July 2025

A culture of likes and followers. That’s the schoolyard, folks, how do we not see it? The medium is the message. Teenagers looking to get laid invented these platforms to sort women they liked. 2/3

The content or information here is almost irrelevant. It’s the medium itself that is collapsing democracy, from the inside out. Sociality is violence. The history of civilisation is the history of the restriction and control of connection. /end

And fuck X for not allowing edits unless you pay the enshitiffication fee. Excuse a couple of typos.

To go back to the schoolyard again, activists are standover gangs bullying their way to higher status and domination over others. Nearly always with the claim they speak for ‘the people’ or ‘the community’. /2

There is no such thing as the people, or the community, as some unified group. It’s a con, just as politicians speaking of a ‘mandate’ is a con. I see a lot of this playing out in the battles over renewables. /3

Because everybody believes ‘the people’ is real and is also democracy, politicians caved and now renewables roll-outs are bogged down in endless ‘community consultation’. But the idea the community has problems with renewables is an artefact of anti-renewables activists. /4

Just as the idea that ‘people won’t tolerate more Covid action’ was an artefact of anti-vax/anti-public health activism. Polling showed that in fact the majority consistently supported action against Covid. /5

It’s just that the anti-public health gang was better at being a gang, bullying the wider community into submission. This was the story of both Puss in Boots and the Emperor’s New Clothes. Sleights of hand disguised as community belief. /5

I’ll repeat my view, that ‘the public’ as we thought we knew it is not, nor will it ever be, just a group of people mobilised in some way. It’s a construct of public institutions, set up to create and maintain a society. It’s a continuous calculation of need. /6

Because we live in a kidult culture, assembling large groups of people like a rock concert is mistaken for public action. It’s activist gangs, that’s all. A con. /end

Humans can’t debate reality into existence. They have far less control than they imagine, no humility before a much bigger universe. Most progress in human civilisation came *from* reality, catastrophic disruptions to our team sports status games. 2/3

It’s like arguing whether a ball will drop to the ground when you let it go. It’s Carroll’s caucus race, everybody running in circles until they collapse with exhaustion, achieving nothing. Make a material difference to things, ignore debate. It’s just status games. /end https://t.co/x51eleKMYT

These ideas and memes cry out somebody in a state of extreme existential fragility. To so badly need to feel a certain way is the pathway to an asylum. A rich, full life is a life of all feelings, appropriately in each context. 2/4

‘Happiness’ suggests the feeling of being happy is an independent state of existence. Feelings are never that. It’s a contrast experience telling you something has changed. You can be toxically happy. 3/4

We should want to have the feelings that we have, each telling us something diagnostic about the life we’re living, in each moment. To attempt to live feelings as independent realities is to be a child. Kidult culture. /end

I’ve used the example of recreational travel before, how we believe our own guff about this being about ‘seeing the sights’, and having ‘experiences’. It’s nothing of the sort. It arises from the emulation of the aristocratic ‘Grand Tour’ rich sons did when coming of age. /2 https://t.co/zAH015IblI

Travelling through the world, assimilating its sights and experiences as a preparatory taste for running the empire. Recreational travel is absolutely the product of empire and imperial culture. We’re a few generations past the most obvious manifestations of that. /3

But that’s what it still is, colonial jaunts. First empty locations of their resources to feed the empire, then turn them into theme parks for Grand Tour travellers. This goes well beyond travel. Every part of human culture can be traced back to ‘early adopters’. /4

Who millions then emulate. But what drives the emulation is the desire for status, it’s the high status of the early adopter that makes what they do desirable to millions of others. It used to puzzle me why UK homes for example so often have hideous blue and pink carpets. /5

And then the penny dropped. That’s the carpet colours in the old grand aristocratic and monarchical residences. Humans operate by imitation, and they imitate to have status. Because, as social animals, that status is also identity. Without status, you are literally nobody. /6

Societies don’t run on information, they run on status. If you want to fix any problem, like pandemics or climate change, you have to find a way to make the fixing of that problem a high status thing to do. That’s what the Victorians did, in the 19th century. /7

The engineers and scientists who built the massive public infrastructure that we still benefit from today were social heroes, for doing it. Lauded by royalty. Today our heroes are rock stars and social media influencers, who build nothing. Kidult culture. /8 https://t.co/qj0FFsPUqX

I invite you to look at the society we’re living in with fresh eyes, to trace every custom, idea, way of dressing, what we eat, how we build etc., back to some high status origin. Status runs societies. It’s the atomic level of human life, as atoms are for chemistry. /9

Not information, not power, not economics, not ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ or any of the other idiot teams we form to battle for status. None of the -isms are even real, not capitalism, socialism, communism. It’s all just status, with the names changed. /end

Casuistry says that you must assess each case (of anything) on its merits, when applying pre-existing rules, laws or precedents. It’s a fundamental foundation of law itself. It has extremely profound implications that are rarely noticed (see further down the thread). /2

In this case, F1 has a rule about what Piastri did, that says if you do X, the penalty is Y. The problem with that is the same problem mandatory sentencing has in law outside sport. It’s fundamentally unjust. /3

Without consideration of context and an overall assessment of the justice of the specific case, injustice is inevitable. If you get a negligent driving charge on the road, the penalty can be a whole range of things, depending on the context and an assessment of justice. /4

If you hurt nobody, you will likely get a fine and lose points off your licence. If you hurt another person, the penalty will be modulated accordingly to something more serious. This is what judges do, they add that casuistic modulation to justice. Why populists hate them. /5

In Piastri’s case, a penalty should have been applied, but the mandatory sentencing dumb regulation approach refuses to consider the context, which in this case meant stripping him of a race win. That outcome was fundamentally unjust. /6

The dumb application of a blanket rule, sans context, leads to fundamentally different outcomes depending on the context of the case. There was no way the infringement should have cost Piastri the entire race. “But the rule says X = penalty Y”. No context, no justice. /7

A 10-second penalty *in that specific context* also meant stripping him of a race win, the same penalty applied at another time in the race, to Piastri or another driver, would have meant much different outcomes. Regulations must be applied using a casuistic approach. /8

What case-based reasoning discovered was something much more profound, which is also why it works. Humans for their entire history have struggled to reconcile the specific and the general. The universal and the particular. The micro and the macro. /9

Casuistry though does something breathtakingly wonderful with this age-old chestnut. It rejects it entirely. It says the distinction isn’t even real. It says the universal *is* the specific, the particulars of anything *are* also the universal meaning. /10

There is no ‘big picture’, separate to the particulars of anything. The more specific and granular you get, the more universal you get. This upends millennia of human thought puzzles. The implications are staggeringly profound, across every part of human life. /11

Look at what Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa, as just one example. He transformed this mega-corporation not by looking at any big picture, but by doing what every idiot MBA tells you not to do. He went ‘into the weeds’, and stayed there. He focused on one highly specific thing. /12

The safety of the work Alcoa did. In our ‘big picture’ thinking that seems important, but piecemeal. That’s what all the analysts thought too when he started. He sat them on their arses. Alcoa’s performance exploded. https://t.co/AItU1PHLkd /13

O’Neill understood that “Alcoa” was in every tiny detail of what the organisation did. If he could find a specific everyday practice that networked with everything else the company did, he could transform everything. Safety was that thing. /14

Societies and organisations are networked. Find the network keys and you can transform the lot, fast and simply. This is what casuistry discovered millennia ago, in entirely different contexts. But it applies to all of life. /15

We have the assumption we need to aggregate an enormous number of particulars, to see the big picture of what’s really going on. That assumes society is made up of lots of separate Lego blocks. But societies and every part of them are networked. /16

The more particular and specific you get, the more likely you are to find the linkage to everything else. That’s where your big picture will be. In my career I shocked everybody by shifting from a senior management position, to a much lower status position. /17

I did it because I wanted to end my working life in the ‘weeds’. Back in the specific details of what the organisation was doing. Because I knew that was also where the big picture was, where nobody thinks to look. In the detailed, everyday ‘operational’ tasks. /18

Senior managers today spend most of their days in endless meetings discussing ‘strategy’ and other big picture paraphernalia. Because we believe those are two separate things, operations and strategy. Micro and macro. But they’re not. /19

The law already knows this. The law never reaches a big picture by accumulating lots of specific cases. Every specific case can fundamentally disrupt the provisional big picture. The precedents. The universal and the particular are the same thing. /end

I strongly believe the American biologist Paul Ewald will be proved right, that the origin of most chronic disease will be found to be infection. That includes cancers. We see that causation being revealed every day in research. Humans are societies of microbes. 2/5

Not biomechanical machines. There is an ‘atomic’ root cause for all things, which when found provides true causation. For humans and all living things, that root cause is microbial. Microbes are the atoms of life. 3/5

That view has made its way into medicine, with the now acknowledgment of the profound role of gut microbes, for example. But the transformation still has a long way to go. Microbes were swept out of mind by successful vaccination and antibiotics. 4/5

But these were always control measures. The greatest threat to human health is always infection, because it targets our root mechanism. We are microbial beings. All life is a civilisation of bacteria mostly, with viral interlopers. /end

The people who say that are part of a majority who feel it. That a proper life is a social life. One with total freedom of association, lots of mixing with other people, lots of travel and displacement. I don’t think we see how much that almost defines kidult culture. /2

I’ve Tweeted many times how sociality is violence. These assumptions we have that somehow sociality *is* the most full and lived life are actually both bizarre and dangerous. Sociality is violence because imitative rivalry is the basis of all civilisation. RIVALRY. /3

Left to themselves humans will always, in every situation, compete for status. That’s what social animals do, because status is identity. It makes you somebody, rather than nobody. The more social we become, the more violent we become, as societies. /4

In our hypersocial social media world today, who doesn’t see this? How even the tiniest issue generates conflicts, a proliferation of teams fighting one another, competing for status? That’s the schoolyard, folks. I’ve Tweeted the empirical way that shift happened. /5

How we created two separate cultures, child and adult, when we invented compulsory schooling. All humans create cultures when forced to co-inhabit a space for an extended period. And then as those children left school, they re-made adult culture, as school culture. /6

That’s what kidult culture means. Everything is now a school. It’s all the kids knew when they left school, so of course they re-made life using all the social and cultural characteristics of schooling. For a while older adult institutions resisted. They had some inertia. /7

But that dam broke some time ago, beginning in the 1970s. That’s all that ‘neoliberalism’ was, the overcoming of our post-WW2 institutional culture with school culture. Kidult culture. The institutions we built to repair our civilisation, post-WW2, became the target. /8

Because kids hate school, and their kidult culture is mostly formed in opposition to it, and to all adult institutions. We give political and economic names to these shifts, but they’re just social changes. Kids re-making adult life, as child life. /9

Sociality is a critical component of that school life, and why today everybody seems to agree that sociality is the foundation of all happy and rich life. Horseshit. The path to true adulthood has always been towards strong individuality, moving through social experiences. /10

Through into self-determination, into the expression of true individuality. Into greater comfort in being alone and not dependent upon others. Not lacking social interaction, but also not *needing* it so much. The pathetic narratives about loneliness, for example. /11

Like feeling alone is a terrible thing, rather than a symptom of coming to adulthood. We don’t see this as a clash inside kidult culture itself, with our own true nature. The rush to restore hypersociality in the middle of a pandemic is the tragi-comedy of kidulthood. /12

Learning to ‘live with’ pathogenic viruses, because otherwise we’ll all feel too alone and not be able to travel and eat out, and do all of those things that adolescent culture has traditionally worshipped. The neediness, the clinginess, of that sociality. /13

I taught adolescents, teachers know this culture well. That neediness is born of fear, ‘peer pressure’ is kids using sociality to begin to form some sort of adult self. It’s them learning to fight for a position in a world outside their family. It’s violence. /14

All sociality is violence. Now living our personal professional and political lives entirely through social media is magnifying and extending this violence into every tiny part of life. EVERYTHING is now a battle. For status, identity. /15

True freedom is the freedom to be alone, and to enjoy that aloneness. It’s coming to your true self, comfortable in your own skin. Not clamouring to emulate others inside teams, at war with other teams. The populism that dominates politics is, again, just school. /16

Popularity is the currency of school culture, we know that. When adult culture becomes school culture, it becomes the currency of adult life too. Likes and followers. Social media life *is* school life. /17

So I continue to resist infections, because they’re bad for me. If it means being less social, who the fuck cares? I’m an adult, most sociality is tedious comparative grandstanding anyway. It’s violence. Let’s all leave school, once and for all. /end

These others are the same people who most embrace the ‘living with’ infection culture that started during Covid. In front of others they boast and bluster about how ‘you have to live your life’, and mock people in masks etc. /2

It’s a show. The fear at catching Covid in particular is there under the surface. They’ve had several years now of being pummelled by infections of various kinds. One who asked me in private to make the sick staff member go home was desperate, they have no more sick leave. /3

Others who affect total casual indifference to Covid have been seen emptying whole cans of Glen-20 antiseptic spray into the air and onto furniture when a person with known Covid left to go home, sick. /4

Living with Covid is a political lie that worked because it cynically tapped into some basics of human behaviour. The bastards who came up with it knew that the most basic human behaviour is to imitate others, to maintain social status and identity. /5

That ‘peer pressure’ would ensure this outrageous piece of public health bullshit would self-regulate, if this perverse behaviour could be made to ‘trend’. Most importantly, they appealed to ideas of ‘the people’, always an indication that lies and power games are in play. /6

Claiming that ‘people would no longer support public health action’. Or that ‘the community’ was over it. Groups of people never have agency in that way. Anybody who says they do is trying to lead a change to something, while attributing it to all of us. /7

By leaving public health to the ‘personal responsibility’ of the public doing it itself, it cut the head off public health itself. Public health ceases to exist, unless it’s led. Like anything humans do, all action and change must be led. /8

That’s what then gets imitated, to create mass action. It ‘goes viral’. Social imitation is what creates all collective behaviour. These cynical bastards knew that by leading a leaderless public health, there would be no more public health. /9

Instead we ended up with a libertarian-led anti-public health, not a ‘freedom’ movement of the public taking control. All change is led. Supposed freedom movements are also led, under cover of drivel about the people running the show. /10

Anyway, I had no intention of this sick staff member remaining, unlike other managers I’ve seen who just go along with the living with nonsense, for a quiet life. As an ex-school teacher I know people will pretend to be behind things they actually secretly fear and hate. /11

That’s your job, as a teacher or manager. To lead. I told the employee this wasn’t a negotiation, it was an order. Go home, it wasn’t just about their health, it was about everybody else’s. They were relieved, as was everybody in the office. /12

Not one of them would have openly said that, in front of others. They would have continued the farce of pretending everybody was having a rollicking good time, infecting each other to various levels of shocking health. You have to lead, for everybody’s sake. /end

Bob’s regular updates on the Covid situation in the UK and globally are very thorough. This latest one could make you wonder if herd immunity is actually working. Describing low or even very low levels of Covid activity, in many places, globally. /2 https://t.co/Gaw1lTokFF

Of course with an epidemic disease, you will have troughs as well as peaks, so that in itself tells you nothing about herd immunity. But Bob shows that often those peaks seem to be getting lower over time, with the data we have. So how do we understand that? /3

Many have pointed out that the underlying baseline level of infection has risen and remains at elevated levels, so that what we’re seeing is more like tidal ebbs and surges, rather than waves. This isn’t my area of expertise, but every day I want to ask these questions. /4

The basic science on population immunity, as expressed by the Mayo Clinic, tells us it is simply impossible to ever achieve this aim, with this virus. Many experts have been saying this ever since ‘living with’ Covid was proposed. /5 https://t.co/dkrAF0qwqb

Are we in fact seeing fewer infections in the peaks, over time, as Bob’s report suggests? Or is something being missed here? And if we are, how could that even be possible, with the nature of this virus, that seems completely non-amenable to a herd immunity approach? /6

Is it just that you will expect very large peaks in the beginning, with novel exposure to a new virus, and those peaks will then become lower due to temporary immunity from infections and vaccinations? But endless epidemic peaks will continue? /7

These are genuine questions from me, again a non-expert in this field. An interested member of the public whose life has to be negotiated with some sort of answer to these essential questions. @CrabbBrendan, @Globalbiosec, or any others who have this expertise? /end

@AmandaKvalsvig interested in your thoughts here?

This is something I Tweet about all the time. How we’re destroying democracy by not even understanding what it is. It was never the replacement of sovereign (i.e. hierarchical) power with some magical system of ‘the people’ running the show. 2/6

That literally, physically and empirically can never happen because groups of people cannot function in that way. It’s not a matter of principle, it’s basic logic. Groups of people do not, ever, form a unified ‘group mind’ or will that becomes ‘the people’. 3/6

I watch the US fight the same empty fights year after year, against a straw man enemy of ‘authoritarian’ rule, at every appearance of some sort of hierarchy in life. Hierarchies are human life. They reflect values and expertise, as well as social status. 4/6

The fascism people fear emerges always as a populist movement to try to restore a hierarchical structure to a dysfunctional society. The result is a disaster. But what creates that disaster is the dysfunction. Not a ‘takeover’ by ‘authoritarians’ of ‘the people’. 5/6

Until we abandon the nonsensical idea, also behind ‘free markets’, that people as a mass self-organise societies (or anything), we will continue to have epidemic waves of tinpot populist demagogues and social dysfunction. /end

There was no big gig for Covid. Covid loves gigs. It destroys gig culture. It’s why kidult culture won’t fight it. The ‘we’ of post-WW2 institutional public life was replaced by a giant high school of kidults battling each other for status. Including their gigs. /end

…since property reckoned in terms of money is accessible to all men. Venality is one of the cardinal virtues. The venal man suppresses his murderous and anti-social instincts - honor, self-pride, patriotism, political ambition, religious fanaticism, racialism… /2

…in favor of his need to co-operate with others, his love of fruitful exchanges, his sense of human solidarity. The term, the Golden Age, should be taken literally, and I see now that mankind would swiftly achieve it were its affairs wholly in the hands of venal men. /3

Alas, it is nearly always high-minded men who make history, and so the flames destroy everything and blood flows in torrents. The plump merchants of Venice afford us an example of the luxurious happiness possible in a state governed solely by the law of lucre… /4

…whereas the evacuated wolves of the Spanish Inquisition show us the infamy of which men are capable when they have lost the love of material well-being. The Huns would soon have checked their advance if they had known how to profit by the riches they acquired. /5

Encumbered with their gains, they would have stayed to enjoy them, and life would have resumed its course. But they were disinterested savages. They despised gold. They rushed onward, burning as they went.” Michel Tournier. Friday, or the Other Island

Decades of Left v Right team sports signifying nothing have led us to believe that’s the dialectic that drives our world. It’s all hot air. Societies are social, not political. Politics is just a form of sociality, or culture. Left and Right are teams battling for status. /2

You can see it with the countercultural revolution, the revolution we’ve all grown up in as *our* culture. Do we understand what that means? It was driven largely by youth, and using today’s meaningless terms, most would have been ‘Lefties’. /3

That Left and Right are meaningless categories is shown by how those 1960s ideals of bringing down the establishment are Trump’s aim today. From the ‘far Right’. He goes to war against institutions. But that’s exactly what students and other young people did, in the 1960s. /4

His ascension to global clown isn’t fascism at work, it’s the culmination of more than 7 decades of anti-establishment, anti-institutional warfare. We’re still the countercultural revolutionaries, that’s OUR culture. Left AND Right. Still seeing ‘the system’ as the enemy. /5

Ditch all of the political framings of those past 70 years, and see them for what they really were. The victory of the youth of that day over a terminally wounded adult culture, broken by two world wars. That’s what opened a space for youth to determine our fate. /6

That’s the shift to kidult culture I Tweet about a lot. The victory of the countercultural revolution, where adult (institutional) life was gradually replaced with high school/teen life. A culture of likes and follows. Of trends, fads and fashions. Of social media. /7

Just have a look, the ‘Left’ and Right’ are all in the same social media spaces. it’s where we live now, the vast digital high school playground. It was invented by adolescent guys scoring the looks of women, ffs. /8

Populism is our culture because it’s the currency of high school culture. It’s not an analogy, the teens re-built adult life that way, it’s all they knew. It can lead to fascism, which is really endgame populism. Anti-institutional protest, Hitler was the same. /9

The replacement of one status hierarchy with another, one King (or equivalent) with a new King. Not democracy v fascism. Institutions are the only exception, and they only happen in catastrophes disrupting all status hierarchies. /10

But we weren’t all living in a ‘democracy’ where we were all driving the car all this time, despite our beliefs to that effect.

The Trump wrecking ball is where the counterculture was always going to end. The establishment is finally down. /end

Humans act as a ‘we’ only when their existence is under immediate threat. The building has to be literally burning down for it to happen. Capitalism didn’t do this. It isn’t fascism either. The -isms aren’t real. It’s just “I”/status culture. The default human culture. /end

It’s the replacement of one set of status hierarchies, with another. Teenage life forced itself into adult life, the enormous demographic surge of the Boomers, taking advantage of broken societies post-WW2. And then replaced that adult culture, with teen culture. 2/3

Take all of the often described features of ‘neoliberalism’, and you’ll find they match adolescent culture in every detail. They’re the same thing. Societies are always 100% social. Not political, not economic, those are just names for teams in the social status battles. /end

This angers quite a lot of people, who have grown up in Western cultures used to finding a fairly rapid pathway from their individual challenges, to collective society-wide solutions. That pathway is privilege. Western cultures are the existing (now failing) world empires. /2

If you’re the empire, what you want tends to be what you get, at multiple scales of social life. That’s what being an empire means. The majority of humans on the planet have never experienced this. They’re the people our empires take advantage of. /3

They’ve always been forced to ‘live with’ war, plagues, crime, loss of land etc. Those things are ‘endemic’ in their lives. The shift now to making all of these things endemic to Western life too they would see as Westerners rejoining humanity. /4

The more technological you make societies, the more resistant they become to the whims of social status games. Technologies need a significant amount of status battle-independent expertise to build and maintain. They act as a stabilising social force. /5

But it won’t be enough in the longer term to save an empire. Ask the Romans, a superb and prolific engineering culture. It was the secret of their longevity. But Rome still fell. /6

The quality of life across the globe has on average increased in the past 2 centuries. It would be disingenuous to say otherwise. Scientific and technological change has had a profound impact. But it won’t be enough alone to prevent the collapse of societies. /7

History tells us this, over and over again. Part of wisdom and true adult life is to recognise the fragility of it, and to think and act accordingly. Right now thinking Westerners are mostly stuck asking why ‘we’ aren’t doing important things. /8

Why aren’t ‘we’ (never defined) fighting pandemics, and climate change, and Trump. Things that in the past just seemed to happen, they were taken care of. Our institutions did that taking care of, for us. The ones we built post-WW2, to rebuild broken societies. /9

We had to break, to change. This is a reset for the Western mind and the people in Western cultures, to rediscover the fragility of life. To have humility again, before some existential realities. /10

The greatest art and science and achievements of our history mostly took place knee-deep in existential catastrophe. Archimedes was run through by a Roman sword at his work desk, ffs. That’s the default. We’ve lived an incredibly anomalous 70 years, post-WW2, in the West. /end

We would all immediately look at life in China or Russia, and see it as the playing out of their earlier revolutions, over time. And yet we see our own lives in the West as just normal life. Like some scientifically ordained way to live. /2

But our lives today, in 2025, are exactly like those of the Russians or Chinese. The playing out of our own revolution. The countercultural revolution. We think that all ended in the 1960s. And that since then ‘the economy’, and ‘neoliberalism’ have taken over. /3

It’s nonsense. The pseudo-science bollocks of economic politics is just a set of names we give to the playing out of the countercultural revolution. Our beloved ‘free market’ economies are the direct product of that revolution. They were a social invention. /4

How do we not see it? Fish don’t know water exists, until beached. You don’t tend to see your own culture, *as* a culture. It just seems to be the way things are. The anti-establishment counterculture was about a ‘free market’ of individuals, free of establishment shackles. /5

All the ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ gibberish we attribute as the cause of our modern lives is piffle. They’re just teams playing out the same revolution. The small State ‘Right’ today would be welcome in the anti-establishment protests of the 1960s. Bizarre bedfellows? /6

Only if you think politics is a thing, and not just social and cultural actual things. The culture shifted, towards an adolescent framing, developed in schools over decades. The ‘establishment’, still Trump’s enemy today, was just a name for adult life and culture. /7

Which teens rebelled against. And because they were a massive demographic blip post-war, the ‘boomers’, as they grew they gradually replaced that adult culture, with the counter (teen) culture. Some of the heroes of the counterculture, rock stars, are now billionaires. /8

Living in aristocratic country estates vacated by previous aristocracies. This is how all revolutions go. What is the adolescent obsession, in modern compulsory schooling times? Identity. Forging one, amongst strangers. /9

So of course, we should see what we are seeing, a literal explosion of identity-based social movement. ‘Identity politics’. Look around you, every critical problem facing us as a society, what’s our overwhelming response? /10

To use it as a platform to reinforce and multiply new forms of identity. We’re in a pandemic where some public health professionals gained fame and status by preaching public health bollocks. It got them likes and followers. Status. Identity. /11

Significant numbers of bushfires and mass shootings are about the perpetrator (arsonists and gunmen) wanting to gain notoriety, to create an opening for their identity in society. We ‘Stand with’ rather than fix things. Still the counterculture, performative outrage. /12

Our view of democracy is as ‘the people’ running countries, and our view in turn of what the people is always is some mass assembled in protest, like they’re at a rock concert. We think we have to ‘mobilise’ a crowd, to bring about change. More counterculture. /13

Once you accept that just like the Russians or Chinese, we’re still beholden to the revolution that shaped our society, everything will look different to you. The West is a giant high school, riven by status games/team sports between rival teams. /14

Like groups in a school playground. Because that’s what adult life literally now is, in countercultural times. /end

Culturally and socially, it’s the schoolyard’s final victory over the classroom. The jocks over the nerds. Not by analogy, that is the literal cultural shift. The nerds are never popular. But they’re the civilisation that lasts. 2/3

Only a culture focused on material realities can survive, longer term. That reality requires zero detour through popularity. Our days are wasted fighting in teams against other teams. Populism. Focus on material realities, ignore the detour. They’ll always ultimately win. /end

As somebody who works on the inside of governance, I sometime challenge people to show me where the -ism in question physically is. Where’s the USB port where you can install a different -ism? /2

There isn’t one. Societies aren’t ‘systems’. Systems are academic, analytical devices. Black-boxed ways to try to capture the multiplicity of social things going on at any given time. /3

So often I see a sort of triumphant assertion that ‘capitalism’ is the cause of our woes. Like that’s job done, we’ve found the cause. Did you know there is no universal agreed definition of what capitalism even is? That’s because it’s a fiction. /4

It’s as slippery as an eel, because it’s nonsense. Systems thinking is lazy, ham-fisted generality. All of the -isms are just team names in the true bedrock of all societies. The battle for status. /5

Status is to societies as atoms are to matter. The root, atomic level of explanation, the foundation. Humans are social creatures, and status is the currency of sociality. Because status is your identity, as a social creature. /6

You’re literally nobody, without it. If something happens rather than nothing in a society, it’s because status made it happen. Information and facts don’t run societies. Disinformation doesn’t destroy societies. Both are proxies for status. /7

I won’t rehash the many threads I’ve done on status here, but in relation to the -isms of our everyday public debates, I think it changes how you see things fundamentally if you recognise that each of them is just a team name, in these status battles. /8

The Chinese are no more communist than the West is capitalist. All societies are functionally equivalent, they run on status. They’re all teams, branded in different ways. In a Status Premier League. /9

Ultimately they all have a King or equivalent, with an associated court or aristocracy, and the rest of the society’s status hierarchies cascade from this central hierarchy. We’re all just humans, acting socially. Battling for status, to be somebody, rather than nobody. /end

Social networking is a fabulous thing, but social media weaponises and monetises it, and in doing so it’s destroying our cultures and even our civilisations. We are handing over our most basic social operating systems to a handful of billionaires, who own these platforms. /2

Many say the connections they make on the platforms are essential to their lives, not recognising how clearly that shows their entrapment by the platforms. They’re replacing society itself. They’re not tools to share information. They’re a living culture. /3

I have friends who check-out, thinking they escape the endless bickering stupidity of the culture. But there is no escape, because the basic operating systems of societies are now dominated by the platforms. Your life off the platform is fundamentally shaped by them. /4

You are ‘living with’ a pandemic now, because of these platforms. Only in this cultural space does the staggering stupidity of that make any sort of sense. I wish not being here fixed things. You have to be where people are, there is no exit ramp from society. /5

I’ve watched the Terminator movies, and millions believe the essential premise there, that humans might create machines that one day could destroy humans themselves. But AI isn’t the risk. We’ve already done what those movies fear. It’s social media. /6

Sociality is violence, as Girard saw. By making tools that target sociality itself, we are burning down our civilisation one hashtag at a time. Civilisation is the control and restriction of sociality. Because the basis of sociality is imitative rivalry. Girard, again. /7

Or as Noah Smith says, the growth of ‘vertical communities’ at the expense of older style ‘horizontal’ communities - the dominance of sociality over basic social infrastructure and governance - is destroying our societies. /8

Look around you, everything is turned into a pile-on of one form or another. That’s sociality at work, imitative rivalry. These platforms are driving it deep into every tiny nook and cranny of our lives. Existential threats become only stages to perform more team sports. /9

Why I despair at the idea that these platforms are in any way the answer to anything. Like a good hashtag activism will fix the world’s problems. That is the world’s current problem. The medium is the message. /end

That imitation then leads to rivalry with others also imitating, imitative rivalry. That rivalry is driven by status. And that’s the genetic root of all human thought and behaviour. /end

It’s because while we think we like things because of some intrinsic properties of the thing we like, in reality what presses our aesthetic buttons is conformity with what others like. That’s what a fashion is, everybody doing the same thing. How do we not notice this? /2

The things we swear we love with a deep passion, because that’s our ‘taste’, a decade later we may find appalling and ‘outdated’. All the home renovation shows that tut tut at how unfashionable the before home is. /3

Not stopping to think that it may once have been the ‘height of fashion’. The obvious fact is that what drives the aesthetic desire in both cases is conformity with what everybody else is doing. Like those who claim that the best music or art is ‘purely subjective’. /4

If so, why do we always end up with a hierarchy there too, of value? Why do a small number of artists do obscenely well, and most live off 2-minute noodles? Our ‘personal taste’ is where we’re least likely to recognise our deep attachment to social ties, to conformity. /5

But fashions make a lie of that every single day. Humans are 100% social, in everything they do. Not political, not economic, not anything else. Social. We’re social animals. Stop paying lip service to that basic fact. /end