May 2025

The medium is the message. The quality of information on social media isn’t the problem. Societies don’t run on information. Societies are cultures. Social mechanisms. We’ve substituted multi-dimensional cultural spaces developed over millennia, with these platforms. 2/8

And these platforms are owned by a handful of immature idiot billionaires. We’ve handed over our entire societies, to these gold-plated adolescents. You may think this overstates what’s going on. I encourage you to open your eyes. 3/8

Find any aspect of our lives now that isn’t being shifted onto social media as the dominant venue for their operation. The President of the US is the Twitter/Truth Social President. 4/8

The medium is the message. What gets said here is almost unimportant, it’s the substitution of those vastly complex, multi-dimensional cultural and social mechanisms with these mono-dimensional rage-revenue machines that is the story. McLuhan felt the same frustration. 5/8

People blinded by ‘content’. Ignorant of the way that the medium of social exchange itself is what creates societies and the personalities that live in them. We are zombies to these platforms. Reality and expertise now replaced by what’s ‘trending’. Reality as fashion. 6/8

If it trends, it’s real. If it doesn’t, it literally ceases to exist. Covid trended for a while, now it doesn’t so nothing - NOTHING - is being done. The trend is to exterminate it from collective memory entirely. Same as climate change. 7/8

Only institutions staffed by genuine expertise, focused on intergenerational timelines, can resist a society of trends. The very things our social media ‘leaders’ attack with their greatest venom. They know their true enemy. /end

Of course what SC2 does to the immune system may be entirely different to what HIV does to it. That’s NOT the question. The question is - what is SC2 doing in *its* ‘clinical latency’ period, right now? Do we know? Some are trying to figure it out. /2 https://t.co/khgmZvxDpy

The comparison is about the clinical latency period. And SC2 is already not very latent. ‘Long Covid’ tells us that. It’s not waiting years to fuck with us. If we’d used the same acute impact filters for HIV that we use for SC2? /3 https://t.co/Pu4zM70B4i

Look at that x-axis. We’d have had 8-10 years of delusional comfort that everything is fine. Then people start dying. That clinical latency period can last decades, for some infections. It’s still a ticking bomb. /4 https://t.co/BCwBYoeJbo

Maybe it’s like chickenpox and shingles, some horrendous longer-term impacts years into the future, but not necessarily life-threatening. The point is, we don’t fucking know. Everything is looked at through the acute impact lens. /5 https://t.co/FX4FCx8ZER

The bare minimum precautionary principle in public policy is not being applied. We’re infecting EVERYBODY, over and over. Including the entire next generation, them worse than anybody else. /6 https://t.co/FmIAlY2vAH

Populist societies run only on what is trending from day to day, social media societies are simply incapable of addressing public issues like this. Everything becomes about acute impact. Not just disease, we all just live ‘our best lives’, for present fun. /7 https://t.co/N8GCVcznl4

Only institutions have a longer-term, intergenerational focus. The things our modern populist politics attacks with greatest venom, as red tape. Activism won’t fix this. Only institutions can. And they only emerge in response to catastrophe. /end

As I often Tweet about, all that drives human groups to work together at all is a threat, a catastrophe. The bit in green. Without the catastrophe, they just play team sports, status games. The bit in yellow. 2/8 https://t.co/4qNps6w0H6 https://t.co/mU0nuZPEkt

Both those for democracy, and those who oppose it with market-based solutions, share the same idiot fantasy idea of self-organisation. Revealing that State vs markets is just another team sports status battle, with no connection with actual reality. 3/8

Humans will *always* form hierarchies, using status as the glue. They will always strive to attain and maintain a status in relation to other people, because that also gives them an identity. They are then somebody, rather than nobody. It’s staggering this isn’t obvious. 4/8

And this isn’t bad, or even good. It just is. For something to even exist, there must be a scale of value saying X is better or great then Y, all the way down the hierarchy. Without hierarchy, there is no distinction between things, of any kind. There is no-thing. 5/8

All ideas of ‘the people’ and self-organisation do is allow some social status groups, who pump these ideas, to gain status over others. We never, as individuals, spontaneously act as one group mind and will. Everything is led, in all spheres of life. By about 5% of us. 6/8

5% of plumbers determine best practice for plumbing. The same for teachers, accountants, politicians, hairdressers - everything. It can be a different 5% in each group, it’s not elitism or authoritarianism or fascism. 7/8

The best plumbers are rarely the best hairdressers or politicians, etc. We each have roles in different hierarchies, higher in some than others. Societies are networks, of many hubs (5%) and ‘followers’. Hubs come from threats or catastrophes, which they lead us from. /end https://t.co/kdEOQUwY2I

Not because this or that party will fail. They all fail. Popularity - formalised here as elections, but now the dominant operating principle of our societies, via social media - cannot solve real problems. /2

Take the transition to renewable energy. Those with expertise in that area applaud the rejection of the LNP nuclear fantasy. But the renewables approach from the ALP is nowhere near enough to meet even its modest targets. /3

Keeping in mind the targets in turn derive from scientific work trying to rescue human civilisation from extinction. Easily, by orders of magnitude, the greatest threat humanity as a whole has ever faced. And what does popularity governance deliver? /4

A ministry focused on it, though only in the past 3 years. Contrast that with what nations did in WW1 and WW2. They stopped literally everything they were doing, to fight a threat that in comparison was pathetically feeble. /5

The plan the ALP has now had endorsed in the election again won’t even meet its own modest targets, themselves developed to cause the least offence (and therefore drop in popularity, votes and donations) to key ‘stakeholders’. Not because the ALP is spineless. /6

But because the magnitude of change needed in *every* ‘portfolio’ is so immense that there is no actual way to make it popular. We’re trapped by our own system of government. We keep voting new people in to try to fix that system. It won’t work. /7

Perhaps not enough people are on the frontline of what we euphemistically now call ‘essential services’. The bare basics of running civilised life - providing energy, water, education health care, food etc. You won’t find a single essential service that isn’t fucked. /8

That can’t get staff, because demographically there are no young workers, and certainly none trained in what needs doing. The people on the literal front lines of keeping civilisation afloat are being absolutely smashed. /9

Already completely overwhelmed by the health needs of rapidly ageing populations, health systems then had a permanent pandemic foisted upon them, by a politics of popularity that was appalled that its perpetual recreational jet travel and dining out had been interrupted. /10

Roads across Australia are in a dire state of collapse. There’s no money, skills or resources to fix them. The ‘environment’ is in collapse. Aged care is so broken that the elderly occupy desperately needed hospital beds because there’s nowhere else to park them. /11

Education outcomes are in free fall. There are no new teachers for any schools, and the ones that hang on are under assault from the permanent pandemic, and kidult parents. Parents shackled to astronomical mortgages, with no time to raise their own children. /12

Housing is an existential disaster. The ALP’s policy is more of the same idiot ‘supply is what is important’, because everybody says that. It doesn’t make it true. A supply of 𝙖𝙛𝙛𝙤𝙧𝙙𝙖𝙗𝙡𝙚 housing, yes. but nobody has any intention to do that. /13

It would be deeply unpopular with the vast numbers of existing homeowners, who don’t want the market value of their homes affected. I could go on, enumerating the disastrous state of affairs in every single portfolio. But the point is, no amount of voting will fix this. /14

Voting CAUSED this. Trying to fix complex material problems, using a popularity contest. Once you surrender the resolution of your problems to popularity, you will be permanently stuck in the schoolyard (literally). The team sports of popularity and status. /15

Nothing truly fundamental will be done, because it will upset the status quo, the complex and rigid equilibrium of the aggregate of all status games. This is why all meaningful change in history is imposed on people. Via catastrophes. /16

In the same way some evolutionary biologists see evolution itself happening, in ‘punctuated equlibria’. Things don’t evolve in nice gradual steps. Catastrophes wipe out the dominant species, leaving room for others to emerge. Societies are exactly the same. /17

If you don’t believe this, take an honest look at the magnitude of the challenges now facing us. And on the other side of the ledger, look at what plans we have to fix those, the plans we voted for. Then have a Bex and a good lie down. /18

It’s not about being optimistic or pessimistic. Kidults of the world, reality doesn’t give a flying fuck about your precious 𝒇𝒆𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒏𝒈𝒔. Like outcomes will be determined by how ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ we are. It’s like being stuck at a New Age retreat. /19

It’s recognising the actual material problems of societies, identifying the fixes, and implementing them. It’s mostly engineering. Not ‘Left wing’ or ‘Right wing’ fixes. It’s like saying gravity is Left-wing or Right-wing. /20

With social media entrenching these same status games, I can promise you no amount of voting will rise to the challenge of fixing any of it, meaningfully. So, we’re fucked. Catastrophes incoming. Then things might change. /21

I say might. Civilisations never last forever, in historical terms most are fleeting at best. The odds are that even the catastrophes won’t fix things. The civilisation itself is more likely to simply collapse and disappear. /22

Kidults will despair at that message, life is supposed to be endless recreational fun. Most humans who ever lived never lived our Western ‘lifestyle’ lives. There’s calm joy and sanity in being rid of permanent cruise culture. To stop living in denial. /23

We are never more bored or listless than when we face no challenges. Give Lifeline a rest folks, embrace the messy clusterfuck. There’s real joy in at least seeing it. Spinoza said it, the only true joy is understanding. /24

The fun life you feel slipping away was itself the result of millions dead in global catastrophes in the first half of the twentieth century. We didn’t vote it into existence. We’re the survivors. /end

That root cause is status. Status is the ‘atoms’ of our lives. Everything we use as explanation instead, like power and politics and personal psychologies, are ‘chemical compounds’ of status. It’s the key that unlocks everything. /2

And as with chemistry, this doesn’t prevent our lives being endlessly complex and colourful. But underneath all of that complexity is a simple mechanism. The workings of status. Our social periodic table. /3

I Tweet often why this is. Status is also identity. Without status, we are literally, individually and collectively, nobody. Having status makes us somebody. We are unrecognisably anything, without status. /4

Status games, the ongoing battles for status, what I call team sports, to capture the essential group-based mechanism we employ, are pretty much our whole lives. It’s so complete as a mechanism that we often don’t even realise this is what we’re doing. /5

You will struggle to find a single thing humans do that doesn’t reduce to the imitative rivalry (team sports) of these battles for status. All of this matters because without root causes our lives spin endlessly in fictitious secondary manifestations of status. /6

All the -isms and Left/Right framings and today hashtag-ontologies that are really just status games. Us in our groups or teams, fighting to be top dog in the social melee. Mistaking the message with the medium. /7

Try the framing today, as you scroll through Twitter. Find any posts or threads that aren’t ultimately somebody or some group jostling for status. For their identity to be the dominant identity, to be ‘recognised’ by others as dominant. /8

Find one thing humans do that wasn’t originally something a high status person or group introduced, which was then imitated by others. Like our rampant travel culture today. Do you know its origins? It seems the most ‘democratic’ expression of human desire. Bollocks. /9

The idea of recreational travel, travelling to ‘see the sights’, derived from the Grand Tour aristocratic families provided for their sons when they came of age. Now emulated widely by the rest of us peasants. /10

I bet you can’t find something in human society that escapes this root cause, that is outside our social periodic status table. Once you see it, the world unfolds before you like a large-print book. /end

As McLuhan once said, it's imitation that produces the entire concept of an 'original'. Without a copy, there is not even such a thing as an original. This more authentic art work or life, which people will pay millions for, is itself an artefact of imitative culture. 2/5

It's not some natural baseline covered over by all of the imitative rivalry. The imitative rivalry *produces* it. The tidal wave of minutiae of peoples' supposedly personal lives and feelings is confected, performative rubbish. 3/5

It's just more curation, more imitation, more status games. We saw this in the 1970s, in the back to nature and self-sufficiency movements. Isn't the concept of 'natural' getting a workout now? People imitating some loon idea of a more authentic and natural reality. 4/5

Imitation is human life. Driven by status. That's the key that unlocks everything, if you look. /end

If you’re pleading for important things to happen, just note that Superman ranks above them. Nothing in today’s Top 5 comes within light years of important public problems. That’s the same every day. 2/3 https://t.co/WD4A5xpXYg

The medium is the message. We HAVE to stop thinking we’re talking *about* society, on these platforms. The platforms ARE society, now. They’re not content receptacles. They’re our social spaces. /end

Do we not see adult life now as the giant high school it literally is? Social media is our social space, and it’s structured like a high school schoolyard. Societies are 100% social. Not political, not economic. Those are just labels we give to school gangs in the melee. 2/2 https://t.co/MFm1D4uJ8H

The status quo is infinitely inventive at rationalising why no change is needed. So it will be forced upon it, by reality. Either it will die out, or internal or external catastrophe will force it out. The French Revolution, or world wars. Or climate disaster. 2/3

And it’s not that the status quo represses us. The rest of us largely want to be those high status people. That’s where they get their power. That’s why they trot out ‘the politics of envy’ comebacks. They know what people really desire. /end

Controlling spread is mostly engineering, not medicine. Animal husbandry that results in wide spread of infectious disease is said to be unethically negligent. We’re infecting people deliberately now, for ‘natural’ immunity. History will see how fucking crazy that is. 2/2

That’s what an institution is, a collective embedded memory, a set of habits, that continue to act after those who set them up have long gone. They’re the only long-term-focused stability that can defeat human status games. /2

To the present day they always seem like a lead weight. ‘Red tape’. ‘Bureaucracy’. An irritating inertia. That inertia is all that allows societies to survive. Of course it will sometimes clash with urgent need. /3

Just as your body’s accumulated systems sometimes push back against your immediate desires and needs. They force you to sleep, for example. The further an institution gets from its originating catastrophe, the more likely it will be hijacked by status games. /4

We saw that with public health and Covid. In Australia when Covid arrived, the institutions worked exactly as designed after previous catastrophes. They kicked Covid’s arse. But then the demands of present-day status games fought back. /5

It had been too long since the invention of public health for enough people to remember why it’s important. Too long since the last disaster. Surely we can live with a pandemic, the status games said? This is all just hysteria? /6

This same cyclical pattern repeats throughout all of our history. Equilibrium of status in better times (the ‘status quo’) allowing dreams of god-like life free of all restriction. Punctuated by the catastrophes the status quo generates. Generating new institutions. /7

Creating new periods of comfortable ‘free’ life, a new status quo to ignore the empirical link we have to wider realities. Generating new catastrophes. Etc, ad infinitum. /8

Institutions are humanity’s memory, and will always seem like an obstacle to the present day. The ‘restrictions’ of customs and traditions. They’re the ‘we’ that many have noticed has now disappeared. It’s they who do the constant assessment of what ‘we’ is and needs. /9

They’re the mostly silent and invisible actors looking after things, keeping the lights on. Without them it’s all up to you. That’s what the ‘cost of living’ crisis really is. Forget all the economic explanations. It’s the collapse of that calculated ‘we’. /10

That continuous calculation is what keeps people healthy and safe and solvent. When it’s removed in favour of a fictitious ‘market’, humans just play status games to try to survive. Welcome to 2025. /end

As politicians know, the fastest way to gain influence is to make people feel threatened. ‘Shock jock’ media uses the same insight, to create a continuous sense of crisis. Then vacuum up the anxious, steering them towards yourself as the new high status leader. /2

But it’s not just ‘elites’ who do this. Take diseases, as one bizarre example. Peoples’ afflictions become their rallying point for status and identity. Those who try to generate discussion about long-term chronic impacts of infection find this out very quickly. /3

Every existing disease social group will appear, weapons drawn, to challenge the possibility of another disease taking some of their status-oxygen. Of course all of these people are suffering. That’s not the point. /4

The point is that the disease becomes so entrenched as the way they have a status and therefore identity, that it reaches a point where they would almost rather be sick. Because if they weren’t, it would be a major threat to their status, and therefore identity. /5

The disease makes them somebody, rather than nobody. It gives them a much more powerful status than being well ever did. None of this would be necessary if wellness was a proper institutional focus. People play status games with health when it isn’t. /6

You can see this same pattern across every facet of human life. Completely dysfunctional things remain that way largely because status hierarchies emerge around the clusterfuck. The dysfunction becomes the thing that makes people important, that gives them status. /7

Which in turn acts as an enormous handbrake of inertia then in fixing the problem, because to do that means surrendering a proliferation of status positions people have achieved in working with the dysfunction. This is why you have to understand status to effect change. /8

And sadly all that tends to interrupt status games is more catastrophe, to re-jig the existing status quo, which will hold onto the existing clusterfuck for dear life. Victorian England stumbled upon a way out of this impasse. /9

It made expertise itself a high status activity. Solving public problems. That’s what the Republic of Letters and its Royal Societies etc. were about. You can’t be rid of status games. But you can divert them to actual human material need. /end

The status quo is not aligned with any team. It has no direction, left, right or centre. It will wipe out any team that gets in its way, no matter what idiot ideology it’s promising. Societies run on status. The political spectrum is a cartoon fairy tale. /end

Politics, as we call it, does not determine how our societies function. It's a thin veneer of status games overlaid upon the top of the material realities of societies. What always, without exception, determines outcomes is those material realities. 2/6

So with housing, the reason our beloved 'Left' and 'Right' converge upon the same fake solution is that what really drives housing also drives those teams. Social status. Damaging the housing gravy train would fundamentally undermine status hierarchies in Australia. 3/6

Not just in an impoverished sense of status, as in reputation and bragging rights. The status and identity of millions of Australians is dependent upon the entire housing industry and its myriad associated networks. 4/6

Which is why our beloved cartoon teams, the Left and Right of politics, converge upon resisting actual change to this status quo. It reveals very clearly that 'politics' doesn't determine things. It's a show, a performance, that we love, team sports. 5/6

Status determines things. And beyond that, the material realities of existence determine things. The former loves to ignore the latter. When it does that for long enough, material realities smash it with various catastrophes. Only that shifts status hierarchies. /end

Everything we see in our modern Western societies is the result of us substituting adult (institutional) life, with high school culture. I’ve shared how that happened, the use of compulsory schooling, which split a single adult culture, into a child and adult culture. /2

Then because everybody went to school, and learned the culture there, when they left school they remade the old adult life, as a giant high school. It was all they knew. That substitution was complete some time ago. Social media has absolutely entrenched it. /3

Social media’s entire mode of operating is the schoolyard. It organises everything according to likes and followers. Popularity. That’s the schoolyard, we all experienced it at school. We don’t see that’s now adult life too. /4

Social media *is* our societies now. It’s not ‘about’ them. It’s not about content. It’s the place we transact our societies. Public policy was replaced with what’s trending. Our collective attention span is now about 10 minutes. /5

People say ‘that’s a great analogy’. It’s not an analogy. This is *literally* what’s occurred. Our entire societies now are giant high schools. Kids at school and adults through to the elderly are all sharing the same cultural/social spaces. /6

These platforms. The medium is the message. How these platforms are designed IS now our societies. ‘Influence’ replaces expertise. Half-witted publicity whores transform their social media followings into actual seats at the table, in government. /7

And remember at school, that loose distinction between jocks and nerds? It’s absolutely real, and populism is the revenge of the jocks. Previously they lorded over people at school, but were mostly swallowed up by mature adult life. They ended up in shit dead-end jobs. /8

Meanwhile the ‘nerds’, who actually studied the culture the civilisation was passing down over generations, slotted into institutions after leaving school that continued implementing this culture. But now the jocks are running the world. /9

You can hear it, yelling at you, in the endless sneering now at ‘elites’. That’s the jocks from school railing against the teachers and nerds they always despised. Trump is one of those Prom Kings from high school, now having his revenge against the nerds. /10

(Except I doubt he was ever that popular, he’s the spoiled rich kid everybody hated, who bought his way through school and life.) Same hatred of the nerds. The great hatred of the ‘unelected’ is so obviously a war cry to make popularity the metric to run everything. /11

That’s why I hate elections, they entrench popularity as the ultimate currency of power. Combine elections with social media and you demolish millennia of civilised progress. Trump is the Twitter/Truth Social President. Are we blind? It’s so obvious. /12

Our institutions are all that oppose this transformation of all life into high school life. For now they’re holding in some places, and not in others. Public health as an institution was swept away alarmingly fast in the early pandemic. /13

Powerless against a tidal wave of social media and electoral jock-power. They wanted their adolescent eternal lifestyle travel and eating out lives back. We can’t vote our way out of this mess. Voting is one of the root causes OF the mess. /14

Institutions, as Burke said centuries ago, are what run societies. They emerge in response to catastrophic need, and embed procedural habits that cross generations. Like our own autonomic social nervous system. Populism is political dysautonomia. /15

We have to stop packing the stadium of all of our team sports substitutes for institutional life, stop our obsessive focus on X v Y, in every facet of life. Those team sports are literally just a game. They have no connection with material reality at all. /16

Only our institutions, which nobody made but emerge through generations of trial and suffering, keep us alive and healthy and prosperous. Go Harvard. Go US Law. Kick the orange fucker to the kerb. /end

Similarly as I’ve posted about here a few times, Covid is not everywhere, all the time. It breeds in a relatively tiny number of places, and then spreads. Stopping Covid is a much SMALLER job than we think. Portraying it as impossibly huge was deliberate political strategy. /2

This is the danger of the idea of ‘the people’ running societies, and of these platforms, who pretend to operationalise ‘the people’. Right now for example renewable energy rollouts have stalled, because (it’s claimed) of ‘community opposition’. Bullshit. /3

It’s stalled because again a TINY number of bad faith actors have stirred up shit in communities. Just as they do for every issue. They then claim the community is against things. They did the same thing to shut down public health action against Covid. /4

Humans do not, EVER, act as a group, as ‘the people’. They follow a tiny number of people in status hierarchies. About 5% of any group, of any size. If you see somebody claiming ‘the community’ is thinking or doing something, call BS immediately. /5

And find that 5% driving a particular position, that it then retrospectively attributes to the community. Politicians similarly talk about ‘mandates’ from electorates. The same politicians who then get turfed out 3 years later. /6

Understanding the networked nature of all human life and society is an incredibly powerful and positive thing. It strips away so much of the apocalyptic thinking and feeling. Instead we accuse entire populations of being stupid, when things go wrong. /7

But it’s always a tiny number of actors driving bad things. Who can be identified and neutralised, with precision. That is what bad faith actors do every day, to gain ‘power’. They know this stuff. Good people generally don’t. /8

Good people look on with horror at what seems an apocalyptic disaster incapable of resolution. That’s the con, that the bad faith actors generate. But it can all be turned around, again with surgical precision, with the right understanding. /9

Beginning with abandoning the idea societies are ‘the people’ doing anything. They’re networks of constantly evolving hubs, hubs made up of tiny numbers of actors, driving change. ‘Influencing’ our lives. /10

Remember this? Only a dozen people generating most anti-vaccine hysteria in the community. A sane society would identify these people and shut down their postings. But these platforms won’t allow that. They’re ’the people’ fanatics. https://t.co/zmoKnAvTnG /11

But again, only because the tiny number of people who own them want to be that 5% who determine what the rest of us do. They have no interest at all in ‘the people’. The people is a fiction. /end

They in turn evoke the people or the community as driving what they, individually, are trying to do. It’s retrospective. We’ve seen an absolute slam dunk illustration of this in the recent Australian election. /2

The narrative everybody, even those for renewable energy, now use is that ‘community opposition’ needs to be factored in. But the entire Australian population just returned a pro-renewables government with an historic landslide majority. /3

As with every urgent problem we now face, there is no widespread problem with people themselves. Just a handful of shit-stirring activists. They’re conning us, it’s a sleight of hand, evoking the people or the community to cover their own self-interest. /4

As with mis- and disinformation, the solution is to identify and then shut down activists. Not to educate or consult with the entire community. To understand networks and status hierarchies. Societies are NOT some amorphous mass called ‘the people’ or ‘the community’ /5

They’re networks of status hierarchies. They look like the picture on the left, not the right. Tiny numbers of people determine outcomes. /6 https://t.co/wwTmpjRMRG

With renewables, again, the Australian community at the election told these anti-renewables activists already. They’d say the same about disease control, if we weren’t blinded by ideas about the people/ the community. FUCK OFF. /end

When human groups are under threat. You’ll have seen that all the time in your own life. For example you may barely speak to people in your own town. But if the town is threatened by something, suddenly you find a ‘solidarity’ with your fellow human beings. A ‘we’ emerges. /2

You’ll even have experienced that at school, where the groups you were part of often found a reason to exist as a refuge against threats from bullies or other groups. So, the ‘we’ that used to run things like public health, and now isn’t? /3

I’ve traced that history many times. It emerged from the ruins of the 4 great catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. WW1 Spanish Flu pandemic The Great Depression WW2. Those created a ‘we’ that we then called ‘the public’. And what was this ‘we’? /4

It was the public institutions we used to repair societies, after that 4-pronged apocalypse. Institutions created and enacted the ‘we’. ‘We’ is a continuous calculation of collective need, by *institutions*. Not the idiot populist idea of ‘the people’. /5

Populism will have you believe that any crowd or social media group you can cobble together is ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. But that’s really just enumeration. Big groups of people together is not a we. It’s just a group of people. /6

It’s the continuous calculation of and response to collective need that is a we. Those institutions just ran, they looked out for us. They gave us that sense, now gone, that somebody, somewhere, was looking after things. /7

We saw it with Covid. When the pandemic started, the institutions already knew what to do, they swung into action. In countries with relatively strong institutions, like Australia and NZ, Covid didn’t stand a chance. It got its arse kicked. /8

But the great Anglo libertarian loon countries - the UK and US - had already had decades of damaging their own institutions, in the post-1970s resistance to the post-WW2 rebuilding. The ‘free market’ movement, really just the restoration of status-driven life. /9

A free market is a fiction, they don’t exist. It’s a blatant con to remove institutional input to human affairs, to allow individuals to play status games again. Look at the phenomenal growth in wealth and influence of a tiny handful of people, since that shift. /10

If you want healthy, prosperous, peaceful lives, you need to live under the guidance of institutions with thousands of skilled staff, continuously assessing collective health and altering course as required. Everything else is just status games. The restoration of Kings. /11

And the only thing that will put those institutions in place, is catastrophe. They’re an emergency response to catastrophe. Nothing else ruptures our status quo. The Catholic Church managed many centuries of probably the only alternative, by targeting status itself. /12

They provided an institution - the church itself - built upon the principle of humans surrendering ultimate status to a non-human power. And a specific non-human (Christ) principle of rejecting status games and scapegoating. /13

Rene Girard saw this, that Christ’s taking of the entire scapegoating mechanism of human status-driven life onto himself, in his crucifixion, was the key to the specific genius of Christian societies. It’s what built them, what held status games at bay for millennia. /14

Of course these status games were then reproduced within the church itself. You can’t be free of status, because status is identity, for social creatures. But you can redirect it, which is what they did. That’s the best you can do. /15

Now in social media societies we’re going in exactly the opposite direction. It’s not capitalism or any -ism at work, it’s rampant, naked status battles. If you don’t address status as the atomic cause of all human thought and behaviour, you will never change anything. /end

Their ‘content moderation’ processes, if they still exist, relied upon the same idiot idea that everybody needs to be regulated, all at the same time. Why they end up using algorithms. No humans could manage the volume. But it’s also completely misguided. 2/3

It relies upon the same stupid idea that societies are ‘the people’ running things. They’re not, they’re nearly everybody following a tiny handful of people, in each domain of life. Shut down the hubs - there will be tiny numbers of them - the rest fixes itself. /end

Firstly, despite the almost universal belief that human groups of whatever size act as some sort of agency or entity, like ‘the people’, they just don’t. No group of any size does. We’ve all been in groups of various sizes, we’ve seen this from the inside. /2

The group only ever gives an impression of acting as a single agency when some tiny number of people in it suggest something, which the others then ‘get behind’. A group only exists as a hierarchical following, never as a simultaneous miraculous unanimity. /3

How could we think otherwise? How would it happen that everybody in a group suddenly had the same idea, at the same time? It’s nonsense. Groups are networked hierarchies, always. Society itself is networked fractal hierarchies. They look a bit like this. /4 https://t.co/3PYetaUSaX

A parallel belief that ‘the people’ run democracies is that information does. No society runs on information, ever. Again, how would that even work? Which information? The amount of information out there is beyond anybody to make even the slightest dent in, in their study. /5

My friend passionately every day attempts to ‘educate’ people, to eradicate disinformation and misinformation. And then to mobilise people with their new understanding. It never works, but he’s been doing it his entire adult life. The mythology of it all never dies. /6

I’m pretty much alone in most conversations about this, when I suggest the sign of a healthy society is people knowing hardly anything at all, about anything. Remember the saying, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing? Were we paying attention? /7

Because a little bit of knowledge is all ANY of us can now possibly have, about the staggeringly complex world we live in. We absolutely need all that knowledge. It’s the wonder of our age. But the idea we need everybody to have all of that knowledge? Seriously? /8

See the diagram again. We *delegate* responsibility for that staggering complexity of knowledge, extensively throughout society. So that most of us can get on with living our lives not needing to know it. We’re all part of at least one of the hubs. Knowing something well. /9 https://t.co/brEBIgZ4st

But the idea we all have to know everything about all of them is laughable, dangerous nonsense. Encouraged by populists, because by making everybody an expert in everything, their true mission is carried out. /10

The destruction of *trust* in all of these networked hierarchies. Look at this and other social media platforms, you can be a complete bullshit artist, and post alongside a Novel prize winner, lecturing them on their own field of expertise. /11

Social media IS the toxic implementation of ‘the people’ ideas, across every facet of life. From the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political. Everybody is now an expert in everything. Apparently. Why society now seems so staggeringly stupid. /12

Humans set up institutions full of millions of skilled people, to undertake the daily churn of the astronomical knowledge-based social lives we live. Populists level these institutions, to be replaced by universal expertise for every individual, through social media. /13

Which is a con, to allow them to then vacuum up millions of ‘followers’ without doing any work at all processing the complexity of peoples’ lives. The medium is the message. These platforms, I say nearly every day, are the way we are destroying civilisation itself. /end

They’re a remnant of the Magna Carta. Which in turn was a truce between a King, and his barons. This is the important bit. Democracy has NEVER been about what we call ‘the people’. It’s been about a battle for supremacy at the very top of human status hierarchies. /2 https://t.co/LETEDbgI9M

Even today, while we should cheer on courts and the law standing in the way of the great tidal wave of orange stupidity, remember why they’re doing it. Not for ‘the people’, an empty, meaningless concept. Existing businesses want certainty back for their trade. /3

That’s the status quo resisting a shift. And let’s face it, that status quo is better than the idiot populism of Trump. But don’t be deceived into thinking this is a battle for ‘the people’. Nothing is ever that. /4

Human societies run on status. Those with high status don’t oppress those with low status, those with low status want to be people with high status. We need to ditch these good versus bad binaries, to stop looking for our own personal Darth Vader in the Death Star. /5

When we do that we really just want somebody else to take that high status position, including ourselves. We want our team to be the winning team, instead of the current winners. All human-centred schemes for governance will become status games. Team sports. /6

Only connection to the empirical *non-human* realities of existence can interrupt these status games. Plagues, natural disasters, ecological collapse. Science is supposed to be the conduit for these material realities, into human societies. /7

Except it’s just as saturated with status games as any other human activity. It progresses one funeral at a time, as Planck said. Right now people trained in science tell us we can live with pandemics, because it boosts their status. /8 https://t.co/daQWgiOwZ2

Imagine the Old Testament written today. Where God launches plagues upon our sinning ways. And we shrug and say ‘we’ll live with it, you do you, God.’ That’s how insane societies become when status games are allowed free rein. /9

This is social media society, today. Social media is not about our society, not a place to ‘connect’ or discuss society. It is society. It is where it’s all increasingly transacted. It’s a giant digital high school of likes and followers. /10

Our stories already imagine a world hijacked by evil machines. We think that’s AI. It isn’t AI. It’s social media. Now replacing our public institutions. Targeting our deepest DNA as social animals. Insanely addictive, because of that targeting. We can’t look away. /end https://t.co/vgIrQLlKOb

What I call reality politics. Which isn’t politics at all, humans have a whole variety of Premier League team sports they perform every day, believing they’re shaping reality. They’re just playing status games. The outcome will be largely out of their hands. 2/6

Take the widespread belief that from the 1960s onwards, activist social movements caused massive positive changes to our societies. No, they attributed those changes to themselves, their team. That’s all. What caused the changes? 3/6

That 4-pronged reality apocalypse of the first half of the 20th century. WW1, Spanish Flu, the Great Depression and WW2. Those catastrophes broke existing status hierarchies, allowing massive social change. Reality did it, not humans. 4/6

Track progress in all of those supposed big wins of that time, and you’ll see it’s all unravelling at tremendous speed. The status quo now rules again. 5/6

I don’t come here every day to root for this or that team to win over this or that other team. Who wins those games is irrelevant. Reality wins. Always. It will kill millions of us if we refuse to see it, it has no feelings. /end