2025 Threads
230 demonstrable authored self-threads.
Covid minimisers, climate change deniers, all the loon modern contrarians. I call them social status whores. Because that’s what they’re up to. 1/7
The 20th century was a century of revolutions. Russia, China. And we had one too, the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ revolution. Like Burke I think all revolutions are disasters for s…
Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way. This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to v…
Bruno Latour once suggested ( think rightly) that we aim for an ‘object-oriented democracy’. What does this mean? Read on. His magisterial essay at the link below too. /1 https:…
For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling the spread of a pandemic aren’t being done. A few years ago I realise…
The distant lands we read about and imagine are always far more accurately captured by that distant reading, than by going there to visit. Like a probe capturing Jupiter. Going…
For me the most important story out of the LA fires was the fire hydrants. Because they show the enormous chasm between a politics focused on actual material need, versus the lu…
For life itself there have been 5 known major catastrophes, which drove most evolution. Also how societies work. Most of the time humans play status games, competing for positio…
Negotiating the world of alternative social media platforms. It’s one of those things where I think we need to zoom out and reframe the entire question. Before we focus on techn…
Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations. Now, a li…
For most of history, there was no separate culture of children. Kids joined the adult world at a very young age, and never left it. Then we invented universal mass schooling. Th…
It is a fun challenge to come here and openly criticise popularity as a mechanism for running societies, on platforms structured around it. There is no connection between popula…
Populist landslides always lead to triumphalism. Because our entire understanding of politics is elections, we think these victories mean the complete opposite to what they actu…
Human life is a battle for status. Status is also identity, without it, you’re nobody. We join groups (teams) to fight these battles, emulating high-status individuals. Team mem…
The medium is the message. There’s fear about the impact of AI technology. Meanwhile, a far more dangerous technology is completely entrenched in societies, eating them from the…
After spending several years here writing about the idiot ‘team sports’ of social life, where you back a position inside a group or team, and then battle other teams, it apparen…
Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an…
While simpletons use their Left/Right electoral goggles to understand what’s happening, Gil’s ‘Nerd Reich’ begins to implement exactly what they openly promised to do. And there…
We all know fashions change. Crocs are in again, for example. Do we think about what that means though, about humans? Just one more sneaky way status rules our lives. /1 https:/…
A friend in the travel industry made a very interesting observation to me about ‘overtourism’. He said look at images like this, and ask a basic, material question. Where are al…
Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially and culturally. Forget the technologies. Silicon Valley is the Ameri…
Humans will turn everything into team sports (imitative rivalry). The terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in politics derive from which side of the Speaker’s chair politicians are sitting…
Indebted to @DavidJoffe64 for this share. While we flail and wail with hysterical concepts like fascism, and the tired old Left and Right rubbish, the specific thing going on ge…
Have been saying this here for years. We see it as the destruction of democracy, but the checks and balances that are democracy were mostly invented in feudal times to keep a tr…
Wonderful piece from Timothy Burke about how Trump-Musk are destroying the very power they want to wield, right under their own feet. This is what happens when ‘elections/popula…
Private versus public is an old, legacy team sport that we still play. All of what Cory says here is disgustingly true. The answer isn’t necessarily ‘make everything public’. Th…
What ‘activists’ (usually righteous but not very bright) don’t understand is that all they’re achieving here is widespread anger towards, and abuse and vandalism of, ordinary pe…
The Cult Archipelago. How social media is shaping our world. The medium is the message, as McLuhan said. How we transact our lives socially is unsurprisingly how our society is…
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 solution…
The greatest threat to the stability of the Trump regime is Musk. We should be cheering him on, every single acolyte around that table will be seething at the attention and infl…
Toby Walsh here saying the things I’ve been saying for several years. The medium is the message. Social media is a far greater danger to society than AI. But we wont see that, b…
The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna Carta. Rule of law, limits on power of the King and Church, just taxation…
Mob rule doesn’t discriminate between just and unjust causes. The fact this behaviour is not universally condemned, but ordinary people actually applaud it, is a symptom of how…
I want to continue to openly challenge our most basic assumptions about democracy. Like the idea that sustains social media, that somehow allowing entire populations to interact…
An essential component of team sports populism is accelerating moral panics. Mob rule, when huge numbers of people suddenly pile-on to a chosen scapegoating target. This is a cr…
It’s feudalism, not fascism. My theme for several years now (just saying). It absolutely matters that we diagnose things correctly. These are fundamentally different things. Als…
How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups, in battle with other groups, for status. The Welcome Stranger nugget…
The almost universal worshipping of small business reveals how far we’re infected by the terrible American disease of iconoclastic hatred of anything institutional. All sides of…
It genuinely angers me to see the Tesla pile-on. I think what Trump and Musk are doing is criminally insane, but I never for a second think any sort of solution to that is to de…
I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising…
Imagine if climate activists said that petrol and diesel vehicles need to go, so we should all go out and vandalise and burn those vehicles, while abusing their drivers. They’d…
America is not becoming a fascist nation, and believing it is plays right into Trump’s hands. The strategy of apocalyptic hysteria. We saw it with Covid too. /1
It’s very difficult for residents of rich countries in particular to understand that human will and rationality has little impact on how life unfolds. Rich nations assume that,…
“…activists focusing ire on a corporation has a long history in America.” ‘Troubling’, yes, rather than people cheering on the destruction. It’s deeply unpopular to say this, an…
I’ve been called too ‘dark’ or cynical, in saying that very little humans deliberatively do changes our overall fate. That only catastrophes really change societies. But I live…
Rene Girard’s passion was to understand violence. Why are humans violent to one another? People who follow me know what he discovered. It had nothing to do with individual human…
The biggest story in the world today, and I doubt many will even see it. PNG shuts down social media. But read it, I bet it won’t last, because the enshittification of PNG life…
The headline almost gets there. This is ‘Team Trump’. The entire Trump phenomenon is the substitution of public, civic life, with team sports on social media. The enshittificati…
Earlier in the pandemic, in Australia we saw the process beginning that I often Tweet about. Catastrophe disrupting a status quo. ‘Lockdowns’ were tremendous for the poor/low-st…
I’ll use one of Vera Kober’s wonderful paintings to talk a bit more about imitation, the core of all human life. How do some smears of paint ‘capture’ a flower? How is that ‘lik…
We know elections won’t fix our major problems. At best a victor may make more progress than somebody else. But it isn’t anywhere near enough. The problems we face are orders of…
The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, th…
The people who ask ‘why do you still mask?’ ask it in the way they might ask ‘why do you wear Crocs?’, when Crocs weren’t fashionable. There’s no science or public health in the…
The curious bed-sharing between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, showing how vacuously empty all team sports rivalry is. Rational-choice theory is the foundation of both market-driven capita…
One of the symptoms of entire nations and cultures now transacted through social media is the total absence of memory and perspective. The belief that Trump-Musk are Nazis or fa…
The myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t agree with the rest of this thread from Cory, about ‘groundswell’ politi…
I encourage everybody to focus not on the content of public debates, but on what’s going on socially. Societies don’t run on information, they run on social status. Cars are a t…
The transformation of societies into giant high schools is most visible in the young and the old. Both age groups bear the brunt of Covid. One left to die, the other repeatedly…
Calling everything fascism is an attempt to import mid-20th century Orwellian gravitas to (we think) give our mostly hot air words more impact. Our narrative is ‘things were goi…
Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highli…
What’s happened with car reviews illustrates a wider socio-cultural shift. The exponential growth of two connected things. Team sports (imitative rivalry), and what I call spec…
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 s…
“Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and s…
For a few years I’ve argued for what I call reality politics. Galileo’s ‘and yet it moves’ is the motto. This is not about plugging some science into what we call politics. It’s…
A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current syste…
The euphoria of victory in team sports taps into something that goes well beyond sport. It’s only one manifestation of a deeper cultural framework. Girard said, the root of all…
Putnam is one of the pre-eminent historians of social change. He recognises the alternating swings between ‘freedom’ individualism and collective ‘we’-based politics. The ‘upswi…
I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us…
Most of humanity’s urgent problems have known, often simple solutions. Much of it is engineering. We don’t do the things that need doing because of our belief that democracy mea…
Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to…
The idea we live in nation States is now quaint. Social media has rapidly assumed dominance as the place where we transact every aspect of human life, from the most personal, to…
Because everything is a crusade today, trying to assess the chronic long-term impacts of SC2 by looking at the progression of HIV was heavily frowned upon, because diseases are…
The idea that democracy is ‘the people’ running nations is like self-organisation theory. That we’ll together spontaneously decide upon the optimum thing to do. It’s also the ba…
The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But i…
For all things there is a root cause. Reality is not multi-factorial. A root cause isn’t reductive, when chemistry realised atoms were the root cause of all matter, it didn’t pr…
When imitation becomes rampant, like in the art market and now society as a whole through social media, it generates a powerful desire for 'authenticity'. Grok did a summary for…
Every day I watch the substitution of our societies by social media platforms. Lots of wailing about why ‘we’ aren’t doing important things. This is ‘we’, now. What’s trending.…
Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy are not capitalist, fascist, socialist or any variety of -ism. They’re giant high schools. Cultur…
Listening to a Tory toff on UK television still championing ‘levelling up’, or ‘growing the pie’. All the BS high status folk invented to try to avoid the inescapable fact that…
It’s estimated that 40-50% of humans who have ever lived died from some kind of infection. This doesn’t include chronic and persistent infection. Antibiotics and vaccines drove…
Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They…
Humans will transform every existential threat into more status games. We saw that with Covid, a pandemic became a launchpad for multiple ‘causes’, which are social movements dr…
The ‘political centre’ is a myth, even the most serious commentators still pretend politics is all about different teams along a spectrum, from Left to Right. No change comes fr…
Housing is the perfect example of status, the currency of all human society. Both the 'Left' and 'Right' in Australia converge on the same idiot idea to fix housing. 'More suppl…
This is a pivotal story, those dedicated to the team sports status games of ‘politics’ won’t understand why. Note the Trump administration’s immediate response, calling out ‘une…
Once you understand that societies run on status and not information, you also see that most problems are much smaller than they seem. The worst things in your life are controll…
‘Community opposition’ is a subset of belief in ‘the people’. Both are myths. There is no such thing as ‘the community’. Every time somebody evokes the people or the community,…
‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very speci…
For every urgent public issue today, social media platforms could identify in less than a day the relative handful of mis- and disinformation hubs on their platforms, driving re…
I have an American friend who’s a passionate believer in the idea that democracy is about educating and mobilising ‘the people’. I would call this an American cultural disease,…
Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game tho…
We think politics runs societies. It really doesn’t, it’s recreational team sports overlaid upon material realities. It’s those realities that determine what happens. Every prog…
The obsession with ‘the people’ in politics took off in the counterculture revolution in the mid-20th century. There it is, ‘Power to the People’. At the same time this movement…
The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The founding mythology of ‘the people’ ruling themselves, what Graeber and…
Roman cities are instantly recognisable. What isn’t is that they’re the blatant plagiarising homage the Romans paid to the Greeks, whom they invaded and sacked. The Romans wante…
I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of freedom, but of course today’s politics wants you to think the oppos…
It’s amazing that ‘debt and deficit’ politics, weaponised junk economics, has completely captured the public policy space. Many even believe it, that governments need to find mo…
The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, com…
America’s political woes are intrinsic to its culture. The rest of the world should jump off all the comparisons with European fascism, it’s not what’s going on. The Puritan fou…
So much of the hysteria about ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ reflects widespread ignorance of history and its patterns. Rome is instructive. It began with Kings, moved to rule…
The distinction between tailoring and designer clothes in this thread is fundamentally important culturally, going well beyond fashion. Tailoring is expertise-based style. Desig…
Recreational travel cultures like to call themselves ‘nomads’. They’re nothing like nomads, nomads move to survive. Meanwhile travel cultures invest trillions in their own homes…
Most of us can look on and wonder what do we do about this nonsense? Well, we can read history. Human societies always degenerate into status/popularity games, led by buffoons,…
Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s first spymaster, takes us back to a time when it was understood how power and influence works. There was no tosh then about needing to route in…
I’ve always found social media appalling, I come back here as others do to gather information I shouldn’t need, but do to maintain my own life and safety, because of the wreckag…
Robert Putnam’s ‘The Upswing’ traces the cycling between “I” and “We” in American life over the past century. You can see here how the 4 great catastrophic disruptions of the fi…
The greatest enemy of kidult culture, which is social media culture (social media converted our societies into giant high schools), is expertise. Expertise breaks the kidult min…
These things follow a cycle. The Anglo empire (Britain and the US) first plunder other lands, usually for oil or other resources. Installing puppet regimes to squash any local d…
I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and free speech mean lead us to believe debating is some sort of winnowi…
Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life…
All modern civilisation is a tension between the school classroom and school playground. The classroom is where a society grafts its knowledge onto its present-day culture. The…
While so much oxygen and energy is wasted on empty, pointless terms sports of Left v Right, social media warriors are storming the Bastille from every direction. Social media. i…
What we used to call the ‘public sphere’ has been almost entirely replaced with social media, the space where we now transact all of society. Public policy is determined by what…
The path to sanity? Focus on the material realities of our lives, the continental plates under the frisson of the team sports human status games overlaid upon them. Stop thinkin…
Stories from inside a kidult bubble culture. The idea that feelings are independent things, to be lived. What I call the ‘culture of the feels’. Putin is happiest crushing resis…
Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear, say, how we build and decorate homes, etc. At its origin will be a…
I sometimes post about casuistry, case-based reasoning. The genius human invention that is misunderstood, neglected and forgotten. The outrageous injustice meted out to Oscar Pi…
Norman Swan has a piece today on these numbers. (https://t.co/ERqs0LO7OX) Infection isn’t mentioned as a possible smoking gun. Not just SARS-Cov2 infection, any infection. Medic…
So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life…
Staff member turned up to work sick yesterday. It was an insight into ‘living with’ infection culture. I told them to go home. ‘No, I’m fine, I have too much to do.’ Then others…
Herd immunity. The Mayo Clinic setting out the basic scientific reasons this should never work, for Covid. And yet it’s the global strategy, copied from the Great Barrington Dec…
There it is, the core belief the US (and now others) hold that destroys democracy. The fake opposition between the ‘sovereignty of the people’, and ‘authoritarianism’. There is…
The 40th anniversary of Live Aid. Adult culture looked at a critical problem facing the world, and thought ‘we should hold a gig’. Kidult culture. Still active from the counterc…
“Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality th…
Trump isn’t bringing fascism to America. We don’t know our own culture, and that’s not unusual. Fish don’t know water exists, until beached. Trump is the apotheosis of the count…
Every single post on this platform imploring that ‘we’ need to act to fix something is 70 years too late. Looking to do “we” things in “I” cultural times is pissing into the win…
Our culture *is* the counterculture of the 1950s and 60s. A culture that began as teens rebelling against the old, and is ending with adult life replaced by teen life, with its…
One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world in some immediate way. I’ve spent a few years here detailing the mech…
Culture is mostly invisible to those living it, it’s like water is to fish. I spend a lot of time talking about the countercultural revolution of our era, with friends. Because…
If you run societies using popularity, and even say that’s democracy, the outcome will always be some form of Trump. Popularity is the enemy. Authoritarianism is just endgame po…
So many see the world as competing -isms. Capitalism takes on socialism and communism, with authoritarianism now the flavour of the month too. The underlying belief here is that…
I’m increasingly bored with social media, it traps people in adolescent cultural games of team bonding and battling, with other teams. Everything is a pile-on, and adult respons…
What we desire is also what we think, what we feel, what we believe. We mistake all of these for the objects of our desire, we think what we like is present in the object of our…
We don’t really understand that as social animals, everything is social. Our deepest, most intimate likes or tastes too. Take interior design. For many years now minimalist grey…
“…people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.” Like I…
I’ve watched sport over many years, as a window into a culture we’re still not seeing or understanding. Victory now creates utter euphoria. Defeat has professionals in tears, wi…
The danger of social media isn’t about information. Societies don’t run on information. They run on trust, which runs on status hierarchies. Social media destroys those hierarch…
The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and…
Those sceptical that Western life is really highly school culture should maybe consider this. From an age when humans can only just walk and talk, they go to school. They remain…
Saying I had regular conversations with AI really fired up some of those whose understanding of technology comes from Hollywood movies. 72% of teens surveyed had used an AI comp…
If you live in a modern democracy, I think the Magna Carta is necessary reading. Only half-a-dozen pages. The foundation agreement that invented the original checks and balances…
Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when facing catastrophe? ‘Prosociality’? Here’s the thing. That IS ‘democracy’…
Australia’s main energy companies are buying up big with grid batteries. Unsurprisingly the much lower cost of generating the renewable energy to fill them isn’t being passed on…
The Albanese government’s attempt in its first term to ape the status quo by simply replacing fossil fuel generation in the electricity grid with renewables was a lost opportuni…
There were 3 revolutions in the 20th century, in all 3 major powers. Russia, China, the Anglosphere. We only notice the disasters of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. We igno…
Millions believe democracy means letting entire populations opine on things they mostly know nothing about, with the most popular opinions the ones that then win the day. Social…
Again, we stopped everything we were doing for years at a time for two world wars last century. For risks that were insignificant, compared to this. Today’s status quo is imperv…
If you don’t know your culture as a culture, you know nothing about why things happen. Our culture believes that there is no greater catastrophe than the denial of social life.…
‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had…
I often Tweet about the 1970s being a pivotal time in the reversing of the public gains of the we-based society, post-WW2. The period 1950-late-1970s, when ‘the public’ was the…
In kidult culture, everybody who acts badly is labelled a ‘narcissist’. To adults who see the world through the lens of rampant adolescent culture, all pathology is deviation fr…
This is a much, much bigger story than something like “Hitler invades Poland”. Many find the view that only catastrophe will shift a human status quo pessimistic. Have a look ar…
I think it was McCartney who recently called out the nonsense of the lyric and vibe of this sort of song. It’s a window into the massive social/cultural shift that became our cu…
The more we socialise human life, the more unequal the outcomes will become. This contrasts with our common assumptions about sociality, that it’s a type of leveller. An experim…
Headlines yesterday about this meeting of ‘authoritarian’ leaders. Our democracies are dying because of the ludicrous ideas we have about them. That we in the West are led by ‘t…
The transition to renewables shows how human societies work. Objectively everybody should be celebrating this near-free energy. But as with all human change the status quo is mo…
Almost universally the US is now described as a battle between democracy and fascism. What we call democracy is really just a monarchy with significant checks and balances force…
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…
The Nepalese government tried to regulate and restrict social media. ‘The people’ burned down the parliament in response, and took selfies for their feeds. When are we going to…
We assume humans just get on, and when they don’t they’ve become ‘polarised’. Reverse the assumption. The baseline of all human life is violence. Imitative rivalry, for status.…
‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue. And it’s in decline even in…
The Beatles were right at the centre of the countercultural revolution, often involuntarily. A story from that time reveals the BS of that revolution. (And still our culture.) M…
Those who zoom out of daily trending obsessions will see patterns. Democracies are collapsing, under assault from populism. Which is really just uncontrolled human status games.…
How is the world going with climate targets? Nowhere. The status quo will never change something that it relies upon for its own existence. Look around. Humans are just fighting…
We in the West are end-of-empire people. That social-cultural fact barely rates a mention in analysis. End of empire cultures are so habituated to things in life just working ou…
One of the tropes of modern politics is that populists like Trump succeed because of millions of disaffected working people. This is just one more delusional variety of the nons…
Lawrence’s Letter from Germany in the late-1920s was a novelist’s perception of a dangerous shift in human social life. It was prescient of what happened next. That danger is ba…
No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’ makes the slightest difference to the collapse of the US. Lewis and Usma…
Even in the study of catastrophe, how we *feel* about everything is front and centre. The culture of the feels. “It's not humans per se that are bad, but the institutions and po…
If you include the linear regression trend line, it’s clear that American democracy is getting worse, the more people come out to vote. I’ve Tweeted about how elections clearly…
@gilduran76 quotes Lincoln to fire up Americans against Trump. I get exactly the opposite feeling from what Lincoln said. To me it reveals the cancer at the heart of American so…
I sometimes get accused of being anti-democracy. But my position is that there are no ‘systems’ of government in the first place. Societies are not systems. They’re humans, acti…
The more social life becomes the winning of pointless daily team sports status battles on social media, the more we stop seeing repeated historical patterns. America has arrived…
In Dewey and Lippmann’s famous discussions about the nature of a public and democracy, they agreed on one critical thing. That only problems bring a public into being. As I say,…
The 19th century was a century of rival kings. Here they are in 1815 carving up Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon. “The Cake of Kings.” Most of the two millennia of modern Eu…
Eric Topol here discussing the failure of preventative medicine in the past 75 years, with the exception of vaccination. And how AI is turning that around. One thing stood out f…
So either a tiny minority is incredibly skilled at global-scale suppression of the ‘will of the people’. Or the will of the people has always been a horseshit idea. Hitler loved…
The more people vote in the US, the worse ‘democracy’ gets. Socially, this makes perfect sense. Using idealistic claptrap, it’s totally bewildering. 1/3 https://t.co/YUj7Fbq9Qz
It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy challenges that. Putting solar panels on your roof can to a considerable e…
The truths of life are neither popular, or unpopular. The whole continuum of popularity is a status continuum, not a truth continuum. What is unpopular is just popular to anothe…
We know the Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free market think tank. Also a climate change denial…
My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the s…
The energy and environmental impacts of AI are a common narrative now. It’s funny how we never question the real elephant in our cultural room. Recreational travel. On energy it…
A revolution introduced fossil fuels into societies. We think the ‘market’ will drive them out. The true nature of the market as a defensive shield of bullshit to protect the st…
I often post about how all meaningful and significant change in societies comes only from catastrophic disruptions. Historically, wars, plagues, natural disasters. Everything el…
Democracy was never about ‘the people’. Ever. It always was feudalism with checks and balances installed to limit the power of the King. We then began calling those checks and b…
In my town years back, a tradesman was burned while working on a shop renovation. He was taken to hospital, feeling OK, and asked when he would be allowed to go home. Doctors sa…
This is our framework for understanding the entire world. We’re trapped inside this team sports bubble. Every point on this spectrum is only a status/identity-based team, battli…
Lord of the Flies was a great window into our assumptions about how societies work. The idea that without wider social life, we become savages. In reality this is completely bac…
Popularity is the currency of populism, which is Western culture today. In populist culture, the only revolutionary is the person who thinks or does unpopular things. Not opposi…
It was Edmund Burke who saw human institutions as humanity’s past and future, folded into the present. As humanity’s memory, its capacity to act outside the present moment. We n…
John Anderson, on public health. “One aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns was the emergence of a sense that essential freedoms were somehow gifts to be bestowed by gov…
Noah Smith. Funny how the worm is turning in understanding the deeper social transformations in play. But he ends with: “ I predict that the new age of kings won’t last.” The ag…
The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have be…
It was only the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century which gave ordinary people access to housing for the first time. Prior to that, housing and land were the excl…
For most of modern history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. So why aren’t we today? Only catastrophe really changes societies. The Black Death killed up to…
Populism is described as a political strategy of appealing to ordinary people against elites. My definition of populism is any governance system that uses popularity as its main…
"COVID has pulled us back toward the pre-vaccine pattern — a biologically self-sustaining but socially costly equilibrium. The difference is that now we know better: we have too…
Much infectious disease was historically ‘endemic by attrition’. A dynamic equilibrium with the pathogen through the death and maiming of people, because there weren’t other opt…
The greatest enemy of human existence is infection. Worth repeating every day that most people who have ever lived died from some form of infection, the majority before they’d e…
Russian culture is still the playing out of the Russian Revolution. Chinese culture is the playing out of its revolution. Both populist movements. The West is the same, but refu…
Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was revolutionary, and offers us a way to run our societies that would be f…
America has always *defined* democracy as continuous insurrection. . Guns are just a means to an end, the culture itself is fundamentally violent. It celebrates that violence, a…
The most counter-intuitive and unpalatable truth of the fact that status runs societies? The more equal we are, the more violent societies become. It intensifies rivalry. Our ne…
Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call democracy? What is popular under populism is the destruction of those…
Most social problems are generated by tiny numbers of people who form hubs in social networks. This account for example is one society could easily choose to shut down, to preve…
If the ALP wants to head off Voice-like populist climate politics from the LNP, it needs to continue to focus strategically on households. Continue to subsidise power bills, and…
The Republicans and Democrats in the US have swapped ideologies over the course of their history. Societies don't run on politics, they run on imitation/conformity, driven by st…
The disgusting term ‘lockdowns’ disguises that emergency Covid action actually lifted huge numbers of people out of poverty. What was ‘locked down’ wasn’t people. It was a statu…
This is how disasters are usually managed. Somebody with expertise in the specific disaster leads the response while politicians step to one side. Scott Morrison convened Nation…
‘Fair trial’ is more democratic checks and balances. But it originated (as all things do) in battles between the highest status members of societies. In the Western case, in the…
It’s one thing to relish the unveiling of foreign influence on social media, especially with supposedly MAGA accounts. But it’s the belief that ‘the people’ run democracies that…
Compare and contrast Sir Humprey here with the revolutionary ‘the people’ narratives coming out of the US and elsewhere. Is Sir Humphrey anti-democratic? Absolutely no. We need…
@annabelcrabb here using the common belief that democracy is ‘the people’ thinking and acting, in this case to provide checks and balances on power. Why I think that’s a very da…
A few years ago I shifted my Twitter contributions away from chronicling the problems societies face, from vomiting ignored facts into the void. Towards what seemed a more usefu…
‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to understand what’s happening to us. Starting with the UK. Look at the densi…
Day after day I watch brilliant people posting brilliant things into the complete void that public life now is. Desperately hoping they can get something to trend for even 10 mi…
Government activity as a proportion of GDP exploded in the 20th century, due to the rebuilding of societies, after two world wars, a pandemic and economic depression. From about…
The world where the public good led government decisions was not the outcome of voting or of better leaders. It was a world led by the public institutions that surged between 19…
Using Turchin's work on elite overproduction, it's possible to conceive all societies as status rivalries between elites. What we call 'democracy' is really the degree of co-opt…
The angst over AI bemuses me, when we’ve had technologies for a while that are vastly more dangerous to societies, which attract little criticism or action. Social media platfor…
What if, as a culture, we shifted to living in time, rather than in space? Shifted our focus to what endures, rather than to our present-moment ‘positions’, both on a map and in…
A few years ago I shifted most of my posting here to target one thing. Status. Status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. Without understanding status…
I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate.…
What social media does is make visible just how unbelievably stupid most of us are. And then gives the stupid a mechanism to mobilise and coordinate that stupidity, to take over…
They say Copernicus T-boned our human comfort because he took the Earth out of the centre of the universe. I see a similar de-centering happening with human thought, and AI. Man…
So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s…
Scrolling through the rich vomiting of drivel on social media, where everybody is now an expert on everything. And comparing it to the Republic of Letters. Which Stanford has be…
I’ll begin 2026 as I ended 2025, by inviting people to admit that our ideas about how societies work aren’t working. Otherwise change might happen. All societies are rivalries b…