May 2026
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
The dangerous thing about social media isn’t misinformation. People transact their actual lives, on it. Whole communities, to the tiniest level of detail (‘whose cat is leaving footprints on my car?’). The anatagonistic structure of the platforms then becomes your society.
Yes. But the even bigger lie is that there is such thing as ‘the economy’. It’s a strategic, political con, to bypass government. Like some cyborg entity that operates independently of human societies and their social relations. https://t.co/nnRigynSrj
Tipping points are being reached, but it’s at this stage governments need to press even harder, to accelerate the transition. There is no ‘market’ that can create fundamental change. Winning world wars wasn’t market-led. https://t.co/5KXVwNO8wD
We’re trapped in the Westphalian bubble. We think everything leaders do has to be framed through the lens of State sovereignty and democratic process. Those are both outcomes of the Westphalian agreements. Populism is reverting to *pre-Westphalian* royalism. https://t.co/EeFu5JlfeS
It took 20-30 years between the introduction of combustion vehicles to Australia, and the existence of a widespread centralised fuelling network. EVs already well on track to easily eclipse that rate. Not least because a centralised charging network won’t be the final model. https://t.co/jtw0mQ1Y4r
The men and women who built the original Snowy Hydro scheme, a renewable energy project that helped create modern Australia, would surely feel violated by 2026 politics. Anti-immigration. Anti-renewables. A disgrace to their legacy. https://t.co/dwFfs2P8F3
When America rejected monarchy, it became a plutocracy. Status will always drive societies, manifested in different ways, unless there’s catastrophic disruption to a status quo. You can see tax rates went up only when world war suppressed the status quo. https://t.co/IotFu2cElb
The conservative Stanley Fish pointed out the nonsense of debates over free speech. Speech can never be free. Nothing in life is free. ‘Free’ speech is speech devoid of any connection with reality. It’s that connection - a restriction - which makes speech intelligible.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that we think great intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. AI, for example. Intelligence absolutely is a threat to our standard way of being human. Our eternal rivalries over status.
I read that Google in its early days had a stringent hiring policy, with all (?) hires vetted from the top. The reason? A belief that even one hired idiot would become a nucleus of idiocy, within the organisation. There’s real wisdom about humans, in that choice. /1
We’re determined to live multiple myths about human beings, in politics, business and elsewhere. One of the greatest of these is the idea that humans and their organisations and societies operate as information processors. A rationalist fantasy. /2
For several years here I’ve shared work that shows that humans instead *always* act socially, first and foremost. And acting socially means they act, as people like Will Storr and Rene Girard show so brilliantly, in rivalry with other humans, for status. /3
Imitative rivalry, Girard’s ‘atomic’ level of all human belief and behaviour. We imitate others, to belong to social groups, in rivalry with others within that group and then against other groups, to compete for social status. Social status IS identity, for social animals. /4
We do this to actually be somebody, rather than nobody. You are literally a nobody, without social status. You can say the most brilliant things, from a regionalist point of view. But without social status, you are a non-entity. Nobody will listen or care. /5
As Girard says, you are much more likely to become the scapegoat, when imitative rivalries reach a level of intensity where widespread toxic violence is imminent. The scapegoating mechanism is a release valve, for that danger. /6
To go back to Google’s hiring mechanism, I think social media shows a similar mechanism in play. Its ‘free speech’ (BS) operating principle would be like Google allowing anybody to work there, with no vetting at all. Free speech is always a con. /7
Speech that is free in the way free speech advocates suggest would be like a pumping heart sitting on a table, unconnected to any of the rest of a body. Free speech is not even language. Stripped of any ‘restrictive’ context, it has no meaning whatsoever. /8
It’s just a Trojan Horse disguise for those who wish to bypass established norms, customs and traditions. Who want the right to say and do anything they like, without any resistance from established traditions, and their embedded long wisdom for avoiding violence. /9
So social media over time, and who can’t see this, just becomes the now famous ‘sewer’. Like unvetted hires leading to a culture of exponentially growing idiocy and dysfunction within an organisation. /10
If nobody is making value judgments, the tough calls about what’s right and what isn’t, then it’s a race to the bottom of human decency, intelligence and behaviour. Things will not only become dysfunctional, they will become vile. Toxic darkness. /11
This platform shows it so well. Some old-fashioned social networking remains, a place to swap ideas and connect with interesting people. But it’s a tiny archipelago now sinking in an ocean of uncontrolled toxic rivalry, activating vile, debased depths of experience. /12
Look to the lives and businesses of the most prominent activists for free speech. Do they practice what they preach? Absolutely they don’t. They favour the most ‘authoritarian’ and restrictive behaviours, in the running of their own concerns. The con is up. /end
Yes, and no. The Western ‘world order’ obviously came out of Europe, and in some ways its its problem to solve too. But…Asia? It ran the world before Europe, and is kinda doing it again now, in meaningful, material, grown up ways. But… 1/2 https://t.co/2Wrkwki526
Ultimately all collective order or coordination comes from existential threat. Catastrophe, from within or without. Humans will not ever coordinate or cooperate by themselves. Status drives social animals, rivalry. Only catastrophe defeats status. And engineering. /end
Societies don’t run on information. The more we keep yelling the facts into the void every day, the more demoralised we’ll become, wondering why nothing is happening. Societies run on status. Science was never listened to, it just once had status. Now it doesn’t. https://t.co/YAzz7IGkop
In kidult populist culture, all social roles relating to the material operation of societies are stripped away and replaced by pure popularity. To then have a role and therefore be somebody, you have to invent new identities. ‘Identity politics’. 1/2 https://t.co/ZVdzC57EpN https://t.co/sMCH4SGymL
All the meaningless ‘sides’ of politics do it. It’s a culture, the Left v Right nonsense is just more identity politics, within the same populist/kidult culture. We’re cosplay adults. Fighting for status and identity in our social teams, while Rome burns. /end
It fascinates me that Girard came to believe in a deity not through any faith, but via his study and analysis of the scapegoating mechanism in societies. He thought it was so deeply entrenched, that Christianity’s targeting of it specifically was beyond human possibility. https://t.co/dfFAIQrkR8
There’s a muscular, macho stupidity about calls for ‘calm’ in response to threats now. It’s normalisation of the status quo at work of course, the attempt to head off any change. It’s not a call for calm action. It’s a call to do nothing, and to label action as hysteria.
Trump rhymes with both pump. And dump. https://t.co/W5meiPbBi0
The Trumptanic is going down. https://t.co/0ouUamMCFv https://t.co/KRX1Nvbs4y
Populism swings between landslides for either side, often within only a few years. The UK has had 6 PMs in 10 years. Politics has been transformed into trending fads and fashions. Because societies are now social media. Popularity (elections) is not a basis for governance. https://t.co/VREfhebGMN
The stripping away of all democratic checks and balances, including the law itself, is not fascism. Fascism is a State-phenomenon, another Westphalian bubble concept. It’s the re-emergence of what preceded the Westphalian agreement that created modern States. Royalism. 1/2 https://t.co/vGzKp7gSwt
Neo-royalism. These checks and balances didn’t have their origin in any democratic movement. They were controls placed by rival elites, upon other elites, like kings. Trumpism is the attempt to remove those controls and restore an absolute king. /end
Human institutions evolve to curtail the power of the most elite, instigated by counter-elites, and/or catastrophe. Institutions lead to relative peace and prosperity. Status games thrive in peace and prosperity, and attack institutions as ‘bureaucracy’. Return to step 1.
The RedBridge survey on EV use in Australia highlights something I’ve talked about for years. Politics is a completely decoupled layer of hot air rivalry, overlaid upon material reality. Material reality - ‘Reality Politics’ - is now winning, on EVs. Opinions are bullshit. https://t.co/vcFTqto6NN
The chattering team sports of ‘politics’ will be awash with discussion of One Nation’s win in a by-election. Big material shifts in society are ignoring the political team sports. Routing our material problems through those team sports - through ‘politics’ - is a redundancy. https://t.co/dihaVqcaXx
Following every election is the search for what it means. Elections have no meaning. They’re a popularity contest. That’s all they are. There is no link between popularity and our material lives. It’s a status game overlaid upon those material realities. 1/3 https://t.co/imjuydYZvW
The reason we’re seeing more churn, more landslide wins in elections, is that populism has now completely decoupled them from any relevance to the issues facing us. They’re just viral trending fads and fashions. 2/3
Elections have entrenched populism as civilisational suicide. Popularity is entirely separated from reality, its function is only status in social systems. Combined with social media, where we now live, and its likes and followers, and we’re accelerating our collapse. /end
I think the lesson from Farrer is that if you offer voters One Nation-lite, they’ll go with the full sugar version. https://t.co/v9lVghjJpx
The sad truth is that this continued disaster is all that was ever going to shift the fossil fuel status quo. Catastrophe is all that ever does. And so often the catastrophe is of the status quo’s own making, as its disconnect from actual material reality plays out. https://t.co/kMblbfGQiC
American culture will realise much too late that ‘the people’ is a fiction. It’s a fiction that is destroying America. https://t.co/oe04pop6MI
Trump seems to be asleep in everything I see him in now. https://t.co/TIjbLy3biB
Those with a bit of wisdom and long experience in running societies know this sort of thing is a critical breakdown in basic social functioning. You open this door, it doesn’t close again. The mob is indiscriminate. https://t.co/Cj5qQfbcv6
Rationalism is a type of religion, the belief that human concepts are the root cause of all things. You don’t even need to be religious to see the vanity in that, as if all knowledge and meaning in the world comes only from the human mind. https://t.co/T1UPr9vVF8
If you hit somebody with your car and they die, you will be charged and likely spend time in jail. If you’re a politician or one of their appointed public health human shields, you can kill millions unnecessarily, and get a gong for it. https://t.co/C4MVIo5P7N https://t.co/Xs9ceV8CF0
The redress on capital gains tax and negative gearing was long overdue. But it won’t give us affordable housing. Unaffordability is about status. You need to smash the status attached to land and dwellings. Only once in all of history did we do it. It took 2 world wars. https://t.co/4DEEYpJta4
Gods reminded humans that their fates were largely out of their hands. It put a brake on human status games and focused attention on the material realities of life. Without restraint on status, humans just fight for it. All day, every day. Each wanting to be a god. https://t.co/r35k9IMnlI
The electricity grid is a model for society, not just a service. There is no real ‘local’ or ‘global’ in a grid. It collapses that distinction. Fake debates on the socials won’t change the world. Electrifying your life will, with immediate global impact. https://t.co/JvKgKokAhz
A brand is a team, in the imitative rivalry ‘team sports’ status games that define all human life. Societies don’t run on information. People choose brands for status and identity. There are no markets, just rival teams. All ‘market comparison’ tools fail for this reason. https://t.co/G9TmAkco3u
‘Living with the virus’ arose during Covid. It was a designed wrecking ball through all of public health, replacing alert and calm swift action with platitudes about remaining calm. It’s GBD free market strategy. Paint public health as hysteria. https://t.co/Xl2x0TPLUg https://t.co/NInnFyEyAz
In the 19th century Jules Verne excited people with visions of collective technological progress. Today we live in an adolescent ‘kidult’ culture of trends. No collective excitement of building anything remarkable. Just fights for social status. Eternal adolescence. https://t.co/Oco8366lGA
These checks and balances on power derive from rival elites imposing them upon ruling elites. Or from catastrophe destroying all elites. https://t.co/dp4nziNWkg
Jane Caro on private versus public schools in Australia. The real reason people flock to privates is status. They’re perceived as a higher status place to be, and to give connection to networks of higher status people. All societies run on status. They’re 100% social. https://t.co/5R7xczlmug
Kings are back. It’s not authoritarianism or fascism. It’s royalism. The dominant social model throughout all history, except since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which created ‘sovereign’ nation States. That Westphalian model is now in tatters. Kings are back. /1 https://t.co/TRDwzXZEWo
This isn’t a bad or a good thing (though is likely more good than bad). It’s the default organisation for human society throughout all known history, re-asserting itself. Our populist tyrants are just re-activating the old King model, which never went away. /2
This week two of the other modern kings - Xi and Trump - got together. Kings act in personal networks of allegiances that cross our Westphalian State boundaries. /3 https://t.co/NnWoBNMvz8
As Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins describe in their book ‘On Kings’, kingship is like the baseline for all human existence. Even our vaunted ‘democracies’ replicate kingship, by simply putting a fiction called ‘the people’ on the sovereign’s throne. /4 https://t.co/Ylzb7N6iVK
You can find modern scholars making the same leap here, describing the emergence of ‘neo-royalism’. https://t.co/ou4eUZgk2b An international network of ‘hyper-elites’. All societies are *always* run by elites. Our fiction of ‘the people’ blinds us to what’s happening. /5
Societies are always run by elites because human life operates via social status. Those who win status games are by definition the elites. I’ve Tweeted a lot about how you can’t remove status as the operating principle of human life. You can only manage or control it. /6
Will Storr analysed ‘success’ status hierarchies, how status was used in Victorian England and the wider Republic of Letters, to couple status to collective progress, through knowledge and engineering. Without that coupling, you just get an empty, brutal populism. /7 https://t.co/8lSTO8ajXJ
I’ve also Tweeted before the two main institutional ways that emerged, in that Burkean understanding of institutions as emergent responses to social threat, to tame status. Monarchies and religions. Both centralise status games in a managed central status hierarchy. /8
With a God and/or a King at their top. Transcendent status figures, that suck the oxygen out of widespread social status games. You can’t be a King or a God, so give up trying, etc. And this is likely what we’re seeing now, with the resurgence of royalism. /9
Emergent structures to tame the chaotic, exponential increase in status games, largely through social media. Our new kings are the emergent way societies are trying to tame that violent chaos. It may fail, it’s not a project by any person or group. It’s emergent. /end
It’s striking that the idea dreams (or memories) reside in the brain isn’t seen as rank mysticism. Henri Bergson more than a century ago said as much. As Bergson said, dreaming/memories return us to the past itself, which never passes. It continues to exist, in a virtual state. https://t.co/XkqBYsrKC8
Calm-mongering, the deliberate political strategy to paint public health as hysteria, and those who practise it as mentally ill oppressors. https://t.co/rjtcTfWCFw
Worth remembering every time the world as a whole looks like a collapsing train wreck. Tiny numbers of people generate the world’s mis/disinformation and obstructive hysteria. It would take about a day for proper regulators to identify them on social media and shut them down.
The modern conservative drivel that government gets in the way of achievement and prosperity. It works as strategy, because societies run on status. People aspire to higher status. Government *is* civilisation. Without it there are only warring gangs. https://t.co/OHCo2Vy1F0
America has never been a secular democracy. It’s always been a post-revolutionary plutocracy, with lashings of Christian piety. It’s not being overrun by fascists. It’s maturing to its essence, as a culture. https://t.co/4YCjuLaqEE
Imagine a major company changing CEO every two years. With each new CEO expected to introduce a fundamental change of direction. Nothing meaningful would get done, and the company would collapse. Electoral democracy does this to countries. https://t.co/lms9pWeInW
Turchin notes that mass tertiary education causes a dramatic escalation of elite rivalry, as frustrated graduates excluded from the elite develop ideological war machines. ‘The people’ don’t create revolutions. They’re foot soldiers to the causes of elite rivals. https://t.co/rVpcOQeK2g
AI describing the Covid pandemic. If this is hallucination, I’m not sure the best word to use for the relentless tidal wave of horseshit I read on social media every day. https://t.co/0ZknO5oeh5
Talk to your friends and colleagues. Sample the extent of AI use. The culture is shifting profoundly. Worth pondering where people were getting advice from before. AI may be all that can slay the social media civilisational wrecking ball.
Yes. It’s making the underlying operating system visible. https://t.co/LS5dyYDZyo
And yet he’s like Gandhi, when compared to say Henry VIII. We’re not coming to terms with what this populist shift globally is doing. Returning the world to easily its dominant form throughout nearly all human history. We’re stuck in a Westphalian bubble. Royalism is back. https://t.co/fEbeA2DIsz
Few ask why university (or any other) pedagogy is so easily disrupted by AI. Education remains the only major industry where evidence-based practice is almost entirely at the whim of individual institutions and practitioners. https://t.co/zacU0Eod5M
Social media completely fucks over centuries of human progress, but it targets the sweet sugar of imitative status rivalry humans can’t resist. So AI is the enemy instead. AI may be all that can save us from social media. https://t.co/91iQz7Qs5B
AI’s contribution to the Covid pandemic - enabling dramatic acceleration of vaccine development. Social media’s contribution to the pandemic - destroying public health in its entirety, as a practice and outcome.
Here’s a window into kidult culture. Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. Kidults love dogs because they’re pliable and lavish us with seeming unconditional love (which is really more pack loyalty). 1/3 https://t.co/Ou4gxuExUr
If a virus created long-term risk to our dogs, kidult culture would fall over itself to fix it. Covid is that long-term risk to children. What do we do? Nothing. Even worse, we *deliberately* infect them, to protect the kidults, through fake population immunity. 2/3
I’m tired of all the empty ‘political’ explanations for our culture today. It’s just an entrenched and unchanging adolescence. Shorn of adult responsibility for adult things. ‘Living your best life’ recreational vacuity. An entire culture on a gap year from reality. /end
We’re casual about infection for 3 main reasons. Antibiotics, vaccination, and flat-out ignoring of viral persistence and the chronic impact of infections. All infections. https://t.co/iDo8yXj0Au
Henry VIII was systematically corrupt, by modern definitions, even debasing the coinage to cheat his creditors. We’re not in ‘politics’, as defined since the Westphalian shift to nation States. We’re returning to royalism. Neo-royalism, as scholars now call it. https://t.co/KYkIs50ir6
Who cares what people think? It’s like polling people to decide between optimum neurosurgery techniques. Most won’t have a clue. Nor should they, they have their own work. This is our delusional idea of democracy being ‘the people’ running countries, in action. https://t.co/q4gNbp4voq
Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is baffled. /1 https://t.co/77e1AU5zlY
It says this is just the rising up of millions of people who have felt ignored by traditional politics. Who are doing it tough. They’re trending ‘Right’. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The LCR lens is hopelessly disconnected from reality. /2
All shifts in human life are led. And then followed. We have the causation backwards. Led by ‘elites’, followed by everybody else. Elites spinning narratives about how they’re here to rescue people. But really just wanting to promote their position in the status quo. /3
Or to supplant that status quo entirely, with a new one. An absolute favourite for rival elites is to claim to be speaking for ‘the people’, whom they say are being screwed by the existing status quo. Everyone on the LCR spectrum claims to be doing that same thing. /4
All claim to be fighting for ‘the people’, an empty and non-existent thing, as if populations of millions have some sort of active group mind, but are for some reason incapable of speech. @Peter_Turchin’s work identifies this elite rivalry that drives all change. /5
He combines it with an ‘immiseration’ of the wider population as key ingredients for sparking change. On the latter I think he’s maybe on the wrong track. He’s adopting the same LCR idea that the people is a thing, and only mobilises when being screwed. /6
It’s very standard LCR mythology, that economics is the dominant existential framework for people’s lives. “It’s the economy, stupid”. That guff. Marry it to LCR thinking, and you have modern politics. /7
Now being swept away with increasing and alarming speed by populist movements. Plenty who sign onto these movements are doing OK, economically. Money doesn’t run societies. Information doesn’t either. Societies run on status. /8
Progressives try to help the immiserated, and are rarely rewarded for it. Have a look at Albo this week facing a barrage of heat from the immiserated young people he was trying to help. Look at that word. ‘Aspiration’. Conservatives trot it out obsessively. /9 https://t.co/I9Kw1rfuEd
They know in the way progressives don’t that status runs societies. That’s what people aspire to. Higher status, or having any status at all. Not money. Research actually shows people will choose status, if they have to pick between that, and money. /10
Make a person a ‘team leader’ at work, and you neuter their dissatisfaction at being poorly paid. You can even make a team leader do a manager’s work, for no extra money. We need to go to people like Girard, and Tarde, and Storr, to understand what’s happening to us. /11
The rise of Trump-like movements isn’t some heroic coming to the rescue of the downtrodden. They’d love you to think that, it’s the spin most elite rivals use. These populists are already elite. They’re fighting other members of that elite. Turchin is spot on there. /12
The followers they accumulate though aren’t just looking for a better life, economically. Again many of them are already doing fine. They want status. They’re imitating these elite rivals, in their own imitative rivalry (Girard). /13
Societies have lost their status hierarchies. The great ‘democratic’ experiment of making everybody equal status is a train wreck, when you understand status. An incendiary accelerant of status rivalry. /14
The more similar people become, the more they imitate one another, the more ‘social’ they become, the more rivalry will intensify, and the more violent societies will become. Imitative rivalry. People fighting to differentiate themselves from others, in status. /15
That’s why ‘aspiration’ works, for conservatives, representing the most elite of a current elite. Promising millions that they too can join them, if they ‘aspire’ to that position. Of course it’s bullshit, that transition never happens. But they know their target. /16
The global wave of populism we see isn’t a global rising up of the immiserated, fired up by elites battling one another for supremacy. That latter rivalry is what’s leading the shift, but its motive force is the absence of a strong centralised status hierarchy . /17
Monarchies and religions were those hierarchies, that controlled status rivalry. Both by making the top of those hierarchies transcendent, in the sense that none of us can really be kings, or gods. That one step sucks the oxygen out of widespread status rivalries. /18
As scholars are now saying, time to step outside the Westphalian analytical bubble, which can only see everything through LCR-State-economic categories. What we’re seeing is the rebirth of royalism. Easily humanity’s most dominant social form. /19 https://t.co/ou4eUZgk2b
And as Girard said, what eventually enabled Western civilisation at least was the use of Christian belief to relocate the scapegoat of status rivalry into the divine itself. He found that impossibly unlikely, that humans would voluntarily sacrifice status in this way. /20 https://t.co/NUU25J3DqW
It converted him to a believer, in some form of supernatural intervention in human affairs. With no pre-existing ‘religious’ skin in the game. But that’s for another day. /end
“…actually on so many of these big challenges we’re facing, it’s not necessarily Left versus Right. It’s actually vested interests, and their stranglehold on the major parties, versus the Australian people.” @DavidPocock nailing it. And a physique just like mine. https://t.co/KbLqyZAqIk
I was going to say I lost my hair without a clinical trial. @DavidJoffe64 thoughts? https://t.co/mHe2oUUeqZ
Yes. But ‘corruption’ is a concept from within our frameworks of Westphalian nation States. Trump is a global push to restore the pre-Westphalian status quo. Of kings, ultra-elite individuals, who act independently of States. Henry VIII was far more ‘corrupt’ than Trump. https://t.co/aae4TF1TM8
And we’re too quick to say this sort of thing is Covid. Sometimes it isn’t, but rather the generalised normalisation of infection of any kind. ‘Living with Covid’ was a political tool which will destroy the basis for our entire culture and civilisation. https://t.co/xAl8FTGPKL
Like entire crowds of graduates booing speakers who talk about AI, in universities. Social media has transformed democracies into gang warfare, each gang with its particular righteous cause, in imitative rivalry within the gang and with other gangs. The medium is the message. https://t.co/5GV9o3QvIE
Anti-AI is the latest trending righteousness. Trends are Girard’s imitative rivalry, social groups weaponising things to create status/identity. Bruno Latour always said the technological is what makes us humans. Making tools is the defining human act. https://t.co/a8wXGkcxvO
I would love to know how much the thrilling acceleration of progress in this and many other areas of medical science right now is thanks to the use of AI. From what I’ve read, it’s very heavily involved in the rapid progress. https://t.co/VTWLIWQzXh
The pearl-clutching about the growth of data centres might want to look at causation here, and see it as a key indicator of the degree of AI penetration into all facets of life. And avoid the pearl-clutching there too, and actually analyse the profound cultural shift underway.
The medium is the message. The medium creates interminable debates, it feeds our deepest need for imitative rivalry. You can be here every day fighting for clean air, or to end Trump’s rein, or whatever. All it produces is more fighting. Fighting is the only ‘content’. https://t.co/DwhOEPN6gS
My understanding is that the ‘platform’ that is key to these sorts of successes has AI and machine learning as central components. And that’s a good thing, but not foregrounded, from what I can see. Only apocalyptic Hollywood-Terminator narratives about AI trend. https://t.co/j9VC2RZmrV
AI is transforming our culture in almost every way, in the same way that social media did decades ago. But much more quickly. And I think on balance in a profoundly curative way. AI is our only hope of rescuing civilisation from social media. I think it’s that important. /1 https://t.co/LRAnjNaKch
Why such sweeping claims? For two reasons. One because I think the toxicity of social media is almost universally misunderstood and understated. Social media creates hypersociality. Sociality is violence. Hypersociality is collapse of civilisations. Mass imitative rivalry. /2
This is wilfully unseen because the most popular assumption in play is the opposite, that mass sociality is the growth of ‘the people’ running societies. It’s ‘democracy’, flourishing. This is an almost universal belief, shared by users and owners of these platforms. /3
It’s horseshit. As Girard spent a career trying to show, it’s a recipe for complete civilisational collapse. Societies run on status, and making the status of all equivalent, in ‘the people’ way, is an astronomical accelerant of status rivalry. /4
Control of that rivalry IS civilisation. Centuries of blood and suffering led to emergent institutions, like monarchies and churches, whose most fundamental role was to contain status rivalry and provide space for civilisation to emerge. /5
Social media has been unwinding those centuries of bloody, emergent civilisation in the space of a single lifetime. It is not ‘social networking’. It’s a toxic, weaponised hijacking of that process which destroys all hierarchies of trust in those emergent institutions. /6
The thing AI is doing which is separate to almost everything said about it, is restoring a reference point for status games that is external or relatively transcendent to status games. People are increasingly going to AI for guidance. It is undermining social media’s grip. /7
We know and say incessantly that social media has led entire populations astray, with ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. All attempts to rein that in have failed, because they misdiagnose the actual problem. Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. /8
There is no ‘we’ now. Our mistake is not understanding that. Again. That ‘we’ disappeared from the late-1970s, with the invention of market-based societies. Societies became ‘economies’ (apparently - it’s a fiction). The ‘we’ was invented post-WW2, in societal repair. https://t.co/xXBLwRkXlo
Decided to take a break from hallucinating with AI, to get back to some more real living with infection, the free world run by a reality TV star real estate shonk, and coffee enemas of social media.
A colleague asked why I keep masking at work. “I don’t like Covid.” “O yeh, worse 2 weeks of my life, I never want that again.” They take no precautions for one simple reason. Nobody else is. Humans think and act socially, not individually.
We don’t learn. ‘Public’ backlash to data centres. There is no such thing as ‘the public’ acting wth some sort of agency. This will be activists of some kind, mobilising people against the centres. Just as ‘the public’ never rejected Covid measures. Activists did. https://t.co/XCeiLy9YNY
Stop looking at our lives politically and economically. They’re social. ‘Unaffordable’ housing is really us returning to land as a feudal arrangement. To go alongside our re-energising of the monarchic/regal model of governance (Trumpian populism = royalism). https://t.co/Lh53lKzxnf
Again, what does it say about university pedagogy, that it’s so easy to cheat? Nobody asks the more important questions. https://t.co/v7DpwwG2Rp
Humans and their technologies have always been hybrid entities. The framing of all of this critique of AI is B-grade sci-fi. Tools are what make humans human. https://t.co/4XcxK5bkQm
Neil Chapman of ExxonMobil, on May 28, 2026, at the Bernstein 42nd Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. The Covid model of normalising crisis, to pretend it isn’t happening. Using oil reserves. Just as we’re using immune reserves to pretend Covid is a nothing burger. https://t.co/Mpmc83SJXJ
I pay no attention to all the political categorisations of societies. All the Left/Right, capitalist/communist garbage. None of that is real. China or Asia more generally are the only adults left in the international room. The West is endstage Rome, a circus. https://t.co/ht4aCY0Kmt
The ‘if you stop taking them you’ll get fat again’ criticism of GLP-1 drugs seems like saying if you stop any drug for a condition you have, it may flare. I thought one of the revelations of GLP-1 is that obesity is a metabolic condition. That may need regular drug therapy.
So we want house prices to go down. But not for houses people already own. Just for houses nobody owns. Yet. But once somebody owns those, we want those prices to go up. And unbought houses won’t depress prices on owned houses for sale at the same time. Got it.
Hey #Insiders. I haven’t had an electricity bill in 3 years. I don’t pay a cent for petrol or diesel either. Now just waiting for the dullards to catch up.
Remembering, only catastrophic disruption removes a status quo. We need to think hard about what we’re defending, in scenarios like this. https://t.co/C5rT7FHXNH
Open questions now about a possible Prime Minister Hanson. Something I haven’t seen noted is that if that were to occur, she’d be Australia’s oldest first-term PM ever, by a considerable margin. Even Menzies’ long run ended when he was 71. Hanson is already 72. https://t.co/mma4d0z1ii
The surge of Trumpian populism, in the UK under Farage and now in Oz under Hanson, is already interpreted as ‘the people’ taking power back. In reality it’s just one more elite, in rivalry with the existing elite. Both backed by big elite donors. ‘The people’ is just the PR. https://t.co/cNtz13xX6R
Nobody takes ‘the medium is the message’ seriously, what it means. We’ll continue to interpret the big populist shifts in Anglo politics using the team sports framing of ‘politics’. In reality it’s the replacement of broadcast media culture, with social media culture. 1/2 https://t.co/hh2Vx4AzkA
Trump is now toast in the US, on borrowed time. His ‘trending’ days are over. Just one more viral fashion or fad. The US is now operating *as* social media, across every aspect of life. That’s the shift. Life as continuously shifting viral trends. /end
Labor was told to be brave, to go hard on big reforms like capital gains and negative gearing. Humans are not economic animals. They’re status animals. Labor now discovering ‘the poor’ don’t like being seen as poor. They like to be seen as the aspirational rich. Status.
Populism is the culture-wide attempt to restore Kings. A quarter of a century is about as good as it gets, which is nothing in historical terms. Populism always founders on succession. Cronyism tries to shoehorn the leader’s family into the role. It rarely works. 1/2 https://t.co/1ix3Aeh52V
Hereditary monarchies emerged to remove any rivalry for the top job. Societies could then pursue non-status things. Electoral democracies compress all of history into 3-5 year cycles. Barely a century on, all are collapsing under populist surges trying to restore kings. /end
Turchin’s work, looking through the lens of elite rivalry instead of our pointless framing of ‘the people’ running things, will save you many years of your life staring incomprehensibly at what’s going on in the world around you. https://t.co/KyFCTkRVMg