The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to…

The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can capture that sort of complexity. My trip to the pharmacy yesterday, short 🧵/1 https://t.co/uKG03n2GUl

I was booked for my 5th Covid shot yesterday at a local pharmacy. After arriving on time, the shot was delayed about 15 minutes, for a reason that made me think about the themes covered in this ABC story. (Journalists write ‘stories’ too, they’re…/2 https://t.co/uKG03n3eJT

…not unlike novelists. George Bernard Shaw described his literary work as a type of journalism.) The reason for the delay at the pharmacist was that an elderly couple had brought their phone bill to the pharmacy, because they didn’t understand it. It obviously had nothing…/3

…to do with the pharmacy at all, but they know and like the pharmacist, he’s a trusted local figure. So they hoped he could help them understand. Echoes of earlier times, when local bank managers and pharmacists and doctors etc. were ‘pillars of the community’,…/4

…beacons of trust that helped shape and steer how the community operated. For many elderly people, this is still how they see community, though the modern world is pretty brutally disabusing them of it in their daily transactions. They want somebody to guide them. /5

It’s an economy of trust, not of dollars. All societies function by trust, the social conformity that shapes all of our collective behaviour is driven by hierarchies of trust. Yesterday’s appalling behaviour by some of Australia’s leading health figures, mocking other senior…/6

…health figures and questioning the value of clean air etc. A perfect example of how trust is destroyed in a society. The public can only look on with disbelief that these are people paid to look after us. But to go back to the ABC article. Online scams. Gotta think like a…/7

…novelist. (h/t to @JohnBirmingham, whose novelist perspective on modern Australian shitfuckery should be compulsory reading). Easy to look at the explosion of online scams as some sort of technical issue. We just need better security, etc. /8 https://t.co/uKG03n3eJT

To me it’s much more than that. This is the world the old couple I saw now faces, what we replaced their world with. The IT industry, with some notable exceptions like Apple, has always proudly followed a libertarian ethos of open and free. Completely ignoring, as Steve Jobs…/9

…knew, how humans actually function. People mostly want something that just works, that they can trust. They used to have that for banking, with the local bank manager, but now the branch is shut down and they have to move online. People who may not even own a computer, or…/10

…mobile phone. I’m not against the shift to more online options, for many it’s also opened up a lot of flexibility in how they live their lives. But it’s how it’s done that matters. As an Apple executive once said when asked why the company had been slow to adopt a…/11

…trending technology, paraphrasing: “it’s easy enough to do it, it’s much harder to do it well”. Much harder to provide something that ‘just works’, seamlessly, which is about much more than bits, bytes and chips. Anyway, standing at the pharmacy yesterday, I could feel…/12

…acutely the clash of two worlds. One that market-based politics forced us to jettison, centred on social networks of trust and community, and replaced by a void at the top, in government and in business, which grifters are now rushing to fill, as social media ‘influencers’…/13

…and online scammers. Nobody knows who to trust is a perfect description of a world where societies are replaced by economies, where each person is an individual unit within an international market, stripped of community touch points. Fighting a pandemic with ‘personal…/14

…responsibility’, torn hither and thither by competing expert opinion in the Twittersphere, as our institutions fracture under constant assault by libertarian fantasy. The institutions people used to trust. We need the novelist’s skill at rejecting the analytical divide… /15

…between the specific and the general, in their stories. Everything universal about life is in every specific detail of it. All the tired old flabby concepts like capitalism and socialism are 30,000 feet away from what’s actually happening out there. /end