Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian…

Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small businesses of ideas, ‘competing’ daily for customers. A market. /1

Even in resisting the rampant adolescence of society (libertarianism, that’s all it is, in cultural terms, the expansion of high school culture to all of life), we don’t see that our resistance is framed by that same movement. /2

The kids at school complaining because the school bullies stole our lunch. How did that work out at school? Badly? Completely ineffective? Does it change anything if you’re on the pro-mask or anti-mask team? On the pro-ventilation or anti-ventilation team? /3

Notice how every issue is split into a neat binary, like team sports, with the teams defined by that split? That’s high school, still acting in our adult lives. Modern conservatives actively promote this, because they know it prevents action on anything, as people argue. /4

That daily team sports is mostly hot air, floating above social collapse. It’s also incredibly tedious to go from dawn to dusk each day policing whatever set of boundaries your particular binaries set up, seeing who is and isn’t wearing a mask in photos, who is or isn’t…/5

…promoting ‘lockdowns’, and so on and on. If you’ve taught teenagers, you’ll know that tragedy becomes more a platform for self-expression, of their own individual grievances. And that’s all of us, now. The pandemic is just more grist to the adolescent team sports mill. /6

Sportspeople wear black armbands now when the third cousin, twice removed, of some physio that works with the team dies. It’s symbolism everywhere, statements, causes, expressions of outrage and identity. High school. Exhausting and unremitting tedium. /7

Most of the problems we need fixed have very practical, simple solutions. We can’t get anywhere near those, through the fog of the team sports. The word ‘woke’ is thrown about with abandon, the hypersensitive outrage caused by symbolism of some kid, somebody used a wrong word. /8

All sides of these tedious debates are ‘woke’, in that way. All obsessively focused only on the symbolic, performative gestures that constitute their daily sport. Good luck if you’re somebody caught up in it, used as a punching bag by both sides in the sports. /9

Is it that hard to see that as the politics of high school, libertarianism, pulverised us into 8 billion independent islands, that the fastest way to make that even worse is to develop 8 billion separate grievance-driven teams? We have the collective institutions already. /10

To solve all of these problems. Unions, government officials, expert bodies, engineers, etc. All tied in knots by this daily adolescent team sports, that achieves nothing. Social media is the enabling platform for this. Why I often say we’d be better off without it. /end