all collective problems. It’s a dismal failure. /10

We ‘raise awareness’ (the old protest methodology, really just teenagers complaining). We hold concerts to raise awareness and money. We try to fix poverty by having more concerts. You can’t unsee this now universal teen culture, for every stage of life. /11

Some of those who forged this culture in the 1960s are still at festivals like Glastonbury, as headlining acts. The perversity of that doesn’t seem to strike anybody. To return to Burke, why are revolutions so disastrous? /12

Because they completely ignore the actual thing that keeps societies running and safe. Institutions. A very complex concept, but including all of a society’s inherited customs and traditions. All of the things that ‘worked’, and therefore survived. /13

Not even consciously designed, more emergent from centuries of empirical testing in the ordinary lives of people. The only things that restrain our otherwise compulsive playing of social status games, to promote our own status and identities. /14

The 1960s counter-cultural revolution attacked the very thing that the post-war rebuild was doing. The ‘establishment’ itself. The young adults of that time had been largely shielded from he horrors of the half century that preceded them. So they invented their own baddies. /15

Society itself. It’s why this revolution is particularly destructive. It’s society literally eating itself. The small government libertarian freedumb populist nonsense that dominates our politics today is a direct descendant of that revolution. /16

Many don’t even see the connection, that the same musical acts who sang of revolution and peace are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars each, some even billionaires. It’s Animal Farm. They created brand new status hierarchies, to destroy the post-war consensus. /17

‘The public’ is now dead as an idea. It existed only for a few decades after WW2, during that re-build. The ‘revolution’ then re-introduced social status games, but with a nice soundtrack so we don’t spot the same pattern. /end

As LIFE describes (https://t.co/PxbCMkksEn), it was that mid-century period where teenagers were suddenly invented as a distinct social group. People who follow me know why I think that mid-century period is critical. /2

The first half of the 20th century was dominated by 4 major social catastrophes: WW1, Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2. Those catastrophes decimated existing adult social status hierarchies (the things that drive all human life). /3

At the same time, mass schooling was bedding down in most Western countries. The confluence of these two things led to our world today. Adult life was destroyed, leading to a fundamental re-build post-WW2 around the notion of a ‘public’. /4

A concept created to capture collective life, rather than status-driven life, to guide the re-build. At the same time children, now effectively decoupled from adult life in schools, were developing their own culture. Teenage culture. /5

The collision of these two movements led to our world today. Teenagers emerged from school, the only culture they knew, and remade the adult world, now a near blank sheet because of the 4 catastrophes. They remade it as a giant high school. /6

The currency of high school is popularity. And that became the currency of adult life in the second half of the 20th century, and still is today. Populism. Voting went from being a mundane way of selecting leaders - a means - to becoming the actual ends of political life. /7

Winning elections was no longer a means to an end. It became THE end in itself. That’s adolescent culture as adult culture. The economic and political framings we use to try to understand the world today describe nothing. /8

Our world of free markets and small government is just a teen world of ‘freedom’. Teenagers will of course rail against authority, that’s all 60 years now of libertarian politics has been about. That’s our society-as-a-high-school. A social, cultural shift. /9

Similarly we’re now ‘living with’ a pandemic because everybody got too bored with dealing with it. (Recognising teen behaviour here?) It was no longer ‘trending’. We’d moved on. Climate change the same. To deal with that, we’d have to interrupt our ‘lifestyles’. /10

Whole societies now are on permanent adolescent ‘gap years’ from reality. Again, this is all perfectly understandable as the extension of adolescent/teen culture, to all adult life. Because that is literally what happened. /end

When we think about humans acting together, we almost always think about them interacting ‘subjectively’. With feelings and ideas and thoughts. Latour’s entire career was an attempt to show this as fundamentally wrong. /2

Latour showed it was the objects we use every day that are actually what hold societies together. That technology is fundamentally misunderstood as a ‘tool’. Objects/technologies are profoundly social. The MOST social part of our societies. /3

Take any technology and if you look you will see gathered around it a whole collection of humans. The people who design and build it, the people who use and maintain it, the people who wholesale and retail it. Etc. Objects and technologies are not tools. /4

Yes you can frame them in that way, ‘a lawn mower is a tool to mow lawns’. Obviously. But that misses the fundamental *social* transformation the introduction of that technology brings about. /5

Once mowers exist, an ‘industry’ exists around the design, construction, sale and maintenance of the mowers. Thousands of peoples’ ‘subjective’ lives are now not only maintained by the existence of mowers, those subjective ways of being didn’t even exist beforehand. /6

And then add the millions who use the mowers, the technology weaving its way into their various social ways of being. As well as the providers of fuel, lawn products etc. What’s critical here is that it’s the technology that holds everything together, as a *social* group. /7

This is the problem Japanese and German carmakers are having right now, with EVs. Chinese automakers are threatening their existence. There’s nothing objectively too difficult for these older carmakers in shifting to EVs. Their resistance is social. /8

Not only their companies, but entire communities and cities surrounding legacy carmakers have shaped their social and cultural lives around combustion engine technology. To shift to EVs means a profound disruption of their social and cultural lives. /9

Once objects and technologies have woven together a particular group of humans, the dreary concept of ‘maintenance’ (like the concept of ‘administration’) is really the magic key. It’s the ongoing maintaining of these objects that disciplines human collective life. /10

People will never, ever just agree on things. Human desire is far too fluid. But once you embed social relations inside objects and technologies, their continued upkeep imposes a discipline on collective life. Societies that build things are stable societies. /11

Those aren’t two separate statements. It’s the process of building things that creates social stability. The Romans knew it, it’s why their particular collective lasted for so long. A material basis for human collective life. A collective focused on material well-being. /12

Imagine an object-oriented democracy today. One focused only on the material well-being of peoples. Where decisions are made entirely on gaps on that material well-being. What do we get instead? Rampant idealism. /13

Decaying and collapsing ‘infrastructure’, while we vote for idiots arguing idealistic battle cries about small government, trickle-down, the level of taxation, the commitment to nationalism etc. All ‘subjective’ hot air. Debates that never (and can’t) end. /14

We can usually all agree though on the level of material well-being. Our ‘cost of living’, for example. And the solutions to these are also material things, mostly already known and quite simple. What stops them being implemented? /15

The necessity to route everything through these idiot subjective status games, where the prize is victory in the electoral battle. So for example we might have ‘small government’ advocates for public health up against ‘the usefulness of the State’ advocates. /16

One of them will win a given election. Does this mean public health will get attention? Not at all. It was always just the currency of the subjective debates over meaningless idealisms. We need an object-oriented democracy. One focused exclusively on material well-being. /17

Down with all idealisms and ideologies. The entire focus on ‘keeping the lights on’. Material things. /end

These platforms operationalise a view of society. It’s what IT more generally has always done. Technologies embed a view of the world. They promote and produce a view of society that says ‘the people’ generate society. /2

Anybody who follows me knows I think this is a suicidal belief, for civilisations. Not only do ‘the people’ not run societies (and never have), ‘the people’ is not even a thing. It’s a retrospective justification for high status individuals and groups, for their actions. /3

Politicians for example always evoke the mandate of the people, when they win elections. In reality voters just put some numbers next to names on a ballot paper. Those numbers are then aggregated, and winners claim they mean anything they choose them to mean. /4

While saying ‘the people have spoken!’ The people didn’t speak, they put some ticks or numbers next to some names. That is literally all that they did. Social media is another profit-hungry brain fart from Silicon Valley types. Empowering and decentralising society! /5

Horseshit. Like all IT products, what it does is strip away existing status hierarchies, and replace them with new ones, headed by the owners of the IT products. Social media barons now run the world. With total impunity, governments look on helpless as they gut societies. /6

They swallowed up traditional media, and commerce, and now politics as well. Meanwhile the rest of the population, drunk on the idea that everybody having a daily opinion on everything, on these platforms, is democracy at work. /7

Including daily pleading to do something, anything, about our collective messes. None of which translates into any action, because the entire purpose of these platforms is to translate that pleading and anger into one thing only. /8

Profits and power for the owners and shareholders, of these platforms. Look at how Musk has weaponised X now as his global platform for massive interference in established democracies. /9

While we all believe ‘the people’ run democracies, and not the status hierarchies that actually do, our civilisations will continue to spin out of control. And we will continue to express our outrage here, as if it’s some form of public square. /10

When in reality social media is the key weapon for the building of Silicon Valley status hierarchies. How do we not see the astronomical wealth and influence of Silicon Valley, even long before social media, and recognise what’s actually going on? /11

A world now crippled by cybercrime too, courtesy of this shift. Totally beholden to these coding behemoths. This is the American disease. A nation so pathologically at war with the idea of collective anything, that the ‘American Dream’ is not seen for what it really is. /12

The desperate desire to escape the social nightmare generated by this collective vacuum at the root of American life, by building fabulously wealthy enclaves, gated communities, to escape the chaos and violence. That’s the true Silicon Valley motivation. /13

The Nerd Reich, as @gilduran76 wonderfully calls it. The dystopian total society-replacing fantasies generated by tech entrepreneurs. And then released into every other society that uses these ‘tools’, really Trojan Horses for these libertarian fantasies. /14

Fantasies generated by the desperation to avoid being road kill in a society that recognises no collective ‘we’. /end

Going there would asphyxiate you, crush you. You can only ever imagine being on Jupiter, and that imagining will be far more real than being there yourself. Travel doesn’t understand this. It fetishises ‘being there’. It has no understanding of place, of ‘there’. /2

The distant view can capture a location across multiple dimensions, with minimal disruption to that place. Going there to somehow ‘experience’ it more directly changes the place. What you go to see is fundamentally changed, by you being there. /3

What you go to see is no longer there, when you go to see it. Because of you being there. We’re still that old imperial culture mapping the world so we can accumulate it. We travel through our maps. /4

And today the locations we trash are incidental fodder for our true travel, through our social games of imitative rivalry. We travel to show others, that we have travelled. We don’t actually go anywhere, the ‘trip’ is all within our social media feeds. /5

We arrive at locations and try to reconcile our images, themselves generated by our social media status games, with the ‘real’ physical location. And we take thousands of photos and selfies, to try to get close to the ‘real’ location while there. /6

Which of course is us not moving an inch from our actual home, those photos just feed our feeds. Walt Disney theme parks in some ways were early recognition of living the world from a respectful distance. /7

And when we got jet travel. And we thought we’d go there instead. But all we did was turn those locations into new theme parks. The actual reality was like arriving at Jupiter. Brutal and overwhelming. We needed to tame the ‘experience’, to make it palatable. /8

I’ve heard locals say ‘that one’s a Lonely Planet tourist’, or ‘that one’s a Contiki’. You don’t ever arrive, when you go ‘there’. You travel through the virtual theme park of your imitative status games at home. /end

It’s clear that’s happened because the magnitude of the fires completely overwhelmed the urban reticulated water system, which was never designed to have to fight fires on this scale. Of course the old conservative white men brigade did what they do with every disaster. /2

Immediately tried to use catastrophe to fertilise even more team sports, more fights, to generate more votes for themselves. Trump claims it’s because of some Greenie obsession with protecting species. /3

We see this in Oz every bushfire season now, every disaster is said to be the fault of Greenies not burning and chopping down enough bush between fires. But the male, pale and stale old men who generate these arguments don’t give a fuck about fires anyway. /4

They love catastrophes because they use them relentlessly to whip up more division, more team sports, and therefore more votes. The world needs to fix material problems. Not to turn the not fixing of them into platforms for eternal team sports status games. /5

This is history though, what always happens. The status games will continue right up until the point the catastrophes completely overwhelm us. That’s all that will sweep the status games away. Total, utter catastrophe. /6

Societies don’t progress through politics, or any form of discussion. Humans are simply incapable of agreement, on just about anything. They progress when external objective catastrophe forces a provisional unity, to fight threats. That is all of our history. /end

Then external catastrophes befall societies, sweeping away the current status hierarchies. Only then do societies change. Or the catastrophes come from within, through the ignoring of basic material needs while playing status games. /end

All technologies implement a particular view of the world. They’re not just tools. Social media is clearly sold as some form of ‘democracy’ in action. A way to ‘connect’, and for ‘the people’ to coalesce all of their daily opinions into democratic outcomes. /2

I’ve Tweeted very often here about why I think all of that is a total misunderstanding of the most basic ways humans behave. Societies do not and never have (or will) operate by aggregating what every individual thinks and feels. /3

It’s not even what happens on these platforms. What happens on these platforms is how all humans *always* behave, together. People join groups (I call them teams to capture the rivalry/competition). Those teams battle for status with other teams. Team sports. Status games. /4

A team/group forms mostly around a high-status individual or belief, that followers then emulate in various ways. Imitation is the root of all human life. Imitation creates status, and status creates identity. /5

It literally defines who we all are. The structure you see on social media, with a relative handful of hugely popular ‘influencers’, followed by vast numbers of others, is the structure of all societies themselves. /6

In the case of X now, it’s obviously been hijacked (though at great expense) by an owner who has socially dangerous ideas for it. It’s a tool to further his particular belief system. Which is forcing many to abandon ship. The platform is probably terminally enshittified. /7

But do we really want to reproduce this same model somewhere else? if societies do always have this same basic structure, driven by status and identity, why wouldn’t we just revert to the techniques that evolved over millennia, to manage that? /8

The entire history of the human race is the history of the invention of those techniques. We wouldn’t be here otherwise. Most generally, it requires a centralised status hierarchy that can be managed, from which all other team sports then derive. /9

It’s unpopular to say it, but this is the actual origin of religion and monarchies. And States. Centralised status hierarchies, invented to prevent the widespread chaotic and violent battles over status. The team sports, status games. You can’t be rid of those games. /10

But you can manage them. Which is what those institutions did. Social media has zero chance of emulating their relative success, not least because it’s owned by a handful of people with no real merit in any way at all, let alone as leaders of entire societies. /11

We need to abandon the idea that societies are built from the ‘bottom up’, by ‘the people’. A fantasy invented by people who never had to run a society. There are no tops and bottoms. Ditching this fantasy should fundamentally shift how we think about social media as well. /end

Initial analysis shows the trend being driven strongly by women, enabled by their use of software via their mobile phones, to ‘leapfrog’ their usual cultural options. That sounds extremely plausible. Women wanting a better cultural deal. But I think it’s more than that. /2

Because I suspect online life, and particularly social media, doesn’t offer a new deal. It offers you ongoing dependency, to the apps. It decouples our lives from some basic social and cultural institutional foundations. /3

Which could be seen as liberation and progress. Except I think it ignores that the apps (general term for software we increasingly use to transact our personal and social lives) are not very social or cultural things. They’re pretty obvious commercial things. /4

And sure, all cultural artefacts are also commercial artefacts. Books were the same. Users eventually determine their fate, not the commercial interests. But social media in particular is different. Because its algorithms target some core social and cultural behaviours. /5

It’s been such a rapid and astronomical force because it’s a ‘a slot machine for status’, as Will Storr calls it. It targets and creates imitative rivalry, the battle for status and identity, the root of all societies, as Rene Girard spent many years analysing. /6

And as @doctorow has described, it ‘enshittifies’ our social, political and economic relationships, in a bait and switch where the bait is ‘connection’, and the switch is monetising those same connections. Or as I call it, social media is society eating itself. /7

Bruno Latour in his last work on climate change often asked when societies were going to come back into land, in the sense of a plane landing. Meaning when they would end the decoupling, as I call it. When they would rediscover place. Not space, place. /8

Coupling in the relationship sense, as John Burns-Murdoch analysed, is itself historically mostly about place too. Couples raise children in homes. Home as a concept is the heart of any idea of place. In our travel culture, it has no meaning at all. /9

Life shifted from being about place, to being about living a series of decoupled ‘experiences’. Including, now, intimate relationships with other humans. This isn’t a modern conservative argument for ‘family values’. That if we just took phones off these pesky women! Etc. /10

Modern conservatives are the chief destroyers of place, including of family. With their decoupled and globalised ‘economies’, that respect no place. All places become ‘resources’. We need to come into land. We need to rediscover being *grounded* again, in some way. /11

Social media is taking us in exactly the opposite direction to that. Societies eating themselves, decoupling every personal, social, political, economic and other social and cultural history in favour of short-term profits for app developers and owners. /12

In the West at least, we never got over being an empire. For us everything is still about perpetual movement, displacement and accumulation. Our recreation time is dominated by travel, where we accumulate sights and experiences. We turn the world into bucket lists. /13

So in a way this is still us struggling to understand anything except the colonialism we grew up in, as the default for life itself. /end

…all institutions develop an internal culture. Schools are the same. The culture of schools became child culture. It’s all they knew, decoupled from the adult world. So what did they do when they left school? They remade the adult world, as a high school. 2/4

Again, it’s all they knew. Societies then had completely flipped, from being an adult world containing children as young adults, to being a child’s world. Everything you see about modern ‘populist’ life has this as its origin. Popularity is the currency of school culture. 3/4

Elections are society-wide popularity contests, contested by rival groups. Again, just a giant high school. If you want to change the world, think like a teenager. That’s your target audience. /end

In fact, it’s way worse. It sets up status hierarchies based entirely on popularity, a world of influencers. Those hierarchies replace the ones based on expertise. Then they destroy societies. This pattern has repeated throughout history. We refuse to see it. 2/2

The winner comes to power on the promise to fix the broken society. But populist leaders wouldn’t know how to boil an egg. Thus ushering in the inevitable collision between the reality (nothing gets fixed) and the promises. 2/4

Once the public or crowd recognise this, the populist leader is toast. Go look at what has happened to *every* great populist political movement, and its leader. The retribution is brutal. I still bet that Trumpism will be over by the mid-terms. 3/4

Everything his cadre of loons is taking as ultimate victory is actually a fast-track to their own destruction. If we could stop mistaking elections for reality, this would all be obvious. But we’re trapped in the team sports bubbles. /end

These teams then battle each other, in status games. Team sports. That’s the origin of everything from actual team sports, to fashion, politics, art, science etc. Look around. Our world is status games, not politics. Not economics. Only catastrophe disrupts it. 2/2

The medium is the message. It’s not the information or content on social media that is dangerous. It’s that it’s a substitute for society itself. Our most intimate and deepest personal and social lives. Which is all of our lives. 2/5

Just look at it. We now transact a vast amount of our personal, social, political and professional lives, on these platforms. We watch too many Hollywood movies. The AI fear is mostly people watching Terminator too many times. Imagining machines taking over the world. 3/5

Which fundamentally misunderstands machines, just for starters. But we’re already well past the point where a technology has done as good as that anyway. This is it, right here. Social media. 4/5

It’s not only the medium shaping and hijacking our societies. We’re happily letting it. We swallowed its bait, and don’t notice the switch. /end

I can only emphasise again, if you want to change the world, get back to reality. Actual *material* change. Not symbolic posturing, in your team, against other teams. Who wins elections is irrelevant to our future. Only material change is relevant. /2

If a person, in this case Musk, goes into bat for the appalling stupidity of Trumpism, that’s terrible. But if his cars and other technologies fundamentally undermine existing status hierarchies, which are dominated by fossil fuel interests? /3

Go with the material change every time. All the ‘politics’ is meaningless, populist hot air. Trumpism will be gone in 4 years, ineffective in 2, together with its billionaire barnacles. But material changes will persist. /end

All of the standard explanations we give for the shit that happens in our world really reduce to this status-driven imitation process. ‘Left’ vs ‘Right’ - just two groups, rival statuses. Why I call this basic process ‘team sports’, it’s a competitive rivalry. /2

Cars, clothes, food, beliefs, body shapes, houses, travel destinations…look around, everything is imitation really. We like the things we like and do the things we do because we’re copying others, and that gives us an identity, in some group. /3

We feel like we belong, somewhere. Other groups then clash with us, and our statuses collide and identity feels threatened, so we fight back. All the political and economic and even psychological and sociological explanations given for how humans behave? /4

Just more teams, this time deriving from academia. Each set of ideas is something one academic team rallies behind, in conflict with other academic teams. This then filters through to everyday life, where ordinary people adopt ideas for their own team sport identities. /5

Social media is this root imitative rivalry, built out into a technological system. It’s why it’s swamped the world with breathtaking speed, and has literally captured our entire societies. We transact personal, social, political and economic life increasingly on SM. /6

Things that ‘go viral’ on SM become our actual realities. Complete fantasies like nuclear power for Australia take on an actual reality because the idea of it gives status and identity to its adherents, completely independently of any objective feasibility. /7

It’s explicitly designed ‘as’ a way to seed a new group, the ‘vote for Peter Dutton over Greenies and other renewables and EV wankers, while feeling like we’re doing something about climate’ group. All of our lives is now this. Look around. /8

Every single public issue immediately spawns new teams, who go into battle against other teams, for status and identity. And the more we allow our entire lives to be transacted through these platforms, the more and faster this will happen. /9 https://t.co/KZLjWXSAI2

And because it’s imitative *rivalry*, the more we do it, the more violent our world becomes. The more ‘connected’ we are, the more violent we are. The complete opposite of what platform owners and users say. Owners don’t even believe it. /10

They know it’s a way for them to take over the world, to achieve ultimate status and identity. How anybody can’t see that in recent politics, with these same owners occupying preferred seating at Trump’s inauguration, over his own cabinet, is beyond me. /11

I’ve posted many times how humans have tried to solve this ’populist’ problem in history, re-directing these imitative status games towards actual material outcomes for societies. How to turn status games into ‘success games’, as Will Storr calls them. /12

Where the battle for status in turn progresses human life in general. You can’t be free of status games, but you can channel them. Victorian England did it, through the ‘Republic of Letters’, where science and engineering became high status activities. /13

Churches and monarchies were earlier attempts to do the same, providing a centralised master status hierarchy as a way to control all other status activity in a society. That’s how the ‘class’ system evolved. Channelling status games towards practical, material outcomes. /14

Sadly we’re now so far gone down the rabbit hole that elections, the blue ribbon status game events, are seen as a mechanism of change, seen as democracy itself! Elections don’t change anything much, even less so now they’re hitched to social media. /15

Our social media leader of the free world is now into his second term, more powerful than ever. When existing social media was denied to him in his first time, he built his own. Doesn’t that tell you what social media is really about? /end