2024 Threads
436 demonstrable authored self-threads.
A belief central to our culture is that we need to ‘experience’ places. It’s an empty concept, never unpacked. As if simply being somewhere allows you absorb some culture, osmot…
This is the game-changer. The data that shows conclusively that you don't 'live alongside' pandemics, they destroy your economies. The ECONOMIC data is in, and it's *already* a…
70+ years into the 'there is no such thing as society' political project, that's exactly where we've arrived. This wasn't accidental, this was the stated plan. Even in the theat…
It was Lynn Margulis I think who said all life is really bacterial. That the huge variety of flora and fauna on Earth is all the product of microbial activity, mostly bacteria.…
In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted for me the magnitude of the damage to public heath that's been done…
What can netball teach us about pandemics? If you follow it, as I do (my favourite sport), you'll have noticed that the rest of the world is getting closer to Australia. Why tha…
Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what…
To give an indication of how much aviation seems oblivious to climate action elsewhere, the fuel for the new Sydney airport will need to be trucked there, every day, there's no…
The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. W…
We need to completely re-frame the challenges we're currently facing. They're not 'Covid and climate change threatening the economy'. Let's keep it all in-house, in the economy…
I guess the majority of Australians who don't even qualify for updated vaccines any more would want to know what 'vaccination works' against. https://t.co/YWOb2wqqGq
A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of Information. All sides say FOI is a great thing, to 'hold government account…
Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been t…
Yesterday various culture warriors posted with glee about line-ups at Tesla charging stations in Chicago, which is experiencing a major cold snap. And how some of the EVs had to…
I have several friends who are GPs, whose attitude towards Covid I’d describe as professionally negligent. Because I believe nearly all human behaviour is social behaviour, it s…
The comfort space of ‘living with’ infection is less than a century old. And it was brought to us almost entirely by public health measures. The exact thing we’re jettisoning no…
The great untold story of the fabled range of ICE vehicles. Getting the fuel to the servos. It’s like the famous story about Gandhi, that it cost his family a fortune to keep hi…
I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, p…
A question for the calm voices of minimisation. My mother’s 80th birthday, next week. Her lungs aren’t great, a variety of ailments there, but not enough to prevent her living a…
The common minimiser theme, that they and their friends and families want to have their social lives back, and ‘Zero Covids’ are free to continue to obsess about Covid alone. Th…
If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon. The Romans. Their civilisation flip-flopped between more democratic fo…
Insurance is the privatisation of risk. The abandoning of public-level action on a whole range of serious issues has dumped the damage on the insurance industry, with populist p…
Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of u…
We’re living in a completely fake political war. Where one side of the war argues for the benefits of government, and the other argues to get rid of most of it. A thread on why…
What’s this represent? (Genuine question.) https://t.co/aq0zb8LNcO
One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that…
Populism needs to be understood to be beaten. It brings to the surface the true mechanisms of human belief and knowledge. A mechanism of trust, not of understanding. We trust ot…
Kids with bags of camphor around their necks, during the Spanish Flu pandemic. It was thought by mothers that it may ward off infection. We can laugh now. But we’re doing absolu…
One of the useful things about this platform is that it gives you a direct way to see the myth of the idea that societies are made up of a collection of individual viewpoints. L…
@theAliceRoberts did you ever work on Time Team episodes? Just watching an older one, excavation of parts of Roxburgh, and one of the people in the trenches looked a bit like you.
The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add…
There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocra…
What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mea…
The picture says it all. How retirement went from being a time of winding down after a lifetime of hard work, to some sort of perpetual orgy of recreation. It will be scaled bac…
A teacher friend maintains a CO2 reading in the low-500s in a classroom full of primary school children, using open windows. Also bought 2 HEPA filters out of their own money. 4…
I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No grea…
In 1928 DH Lawrence wrote ‘A Letter from Germany’. Novelists are necessary to diagnose a zeitgeist. This is more than 10 years before WW2. He knew then what was coming. Compare…
The hilarious nonsense of ‘the economy’. It’s said to be a market, where supply and demand regulates the exchange of goods and prices. But it never does that, unless you regulat…
Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some…
Been talking with a senior academic about Covid, who insisted the danger is over and it’s time to move on. It finally emerged they believed the vaccines stopped Covid, deaths an…
Pathogens often follow a similar pattern to human societies. An invasion stage, with a lot of deaths, as pathogens fight to occupy territory (our bodies). Followed by a long occ…
I spent a bit of time over the weekend reading research literature on hybrid immunity. Specifically for Covid, but also any other reference to it. A very contentious topic, and…
This isn’t a funding question. It’s a status question. The answer is always social. Comprehensive education was dismantled in Australia by turning education into a status rivalr…
The common wondering we do about why nothing is being done against existential threats. Have Tweeted about how this is due to the removal of the administrative construct of 'the…
We need to take back control of the overall narrative of this pandemic. That we’re now living with Covid because anything else was impossible. That outcome, that surrender, was…
There’s a total disconnect between popular political ideas and the reality of how societies work. The ISS is a good way to see the disconnect. Our politics is dominated by the i…
This is how seductive seeing society as an economy is. I don’t actually think more competition is the answer to grocery prices. That’s part of the mythology of market economies,…
4 Corners excited some last night because it went into bat for their team. The ‘big corporate market power price gouging’ team. Except none of it made sense. Nobody asks how you…
Happening everywhere, climate events destroying public infrastructure. Authorities completely overwhelmed by the damage. Meantime communities, whose spending patterns show domin…
The all-out assault on Google search by search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing is a story that should be front page news. In a world where we outsource expertise to the web,…
Three have been many outrageous slogan-driven violations of public health in this pandemic. But to me the most fundamental violation is one that is still not spoken about enough…
At a time when collective action is almost non-existent, we have the strange apparently counter-evidence of huge masses of people acting in a coordinated way. Thoughts on living…
Going back in time, one of the main debating points Covid minimisers use is that we couldn't have maintained control of Covid without permanently restricting flights. Two things…
Maybe an economist can explain why floor coverings/carpet don't drop significantly in cost? Had that drop already occurred much earlier in history, it being an extremely early t…
Exploring risk. The RHS of this diagram is now mostly not operating. But neither is much of the LHS, for most. Personal responsibilities crystallise out of shared framings and p…
Rooftop solar is the way people should be thinking about Covid. The collective grid-level effort is lagging, but you can create energy independence and make money using your own…
The irony of life today is living under a political belief system of extreme individualism, which in reality is the exact opposite, societies driven by a pathological social con…
Lots of data analyses focusing dutifully on the political framings of this pandemic, around severe disease, hospitalisation and death. I refuse that framing. The data tells a di…
We need to talk about disease eradication. Those delighted with the uncontrolled spread of Covid often justify it by saying nothing else can be done, that it can’t be eradicated…
This was where I first saw the idea that vaccinating against severe disease can still lead to effective disease elimination. The (flawed) idea of ‘sterilising’ immunity is actua…
Everywhere that politics inserts itself you end up with false binaries. Like the one between hybrid immunity and ‘Zero Covid’. In reality hybrid immunity *requires* control of s…
“In reality, the spectrum of protection might best be framed as the extent to which vaccination prevents transmission of the wild-type virus or bacteria.” Immunity doesn’t end e…
The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for yea…
Prevalence data from the UK. Infections. This is what we need to see to determine if the pandemic is waning, pandemics = number of infections. This looks promising, though it’s…
Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life sta…
“The use of existing childhood vaccines, such as MMR, in combating the surge of COVID-19-related morbidity and mortality, is potentially a low-risk, high-yield measure for all p…
The ‘politics of impossibility’, where a problem-solving focus is replaced with a fatalist do-nothing. That’s what political libertarianism is, it wants to castrate collective p…
I keep coming back to immunity in my thinking around Covid, because we’re continually forced into a dumb binary between immunity and prevention of infection. Social media does t…
The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, econ…
The smartphone and social media have together created a continuous self-referential feedback loop that has replaced reality. Gigs, pandemics, travel, bodies, news etc. - all cre…
The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate…
Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogan…
Early discussions about hybrid immunity, for Covid. In https://t.co/pMB7Cl5zQK… The individual focus, so common now. The idea immunity is about protecting individuals, rather th…
If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of econom…
It’s been enjoyable to see the concept of a ‘per capita recession’ trotted out. A slow realisation that the statistical indicators we call ‘the economy’ often bear little relati…
The LNP at the time said government shouldn't 'pick winners', leave it to the market. The same fallacy that says democracy is what 'the people' decide should happen. Groups of p…
Coming back to this, the genius of Asia was to take the factories we sponsored there, to free ourselves of doing any thinking or work, and use them to restore Asia at the centre…
1967 photo showing industrial waste pouring in an uncontrolled way into the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, Ohio. Short lesson here for us in the speed of essential change, in our…
It’s not uncommon to use road safety as a way to triangulate ideas about public health responses. In many ways these aren’t distinct things, so it’s not just trading in analogie…
The World Happiness Report for 2024 has been released. The top 4 countries? The scandis, citing their public institutions as the main reason for their happiness. Meanwhile in th…
Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s over…
Seeing the great summaries of durability of immunity from different vaccines in the paper from @vipintukur prompts a few questions. 1) Given that for most vaccinations protectio…
Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building…
It’s often said Covid spread can’t be controlled, because people wouldn’t support it. But if prevalence really is only between 0.7-5% in the UK, for example, it suggests 95% or…
It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s…
We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is supers…
Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good vent…
Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these network…
HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid vent…
Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change…
Covid minimisers are a classic case of a network structure, mistaken as a society-wide phenomenon. They’re a *tiny* number of players, who form hubs that then feed skinny networ…
Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘T…
Many (including me) are wary of politicians raiding super to avoid public spending on essential services and infrastructure. But in many ways it’s like running a private health…
My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late…
When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. B…
Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 200…
With MMT ideas, if inflation is caused by money being in excess of productive capacity to use it, and taxation is the withdrawal of money from circulation to control distributio…
Social media is running a real-time experiment of what democracy looks like when ‘the people’ run it. Which as many South American countries can attest, just leads to marauding…
Those who say ‘not all boomers’ are correct too. Like everything else, wealth is networked, concentrated in a small number of hubs. Many boomers in fact have been hopeless saver…
All change is led. So yes, it's not true an entire generation conspired to do this, no groups act in that way. But they have consistently, for 50 years, voted for the people who…
What I call team sports. Political parties are like peoples’ Ur-teams, their foundational team that shapes all of their others. You can waste a lifetime arguing topics with peop…
From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy. 'Things are better', fewer deaths. From a public policy point of view,…
The most fundamental obstacle in the public narratives on Covid is the idea that reducing transmission and vaccinating are two distinct options. They’re the same thing. Vaccines…
Social media takes existing problems and turns them into team sports. It also generates completely new social problems, through the same team sports mechanism. It’s transforming…
When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only tha…
From Bob Hawkins' Substack (link in last Tweet). UK. Are we seeing 'increased immunity from vaccinations and infections'? Do coronaviruses have that sort of cumulative immunity?…
The NSW Government’s FuelCheck app allows you to compare fuel prices by location, and also trends across the State. One of those things politicians who believe in markets create…
We saw the same shift to ‘off-grid’ living during the economic crises of the 1970s. It’s a false dawn, a bucolic delusion. Like most tree-change, it’s not a retreat to a more si…
From my pinned tweet, American POWs in the Korean War. Groups of any size, right up to organisations and full societies, don’t have tops and bottoms. There is no top-down or bot…
One of the brilliant reframings in @DrCameronMurray’s book on Australian housing, which I hope I’m understanding correctly, is the mistaken idea that housing is in fact a market…
The sovereign citizen movement is an example of networked society and how to work it. As authorities slowly recognise, it’s driven by a tiny handful of people, with networked fo…
Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe I have with @doctorow’s work is the belief I sense that ‘competitio…
Humanity's greatest ever achievement was the near doubling of life expectancy in the past 150 years. Now being swapped out for recreational lifestyles. Kiddult culture. One for…
I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1
How does the Land of the Free (market) manage to have house price-to-income ratios less than half of us here in Oz? Well, it's an interesting story. Much of the magic happens in…
On of the great myths of ‘the economy’ is that it operates already *without* massive government ‘intervention’. Governments create the entire framework of economic activity, inc…
We believe Western societies operate as ‘market economies’. Look at the caravan of market spruikers shout down Albo this week for daring to suggest government invest in manufact…
Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And those things will be network phenomena. Take the resistance to the s…
Helping somebody find this card is a good thing, what’s disturbing is how social media platforms have become the most intimate, granular infrastructure of our social lives. Enti…
Both of the big news stories of the past 3 days implicate social media in crimes against civil society. This one, and the Higgins/Lehrmann/Channels 7&10 court case. Enough i…
From a recent Independent SAGE update. A great group, I’m not interested in pile-ons of any kind. But what’s striking here is the timidity, the surrender. If this summary analys…
The interplay of regular and random contacts in the dynamics of superspreading. Or more simply, the role of mixing with strangers in the spread of Covid. It’s mixing with strang…
Annabel Crabb’s piece perfectly identifies that this case was about team sports, versus justice. And that judgments are masterpieces of reasoning. This type of reasoning also ha…
Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extrac…
Jeremy's going to find himself locked in a cupboard with our CHOs if he's not careful. Proportionate measures will need to be taken. Like suppressing the data from Day 1 this ti…
If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hub…
Here’s what in my view is most widely misunderstood about social media, and why it’s so dangerous. And yes, I’m still on it. You can criticise unsafe driving, while still drivin…
My great friend @DavidJoffe64 taught me about dysautonomia. When your body’s automatic functions suddenly go haywire, as he sees sometimes in Long Covid. There’s a social correl…
Just once, on Anzac Day, I’d like our unthinking nation to read what Kipling meant by ‘Lest We Forget’. Now co-opted by the bastards who sent millions to their deaths, for their…
Another way to think about our perverse travel culture. The places we travel to ‘see’ are the exact equivalent of movie stars or other celebrities. 1/8 https://t.co/cjLUqNPnqd
Framing an issue in a way that outrages and enrages, and generates two opposing teams, is not reality. It’s a business model. For political success, and social media profit. Tea…
Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both frayi…
It turns out we couldn’t hash-tag this problem away. As with all things, we got some tremendous team sport out of it, as we rallied behind our hash-tags. But the problem? Still…
We only need to stop some Covid, to stop all Covid. Going back to Jeremy’s work nearly 4 years ago, on masks. But the same applies across most aspects of Covid. /1 https://t.co/…
Just waiting for the traveller comeback, ‘if you go off the beaten track you can still find places’…places that then look like this as well. https://t.co/tdJzGSfYOl
Many who still mask have discovered a health they’ve never had in their whole lives. It’s glorious to be free of colds and flu, for example. And in this they’re following a long…
Target the hubs. Covid’s breeding grounds. Schools already have worse air quality than most other public or private buildings, it’s long overdue even without a pandemic. The act…
With the insurance industry facing collapse, it’s important to extend their concept of ‘pooled risk’, to Covid. Pooled risk means distributing risk. The exact opposite of what w…
‘Lockdowns’ reduced intimate partner violence. It also made many disadvantaged people better-off than they’d ever been. The outcome of a greater share of our common-wealth going…
The size of business is a key way we can see how all business is just social too. All of society is. What many don’t realise is how many small businesses fail. And always have.…
The ABC reports that some men are uncomfortable with the focus on ‘gendered violence’. And that they should be. I think some men and women just don’t subscribe to social media g…
We don't see the social transformation that social media is. It's not about 'sharing' now, we're well past that. Social media *is* increasingly peoples' social lives. They don't…
“…the key to HIV prevention is that it has been selective, not universal. It focuses on communities most at risk.” We’ve fallen into a trap with Covid. Universalising something…
There is only one ocean in the world. It’s all the same water. Territory and sovereignty blind us to some obvious truths. /1 https://t.co/aAwfJqheaR
The ongoing battle to convince us that a few months of restricted social movement led to entire populations with plummeting immunity levels to a big list of diseases. Oh, and al…
Not once in my life did a doctor or anybody else tell me it was important that I get infected regularly, for my good health. Until Covid. 1/3 https://t.co/N5KGydc6IF
“We vaccinate all to protect the few, because we can’t identify the vulnerable." (Professor Michael Levin.) Applies to all public health measures, like masks, isolation, air cle…
The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1…
The visceral reality of a broken public. My elderly mother, on IV antivirals right now for hospital-acquired Covid, had a visit from a neighbour yesterday. (Please no sympathy,…
We so desperately needed expertise on human social behaviour to beat Covid. Instead we used graphs. An example from this week. Person at work about to go OS on holiday for 2 wee…
Political libertarianism has quite a foothold in Australia. Thanks to @ColinKinner for the tip-off on this one. This set of ideas is toxic to civilisation itself. And also laugh…
Edmund Burke is often seen as a forefather of modern conservatism. He’d have been appalled at people sailing under that banner today. Some critical points here. /1 Taken from: h…
Before social media, there was already significant trade in what are called ‘urban myths’. Factoids that sound amazing, and are repeated widely. That are actually compete bolloc…
The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its mo…
I wince at the memory of the certainties of teen and early adult life, and how forcefully they were sometimes presented to others. That’s part of being young. It brings energy t…
I’ve seen estimates that both in the US and Oz, people are getting Covid on average every 12 months. This factoid is trotted out to counter those who say people are getting infe…
Minimisers managed to blunt the comparison of Covid and HIV/AIDS by saying’ they’re not the same disease at all!’ The point never was that they were the same disease. The point…
Every day I come here and watch people struggling to find a ‘we’. So many pleading Tweets about horrible things, that nothing is being done about, as a community. That to me is…
It seems a killjoy thing. But I don’t socialise on social media. The ‘morning everyone, nice day’ type of thing. I refuse to allow these platforms to become the venue for my per…
We now process disaster socially by turning it into a platform for expression of our individual grievances and sensitivities. This is part of the victory of political libertaria…
We don’t need to stop Covid. We just need to slow it, and keep it slow. Maths does the rest. As exponentially fast as it grows, it dies. Politics makes us believe we have to do…
For those who believe democracy = elections. There’s not one objective way in which this race should be close. Close to two decades of abject incompetence from the LNP, and they…
“And yet it moves.” (Galileo) I sometimes advocate for something I call ‘reality politics’. Meaning politics that recognises that most of the things we argue about aren’t in our…
The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is what should *change* the world. New knowledge, to fix problems. We’ve f…
The 2022 debate over whether 2 or 3 shots was 'fully vaccinated' was about one thing only - Scott Morrison's re-election campaign. Waiting for a third shot would have bypassed t…
I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid is a great example. The in some ways misleadingly called ‘desire li…
Did the French Revolution usher in a new golden age of freedom for the liberated masses? It created an Emperor even more powerful than the royalty and aristocracy it beheaded. B…
Things are expensive in cycling because it was captured by imitative rivalry. Look at any public activity or debate, and watch it become a pissing contest over status, as imitat…
Thanks to @GosiaGasperoPhD for this. The problem we’ve had selling this message I think is that Covid minimisers have successfully created an impression that Covid is everywhere…
What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it b…
So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the pr…
It’s easy to think you’re escaping political binaries just by picking one side of them. For example the solution to the disaster of most privatisation isn’t to nationalise, to m…
Scroll through a Twitter feed and you can see how ‘flooding the zone with shit’ really works. Most obviously it’s the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ you can find there. B…
To escape the team sports that infect our understanding of ‘politics’, you have to look to history. Take the two most famous ‘autocrats’ in the world right now. Putin and Xi. Sa…
This was less than 5 years ago. Now the UK looks set to completely reverse this landslide with even greater force. Nothing changed after Boris won. Nothing will change if/when L…
'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Wilde inadvertently saw our future. All of our worst problems ar…
For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n…
We extrapolate the desired collective endpoint (end of pandemic) to individual actions. Which leads a status rush to buy only the best masks, and best air purifiers, and fit-tes…
"The Great Compression". Only catastrophe brings about meaningful social change. The data is compelling. And the logic. Without catastrophe, social conformity and imitative riva…
The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close…
More about place, in a culture that lives in maps. The English countryside. A wonder of the world. How does it exist? Well, it’s absolutely NOT a ‘natural’ thing. Place is made.…
I think we need to recognise the literal meaning of the term 'public health'. It means the public being HEALTHY. It doesn't mean 'the public not being in hospital or dying', as…
It’s struck a few people as odd that in rapidly ageing societies, we’re doing nothing to prevent mass deaths of the old from Covid. You’d think old societies would look after th…
Many workplaces are relying upon NSW Health’s advice of ‘symptom-free’ people being allowed back at work. Not only is that public health gibberish, it’s also the least practical…
The ridiculous levels of illness in the community right now are coming up against 19th century command and control sick leave policies. The same command and control economy that…
Covid disrupted our ‘supply chains’, leading to a cost of living/inflation crisis. Most of these supply chains originate in China, where we outsourced most of our manufacturing.…
Human activity is driven by desire. But we don’t desire the object of our desires. We desire something because somebody else desires it. It’s social, a rivalry. The love triangl…
We’re not making progress against our biggest problems because we have the wrong models of the societies we’re trying to change. (Beautiful network diagram of the whole Internet…
#Insiders debating the LNP and ALP condemning The Greens for their stance on Gaza. The usual hot air of all our politics and commentary. The actual reality is whether the Greens…
And about 70% of the only 38.5% of internet traffic that is human, is streaming video. The internet was conceived as a many-to-many communication system. Like our politics, it i…
All human activity is just social activity, even political activity. Which means the categories of ‘Left’, “Centre’ and ‘Right’ are meaningless, and need to be replaced with soc…
Windows into populism. People don’t desire things, they desire what other people desire. It’s a social sorting process, to create teams and hierarchies. This is what fads and fa…
“Academics, more than anyone, should understand that the future lies in services, not manufacturing. The good jobs come from what you know, not what you can make.” Ross trotting…
Only disasters shift societies meaningfully. When Hitler was mobilising in the 1930s, the world mobilised at emergency levels to oppose him. Climate change is a much, much bigge…
The individual experience of heat exhaustion has a sobering message for us as societies. We can stumble on, thinking we’re fine. While critical life support systems are in termi…
The centrality of engineering to our actual existence isn't on any curriculum. Our infrastructure has precise heat tolerances, just like our bodies. We're already exceeding them…
Climate change is often thought of as a ‘natural world’ problem. It’s much more than that. Our trillions of dollars and tonnes worth of infrastructure is built to tolerances tha…
Michael Mosley’s death was so often framed as him being tragically so close to reaching safety. What I don’t think is recognised with climate change is that the infrastructure w…
Our culture of adolescence worships the present moment. There is no history, no future. Just a lifestyle, of right now. Nowhere is this clearer than with nuclear energy. The was…
Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. O…
Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the d…
It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understan…
We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. A…
We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a GW of nuclear power? In the US and UK, about $25 billion. /1 https://…
This is where the fossil fuel age in many ways began. Saudi Arabia's first successful oil well, Well 7. The "Prosperity Well". In 1938 it struck major oil. In a way 2024 is 1938…
The incredible inertia of the status quo is already dampening recent efforts in renewable energy and EVs, as prominent examples. You can’t gradually change a status quo. It need…
Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential public service, and turn it into a team sport. By offering political…
Excellent. But remember Abbott's string and tin can NBN being fact-checked too? It made no difference. Nuclear is a stalking horse. A strategy to mop up votes of those who want…
One of the weirdest manipulations in the energy debates is the idea of 'baseload power'. The public has been led to believe this means the minimum amount of supply the energy gr…
You don’t ’speak truth to power’. Power doesn’t care or listen. You speak truth INTO power. We already won against Covid. It’s the minimisers who lost. A message from Puss in Bo…
That situation where you’re in a group, and somebody offers you a swig out of the same drink. And you don’t really like the idea of getting half a mouthful of their spit, but it…
What am I not seeing here? The maximum capacity the nuclear announcements this week could produce is 9.8 GW (1.4 GW for the APR1400, the biggest reactor mentioned, x7). The NEM…
It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a s…
Peter Dutton is looking for a chain reaction. But not a nuclear one. An electoral one, like he got for The Voice. The latest polling from resolve suggests ‘the people’ see throu…
Saul Griffith gave governments not just a renewable energy strategy, when he said target households. He gave them a winning political strategy. They’re too stupid to listen, too…
I bought one of these (Xiaomi Pro H) over 3 years ago, to have in my office space at work. It's never registered the need for a filter replacement. Checking, it's still at nearl…
My mum, the 80-year-old who got her first Covid infection courtesy of a NSW Health hospital, shared a story today. She went to have coffee with friends. 1/3
It's quite legitimate to consider societies as engineering problems. More so in fact than as economic problems. How pilot-induced oscillations in flight have lessons for a pande…
One of the great Covid minimising tropes was how ‘lonely’ people get if they’re not allowed to mix socially. Our culture is always in plain sight. Sociality is our default. Bein…
We're entering a new Restoration. In the 17th century, a relatively brief experiment with a republic in what's now the UK, led by a democratic parliament, collapsed with the res…
You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under ass…
Society has material problems with known solutions. None of those solutions happen because they have to cut through the fog of the completely redundant popularity contests we ca…
Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to house…
The enormity of this decision for democracy everywhere. Not since 1215 have Western rulers been above the law. These aren’t analogies. This is the literal Return of the King, an…
So much of the US right now is Rome. A failing Republic, with a surging imperial Presidency that is more like a King or Emperor. By far the most successful period in Rome’s hist…
Keir Starmer is a decent, intelligent guy. He'll be much better for the UK. But like Albanese he reveals the fundamental weakness of modern progressive politics. Good people are…
The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. T…
The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Oft…
Voting about to close in the UK. At 10pm. Gotta make sure the peasants can get a full working day in before voting. Then the count goes most of the night. Many won’t bother voti…
A primary teacher friend has a kid in class today with known Covid (tested positive earlier in the week). Was off for a few days, parents sent the child back today, for the last…
Zoom out from the euphoria of electoral victory for Labour in the UK, and you see the real social mechanism that drives the country. Starmer is the 58th PM. There have only been…
If you believe the mythology of elections, entire populations swing from being free market fanatics, to Big State socialists, in only a handful of years. And then back again, ad…
Another idiot hashtag, yallmasking. Who cares? I’m masking, posting a photo of myself doing it will do diddly squat to change anything. I say idiot, because it derives from the…
Popularity is like chronic infection. You can be so infected by the pathogen that it becomes normal life. When, ever, in history was the truth or the right thing the most popula…
Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin - connecting with others. ‘Networking’. Then weaponise it by turning that c…
Post-WW2, war industries mobilised to churn out massive amounts of consumer goods, housing, agriculture, etc. Re-building societies. We're now living in the last afterglow of th…
I’m fascinated by us, as a culture. Nothing is more invisible to you, than your own culture. It just seems like the natural order of things. Here’s why I think our culture doesn…
Slacktivism. I don’t really like the term, because it suggests there’s a better activism people should be doing instead (more on that in a second). But the idea we can use these…
This article is almost a decade old. But it asks a question even more pertinent for today. Are we too connected? Connection is an assumed good. I think that's a terrible mistake…
The mythology (the ‘bait’ in its bait-and-switch) of social media, is that it’s like the world’s conversation. Everybody talking to everybody else. Except it isn’t. The same hie…
“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” (McLuhan) Our sense of inevitable failure to address our problems is d…
Still the most beautiful meditation on the brutal tension between sociality and knowledge. Spinoza. Sociality uses knowledge as fodder, to build and unify teams. To fight other…
“Y’all Masking”? That ‘y’all’. Covid minimisers won by portraying Covid as everywhere, all of the time. The hashtag shares the framing. Covid isn’t everywhere. It’s bred in high…
"...40% of social media users would give up their pet or car before they'd give up their accounts...This is not healthy behavior. Social media is currently designed for virality…
“But conversations about digital infidelity are happening as young people express increasing dissatisfaction with love and romance. They’re burned out on dating apps that turn l…
I’ve seen multiple people here say ‘I’d never buy a Tesla now, because of Elon.’ They say this on a platform owned by Elon. They won’t leave the platform. yesterday I shared res…
China may be a more ‘authoritarian’ culture because it’s a much older culture, and it’s discovered that nothing else works. It may be WHY its culture has lasted. /1 https://t.co…
When causes are pursued on social media, status hierarchies are set up within the crusading groups, as humans do off social media as well. For example, ventilation groups develo…
As a plane goes down, would all the passengers talking to one another right the descent? Or hashtags like PullUp, or SaveUs? The idea that democracy is everybody talking to ever…
This event should be a wake-up call to what social media-driven culture is doing to us. Who is Trump ‘fighting’? You can see how his entire political success is to turn everythi…
People are not so much passive or obedient, as imitative. We all imitate or emulate those we admire. We don’t have time to do everything for ourselves, so we have to choose othe…
Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thu…
The US is one of the most violent countries on Earth. Because it rejects basic collective regulation of its society. Without that, violence is the default. But there’s also more…
From the 1970s, the push was on to reverse the post-war emphasis on collective good. A mystery for some is why conservative politicians and their ‘economy’ have dominated this s…
The social process I Tweet about, where only catastrophe leads social change, was also seen by Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in the 14th century. He called it Asabiyya. Meaningful c…
China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electora…
House is closed up in winter, freezing here. Well insulated, double-glazed UPVC windows. No draughts. 4 people. However I did leave the old gas lighting vents in the top of the…
There was a moment in time when the disruption of Covid opened the possibility of more flexible work practices. As always, only catastrophe forced a possible change. In many wor…
Well before social media, the IT industry more generally was ‘disrupting’ all of our social checks and balances. So that it could monetise their removal, for revenue back to the…
Does nobody cook any more? Ordinary home cooking, not Master Chef performative rubbish for SM? Does nobody make a sandwich for lunch? Was thinking about this in a lunch break th…
Those sceptical about eating out/take away culture as a social change. Many towns in Australia are raising council rates to meet increasing costs. it’s creating a lot of social…
Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available. Says tree changers settle in the area, often b…
I call toxic sociality the underlying problem behind all of our other problems. And the vanguard of toxic sociality is social media. You can see in this student post that there’…
Healthy friend in their 40s has Covid. Had the chills, then collapsed and was admitted to hospital with dangerously high blood pressure and heart rate. Intubated, and placed in…
The bait of SM was offering the public ways to ‘connect’. The switch is using those connections to then take over existing industries, and vacuum up their revenue. Social media…
At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘…
Before his death Bruno Latour saw the catastrophe we’re living, wrought mostly by his own generation. Perpetual iconoclasm, anti-establishment culture. “Once they’ve been destro…
What gives me hope for the US election is that Trump already lost an election, at the height of his popularity. The only US President to lose the popular vote two elections in a…
Imagine a political party whose entire focus was fixing known problems. No routing them through ideological frameworks. Just ‘this needs to be fixed, we’ll implement best practi…
True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go. The two cannot…
To be social is to conform. To not conform is also social. You can’t avoid conformity, when you act socially, it’s the currency of social life. The more social we are, the more…
The phone is the gateway between social media and reality. The tool that uploads everyday life into social media, and then allows social media into those lives to transform them…
Example of how the imitative rivalry of social media (team sports) loops back into everyday life. Posts on social media platforms about EVs attract a conga line of rabid ICE fan…
Pandemics and other catastrophes accelerate the collapse of already broken social systems. Because we’re pretending we’re post-pandemic, this process of collapse is being drawn…
I often see accusations of ‘activism’ levelled at those advocating for continued action against Covid. If those advocating are working in their area of expertise, they’re doing…
We still have the idea that societies operate using information. They absolutely don’t, they operate using status and conformity. People are ignoring Covid because their friends…
It was unpopular to question the Y’all masking hashtag. It’s petering out, as all performative symbolism does. It provided ‘support’ to some, but because of these platforms just…
This is social media at work. Not the ‘far Right’ or any ideology. The practical, simple mechanism of connecting people to each other. This is the paradox of sociality. The more…
Public health action was shut down through a deliberate campaign of highly organised hysteria. ‘Grave concerns’. By the same people who call hysteria every attempt to do the opp…
Societies don’t run on information. They run on social relations. Social relations are intrinsically violent because they’re clashing desires. The more social or connected we be…
I would like us to see all of our problems as the outcomes of quite simple to understand human behaviour. To rediscover societies for what they are - 100% social. Not political,…
I sat watching this, incredulous at the self-serving econo-babble the West dishes up to protect its existing status. We all know the world - all of it - desperately needs solar…
Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts…
We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault fro…
Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides ‘hey, let’s be authoritarian’. Older cultures seem that way because t…
As social media continues to fracture societies, we’re still fixated on the message, rather than the medium. Blaming one team, the ‘far Right’, so that our opposing teams have s…
On a freeway yesterday, I observed the use of variable speed limits. A great idea, to modulate traffic flow. Except maybe only 5% of drivers pay any attention to them. It hasn’t…
Why don’t we question the idea that a society is like a computer, that we can replace the operating system of, with one or other -ism? Societies are ALL social. And nothing else…
A couple of months ago I shared the experience of my elderly mother here, who was admitted to hosptal with serious heart and lung issues. She contarcted Covid while there. What…
An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave…
Ask a school teacher if a model of society that says ‘just let the group interact and order will spontaneously emerge’ is a good idea. This is our idiot idea of what democracy i…
About a decade ago I got whooping cough. While recuperating, I decided to read some of the history, to see if there were any forgotten options for symptomatic relief. I found Or…
1945 is sometimes called Year Zero. Here’s one for our mental health, the frustration we have that politicians aren’t doing anything to fix our problems. A hint: they never real…
Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with th…
A story from Cook’s voyages demonstrates well how groups and societies run on status, not information. For sailors of that time, scurvy was a constant threat. Cook knew that sau…
This is the great mythology that all sides of politics embrace. That high prices are caused by lack of competition. By monopoly. Scale is what allows humans to create things che…
Refusing to accept the boundaries of your own and others’ homes is also the definition of a pandemic. A travel culture is a pandemic culture. Ecologically pathogens are controll…
My apologies for the re-post. A technical issue. Attitudes to public health. Cholera epidemics in England in the 19th century prompted construction of 1300 miles of sewers in Lo…
Increasing talk of the dangers of social media, and possible solutions. None of them will work because the root problem isn’t diagnosed. Sociality is violence. The act of connec…
If you read the history of Victorian England, the birth of the modern world, what stands out is how much the focus of their massive engineering innovation was one thing. The hea…
Much of the tension in watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window stems from the shared voyeurism of spying on other peoples’ lives. That was 70 years ago. Do we want to imagine a Rear Wi…
The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premis…
Again, using the social lens for all things. There are no Covid minimisers who are really prominent in their fields. Mostly they’re younger upstarts who saw a pandemic as a fast…
Hub-network structure. A small number of people form hubs, leading thinking and behaviour. Our tendency to think of society as ‘the people’ means we often target public action a…
Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising.…
‘The economy’ is the idea that societies will run themselves, if you don’t regulate them in any way. A political invention, not economic. The fiction is maintained only by vast…
Several religious traditions speak strongly in their most ancient texts of prohibitions on debt, and of the control of pandemics. In an ‘economy’, all custom and tradition is ab…
There is extensive research on social collapse, it’s not just shock and awe social media language. (From me anyway.) Previous societies have been extensively studied, to identif…
Much of the enormous engineering of the Victorian era survives to this day and is often still functioning. It was targeted at the public good. Today if we get infrastructure at…
The unspoken truth is that we CAN’T do it. The magnitude of the revolution needed is unrivalled in human history. No variant of business as usual will get us even close. James L…
‘Chinggisid’ sovereignty is what I Tweet about in describing the perennial love of Kings. Trump-type populist leaders are this sovereign form, in modern clothing. This extract h…
Trying to remember the name/URL of the more detailed alternative to AEMO's real-time NEM dashboard...
Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. Peo…
One of the hilarious myths of societies transformed into economies, is that ‘business’ creates social activity, including jobs. Business provides goods and services for people.…
Modern economics is a dry and barren retrofitting of societies with fantastical self-running equilibrium models. Models that are so insanely stupid that ‘invisible hands’ have t…
Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening to voters’. All that produces is a continuous barrage of ignorant, w…
There’s no greater indictment of elections as a component of democracy than Peter Dutton and his team being viable in the next election. Booted out just a few years ago after a…
A numerically small populist movement led through social media and harnessed by anti-State politicians led to the collapse of public health in Australia. Other politicians could…
Only massive disruption shifts societies and their status hierarchies. China’s industrial juggernaut at work. Our possibly best hope for the rapid change needed. Politics as usu…
Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free. We…
There’s resistance to the idea that Covid is not everywhere, all the time. Social media’s team sports runs on sweeping apocalyptic generalities. Both ‘sides’ need that everywher…
If you sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s cr…
If you see a friend come back from an international trip or large event, Covid-free, it reinforces the sense of ‘maybe Covid is a spent force’. The importance of infection and d…
In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no a…
'Endemic' diseases are normally only endemic to poor nations. It's not a disease pattern, it's a status pattern. Like some neighbourhoods are said to have 'endemic' crime. Usual…
Social media is not social networking. We had social networking many years before we had social media. Social media is the monetisation of social networking. An economy of ‘like…
I admire them for having a go against the tech giants. They’ll have entire populations addicted to the daily team sports dopamine against them. It won’t work, because the much b…
Aged care Covid deaths mapped against community deaths from Covid. The vulnerable live in the community, their deaths follow the same patterns. Not controlling Covid in the comm…
Not one insight here. Australia is a settler culture that has no meaningful relationship with its own (or any) land. It travels obsessively to suppress this existential discomfo…
That black band (coal) overnight for NSW represents the perennial pointlessness of NSW governance. Daytimes are dominated by ordinary peoples’ solar (yellow), years ahead of gov…
The disgusting emptiness of much Western culture now is all there in the idea of ‘revenge travel’. This is why we refused to keep fighting a pandemic. Our entitled travel in the…
From 2020, I think we've mistaken means with ends, with Covid. The end was always disease control. Disease control shouldn't be permanent masking, or in some situations even per…
When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’. Areas of Na…
Every outrageous injustice is a window into a truth we’ve not been seeing. Why can Israel act with impunity in Gaza? Because what we call Western democracies have always been Ju…
Even Laura Tingle succumbs to the idea that electoral politics is about solving problems. It never has, and never will, it’s a status game with the currency of popularity, over…
I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the eno…
There are no ‘authoritarian’ political systems, just as there are no ‘free’ political systems. There are no political systems at all. There’s just people, acting socially, in ev…
Two aspects of the diversionary ‘China is the big polluter’ narratives around climate change that aren’t as much mentioned. Time. Western countries have been polluting since the…
The world was international before it was national. National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an international, pre-existing social mechanism. Exhibit A. The car indu…
Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to…
The sad (social) truth playing out in the Middle East is the same truth underlying all societies. Only catastrophe brings change. We’ve had decades of the peace process there go…
We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate p…
My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else. The content of public debates is almost completel…
There's a mythology around 'sterilising' vaccines. That they're like a silver bullet, allowing us to wash our hands (ha) of any other public health work. Measles a good example.…
A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 https://t.co/4LXnRl9rKq
Pretty much nothing in the current narratives on supermarkets is true in reality, this research shows. There are clear lessons in the cost of living crisis to expose the farce o…
Teddy Roosevelt is attributed with ‘if you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow’. What’s happening in the Middle East right now is a repeat of a pattern…
Tim Winton on the politics of climate, identifying ‘fossil capitalism’ as the enemy. The real enemy is something he also mentions. The status quo. Fossil fuels fuel the status q…
On a visit to northern NSW, it was difficult to not wallow in the gobsmacking beauty of the Australian countryside. But it also triggered thoughts, about place. /1 https://t.co/…
A dear friend who’s throughly wedded to market ideas about societies (happy to see them as economies) was discussing climate change with me. I shared this quote with him. Here’s…
Just back from a short holiday. The country is awash with travellers, and as vast numbers are now retired or retiring, it’s getting worse. As a culture, a dominant desire at ret…
Of the 12 men who walked on the moon, these are the only 4 still alive. I still remember the sense of possibility and excitement of those times. ‘Moonshot’ culture, the sense of…
This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year. We’re being led to believe that because a lethal virus isn’t causing huge numbers of deaths, it’s not l…
We stopped normal life for years to fight world wars. That threat was a pimple on the arse of what's coming now. And what are we doing? Nothing. That's the power of 'the economy…
At the time universal suffrage was introduced, it didn’t occur to many that it would destory the democracies using it. Many came to see it *as* democracy. A ‘voice of the people…
This sort of thing is the tedious world we now live in. It’s all there in the name-calling, there always has to be two teams. Nobody could buy a Tesla unless they’re on the ‘fan…
Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from catastrophe. It’s neither pessimism or optimism. I don’t project feelings onto…
I watched this launch today. A few thoughts. I think Tesla do some fantastic technology, brilliant engineering. It's hard to talk about because of the minefield of team sports b…
What do you do, in a world where public services like public health have been destroyed? This is the question for every day. Most of the world never had those public services. S…
Thanks to @Kerbrech for sharing this excellent illustration of the status-drives-societies idea. The work Peter Turchin has done on ‘elite overproduction’. The bit in green is w…
A friend currently has Covid. He’s had it multiple times. He says each time the symptoms he found most disturbing were feelings of impending doom, darkness and depression. What’…
I often talk about the status quo as the controlling force behind every society. It’s very easy to take all the baddies from existing narratives and just make them the status qu…
The Chinese industrial disruption that is (thankfully) shattering our status quo. The BYD Shark ute. Utes are central to our status quo psyche, a previous PM loved to reference…
Mussolini like so many before and after him loved the rush of instant power populism provided. Using popularity to bypass all due process, all checks and balances. Populists nev…
Conversation with a friend this morning. Talking about dementia, a relative of theirs has the condition. They had no idea Covid is a possible cause. Which isn't unusual. They sa…
A possible repeat of the post-Spanish Flu experience. Some believe the epidemic of heart disease in the 20th century was caused by that pandemic. The smoking hypothesis is weake…
Should be a good watch. As ‘Daily dose of brain damage’ @DavidJoffe64 tries to warn us every day, what we’re doing to the brains of the *entire* population with repeated Covid w…
We inherited a framing of religious questions from the Enlightenment, in the West anyway. That religion was just one other way to know the world. Like an inferior science, based…
As societies we only functioned with a plurality of beliefs when the essential infrastructure of social life didn’t depend on those beliefs. Now what you believe also determines…
Many can escape the pandemic already. They can just refuse to socialise. Yes if they have kids, if they need hospitals or aged care (for example), they will have enforced high-r…
For a few years now I’ve argued for what I call ‘reality-based politics’. Not really ever explaining what I mean by that. I’ll use Covid as an example. /1
We are bringing back the past. A status-driven society (feudalism), where if you don't have status, you have nothing. Debt was all that gave the illusion of most of us having so…
Conversation with a revhead at work, about buying EVs. Him: ‘they’re not even green’. (They are, but it shows for him it’s a team sport, with ‘Greenies’ being the opposition.) M…
“…it’s useful to remember that the history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of free and fair elections.” Autocracies are thousands of years older than…
One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We…
The hidden story of chronic impacts of infection. Those who followed Queen’s career sometimes noticed how Freddie Mercury’s live performances deteriorated after 1982. The band t…
BYD employs over 110,000 engineers. Let that sink in. Here’s just how ridiculous our politics are. The world desperately needs enormous numbers of affordable electric vehicles.…
Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do a lot better at understanding this than trot out tired tropes about…
For 1-2 years, delusions like ‘hybrid immunity’ and ‘immunity debt’ survived because enough people seemed to be getting on with normal life to make them plausible fantasies. But…
This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regula…
Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism…
Today is Friday. The day most people I know celebrate as the end of the working week. Fri-yay. They celebrated particularly during lockdowns, when they didn’t have to come to wo…
At the start of the pandemic I wrote about the strategy with National Cabinet, how it was nothing about ‘all working together’, or any of that nonsense. National Cabinet was the…
The whole world waits on the edge of its seat for this week’s election, to see if Team Blue or Team Red will lead the great charge to do nothing meaningful against climate chang…
If you want to understand the continuity of today with our history, Trump is Henry VIII, and America’s billionaires are our modern nobles, circling the King, trying to gain favo…
This is the new power demographic in politics. Young men. Often driving utes. And towing stuff. Unpacking status hierarchies. /1 (Image: https://t.co/KlpaW5WJg7) https://t.co/io…
Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’ crises. The same problems recur in our supposed economies, with the same i…
In the post-orgasmic euphoria and devastation of another election, I invite people to zoom out and see the farce we’re trapped inside. 5 outcomes here from the annual review of…
All the things the economy is supposed to do, the pandemic actually did. Redistributed wealth more fairly, away from those dominating the status quo. Only catastrophes change so…
Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another. One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don…
Under populism, political leaders attribute all election victories to themselves, as do commentators. It's a popularity bubble. In reality, people vote mostly according to the m…
This latest election has reinforced even more strongly for me that societies cannot be saved from election bubbles. 100% of the emotion and analysis has been either elation or d…
This was Keir Starmer’s triumph, July 2024. The red. In the ensuing 3 months his approval rating has plummeted by 49 points, to -38. The greatest post-election fall of any UK PM…
Trump’s second inauguration may be the first trip many of his followers have had to Washington in a while, without a bootload of ordnance. https://t.co/l3jWLxkYO2
An election is literally a type of Miss Universe competition. A popularity contest oblivious to most of the material realities of the world. It’s delicious that Trump once co-ow…
#Insiders notes it was a ‘change election’ (because people are struggling, then moves on to all the (very common) meaningless babble about why people voted the way they did. We’…
One of the things to understand about China is that it plays ‘the long game’. In the West we’re hopelessly glued to meaningless short electoral cycles, which have degenerated in…
There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined. But let me suggest how this means *way*…
“In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” (Benjamin Franklin) This is the American political DNA. It’s also impossible no…
We love advocacy, ‘awareness’, ‘education’, as if the problem is other people being stupid. Advocacy is like a crusade, where you get to put together a team, and fight other tea…
If you use a social instead of a political or economic lens for society, you’ll see the same patterns repeating throughout history. Take a classic Agatha Christie story. So ofte…
Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint summarises something important, even in its title. Who doesn’t feel that culture, every day? Public life is now eternal complaint. Every issu…
As the UK and US disappear down Anglo fantasies of lost empires, Asia is taking over the world. Paul Keating tried to align Oz with Asia, but met fierce resistance from the Quee…
This extract from Will Storr's book on status is required reading if you want to understand Covid minimisers. For 'events', let's use 'anti-lockdown crusades'. /1 https://t.co/1…
Gil Duran coined a phrase to describe something I Tweet about a lot here as well. The capture of democracies by Silicon Valley. Duran calls it 'The Nerd Reich'. This has been go…
Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. It’s very common to think of information or ideas in this way, as connected semantic bubbles. (from: https://t.co/k9sdX5F…
Covid minimisation is status-driven insanity. History suggests it has a lot further to run. This is Francis and Dan Keller. Falsely convicted of sexual abuse of children in a da…
One of the most destructive myths is the idea of ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’. Human groups and societies have no tops or bottoms. Implicit in the belief that they do is also a bel…
I look on every day as our most serious problems have nothing done about them. Activism won’t shift that. Somebody called me cynical for continually pointing this out. To me cyn…
I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire live…
Here’s a fun status game from the UK. Uproar over the Labour Party there now modifying the tax-free inheritance on farms, introduced to help sustain the industry. ‘Tax-free’ att…
One of the most important parts of status as the mechanism of all societies, is the scapegoating mechanism that Rene Girard talks about. The relentless battles for status - stat…
We classify countries along a rough continuuum from 'freedom-loving democracies' through to 'authoritarian dictatorships'. And we assume these are either choices countries make,…
Stop me when you figure out which country and government this is. 1) Government comes to power and within 3 years has built 3,500 km of high quality new roads. 2) Within that sa…
Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history p…
The most common assumptions about democracy, what it is or even should be, are wrong. Democracy is not ‘the people’ running societies. That’s populism. That’s Homer’s car, the i…
In feudal times a small number of families (the nobles or aristocracy) hoarded most of a society's wealth, in alliance with a King or Queen. Like I say, 'the economy' is really…
Storr is absolutely right that all of society is status games. What I call team sports. There’s no escaping that, but there is shaping those sports so that they focus on more pr…
Our ‘freedumb’ times. The cultures that have the loosest social restrictions on the planet? Former communist and Eastern European countries. The countries we would see as ‘autho…
Pretty much everybody who goes on this show lists the main thing they want to ‘escape’. Cars. Traffic and roads. Cars are (apparently) designed to take us places we want to go.…
How is everybody going with ‘the people’ running societies? Our own ideas about democracy are what destroys it. What those with highest status did was use this whole idea of ‘th…
Why do bad people keep winning our political games? Because they understand people better. They know what drives all people is status. Have a look around the culture you’re livi…
The cost of nuclear power has risen over 25% in the last 10 years, while in the same period the cost of solar power has fallen almost 90%, the cost of wind power has fallen near…
One of the critical things to understand about how we live is that our existing status hierarchies are absolutely dependent on the centralised ownership of energy. We need to sh…
Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading th…
Existing homeowners can’t afford plummeting house prices. So we’ll build a glut of new ‘supply’, and those new homes will therefore be cheaper. Except the housing ‘market’ means…
It’s emotionally satisfying to imagine that action against things like climate change and Covid is being blocked by a small cabal of evil [insert chosen baddies] people. The rea…
Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a…
When you ‘connect’ people, they will form teams, and those teams will then battle within themselves and with other teams, for status. In other words, you make the world a more v…
The basic act of segregating children from adult life in schools caused a violent change to our societies, that we’re still living through (and not understanding). When you put…
My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have become the venue to transact every aspect of our lives now. Let’s t…
The most brilliant windows into our lives as humans are in the most mundane and banal stories. Like this one. I often post about how, contrary to popular opinion, our sociality…
We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world. Now we increasingly all just travel there. Because we don’t understand place…
Democracies still cling to the idea that their societies are shaped in parliaments. The more cynical suggest it’s corporate boardrooms. But our societies now are mostly run by a…
DH Lawrence was also a primary school teacher. His writings about that experience are remarkably prescient about the world we’re now confronted with. Thinking is a specialised s…