February 2025

Gil rightly identifies the focus of the tech bros as the dismantling of democratic *institutions*. Those institutions ARE democracy. Without them democracy is just what it’s become now. A facile popularity contest every 3-4 years. /2

Decades of all-out assault on those institutions, now widely and popularly labelled as ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’, has done the work of mobilising widespread support for their dismantling. People from every corner of society despise bureaucrats. /3

The sponsors of these narratives have been vested interests, furious at the due process of these institutions standing in their way of uninterrupted accumulation of wealth and power. Checks and balances. Regulation which should always be understood as a verb. /4

Regulation of social processes is what creates democracy. It’s also what enables the entrepreneurial activity of the vested interests trying to destroy the regulation. All of our most pressing problems are really only the absence of regulation. /5

Try running that idea up the flagpole and you’ll see firsthand how much the narratives of the past 70 years have been about the dismantling of democratic institutions and their regulations. Almost universally that regulation is seen now as a restriction, on our ‘freedoms’. /6

As if the default state of humankind is a glorious freedom to do whatever we like, interrupted by red tape regulation getting in the way of that glorious free adventure. It’s literally the opposite of what’s actually going on. /7

It’s only by regulating human activity that any sort of freedom, individual or otherwise, occurs. It’s our laws and standards and customs and traditions that create freedom. Only teenagers see rules as oppression. And we have an entire culture now that is adolescent. /8

So there’s now no restriction on this accelerating dismantling of everything that made us free, prosperous, and healthy. Vested interests are driving it, but they’re not imposing it on us. Our entire adolescent culture cheers it on. /9

Edmund Burke at the time of the French Revolution tried to show his society that it was their institutions, their customs and traditions, emergent over generations of trial and error, that really made people free. It’s an argument real conservatives carried forward. /10

Today’s conservatives are radical revolutionaries, there’s not one atom of actual conservative understanding in them. They’re a team in the team sports culture that is now our lives. Desperately trying to be the highest status team of all. /11

Zoom out historically and the Nerd Reich tech bros are nothing more than the nobles/barons, circling their King (Trump), parcelling up their own fiefdoms. Not an analogy. In the absence of institutions, all societies are feudal monarchies. /12 https://t.co/XZKT23gqGV

Trump’s reign will be dominated by these barons-nobles fighting amongst themselves for pre-eminence, and also the King. As Turchin says, we have ‘elite overproduction’, there are too many of them, with too much power and wealth. /13

They’re not united, they’re at war with each other. Trump is too stupid and too weak to unite anybody, even his own team. The best we can hope is that this entire cabal will implode through infighting, which is already underway. /14

The lunacy of their policy ideas should also mobilise just about everybody against them, as society stops functioning. They have no idea how to run a country. This will become more dangerously obvious every single day. Things are already breaking. /15

As I often Tweet about, only catastrophe brings true social change. Our own democratic institutions only emerged in their modern form post the apocalyptic cataclysm of the first half of the 20th century. It was the re-building after 1945 that gave them space to exist. /16

That’s where we’re headed now, towards another cataclysm. Only that will remove the status hierarchies now fighting for supremacy. And that’s all of us now, in social media world. Fighting to be what’s ‘trending’. /17

Social stability, managed by institutions across generations, is now replaced by trying to get anything to ‘go viral’. To get the chaotic society-wide team sports to align in any way. That lasts barely a day, mostly, any trend. We lurch between fads and fashions. /18

Left to themselves, with ‘freedom’ to do what’ve they like, humans will always do one thing. Fight each other, for status. That’s the default. Welcome to 2025. /end

Because it surely shows that what we like, our aesthetic taste, is not the personal choice we say it is. We like something because other people like it. It has nothing to do with the thing we say we like. /2

Fashions change because the trend moves on. Collectively. Trends are driven by social imitation, the root of all societies. And that imitation is driven in turn by social status. /3

I’m sure this kitchen looked wonderful to many people in the 1970s. I doubt many today would agree, even those who lived through those times. Did their personal taste change? Or was that taste always just the imitation of what other people were doing? /4 https://t.co/N66S3J5B3f

We truly don’t see how all of human life is the imitation of other people. Right down to our most intimate, personal tastes and desires. All of our supposed economic and political world uses exactly the same mechanism. It’s all imitative rivalry. Status games, team sports. /5

We are human, all too human. Always immediately disbelieve ‘systems’ views of the world, that say humans live inside economic or political systems. They don’t. We’re always following the same basic social rules, at every scale of society. /6

We want to belong, to have an identity. To do that we imitate others, to give us membership of their group or team. A team led by a higher status person that the rest of the group emulate. /7

The populist destruction of a Trump simply makes this mechanism visible again, hidden for so long behind economic and political gobbledygook. We were never living in economies, or even nation States. Always in groups or teams, struggling for status, and thus identity. /end

And of course, the answer today is largely, in Airbnbs. His view is that overtourism is exploding now because the capacity to house this vast number of tourists has been provided by Airbnb-type processes. Previously available accommodation allowed a managing of impact. 2/3

It was more possible to integrate tourists with local infrastructure capacity, because the accommodation providers were key players in that local capacity. Not so with Airbnb. Just one more example of how get rich quick Silicon Valley types are fucking over societies. /end

(Pic from National Geographic.)

A culture so obsessively focused on removing anything collective, so that status is only ever individually achieved. Why wouldn’t anybody in that context look for a short-cut out of destitution and low status? The Founding Fathers were determined to avoid tyranny. /2

Refugees from a Europe that didn’t want them, scarred by their clashes with royals and popes. Sadly what they implemented was a fundamentalist fanaticism of individual-driven societies. A governance oxymoron. Individuals and collectives are not two things. They’re one thing. /3

You have the freedom to be an individual if much of the work of the society you live in has been delegated widely to others, to do for you. To feed you, keep you safe etc. The more collective we are, the more individually free we are. Division of labour. Economies of scale. /4

Government itself, the vile enemy of freedumb culture, was invented as an economy of scale, of social transactions. A way to make individual life even freer and more easy. People invented government. Aliens didn’t impose it on them. /5

The US has been at war with itself since its inception, in a bootstrapping tug of war. Iconoclastically smashing all of the collective mechanisms that actually give people freedom, to protect individual freedom. /6

On the basis of the hilarious idea that the default raw material of human life is some isolated free individual. It’s worth noticing that nobody who believes this stuff is living in the jungles of violent countries. /7

It’s a belief system that only flourishes in places of collective well-being. An armchair/keyboard fantasy. You can see it in other ways. When individuals become obviously impotent in the face of existential threat? What then? /8

You create super-individuals. ‘Super heroes’ are largely creatures of the American imagination. You can feel the desperation, of individuals facing clear collective clusterfucks, responding emotionally in the only logical way then open to them. Super (individual) powers. /9 https://t.co/XVDM5bcrw2

Fast forward to SIlicon Valley, and you have people there determined to own and run the world. Their products are doing that. The tools are all about disruption, about hijacking of existing social processes, to lift the tool owners above the unwashed fray. /10

This bizarre social tug of war generated by a simple mistake, of believing individual and collective to be in opposition, is exported to every country that uses the tools. Once they arrive there, the tools unload those underlying assumptions onto other cultures too. /11

People now have ‘freedom’ using the tools, to subvert centuries of evolved, incredibly complex social systems. Social media is the apotheosis of this hijacking. Entire societies have been swallowed by SM platforms. /12

Personal, social, professional and political lives are now transacted almost in their entirety, on these platforms. They’re the ultimate Trojan Horses for that horrible mistaken constitutional tug of war between individuals and society. /end

Team sports leads us to believe these are real existential distinctions. Left and Right are just banners two of the teams in that one room march under. 2/2

I much prefer team sports as a simpler term, because that’s what the article is talking about. The transformation of democratic institutions, into team sports. With the institutions now being hijacked by the teams, to progress their team sports. /2

You’d have to be blind not to see this as Trump’s entire agenda. All about revenge, in fake fantasy team sport battles, sometimes called ‘culture wars’, but it goes beyond that. He’s using the Presidency and now the institutions of democracy to bolster his team’s position. /3

Of course traditional politics always had parties, in our lifetimes, which look a bit like teams. But they didn’t begin as that. They derived from the Westminster idea of having contestation between opposing positions. Left and Right of the Speaker, in the chamber. /4

Or a prosecution and a defence, in law. A sound and interesting way of testing ideas. But humans turned it into team sports, and now people think the Left and Right for example are actual existential realities. /5

The (Western) world that looks crazy today is the one I describe lots. A world that was running as peacefully as at any time in history, with shared prosperity and widespread health. Because it was running on the institutions it set up post-WW2. To rebuild societies. /6

Only that shift, to pragmatic and practical institutional rebuilding focused on collective good (the ‘we’) halted the teams sports. The status games of social position. By the 1970s that interruption was over. The status games were back. Societies became ‘economies’. /7

Really just a Trojan Horse, a pseudo-objective sounding thing invented out of thin air using economic gobbledygook, to hide the return of status as the driving force of societies. That’s all a ‘free market’ is, societies stripped of checks and balances on status. /8

And now we’re reaching a short of endgame, where the team sports is taking over those collective institutions from the inside. That’s all Trumpism really is. Competitive authoritarianism. Team sports, uncontrolled status games. Prosecuted mostly through social media. /end

That’s what the Magna Carta was, those checks and balances. A document to apportion power between King and barons. Trump is surrounded by billionaire barons. Together they’re shredding their historic truce. Trump is a useful idiot. The barons are taking charge. 2/2

This is where the ideological insanity of the US itself, stretching back centuries, of being at perpetual war with the institutions of actually being a country, is reaching its possible endgame. What gives the US power, domestically and internationally, *is* its government. /2 https://t.co/HvWa8RHJ2Z

The more Mump (Musk-Trump) dismantle federal institutions, the more power they give back to the States, to oppose them. None of this is surprising to those who see democracy as active public institutions, rather than elections. Mump is neutering itself at speed. /3 https://t.co/mOLARsCI5E

There it is. All the social media wailing and gnashing of teeth about fascists and Nazis and tyrants is just more populism, from the losing team(s). In REALITY, by destroying the State, these imbeciles are literally ‘dickless’, in terms of power. /4 https://t.co/oj2Hhp9tBg

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad. Right now that’s Trump and his team, AND all the other opposing teams yelling ‘fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ at them. All adolescent team sports. Irrelevant to what’s actually going on, in REALITY. /5

I’ve Tweeted about this for years. Reality does not give a shit what we think or feel. About anything. It could not care less who we elect or don’t elect. Victory in an election is a momentary victory in popularity team sports. That’s all it is, nothing more. /6

It has no meaningful impact on actual realities of life or existence. Once you surrender to popularity and team sports *as* reality, you’re blind to actual reality. I’ve never believed the apocalyptic narratives around the populist insurgency. /7

It’s ‘dickless’ chest-beating hot air, all of it, from all sides. All that matters is victory for the team. Substituting society with social media has dramatically accelerated this insanity. /8

We’re living inside the bubble of these platforms. They’re making us blind to obvious truths. The Trumpian project will collapse under the weight of its own incompetent, dickless insanity. /9

Yes it will do tremendous damage in the process. But electing somebody different wasn’t going to prevent it. Once we handed over dealing with reality to popularity contests, the die was cast. That will always end the same way. In catastrophe. /10

And that, finally, is all that will bring change. Catastrophe. That’s all of history, alas. All that ruptures our obsessive self-interested status games. Only monarchies and churches ever slowed this cyclic destruction, by erecting centralised status hierarchies. /11

To manage status games, to open some breathing space for attention to reality itself, for a while. Government itself appeared in this breathing space. Dismantling it will break everything. Nothing else will be a big enough bitch slap to our eternal striving for status. /end

The idea of a ‘private’ sector is already a fantasy abstraction. It’s a legislated domain, created by public governance. In nations with weak legislation, the ‘private sector’ is just looting gangs. Not peace-loving freedom democracy fans. /2

The demarcation between public and private is artificial and set by legislation. By government. There is no private sector or freedom, without government. Only gangs. Similarly, government was set up by (private) individuals, to make their private lives easier to live. /3

The binary is a fiction. The private sector is individuals granted leeway to act in certain ways, by collective permission, through legislation. Modern robber barons have relentlessly sold the idea that their ‘private sector’ interests are a sort of default state of society. /4

That would carry on even more efficiently, without government. This is the Trumpian coup right now, trying to enact this ludicrous idea. Without government there is no business, no private sector. Just gangs. /5

The American disease is to see government as some great repression of individual freedom and initiative. You know who invented government? People did. Because they were heartily sick of life without it. The gang warfare. /end

Want to change the world fast? Buy an EV, even one from Elon. It will infuriate most of the Trump team as a bonus. Want to feel righteous and achieve nothing? Be an activist. 2/2

Social media, like all technology, was created with a framework of assumptions about how humans behave, individually and collectively. Most obviously, it’s a fundamentalist belief in the idea that ‘the people’ create societies, by talking to and interacting with each other. /2

That’s what its platforms use as their structuring principle. Everybody is equally able to share their beliefs and feelings, with everybody else. Sometimes said to be democracy in action. The current coup in the US uses social media as its replacement for civic institutions. /3

Trump was the Twitter President, who then set up Truth Social when booted off Twitter. He was telling us the source of his own power, by doing that. We didn’t listen. For his second term, he had platform owners in the front row, at his inauguration. /4

It’s not difficult to recognise that we transact more or even most of our lives, from the most intimate thoughts to the professional and political, via these platforms. I use the word ‘transact’ a lot. Deliberately. These are NOT ‘information’ technologies. /5

They are social infrastructure. We literally live our lives through them, they’re not sitting alongside our ‘normal’ life. They shape how we think and how we act. The medium is the message. The message is not the message. The problem isn’t mis- and disinformation. /6

Societies have never run on information. That’s part of the social media framing of our lives, that gives them immense power. All human progress has been the exact opposite. The gradual, bloody winnowing of information into tightly controlled institutions. /7

The long, toxic and lethal battles over what is right, and what isn’t. Then embedded in human custom and tradition. Into institutions. The modern ‘free speech’ mental midgets don’t know that history, and don’t understand the toxically violent past they’re re-energising. /8

So many millions died for humans to finally see truths in all areas of life. The truths human institutions are tasked with implementing into the future. That’s the role of an institution. To take the lessons of the past, and apply them in the present, to ensure a future. /9

Lessons most in the present won’t know about, and shouldn’t need to. The institutions are there to free them from having to know all of that. You can see in the US coup, but also in politics since the 1970s, that institutions are the main target of modern politics. /10

Their destruction can only lead to the toxic and lethal violence of past history. The totally idiot idea of ‘freeing’ people from their own institutions is sociopathic serial killing nonsense. I’ve Tweeted about how this is our default social machinery reasserting itself. /11

Status games. High status individuals tend to hate institutions, because they place ‘checks and balances’ on their status. Look at every person moaning about ‘red tape’ and you’ll see a high status person whose plans to pillage some part of society has been thwarted. /12

Regulation is the core of all human life, freedom, peace and prosperity. The very thing modern politics attacks with relish. Because modern politics is a status game, not the running of countries. /13

So why the ‘Cult Archipelago’? Only human institutions, arising as the result of catastrophes of various forms, embedding the lessons from those catastrophes, create the world the free-speech era pretend to want. Of populations living with ‘freedom’ to do things. /14

Where a crowd can just be a crowd, peacefully co-existing. Rather than a violent mob. ‘Free’ that crowd from its regulations, its institutions, and what do you get? Not that free crowd of equal exchanging opinions. You get uncontrolled status games. Gangs. /15

Without the institutional regulation, humans will just fight for status. In everything they do. Gang warfare. Team sports. You see this form emerge in every nation with broken institutions. Not freedom, violence. Toxic, relentless violence. /16

All knowledge and behaviour becomes the enforced currency of these gangs or groups. And the groups proliferate, particularly if given tools that allow them to form and spread, like social media. /17

We go from most people not needing to know most things to live happy, healthy and peaceful lives. To a DIY society, where every group defines its own universe of meanings. That’s the archipelago. Proliferating islands of certainty, where every other island is a threat. /18

Where the knowledge shared on that island is about loyalty and emulation of the influencing leader(s) of the group, not about reality. We don’t see that the call to ‘educate’ everybody to solve all of our problems is an artefact of this archipelago of cults. /19

They’re cults because the connection to actual material reality, something catastrophe forced upon humanity collectively through its institutions, is now gone. What is believed is now a measure of loyalty, not reality. /20

It’s all about (apparently) knowing everything about everything, and fighting for your team. That’s what these platforms have enabled, ways to connect the grossest stupidities and violence, decoupled from history and reality. /21

Within these islands you will see further status games, the lurch to luxury or ‘premium’ for example, whether in cars, watches, homes etc. Status differentiation within the group. Watch a modern car review on YouTube. The painful dissection of every surface of the vehicle. /22

People caressing dashboards and door linings, to feel the ‘premium’ materials. All status games. This is the world social media has now built for us. An archipelago of non-communicating cults. /end

(Picture from National Geographic)

A monopoly is really just a status hierarchy re-badged using modern economic words. Completely unsurprisingly, humans turn economic life into status hierarchies too. The solution is not more ‘competition’, to prevent status hierarchies from forming. /2

That solution is within the same framing as the alleged problem. The ‘team sports’ or status games, just with more teams added to keep other teams in check. Team sports are not the solution for team sports. /3

I’ve Tweeted a few times about how humans have historically tried to solve this. To prevent uncontrolled toxic status games. Will Storr’s wonderful book on status covers one brilliant solution, that created our modern world. To turn status games into ‘success games’. /4

Or in other words, to make high status the work of collective engineering. That’s what the ‘Republic of Letters’ was about, that shift to science and engineering in the Victorian era. Where engineers and social reformers became high-status individuals and groups. /5

The Victorians were obsessive about public ‘works’ or infrastructure. From the Queen down, it was the passion of that age. Because they found a way, accidentally, of making creating the collective good a high status activity. /6

The Royal Society - it’s in the name. Engineering harnessed to status, let’s have that world back. The other much older way humans managed status games are things which modern humans find unpalatable. They don’t understand it. /7

Humans created churches and monarchies. And governments. Using a modern lens these can only look like ‘authoritarian’, ‘undemocratic’ fairy tales. But we miss entirely what their real functional role was. /8

These institutions were mostly about the regulation of status. About having a centralised master status hierarchy in a society, to regulate status throughout society itself. Modern thinkers glory in describing the abuses of these institutions. /9

Missing entirely the violent chaos of life that preceded them. Like all institutions, they emerged from that chaos, as a counter to it. If you want to revel in anti-institutional life, move to Trump’s America right now. /10

It was Edmund Burke who most famously argued the case for the centrality of institutions to human well-being. It used to be what conservatives stood for. Now they douse them with petrol and set fire to them. Institutions and regulation are the road to human well-being. /11

Not competition. Yes competing teams will destroy dominant teams sometimes, which seems a victory. But the team sports continue unabated that way. You can’t stop status games with more status games. /12

Unfortunately, the power of status is so absolute, all that allows the emergence of the institutions that control it is catastrophe. Most human institutions emerge when collective life has reached catastrophic outcomes. They emerge in the rebuilding. /13

That’s our entire modern history, the 4 horsemen of the modern apocalypse in our times, in the first half of the 20th century. WW1, the Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2. A carnival of catastrophe. Only this suppressed status games enough to force a re-orientation. /14

That’s when the notion of a ‘public’ finally could emerge. A calculated construct required to rebuild societies, after WW2, at the tail-end of the carnival of catastrophe. Public institutions were formed and strengthened, to do the rebuilding. /15

That period between roughly 1945 and the late-1970s was when those institutions ran our lives. The enormous surge in prosperity and health and general well-being came from those institutions running countries. /16

When basics like public health and education and transport and other ‘public services’ were suddenly unquestioned central components of our lives. By the late-1970s life had become pretty good again. The carnival of catastrophe had receded from view. /17

And so, the status games returned. Under cover of a new Trojan Horse, ‘the economy’. Market-based societies. Which when you strip away the economic mumbo jumbo, is really a society where status has free rein to do whatever it likes. /18

Where regulating it becomes ‘anti-competitive’, obstructive of the free operation of a free market. Socially a total con, hidden in econo-bollocks. Really just a set of statistical indicators describing the current status quo. /19

No politician dares challenge ‘the economy’. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. No, stupid, the economy is stupid. It’s not a thing. It’s a con, to remove all public institutions and replace them with uncontrolled status games. Tor replace a public, with a market. /20

The fictional idea that humans operate by all being allowed to freely do what they like, and the competition between them produces the best outcome. That’s not how humans ever behave. They overwhelmingly imitate one another, in games of imitative rivalry. /21

In teams or groups. Thus ‘team sports’. Rene Girard saw this. The ‘free market’ was really clearing the field for uncontrolled imitative rivalry. Status was back, on steroids. Social media dramatically accelerates this shift. Team sports is its business model. /22

As you look around at the lunacies of Trumpian politics, wondering what happened to our democracies, well…they never existed in the way we think they did. Our progress wasn’t due to decades of electing people. It was the legacy of the carnival of catastrophes. /23

Now that legacy’s power has waned or more or less disappeared. It’s uncontrolled status games again, anything goes. “Meme it, and we will be it” (see next Tweet). Imitation (of status) is King, unleashed from all institutional checks and balances. /24

“Seemingly insignificant changes to the Culture, which can have outsized impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it.” Elizabeth Boyle. /end

And no, this isn’t a pro-Elon Tweet. Fuck off with your team sports. Tesla should have got rid of him years ago. It’s a Tweet looking at the actual political reality of the current situation. And the material reality of life, including EVs.