August 2025

Status drives all change, led by high-status people. The lives of the majority are improved by catastrophic disruption, to the status quo. BUT…people are not egalitarian. They all strive for status. /end

Team sports culture. Kidult culture, the now entrenched imitative rivalry of competing groups or teams, not just in sport, but in every part of life. The culture of the schoolyard. Status battles, for identity. /2

Long gone are the days where both winner and loser shook hands politely, both smiling, celebrating a ‘good game’. Where crowds applauded both competitors. Everything, in sport and outside it, is now resolutely ‘partisan’. /3

Winners fall to the ground in ecstasy, while losers sit with head in hands, dejected, even crying. This is a fundamentally different culture at work. As used to be commonly said, ‘it’s just a game’. Not any more. /4

Crowds explode into deafening rapture when their team succeeds, or into literal total silence when they fail. A tipping point was passed some time ago where this long ceased to be about watching a game. These are battles for status. /5

Both players and supporters are at war, for their status and therefore (as social animals) their identity. Feel the depth of the emotion at these modern events now. The hysteria of emotion. Team sports societies, revealed in sport and elsewhere. /6

Societies with weak or non-existent institutional status hierarchies, where every individual now battles for recognition and status. For their very identity. ‘Tribalism’ some call it, but it’s a weak concept. It’s about status. Humans crave it above all else. /7

Take away formal ways of recognising and regulating status, and they will invent other ways to achieve and maintain it. We live in societies of rampant status-seeking now, at every level and in every activity. Fractal imitative rivalry. /8

As gods proliferated in some ancient cultures, we are polytheistic again now. A world of proliferating ‘influencers’. Reaching clumsily and unknowingly for a new monotheism. A new King or God. Trump is that, for some. /9

Sold pap ideas for decades about democracy as the supposed continuous agitation of crowds, battling for status, and sick of it. People want the stability of status hierarchies back, and will invent them if not offered alternatives. That’s why we have Trump. /end

How did we get this idea that millions of people are out there every day processing the vast quantity of information societies generate? They’re not. They trust others to know different bits of it. Social media replaces many of those others with dangerous numpties. /end

And central to our Western culture, which historically is mostly a Christian culture. The Catholic Church built most of Western society, in conjunction with the Romans. And what special sauce did it use to make that work? Girard saw it, as did El Greco. /2 https://t.co/TYxC7vNxoq

It targeted human status games. Christ’s specific role was to absorb the status games of human life, including its critical scapegoating mechanism, into himself. The ultimate status figure, the son of God, took upon himself the humiliation of the losers in status games. /3 https://t.co/CxMuYjfsgl

In 2025 you can’t really talk about this cultural role without somebody immediately assigning you to a ‘team’ in modern status games. You must be ‘religious’, for example, a spokesperson for the church. This is beyond any of that. Girard’s work was anthropological. /4 https://t.co/DMJvBvjjvp

Christ carrying his own cross, to be crucified, is again the top of the status hierarchy, a literal supernatural top beyond all human status games, assuming the role of the bottom of the status hierarchy. The scapegoat, the excluded. ‘Stop this, humans’, is the message. /5 https://t.co/MpKBDzZAb6

‘I’m calling you all out on these games, short-circuiting them from my position at the pinnacle of all status hierarchies’, you could imagine El Greco’s Christ saying. Subjecting himself to the greatest of all humiliations, to make the point. /6 https://t.co/KVYsar3DII

Humiliation as the most destructive, soul-destroying of all human experiences, because it represents the total loss of social status. Research shows it in the history of many if not most serial killers, as a cause of their behaviour. /7

Collectively it can explain the German embrace of Nazism in the 1930s, after their national and deliberate humiliation following WW1. And in our populist times, well…if this isn’t about status, what is? /8 https://t.co/WPxUCzfBBc

Societies are 100% social. Not economic, not political. Social. They run on status. Which (as social animals) is also our identities. Status gives you identity. The loss of it - humiliation - is the loss of everything. /9

Status games are imitation games, humans copy or imitate/emulate those they perceive to be of higher status. They do it in teams, against other teams. ‘Team sports’, as I call it. Look at your social media feed. That’s the business model there. That’s our culture today. /10

Unconstrained and uncontrolled status games. Populism, as that’s sometimes called. The corrosive dismantling of centuries of Western history. The crumbling of a (Christian) civilisation. /end

How is it not obvious that the culture of this place they spend so much of their time growing up in will become the culture they know? Not just teachers and classes. All human prolonged gatherings generate an entire ‘culture’. Here comes the biggie. /2 https://t.co/WvqmK8fHIO

I think more than anything else what this culture did to Western societies is fundamentally alter one thing. It shifted a child’s social reference points from being their immediate family, other adults and relatives, to their ‘peers’. /3 https://t.co/E1wlr1y2wz

It’s a defining change. From a culture where custom and tradition, handed down over generations, formed the cultural seedbed for your growth into adult life. To a culture where your reference points became a real-time assessment of position in relation to your peers. /4 https://t.co/dUoHKnkvfj

That real-time assessment is a resolutely present-moment, continuous jostling for status. History and tradition disappear almost entirely. It’s a game that never ends. The team sports of status. Public adult life becomes a life of trends, fads and fashions. /5 https://t.co/OTeETUbK1i

Human civilisation has always been about status, nothing new there. But what our modern shift in compulsory schooling did was decouple that status from any historical continuity or institutional base. From the existing social status hierarchies, evolved over millennia. /6 https://t.co/CBPsmyAFE2

Sure the kids learn about some of that historical stuff in the ‘content’ of their schooling. But that’s a superficial veneer on the actual culture they live there. In adult life, where kids previously grew up, those historical reference points also framed everyday life. /7 https://t.co/UDsOJGsbKb

You didn’t get to freelance new ways of doing things without colliding with that historical status quo. But at school, it’s just stuff in textbooks, in a culture of only kids. This is the origin of make your own facts, folks. Uncontrolled status games, between peers. /8 https://t.co/rHCm6PUqb5

Today’s kidult culture is actively dismantling every remnant of that older adult institutional culture it can get its hands on. At an accelerating rate. Really badly understood as the march of ‘fascism’ or ‘authoritarianism’. /9 https://t.co/rZVhg50SN0

It’s the march of high school culture, in its endgame. The revenge of the jocks, who dominate school but previously had to take a back seat to older ‘nerdy’ adult culture when leaving school. Now that society is a giant high school, the jocks own everything. /10 https://t.co/nMIxAxbUWY

Many decades of this culture we learn in school entering adult life and remaking it has fundamentally flipped Western civilisation. From a culture only of adults, with kids as little adults in tow, to a culture of nothing but adolescents. Fighting for status, in gangs. /11 https://t.co/Ip0lZfCrXC

Social media was modelled on this same culture. A culture of likes and followers. It’s where we now transact life itself, from the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political. None of our political or economic framings are meaningful. /12

Humans are social beings, living in cultures. Not in economies, or in ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ political teams. Those things are just the names some of the schoolyard gangs call themselves. By the way, that’s Donald Trump in the middle, at high school. /end https://t.co/rSZiVyM4NP

This topic attracts so much interest because of the framing, lost in the noise. The framing that says human-human interaction is ‘natural’ and ‘real’, and human-machine interaction is ‘algorithmic’ and ‘fake’. That framing falls apart with even small scrutiny. /2

I’ve spent years here describing how much if not most human activity is actually social. It’s about people negotiating their status, in groups, against other groups. This should ring all sorts of alarm bells about the idea of ‘natural’ human interaction. /3

Most human-human interaction is performative sociality. Imitative rivalry, driven by status battles. The focus is *between* people - social - not their individual psychology. I posted earlier today about period dramas. They foreground this interpersonal human life. /4

We were much, much smarter about what it means to be human, when these period stories were written. We knew what human-human interaction was mostly about, then. Even the most supposedly intense human-human relationship - love. Let’s ask Proust. /5

Here again, so much of what the righteously human claim as ‘natural’ is nothing like it seems. The French philosopher Michel Serres was amused at the whole idea of ‘artificial’ intelligence. /6 https://t.co/2FfuXL7wYk

As if there was a non-artificial human intelligence. As Serres pointed out, humans can’t think at all without language, text, books, databases etc. Intelligence has been material and artificial forever. Or if you work in a larger organisation, notice this. /7

How so much of what passes for thought in those organisations is really just a translation of basic organising tools like tables and lists, in software like Microsoft Office, into human conversation stripped of that explicit origin. The visions and strategies and plans. /8

Really just those tools structuring how we think. As McLuhan said, we make our tools, and then they make us. So those who ‘talk’ to AI or even use it as a companion aren’t violating some human-machine boundary. /9

That boundary never existed. As Bruno Latour spent a lifetime explaining, humans and non-humans are always blended, hybrid things. Or as Donna Haraway says, we’re all cyborgs really. We watch too many Hollywood movies. /10

Most of what I read as a critique of AI is just a reworded rehash of one or more of the Terminator movies. Seriously, that’s all it is. The idea machines and humans face off against each other is nonsensical. Machines *are* human, we make them, they make us. /11

Generally the humanly righteous are also those who have never been anywhere near an actual machine. Machines full of unexpected agencies, that need constant ‘debugging’ and maintenance. The American journalist Tracey Kidder wrote a book on the ‘soul’ of machines. /12 https://t.co/keYoM5Epem

You can hear the humanly righteous now, pausing the Terminator reruns to yell ‘how could machines have a soul?!’ Well, read it. You might be surprised that it resembles none of the idiot narratives on this on the socials. /end

Those checks and balances are almost entirely the placing of limits on the exercise of power. But limits defined by the exercise of other powers, by others in a society. It’s a truce between King and nobles. Between a King and his court. /2

Or in more modern terms, they’re the balancing of power between those at the top-end of status hierarchies. That provisional balance is what we call the status quo. And here’s the most important bit. /3

‘The people’, the central concept we use to define democracy today, are not even in it. Except insofar as they’re the property of Kings or nobles. Democracy never was ‘power to the people’. And no, we didn’t just add that later. Not least because ‘the people’ is a fiction. /4

Societies never stopped being hierarchies of status. Democracies are that too, and always have been. Yes constitutions that came after, based on the Magna Carta, sometimes reference the people. /5

But they simply give ‘the people’ sovereignty, replacing the King, or in constitutional monarches give them a place alongside a monarch. But ‘popular sovereignty’ is complete nonsense. A literal oxymoron. /6

You can’t grant sovereignty over people, to people. It’s bootstrapping. A logical impossibility, an absurdity. It was some activist/revolutionary idea of its day that was really some small number of people wanting to supplant monarchs with themselves. /7

While then attributing their new power to ‘the people’. The people is always a retrospective attribution, by small numbers of people looking to replace higher-status members of society, with themselves. Hitter’s ‘Volk’ was literally ‘the people’. They all do it. /8

Groups of people are not an agency in that way. They can’t be, it’s a logical and physical impossibility. Groups of people are always led, they’re always status hierarchies. Those lower in the hierarchies emulate those higher, to gain status. /9

There’s no avoiding that, it’s not a failing. Groups of people couldn’t (and wouldn’t even want to) be a group mind that acts in some miraculous way where there’s an ongoing, instantaneous unanimity of thought and feeling. /10

That this is how we think ‘democracy’ works shows just how far down the rabbit hole of total lunacy we’ve been, for so long. And why democracies have consistently and progressively failed, since this lunacy was invented and believed. /11

Trumpland right now shows it. Trump is the King many Americans secretly or even openly want. They weren’t offered a status hierarchy they liked, so they made their own. Resistance to status is futile. It’s the root of all human thought and life. We’re social animals. /12

The ontology of the world requires it. The only way to coordinate and unify the vast differences in types of being that make up the universe, is for some to imitate others, to create always provisional collective entities. /13

It’s the fundamental differences that are reality, that require the imitation and rivalry that form human societies. But also all non-human societies, even the societies of things or ‘objects’. If you treat difference seriously, this is always the logical outcome. /14

Two or more things that are fundamentally different can only align by imitating each other. They can never *be* each other, in the way all of our representational modes of feeling and thought rely upon. That rely upon some impossible identity at the root of all things. /15

Only the tiniest handful of thinkers have dared place difference at the root of things, without sacrificing it to some pre-added identity. Like Gabriel Tarde. And when they did that, they discovered that imitation is the root of all things. It can’t be anything else. /16

We can only imitate that which is fundamentally different to us. And even that imitation will be full of at first unseen differences which will come to the fore over time and rupture any provisional imitative agreement. All of reality is ‘Chinese whispers’. /17 https://t.co/L7N78GoUZA

Difference is the engine room not just of human societies, but of reality itself. Pure difference, unsullied by fake identities we place there, to control all other differences with. Those fake identities crumble as the imitative differences that make them up unravel. /18

This difference and imitation engine is what leads to status games in human societies. The imitation is always a rivalry. We imitate to gain and maintain status. To try to protect and enlarge the specific differences that are us and our groups. /19

That status is the endgame of this eternal interplay of difference and imitation, in human life. We gain actual existence, with this status, it’s an ontological thing. Social animals cease to even exist, without status. /end

Without catastrophe, humans fight each other for status, usually in groups or as I call them ‘teams’. They play team sports, for status. You can see it on the socials. Remember the surge of energy when Covid started, here and on other platforms? /2

The sense of collective threat energised many teams, humans use misfortune as a stage to perform status games on. Misfortune generates attention, and status games crave attention. A whole industry of protest. Protest is the default human state. Complaint. /3

Come spend a day on any switchboard in a large public service organisation. A tsunami of complaint, every day. Or scan the socials. Swarming teams of complaint after complaint. /4

Notice also how people fall away here and on other platforms, like those who (rightly) fought to actually fight a pandemic. The platforms ate them alive. It was good business, a pandemic, status games need and love dissent and disaster. /5

Many if not most have now disappeared, onto ‘nicer’ platforms, which also achieve nothing except unanimity of how bad everything is, that leads to no action. Covid alas didn’t trigger the tipping point of collective ‘prosociality’. The catastrophe wasn’t big enough. /6

It (the status quo is an entire culture, not just evil authoritarians) reconciled itself to ‘living with’ infections, rather than shift. Of course that can’t last, longer term, it’s lunacy. A culture of infinite infection is a suicidal culture. /7

But until the day of total catastrophe arrives, it’ll all just be fodder for the team sport status games. Only true catastrophe ‘unites’ people. That’s how our modern democracies emerged, post the cataclysmic first half of the 20th century. /8

Without that catastrophe, humans just fight each other, for status. They complain, and complain, and complain. And they have much to complain about. But none of it transforms into restorative action, until everything collapses. /9

There is no ‘we’ until the Grim Reaper is at the gate. /end

All a ‘market’ means is the absence of regulation. It’s regulation that creates optimal outcomes, there is no invisible hand. Leaving things to the market initially creates a sort of ‘competition’. But economies of scale and status eclipse that quickly. 2/6

Leading to a consolidation by a handful of players, the oligopolies and duopolies we affect hatred for. But it’s the natural state of things, economies of scale, and of status. People don’t like negotiating lots of players, and logistically it’s more expensive as a whole. 3/6

Until we drop the idiot belief system that says ‘the people’ (in any sphere of life) will drive optimal outcomes by being allowed to compete with one another, this see-saw of regulation/de-regulation will continue. Know what an unregulated people always do? 4/6

They form and join status hierarchies. Regulation exists as a counterbalance to that deepest human behaviour. It’s why ‘branding’ is such a thing. It’s all about status, always. Everything is. 5/6

If we want the energy revolution to succeed, we’ll need to follow the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese, and lead it from the ‘top’. They’re miles ahead, their culture isn’t subject to fads like market-based thinking and people-led democracies. /end https://t.co/8krLHUWb9I

@RewiringAus had advised that, but were mostly sidelined. Much of the anti-renewables obstruction would have disappeared from the transition. If you’re electrifying households, costs to consumers drop immediately, often to zero or even allow them to make money. 2/6

A modern electricity grid is a direct example of how our old local v global ideas are past their use-by. These ‘local’ electrifications have ‘global’ impact, immediately. It was a mistake to portray electricity supply as centralised generation transmitted to locations. 3/6

Everyone can be both a generator and consumer, in a modern grid. It’s a very different framing or model. If done well it creates an even more stable grid, with vast distributed generation capacity. 4/6

The idea the vast advantages of renewable energy could only reach households after massive infrastructure projects in generation and transmission have been rolled out was a strategic error. They were always available straight away. 5/6

Politically, if you electrify millions of householders, the momentum to a renewables shift becomes unstoppable. Starting with mega-projects was like a honeypot for fossil fuel-funded obstruction. A massive ‘kick me’ sign sticky-taped to the new grid. /end

Most revolutions are, it’s the PR of the shift. Always it’s a small group who actually lead the shift, and then attribute it to the population. Western culture *is* the counterculture of the 1960s. That was *our* revolution. It was the same disaster all revolutions are. /2

Yes, but didn’t the Russian and Chinese revolutions lead to ‘authoritarian’ dictators? Hello Trumpies. Open your eyes. We arrived there too. /3

Edmund Burke wrote about the disaster of all revolutions, at the time of the French Revolution. Nothing has changed since. It’s like Orwell wrote for nothing. /4

The chaotic mess of Western democracies now is the direct outcome of the all-out assault on their most basic institutions, by the anti-establishment countercultural revolution. Both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are just teams in this same counterculture. /5

The revolution that led to the replacement of societies, with ‘markets’. Really a genius strategic tool to strip away all existing institutional hierarchy and replace it with whoever can garner the most popularity. A cultural tool. Not an economic one. /6

Markets have never existed. It’s a fantasy, which allows us to pretend that the ‘invisible hand’ of ‘the people’ determines our social life. It’s very visible. Turn on your TV, right now it wears orange skin tanning. Populist blowhards. /7

The absolute arrogance of we in the West, to think that we’re somehow a-cultural, living outside the usual social mechanisms of human life. We’re just living in objective scientific economies! Delusional claptrap. /8

We’re a fundamentalist anti-establishment culture. A culture that eats itself, continuously attacking the basic cogs and wheels of our collective lives. Who hilariously sees every other culture as ‘authoritarian’, because they retain hierarchy and institutions. /9

As McLuhan said of culture, fish don’t know water exists, until they’re beached. That’s us. Our culture is becoming visible to us now that it’s collapsing under the absurdities of Trump. /end

Replacing the institutions that *were* democracy. Democracy always was a hierarchical system, with voting then used to choose who sat near the top of the hierarchy. Electoral politics is now stripping away the hierarchy entirely. Leaving nothing but fads and fashions. /2

Democracy isn’t a break from older hierarchical systems like feudalism. It keeps the hierarchies, but simply changes the selection mechanism for who sits at the top of them. Then that selection mechanism was gamed. Elections are what’s destroyed democracy. /3

It’s a mark of how successful those who gamed this mechanism have been that the same millions believe elections ARE democracy. It’s why complete morons can now lead countries and the world, because they’re good at marketing, at generating popularity. /4

And once there the morons strip away the hierarchies themselves, the institutions that actually run societies and carry the accumulated blood-splattered wisdom of generations of human beings. Replacing them with nothing but daily ‘trending’ outrages and whims. /5

Have a look at what Trump is doing, I’m describing it exactly. Targeting the institutions above all else. His greatest threat. The idea ‘the people’ run societies in democracy is historically just wrong. That was never the idea. /6

That’s the mythology that is destroying the US. It’s not being overrun by ‘authoritarians’, that’s another symptom of the myth, that it sees every attempt to do something hierarchical as authoritarian. The myth of ‘the people’ is destroying America. And democracy. /7

We seriously believe you can run a complex society by allowing billions to have opinions about everything, which you then aggregate. Things they know nothing about. Not because they’re stupid, but because the volume of information required is so staggering. /8

That’s why we have all of the hierarchies in society, of expertise and experience. So we don’t need to know all these things. Nobody can know all of these things. We TRUST others to know the things we don’t. Populists target trust directly. /9

They know making people distrust the institutions that run societies is the quickest path to power. Only popularity can be allowed. All we’re left with is the schoolyard. Gossip, fads, fashions, trends. No attention to complex problems. /10

That’s the final triumph of a culture that transformed adult life into an eternal high school. The jocks are running the show. Nothing is happening, except the jostle for status in schoolyard battles for status. /11

That’s where you’ll always finish up, if you think ‘the people’ is real. Hilariously, those who evoke the people forget that it’s the ‘fascists’ who invented the whole idea of them. Hitler’s ‘volk’. Literal translation - ‘the people’. /12

All tyrants claim to be speaking for the people. It’s a con. An attribution hiding their own ambition and clamouring for status. ‘The public’ is an invention of institutions. The public doesn’t exist without institutions, they create the public. /13

It’s an administrative construct, a constant calculation of collective need. It’s not ‘the people’, nothing like it. The counting of opinions is nothing like this. It’s a status game, schoolyard jocks taking control using nothing but popularity. /end

In ‘identity politics’, which is really just millions of individuals fighting for social status, so that they have an identity in a world where there is no collective (“we”) to give them one. Catastrophe will restore a “we”, eventually. It may be too late by then. /end

You can infect entire populations with lethal diseases, rather than deny them their ‘right’ to have a good time, with others. That’s the relative moral weightings we’re dealing with. They point to the culture that drives this assessment. /2

The culture I Tweet about all the time. It’s kidult culture, teen culture, the complete domination now of adult life, by adolescent culture. A culture where hanging out with your friends is the ultimate good. None of this is an analogy. /3

I’ve Tweeted many times how this shift came about. Up until the late 19th century, we just had an adult culture. Children were little adults, working side-by-side with other adults, even in workplaces. And then came compulsory schooling. /4 https://t.co/IldOeFiTRy

Where children were separated for the first time from the adult world, ostensibly just to teach and prepare them for that adult world. But it did much more than that. If you isolate people together for long periods of time, they will develop a culture. /5

School culture is what every child then learned and lived, from the time they could walk until they reached adulthood. And then they entered adult life, and what did they do? Gradually converted it into this same school culture. /6

Because they knew nothing else. We went from having only an adult culture, to having an adult and adolescent culture existing side-by-side, to then over time having only the adolescent culture. Adolescent culture is now the entire culture. From cradle to grave. /7

The culture of eternal battles for status, the battle for identity. ‘Identity politics’ is just the schoolyard, we don’t see that it’s a cultural shift, not political. We refused to fight a pandemic because there is no we. Just millions of I’s, fighting for status. /8

Again that’s just the schoolyard, and not by analogy. Adult life was re-made, as a schoolyard. Social media was built to be that schoolyard, likes and followers. Our obsessive recreational travel is the old adolescent gap yer, now extended into old-age. /9

The entire culture is now on a permanent gap year from reality itself. Don’t Look Up. /end https://t.co/j6OyNLJbS2

Now infection has been framed as good for us, to avoid the obvious train wreck of a reversal of a century of reducing it in our lives. Because that reduction needed collective, public action. That can’t be allowed, in a privatised anti-State culture. /2

The two nations who led this assault on public health, the US and UK, were both at the time led by aggressive small government libertarian parties. The public health and other medical and scientific professionals who joined this assault as human shields for the politics? /3

Likely this was their political team already, and they pretend the science matches their political views. Which of course it doesn’t, nor does a century of direct action in communities match it. /4

It’d be easy to put one of our modern team sports labels on this shift, like ‘neoliberalism’. It never explains anything, societies don’t run on -isms. They’re just legacy constructs from fields like sociology and political science. /5

But the shift to an anti-State culture, in all areas of life, is really the resurgence of human status games after their suppression post-WW2, in the rebuilding of societies. The shift back to the “I” culture. Only disaster creates ‘we’ cultures. /6 https://t.co/e2kcY4SuLb

The various -isms and ‘political’ movements are just team names in this deeper cultural/social shift. Now you’re more likely to use infectious disease as a platform for various kinds of ‘identity politics’, which are status games. Status = identity, for social animals. /7

At the same time the battle between Church and State for occupation of the top rung of social status hierarchies, that has gone on for centuries, never ended. The weakening of the State by the shift back to status games has opened the door again for various theocracies. /8

Because status hierarchies will be re-formed, the ocean of fighting “I’s” won’t last. The State hierarchy which became dominant post-WW2, that blip of ‘we’, is now in the US for example being replaced by a new monarchical model (Trump), plus various Christian hierarchies. /9

That explains the continued support for Netanyahu’s lethal adventure in Gaza, which is otherwise completely baffling in a modern Western democracy. It’s a Holy War, for some. History never went away. /end

Look at how mass home ownership only emerged with massive government-led public housing programs, post-war. And how that ownership rate flatlined and then declined with the progressive removal of public housing programs, replaced by ‘the market’. 2/5 https://t.co/NVJtdoPuLM

Really just a smokescreen for the resurgence of status as the dominating principle in housing. Look at that price curve, accompanying the flatlined rate of ownership. The same pattern of reversal of the public good as an organising principle can be found everywhere. 3/5 https://t.co/jcQTJWDcuS

In public transport, health, education, etc. All shifted from being collectively-focused post-war, to individual status game focused from the late-1970s until the present day. It’s this curve, again. All the economic gibberish about supply and demand is just blah blah. 4/5

Do we not see how the ‘invisible hand’ (supply/demand society) is really just a balls-out con to replace a collective focus with each-to-their-own status games? Economics has nothing to do with it. It’s all about status, and finding ways to justify its dominance. /end

Most of the behaviour described as narcissism is something else, usually some fight for social status in one of the bewildering array of status team sports that now pass for public life. We can’t fix things while being part of teen gangs on social media and outside it. 2/3

Preening and posturing and fighting for status. Curating ever more granular, pulverised ‘identities’ and then ‘standing with’ them, against other identities. What a world. So fucking tedious and boring. /end

No breaking up of the task into any number of separate ‘jobs’ will even get us to the starting line of defeating our big challenges now. Societies need to be on a war footing. Where everybody is mobilised to the same end. Instead what are we doing? /2

What we always do, without the discipline of an imminent end to our lives. All of those separate jobs and social roles are fighting for their own status in the melee. The problems are just fuel and performance opportunities, for those status battles. /3

It’s only the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese keeping the globe in the fight against climate change, with its supply of cheap renewables, at scale. Only a society that is on its own war footing, that never fell for the nonsense of ‘the people’ being in charge. /4

If you work with this feted ‘people’ every day, as I do, you know what a lethal joke that idea of democracy always was. Populations of people will do one thing, if left to somehow magically bootstrap their own leadership, from nothing. /5

They will argue, complain and fight. All day and night. For status amongst the incoherent mob. Tell me that’s not what you see around you, on these idiot platforms and outside them. /6

No empirical solutions to anything, just the weaponisation of all things into endlessly proliferating fake ‘debates’. Shifting empires of popularity and trends. Fads and fashions. What it’s all about, this platform even shows it in the RH column next to your feed. /7

The fact this story of collapse of one of the essential mechanisms of civilisational survival itself barely even makes it to the ‘front page’ of human attention yesterday. They couldn’t get it to trend, in the melee. /8 https://t.co/qnHFI5lZNJ

I look at the failed attempts from many brilliant minds here and elsewhere to defeat a pandemic. Where are most of those people now? Most have given up. Retreating to ‘nicer’ platforms where they can all agree how horrible everything is going. /9

Sadly many believed the ‘facts’ would win the day. They never do. Giving up at least recognises we were never going to debate our way to victory. The debates are a con. Flood the zone with shit, at work. Delay all action, in endless arguing. /10

Until humans, as social animals, recognise that without the circuit-breaker of imminent total catastrophic collapse of their lives, they will just fight each other for status in social groups, nothing will change. And yet it moves, hey Galileo. /end

When high school culture hit adult life post-WW2, with the old adult status quo critically damaged, and thought what do we do here? This war and fighting stuff seems distasteful. Let’s sing songs about no more war, and love and peace. 2/6

No means to an end here. Just ends. Fantasies, created by a demographic forcibly separated from adult life through its schooling, and then having to figure out what to do when the old adult world knocked on the door at graduation. The ‘establishment’ must be the cause. 3/6

As Trump steers wrecking balls through that establishment right now, we don’t even see the continuity of what’s happening. It’s the endgame of the counterculture. Trump is the love-child of The Beatles and the counterculture. ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ - they’re all fans. 4/6

I’ve Tweeted before how all the major powers of our time took their culture from an earlier revolution. Russia, China, and us too in the West. But we think Western culture is just an objective way of life. Western culture today is the countercultural revolution. 5/6

The day teenagers took over the world, and re-made it as a giant high school. A ‘free market’, really just a social fiction to strip away all existing hierarchy - the ‘establishment’ - and allow each to do whatever they like. Not politics or economics. An entire culture. /end