What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never…

What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1

This also means doing anti-social things, including repeatedly infecting people with viruses, is destructive of the economy. It’s not two separate things, it’s one thing. Tarde always gave the example of railways first coming to towns. /2

How it literally, physically connected the people there, socially, to everywhere else. How a local farmer was now socially tied to urban diners. Electricity networks the same. They don’t just provide power, they tie societies together socially. /3

By creating networks of people and technologies, socio-technical networks that simultaneously create new social roles connected over vast distances. A train driver or boilermaker is a social role as much as a technical one. /4

Fast forward to today and that process has been multiplied exponentially in the vast socio-technical complexity of modern society. It makes our lives more and more social *at the same time* as they’re becoming more technological. It’s the same process. /5

Quarantining for Covid showed this, how everything was connected to everything else. It’s taken years to be able to get cars available again, as just one tiny example. The lesson here is the opposite to the one we’re told. /6

That inter-connectedness, that intensely *social* nature of modern society, through its technological developments, doesn’t need us to stop action against a pandemic so it can carry on. It needs us to stop the pandemic. What harms us socially destroys the economy too. /7

This is how pandemic action will be forced upon us. And climate action too. The incredibly inter-dependent complexity of modern technological life won’t function with these threats. The idea we can run ‘the economy’ while ignoring the threats is nonsensical. /8

A set of ideas by modern nobles, who throughout history have never got their hands dirty doing the basic work of keeping life running. Who often don’t even know it exists. Life just happens by magic for them. Reality-based politics will end that illusion. /end