March 2025

It’s all there. It doesn’t ‘connect’ us, it pulverises us into a proliferation of competing teams. And it hijacks society itself. We transact *everything* on it now. From news, to our intimate private and social lives. And our politics. 2/4 https://t.co/OmVPjkkftE

Right now the US is under assault from a coup, transacted in real time on social media. By the social media President. If you think you can oppose that by assembling your own teams on the same platforms, that more team sports will destroy team sports? lol. 3/4

This idiot idea that by rallying the troops here we are ’the people’ fighting some sort of resistance is tragically hilarious. We’re puppets inside the bubble-algorithms. Forming more and more bubble-cults, to feed the revenue to the algorithm owners. /end

It was about the highest status members of societies (the ‘elite’ as populists call them today) reaching an agreement as to their respective powers. Which they of course immediately ignored, it took many centuries to bed the idea of checks and balances down. /2

We’re sort of living in 1214 today, prior to the signing of the Magna Carta. With our ‘elite overproduction’ (a proliferation of barons) fighting around their King (Trump and other ‘authoritarians’). With the churches strategising amongst it too. /3

How did ‘the people’ ever appear in this clearly top end of town checks and balances system? In only one way. Via catastrophes, which damaged the top end of town. Wars, plagues, natural disasters. /4

Elections were gamed by the elites the moment they were introduced, and the populists who rally around them today are just using them to short-circuit the checks and balances. Nothing is easier to engineer than popularity. Once you do that, you can bypass all due process. /5

Catastrophes force societies to rebuild, to survive. Then and only then are the needs of ordinary people taken into consideration. The workers. Until the rebuilding is deemed done. Then the status games return, amongst the high status groups. /6

There is no counter movement of ‘the people’ separately, because the people is not a thing. No group of people is an agency in that way. All groups are led, it’s what forms the group. By about 5% of the group. There are always status hierarchies. /7

The best humans achieve is embedding some form of obligation regime into these hierarchies, a noblesse oblige. A responsibility to all people, derived from a functional recognition of the interdependent material reality of societies. /8

The laughable idea that social media for example allows ‘the people’ to rise up as an independent force? Or protest movements? All that produces is violence between a proliferation of gangs. Mob rule. People torching Teslas. /9

It feels righteous, but it’s just uncontrolled violence. Just look at our world every day now. The proliferation of team sport status games, on *every* issue. Always new gangs, slugging it out. I bought a Tesla, it’s been fascinating. /10

I bought one as an engineer, it perfectly matched my material needs. My options though apparently were to be either a ‘Tesla fanboy’, or an anti-Nazi campaigner. Listen to the childish bullshit dominating our lives now. People bandying around terms like ‘fascist’. /11

The fuck they know about fascism. Trump and Musk couldn’t organise a root in a brothel, to use a great Australian phrase, the 20th century fascists would see them as buffoons. Gangs online and roaming the countryside, like some righteous modern Inquisition. /12

We need to grow the fuck up, and fast. All of this team sports is the problem, not the solution. The more ‘connected’ we are, the more violent we will become, the more gangs will be formed. Sociality is violence. /13

Social media is probably the catastrophe that will ‘fix’ it, by destroying everything. Add the influencers there and the elite overproduction is exponential. Rampant, uncontrolled, fractal battles for status. Everyone a wannabe baron now. /14

I’ve suggested before that the least bad catastrophe that might save us right now, is China, or Asia more generally. With its ‘authoritarian’ regimes. Stabilised status hierarchies, actually building things towards the social good. /15

Because they understand status, and the need to control it. Only that opens a breathing space towards the material well-being of societies. They’re the ‘world’s factory’. The rest of us are just playing games, trying to be top dog, in nations producing nothing. /end

Jut as those who believed ‘living with’ Covid would be confined to Covid then often were shocked it suddenly meant living with TB, pneumonia, pertussis, measles and every other infectious disease. A society has all of its habits, thoughts and behaviours at once. /2

You don’t get a bit of mob rule for your personal cause, safely roped off to take down your chosen team’s enemy. Once mob rule begins, it is indiscriminate. Vigilantism is a *total* breakdown of civic order. For *all* causes. /3

Just as people don’t discriminate between viruses and bacteria, when they ignore public health. Ignore one, you ignore the lot. These were things Edmund Burke called out against during the French Revolution. He was ignored. /4

Within a handful of years the catastrophic collapse of civic order there had ushered in a far greater tyranny. Napoleonic tyranny. Chaos breeds tyranny. Not reform, not change. Tyranny. Only total catastrophic collapse of societies brings reform. /5

But that kills the reformers as indiscriminately as their team’s enemies. An entire generation was lost on the battlefields of WW1 and WW2. The reform those wars ushered in was never shared by those dead. /6

When I see ordinary friends and family cheering on ‘SwaSSticar’ activism, I know populism is getting really close to the total social collapse that fools believe is just a victory for their team’s enemy. The collapse will take out the lot of them. /end

Any event organiser knows that what separates a successful event from one where people end up dead, is intensive planning to prevent the sort of interaction we see as democracy, on social media. Restrictions on how people interact. To prevent a crowd becoming a mob. /2

Groups of people, of whatever size, simply don’t act as a single entity. Unless they become a mob. And then people die. One of my main themes is to try to show how people always form status hierarchies. Any group does this. /3

Put a group of people together, again of any size, and it will quickly stratify itself into a status hierarchy. About 5% of the group will ‘lead’ the other 95%. This doesn’t need to be imposed externally. The group will do it all by itself, as well. /4

Societies and sub-groupings of people form clumpy networks. The hubs are the status hierarchies. Most of ‘society’ is empty space. It’s like atoms. With intensely focused activity in hubs. /5 https://t.co/IqPLW3nEXn

You can see this exact pattern on any social media platform. It sells itself as a glorious interaction of all with all. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s the same clumpy network structure, with intense activity around hubs (influencers). /6

I’ve used this network structure to also show how we were conned by Covid minimisers. Their success was to paradoxically paint Covid as a problem everywhere, all the time. It isn’t that. Covid has that same clumpy network structure, with the hubs being superspreading events. /7

The minimiser con was what justifies ongoing inaction against the virus. Painting it as everywhere, all the time makes it seem impossible to deal with. So we must ‘live with it’, they say. That was always bunkum, and good people fell for it. /8

Some very targeted and minimally disruptive action at those superspreading hubs could smash Covid, as it did in countries who did just that earlier in the pandemic. It’s a puny virus in terms of spread. Easily controlled. Not eliminated, just controlled. /9

You can see here how some foundational ideas about how people (and the viruses they carry) behave can have profound impacts on how we think and act. Similarly a literal handful of people are generally responsible for most of the destructive filth on social media. /10

Some again quite simple, targeted action could identify and remove them. Except that would ruin the business model. The filth drives the revenue. /11

Democracy is not ‘the people’, as some amorphous mass. Put an amorphous mass of people together and they will trample each other to death, out of no ill will to each other. Democracy is an administrative construct. /12

It’s what the dreaded bureaucrats do. Every day they go to work and undertake precise calculation and analysis of collective needs, in all areas of our lives. And then they administer assistance to identified areas of need. /13

Contrast this with the truly ludicrous idea that democracy is that 3-4 yearly popularity contest we call elections. The more we connect people, the more violent we will become. Ask any event organiser. If you don’t control connections, people die. /14

This control, so hated by modern trust fund man-babies, is the basic stuff of adult life. No successful parent aims to be popular. No manager either. Only populist politicians. Adult life is the saying of ‘no’. Filtering the good from the bad, and suppressing the bad. /15

Ruthlessly if required. That’s not ‘authoritarian’, the only way for populations to be free and peaceful and healthy is to regulate the fucking daylight out of them. That’s what law and regulation is. It re-balances the inevitable inequities of uncontrolled status games. /16

All successful societies are authoritarian. You only get to choose what sort of authoritarianism you want. A nuanced one, based upon expertise and social need. Or one based purely on unbridled status. Like Trump’s America. /end

Unceasing team sports leads to a level of rage in communities that eventually reaches a fever pitch. Fight, fight, fight all day and night unsurprisingly leads to rage as the dominant social mechanism. This is where Rene Girard is so important. He saw it. /2

Girard pinpointed what he called imitative rivalry (what I call team sports to simplify) as the root of all social life. The competition for status between rival groups. Girard also saw that this process will not end of its own accord. Violence and anger will escalate. /3

Girard identified that this will destroy societies, for the obvious reason that violence is destructive, and uncontrolled violence breaks everything. He then identified how societies and groups (it’s fractal, at every scale) avoid this destruction, at least temporarily. /4

They identify a scapegoat. For the anger and violence. This triggers an instant tipping point in social relations. The teams stop fighting each other and suddenly people are unified behind hatred for the scapegoat. Unity at last! /5

The scapegoat is then destroyed, either figuratively or quite literally. This dissolves the pent up anger, in a sort of orgiastic release. The collective returns to a lower level of emotional intensity. And what happens then? The team sports begin again. /6

These scapegoating episodes, what some call moral panics, are a crucial component of team sports culture. They’re what allow it to continue indefinitely. Right now for example Tesla and Tesla owners are being scapegoated. This will seem like social progress, to the teams. /7

The appalling things Musk and Trump are doing create rage. The anger and violence then intensifies, into mob behaviour, which is just another name for the scapegoating mechanism. The mob is now unified, against the scapegoat. It feels like progress is being made. /8 https://t.co/lzPDWNF9ks

It’s not progress, it’s just the release that will allow the restarting of more team sports. The scapegoat isn’t the solution to any problem, the scapegoating mechanism is not about any particular detail. It’s about the imitative rivalry of social life. /9

Team sports is never about ‘information’. Why the misinformation and disinformation focus is so misplaced. Team sports is about the status of the teams, and the people on them. They’re not interested in the things they fight about. The ‘content’ is irrelevant. /10

Ordinary people right now, observe them. How the crystallisation of a new scapegoat fires them up, gives them a sense of ‘this will fix it’. That’s the delusion of team sports life. Mob rule, scapegoating, simply releases pent up rage, to allow more team sports to start. /11

You can see here a new scapegoat firing up in response to anger about the Queensland floods. Insurers. A common target. Politicians are shrewd and cynical. /12 https://t.co/BStX0Zf7g0

It’s their action and inaction that allows people to build on flood plains, and does nothing against climate change, which drives these disasters. The team sports rage in the community against the disasters has to be quickly refocused away from politicians. /13

So politicians create a scapegoat. Insurers, in this case. It ‘takes the heat off’ them. You’ll see this same mechanism in every facet of our lives. The relentless team sports, especially now with social media owning our social lives. /14

And then the scapegoat, to temporarily unify and disperse the rage in an orgy of destructive mob righteousness. Then it starts all over again. We had two world wars that followed a similar model. But you can see it at every level of human life. It’s fractal. /end

There is no solution to feudalism, it’s the default social form in history. It will *always* return via the back door, if you kick it out the front. It just won’t be recognised, because the labels will have changed. /2

Humans will always create hierarchical societies, with a King or equivalent at the top. Hierarchies of status. Status in turn creates identity. It’s how people are somebody, rather than nobody. /3

That’s why (the mechanism for the millionth time) they join groups (teams), and battle others in the team for status, and then other teams for the same. Team sports. Status games. Also the business model for social media, which has caused a rapid return of naked feudalism. /4

Trump always was the social media President. He and his team live and think entirely within social media platforms. Their enemies and ‘policies’ are defined by their social media activity. They OWN social media, literally. It’s why they own it. /5

We’re all living inside Tolkien’s title, The Return of the King. That’s what this point in history is. The dissolution of ‘democracy’, really just a repair job after WW2 driven by public institutions, created to do the repairs. /6

The ‘economy’ folk were really the old feudalists, who used that econo-babble to undermine public institutional life. They called it ‘red tape’. It was a spectacular success, and achieved exactly what they wanted. /7

The return of feudal hierarchies, rather than governance by public institutions. Fuck off with all your ‘fascism’ memes. Your childish, ignorant social media team sports. You’re the problem. /end

Found in Victoria, Australia, in the mid-19th century. What’s most fascinating about it isn’t the gold or the size of the nugget. It’s that the Indigenous Australian population almost certainly found it long before that. /2

It was found under only a few centimetres of dirt, at the base of a tree. Aboriginal Australians had likely discovered it, and found it of little interest. To many other cultures, 70kg of gold in a single nugget would create enormous excitement. So - why? /3

Because it’s ‘valuable’. But again - why? Who defines the value? The culture does. It’s a social thing. You can make a lot of money from that much gold. And can turn it into beautiful things. /4

But again, and this never changes, both of those are socially defined things. Gold is worth a lot of money because it has a lot of *status*, socially. Its beauty is also a socially-defined thing. And again, it comes back to status. Everything does. /5

Even aesthetics, the most ‘subjective’ of things, is defined by the collective assessment of value. The fight for status, for what’s better or worse. You’ll struggle to find a single thing humans do every day, that doesn’t ultimately reduce to this battle for status. /6

Which in turn is a struggle for identity. Status gives identity, your membership of a group and the group’s position relative to other groups. The modern acceleration of ‘identity’ politics is really just the astronomical escalation of status games. Team sports. /7

In turn largely traceable to the explosion of social media, which has status games as its business model. Just look, at everything around you. Humans imitating each other (currently trashing Tesla, for example), because imitation is the root mechanism in status games. /8

Imitating or emulating is how a member of a team demonstrates that membership. Monkey-see, monkey-do is pretty much all civilisation. And the more you take away shared, collective ways to define status and identity, the more individual ways to do that will grow. /9

The ‘freedumb’ world we’re now living in, glorying in the smashing of institutions, everything from the entire US government, to again Tesla, is a status games orgy. Without institutions, status is not only up for grabs, it’s *all* we can focus on. /10

Without a sense of status and therefore identity, we spend all our days and nights trying to repair that cataclysmic void. None of us want to be a ‘nobody’. And are you part of the mob, glorying in institutional destruction? /11

The reason the pile-on on Tesla disgusts me, isn’t that I support Musk’s lunatic politics. It’s that we don’t see that mob smashing of institutions is social collapse, not progress. Trying to inflict maximum pain on another team and its leader is bog standard team sports. /12 https://t.co/PUEu58OpT8

Righteous activism is just status games, the same games the supposed enemies of ‘the people’ use to destroy societies. You’re not fixing team sports, by doing more team sports. As always institutions that are incredibly difficult to establish and maintain are the victims. /13

130,000 brilliant people work at Tesla, for example, producing brilliant technology, much of which is critical to our transition to renewable energy economies. None of that is of interest to the righteous. They just want the team leader of the opposing team brought down. /14

Like the vandals who travelled the countryside smashing beautiful churches in history, in iconoclastic outrage. In modern times this is a pathology shared by several cultures and nations. Iconoclasm. It’s destroying the US right now. /15

Smash the institutions! The impersonal guardians of collective health and wealth and peace. But they get in the way of the team sports, the status games. They’re ’red tape’. Put there when previous status games erupted into total violence, in wars and other catastrophes. /16

If you think ‘the Right’ (or Left) is taking over the world, or even the ‘far-Right’ (or Left), you’re just playing team sports, together with the people you’re defining as far-Right. You’re all in it together. Blind to basic material reality. /17

Obsessed with being top dogs in the status games, to take total control of societies. While the actual material needs of those societies are ignored, or used as fodder in the idiot status games. Even Teslas, and Tesla batteries. Wonderful machines. /18

Now cannon fodder for the team sports. The mob outrage will fade, the mob is easily bored. Some new outrage, some new smashing, will replace it soon enough. Some new institutional remnant of civilisation will be pulverised instead. Until there are none left. /end

There’s a political origin to this worship. Again mostly driven by US culture, which sees small business as the purest form of entrepreneurial American Dream. The nonsense about heroic success through personal hard work. Almost 70% of small businesses fail inside 5 years. /2

Not only because they’re badly run (though there’s that too), but because the whole stupid idea ignores the most basic fact of social life. Economies of scale. The thing US culture was set up in direct opposition to. That ‘many hands make light work’. /3

The origins of modern America, as exiles from Europe determined to avoid the ‘tyranny’ of ‘elites’ ever supposedly persecuting the exiled again, led to most of the train wreck we see in the US today. The entire nation was set up in hostility towards collective organisation. /4

There’s not one problem America faces that it doesn’t see the smashing of some collective institution as the solution to. That’s the DNA of the entire culture. That’s the theme of every Western movie, a cultural bedrock. ‘Power to the people!’ echoes down the ages. /5

The people and their guns. Both Democrats and Republicans converge upon this idiot idea of ‘the people’ running the country. The GOP slash and burn public institutions to ‘free’ the people. The Democrats try to mobilise ‘the people’ against the slashing and burning. /6

Seeing the common theme here? The shared framework? This idea of ‘the people’ is the pathogen the US has unleashed on the world. Now driven deep into almost every nation by the saturation coverage of social media. A technology developed to do just that. /7

‘We need to mobilise people here (social media) against enemy X’ etc. Hashtag them! Public policy entirely replaced by what’s ‘trending’. Fads and fashions, shaped by influencers. The people is not and never will be an actual thing. It’s a fiction. /8

I oppose it to the idea of a public, which is real, but entirely different. The public is an administrative construct, it’s a continuous calculation of collective need, by dreaded bureaucrats. No group of people, of any size, acts in the way we say ‘the people’ do. /9

Humans never act as a group. It’s not even physically or logistically possible. Every time you see a group of people acting in seeming unison, that unison was led into existence. By about 5% of the group. Humans form imitative status hierarchies. /10

Nothing enrages bedrock US culture more than the ‘government’. The ultimate tyranny, apparently. But really, as most other nations calmly know and get on with, just the ultimate economies of scale of social life. /11

Humans invented government to have easier, safer, more prosperous and healthier lives. Institutions emerge always for the same reason, to respond to crisis. Humans were sick of living in permanent crisis. Gang/tribal warfare. /12

So they invented government, as an overarching economies of scale for all human transactions. To make their lives much easier and better. Many hands make light work. Regulation is and always will be the only path to true freedom, for societies. /13

Ironically, America is also home to some of the largest institutions in the world. Corporate behemoths. Because they see those as just small businesses that succeeded, against the elites. That’s fine, no tyranny there. /14

Except of course it’s an even worse tyranny, as anybody whose lives now depend on these corporate behemoths will tell you. Like the American health care system, or Silicon Valley, now dominating US politics and the world. Privatised government, really. Hopeless. /15

Privatised feudal rule, without any of the checks and balances of actual feudal rule. No noblesse oblige. Just naked pillaging of a society. The world needs to rid itself of this cancerous idea that ‘me’ and ‘we’ are in opposition. /16

Humans organise collectively to have better *individual* lives. There’s no binary here. Economies of scale aren’t socialism or any form of -ism. They’re just logistics. The material well-being of societies doesn’t exist without them. /end

Tesla’s VP of Vehicle Engineering and Chief Designer talking about the core principles behind Tesla car design. We fail to appreciate the genius of what’s gone on there. Cars used to be placed into segments. Performance cars, family cars, efficient cars, etc. /2

Tesla’s genius was to say, we’ll give you as much of that as possible, all in the same vehicle. At a family price. Electric motors make that possible. Both the cheapest to run and highest performance, collapsing multiple segments. /3

Also some of the safest cars on the road, great fun to drive, astoundingly efficient even amongst EVs, great sense of humour in the software and functionality (dog mode, camping mode, farting indicators etc.) None of this is ‘fascism’, for fuck’s sake. /4

Tesla annoys the self-appointed guardians of the various segments at every turn. Which means they’ve nailed the brief. This is engineering given free rein to amaze us. A bit like Google used to be, when it astonished people. /5

It makes me want to tear my hair out seeing the determination people have to smash everything the people at Tesla have achieved, to (they think) bring down Musk. That’s such an American thing to do, and now all of us, because social media has replaced our societies. /6

We have not one idea how to process public life except to launch guerrilla hashtag campaigns, that now spill over into actual arson and violence in real life. Kids steal cars to make TikTok videos of the theft. We’re all teenagers now, and social media is trapping us there. /7

No matter how many times you type ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ on social media, you’re not getting rid of Trump or Musk. No matter how much senseless vandalism and violence the righteous cause evokes, the same. You’re feeding the monster. They exist because of those team sports. /8

It fuels the idiot movement of Trumpism, to have people respond in that way. It fires up their troops, a joy to their recruiting arm. Meanwhile one of the only companies in the world taking the emergency need to transition to renewables-based life seriously is under assault. /9

Stop equating social change with righteous mob outrage. Mob outrage is indiscriminate, it feeds the team sports and only brings destruction. Slacktivism won’t save the world. Engineering can, if we let it and stop trying to destroy it. /end

Trump’s victory accelerated this shift. The greater the violation of the checks and balances of democratic life he and Musk inflict upon the US, the more intense the performative outrage becomes. Everyone is a fascist now, or a Nazi. Apparently. /2

If you’re stuck in a public life comprising entirely various teams battling for supremacy, particularly online, then only the biggest, meanest words will do. It’s childish schoolyard name-calling. I’ve spent years tracing the shift of adult life to kidult life. /3

Adult life now feels like an enormous schoolyard. Not by analogy, it is literally, culturally that. Adults with no conception at all how to progress material change in their societies. /4

Except to sling insults and to ‘cancel’ other teams and team members. That’s 100% schoolyard, exact in every detail. Performative outrage, white hot righteousness. I saw somebody abused while driving their Tesla in a small remote town supermarket car park yesterday. /5

Through an open window a guy in a Wankpanzer called them a ‘wanker’. The anti-Tesla crowd cheer this sort of stuff on. They think it’s changing the world. They have no idea at all of the dangers of shifting public life towards mob rule. /6

Mobs, again, do not discriminate. It starts out looking like a victory for the team, against another team. But it quickly becomes indiscriminate violence. The Simpsons even did an episode on it. Lawrence saw this shift years before it erupted into WW2. /7

By boycotting or cancelling, we’re not mini Ralph Naders shifting politics as ‘consumers’ of governance. We’re a team, lashing out at other teams. Allow that to become uncontrolled team sports, and the next step is the mob. /8

The mob is not so much a team, as the dissolution of all teams, towards collective, uncontrolled enthusiasms. Those enthusiasms eventually are narrowed to one thing only, violence. Rene Girard saw this. It was his life’s work to describe it. /9

The community feels increasingly dangerous to me now, in very dark ways similar to what Lawrence felt in Europe between the wars. The moderating, calm operation of societies via its public institutions replaced by open vigilantism. /10

Somebody being abused in a remote country town’s supermarket car park is apparently helping get Trump and Musk out of the White House. Seriously? Are people now so deranged that they believe this stuff? /11

I’ve Tweeted before how the sign of this collapse is not the spread of misinformation or disinformation. Societies have never run on information. It’s that people are interested in and discuss things that were previously of no interest to them at all. /12

People in their teams now prosecuting tribal warfare over the basic operating system of societies, basics like public health and transport and anything else the teams latch onto. Like a human trying to take over their autonomic nervous system. /13

When public institutions ran societies, people could have different, even crazy, views about the world. It didn’t matter so much because collective life was regulated separately to it. Now those views are in car parks, harassing other members of the public. /14

I’ve lost respect for those who until this point in the status games appeared to at least have retained some semblance of old-style adult life. Where it was obvious that you didn’t harass or assault people, you didn’t shoot them or commit acts of arson. /15

But it appears some team sports causes are just too much for them. The magnitude of Trumpism for example has led them to join the mob. Burke saw that mobs are worse than no change at all, during the French Revolution. They usher in even greater tyrannies. /16

An orgy of intense, violent outrage releases some of the anger of the team sports, but it just destroys, and kills. And the new tyrant then has no checks and balances at all. An indicator of a shift towards the mob is escalating, intense imitation. /17

Because status games are games of imitative rivalry (Girard), the more intense the rivalry becomes, the more social life becomes uncontrolled imitation. Manias, irrational enthusiasms. Burning Teslas becomes a copied behaviour. /18

Justified of course by the righteousness of the supposed cause. But really blind, righteous imitation. That’s what a mob is. Most of those committing violence and destruction in a mob are unaware of the details of any preceding’ ‘debate’ at all. They’re just there to smash. /19

Glorying in the destruction, publicising it in an escalating game of who can smash better. Like teenagers stealing and trashing cars for TikTok follows. The millions who flock to Taylor Swift concerts, or whatever the latest mob trigger is. Manias are imitation unleashed. /20

A society where public life is replaced by what’s trending. Imitation completely decoupled from any material reality or historical check or balance. Uncontrolled, violent imitation. Social media pouring petrol on this fire, a dramatic short-cut for trending stupidities. /21

Those who recognise that the team sports of popular elections isn’t delivering for democracy, now think that taking the team sports to the streets will fix it. As Lawrence said, apparently it wasn’t to be helped. The die is cast. /end

Celebrities post things like this, and are again cheered. Ordinary people are harassed and even assaulted, in car parks, because they might drive a Tesla. Not one politician or law enforcement person I’ve seen is yet to condemn the behaviour. /2 https://t.co/DukQ5NFnMN

Talking to friends or people here, overwhelmingly the feedback is “well…Elon. It’s deserved.” Many for years have (rightly) condemned Rupert Murdoch’s contributions to public life. Are we all out there ripping Foxtel dishes off ordinary people’s homes? No? /3

I’m disgusted by the descent into mob rule that these idiot platforms now make completely imperceptible to previously sane, sensible people. The poison of US politics now entrenched everywhere, by use of these platforms. Where everything is a gun-slinging Western. /end

The way Covid action was destroyed was to portray Covid as everywhere, all the time. So therefore impossible to control, and to try defined you as peddling hysteria. Hysterical claims (Covid is everywhere) shut down Covid action. While labelling that action as hysterical. /2

See the con? Actual (engineered) hysteria, that Covid had overwhelmed societies who were therefore powerless to do anything, while labelling those who calmly denied that hysteria, as hysterics. Societies only change via catastrophe. Status hierarchies otherwise resist. /3

Those catastrophes can be a con, too, deliberately engineered, to bypass the checks and balances of existing status hierarchies. That’s what modern conservatives excel at. It’s their entire business model, to engineer fake crises, every day. /4

That’s how they get people who would never have voted for them in a million years, to suddenly ‘vote against their own interests’. Endless hysterias about immigrants, foreign powers, sexuality etc. etc. And then Covid. Engineered hysteria about Covid action. /4

Covid is NOT everywhere, all the time. It exists in incredibly fragile networks, of thinly-connected hubs. Places like schools, and hospitals. Incredibly amenable to control, as those nations who followed standard public health procedures early in the pandemic showed. /5

But people were conned into thinking that to stop Covid, everybody had to do everything, all the time. Suckered by hysteria. Everybody had to mask, everybody needed to invest in ventilation, etc. But that’s a lie, and a lie that achieved its aim. It stopped all action. /6

Very targeted action, invisible to most, would stop Covid in its tracks. Send the engineers into the key hubs and Covid would be on its knees inside 6 months. It never happened, because engineered hysteria prevented it. That was the strategy. /7

Hysteria about your freedoms being taken from you. While the massive public health apparatus was shut down and all that work and cost was shunted to you, individuals, to try to do and fund yourself. A magnificent con. And now Trumpism is following the same script. /8

Trump is a con man. He’s far too lazy and stupid to be a fascist overlord. His entire career is one con after another. By being enraged every day by the supposed fascist (can we retire that word?) overthrow of the US, we’re energising the mechanism that makes Trump win. /9

It strengthens Team Trump, to have its opponents portray Trump’s impact as apocalyptic. MAGA *loves* being seen as that powerful and important. But it’s a joke. A cult of the pathetic that couldn’t organise a school fete. Humiliation is the best weapon against them. /10

Drawing upon the rich vein of the total chasm between their chest-beating assertions, and the material reality of their reign, which is achieving nothing. It will implode under its own weight of ineptitude. We just need to speed that along. /11

Instead people are out burning Teslas and wailing ever more hysterically about the fascist overthrow of the US. All of that is petrol on the fire of MAGAism. It feeds on that team sport outrage. /12

I say it every day. We are so addicted to team sports social life that we are literally blind to obvious material reality. Trumpism is an enormous con. Not fascism. We’re being swindled, not overthrown. /end

The apparent discretion those living in rich nations have to choose outcomes for how life unfolds derives from previous imperial/colonial conquest and rule. Existential choice is literally just power. That’s the only way it happens. /2

In other words you have to kill and destroy and tame what opposes you, to have the impression of choosing your destiny. The world, both human and non-human, will always fight you to impose a different destiny. /3

And this remains true within rich nations too, where those with lower status experience an entirely different, largely imposed order in their lives. Not much freedom for them. Freedom is status. Status is power. Status comes from fighting. /4

Year after year I scroll here seeing pleas for ‘we’ to do something, to right some terrible wrong in the world. There is never any we, without some form of catastrophic disruption to status. War, natural disaster. /5

Just as evolution is likely driven by catastrophic events, rather than by some sort of gradual optimisation driven by living things themselves, social life exists in two states. Status hierarchies, or destroyed status hierarchies. /6

Only in the latter, which we experienced in the aftermath of the 4 catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century, does a ‘we’ emerge. Not out of good will or ‘democratic’ reform, But to survive. It’s all hands to the wheel, to not die. /7

Watch this mechanism during natural disasters, the same people who the day before a bushfire are on social media in battle with each other, or slagging off their neighbours, are suddenly ‘united’. Politicians talk about ‘true Aussie grit’, and other jingoistic bullshit. /8

Reality drives societies. Not information, or mis/disinformation. Humans squabble in their status games, ignoring reality, until reality being ignored overwhelms their societies. Only then do they suddenly find solidarity. Until the wreckage is cleared. /9

Then the status games begin again. Rinse and repeat. Ad infinitum. /end

It’s an American disease to attack institutions. It’s a culture defined by hostility towards anything institutional. Founded by Puritans escaping what they saw as institutional tyranny in Europe. Really they were extremists, which is why Europe was sick of them. /2

And that’s still playing out today, in everything we’re seeing. Not least with the open hostility towards Europe evoked by the MAGA cult. Smashing Tesla is a disgrace. I don’t give a shit that the current mob obsession is in doing it. I’ll explain. /3

Saying it will get the teams in play here trying to pigeonhole you as in this or that team. Pro-MAGA. or pro-any team against MAGA etc. Left, Right, blah blah. Fuck off with your team sports. Have some self-awareness of the same stupid patterns we’re living, over and over. /4

Tesla is an institution, all organisations are. I’ve worked for institutions, with noble and brilliant aims. Some had appalling senior management. Never once did it occur to me or anybody critical of that management, to destroy the institution to try to get rid of them. /5

As the Los Angeles Times notes in Tweet 1 of this thread, it is especially American to attack institutions. And now that social media, the libertarian attack weapon of US culture, is dominant in so many societies, that disease is spreading. It’s societies committing suicide. /6

Without institutions, societies are dead. All that remains is gang violence, between surviving, battling teams. That’s why institutions evolve, to counter that mob violence, the gang warfare that is the result of the absence of institutional governance. /7

Modern populist times are really, despite our rhetoric about democracy, a time of fundamentalism. We’re electoral fundamentalists. Electing people by popular vote is what many see *as* democracy. The US in particular, note the particular venom MAGA has for the ‘unelected’. /8

Democracy always was only an institutional thing, with checks and balances between arms of government defining democracy itself. Not elections. Similarly, Tesla is a brilliant organisation, headed by a member of the MAGA cult. Yes the MAGA cult must be defeated. /9

Not long ago electric cars were at the vanguard of opposing the fossil fuelled status hierarchy that has dominated our world for the past century. Now people are burning them, to the great delight of that hierarchy. How stupid can we be? /10

The work Musk’s organisation does is critical to undermining the status quo that desperately needs to be removed. We can want Musk gone, without destroying his organisation. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. /11

Again, never once did it even occur to the sane grown ups in the institutions I’ve worked in to destroy the organisation itself, to be rid of toxic senior management. That’s us all now being infected with the American anti-institutional disease. These platforms do it. /end

We in Western nations constantly mistake the lived experience of the past 70-odd years, with life itself. Those 70 years are absolutely historically anomalous. Like no other time in history. The lives many now feel spiralling out of control is not the apocalypse. /2

It’s that anomaly being removed. Sadly, yes. It was glorious to live in a time when there was an actual ‘we’ driving our lives. A public. When collective life was the focus of our everyday work. When we laboured collectively to make life better for more people. /3

When we recognised that ‘many hands make light work’, literally. When we implemented the basics of economies of scale, socially as well as economically. The modern State is just that. Economies of scale applied to all human life. Rather than just to business. /4

But as I’ve Tweeted about so often in recent years, all of that glorious public work, in health, education, transportation, housing, water supply, etc., came from one place only. The apocalyptic catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. /5

WW1, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2. An astronomical hammering of our established social status hierarchies. Societies were nearly destroyed. Rebuilding them required a collective focus, because we were building the lot. That’s where ‘public life’ came from. /6

Not the hard work of noble reformers, or some modern sudden enlightenment, or society finally responding to protestors or activists. That’s human vanity, that humans determine reality. Reality determines reality. /7

Centuries of accumulated human status games focused only on humans always leads to the neglect of the basic material realities of existence. That neglect reaches a tipping point, and then BAM. Reality bitch slaps us. With catastrophes. /8

I live a happy life because I recognise it’s a life that most humans who have ever lived, have lived. Of course living in the West today, it’s much more materially lavish than most lives ever lived. But in 2025, that sense of no ‘we’ or public driving things? /9

Most humans who have ever lived never had that. The calm, institutionally-driven relative peace and prosperity and health of collectively-focused lives. Those institutions mostly flourished only in the repair of that cataclysm between 1900 and 1945. /10

Then in the 1970s, status returned as the driver of all human life. Through the Trojan Horse of ‘the economy’, a ludicrous idea that individuals live individually in ‘markets’. Really just a way to smash institutions, and return life to endless status games. /11

In teams, team sports as I call them, because that’s our most fundamental social model. (And also why we adore watching team sports themselves, not by analogy.) People are honestly blind to status as the driver of everything we do. They don’t see it. /12

Take any modern cause, be it Covid, climate change, Gaza, housing - whatever - and look for the teams. They’ll always be there. Even those who enter these debates honestly trying to stick to the facts end up in teams, fighting other teams. It sneaks up on them. /13

I’m not a very good friend, because friendship itself is team-based, and the second I think a friendship is diverging from the material truth of life in some way, I ditch it. I’m supposed to be fighting Tesla right now, for example. /14

Because the people who are, broadly of the mega-team ‘the Left’, see it as necessary to oppose the rise of mega-team ‘the Right’. Sorry, that’s bullshit for me. Team sports is just team sports. I’ll focus on the *material* contribution of Tesla to society, to decide. /15

And right now that contribution is unique, and still immense. 130,000 brilliant people work there. So no, I won’t be cheering on idiots out there vandalising, burning and abusing. Fighting for their team. Fuck team sports. Reality politics is the only politics. /end

People are not stupid, people are not violent, people are not anything much at all, individually. We are social animals. Pretty much everything we are and do is a social thing. And the most fundamental social act is imitation. We copy one another. /2 https://t.co/0sgwoPgxwM

I remember first reading Girard and others, placing imitation at the centre of human life, and thinking, surely that can’t be it? But it is. And the deeper you look at it, the more you’ll see. We are obsessively, compulsively engaged in copying one another. /3

But why? The reason is more one that Gabriel Tarde explored, a forgotten genius. We imitate because we’re so different to one another. That sounds like a paradox. Genius feels like that. Nothing is a greater hint of lack of understanding than a strong feeling of ‘a-ha!’ /4

A-ha is just a recognition of similarity between something you know, and something new. More imitation, a feeling of satisfaction that what’s new is just some variation of what you already know and feel. And that’s why humans imitate. To try to assimilate difference. /5

Because we are all uniquely different, to get along we need to imitate what others do, so they recognise us in some way. We can’t ever be them or really understand them. As Tarde says, pure difference is something most never really consider. /6

They try to tame it under some schema of explanation, that makes something new just some variation of something they already have or know. Ah, it’s just like X! No it isn’t, but it might resemble it a bit, so by imitating X the other person suddenly feels a bit connected. /7

That’s what social life is. We’re all charlatans, imitating to connect. And it’s here that Girard found the link to violence. Because it isn’t X. And so that connection is always fraught, it’s always a betrayal of the true nature of X, in some ways. /8

Our imitations come unstuck, and make others angry. There’s no faster way to mock somebody than to imitate them, it makes who they are feel threatened. Imitation creates rivalry at the same time it causes connection. Imitative rivalry is the root of human violence. /9

We imitate to connect, into groups, or teams as I call them, to capture the rivalry at the root of the process. Within the team we imitate or emulate one another, in turn imitating the highest status members of that team. /10

The team itself is therefore always unstable, and can descend into violence at any time. We’ve all been in human groups, we’ve seen that firsthand. Even a soccer club, or small group of friends. But then it also is in rivalry with other teams. /11

And thus the ‘team sports’ begin. The imitative rivalry between teams, added to the imitative rivalry within teams, that forms them. The battle ultimately for status. For ‘recognition’ (more imitation words). Because ultimately we imitate, to be somebody. To belong. /12

We copy others so they ‘recognise’ us, and see us as ‘one of them’. And there’s pretty much all of human life. Seriously, you can’t unsee it once you start looking. It is EVERYWHERE. /13

In politics, work, science, art, which cars or clothes or food we buy. Imitative rivalry runs all of it, down to the tiniest details. We do what we do to fit in. What gets called peer pressure with teens, but adult life if anything is even more forcefully that. /14

But called by different names there, so not recognised. Pretty much everybody is fighting for status, within a team, and against other teams. It creates a bubble, team sports. We stop seeing or understanding anything, outside the status games. /15

Why I and some historians say, all that ruptures these bubbles is catastrophe. An external or even internal event of such magnitude, that the team sports are interrupted. Wars, plagues, natural disasters. Something that overwhelms our imitative ‘it’s just like X!’ powers. /16

Catastrophes aren’t like X. They destroy X and everything related to it. That levels the status hierarchies, smashing them to bits. And for a while, there’s a feeling of anything is possible. Collective peace and progress. /17

But as soon as basic living conditions are restored, the status games will start again. Always. Because without them, as social animals we don’t even know who or what we are. They give us identity, and belonging. /18

You can try to escape this, and succeed to some extent, but not by being a contrarian. Contrarians are even more addicted to status games, their entire existence is obsessive studying of the rivalries. Without them they have nothing. /19

The only escape is a pretty ruthless passion for material reality. Independent of what others think about it. That’s a very lonely, solitary affair. But it’s also a deeper connection to existence, the only real joy. As Spinoza knew. /20

Many believe that’s what their scientific and other work is already doing. But most of it is status games, when you look. Science is absolutely riddled with status games. All human endeavours are. /21

To be genuinely without fear or favour is incredibly rare. Those people tend to be hated, like Germaine Greer. Real truth tellers are by definition not popular. Popularity is imitation. They violate our very sense of identity. /22

But life is really pretty empty doing anything else, for me anyway. As Spinoza said, only genuine understanding brings true joy. Everything else is just an imitation of it. /end

Local businesses are utterly dependent on the platform. Basic social interaction is as well. PNG citizens and businesses will be the first to resist the move. Social media platforms are vampire squids on the faces of humanity. This is an existential fight. 2/2

Not fascism or Nazism. Those are old-fashioned movements that accepted the central role of the State in running modern societies. Trump’s team exists only in a social media bubble. Their entire agenda is a series of social media battles that have been ongoing for years. /2

“For 18 senior US officials to have a casual chat on a commercial social media platform has shocked many in Washington.” Why would this be a shock? Reality itself for this team is entirely lived through social media. /3

Trumpism is the hijacking of civic infrastructure and life by social media. The medium is the message. The wanton destruction of US institutions isn’t a fascist plot. Fascists adore the State, they just appropriate it for their own purposes. /4

Trump doesn’t care about any of that. He wants to win social media battles. And because of the almost total disconnect between social media and reality, those battles quickly take on an apocalyptic vibe. /5

Everything is the end of the world, Nazi stormtroopers and fascist electric cars. Just step back and look at how ridiculous it all is. Rampant conspiracy and hysteria. All of this taking place inside social media bubbles, decoupled from material reality. /6

Sociality is violence. A technology that hyper-connects us generates nothing but increasing, ever more granular violence. Nothing but warring gangs or teams, in every dimension of life. That’s why the world seems so crazy right now. /7

The progress of civilisation is the winnowing of connections between people, to create hierarchies based on expertise and experience. Rather than prosecuting life according to who can accumulate the greatest amount of followers in their social team. /8

Social media has thrown all of that into reverse. Which is why civilisation’s fruits are now falling from the tree at increasing pace. Humans are social creatures. Change how that sociality is transacted, and you change everything. /9

The medium is the fucking message. It’s the platforms, stupid. Turning us into nations of warring gangs. /end

The complete rationale for Scott Morrison’s National Cabinet, sold as pap about unity amidst adversity, was to derail this disruption to the status hierarchy. Morrison knew he had to be on the inside of the public health response, to best destroy it. /2

To create a new team, the National Cabinet, to decouple State Premiers from their existing public health teams. Modern conservatives know that if you set something up as a fight, you will automatically generate opposing teams. /3

Even on issues on which the majority of the population have neither knowledge of nor interest in. Like public health. Activate humans’ most fundamental need to have status inside battling teams, and anything is fuel for the fire. Including basic public health. /4

You’d have to be blind not to see how that then unfolded. All the bullshit about ‘lives and livelihoods’, the two opposing teams. It’s total insanity to make those even two distinct things. But team sports has no logic, except for your team to win. For your status to survive. /5

Morrison et al turned Covid into a team sport. From that moment, public health was dead. Premiers and the PM bonded in a new National Cabinet groupthink team, against the increasing ‘resistance’ from opposing teams. But that resistance was part of the plan. /6

Morrison created the resistance as the most fundamental part of the plan. He ‘weaponised’ public health, by turning it into a debate and then fight, between rival teams. That’s what populist politics does. Its entire business model. /7

People are still fighting that battle, here and elsewhere, every day. None of it has achieved anything except destroy public health, no matter which team you’re on. Team sports is never the solution to team sports. ‘Mobilising’ your own team just feeds the clusterfuck. /8

It was a more or less total victory for the pre-existing high status groups in our community. Covid action is dead, all the old status hierarchies are restored, with battles around the margins of things like WFH the only remnant shock to the system. /9

Thus also the utterly desperate reframing of what did happen, with Covid action, as a terrible mistake. The existing status hierarchies are absolutely determined that they won’t be placed under that sort of threat again. ‘Lockdown’ demonisation is relentless, to this day. /10

If being on social media, and voting, are where you think this sociopathic status quo will be rooted out, it’s a sad delusion. The existing status hierarchy created these platforms, to monetise the anger their injustices create. They’re owned by billionaires, ffs. /11

Only catastrophes change societies, meaningfully. Covid gave it a red hot go. Unfortunately its acute impact wasn’t great enough to dismantle those hierarchies. Its ongoing chronic impact may be. But today’s hierarchies will feel that’s another generation’s problem. /end

You can say the painting ‘looks like’ a flower. Very few would not see the ‘resemblance’. But we gloss over the most basic fact here. How is it possible to detach or decouple a likeness, from an object? /2

Paint and flowers are two fundamentally different material objects. And yet they can be made to resemble one another, uncannily. Even more, the paint can create new perceptions of flowers that aren’t immediately obvious by just looking at a flower. /3

That’s what brilliant art does, it allows us to see more than we could see without it. It extracts more reality, out of what it ‘represents’. How do smears of paint and flowers end up having this profound connection? /4

It’s important to note here that our culture today is profoundly antagonistic towards imitation. We see it as inauthentic. The ‘original’ is what matters! Apparently. Bu there are no originals, without copies. What creates the actual concept of originality, is imitation. /5

It’s only when copies exist, that we can make a distinction between the original and the copy. That’s when the whole framing of authenticity emerges. Authenticity is a toxic social creation. If you unpack it, you land smack bang inside the identity politics of our day. /6

We’re so obsessed with originality, and hostile to imitation, because our social lives (paradoxically) are now almost entirely driven by imitation. As the collective institutional bases of our civilisations unravel under the various freedumb movements, something happens. /7

Who we are, our sense of status/identity, becomes problematic. With collapsing social roles, that status and identity has to be made anew in other ways. It becomes our personal responsibility. And we create identity and status always the same way. /8

We imitate or emulate others. That gives us status in their ‘teams’ (social status groups). We become members of those teams. This becomes an obsessive, all-consuming activity when the wider social framings of status and identity crumble. /9

Nobody wants to be nobody. We all want to be somebody, to have a purpose in life, a place in society. We want status, and from that we get our identity. Under the institutionally-governed relative peace and prosperity post-WW2, this was much easier. /10

You just were a gardener, or doctor, or teacher, or road worker, or whatever. Roles attached to important social functions. You got your identity and status doing socially needed work. Not only were you helping others, you didn’t have to curate your own existence. /11

But the anti-institution freedumb movements have now destroyed most of that. Now social utility has been replaced with what’s ‘trending’. Everybody now has to play imitative rivalry games, to even define who they are. /12

Identities are proliferating, not because of some newfound tolerance for difference, but because of a genuine mass existential anxiety about an absence of status and identity. Those identities are like psychological gated communities, for one. Violence follows. /13

These endlessly curated identities clash with others, and so societies become endless gang warfare between rival teams. Recognising the world today here yet? /14

Imitation becomes the ONLY social mechanism. That’s what ‘trending’ means, something only becomes even vaguely similar to our old public policy space by trending for some length of time. Trending is now our only social glue. And it’s toxic glue. /15

Anything can be made to trend. The most vile equivalent of the ‘bearded lady’ at the circus comes to dominate. It’s a race to the bottom, for likes and follows. To create and maintain status and identities for people, whose social frameworks for that have disappeared. /16

And so here we are, in 2025, where collective life is just a series of trends. Fads and fashions. With fragile, evanescent identities attached to those fads and fashions, because that’s what drives them. The clamouring for status and identity. /17

So to go back to paint, and flowers. What magic allows them to ‘resemble’ one another? They’re fundamentally different material things. It may sound New Age to say it, but it’s really just chemistry. All things partake of all other things. /18

Things are all fundamentally unique and different, but they can resemble one another and then interact because they ultimately share a baseline potentiality, a quantum soup, from which all things arise. Art lets us see that underlying shared material reality. /19

Paint can be a flower (or anything else). Representation is a terrible concept, likeness is a fundamental material reality. Those painted flowers *are* flowers. Made out of paint. Not resemblances to flowers. /20

Similarly when we imitate and emulate in social groups, we’re tapping into a shared material foundation for human life that transcends all differences between us. We ‘recognise’ each other, because of that shared underlying reality. /21

But re-route that imitation towards only your position within a human-human status hierarchy, and the material underpinnings disappear. Humans become decoupled from material reality. What Goya was trying to show in his cudgeling humans, I think. /22 https://t.co/Sso9pw1DfR

To imitate or emulate is divine, provided you’re emulating connection with the underlying material realities of existence. Emulating people with the deepest understanding of and connection to those realities. /23

Not just influencers, looking for an empire of followers and likes. /end

We need that level of disruption to our status quo, to ‘mobilise’ entire societies on a ‘war footing’, to make meaningful progress. Is that in anybody’s election platform? No. Elections are popularity team sports, nothing more. /end

With Covid (or climate change) we didn’t move from a society running on facts, to one running on lies. Societies never run on facts. They run on people imitating what other people are doing. That imitation gives the person status in a social group, and therefore identity. /2

We all know this, we all went to school, where this is the entire mechanism of life. ‘Peer pressure’. Why do we not see that it continues into adulthood life? It gets even more intense there, particularly now that it’s lived mostly through social media. /3

The business model of social media is imitative rivalry. It’s entrenching schoolyard peer pressure *as* adult life. Not an analogy. I see so many look at the appalling collapse of public life, and blame ‘the people’ for it. The people are stupid, they need more facts! Etc. /4

Bollocks. People are doing what they’ve always done, and should do, copying other people. It’s how social animals work. It’s actually a huge advantage to social animals, it allows for rapid change in response to threats. But it can be gamed badly. /5

Because ‘the people’ (a completely empty concept), when they copy, copy somebody. A small number of high-status people. If the currently high status people in a society are sociopathic idiots, society will become sociopathically idiotic. /6

Which is what we’re seeing right now. America elected Trump *twice*. QED. You can’t blame the people for this, because people never act as a collective group in that way. They individually ‘follow a leader’. They imitate, they emulate. Because they want to ‘fit in’. /7

It’s the beheading of the leadership function in societies by the politics of ‘the economy’ (which deliberately replaces all leadership with a fictitious self-regulating ‘market’) that is destroying our civilisations. Not ‘the people’ needing education. /8

Democracy as we call it never was the people running anything. They can’t, groups of people never act as a single agency. They always follow a very small number of people, within the group. We need to focus our attention on the basic fact of ‘what everybody else is doing’. /9

That’s what drives societies. The most authoritarian, and the most democratic. They’re all using exactly the same social mechanism. The imitation of high status people, by lower status people. ‘Doing what everybody else is doing.’ /end