I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough…

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is hobbling us on Covid, and climate. /1 https://t.co/H7jHbLe6j6

The sunshine on one rooftop combined with now cheap solar panels is giving me enough energy to cross an entire continent, every week. In comfort. Continental crossings were once major productions, but now an individual can do it without much effort. /2

The point for me here is that we have the wrong view about how societies work. The political beliefs that dominate us encourage us to think of societies as millions of separate individuals, with tiny impact on anything that happens. We even think that’s what ‘democracy’ means. /3

But societies are NETWORKED. They don’t function as millions of separate individuals. The model of democracy as these isolated individuals that then have to be ‘mobilised’ IS the same political belief system that pretends societies are markets. That they don’t exist. /4

Running campaigns to ‘mobilise’ all of these millions of individuals is being trapped inside that same political framing of society, trying to build a ‘customer base’ for a cause. It’s the dead-end the proponents of these political beliefs designed to trap people inside. /5

Everything you do is already not an ‘individual’ thing. I made that point about Covid action, how every infection you prevent by simply wearing a mask and avoiding indoor crowds, can potentially prevent thousands, even millions, of other infections, and sicknesses and deaths. /6

Ironically a pandemic is showing us how connected, how networked, we already are. There is no local and global action, that distinction is meaningless. You are already ‘acting globally’ by being careful about Covid in your own life. Your life is networked to everybody else’s. /7

We spend too much time focused on political leaders, as if they’re an obligatory passage point for any action. The only way to ‘get things to scale’. The solar panels I had installed on my one modest home are generating enough energy for me to cross a continent, every week. /8

Energy is an excellent example of how our frameworks of belief can fundamentally change how we see problems and their solutions. As Saul Griffith says, we can make the whole country renewable much faster by just focusing on peoples’ individual homes. /9

Because those homes are *already* networked, to everywhere else. I generate enough power every day to power 3 or 4 other homes. And that’s where my power goes, when it’s exported. Like my ‘individual’ Covid action, my energy action is already global. Networked. /10

It’s a trap to feel powerless because your aims may not currently align with whatever popularly elected dimwits are currently thinking and doing. You don’t need to wait for them to pull their heads out of their arses to bring about even profound change. /11

And that doesn’t mean you exhausting yourself trying to ‘mobilise’ the entire population in a cause type of way. That’s the trap they set for you, to make you think you need to do that. Everything you do is already networked to everybody else. /12

That’s how a tiny group of conspiracy fantasists de-railed our Covid response. It’s all theatre, like Puss in Boots. They scared the elected dimwits, but it was a con. They used the networking tools of social media to create global impact. Most of us didn’t agree. /13 https://t.co/hVhNizgjL6

They just bypassed sensible people, because they understand how networks work. They didn’t bother trying to mobilise the rest of us, they took their lunacy to scale without us. We can do the same in reverse. Not necessarily by having mass, loud protests. That’s the con. /14

Most of the success of the cookers wasn’t the street protests, it was owning the social networking space, on social media. Everything they did ‘went viral’. Meanwhile good people wail into the social media void about how unfair it all is. That doesn’t go viral. /15

Or they tear their hair out trying to mobilise millions of people who aren’t even interested. Because they’re stuck in the trap the cookers made for them, in the idea democracy is millions of separate individuals. All people are already connected. /16

People act socially, they emulate and imitate. That’s what going viral means, thinking and acting in ways that assumes you’re already global, because you are. I don’t argue with cookers, I try to think of ways to make something that counters their bullshit go viral instead. /17

I don’t wait for elected dimwits to rebuild our electricity grid with renewables, like millions of other Australians, I started without them. They’re now having to respond to us, rather than the other way around. /end https://t.co/hTpgq7Me3j