A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The past 7 years has destroyed it. /1 https://t.co/8NYxb2LD1M

Societies area always just social. What destroyed it wasn’t capitalism or greed or corporations or money, all those grown-up bogeymen. It was the transformation of adult culture into adolescent high school culture. Through high schools as separate social spaces for children. /2

If you sever the social spaces of children from that of adults, when they leave school that’s the social space they will reproduce, in adulthood. It’s all they know. Social media dramatically accelerates this shift, which is why everything seems to be getting worse. /3

Now the same infrastructure of social life coexists across every age group. The platforms of likes. Itself a reproduction of high school life, in software. There’s no grown-up culture left, that we knew from pre-high school times. /4

Also why our politics has collapsed into rank populism. Populism is the culture of high school life, popularity is its currency. Why I say shut social media down, it’s pouring petrol on this adolescent fire. It’s popular to ignore pandemics and climate change now. /5

We won’t survive popularity as the mechanism of running societies. Too much of what critically needs doing will always be either unpopular, or easily made that. Trump is preparing for another populist assault on the US. It can’t survive that. But I think it’s too late. /end

That should say 70 years.