I see ‘enshittification’ as the inevitable creation of status hierarchies. Status is the currency of all…

I see ‘enshittification’ as the inevitable creation of status hierarchies. Status is the currency of all human life. There’s a very anti-trust thrust to Cory’s proposed solutions, which make status hierarchies in themselves the problem. I think that’s a mistake. /1 https://t.co/MKqLXViDZs

A monopoly is really just a status hierarchy re-badged using modern economic words. Completely unsurprisingly, humans turn economic life into status hierarchies too. The solution is not more ‘competition’, to prevent status hierarchies from forming. /2

That solution is within the same framing as the alleged problem. The ‘team sports’ or status games, just with more teams added to keep other teams in check. Team sports are not the solution for team sports. /3

I’ve Tweeted a few times about how humans have historically tried to solve this. To prevent uncontrolled toxic status games. Will Storr’s wonderful book on status covers one brilliant solution, that created our modern world. To turn status games into ‘success games’. /4

Or in other words, to make high status the work of collective engineering. That’s what the ‘Republic of Letters’ was about, that shift to science and engineering in the Victorian era. Where engineers and social reformers became high-status individuals and groups. /5

The Victorians were obsessive about public ‘works’ or infrastructure. From the Queen down, it was the passion of that age. Because they found a way, accidentally, of making creating the collective good a high status activity. /6

The Royal Society - it’s in the name. Engineering harnessed to status, let’s have that world back. The other much older way humans managed status games are things which modern humans find unpalatable. They don’t understand it. /7

Humans created churches and monarchies. And governments. Using a modern lens these can only look like ‘authoritarian’, ‘undemocratic’ fairy tales. But we miss entirely what their real functional role was. /8

These institutions were mostly about the regulation of status. About having a centralised master status hierarchy in a society, to regulate status throughout society itself. Modern thinkers glory in describing the abuses of these institutions. /9

Missing entirely the violent chaos of life that preceded them. Like all institutions, they emerged from that chaos, as a counter to it. If you want to revel in anti-institutional life, move to Trump’s America right now. /10

It was Edmund Burke who most famously argued the case for the centrality of institutions to human well-being. It used to be what conservatives stood for. Now they douse them with petrol and set fire to them. Institutions and regulation are the road to human well-being. /11

Not competition. Yes competing teams will destroy dominant teams sometimes, which seems a victory. But the team sports continue unabated that way. You can’t stop status games with more status games. /12

Unfortunately, the power of status is so absolute, all that allows the emergence of the institutions that control it is catastrophe. Most human institutions emerge when collective life has reached catastrophic outcomes. They emerge in the rebuilding. /13

That’s our entire modern history, the 4 horsemen of the modern apocalypse in our times, in the first half of the 20th century. WW1, the Spanish Flu, The Great Depression and WW2. A carnival of catastrophe. Only this suppressed status games enough to force a re-orientation. /14

That’s when the notion of a ‘public’ finally could emerge. A calculated construct required to rebuild societies, after WW2, at the tail-end of the carnival of catastrophe. Public institutions were formed and strengthened, to do the rebuilding. /15

That period between roughly 1945 and the late-1970s was when those institutions ran our lives. The enormous surge in prosperity and health and general well-being came from those institutions running countries. /16

When basics like public health and education and transport and other ‘public services’ were suddenly unquestioned central components of our lives. By the late-1970s life had become pretty good again. The carnival of catastrophe had receded from view. /17

And so, the status games returned. Under cover of a new Trojan Horse, ‘the economy’. Market-based societies. Which when you strip away the economic mumbo jumbo, is really a society where status has free rein to do whatever it likes. /18

Where regulating it becomes ‘anti-competitive’, obstructive of the free operation of a free market. Socially a total con, hidden in econo-bollocks. Really just a set of statistical indicators describing the current status quo. /19

No politician dares challenge ‘the economy’. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’. No, stupid, the economy is stupid. It’s not a thing. It’s a con, to remove all public institutions and replace them with uncontrolled status games. Tor replace a public, with a market. /20

The fictional idea that humans operate by all being allowed to freely do what they like, and the competition between them produces the best outcome. That’s not how humans ever behave. They overwhelmingly imitate one another, in games of imitative rivalry. /21

In teams or groups. Thus ‘team sports’. Rene Girard saw this. The ‘free market’ was really clearing the field for uncontrolled imitative rivalry. Status was back, on steroids. Social media dramatically accelerates this shift. Team sports is its business model. /22

As you look around at the lunacies of Trumpian politics, wondering what happened to our democracies, well…they never existed in the way we think they did. Our progress wasn’t due to decades of electing people. It was the legacy of the carnival of catastrophes. /23

Now that legacy’s power has waned or more or less disappeared. It’s uncontrolled status games again, anything goes. “Meme it, and we will be it” (see next Tweet). Imitation (of status) is King, unleashed from all institutional checks and balances. /24

“Seemingly insignificant changes to the Culture, which can have outsized impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it.” Elizabeth Boyle. /end