Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And…

Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And those things will be network phenomena. Take the resistance to the shift to EVs. The combustion car was a critical locus of agency for a small group of school kids. /1 https://t.co/8gCYSZf7Ss

The ‘cool’ kids, the alphas in school popularity status hierarchies. More importantly, often the kids whose lives then arrived at the adult world and floundered. And often cars were their escape route from academic work at school, that they had no interest in or aptitude for. /2

It’s this group you’ll find heavily represented in the anti-EV push today, particularly on social media. EVs are taking away the lynchpin of their social lives, a way in which they maintained some of that school dominance in adult life. /3

And it’s networked, all power is networked. The anti-EV push is mostly hot air, from this small, loud minority who form hubs on social media. Like Covid cookers. In reality the combustion vehicle is over. Sales data tell the story. /4 https://t.co/dovODm90RH

But as with the Covid cookers, they have influence only insofar as their bluff is believed. Target their hubs and it’s game over for them. Most bad things in politics are the same, they could be shut down with precision targeting of hubs. /5

It’s how those same bad things became prominent, by precision hub formation. They didn’t try to convince everybody, they fired up their ‘base’ and then used networks to give it an appearance of wide impact. Shut down the hubs and the lot falls over. /end