The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western…

The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideologies really reflect what actually happens in the world. Why this matters. The ISS can help. /1 https://t.co/QFFimwIwsk

All of these ideologies are mostly caricatures that human groups use as debating points. As the world gets more complex and inter-connected, the disconnect between the ideologies and reality is our greatest obstacle to progress. Take the ISS, as an example. /2 https://t.co/68VpnmPORC

The level of international cooperation required to build and orbit this thing is mind-boggling. It took 3 million person-years to build, the equivalent of 26 billion work hours. The US and Russia jointly started the project, and the Europeans form the rest of the partnership. /3 https://t.co/ZONaYBgMZF

If your view of the world is the news, you won’t get even the tiniest sense of this level of staggering cooperation between these great powers. It’s not even mentioned. To compare, it took about 400,000 person-years to build the Pyramid at Giza, and 100,000 to build the…/4 https://t.co/Rl2jOAyVAH

…Colosseum in Rome. One of the things the recently departed Bruno Latour always emphasised is that it’s the enormous amount of maintenance and upkeep that modern technologies require that is the real glue that binds societies together. They require enormous expertise and…/5 https://t.co/RyCZsjIP58

…ongoing maintenance to build and keep running. And the knowledge and skills required to do that are fully international. The Chinese space station uses the same basic science and engineering as the ISS. One of the reasons I agree with researchers who say elections destroy…/6

…democracies is that far too much of our civilisations now is ‘technical’, requiring expertise to function. No amount of popularity-based politics can ever come close to understanding how any of it works. What needs doing is increasingly not even debatable. /7

It’s engineering much more than it’s politics. And for those who might hysterically jump up and say ‘hey, that’s technocracy!’, meaning (they think) experts hijacking democracy, in my experience as an engineer this always just reflects a total misunderstanding of technical…/8

…things. Engineers don’t just deal with equations and nuts and bolts, any engineering project is intrinsically about meeting the needs of ‘stakeholders’ i.e people. Any project scoping is nearly entirely about that more than about the nuts and bolts. The upshot is, the world…/9

…increasingly doesn’t need vast, generic ideologies to drive it, all of them are about 30,000 feet away from the specifics of what needs doing. We need expertise to run the world, and no that doesn’t mean scientists pulled out of their labs and asked to be Prime Ministers. /10

Our public institutions were already the meeting place between those scientists and the political work of running societies. Bureaucrats, as the libertarians sneer. (A good guide of what is right and correct is if libertarians hate it). If you’ve worked in government…/11

…you know the illusion that our elected representatives run anything much at all is farcical. It’s not their job to run anything, their job is to be the public face and input to the actual running of countries. An important job, but one populism now mistakes with actual…/12

…operational running of countries. Populists politicians seem to actually believe it themselves, that they’re running the country. It’s a joke, they would struggle to organise a cake stall. Every wise-sounding thing they say or do is something their departments of thousands…/13

…of experts have explained to them. That’s the heart of ‘democracy’, those departments, our public institutions. Not the idiot popularity contest every 3 or 4 years to elect reality TV stars and other grifters as ‘leaders’. Twitter can be like that too, people here…/14

…every day arguing over what this or that politicians says or does, as if it actually matters. Populism has fooled us all into thinking that’s the important thing. Politicians come and go more regularly than droughts and floods. Doesn’t it occur to us that countries keep…/15

…running anyway? Who do we think is doing that? We think every new populist Gilderoy learns how to run a complex nation in the weeks between election and taking office? Please. /end