The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy…

The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the people’ in various directions. Good people wait for the people to spontaneously resist. They won’t. /1

It’s basic group psychology and also logistics. No group ever acts, as a group. One or a handful of them leads the group in a certain direction. If you want to resist the Economy-god right now, starting at the ‘grassroots’ is like cutting your lawn with scissors. /2

Trying to mobilise ‘the people’ is what human societies did centuries ago, when our current institutional framework for democracy was invented. We don’t want to go back centuries to start that all over again. It plays right into the hands of economy politics to even try. /3

It wants us to think that to defeat it we need to do all of that work all over again, somehow mobilising entire populations. It doesn’t believe any of this ‘the people’ nonsense for one second. It targets the keystones with great precision, instead. /4

It captured our regulatory apparatus with laser guided strategy. It took 50-70 years. The advantage we have today is that social media allows this sort of thing to happen infinitely faster. Things ‘go viral’ in a day that used to take years. /5

But we’re too often using it *within* the frames of the economy pirates. We try to use it to mobilise whole populations. Most people aren’t interested, or are off in la-la land being sovereign citizens and anti-vaxers. Or we fire off limp missives about capitalism. /6

We can use social media to shift the frames. To question the very existence of the economy, and everything that strategic political concept does to structure all of our public conversation and now government. Mock the existing frames. Invent new ones. /7

Most of the population don’t use Twitter. But the 5% who make the decisions mostly do. That 5% is what the economy pirates targeted, 70 years ago. The economy framing is the outcome, and is the root cause of all the crap happening now, including ‘living with’ Covid. /8

The framing to resist is simple. Society is not an economy. Nothing is an economy, it’s a make-believe entity that apparently is the engine room of society. It’s just economic transactions, which themselves are social transactions. And all social transactions are society. /9

Society has not stopped being what our countries are, no matter how many years of Thatcherism and its free markets claim otherwise. Nothing needs to be ‘balanced’ here, what we call economic things are also just social things. As the great Gabriel Tarde said, the root of all…/10

…‘economic growth’ is the basic human act of conversation. That’s the process that creates, circulates, and modifies human desires. Social media brings that conversation to scale. We have to use it in the right ways, by re-framing the dominant frames. /end