One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily…

One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally misunderstand them, and our societies. /1 https://t.co/UGAtUaN7t2

Take the modern Oz or US ute. A fundamental lynchpin in understanding our culture, our social relations. Functionally, hopeless as utes. Hopeless as passenger vehicles (which is what they’re mostly used for). Hopeless in the driving dynamics sense. Hopeless aerodynamically. /2 https://t.co/R8mZIiMzCD

You would think this laundry list of uselessness would give the game away. The modern high-spec ute is not really a functional object. Or it is, but the function is social. It’s a grown-up GI Joe toy. (Why I began this thread with Joe.) /3 https://t.co/L7E0mTh8DZ

It allows the people who buy them to establish an identity, in the community. They’re a Hilux man, or Navara man, or Ranger or F-150 man. Or RAM man. (It’s usually a man, but yes could be anyone.) These are social groupings, not functional/technology groupings. /4 https://t.co/JF7GPlFwNM

Just as growing up our toys allow us to differentiate our identity as kids, collecting the various add-ons and carving an identity for ourselves within a particular toy’s community. Look at all these GI Joes. The proliferation isn’t technical. It’s social. /5 https://t.co/zk5cVyMFsY

This isn’t about analogies. How we buy utes is not analogous to how we bought GI Joes as kids. It’s the *same* social process in operation. We formed teams, around objects in this case. And the stronger our team grew, the more differentiated those objects became. /6

One of the biggest components of modern ute culture for example is how users ‘spec up’ their ride. There’s a vast third party industry in ute add-ons. This is all the same process. Team sports. I know guys who buy a new ute each year, because fashions have shifted. /7

Every day most of my Tweets here are about returning our framing of societies to what they really are. Social. They’re societies. They’re not economies. They’re not capitalist or socialist ‘systems’. They’re people, acting socially. /8

In the exact same ways they acted socially as kids, just with new names and new objects added to the team sports. People who believe in economies for example are just a social team. Ditto for socialism, or capitalism. Just teams. /9

The world isn’t made of economies or political systems or technologies. It’s made of our social relations, with each other. We see it with Covid, and vaccines. People don’t argue about vaccines as technical objects. /10

They’re social objects. Team pro-vax VS team anti-vax. Yes vaccines have an objective reality, they stop us getting diseases. But reality is always just grist to our team sports mill. We would rather be right (i.e. our team ‘wins’), than effective. /11

If you want to shift what happens in the world you have to understand sociality, and you have to be able to work with that understanding. Most fundamentally you need to understand status. And flowing from that, the *trust* that actually binds us. /12

Societies have always been built on trust, that binds people to each other. We trust plumbers to do plumbing, or pilots to fly planes. That trust comes from the status of those we trust. We want to be high status, and to associate ourselves with those who have it. /13

We emulate or copy them. Imitation is the root social act. It’s why everybody is out there buying these functionally useless utes. They want to belong to a team, to have status and therefore identity. /14 https://t.co/LBFgwD4Dyh

Those who have destroyed public health in this pandemic similarly just want to be part of a team, to have status and identity as part of that team. If they can’t get status in the traditional teams, the teams that actually fought pandemics, then they’ll invent new ones. /15

Teams espousing the most ridiculous anti-vax, pro-infection nonsense. But the content is always irrelevant. Remember reality is just grist to the team mill. It’s absolutely pointless to argue the ‘facts’ every day. That’s just the social differentiation process. /16

The more you do it, the stronger the opposing teams become. You’re helping them to strengthen and expand and further differentiate their team. They log on every day hungry for your counter-arguments. It’s what drives them. /17

How do we step outside this social differentiation process? People know I follow researchers who study that. And alas, we usually don’t. We wait for the catastrophic violence of the team sports to destroy everything. Or a natural disaster. /18

Only then do the status hierarchies stop. For a while. Allowing an appearance of ‘unified’ human life, as we re-build. A ‘public’. But it doesn’t last. The teams come back. Status is a bottomless well. /end