June 2026
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
The stupidity of the idea of a housing market. There's no way to create affordable housing without depressing the prices for existing owners. Only once in all human history has housing been widely available and affordable. Post-WW2, when governments built the houses. https://t.co/IyXg54LdYe
‘Destroy AI’ is just the latest idiot social media viral trend. I’m hoping AI itself destroys social media, and its hijacking of civilisations with viral trending imitative rivalry.
It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide. Here’s why. /1 https://t.co/yZACYgU5xJ
Social networking was happening for years before social media emerged. People making connections with other people, for a whole variety of reasons. ‘Networking’. Overwhelmingly what drove those older networks was topics of interest. The content. /2
Social media then came along, and literally hijacked social networking. It added two specific things that not only made its owners obscenely rich and powerful, it tapped into the DNA of human life and behaviour. It had no idea about the Pandora’s Box it had opened. /3
Social networking was much more about knowledge, than about sociality itself. It wasn’t really a rival to the social organisation of societies, it enriched the existing social organisation. Social media took off because it did the opposite. /4
It went from hijacking social networking, to hijacking societies themselves. By introducing something humans can’t resist, the basis of all human behaviour. Imitative comparison between people. The rot started with ‘likes’. /5
The emphasis shifted from the content of what people posted (social networking), to the *popularity* of what they posted (likes). The rest is history. An entire economy of popularity exploded into life, on the platforms. Likes and the ‘influencers’ who generated them. /6
Mimetic rivalry is the basis of all human civilisation. Or to be more accurate, the control and suppression of mimetic rivalry is. Mimetic rivalry unchecked leads to uncontrolled violence and destruction. Rene Girard showed us this. /7
Gabriel Tarde showed more than a century ago, left to themselves humans will imitate one another to the exclusion of all else, in their every waking moment. But this imitation produces rivalry, violence. They copy others to fit in, to have status, in social groups (teams). /8
And thus to the ‘comment’ button. Many now deactivate that button in use, because they know the damage it causes. Commenting coupled to the economy of likes becomes the battleground for imitative rivalry. Watch the instant ‘pile-on’ in comments social media posts produce. /9
Comments become the way one social group can launch an incursion into other groups. Like the small army of combustion vehicle boy racers who pile in to every post about EVs. Likes and comments, combined, changed our entire culture. /10
They gave us a social media leader of the free world. The King of the Influencers. He even created his own platform, he showed us the source of his power. The fastest and most profound way to repair our societies today would be to simply turn social media off. /11
The entire edifice of initiative rivalry/populism would collapse, in an instant. But because it’s so entrenched and that won’t happen, AI may be our only hope. It’s already eroding this like-comment mechanism. /12
People are shifting away from the socials and their imitative rivalry, to arbitrate their ‘real’ lives (though we live inside social media now). They’re going to AI, individually, outside their old social media teams. AI’s anti-sociality may save the world. /end
Asking AI why progress on medical research suddenly seems so rapid. https://t.co/GK1VSmThPj
By far the most perceptive and intelligent things posted on this platform rarely get read or liked. Like this piece Turchin refers to, on why AI most likely won’t displace human workers, in the way people think. Technological disruption is rarely automation of human jobs. https://t.co/SaafYkRws6
That is populism. Conversion of all human concerns into us v them team sports. Imitative rivalry, humanity’s deepest and also most destructive desire. Continuous creation of fake new ‘us’ and ‘them’ teams. Watch it every day, in real-time. https://t.co/1wjmTnI8T0
As elsewhere in the West, Covid was making a fundamental improvement to the lives of the poor in the US (red circled). Only catastrophes create meaningful social change. They damage or destroy an existing status quo. ‘Living with’ Covid was the status quo’s desperate save. https://t.co/uwbO9Zkvl0
Engineering trumps all human debate. Pretty much all debate is a total waste of your time, generated only by humans fighting each other for social status. A completely unnecessary, destructive detour for the improvement of material well-being. https://t.co/8eV3nz5ERW
Societies don’t (and never have) run on information. They run on status. The only time knowledge is used to better human existence is when status is attached to it. Victorian England and Rome both figured out how to do that. Both societies dominated by engineers. https://t.co/tyATutksYj
Only catastrophic disruption or destruction brings significant change. Often driven by those trying to preserve the status quo. The Trump White House’s adventures in Iran have dramatically accelerated the collapse of the current normal. https://t.co/5uKnlOjqjY
If I had to have a stab at figuring out that decline in health, I’d have ‘being repeatedly infected by a pandemic pathogen’ higher than them skipping their daily exercise. https://t.co/Pvjqc9WCsB
The ICE vs EV fake debate shows all the ways revolutionary change happens. An almost exact mirror of the earlier horse-car transition. The seeds are always already there, and then catastrophic, disruptive events drive tipping point, runaway change. https://t.co/1eaAQERdj5
We’re not living in ‘late-stage capitalism’. We’re living in a giant high school, full of kidults. Adolescents have always loved cars. In Australia, there are 4 times as many cars, as there are children. This pattern of ownership is repeated across the Kidult West. https://t.co/YGQHvhC1pT
The danger here is adopting the spin of the populist conquerors. All populists pretend to be the champions of the downtrodden, because they’re actually elites and these are the people least likely to vote for them. They target status. ‘You are losing your country’… /1 https://t.co/40Dssbk5CH
‘…foreigners are taking your jobs and imposing their weird cultures’, ‘inner city elites are screwing you’, etc. blah blah. The populists are elites. Rival elites. They target status to try to overthrow the status quo. All humans crave status. /end
Intelligence has always been largely ‘artificial’, largely the use of tools. Even basic language is a tool, try thinking without its embedded and inherited wisdom. We worry about AI when we really should be shutting down social media. The former may end the latter, for us. https://t.co/aXrbebuptb
The in-plain-sight trashing of democratic institutions should alert us that Trump wasn’t just a problem of people electing the wrong person. The institutions themselves have been under continuous assault from the late-1970s. They only thrived in post-war emergency repair times. https://t.co/WZW3tBEynT
AI debates are framed mostly by Terminator movies. Intelligence and consciousness residing in opposing human and silicon brains. In reality AI is the latest stop in a long historical trajectory of humanity gradually externalising and mobilising its own cognitive capacities. https://t.co/sMxZrNApVX
Working class revolts aren’t led by the richest people in the country, opening a Trump franchise. https://t.co/PduDBtg16I
One thing many years on this and other platforms has taught me is that outside people’s specific area of expertise, their understanding of how societies operate is mostly a script from some terrible Hollywood movie.
When you actually work with the public, in government, Elinor Ostrom’s critical empirical work showing regulation and enforcement as key to any sort of free community life really rams home. Freedom comes from regulation and enforcement. They’re shared baselines, or standards. https://t.co/4z30bV7qs5
The medium is the message. The content of social media is almost entirely irrelevant. It’s not the internet, it’s social media. Networking people is fine. Transforming them algorithmically into rival teams cannibalising civilisation in their team sports is collective suicide. https://t.co/4NoBTYFntK
If you surrender control of societies to a mechanism - elections - that grants ultimate power to those whose only capability is popularity, this is how it ends. No business would last a year using that same mechanism. Competence needs to be the mechanism, not popularity. https://t.co/EKaC5vEo7v
Our models for democracy are really fantasies. In reality our political ‘system’ was replaced by these algorithms some time ago. Societies are social, not political. The algorithms are determining how societies function. We live inside social media now, it replaced society. https://t.co/4NoBTYFntK
The explosive self-harm of American culture has two ingredients. Relentless, centuries-old hostility towards public institutions, and towards regulation more generally. Married to social media platforms which replace those institutions with popularity-based coordination.
Trump isn’t a fascist takeover of America. He’s American culture in its purest form, its endgame. A plutocracy enabled by a constitutional hostility towards government, and ‘public’ anything. Without a public and institutions, you’re left with richest person still standing.
The great lie of the pandemic was that public health action was unpopular and damaged people and economies. Public health was invented to prevent that. And it did. The rush to ‘re-open’ was the status quo protecting its rapidly declining influence. Normalising doing nothing. https://t.co/nNSGUiRMpY
Link: https://t.co/HR45xLEPn8
And as Paul Ewald might say, what’s a major cause of inflammation? Infection. Civilisation is the control of infection. Not living with it. https://t.co/ALU0mNCLHx
The US is being destroyed by social media. It has a social media President, overseeing the brutal replacement of public institutions with ‘influencers’. And its underlying belief system cheers it on. Calling social media free speech is truly hilarious. https://t.co/zwYwjCvjH1
The ‘ boost’ feature is of course designed to make your ‘free speech’ even more free. By paying for it. https://t.co/3xYEYNouWl
Spotify doesn’t organise people into teams battling for status by dismantling the trust that underlies public institutions and collective life. Billionaires create these platforms to accelerate their power and influence. Trump created his own, when booted off Twitter. QED. https://t.co/XuZmUgXPJp
The arguments over free speech are bizarre because both sides of the debate are fictions. Free speech is impossible. Speech is unintelligible if free from restraint. It’s restraint that creates meaning.
The concept of a minority betrays a replacement of the concept of a public with a majority. A public is not a majority. Populism replaced public life with a calculus of popularity.
The current hysteria around resource usage of AI data centres. It’s entirely in proportion to what humanity has devoted historically to cognition. First as individual brains, then institutionally. AI in fact may *reduce* the resource load of collective cognition. 1/2 https://t.co/Z6PBZsO9JA
Much of our current collective cognitive infrastructure is heavily infected by human status rivalries. Credentialism. If anything AI may restore a more manageable allocation of resources to our collective brain. /end
The worst people in politics and business are usually the existing status quo breaking itself. Team Trump is increasingly like a soccer team who score nothing but own-goals. Humans believe they’re gods who determine their own fates. That vanity accelerates necessary change.
We’ve forgotten Charles Beard, prominent US historian. Beard saw that elites drive all societies. He said the Founders of the US were a cohesive elite of wealthy property owners, slaveholders, and federal bond investors. /1 https://t.co/wCVtIO5c5G
He argued the Founding Fathers designed the US Constitution as a system of checks and balances to protect their own personal financial interests and to deliberately guard against the "tyranny" of popular majorities (the common, propertyless masses). /2
Some may remember this was also central to ancient Greek thought, at the invention of democracy. Preventing ‘mob rule’. Some would also draw the conclusion here that democracy needs to go still further, to have governance at last by the people. /3
But the opposite is true. Elites will always drive how societies operate. Not because they oppress the people, but because humans are social animals, and always act by following a small number of high status people. /4
And in fact it would be both physically and logically impossible for them to do otherwise. No group of people of whatever size can think and act. There is no group mind or will. Humans imitate one another, and what they imitate is status. /5
The only solution to a bad elite is an opposing elite, to destroy the existing status quo. That or an internal or external catastrophic disruption to that status quo. Natural disasters, wars, plagues etc. /end
We’re trapped inside social media bubbles, mistaking their proliferating viral outrages for reality itself. https://t.co/GPN2rdz7rq https://t.co/8xT8X4XJLD
We’re watching a real war now, between social media and AI, as the framework for social life. We make our tools and then our tools make us. I will enjoy every day of the destruction of the social media world of eternal rivalrous bullshit.
I did enjoy that foreign powers use social media, the bubble we live inside, to inject anti-data centre memes into Western life. Hook, line and sinker. https://t.co/0K8Bc7xs79 https://t.co/bscq0wXuEi
Recursion is peak human, humans are 100% imitative. There's no necessary 'refresh' to be had by connecting back to human sources, those are mostly imitative pap already, and have been forever. The connection of AI to reality through sensors and experiments is next stage. https://t.co/xaaMIT0UPJ
The question of our time. Social media *is* the apocalyptic risk it now projects onto AI. We don't see it because it hijacked the essence of human society. Imitative rivalry. We're destroying civilisation by living inside these platforms. https://t.co/re7M08neKw https://t.co/Ju53FUGw7d
Some say they love the sound of a combustion engine. I bet you can’t sell them a house next to a main road.
While genuine grievance can spark a political movement - often the explanation given for populism - it’s not what sustains it. Past a tipping point, the movement is only about the imitative rivalry between people. It’s just a pile-on. Contagion is the true danger. Of all forms. https://t.co/JTYPn6B4iQ
#Insiders
Contagion is the root of all crisis for civilisations. Not just infection, but contagion of all forms. The greatest indicator of danger for any society is the degree of uncontrolled contagion. And any technology like social media whose operating principle is viral contagion. https://t.co/FUIxO71OPN
It’s amazing that most admit no meaningful action can be taken on serious issues close to an election. But few say, ‘so - are elections the problem here?’