The Cult Archipelago. How social media is shaping our world. The medium is the message, as McLuhan said. How…

The Cult Archipelago. How social media is shaping our world. The medium is the message, as McLuhan said. How we transact our lives socially is unsurprisingly how our society is then shaped. Social media, now our society, shapes societies into an archipelago of cults. /1 https://t.co/ARKHQVyCdn

Social media, like all technology, was created with a framework of assumptions about how humans behave, individually and collectively. Most obviously, it’s a fundamentalist belief in the idea that ‘the people’ create societies, by talking to and interacting with each other. /2

That’s what its platforms use as their structuring principle. Everybody is equally able to share their beliefs and feelings, with everybody else. Sometimes said to be democracy in action. The current coup in the US uses social media as its replacement for civic institutions. /3

Trump was the Twitter President, who then set up Truth Social when booted off Twitter. He was telling us the source of his own power, by doing that. We didn’t listen. For his second term, he had platform owners in the front row, at his inauguration. /4

It’s not difficult to recognise that we transact more or even most of our lives, from the most intimate thoughts to the professional and political, via these platforms. I use the word ‘transact’ a lot. Deliberately. These are NOT ‘information’ technologies. /5

They are social infrastructure. We literally live our lives through them, they’re not sitting alongside our ‘normal’ life. They shape how we think and how we act. The medium is the message. The message is not the message. The problem isn’t mis- and disinformation. /6

Societies have never run on information. That’s part of the social media framing of our lives, that gives them immense power. All human progress has been the exact opposite. The gradual, bloody winnowing of information into tightly controlled institutions. /7

The long, toxic and lethal battles over what is right, and what isn’t. Then embedded in human custom and tradition. Into institutions. The modern ‘free speech’ mental midgets don’t know that history, and don’t understand the toxically violent past they’re re-energising. /8

So many millions died for humans to finally see truths in all areas of life. The truths human institutions are tasked with implementing into the future. That’s the role of an institution. To take the lessons of the past, and apply them in the present, to ensure a future. /9

Lessons most in the present won’t know about, and shouldn’t need to. The institutions are there to free them from having to know all of that. You can see in the US coup, but also in politics since the 1970s, that institutions are the main target of modern politics. /10

Their destruction can only lead to the toxic and lethal violence of past history. The totally idiot idea of ‘freeing’ people from their own institutions is sociopathic serial killing nonsense. I’ve Tweeted about how this is our default social machinery reasserting itself. /11

Status games. High status individuals tend to hate institutions, because they place ‘checks and balances’ on their status. Look at every person moaning about ‘red tape’ and you’ll see a high status person whose plans to pillage some part of society has been thwarted. /12

Regulation is the core of all human life, freedom, peace and prosperity. The very thing modern politics attacks with relish. Because modern politics is a status game, not the running of countries. /13

So why the ‘Cult Archipelago’? Only human institutions, arising as the result of catastrophes of various forms, embedding the lessons from those catastrophes, create the world the free-speech era pretend to want. Of populations living with ‘freedom’ to do things. /14

Where a crowd can just be a crowd, peacefully co-existing. Rather than a violent mob. ‘Free’ that crowd from its regulations, its institutions, and what do you get? Not that free crowd of equal exchanging opinions. You get uncontrolled status games. Gangs. /15

Without the institutional regulation, humans will just fight for status. In everything they do. Gang warfare. Team sports. You see this form emerge in every nation with broken institutions. Not freedom, violence. Toxic, relentless violence. /16

All knowledge and behaviour becomes the enforced currency of these gangs or groups. And the groups proliferate, particularly if given tools that allow them to form and spread, like social media. /17

We go from most people not needing to know most things to live happy, healthy and peaceful lives. To a DIY society, where every group defines its own universe of meanings. That’s the archipelago. Proliferating islands of certainty, where every other island is a threat. /18

Where the knowledge shared on that island is about loyalty and emulation of the influencing leader(s) of the group, not about reality. We don’t see that the call to ‘educate’ everybody to solve all of our problems is an artefact of this archipelago of cults. /19

They’re cults because the connection to actual material reality, something catastrophe forced upon humanity collectively through its institutions, is now gone. What is believed is now a measure of loyalty, not reality. /20

It’s all about (apparently) knowing everything about everything, and fighting for your team. That’s what these platforms have enabled, ways to connect the grossest stupidities and violence, decoupled from history and reality. /21

Within these islands you will see further status games, the lurch to luxury or ‘premium’ for example, whether in cars, watches, homes etc. Status differentiation within the group. Watch a modern car review on YouTube. The painful dissection of every surface of the vehicle. /22

People caressing dashboards and door linings, to feel the ‘premium’ materials. All status games. This is the world social media has now built for us. An archipelago of non-communicating cults. /end

(Picture from National Geographic)