While simpletons use their Left/Right electoral goggles to understand what’s happening, Gil’s ‘Nerd Reich’…

While simpletons use their Left/Right electoral goggles to understand what’s happening, Gil’s ‘Nerd Reich’ begins to implement exactly what they openly promised to do. And there’s even more to see here. /1 https://t.co/r4xdkH6DQW https://t.co/SlQLCAR7h7

Gil rightly identifies the focus of the tech bros as the dismantling of democratic *institutions*. Those institutions ARE democracy. Without them democracy is just what it’s become now. A facile popularity contest every 3-4 years. /2

Decades of all-out assault on those institutions, now widely and popularly labelled as ‘red tape’ and ‘bureaucracy’, has done the work of mobilising widespread support for their dismantling. People from every corner of society despise bureaucrats. /3

The sponsors of these narratives have been vested interests, furious at the due process of these institutions standing in their way of uninterrupted accumulation of wealth and power. Checks and balances. Regulation which should always be understood as a verb. /4

Regulation of social processes is what creates democracy. It’s also what enables the entrepreneurial activity of the vested interests trying to destroy the regulation. All of our most pressing problems are really only the absence of regulation. /5

Try running that idea up the flagpole and you’ll see firsthand how much the narratives of the past 70 years have been about the dismantling of democratic institutions and their regulations. Almost universally that regulation is seen now as a restriction, on our ‘freedoms’. /6

As if the default state of humankind is a glorious freedom to do whatever we like, interrupted by red tape regulation getting in the way of that glorious free adventure. It’s literally the opposite of what’s actually going on. /7

It’s only by regulating human activity that any sort of freedom, individual or otherwise, occurs. It’s our laws and standards and customs and traditions that create freedom. Only teenagers see rules as oppression. And we have an entire culture now that is adolescent. /8

So there’s now no restriction on this accelerating dismantling of everything that made us free, prosperous, and healthy. Vested interests are driving it, but they’re not imposing it on us. Our entire adolescent culture cheers it on. /9

Edmund Burke at the time of the French Revolution tried to show his society that it was their institutions, their customs and traditions, emergent over generations of trial and error, that really made people free. It’s an argument real conservatives carried forward. /10

Today’s conservatives are radical revolutionaries, there’s not one atom of actual conservative understanding in them. They’re a team in the team sports culture that is now our lives. Desperately trying to be the highest status team of all. /11

Zoom out historically and the Nerd Reich tech bros are nothing more than the nobles/barons, circling their King (Trump), parcelling up their own fiefdoms. Not an analogy. In the absence of institutions, all societies are feudal monarchies. /12 https://t.co/XZKT23gqGV

Trump’s reign will be dominated by these barons-nobles fighting amongst themselves for pre-eminence, and also the King. As Turchin says, we have ‘elite overproduction’, there are too many of them, with too much power and wealth. /13

They’re not united, they’re at war with each other. Trump is too stupid and too weak to unite anybody, even his own team. The best we can hope is that this entire cabal will implode through infighting, which is already underway. /14

The lunacy of their policy ideas should also mobilise just about everybody against them, as society stops functioning. They have no idea how to run a country. This will become more dangerously obvious every single day. Things are already breaking. /15

As I often Tweet about, only catastrophe brings true social change. Our own democratic institutions only emerged in their modern form post the apocalyptic cataclysm of the first half of the 20th century. It was the re-building after 1945 that gave them space to exist. /16

That’s where we’re headed now, towards another cataclysm. Only that will remove the status hierarchies now fighting for supremacy. And that’s all of us now, in social media world. Fighting to be what’s ‘trending’. /17

Social stability, managed by institutions across generations, is now replaced by trying to get anything to ‘go viral’. To get the chaotic society-wide team sports to align in any way. That lasts barely a day, mostly, any trend. We lurch between fads and fashions. /18

Left to themselves, with ‘freedom’ to do what’ve they like, humans will always do one thing. Fight each other, for status. That’s the default. Welcome to 2025. /end