That feeling of the world going absolutely batshit crazy is us reaching a specific tipping point. The tipping…

That feeling of the world going absolutely batshit crazy is us reaching a specific tipping point. The tipping point where reality itself is defined by the fads and fashions of social life. Where what’s real becomes what trends. /1 https://t.co/39886G8nWl

We’ve had fads and fashions forever. In clothing, music, hobbies, food, pets, technologies, etc. etc. None of that mattered a lot, people even had fun navigating the perpetual shift of what’s ‘cool’. But then something much more serious happened. An extinction-level shift. /2

We allowed this social mechanism to infect the basic operating system of what we could call ‘essential services’. The most fundamental mechanisms of running societies. We allowed what is real to be hijacked by fashion. Our new ontology became, literally, what ‘trends’. /3

Of course even in science, the exploration of objective truth has always been highly socialised, highly dependent on the battle of status groups. Planck’s observation about it only progressing a funeral at a time. /4

It’s not in any particular field that our assessment of reality was protected from the fads and fashions of everyday life. This was Edmund Burke’s insight. It’s in institutions that reality-mechanisms are shielded from social whim. /5

Institutions - customs and traditions - that arise in response to threat, to catastrophe. Nobody sets up or supports institutions just on a whim, they’re killjoys in the world of fads and fashions. They demand an adherence to long-term things. /6

They’re the past and future of human society, acting in the present. They will always seem like ‘red tape’ to the fashion-following present, that just wants to follow a whim. The institutions that have created and regulated our modern relative peace, health and prosperity? /7

They emerged from the 4 catastrophes I often Tweet about, in the first half of the 20th century. WW1, Spanish Fu, The Great Depression, and WW2. It was in rebuilding the wreckage from those 4 catastrophes that ‘public’ life emerged. From institutions rebuilding societies. /8

The same institutions human status games, the world of fads and fashions, attacked from the 1970s, when societies were functioning pretty well again. They became dreaded ‘bureaucracy’. Red tape. Replaced with a ‘market’ of eternal fads and fashions. Societies as economies. /9

The economy is a political fiction. Free markets were invented to specifically destroy the institutions running societies. The idea that billions of individuals would spontaneously self-organise into civilisation. This bullshit fantasy has dominated our lives for decades. /10

But how did this shift back to perpetual status games, to eternal fads and fashions and whims, manage to infect the deepest engine rooms of the institutions that actually run our lives, society’s autonomic nervous system? Say hello to social media. /11

The whole idea of social media, embedded in how the platforms work, is to destroy trust. The institutional world we evolved from relied upon hierarchies of trust or status. We each did our own thing, and trusted that the basics were being taken care of. /12

We trusted that somebody, somewhere, was running things That’s what the institutions were doing (not the people we elected). But social media creates a social world where status comes only from popularity. From likes and followers. /13

And everybody is either on it or implicated in it. Science is here, engineering, politics, medicine etc. Watch Nobel prize winners here having to argue basic things with guys masturbating in front of a keyboard while eating chips. /14

Institutional life was the life where the Nobel prize winner had a priority say in how something panned out. That’s gone. Now the chip-eating wanker is just as likely to be able to assemble a war chest of followers, and determine an outcome. /15

We’re now ‘living with’ a pandemic, because that’s trending. The vast majority of people think the pandemic is over, because they use the metric they’ve always used. Not science. Just ‘what everybody else is doing’. In the past everybody emulated hierarchies of expertise. /16

Expertise working in institutions. Now they emulate whoever is trending, on social media. Influencers will make up whatever outrageous fantasy they feel like, provided it gets likes and followers. Reality is now literally only what trends. Reality is just fashion. /17

This is also not just confined to the loon fringes. ‘The economy’ for example is just a trend, not an objective reality. There isn’t a public issue today that isn’t just teams battling for status, in some latest trending outrage. Teslas, anyone? /18

This is also what makes public life now so flaky. Attention spans of toddlers. Entire populations lurch from one trend to another, sometimes within hours. There is no public policy now. You can win elections having no policies at all. Why would you bother? /19

When winning them is only about a victory in your current team sports. Not about making any material difference to peoples’ lives. Look at Trump right now. His *entire* agenda is a set of revenge retributions for social media battles he’s been engaged in. /20

Look around you, every day. If it trends now, it’s real. Not just popular. Everybody is now an expert in everything, because social media lets them be. It gives us a place where anything is real, provided we can get the followers. /21

And our entire lives, from the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political, are now transacted on these platforms. They’re not ‘about’ the societies we live in. They are those societies now. /end