I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause.…

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’ run democracy. Murdoch knows better. /1 https://t.co/ecp12QI5YF

He genuinely does, it’s one thing to hate everything he stands for. But the much more important thing is to understand how he did it. SKY News Australia is a good example. Nobody really watches it, in numbers terms. Most of ‘the people’ certainly don’t. But it survives in…/2 https://t.co/kGcxM15Gu0

…a world where bad ratings usually mean game over. It survives because its purpose never was to be popular, despite it selling a constant stream of populism. Its purpose is to target the 5% of society who actually make the decisions. Politicians and other powerful figures. /3 https://t.co/PBVWNoLGAS

It’s well known that SKY News runs all day in some or even many LNP offices, in parliament. It’s their baseline reference point for the job they do. (Also why they feel increasingly confused when they get smashed at elections, when the drivel SKY feeds them turns out to match…/4 https://t.co/bMTrvJMXrD

…nothing in the wider community). It is true that to be successful in politics, or in anything, you eventually have to get widespread community support. But you don’t START there, trying to convince 25 million Australians to change. You shift the narratives the 5% use, and…/5 https://t.co/nHXB6o9R5f

…let them shift the community over time. As I often say, communities do not lead themselves. All change is led, in all groups, of whatever size. The secret to power and change is to own the narratives the ‘elites’ of society use to guide their decisions. That’s what Murdoch…/6 https://t.co/ZEjsdKEQZV

…has always targeted. It’s what the church did for centuries to coordinate and control societies. We’re poisoned by decades of nonsense about politics being a ‘grassroots’ thing. The Murdoch press often talk of the grassroots, portraying themselves now as the champions of…/7 https://t.co/YykYc5tHyu

…the poor, the battlers. That’s to scare politicians and other leaders, not because they have the slightest concern for the poor. To make them think millions of potential voters might be lost. I think the power of Twitter is not as a mobilising platform for the wider…/8

…population, which seems the dream of many. That can only lead to destructive chaos, as social media more generally shows, where ‘influencers’ supplant all of our traditional leadership hierarchies with their connection to expertise, with people selling coffee enemas. /9

Because social media really is managing to get ‘the people’ running countries now, and it’s a disaster, no other word for it. The big lie that this is what democracy is, now in plain sight, every day. Even the Murdochs of the world are succumbing to this spin they themselves…/10

…created. We’ve unleashed the mob, not democracy. Where the mob is a society completely decoupled from any of its historical expertise, or the institutional hierarchies in which it lives. Not because people are stupid, but because it doesn’t matter how small or large your…/11

…group of people is, roughly 5% of them will ALWAYS lead, and 95% will then follow that lead. It’s how social groups always work, and I’ve Tweeted many times how this conformity is not ‘sheep’ behaviour either. We need to delegate responsibility to people in everything we…/12

…do, because none of us can know everything or have the time to do everything. The power of Twitter is being in the same tent as the existing 5%, for the first time, without having to run through a media network to get that access. To be able to shape the narratives. /13

It’s a high-wire act, because at the same time millions of others use the technology to create brand new hierarchies of influencers, with no clue how to do anything at all in terms of running a society. On balance I suspect it’s a game we can’t win, that social media is the…/14

…libertarian Trojan Horse undermining all of our societies every day, unstoppable. It’s even destroying the libertarians, they don’t understand the carnage they’ve unleashed. It’s implementing their perverse belief system, and showing that it means nothing but destruction…/15

…and chaos. It’s the experimental proof that they’re pathologically crazy. Many Republicans in the US look on as trump steals their party. They thought the Tea Party would do that, Trump swept them away too. But ultimately not even Trump can triumph here, because populism,…/16 https://t.co/25SEF0mcQH

…rule by ‘the people’, cycles new leaders or influencers in a day. Nothing but fads and fashions. Libertarian beliefs destroy everything, including the libertarians. I often get asked to help mobilise people to causes. I never do it, and this is why. It’s the problem, not…/17

…the solution. Democracy isn’t about mobilising people, it’s about managing things so they can get on with their lives without paying much attention at all to running the country. The alternative is a population constantly enraged, by everything. Tell me that’s not what…/18

…you’re seeing. Angry mobs. My time here is about shifting framings and narratives, and learning from expertise in all sorts of areas. Not about mobilising anything. /ending

Apologies for the number of Tweet-breaks in this thread, thanks to those who provided that feedback. I’m mindful of that when writing, but often bash the threads out while eating breakfast and before running out the door to work! Will try harder on the formatting.