I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want…

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’. Furious as in very angry. /1 https://t.co/mXSjrpPAM6

I used Ruben’s Cain and Abel to start the thread, because like Romulus and Remus show too, the foundation of social life is what Girard called mimetic desire. The desire we have for what others have. We imitate others, we emulate them. It’s this that drives our ‘division’. /2

Or in biblical language, we covet, our most fundamental human social act. If somebody else admires something, particularly somebody we hold in high regard, we then want it for ourselves too. Watch kids fighting over toys. That behaviour doesn’t end in childhood. /3 https://t.co/ve3nS7nMm9

Desire is the engine room of all social life. Hilariously today we think economies are, through banal indicators like inflation and interest rates. Boring men in boring suits tell us that, and we believe it! Ha. Desire is what drives all behaviour, including economies. /4

Mimetic (imitative) desire. We imitate others because we desire what they have. The grass is always greener etc. (I am getting to Covid, promise.) ‘Influencers’ are the modern version of the status that drives these mimetic games. Put a celebrity on a bottle of scent. /5 https://t.co/1PHVyIGYX7

It sells. It’s not the perfume we desire, it’s the high-status person who (allegedly) likes the perfume. We desire it because they desire it, we imitate/emulate them. And don’t think this is just about fashions, this exact mechanism functions in every part of social life. /6

Even in science. Full of fads and fashions, like everything else, fuelled by imitative desire of what the highest status scientists like/desire. At this point some might do the pop psychology here and say ‘see, humans are greedy and superficial and selfish, we knew this.’ /7

But that would be missing most of what’s going on. Imitative desire is also fundamentally useful and sensible, why wouldn’t we emulate those who we see as having some sort of superior grasp of something? It saves us all having to discover everything for ourselves, every day. /8

Where imitative desire becomes dangerous is where we also run into the danger of bad ideas about what ‘democracy’ means. It becomes lethally dangerous when it becomes *reciprocal*. Where instead of this economy of desires revolving around status, all status is removed. /9

Which is what social media platforms do (or try to do). They make every voice equivalent. Nobel Prize winners in chemistry are expected to argue with You Tube chemists. What this does is exponentially amplifies the imitation process. Trickiest bit of the argument right here. /10

Because without status to emulate with our imitative desire, the amount of imitation through reciprocal imitation goes ballistic, to try to re-create the status hierarchies. All of the ‘division’ we think we see in society and social media is this. /11

Millions inventing new ways to differentiate themselves from everybody else, to try to fill the void left by the stripping away of status hierarchies. To go back to the start, I call this ‘furious agreement’, because this is the critical thing to note here. /12

That ‘division’ is NOT disagreement. All imitative desire is founded on AGREEMENT. We imitate because we desire, and we desire because we *agree* that what person X has is what we all want. This is where I’ll bring Covid in to the argument. /13

Because both ‘Covid zeros’ and ‘infinite Covids’ (Covid minimisers) are actually in total agreement. They both want the pandemic gone. Despite characterisations of minimisers as being for pandemics, in reality they think we need to get rid of them. They just disagree how. /14

All the ‘debates’ around Covid are actually furious agreement that it’s a pain in the arse that we need to get rid of. But stripping away the status hierarchies whose job it would normally be to do that, what social media and market politics do, leads to a surprise. /15

What we see as fanatical disagreement is the opposite. Everyone in the debate is in furious agreement. Literally furious, the imitation games are brutal and relentless, each group tries to differentiate itself from every other, to restore an imitative status hierarchy. /16

We see it everywhere with Covid. Like with masks, a seemingly obvious tool in a pandemic, but chosen as just one other way to differentiate some people from others, in the furious agreement to do something about Covid. People want status in these debates, that’s all. /17

That’s the ‘division’ we see. Not disagreement, it has nothing to do with the facts or the science. It’s about social status, who will determine which way we will all defeat Covid. We’re societies who for many decades now pretended status was undemocratic. /18

We strip it away with iconoclastic abandon. All sides of politics do it. We actually believe democracy means all voices are equivalent, we invest ultimate authority in those who can collect the most individual voices, through a vote. /19

All that achieves though is that explosion of imitative desire, to try to restore the status hierarchies we strip away at the same time. People performing every day on social media to try to build up new hierarchies of status, through imitation of the tiniest differences. /20

That’s what ‘identity politics’ is, all sides do it. The invention of microscopically granular new points of difference and differentiation, in these imitative status games. To forge some new status hierarchy, if successful, to replace the void we create ourselves. /21

Again, we are nearly entirely *agreed* on what needs doing, in most things. We’re not doing it because there’s no social hierarchy to drive that change. That’s what social media and political ‘division’ means, the attempt to recreate those hierarchies. Furious agreement. /end