Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article…

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure out. /1 https://t.co/FHyijoPg4w https://t.co/5qNjQCeuUB

And it won’t be an argument against having strong restrictions to fight infectious disease, which will be the moral many freedumbs (kidults) would take from this. I’ve Tweeted before about the distinction between horizontal and vertical communities. /2

Horizontal being the older geography-based communities. Your town or city. And vertical being communities formed online, around interests and beliefs. What lockdowns did was create an enormous shift towards vertical communities. That became where more or more people ‘lived’. /3

Where they now ‘identify’ as their real ‘home’. If you work in the governance of local towns for example, you’ll see the result of this every day. People who still live alongside each other in that older horizontal way. But who are like battling, incompatible universes. /4

Many towns are not much more now than battling social media groups. Without the moderating impact of horizontal town life, the continuous negotiation of co-existence in the same space. It’s a battlefield of the righteous. Vertical communities are SO righteous. /5

Because they’re engaged in open, naked status games, all day and night. The purest form of sociality, not tempered by the empirical reality of living together in a horizontal community. Sociality is violence. The continuous battle for status in social hierarchies. /6

Towns in the way we think of them as horizontal communities are the counterbalance of sociality. They’re not extended sociality, they’re the suppression of sociality, for collective outcomes. A ‘we’ to counter the extreme status games of ‘me’, which is sociality. /7

Lockdowns aren’t the cause or enemy here. It’s the purveyors of these online vertical communities, who make little attempt (or are openly hostile to) the integration of vertical with horizontal. The platform owners. /8

Their actual business model is the smashing of horizontal communities. Their disintermediation of every institutional creation of horizontal human life, the taking over of all businesses, governance, expertise and even basic social life, to drive rivers of revenue to HQ. /9

Just look around you. How every aspect of your personal, professional and political life is now shifted onto social media. These aren’t information platforms. They’re actual social and cultural spaces that we now live inside. We are living *inside* social media. /10

In a world of eternal status battles, of pure sociality. Which is pure violence. Civilisation itself is the suppression of sociality. The ‘we’ of public life has nothing whatsoever to do with the alternative social media culture offers us. /11

Where towns or cities are replaced only by what trends. By the constantly shifting victories of every variety of social group or team, battling for status against other teams. The nostalgic souls I see here every day asking why ‘we’ aren’t addressing critical problems. /12

There is no we! It was pulverised to ruins by the social status games unleashed by social media life. In turn deriving from our massive countercultural shift post-WW2, the endless war against ‘the establishment’. These cycles repeat throughout history. /13 https://t.co/v01GaDI0Db

Catastrophes suppress status games long enough for some form of collective we to emerge, maintained by public institutions. To survive, as a society. But then things seem better, and the status games are back. And those very same institutions become the enemy. /14

How do we not see this as the obsession of populists like Trump? Smashing institutions. The home of the ‘we’. But both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ (meaningless, childish teams in the status games melee) do the same. The ‘’establishment’ is always the enemy. Institutions. /15 https://t.co/shNeSq9b8e

We refuse to see that our culture remains the counterculture of that post-WW2 time. The ongoing assault on the institutions of public life. We don’t live in societies now, we live in ’economies’, in ‘free markets’. Or so the guff goes. /16

Really just cover for reinstated status games. The rampant culture of ‘me’. Where we all fight one another for status, in our teams, because our status is also our social identity. The Chinese and Russians are still living their revolutions, and we’re still living ours. /end