February 2026
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
The role of spectacle and magnificence is to restrict wider comparison and rivalry in societies. It’s the control of violence, the creation of distance and difference. To restrict sameness and equality, which lead to intense mimetic rivarly and mimetic crisis. Preventing… https://t.co/FCGo2ByBeJ
The role of spectacle and magnificence is to restrict wider comparison and rivalry in societies. It’s the control of violence, the creation of distance and difference. To restrict sameness and equality, which lead to intense mimetic rivarly and mimetic crisis. Uncontrolled… https://t.co/twsWdmMUEn
Societies have cultures, which are their true operating systems. Their ‘political’ teams are just subsets of that culture, politics is not culture, it’s a type of team sports within a culture. America is a revolutionary society. It was founded that way. To this day you can see… https://t.co/X2OaYiaTGl
Societies have cultures, which are their true operating systems. Their ‘political’ teams are just subsets of that culture, politics is not culture. It’s a type of team sports within a culture. America is a revolutionary society. It was founded that way. To this day you can see… https://t.co/lJm2SK3dAk
Bill Clinton’s statement matches Obama’s, in inadvertently identifying the root cause of America’s problems. The belief that ‘We, the People’ run it. No wonder the Democrats never win. You don’t ask passengers to fly the plane. https://t.co/NuQgg7yW4a
Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it. Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations… /1 https://t.co/0ERRxaBh2v
Hierarchy seems an evil when our belief is that groups of people somehow spontaneously self-generate social order. If you believe that, any sort of hierarchy seems like a minority suppressing the majority. /2
In reality humans are social animals, and never spontaneously cooperate. They fight for status, because status is identity, for social animals. Meaning the natural, default state is hierarchy. Try to ‘flatten’ hierarchy and humans will restore it in any number of ways. /3
That flattening, the pursuit of equality, releases uncontrolled mimetic rivalry. People compete for status, in social groups or teams, against other teams. Each team is hierarchically organised around status leadership of some kind. The true rivalry is between these ‘elite’…
What we’ve come to call ‘democracy’ is really the injection of fossil fuel energy into hierarchical forms. Energy abundance allows: •welfare buffering •bureaucratic mediation •delay of rivalry consequences •tolerance of inefficiency •pluralism without starvation. /5
Information speed then destabilises faster than energy can compensate, by: •destroying symbolic distance •collapsing status hierarchies •accelerating imitation •removing cooling-off time, and •turning pluralism into rivalry. /6
The recent shift to more hierarchical forms of governance only appears a shift to ‘authoritarianism’ within the incredibly historically brief, fossil fuel-generated ‘democratic’ form. In reality it’s societies returning to their historic equilibrium, accelerated by information…
In this way, bizarrely, Trumpism is ‘fixing’ America. It’s a perfectly natural response to historically anomalous social forms, enabled by the use of fossil fuel energy. Information society is re-balancing energy society, by restoring hierarchy and distance, to suppress mimetic…
I’ve been watching the response to AI follow the same status-preserving obstruction we see for climate change, renewables, EVs, control of viruses, etc. The bar constantly raised higher, the more our existing status is challenged. I spend far more time discussing things with AI… https://t.co/VB8x5mjLMs
I’ve been watching the response to AI follow the same status-preserving obstruction we see for climate change, renewables, EVs, control of viruses, etc. The bar constantly raised higher, the more our existing status is challenged. I spend far more time discussing things with AI… https://t.co/VB8x5mjLMs
I’ve spent a few years here arguing that the populist autocracy we’re seeing globally is really human societies trying to restore monarchies. The return of the kings. Humanity’s most common and most stable form, across all of its history. Neo-royalism is sort of getting that.… https://t.co/oTPKBXi22q
The behaviour of the Trump regime seems beyond the pale for those who grew up in the entirely provisional post-WW2 re-build of destroyed societies. Where collective institutions guided the repair of the basics of human life, around an emerging principle of a ‘public’, a ‘we’.… https://t.co/oy9CZRnfhu
Before the Wesphalian accord in 1648, the world was international. It was a trans-territorial elite network, a networked aristocratic-clerical order. This is the world we’re re-entering today, as global elites act beyond the corralling of national boundaries that the Westphalian… https://t.co/zlbqGaWxDY
Mimetic theory allows to see how what we (mis)take for democracy in action, mass imitative action, is really a more insidious development. Mass imitation is nearly always a precursor to violence and social breakdown. The function of hierarchy - of *emulation* - is to control… https://t.co/qyewkHfPzb
This is the same error people make with Covid. Covid minimisers win because they convince people that Covid is everywhere, and to stop it you have to do something everywhere. Everybody must mask, everybody must have HEPA filters etc. It’s not true, societies and viruses are both… https://t.co/qBkfRSvV3H
At a time when chronic illness is not only increasing but embraced, one of the best things you can do is make sure you have income protection insurance.
All of the nonsense about ‘fascism’ is just viral social media posturing. Democracy as we conceive it, as ‘the people’ running societies, is a total fantasy. It’s physically impossible, no group of people of whatever size has a group mind. People follow/imitate/emulate leaders… https://t.co/Kch2lKd7pa
The Epstein files show just one part of the operation of global elites, acting outside national boundaries established in the 17th century. There were no meaningful national boundaries before the 17th century. That’s the world we’ve returned to. The behaviour of today’s…
Trump of course weaponised the term ‘elites’, as populists always do. Others tap the same conspiratorial vibe talking about ‘the top 1%’. Elites are just the current tops of social status hierarchies. They have ALWAYS run all human groups, and societies. With one exception.…
Trump of course weaponised the term ‘elites’, as populists always do. Others tap the same conspiratorial vibe talking about ‘the top 1%’. Elites are just the current tops of social status hierarchies. They have ALWAYS run all human groups, and societies. With one exception.…
We know how this always goes in the US. Fine speeches, people taking to the streets. Then…nothing. It lacks a sensible, calm, pragmatic desire for public administration. Everything is a revolution. https://t.co/1QGd0xXCvy
The idea Western democracies can elect their way out of trouble ignores the long-term trend, irrespective of who gets elected. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. https://t.co/Hfdk6jSD7M
Populism is not anti-monarchical. It is the modern technology for restoring monarchy after societies have lost the courage to name hierarchy directly.
Populism is not anti-monarchical. It’s the modern technology for restoring monarchy after societies have lost the courage to name hierarchy directly.
The cycle of human societies, through the lens of mimetic theory, where rivalry between the similar creates mimetic crisis i.e. violence, and hierarchy’s role is to restrict the degree of similarity and imitation. 1.Hierarchy stabilises society 2.Hierarchy ossifies 3.Equality…
The cycle of human societies, through the lens of mimetic theory, where rivalry between the similar creates mimetic crisis i.e. violence, and hierarchy’s role is to restrict the degree of similarity and imitation. 1. Hierarchy stabilises society 2. Hierarchy ossifies 3.…
Every public debate today is the same debate. It’s a fight for status in public life, at a time when contenders for that supremacy are at record numbers. The content of those debates is irrelevant. Our belief in ‘the people’ as sovereign is the wrong model for how humans…
Every public debate today is the same debate. It’s a fight for status in public life, at a time when contenders for that supremacy are at record numbers. The content of those debates is irrelevant. It’s our passionate refusal to see status hierarchies that creates their…
The UK de-fanged monarchy, but left it the crucial role as a status sink, allowing politics to become almost entirely procedural. No rivals are possible for the top of the status hierarchy, which creates multi-generational continuity. America and other republics fuse status… https://t.co/Ljz2W3TIRu
The UK de-fanged monarchy, but left it the crucial role as a status sink, allowing politics to become almost entirely procedural. No rivals are possible for the top of the status hierarchy, which creates multi-generational continuity. America and other republics fuse status… https://t.co/LxGIM2xgJE
What do cultures whose structure of likes and followers is modelled on high schools do in the face of adversity? They put on a gig. Adolescent protest, they know no other way to process adult life. https://t.co/BioRCKmscE
One of the incredibly useful things AI can do for you is provide quick, detailed summaries of books. There are exponentially more books in circulation than anybody could ever read. And the book itself as a form can be a very long-winded way to get to a point (though not as bad… https://t.co/dYY7YF1Tq3
Yes, but…there is no such thing as the ‘ centre’ in politics. It’s entirely defined by what’s on either side of it, and shifts constantly. And populism will eventually overwhelm all positions on the fake Left-Right spectrum. It dissolves the ‘system’ itself. It’s the way the… https://t.co/6OMHaSgcHw
Yes, but…there is no such thing as the ‘ centre’ in politics. It’s entirely defined by what’s on either side of it, and shifts constantly. And populism will eventually overwhelm all positions on the fake Left-Right spectrum. It dissolves the ‘system’ itself. It’s the way the… https://t.co/6OMHaSgcHw
Pretty much all analysis of inflation talks about supply and demand. Like societies are ‘economies’, a type of machine, where you need to adjust the settings. The economics that says the machine is a complex system isn’t really shifting the dial on the thinking. Still a…
The uncomfortable truth is that entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, a collective fart in an elevator, the breaking of the status quo. Rockefeller, Ford, Edison, Musk - all profoundly difficult people in polite society. And often… https://t.co/xmPfWtuzD7
The uncomfortable truth is that entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, a collective fart in an elevator, the breaking of the status quo. Rockefeller, Ford, Edison, Musk - all profoundly difficult people in polite society. And often… https://t.co/9JtFBAIAcj
The uncomfortable truth is that entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, a fart in the collective elevator, the breaking of the status quo. Rockefeller, Ford, Edison, Musk - all profoundly difficult people in polite society. And often… https://t.co/0HPqmvAWIg
The uncomfortable truth is that entrepreneurs are pretty much always socially obnoxious. That’s what disruption is, a fart in the collective elevator, the breaking of the status quo. Rockefeller, Ford, Edison, Jobs, Musk - all profoundly difficult people in polite society. And… https://t.co/yHiVwlvLB3
I might be missing something here, but I read this as ‘AI doesn’t suffer as much from confirmation bias’. https://t.co/hkE6ziSP8b
Yup. It’s orders of magnitude more dangerous than AI, and more so because we don’t see that. It targets our deepest and most dangerous desires, our imitative rivalry. https://t.co/bLWL36JoBb
Much of the illusion of democracy being people-led is really the operation of social security systems. These were pioneered after WW2, or in the case of the UK in the middle of WW2, to bolster popular support for the war effort. Democracy has always been just our old monarchies… https://t.co/bOxZCNwD9i
When a society says “we are all equal” but behaves otherwise, something lethal happens: •differences still exist •power still concentrates •prestige still accumulates •but no one is allowed to say where. Everyone senses hierarchy. No one can name it. Rivalry then becomes…
When a society says “we are all equal” but behaves otherwise, something lethal happens: •differences still exist •power still concentrates •prestige still accumulates •but no one is allowed to say where. Everyone senses hierarchy. No one can name it. Rivalry then becomes…
@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports. That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So that any attempt to create a…
To quote Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins from their ‘On Kings’, on ‘the people’: “Even when kings are deposed, the legal and political framework of monarchy tends to live on, as evidenced in the fact that all modern states are founded on the curious and contradictory principle…
This isn’t just a question for governance, Cory and many others for example take the same framework and apply it to economics too, with the focus on anti-trust. The intrinsic dislike of monopoly or hierarchy. This ignores essential historical realities, to quote Graeber and…
It matters enormously that we understand the actual realities of human social and cultural life through history, rather than keep hitching our horses to an abstract Enlightenment ideal. This is really a modern hatred of hierarchy itself, in all of its forms. It’s what Bruno…
Societies with revolutionary histories, like the US, are forever stuck in this rut. Everything will always be framed as the crowd or mob storming the Bastille. Hierarchy, as Rene Girard so brilliantly described, is the way humanity has always protected itself from mimetic…
Hierarchy creates *distance*. It suppresses the escalation of mimesis. Mimetic rivalry is the origin of violence. It recognises differences in value, it says this can be better than that, rather than ‘if you can amass enough opinions saying X is better than Y, then X is better…
Hierarchy embeds these distinctions in value. Not just in politics, in every part of human life. There are better and worse plumbers, electricians, economists, physicians, writers, drivers etc. etc. How could we even want to deny that? Those hierarchies regulate life itself,…
In business, economies of scale do the same. And yet the iconoclastic framing can only ever see that as monopoly, as the people being screwed. Of course hierarchies can be gamed. And the easiest and most dangerous way to do that? /8
Pretend they don’t even exist. That we are all equal, in all things. Populism. That leaves the field wide open for every Trumpian half-wit to vacuum up vast masses of followers and rule the world, under cover of ‘taking down the elites’. /9
While I enjoy the concept of enshittification, its colour, to me it’s pointing at the wrong problem. Of course a hierarchy will look to suppress competition. That’s what hierarchies are supposed to do. A cowboy electrician *should* be driven out of business, by the hierarchy of…
And organisations of people, including businesses and States, should be allowed to become big, even enormous, to access economies of scale. The real problem is somewhere else. What I’d call the ‘teamification’ of human life. /11
Where an activity is transformed into imitative rivalries, with teams battling each other for status. Where no calming, rational, established hierarchy exists, or has been destroyed, to ‘regulate’ the claims for status. We bizarrely celebrate this, as ‘activism’. /12
As ‘democracy’ in action! The entire population splintered into a proliferation of teams in competition, in every granular detail of life now. Of competing ‘brands’, viral trends. Even more perversely, this *is* the ideal world of the free market libertarians. Nature red in…
Shared by the anti-trust folk, in the same bed. Showing that these supposedly opposing groups are sharing the same underlying framework, and just become the teams in battle, within that framework, without ever leaving it. /14
Team sports status battles are always the sign that mimetic rivalry is uncontrolled and may lead to mimetic crisis. Human societies evolved mechanisms to control this, over millennia. /15
It’s what monarchies and churches, mostly, have done over thousands of years. Controlled status rivalries by creating master-level status hierarchies at the centre of societies, to suppress lateral, perpetual rivalry everywhere else. These mechanisms emerged. Nobody reasoned…
Teamification. Not as sexy a term as enshittification, but a much more insidious thing. The transformation of human life into perpetual fake debates, imitative rivalry between social teams. Generated by the destruction of status hierarchies in politics and science and every… https://t.co/luymhDMffB
Teamification. Not as sexy a term as enshittification, but a much more insidious thing. The transformation of human life into perpetual fake debates, imitative rivalry between social teams. Generated by the destruction of status hierarchies in politics and science and every… https://t.co/luymhDMffB
No human group of any size will undertake drastic, emergency change without being forced to. Usually via external catastrophic threat, from nature or from other societies. And that threat needs to be literally bringing the roof down on people’s heads, to be noticed. Human… https://t.co/kzeCTwkD8s
Good. It’ll be orders of magnitude better than the slop most humans dish up here. https://t.co/wNwBzDPVPN
In a kidult culture socialising will be prioritised above all else. We just decided to live with a pandemic, to protect socialising, for example. There’s nothing healthy about being so dependent upon socialising. It reflects an emotional immaturity, arrested social development. https://t.co/wOaf5nOUm5
In a kidult culture socialising will be prioritised above all else. We just decided to live with a pandemic, to protect socialising, for example. There’s nothing healthy about being so dependent upon socialising. It reflects an emotional immaturity, arrested social development.… https://t.co/wOaf5nOUm5
In a kidult culture socialising will be prioritised above all else. We just decided to live with a pandemic, to protect socialising, for example. There’s nothing healthy about being so dependent upon socialising. It reflects an emotional immaturity, arrested social development.… https://t.co/wOaf5nOUm5
It amazes me every day how ahistorical we are in our thinking. The populism Trump represents is common throughout history. It always represents societies returning to more monarchical forms of governance, after the violence of ‘flatter’ systems exhausts people. Caesar for… https://t.co/U7YAwReoqG
This. https://t.co/TrQjVodsMB
When are they replacing the Tesla Board and CEO with AI? The company might thrive. https://t.co/iQVn8XHLhY
I wish it was more obvious to more people. But societies don’t run on information, they run on social conformity, based on status. The principle used is ‘what everybody else is doing, in my social team’. https://t.co/nBFRyz0Qtn
The Romans embraced people of all cultures. They didn’t try to enforce any culture upon those who arrived. It’s why their empire lasted for over a millennium. https://t.co/FD1ctKNDm8
The Romans embraced people of all cultures. They didn’t try to enforce any culture upon those who arrived. It’s why their empire lasted for nearly 1500 years. https://t.co/FD1ctKNDm8
This is where Turchin’s work is so important. The two factors that lead to social revolution/collapse? Operation of the ‘wealth pump’ (elites vacuuming money from ordinary people). And a proliferation of rivals amongst the elite. Both of these conditions define America today. https://t.co/M4dmNN8rai
This is where Turchin’s work is so important. The two factors that lead to social revolution/collapse? Operation of the ‘wealth pump’ (elites vacuuming money from ordinary people). And a proliferation of rivals amongst the elite, who all attempt to co-opt disaffected… https://t.co/M4dmNN8rai
This is where Turchin’s work is so important. The two factors that lead to social revolution/collapse? Operation of the ‘wealth pump’ (elites vacuuming money from ordinary people). And a proliferation of rivals amongst the elite, who all attempt to co-opt disaffected… https://t.co/M4dmNN8rai
The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work. So today, we tend to believe individuals are reasoning agents, processing information about the world to optimise their individual outcomes. Both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have…
Teams have no necessary connection with reality. Their existence is driven by social rivalry, for status. It’s the model used by team sports, extended to all areas of human life. It’s why I have less than zero interest in Left/Right framings of the world. Because an…
And leads to fundamentally different interpretations of what we see happening around us. Humans are SOCIAL animals. Nobody denies it. Which means the fundamental basis of every *individual* is social. How does this different model of individual humans look? /3
The fundamental human act is to IMITATE. To emulate other people, of higher status, to in turn give ourselves some of that status, as part of the emulated person’s ‘team’. This is of course the basis of Girard’s mimetic theory. But its implications go beyond even that. /4
It creates a social model that actually matches societies. Networks of imitative groups, organised around hubs, constantly shifting as what is imitated ‘trends’ in different ways, what ‘goes viral’. Societies look like the diagram, whereas the other social model of individual… https://t.co/TuAM9rM9so
At times of social unrest or crisis, the individual reasoning agent model assumes ‘authoritarians’ of some kind are taking over the reasoning crowd. The ‘fascist’ takeover of ‘democracy’. The imitation model on the other hand sees that as an automatic reflex action of a social…
Under the mimetic model, which again actually matches the social structures we live in, the greatest danger-KPI for collective life is when it is driven by social trends, when imitation loses any sense of emulation to structure it, and everybody just begins copying everybody…
When societies seem more ‘equal’ is when crisis is imminent. Because as Girard spent a career trying to show us, imitation is at root a *rivalry*. Imitative rivalry. Everybody imitating everybody else (welcome to the social media age) is a society riven by conflict and…
Surely we see this, today? The way social media, which has actually replaced society, we live inside it, transforms every public issue immediately into a rivalry, fought by always shifting teams? Everything is viral trends. Most fundamentally this is a society that has lost all…
Under Model 1 (individuals as reasoning agents), hierarchy of any kind is poison. A subversion of the ‘optimum’. In Model 2 it’s what regulates status rivalry. Transforming imitation into emulation, suppressing the extent of imitative rivalry. I’ve posted a lot about how what…
Trying to restore kings, or their equivalent, because people are sick of the perpetual rivalry and violence, the fight for basic status/identity. I’ve also posted about how things like monarchies and churches are the emergent ‘solution’ to status rivalry that societies stumbled…
Monarchs and their networked ‘courts’ of higher-status aristocrats were the continually re-invented solution to mass violence. Other solutions have also been tried, like diversifying the ways in which status can be found, for example through civil service institutions (the…
If you live in a society of viral trends, you’re living in a time not of fascist takeover. You’re living in times of social collapse driven by mass imitiation. Humans copying each other widely is the root of social collapse. /end
The world seems crazy? And yet we keep applying the same stale, old political framings to explain what’s going on. The battle between Left and Right, fascism vs democracy, etc. All of these are modern codings of ancient human social behaviours. Until we shift the framing of…
What we call democracy ran from about 1945, until the late 1970s. When two world wars, a pandemic and economic collapse pulverised our existing status quo. ‘The people’ didn’t come to power. Institutions tasked with repairing broken societies did. From the late-1970s those…
And more evidence that no human group runs on information or knowledge. They run on social conformity, to accumulate and protect status. Because status is identity. https://t.co/B9A7pV06II
The data is absolutely clear that the only time in all of history where ordinary people owned their own homes in great numbers was after World War 2, when governments built them for them. https://t.co/nhIG1oBvkV
Populism isn’t a shift to the Right, or even far Right. Populism is the rejection of Left *and* Right, and their replacement by the equivalent of a king.
Populism isn’t a shift to the Right, or even far Right. Populism is the rejection of Left *and* Right, and their replacement by the equivalent of a king. Caesar was a populist and replaced the Roman Republic with rule by emperor.
Again, if you use history as a guide, we’re not democracies under assault from far right fascism. We’re back in feudalism, history’s dominant form. Land is now only for the elite, and inheritance becomes the main fight. Meanwhile leaders are monarchical figures again. King… https://t.co/FM9EI5CHoJ
Again, if you use history as a guide, we’re not democracies under assault from far Right fascism. We’re back in feudalism, history’s dominant form. Land is now only for the elite, and inheritance becomes the main fight. Meanwhile leaders are monarchical figures again. King… https://t.co/gCOjN6WOnC
Why aren’t most schools as well ventilated as other public and even private buildings? Because these are low-status spaces. Shit-holes in a whole range of ways, ventilation just one of them. Education has very low status. Children have very low status. Teaching has very low… https://t.co/OB6uI7OcB1
The Epstein files are lifting the veil on how the world works, despite our fantasy narratives about living in people-led democracies. Through networks of connected and competing elites. Societies are ALWAYS run by elites of one kind or another. That’s not oppression of the…
The Epstein files are lifting the veil on how the world works, despite our fantasy narratives about living in people-led democracies. Through networks of connected and competing elites. Societies are ALWAYS run by elites of one kind or another. That’s not oppression of the…
The reality with inequality is that at no time in history has an established status quo voluntarily relinquished its advantages. Changes to the status quo are always forced, by internal and/or external catastrophe or existential threat. The ‘we’ focused lives many of us have… https://t.co/q90bZ4FULG
For probably the first two-thirds of my life, society functioned peacefully and successfully on the principle that the opinions of the community on things they know nothing about were irrelevant and didn’t need to be heard.
‘They’ did it by withdrawing any hierarchical authority in any area of life to determine truth from fiction. The triumph of opinion. https://t.co/ZyGuhxStLD
Knowledge of even basic history will tell you that the world is rapidly returning to a dominance of Asia that is the historical norm. https://t.co/20zPCHrTLT
I wish countries were investing in bringing HVAC into classrooms, so that schools weren’t the only public or private large buildings having to choose between thermal comfort and fresh air. Bored with ‘bring back’ nostalgia too, I should say. Most kids weren’t learning very much… https://t.co/MQvHUSDjib
I wish countries were investing in bringing HVAC into classrooms, so that schools weren’t the only public or private large buildings having to choose between thermal comfort and fresh air. Bored with ‘bring back’ nostalgia too. Most kids weren’t learning very much with books. https://t.co/MQvHUSCLsD
Social media remains the wrecking ball of our age. The populism it’s enabling may be the catastrophic destruction that launches actual social change. Destruction is never pleasant. But status never allows gradualism to work. https://t.co/g140mdlBKb
The greatest unsaid thing in debates about AI (notice like everything else, social media culture has transformed it into a team sport between two sides). Human culture has never been based on thought. Human life is based on habit, not cognition, habit driven by status, and…
That fossil fuel detour is what gave the West global dominance, over Asia. But that dominance is now only 250-300 years old, while Asian dominance was 10 times that in terms of years. And Asia cleverly has already led the transition to renewable energy. It plays the long game. https://t.co/CA6uFPZVPx
That fossil fuel detour is what gave the West global dominance, over Asia. But that dominance is now only 250-300 years old, while Asian dominance was 10 times that in terms of years. And Asia cleverly has already led the transition to renewable energy. It plays the long game.… https://t.co/CA6uFPZVPx
Social media algorithms have replaced public policy. Social media platforms blow up centuries of emergent status/trust hierarchies, emergent from bloodshed, levelling everything into a fake universal ‘democracy’ of opinion. Influencers then game the algorithms to become the… https://t.co/IcXbgVjWtO
“We can’t easily identify AI-made papers from the genuine ones.” So the genuine ones must be ‘slop’ too? Like all revolutions, change will come when the existing status quo is a smoking ruin. https://t.co/6IO8WW0m3P
Most of modern economics is a political assault upon the State as a functioning entity, not science. Both the ‘Left’ with its ideas about ‘the people’ leading and the ‘Right’ with its free markets share the same conceptual framework. A society led by apparently… https://t.co/rjmo2vofWs
Fascinating, so AI has its own Original Antigenic Sin/immune imprinting. Don’t feed it things in drubs and drabs, feed it as much of your problem as you can upfront. https://t.co/4b27ESeFTC
Fascinating, so AI has its own Original Antigenic Sin/immune imprinting. Don’t feed it things in dribs and drabs, feed it as much of your problem as you can upfront. https://t.co/4b27ESeFTC
Fascinating, so AI has its own Original Antigenic Sin/immune imprinting. Don’t feed it things in dribs and drabs, feed it as much of your problem as you can upfront. Probably just its own version of confirmation bias. Those who criticise AI are usually silent on the really… https://t.co/4b27ESeFTC
The ‘scientific method’ was actually invented by philosophers of science, and then retrospectively applied as a descriptive framework by scientists themselves. Most great leaps in science come from conceptual leaps, not methodological rigour. https://t.co/Zgy9GRueJP
The ‘scientific method’ was actually invented by philosophers of science, and then retrospectively applied as a descriptive framework by scientists themselves. Most progress in science comes from conceptual leaps, not methodological rigour. https://t.co/Zgy9GRueJP
Have made this point many times. The ‘free market’ is a fiction, it’s created by government/the State. It’s the same fiction as ‘the people’ running democracies. https://t.co/E51biH9bJs
AI making everybody smarter will lead to violence and social disruption/collapse, because that’s always driven by mimetic rivalry between people made more equal. However AI could also do the opposite, if its intelligence goes so far beyond human intelligence that rivalry… https://t.co/lSzlVnaQKu
The entire history of humanity is one of continuous imitative rivalry, for status. With some controls emergent over time, like monarchies and religions, mechanisms to attempt to control this status rivalry. I have zero time for bleating about ‘the human’ under assault from… https://t.co/O74dHLcAMU
The entire history of humanity is one of continuous imitative rivalry, for status. With some controls emergent over time, like monarchies and religions, mechanisms to attempt to control this status rivalry. I have zero time for bleating about ‘the human’ under assault from… https://t.co/SvAJw9oTsP
I live in the West, am white, straight and male and have noticed no such thing. I love my Tesla vehicle, I wish the CEO would get off fucking social media. https://t.co/AZYqgNE5IM
That cute thing the billionaire class do, where they pretend they don’t understand that they pay most of the tax because they’ve vacuumed up most of a nation’s income. https://t.co/vqdurMOWuk
Of course in social media culture, AI has become a ‘debate’ between two opposing teams. Everything follows that same pattern in social media culture. We’re puppets inside the platforms.
Of course in social media culture, AI has become a fake ‘debate’ between two opposing teams. Everything follows that same pattern in social media culture. We’re puppets inside the platforms.
I saw republicans link this yesterday to the need to accelerate the shift to republicanism in Australia. America is a Republic. How’s that going? How did the Roman Republic work out? https://t.co/4FFFoN8aU3
The disruption AI will bring to medicine will be just as much about cost and availability of medical care as it will be about the expertise of the AI systems. https://t.co/DjidAkmuE6
AI is clearly ‘trending’, another sign our social media bubble culture is at work. Ever-shifting trends driving imitative status game rivalry between social teams mobilising behind influencers. Another way to look at that is to say social media is now at war with AI. It will be…
AI is clearly ‘trending’, another sign our social media bubble culture is at work. Ever-shifting trends driving imitative status game rivalry between social teams mobilising behind influencers. Another way to look at that is to say social media is now at war with AI. It will be…
‘Nanny’ States happen when adults act like children.
@DavidJoffe64 they’re still trying to convince you… https://t.co/cSqkHI1cfR
Education as an industry is mostly stupid. Right now it panics about AI delivering undetectable plagiarism. But it might just be better at education’s core work as well. https://t.co/VDJKO8ygv6
I’ve never believed in the loneliness epidemic, it was just one more of the bullshit claims that shut down public health, for Covid: that public health action was forcing people into dangerous levels of isolation. All of that is a kidult culture craving socialising. As the… https://t.co/3g0RpmJrOg
Humans overwhelmingly don’t think. They imitate/emulate others, to gain and retain membership in social groups (or teams, as I call them), in rivalry with other groups. Apple is well behind with AI, it doesn’t surprise me they’re maybe saying it’s a nothing burger. Again, just… https://t.co/9ZcRH5Tj5o
Stop turning every fucking thing that happens every day into some new crusade. https://t.co/ktTnbaaGLN
Most arguments or debates are pointless. What wins is always empirical, material realities. What ‘works’. The idea democracy is endless debating and arguing over things is really a con to destroy it. Democracy is building material things that improve people’s lives.
I wish #Insiders, like every body else, would give up labelling things as ‘Left/far-Left’ or ‘Right/far-Right’. These are meaningless terms in a populist age. Populism is opposed to politics in its entirety.
I wish #Insiders, like everybody else, would give up labelling things as ‘Left/far-Left’ or ‘Right/far-Right’. These are meaningless terms in a populist age. Populism is opposed to politics in its entirety.
Vaccination is failing because we’re misdiagnosing anti-vax as the population being more ‘hesitant’ about vaccines. The same myths we wallow in about democracy, that it’s led by ‘the people’. All change is led. Distrust in vaccination has been led. By a very small number of… https://t.co/B7fAAWYLzd
Societies are always networked, with hubs that represent the various social groupings, a nucleus of ‘influence’ led by leaders/influencers and in rivalry with other hubs. Just as democracy will fall by targeting entire populations, so will public health, science, and basic… https://t.co/L5YPh7mwXf
The irony of living in a social media society is that it’s easier than it’s ever been to directly trace the sources of influence. Social media makes social networks highly visible and traceable. I’ve shared this before here. The majority of anti-vax BS online is traceable back… https://t.co/lxbQY5hvsZ
A society could decide to shut down this not by exhausting the doctors and public health workers described in the article at the start of this thread, trying to deal with the *outcome* of these anti-trust misinformation campaigns amongst millions of people. But by targeting the…
I’ve Tweeted many times about how even dealing with something like Covid is exactly the same process. Covid is simply not everywhere, as its minimisers like us to believe, to make us give up trying to control it. It breeds and spreads from a relatively small number of hubs,…
We don’t need to mask or ‘lock down’ the entire population to control Covid. We just need to target the hubs where it breeds and spreads. Targeting schools would be a great place to start. It’s a much, much smaller job than we’re led to believe. We’re led to believe Covid is…
We need to stop thinking about societies as millions of individuals in the driving seat. Not even the smallest local sporting club operates that way. There is ALWAYS a very small proportion of the group that lead everybody else. That’s who you focus on, to bring about change.…
Societies need to ignore the sister myth of ‘the people’ - that imposition of strong action is ‘authoritarian’. Horseshit. What creates peaceful and prosperous societies is the courage to be brutally determined to weed out anti-social influences. /8
As we saw in Geoffrey Rush’s portrayal of Elizabeth 1’s ruthless strategic adviser, Sir Francis Walsingham. None of the nonsense about workshopping focus groups in the wider population and trying to ‘re-educate’ them. A brutal, targeted identification of the enemies of the… https://t.co/FX2WpAV15x
Most of the critical problems facing humanity today are much *smaller* problems than we assume, problems led by a tiny number of anti-social actors, interested only in their own social status. Mostly easily traceable, in a networked social media culture. Right now acting with…
The daily churn of debate here and elsewhere, all apparently motivated by the desire to affect social change. Interpersonal relationships between humans, including debate and conversation, don’t change the world. Most of what happens in societies is imposed upon them by crisis,…
The only historical ways inequality has been reduced is either the catastrophic destruction of the existing status quo, for example by war. Or by governments investing directly in those who are less well-off. Or both. Everything else is gamed by status rivalry. Government could… https://t.co/roSdFGi4hA
The only historical ways inequality has been reduced is either the catastrophic destruction of the existing status quo, for example by war. Or by governments investing directly in those who are less well-off. Or both. Everything else is gamed by status rivalry. Government could… https://t.co/y67p1JA5C0
This delighted me. Not because I’m a ‘Tesla fanboy’. Kidult culture can’t imagine anybody assessing anything except as a member of some social team in rivalry with other social teams. It delighted me because engineering triumphed over a year of relentless social-media driven… https://t.co/as6TSf1Qng
I think the collapse of public health is seen most strongly not in so many medicos refusing to acknowledge or care about ongoing impacts of Covid. Medicine has always had a love-hate relationship with public health, a territorial turf thing. It’s seen most in the outright… https://t.co/WLUZCrIMdF
I think the collapse of public health is seen most strongly not in so many medicos refusing to acknowledge or care about ongoing impacts of Covid. Medicine has always had a love-hate relationship with public health, a territorial turf thing. It’s seen most in the outright… https://t.co/WLUZCrIMdF
Elections always promise complete social transformation. (They never deliver.) All of the indicators of democratic health have been in free fall since the introduction of mass elections. Elections are pure populism. It’s bizarre for us to argue the terrible effects of… https://t.co/1WZRR6I0dA
Hilarious. But the obvious thing to notice here is that social media is not only driving what happens in the world (the President runs the free world from the platforms), it’s where most people now actually reside. We are in a bubble. A bubble that turns everything into… https://t.co/9seKByTUsR
Populism is violence. The refusal to conceptualise populism outside the Left-Centre-Right nonsense means it’s going unchecked. Populism is violence because it’s caused by the removal of distinction between people, leading to mass virality/imitation. Social media is a major… https://t.co/UxkhaCJRnq
The fanatical rejection of hierarchy in life in general leads to the culture of violence, crime and disorder in the US. It’s the obsession with freedom and equality, and the refusal to see that as what hierarchy enables, that creates US violence and is now threatening the… https://t.co/M5aUlXUHEC
The fanatical rejection of hierarchy in life in general leads to the culture of violence, crime and disorder in the US. It’s the obsession with freedom and equality, and the refusal to see that as what hierarchy enables, that creates US violence and is now threatening the… https://t.co/M5aUlXUHEC
Can you give up the team sports of imitative rivalry that defines our cultures now, lived on these platforms? Step back and look at how it transforms every day and night into fake debates and arguments, between social teams. It’s a football league, it’s sport. That’s the…
Rage-baiting is populism. Deliberately manufactured, continuous rage, then re-directed at ‘elites’. Current elites, who the rage-baiters want to replace with themselves, in the name of the ‘community’ or ‘the people, whom they actually couldn’t care less about. Manufactured… https://t.co/iAmF2VGIl8
Rage-baiting is populism. Deliberately manufactured, continuous rage, then re-directed at ‘elites’. Current elites, who the rage-baiters want to replace with themselves, in the name of the ‘community’ or ‘the people, whom they actually couldn’t care less about. Manufactured… https://t.co/prJ8AEssq9
Rage-baiting is populism. Deliberately manufactured, continuous rage, then re-directed at ‘elites’. Current elites, who the rage-baiters want to replace with themselves, in the name of the ‘community’ or ‘the people’, whom they actually couldn’t care less about. Manufactured… https://t.co/GvGEGod1C5
Rage-baiting is populism. Deliberately manufactured, continuous rage, then re-directed at ‘elites’. Current elites, who the rage-baiters want to replace with themselves, in the name of the ‘community’ or ‘the people’, that they actually couldn’t care less about. Manufactured… https://t.co/VOPG9aQCxZ
Rage-baiting is populism. Deliberately manufactured, continuous rage, then re-directed at ‘elites’. Current elites, whom the rage-baiters want to replace with themselves, in the name of the ‘community’ or ‘the people’, that they actually couldn’t care less about. Manufactured… https://t.co/Pw3eXankFe
There’s a lot to this. The social problems we face are so immense, and populations are now so old - what else do people suggest as a way forward? https://t.co/Nw9Ck50N0R
Ending strong action against Covid was like this. In Australia there was clear popular support for strong action, but the minimisers repeated the fiction so often that people wanted to move on that gradually that became the reality. To this day the only glue that holds that… https://t.co/CfzJpLWYzx
For some reason some English comedians seem particularly susceptible to the transparent Trojan Horse strategy around free speech that comes out of the US, where it’s used to strip away basic institutional mediation of everyday life. https://t.co/Zm7io2CgRY
Thanks to @kamomatou for pointing out there’s a term to describe how majority opinion on a topic, like control of Covid circulation, may not match individual, private feeling and belief. In this way bad faith actors can claim ‘the people’ believe certain things, like that… https://t.co/MKDCMEH6vB
We always play the man, and not the ball. That’s the definition of populism. The UK now in a mass pile-on on Starmer, as if he could ever have reversed years of Tory indifference to basic social life there in just a handful of years. We can’t elect our way out of the problems… https://t.co/wiluXDSs35
Trumpism, and populist movements globally right now, are not ‘authoritarian’ hijackings of democracy. That’s us stuck in the old Westphalian Nation State framing. For a few years now I’ve tried to persuade people what we’re seeing is a return to monarchical governance.… https://t.co/kJZCGvkZgu
As idiocy mounts in all areas of life, maybe we will come to understand that it’s only the catastrophic collapse caused by snowballing idiocy that has ever fundamentally changed societies. Tell me what else would, right now.
How good is China, and their weapons of mass renewables transformation? https://t.co/YoOJ6iUNbG
The entire global infrastructure of governance, deriving from the Westphalian settlement in the 17th century, is falling apart. Most of our interpretations of what’s happening, including the idea ‘fascists’ are taking over ‘democracies’, are based in the old Westphalian… https://t.co/Ad7GVEnxFM