2026 Threads
40 demonstrable authored self-threads.
The rapidly escalating pettiness of Trump's fights. He's doing us a favour, making visible the mimetic crisis that is the true threat to our societies. Humans desire what others…
In the roughly 4 billion years that known life has existed, it's only in the past 100 that one life form believed it determined its own destiny. The Greeks called that hubris. N…
The cycle of all human life and history. Drawing upon Girard, Burke, Tarde and Turchin mostly. Imitative rivalry. We imitate to have status. Past a threshold this destroys socia…
Trump’s Venezuelan action continues a long US tradition. Which was a Roman tradition. The US has always led the modern world in these actions. Regime change abroad is about mana…
Those in US society who are ‘decamillionaires’ (>$10 million net worth) have expanded TENFOLD in the past half century. This isn’t about inequality. This is the group from wh…
I still believe Turchin’s overproduction of elites is a far better framework to understand Trump through. Look at the history of the Trump regime. Firstly the big increase in ca…
The genius of the Tupperware party was to understand that what people think and do is driven by social conformity. If you target the social networks rather than thinking of huma…
If it frustrates you that there appears to be widespread resistance to understanding basic facts, ponder the status of teachers in 2025. Teachers know what most of the rest of u…
The Iranian protests have already been shoehorned into our usual ‘people power’ narratives. (Social media loves that narrative, it’s what it deludes itself that it’s doing every…
Imagine a new world order where Europe and Asia (including Australia/NZ) all align behind China as the dominant superpower. And maybe even allow Russia back into the fold, it wa…
McLuhan tried to teach us that the ‘medium is the message’. That first we make tools, and then our tools make us. The escalating apocalyptic narratives of social media made me r…
It really is difficult to not compare the US to Ancient Rome right now. Centuries of a democratic republic now under siege by populist tyrants. The uncomfortable truth from that…
Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from n…
Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it. Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations… /1 https://t.c…
@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports.…
The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work. So today, we tend to believe individuals are reasoning agents, process…
Vaccination is failing because we’re misdiagnosing anti-vax as the population being more ‘hesitant’ about vaccines. The same myths we wallow in about democracy, that it’s led by…
The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of hierarchies that run societies, the destruction of trust built upon experienc…
The bizarre idea of ‘community consultation’ is a window into our most stupid and destructive beliefs. The idea that human groups, of whatever size, have some sort of collective…
Because populist societies are decoupled from history, interested only in a trending present of whims and fads, we forget the origin of the checks and balances and due process w…
Dunkelman traces how nation-building institutions now struggle to build anything at all. We can easily list those who obstruct this building work, like the sponsored small gover…
One for your friends and GPs, who are puzzled by your ‘mystery’ illnesses. Thanks to @DavidJoffe64 for the reference. https://t.co/W8KtghXuZG
Every single day I see social media used as if its ‘content’ is what it’s all about. The medium is the message. Like here, the disconnect between what’s actually happening, and…
I read that Google in its early days had a stringent hiring policy, with all (?) hires vetted from the top. The reason? A belief that even one hired idiot would become a nucleus…
Yes, and no. The Western ‘world order’ obviously came out of Europe, and in some ways its its problem to solve too. But…Asia? It ran the world before Europe, and is kinda doing…
In kidult populist culture, all social roles relating to the material operation of societies are stripped away and replaced by pure popularity. To then have a role and therefore…
The stripping away of all democratic checks and balances, including the law itself, is not fascism. Fascism is a State-phenomenon, another Westphalian bubble concept. It’s the r…
Following every election is the search for what it means. Elections have no meaning. They’re a popularity contest. That’s all they are. There is no link between popularity and o…
Kings are back. It’s not authoritarianism or fascism. It’s royalism. The dominant social model throughout all history, except since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which create…
Here’s a window into kidult culture. Australia has up to 2 million more dogs than it has children. Kidults love dogs because they’re pliable and lavish us with seeming unconditi…
Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian pop…
AI is transforming our culture in almost every way, in the same way that social media did decades ago. But much more quickly. And I think on balance in a profoundly curative way…
Nobody takes ‘the medium is the message’ seriously, what it means. We’ll continue to interpret the big populist shifts in Anglo politics using the team sports framing of ‘politi…
Populism is the culture-wide attempt to restore Kings. A quarter of a century is about as good as it gets, which is nothing in historical terms. Populism always founders on succ…
It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into so…
The danger here is adopting the spin of the populist conquerors. All populists pretend to be the champions of the downtrodden, because they’re actually elites and these are the…
The great lie of the pandemic was that public health action was unpopular and damaged people and economies. Public health was invented to prevent that. And it did. The rush to ‘…
The current hysteria around resource usage of AI data centres. It’s entirely in proportion to what humanity has devoted historically to cognition. First as individual brains, th…
We’ve forgotten Charles Beard, prominent US historian. Beard saw that elites drive all societies. He said the Founders of the US were a cohesive elite of wealthy property owners…
While genuine grievance can spark a political movement - often the explanation given for populism - it’s not what sustains it. Past a tipping point, the movement is only about t…