We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play in this pandemic. /1

The raw material of society is beliefs. Beliefs are the building blocks of all societies. Everything solid or ‘physical’ you see is constructed ultimately of beliefs too. Like our ‘hybrid’ junk NBN. Beliefs aren’t separate, they’re woven into the fabric of everything. /2

The Covid pandemic is the same. It doesn’t matter how many dire health and medical statistics you throw at it, the trajectory never shifts - more infections, more deaths. The most dangerous illusion is that facts have some sort of free-floating existence that compels action. /3

They just don’t. Even basic history and philosophy of science teaches you that all facts only exist within a context of assumptions and beliefs. Covid minimisers have given people a masterclass in this for the past 2.5 years. Every fact is easily re-framed by them as meaning…/4

…something else entirely, some positive thing. They don’t need to argue the facts, they reframe the context instead. A ridiculously out of control novel virus becomes ‘living with the virus, just like the flu’. And so many other examples. /5

The message here is, go after the core beliefs. The context. Covid is entrenched because we’re not doing that, though there are green shoots of resistance. The context of Covid is *exactly* the same beliefs that stymied action on climate change. I Tweet about them a lot, the…/6

…assumption that there is no society but rather just billions of individuals, who interact in a ‘market’ and somehow miraculously produce civilisation as we know it, with plenty of assistance from a mysterious ‘invisible hand’. To Covid minimisers, action against Covid…/7

…is bad because it represents interference with the market, that delirious fiction of individuals magically figuring out all of our problems by themselves. Our NBN again is just one of thousands of obvious examples of the insanity of this belief, we’ve all struggled for…/8

…years with the stupidity intrinsic to its design. It made no difference, all of those frustrated individuals were powerless to actually change the network architecture, until that change was led, now by the ALP. (And more importantly, it was the telecommunications ‘market’…/9

…which gave us the telecommunications mess in the first place that the NBN was designed to overcome). This is the true enemy here, the belief that societies don’t exist and everything is just individuals, and anything that tries to regulate or coordinate those individuals…/10

…is a form of tyranny that destroys the free-flowing market. Why the minimisers are determined to reject masks, it has nothing AT ALL to do with science or medicine, it’s a political freedom thing. All public health actions are tyranny in this belief system, because…/11

…(they think) the ‘public’ is a fiction. It’s why they focus on medicine in this pandemic, and reject public health. Individual health fine, collective health - tyranny. But this all gets more interesting, because reality clearly shows that these beliefs are false. /12

Every time these political libertarians strip away some public or other coordinating mechanism, people just reinstate it in another way. Getting government out of peoples lives more generally just puts business into those lives instead, for example. Things that were…/13

…previously offered as public services are now offered by private providers, with much lower of economies of scale and coordination, and thus higher costs and inefficiencies. The point is, the coordination is always needed, they’ve just shifted who does it. And for many…/14

…who hold these beliefs, that’s the actual intent. They don’t believe in a free market of interacting individuals any more than I do. They just want to shift the coordinating hierarchy in charge to one directed by themselves and friends instead. I said I’d use Twitter as…/15

…an example, and will end by doing that. Twitter on face value looks like a political libertarian dream, a free market of ideas and discussions, free of regulatory interference. But look at how Twitter actually works. It’s as hierarchical as anything else, the overwhelming…/16

…majority of Tweets revolve around a small handful of Tweeters with large followings (my back of the envelope estimate is that all groups follow about 5% of their members, in any context). The free market fails again, reinstating the same hierarchies it wanted to replace. /17

And notice how as a person accumulates more and more followers on Twitter, their capacity to interact with any individual there diminishes exponentially. They physically can’t possibly maintain the connections and conversations. That’s not a limitation, that reflects how…/18

…society has always worked. 95% of people follow the 5% who they find useful and persuasive. Once a person passes a threshold of follower numbers here, they become much more a broadcaster than a participant. Which is the model Twitter was designed to replace, coming back…/19

…in through the back door. There’s no reason to be alarmed by that either, it reflects the basic reality of all societies, of all eras. The 5% will always emerge, hopefully connected to accumulated wisdom and expertise (social media is much weaker there). /20

To finish, the way to beat Covid is to attack the core market-based beliefs that create and sustain it. And to do that, to target the 5% of ‘influencers’ of those beliefs, rather than the 95% of people who follow that belief system. Twitter does a bit of that, but with Covid…/21

…too often it goes after medical experts, and not the underlying political beliefs that gives them a platform to minimise Covid. I would bet nearly every Covid minimising expert subscribes in some way to market-based politics. /end