It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model…
It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political parties are popularity-based groups, like we had in school. But there’s something else important here. /1 https://t.co/QmlTYU9usy
The word ‘popularity’ conveys a feeling that it means everybody being happy, because we assume that what is popular is what people like. That’s absolutely not true. Nothing makes people more miserable than a culture of popularity. It is THE most brutal of all social systems. /2
Only the tiniest handful will ever be popular, in any group, of whatever size, right up to the scale of societies. They will be those everybody else emulates or imitates, in imitative rivalry. Watch that entire economy of likes play out right here on social media. /3
Not even that tiny few, the ‘influencers’ and political leaders, are happy. Their entire lives are re-routed towards continuous maintenance of their popularity. The whole globe will be infected with a pandemic virus, rather than lose votes/likes. /4
We’ll incinerate an entire planet, rather than be unpopular. People would rather die, than do something different to what everybody else is doing. None of this makes people happy, it makes them miserable. The constant attention to being noticed, by not being noticed. /5
That’s the hilarious dilemma of popularity-culture. You will only get ‘recognition’ in that culture, by being the same as everybody else. Be different and you’ll get noticed, but just long enough to be ‘blocked’. It’s a ruthless, rigid conformity. But another trap here. /6
Because conformity, emulation/imitation are unavoidable, the root of all social life. They’re not the problem. It’s a good thing that we look to emulate others, it saves vast amounts of time. Without trust we have no society. The danger is the emulation process being hijacked. /7
That’s what social media does. It destroys trust, it dissolves all of the existing hierarchies of trust, which protected societies by identifying over generations which knowledge and behaviour has positive social outcomes. Which we should emulate, who we should trust. /8
Elections got there first, they shifted from being a simple sorting mechanism for leadership, to being the only rationale for political action. Now parties win elections, so that they can win more elections. Popularity is now both the means and ends. All of life is a school. /9
Culturally, that’s what happened, I’ve Tweeted about many times. The moment we decoupled schools from adult life, we created a new school culture that reproduced itself throughout all life. Children knew no other culture, so they remade the adult world in that image. /10
That’s why our politics now seems so hopeless. Who ever saw the popularity wars at school resolved? Where the bullies and influencers got their comeuppance? It never happened, there was nothing there to make that possible. Only leaving school was an escape. /11
Into the adult world. But now that world has been remade as a giant school as well. So there is literally no escape. Even in schools now teachers struggle to maintain any sort of actual control of what’s going on there. Many kids find school absolutely meaningless. /12
The battle between playground and classroom, which defines not only school but all of life now, has been won decisively in favour of the playground. As I’ve said a few times, only two things can save us. Total catastrophe, to upend the current popularity games. /13
Wars and plagues, historically. People would honestly rather die than go against what everybody else is doing. And the other is the extreme social-technical complexity of our lives now. It can’t be run or operated with popularity. The Roman model. /14
A society glued together by building things and maintaining the things it builds. That’s my best hope for our future, that we will be forced to become that society, or the lights will simply go off. /end