Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall…
Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world.
Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging public followings. /1
Sometimes this surge in popularity even shifts their previously held views, as they find the heroin of attention that contrarian ideas gives them irresistible.
Or they set up a Substack, to monetise this newfound attention. That’s very on-trend, to monetise disaster. /2
To use social collapse as a stage for individual promotion. That’s what cookers did with the pandemic.
And what climate denialists have been doing for decades. In the absence of a public domain, we’ve used catastrophe to generate attention. /3
This thread is motivated mostly by the ongoing complete inaction on the things people come here to discuss.
Many good people wonder every day how to progress things that are clearly going nowhere. /4
That’s been a large part of what I’ve posted here over the last few years, understanding that. I write to understand.
My view is that we’ve been sold a pup on what democracy is, and what produces change. It’s never, ever, discussion. Never ‘the people’. They don’t exist. /5
It’s a counting artefact, not an agency. No groups have agency. They’re always led, by a tiny number of people inside them.
Humans act socially. I won’t elaborate that hypothesis again in this thread. But it’s true. /6
Catastrophes are what shift societies. When their social status hierarchies are smashed. Those hierarchies will NEVER shift on their own.
Unless to be replaced by other hierarchies, by catastrophe. The reason we don’t understand this is our history. /7
We’re the people who were born and grew up in the aftermath of the last social Big Bang, the last catastrophic shifts. The two world wars.
They forced a collective focus on solving collective problems. To survive. Not through discussion. It was emergency management. /8
That’s when we prioritised public institutions for education, sanitation, public health, scientific research pitched at social problems, progressive taxation. Etc.
Those catastrophes are too long ago for collective memory to still have bite. ‘Lest We Forget’.
We forgot. /9
Since the late-1970s we’ve been busy doing again what humans have always done in history. Re-building our social status hierarchies.
‘The economy’ is the tool we used. Portraying societies as absent any status, billions of competing, equivalent individuals, in ‘markets’. /10
The great democratic leveller, apparently. Making us all equivalent. Except it didn’t. It just disguised the re-building hierarchies behind economic mumbo jumbo. /11
Mumbo jumbo absent any idea of how humans *actually* behave. *Socially*. The market/economy at every step has authorised the stripping away of the true levellers.
Those public institutions we set up post-WW2. And here we are. Micro-blogging in the ruins. /12
Enriching the owners of platforms like this as we go, thinking we’re changing the world.
They own the world. They even found a way to monetise our anger at being excluded from that world. That’s all social media ever was. /13
Yes it’s still useful, still enjoyable. They’re not stupid, they make it enticing to be here. And without our functioning public institutions, where else are we going to find information?
With those public institutions we didn’t even need this information. We fail to see it. /14
That it’s a window into social collapse, that we’re now having to DIY social processes. That we’ve all had to become semi-expert in public health, and climatology.
Sifting through the flood of shit the same owners encourage here, to prevent any real traction emerging. /15
I wish it wasn’t true that catastrophe is all that sweeps self-absorbed hierarchies away. But we’re social animals.
We will play the team sports of imitative rivalry as the ship goes down, every time. /16
In this year of an international orgy of elections, of worship to the great fake god of popularity, this message will have as much cut through as…well, it just won’t have any.
Drowned out in the festival of backing your team to electoral victory. /17
Followed by 3-5 years of disillusionment that they don’t change the things you want changed, when they’re elected. They’ll just immediately begin planning to win the next election.
Not because politicians are evil. But because that’s OUR culture.
All of us.
/end