Art, culture & media

@Peter_Fitz saw this online and assumed it was a joke. But it may be legit? Probably covered in your book, which I haven't read, oops. https://t.co/e0q0QGhBIC

@PhillipAdams_1 Ben is a brilliant interview, and his book is a revelation on many fronts. Just sayin' https://t.co/zXQduezuGC

#auspol #covid19 not seeing anybody connect the 2 plagues right now. Mice and Covid. Both caused by ecosystem disruption. In turn caused by our 'Economy', which has transformed agriculture into an economic system as well. The Economy…

@auspol #covid19 'hesitancy' is clearly about consent. If people are vaccine hesitant, it means we haven't done the basic medical consent. That's a dialogue, not the making of quirky TV ads.

#auspol #covid19 watching whining UK tourists on TV, 'what was the point of getting vaccinated if we can't travel?' The point of getting vaccinated was to try to end the pandemic. Travel is the developed world's most disgusting…

A really fabulous, extraordinary film. I've followed Galison's scholarship on scientific imagery for years, and some of that is in this film too, about the first ever image of a black hole. https://t.co/jwMJImpUZ4

#covid19 #auspol the BBC on exponential growth. https://t.co/ZxVxQfbPsJ

#auspol there are so many culture war bores on Twitter who refuse to believe this. https://t.co/7k6rcYzxmv

#auspol #COVID19Aus join us tomorrow when Peter gives tips on painting and decorating, another area he has no knowledge of or experience in. https://t.co/7x9X2E0dAC

#auspol #covid19 love Ian's work, so no criticism of him. But 'opening up' is not medical or scientific advice. Like a trade deal, where you decide the degree of access and protection for the flow of people and goods. /1…

Pretty sure there are still regulations around maximum number/minutes of ads per hour on Freeview TV? Surely @theprojecttv sails pretty close to whatever that line is? Anybody counted?

#auspol #covid19aus I call this painting 'Schools are Safe'. https://t.co/OJqaBRpKS8

#auspol #covid19 the development of universal schooling also created a creeping adolescence of all culture. We can see this in the pandemic, the resistance to ‘lockdowns’ is like adolescents chafing at being grounded. Not an analogy, this…

#covid19 #auspol today's reading, NSW Cabinet, is from the Book of Leviticus. https://t.co/8Zq2SOOklr

#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads to poorer areas, who are then corralled and left to die. /1…

#auspol #covid19 much of this pandemic is playing out as Camus would have predicted. Only a novel comes close to capturing the full complexity of social life. Some excerpts in Tweets, today about illness and life in an ‘Economy’. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus we need a leading journalist to convene a roundtable of top public health experts once or twice a week, to comment on NSW's approach. How about it @David_Speers? At the moment they're just individually tearing their…

@YouAreLobbyLud @OrinCordus nothing to worry about after all, one of Twitter’s top culture warriors is on top of it. https://t.co/YBOwQTapdG

#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is impossible. Most surrender at the idea of the social costs. /1 https://t.co/ItnhmWwxLE https://t.co/LZ4VhMp3FA Let’s consider those,…

#auspol George Bernard Shaw once said the role of journalism is not to be 'fair and balanced'. Journalism isn't 'he said, she said'. You have a TV and computer for that. Journalism criticises, analyses, holds to account. Journalist's…

#auspol #covid19aus one of the curious things in this pandemic is just how immune to some basic empirical evidence so many seem to be. For example it doesn’t take a lot of time to watch international news and see just how many countries go…

‘Authoritarian’ and ‘free democratic’ are both PR terms. As a governance person, I’m more concerned about ‘free’ democracies electing reality TV stars who advocate flushing lungs with floor cleaner against Covid, and who reject election…

#covid19aus #auspol I see tonight Burnet modelling is the new target for live with the virus, anti-lockdown people. Is there anything they couldn’t turn into some sort of political culture war? What boring, fatuous people, what a way to…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW 2021 is probably best compared with England 2020-21, when it comes to Covid strategy. Bugger the models, they're nearly all hopeless, let's go back to some basic empiricism. Real-world outcomes there for our…

Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45 I…

Two things explain most of the world’s craziness. 1. Society is really a giant high school. That’s our actual culture, we get our social models there. 2. We all want to be ruled by Kings and Queens, the -isms and democracy are both…

There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic freedom has never = freedom of speech. That's the political libertarian framing. Thread about what (I think) this all means. /1…

Ultimately the extent of the culture wars are an optical illusion. Minority viewpoints amplified to high volume inside narrow media channels. Creating an apocalyptic impression of end of times and mass support. It’s a bit Wizard of Oz,…

Denmark became the new Sweden this year for the culture war types who cling desperately to the idea that the whole pandemic is some form of alarmism. It ‘opened up’ to great fanfare this month. It’s given the cases graph another erection.…

Just under 50,000 cases registered in the UK today. Should we run a book on how long 'live with the virus' lasts there? Odds of another lockdown before Christmas? #auspol #covid19aus

Less said in relation to this event is how a culture can become so saturated with firearms in its thinking, that armourers become a standard hire for movie production. Would love an assessment of how many billions of bullets have been…

The corner shop represented a more resilient culture, logistically. The hyper-mobility that new forms of transport injected into our societies also stripped them of much of their resilience. Much of ‘freedom day’ type rhetoric is about the…

The standard culture warrior script. Setting yourself up as a universal victim, which then excuses every obnoxious thing you say. The public might be surprised to see what Dr Coatsworth re-Tweets, at a minimum. #auspol…

Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol…

The experts who say child vaccines aren't a priority, also argue against masks for kids in schools. Now they're slowing rollout of vaccines to under-12s, because of myocarditis and pericarditis risks. Didn't stop teen vaccines. /1 #auspol…

Looking at Israel’s data last night made me think about how we look at Covid data as being about the virus. When actually it’s much more about us, the people. These epidemiological curves show social behaviour more than virus behaviour. /1…

Will there be a reckoning one day for those in prominent medical science positions who call to 'live with' a novel pathogen while it's still uncontrolled? You can understand the average punter doing that, but so many who are paid shedloads…

Up is down, left is right, day is night. We’re living in a Dr Seuss book. https://t.co/eTAMubtZsg

Have Tweeted a few times about how society is a high school. And that this is literally true, not an analogy. (See: https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh). You can understand everything going on with Covid using that lens. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

The developed world’s Covid strategy of ‘infect everybody repeatedly’ has turned testing into a universal Tinder. Get a RAT to date, eat out, go to the cinema, etc. #COVID19 https://t.co/7jrnypx6aq

Trying to remember who suggested that epidemiology books should now be shifted to the self-help section of book stores.

What are the achievements of the Morrison government? The only visible activity is the daily spinning of inactivity, as activity. Undergraduate culture war debating games, every day. I imagine Malcolm Turnbull leading the LNP through…

“Yesterday, our dear officials were struggling with an evolving pandemic driven by a novel virus that made us all look like slow-witted fools. But today we are all living in the warmth of a stable endemic. Isn’t that good news for a…

This is a 1798 mapping of yellow fever in NYC. One thing to notice about the Covid pandemic is the way much of the rich visualisation public health has used for centuries to analyse outbreaks has been stripped back to the barest data -…

This advice works well for rich people who can watch the pandemic from home on the TV. https://t.co/yZSUaFHLb2

It's like living in a George Orwell novel, sitting here every day watching political libertarians talking about the pandemic being over, while the bodies pile up. Crimes against humanity, glossed over with cheap political slogans.…

Great what creative work some experts can do, while others sit on their computers playing culture war games while parroting ‘just get vaccinated’. https://t.co/oZtMhmbdsI

The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

Julian Tang on UK TV this morning, asked whether Covid is now like seasonal flu. No, it’s still in an epidemic wave pattern. If it does make that transition, it may take ‘several years’.

This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden…

58 dead last week. Already 33 this week. Not one story on it, anywhere. What a sick, self-absorbed culture. https://t.co/7f4AgbDo1R

“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the…

In Camus’ meticulously researched novel, the town is locked down until the pandemic is over, reflecting practice over millennia. There’s no ‘living with the virus’. What we’re doing right now is without precedent in human history. It is…

So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between…

The real reason ‘living with the virus’ had to become the strategy. Poor people were forgetting their place. ‘Endemic’ was originally a term applied to infectious diseases when they were left to fester in poorer countries. Now endemic =…

For 30 years the LNP has been trying to introduce the neoliberal/libertarian politics of the US and UK. Those beliefs are poison to a communitarian Australian culture. Those furious at what we’ve done with Omicron are mostly so because of…

In live crosses to different seats, notable that LNP candidates have predominantly LNP-TV (SKY News) on in the venues. The party now lives in that tiny bubble. #auspol

A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others predicted it right at the start of that 30 year period. /1…

The US has a ridiculous number of firearms. And it also has a culture of violence, the two are indissociable. Why is the US so violent? That’s a key question, I think. And I’ll bet its hyper-libertarian viewpoint is the culprit. Each to…

Seriously? This is just continuing the Howard-Abbott-Morrison agenda. Surrendering small-l liberal ideas, and shifting the LNP to a conservative party, kept afloat by culture war politics targeted at the ALP heartland? Isn't this obvious?…

For years FB frustrated me, Australians use it overwhelmingly as a social/community thing, not for debating. Then the penny dropped, it’s our communitarian culture, doing what it does, making everything about community. As Hsu et al found:…

“As Health Minister I am not at all keen to be heading back the path that has exhausted everybody with all the restrictions.” BH, March 2022. Sitting on the couch watching Netflix isn’t exhausting. Being a teacher or HCW with the…

It interests me that musos, normally climbing all over each other for a cause, are happily out organising big-earning Covid superspreader gigs again. Let’s not pretend these are artists in financial difficulty. https://t.co/Yw0RcBVyFw

Catching a few moments of the Logie’s red carpet, and wondering if free to air TV and commercial radio would be orders of magnitude less stupid if people just paid for them. It’s been pretty much ‘will drop pants for food’ for a lot of…

Another struggling artist fighting to end the pandemic. https://t.co/y8gOO5HN9O

I’m not sure we see our own culture as still infected by empire. The need to always be invading the space of others, to accumulate places. No real understanding of place at all, of home. Home to us is just an address, defined by a road,…

Cancel culture, living with the virus style. https://t.co/d6EjbHGg9g

Societies run by imitation. Power is really imitation, we copy those we admire. Our best weapon against Covid is ‘influencers’ acting against Covid. Often that’s musicians. What are they doing? Stroking their neglected egos at huge…

The only way to rescue a racing formula that doesn't actually have any racing, was to turn it into a reality TV show. V8 Supercars would know how to fix F1. They won't ever be invited to though. #F1 https://t.co/WKOdO2yjP6

The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol…

Managed to book in a fourth dose for Monday. Vaccination is something that could easily be done outside, under a shade etc. Annoys me you have to go and sit inside a surgery or clinic that has had potentially infected people inside it all…

More than any country, Australia knows how to mobilise as a community for a disaster. But rather than tap into that, effortlessly, political leaders imported culture war nonsense from the US and UK, saying Covid mobilisation was taking our…

@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus Australia…

Albo on SKY agreeing decisions on mask mandates are decisions for politicians. But on the basis of health advice. The current health advice is everybody should be wearing a mask, in most indoor locations. So…where’s the mandate to reflect…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1…

RethinkX did a fascinating scenario report on the future of agriculture, and how precision fermentation in particular may almost completely remove the need for it. Quickly. Well worth your time. https://t.co/Fm8gWVrkBt…

Much social media technology comes out of the US. A culture hostile to public institutions. It filled a gap there which other nations already had plugged with public institutions. Now these tools are dissolving public institutions in other…

The film adaptation is running a bit long now, at nearly 3 years. And the script re-writes, where the community ignores the virus, death and suffering and goes back to its old lives, is a significant divergence from the book.…

Adolescence is a modern invention, emerging between 1910 and 1940 in America with the building of high schools. This social invention changed everything. The culture of high schools gradually became the culture of society itself. The…

An expose into the way top officials are neutered now by populist politicians in NSW. We've all watched Utopia, it's not parody now. What's less seen with populism I think is that this infects an entire culture. Look at the constant…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

Ricky Gervais’ true genius isn’t his new atheism or his challenging of woke culture. It’s his gentle, affectionate passion for ordinary people living ordinary lives, and the people on the margins of those ordinary lives.…

The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to ideas, though we have hierarchies of expertise in every other…

If you’re persuaded to buy one brand of TV over another, you’re unlikely to become a fundamentally different person to your neighbour. This project discovered that the ‘polarisation’ of politics is a thin veneer of marketing overlaid upon…

Survivor - Covid is now in its 3rd year, and producers introduced a lovely twist with survival experts telling all the contestants not to try to survive at all. (And kid you not, the actual TV show originated in Sweden.)…

I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is to work ON my home, not just in the DIY sense but on ‘home-making’, making it an increasingly pleasant place to be. To me this is…

NASA’s stunning Apollo photos are a reminder of a time when societies still had big, exciting, collective aims. Name even one ambition societies currently have, of this magnitude? Short 🧵 /1 https://t.co/ShW1F6Cqkj One of the most telling…

I’ve Tweeted a few times about how what we call the ‘Economy’ didn’t exist before the 1960s. And that it was actually designed as a substitute for society. Beth’s book it seems goes into this in a lot more detail, in the US. Humanity’s…

When the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986, the eventual enquiry found that an internal NASA culture of suppression of individual criticism led to the disaster. I thought of this in relation to National Cabinet and AHPPC, short thread.…

What we’ve learned from Covid is that musicians are all for a cause if there’s no loss of income and live gig adulation involved. Has even one major international act spoken out for Covid action? We had a few speak out against it. Most of…

We face our own possible extinction, and our politics in response is pure high school. Look at the grown up world around you and you can’t miss that it’s almost entirely adolescent tribes fighting for popularity. Adolescence IS our…

Australia’s Head of State needs to be…Australia. The landscape, for want of a better word. Indigenous people see themselves as part of it, and even a European scientific culture is discovering its agency. Nations that don’t re-ground in…

Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the…

As our societies age, their mindset doesn’t. The explosion of adolescent culture in the 1960s was carried forward into boomer old-age, issues are now all framed in adolescent ways. Having a good time is now the only priority, a pandemic is…

The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current…

It’s vanity to assume that the progress of a pandemic is based only on the degree of our own immunity. The agency of pathogens is now being recognised. Interestingly Camus’ novel ends with the virus inexplicably easing off. SARS-1 seemed a…

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it…

You can read lots of definitions of what the ‘economy’ is. But if you pretend you’re an anthropologist studying another culture, it’s mostly just people driving around everywhere, for no apparent purpose.

Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these…

The data suppression program isn’t helping much. At the red arrow it’s a bit like when you think the movie is over, and then suddenly there’s an extra bonus scene. For deaths, the credits seem a long way off. https://t.co/UmTbsXG35f

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

See the culprit? Elections. My local member is swamping us with taxpayer-funded glossy colour ‘news’ about their drip-feeding of politically-targeted novelty cheques over the past term. Ready for the NSW election. Meantime many local roads…

The very first novel in English was Robinson Crusoe. A story about what happens when individuals have maximum freedom. An endless exhausting battle for survival, at the end of which the individual needs to be rescued.…

Social media is like a daily populist election. Yesterday’s stories about Medicare rorting, for example. It quickly became a slugfest. But for all public programs, there has to be governance and accountability. You know, the stuff the…

I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics inevitably fails, it’s usual attempt to keep going is to just…

Flu is mauling young kids in the UK. The hypothesis I heard on UK TV today? They weren’t infected enough during lockdowns. Endless cycle after cycle of bullshit, unsurprisingly leading to wave after wave of disease. (UKHSA data)…

I worked in schools, and think we criminally downplay their formative role in our entire culture. (See my pinned Tweet.) This image shows us nearly everything important about societies today. Kids in the playground, with the classrooms off…

I find the mute button on my TV remote improves the Angus Taylor interview on #insiders remarkably.

The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a lot more besides. How worker safety is the key to economic success, but also to understanding how organisations work. /1…

The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideologies really reflect what actually happens in the world. Why…

For democracy to survive, social media has to be shut down. (Bear with me.) The really dangerous thing about social media isn’t the technology itself, it’s the core idea behind it, that society builds itself from the bottom up. That ‘the…

To link two themes I Tweet about, social media replaces the adult world, mediated by institutions going back multiple generations, with a high school culture. It’s a technology that allows the cultural and social life of high school to…

I’ve Tweeted about how the ISS shows the enormous degree of inter-relationship and cooperation between countries, at historically unprecedented scales. So why (climate stalemate on TV right now) do we seem to be constantly in political…

I dunno, I feel the collective attention span is about 5 seconds. It doesn’t seem along ago we were all pointing out that social media being free meant ‘we were the product’. Subscription-based social media wouldn’t solve all problems, but…

Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science.…

We took so many of our Covid leads from the UK and US, and not from the region that we actually live in. It’s not just nuclear subs which betray the real project of modern conservative politics, the rearguard Judeo-Christian culture war.…

Given that our entire culture is now adolescent, I can’t see this mattering a lot. Do it. And hey, let’s have more voting, because it’s really helping us deal with problems right now? It’s what we need, more popularity. /s…

Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i Serres…

A friend who had to be admitted to hospital with Covid because they couldn’t breathe responded with ‘it is what it is’. These adolescent slogans, or ‘You do You’, are how adolescents think. But that’s now our entire culture. Fatalism,…

A nice window into the adolescent culture we all live is the saturation grief on social media when a rock star dies. But the response to millions of ordinary people being infected and killed by Covid is ‘here’s some pics of me living my…

That kid at the front is the mask-wearer. Not an analogy, Western culture was an adult culture, embedded in its institutions, which school kids graduated into. N=1 politics destroyed the institutions. All that’s left is the social…

This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are a few interesting things to learn here I think, about…

For Covid minimisers, the pandemic is not a novel and lethal virus spreading globally. It’s State intervention in economies. That’s what they see as the actual disaster. Our previous PM and the NSW Premier are in that camp.

Established artists went into well-heeled safe isolation when Covid started. Then hit the road in 2022, to restore the adulation and big earnings they crave. Who knows how many fans they infected. Let’s not pretend they needed the money.…

Our own culture is the one most invisible to us. Where politicians win elections denying asylum to the international homeless, and win more elections saying that staying in your own comfortable home to avoid infection is a restriction on…

‘People have always travelled’ is used as a justification for our jet-setting culture. Nomads travelled to have enough food to eat, not to take selfies in front of tourist sites. https://t.co/n8PRMcx3GP

POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food…

I wrote this thread to illustrate how societies are structured by social dynamics, not by politics, or capitalism (or any of the -isms). All of those are products of the same social dynamics. A society is not a collection of ‘the people’.…

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics is the greatest obstacle to fixing societies that are falling…

Not sure if it’s a metric ⁦@AntonyGreenElec⁩ uses, but when rich Tory supporter rock stars at home assembling their train sets ring TV stations to say ‘get rid of the Tories’, is there a landslide coming? https://t.co/FCFqXzzLIs

“…outrun the data collection portion of this uncontrolled mass infection and reinfection experiment” is poetry. https://t.co/uNpTPzpjni

The one hope I see for turning around the deliberate destruction of the public as an idea and practice since the 1970s, is engineering. The socio-technical complexity of the modern world. The Romans hold the key. The longest and greatest…

2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away democratic reform of the past 150-200 years. That’s often a depressing story. But the other parallel movement isn’t. Hans (RIP)…

I love that the cream of Hollywood, like the cream of popular music, is leading the community in not giving two fucks about ever ending the pandemic. As always, they’ll back a cause so long as it doesn’t starve them of attention and money.…

Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic engineering (I say). Roads are the front line of modern politics, in multiple ways. They’re the real-time proof that the politics we live…

The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can capture that sort of complexity. My trip to the pharmacy…

Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It sometimes feels like we’re in a new age of puritanism, with the collapse of ordinary community-based political life shadowed by a…

Jazz is a bit of an enigma in some ways, it escapes easy definition. Which suggests there’s maybe something being missed. And maybe that something extends to a lot of the problems we have around identity and politics. Bit of a 🧵. /1…

The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A job is much more than a way to organise work. It’s a way to…

The world isn’t run or saved by Left and Right politics, or by the politics of identity. It revolves around engineering, and the materials it uses to sustain us. Narcissistic culture wars aren’t aware of this, which is why @EdConwaySky’s…

Quotes that trace a shift. “the unconditional surrender of microbes”. Dwight D. Eisenhower “Children born in the next decade would no longer face the ancient scourge of pestilence”. JFK “The future of infectious diseases will be very…

Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individually-focused politics, rushing to fill the void left by that…

Watching the Rich Hybrid Immunity Awards red carpet. Are rock stars or movie stars more contemptuous of the public, in a pandemic? I think rock stars infect more of them. Swooping into towns, filling stadiums with fresh hosts, trousering…

It’s a shame that F1, whose formula has been broken for years, has managed to rejuvenate itself by becoming a TV soap opera in the US. Fix the formula, so drivers get to actually race. https://t.co/cXx2ro1BwJ

The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a coalition between corporate and church interests. We’re living…

People huddled around a single TV at Sydney Airport in 1969, to watch Apollo 11 on the moon. What was the last ‘moonshot’ you can remember society pursuing? The accelerated destruction of the public began just afterwards, in the 1970s, and…

Making the excellent point that the dominant work of societies has shifted from agriculture, to manufacturing, to IT, to finance. IT began the split from reality, a massive enabler of what Graeber called 'bullshit jobs'. Finance is BS on…

If concerts spread Covid? Simple, don’t go. Except the people who do go turn up in your schools and workplaces, the next day, to spread infection. ‘You do you’ assumes Australia is 25 million separate mini-societies, independent of one…

The reason politics looks so ‘polarised’ is because we’re using our social structures to make decisions. That’s what social media has accelerated hugely. Decisions that should be straightforward, practical jobs to get done, now have to…

I’m almost completely disinterested in what any politician is doing or not doing, saying or not saying. Team sports politics is a distraction, the thinnest veneer of hot air overlaid upon actual, physical problems. Electoral politics was…

H/t again to all of our popular culture heroes, who almost without exception have had nothing to say about Covid, and have done nothing to starve it of victims. Singing for starvation in Africa? Sure thing. Cut off the flow of adulation…

Perfect example of how rapid change is possible, when you bypass electoral politics entirely. The EPA in the US can make these changes without having them weaponised by dribbling culture-warring idiots. https://t.co/Je1M00dNdG

Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where music was ranked entirely on popularity. To this day you can’t have a sensible discussion about the quality of music, without…

The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1…

One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the drama is unfolding. The cities or towns, the cars, the trains…

Most of the fear around AI seems traceable back to a few Hollywood movies. That’s about as deep as culture is now. As if intelligence, of any form, could ever be a threat. Stupidity is the threat.

The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights for me. I don’t think we recognise that the knee-jerk rejection of constitutional monarchy is another disguised infection by the…

I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you argue for, you’re a monarchist. Against, and you’re a…

Time series charts of results show the true nature of elections. This one from the UK, for local government. Red and blue, Labour and Tory. Mirror images of each other, one is in fashion, the other out, and that position swapped regularly…

People can cry, laugh or gasp reading a book. Ink on paper. And yet the idea of AI creating meaningful interaction strikes them as artificial.

Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get access to loans to electrify i.e. they still pay. 3.8 million…

On UK television they quoted a statistic that said people are more likely to go through 2 divorces, than they are to change their bank. It's excellent evidence that 'the economy' is a fiction. People act socially, always. Not as market…

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

Eurovision is appallingly bad. Mimed kitsch. The Anglo world pioneered modern popular music. Europe has no clue, with rare exceptions like Abba. I wonder if it’s the melting pot of immigration in the US, UK and Anglo territories that…

A fascinating thing about Peter Jackson’s Get Back project, is that it shows a classic example of human group dynamics. The Beatles begin the movie completely dysfunctional. Nobody leads, and they even discuss that they may need that.…

A Part 2 on Get Back. This movie is very important, and it’s irrelevant what you think about Beatles music. The beliefs that are now destroying our societies were taking root at exactly this time in history. The Beatles were a major…

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a…

Are people agreeing yet that our culture is a giant high school? So many adult problems to solve, all ignored while we spend every day in petty adolescent squabbling and status games. Social media is the accelerant that turns it into an…

Rock/pop music culture has been a dominant force in extending adolescent culture into the entire human lifespan. Live Aid for example was a failure, but even more showed how kiddults thought we should fix world problems. By our favourite…

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media…

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

This painting of Spinoza is a deeply profound entire worldview for those despairing of our current situation. Spinoza was excommunicated by his own community for heresy. It’s what the image shows. He was unmoved, also what the image shows.…

Schools, the breeding ground of our culture. Previously the ‘cool’ groups dissolved when entering adult life and its institutions. Social media allows their social model to continue throughout adult life. That’s all an ‘influencer’ is,…

A social media influencer drove Fire Fight. Why has none done the same for Covid? Because Fire Fight was a gig, something teen culture loves. Like Live Aid. Covid action means denying teen culture gigs and travel. It won’t tolerate that.…

Shameless plug here for @EdConwaySky’s book. Out this week. Part of a big shift we need in our thinking about the world’s problems, away from schoolyard debate and towards material realities. A new industrial revolution, to fix our biggest…

Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small businesses of ideas, ‘competing’ daily for customers. A market. /1…

The black armband sportspeople wear now speak volumes to the culture we're living in. An adolescent culture. We can make a huge drama in the moment about bad things that happen, with us as the key players, the centre of attention. /1…

History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the deaths of the holders of the beliefs brings change. Only one…

I have no interest in most debates in public life. Most are adolescent identity politics, conservatives and progressives all the same. They reflect cultures who no longer build things, with the calm adult effort and persistence that…

The more you understand the way societies materially operate, the more you also see politics as the tiniest veneer of pointless hot air getting in the way of things that actually matter. For example, this machine is far more important than…

All history is a tug of war between knowledge and popularity. Not coincidentally also the defining culture of schools. Popularity invented think tanks to replace universities, so that knowledge could also be governed by popularity. Social…

Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage of European science and US ‘fake it ‘til you make it’…

In this movie, when the Earth was faced with a catastrophe, did it hastily run elections in every country to see what was the most popular thing to do? Even Hollywood would see that as ridiculous. But here we are. Trying to vote our way…

The sad truth of why we find some deaths worth our attention and others not, is that in an adolescent high school-based society, if it’s related to a movie we’ve seen, we’re interested. https://t.co/oc9tMRW4PT

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the…

Musicians are all for a cause, provided it doesn’t cost them money or crowd adulation. They have the capacity to lead change in the way politicians won’t. Their efforts in this pandemic have been non-existent. Society is a high school, led…

Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. /1…

The most numerous occupants of Australia’s vast interior now are feral camels, feral goats, boomers towing caravans, and jocks in 4WDs ‘conquering’ it. When you can escape the boomers and jocks, and allow the stillness there to encompass…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledge. The social dimension of society will never provide you with…

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What…

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

An exponential culture, in every way. Why we won’t fight an exponential pathogen. All economic growth is also exponential. Tackling the exponentials brings the lot crashing down, like a house of cards. (Source: International Air Transport…

We’re obsessed with ‘being there’. Travel is just one aspect of this wider cultural framework. Our relationship to place carries with it an assumption of what place means, and for us it means ‘being there’. But it’s not actually clear what…

Battling to get decent ventilation at a shared event brings to the forefront how all of this is a social phenomenon. The resistance you get is for violating social norms. People are literally terrified of varying from ‘what everybody else…

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as…

The deep links between our schools and our wider culture. For Covid and climate, those who went to exclusive schools increasingly make the decisions, and create enclaves (as their schools were and are) from harm. It's social, not…

Covid obviously a major cause here. But I think there’s more, the pandemic gave both students and parents permission to separate themselves from institutions they haven’t respected in years. We have a culture based on schooling, and we…

Covid and climate change are two things the travel industry is a major cause of. Our travel culture needs to ‘come into land’, as Bruno Latour said. It needs to be grounded again. An end to a culture of disconnection, dislocation and…

Meanwhile, travel culture still escalates, unabated. Nothing should stem the flow of selfies from a burning and infected planet. We can all ‘experience’ civilisational collapse, I’m sure the travellers will say. Personal growth.…

If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. Jennifer Senior’s magnificent essay is one more path to…

Populists first impoverish ordinary people, then use that poverty with staggering hypocrisy as a reason to do nothing to fix other problems facing the same ordinary people. Popularity is the root cause of all of our troubles. High school…

The genius of Gravity was to replace space, with place. The movie makes you feel the void at the heart of our culture. The absence of place. William Shatner when returning from orbit said the ‘final frontier’ is really the Earth beneath…

Vonnegut saw it. Until we see that our culture is a giant high school, we won’t understand it. https://t.co/FVhSGaRmEW

Vonnegut again. Novelists have much smarter things to say than most expertise today, which is narrowly focused and hopelessly naive about social life, human psychology and the basic things that keep societies running.…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

Re-watched the Nuremberg Trials the other day, with newly discovered audio of the hearings. Echoes of present times, with populists (Trump, Robodebt pollies) in the dock for egregious trashing of national leadership. It made me think about…

Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cultural. And it’s about kids, and how they develop as the grow to…

‘Living with the virus’ is not going well, for the touring music industry. As artists say in this piece, nobody is talking about it. https://t.co/ED5JmROvmQ

I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From the framing. For Covid and now for the Voice, you see something entirely different if you use reality as the framing, rather than…

Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the way with their opinions, people who have no background or…

Society is a high school. Socially, culturally, that’s what it actually is, that’s where our culture is formed. And it’s on a gap year that never ends. You can see why ‘lockdowns’ were vehemently resisted by some. It interrupted their gap…

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

It’s all team sports. Schoolyard culture. Barracking for your team in the daily melee. The longer it goes on, the further reality recedes from any of the debates, and the more obvious it is that it’s just about your team winning. Why don’t…

I ignore all the culture wars about the -isms (none of which actually exist). I notice that what we call ‘authoritarian’ China actually fought a virus in this pandemic. While we fought measures to fight the virus. That’s how much our…

Every time I hear the phrase ‘closing the gap’ I chuckle. The arrogance of the idea, that original Australians need to somehow catch up with we advanced other Australians. The gap is in the other direction. The continent is broken, and we…

I find Twitter like all social media is so infected with the team sports of high school culture, that it’s mostly a pointless waste of time. Even the best people here mostly just go into bat for their own team. Unless you trigger the team…

In a libertarian culture it's look out for yourself. Your vehicle, like your home, becomes your world. You want it big. It's a 'get out of my way' car. Europeans tend to have smaller vehicles, because they're more social. Guess which way…

It's a cascading thing I think. Politicians responding to gotcha journalism, pressuring VCs to do something about campus consent culture. Which becomes a VC KPI. Which in turn becomes brutalising compliance behaviour by staff.

If you aggregate the number of people who will be maimed and die in generations to come, allowing a novel infectious disease to become permanent (‘endemic’) ranks higher than any historical dictator or genocide for death and suffering.

Good on Metallica for at least being open about what’s caused the cancellation. In an adolescent culture what rock stars do shapes society. A large part of the illusion of the pandemic being over has been gigs restarting. It’s a…

Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landscape, we don’t manage it, we barely interact with it. /1…

The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because building things disciplines human desire and behaviour in a way that debate never can. We will never agree because desire is too…

It's still my experience that nothing is more expressive of the unthinking, invisible arrogance and entitlement of Western culture than its assumption of the right to travel as often and as far as it likes.

You have to say it over and over to remind yourself you're awake. We infected the entire global population with a novel, pandemic virus. Repeatedly. We're still doing it.

It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political parties are popularity-based groups, like we had in school. But…

If you think widespread ignorance of basic science and maths is bad now, talk to your local school about the impossibility of finding maths and science teachers. Societies are in a STEM death spiral, a self-reinforcing implosion. /1…

All politics is cultural. The changes John Howard introduced were a fundamental shift to Australian culture. One of the few nations focused on community as the centre of its life is now as rabidly private and individual as the UK and US…

The grand narratives about travel all being part of a timeless human adventure falter a bit when you see that what we call travel today really only began in 1950. The first jet airliner arrived in 1949. A lot of this is down to WW2. /1…

I’m a fan of subscription. My TV viewing improved infinitely with paid streaming. You get what you pay for. It also does reduce anti-social behaviour, fewer are willing to pay just to troll. But you should also get a regulated framework of…

There’s not one part of Western populist culture now that isn’t about joining a team, and fighting other teams. Social media has cemented this as an adolescent cultural form, for all ages. Once a year we celebrate this cultural form in GF…

The push to do something over a long weekend. Or during any time off. To me time off is time to just be, not do. We do all week. The great driver of travel culture, the inability to be. We’re not grounded, the grass is always greener…

The UK Covid Inquiry screened an incredibly powerful film today of impact of the pandemic on peoples’ lives. The sorts of details minimisers have ruthlessly suppressed for the entire pandemic. Hopefully the video will be published…

Tony Abbott called for First Australians to ‘integrate’ with European Australians, an old White Australia, colonialist favourite. Not once in 235 years has White Australia tried to integrate with Aboriginal culture. It still defines over…

Richard Glover spoke last week with a guest about how generations now seem to occupy their own independent bubbles. That’s what high school culture does, each generation takes its own high school experience and lives it for the rest of…

Has humanity ever infected the *entire* population with a novel pandemic virus, before Covid?

Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just…

Just get rid of elections. Big money flows to them because they’re the loophole that turns popularity into a fast-track to power. Democracy is government for the people, not elections. Popularity is high school culture, not democracy.…

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

Settler culture still dominates the Australian inland. The culture of imported slave labour, unchanged in 150 years. A loud No in the referendum from modern settlers. David Marr’s new book talks about settler culture, the crime part of…

Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the…

I don’t think anybody begrudges any musician playing until any age. The issue is more them occupying a cultural space created for adolescents, when they’re 80 years old. https://t.co/RKrUOy9uHM

Same age as my elderly mother. If you want to see a culture of permanent adolescence, how about 80-year-old rock stars? There were no 80-year-old rock stars headlining festivals when I was a teenager, we’d have considered that ridiculous.…

Postman saw that schooling created a unique cultural artefact, driven by literacy - childhood. He thought TV would reverse the process and return children to the place they occupied for centuries, the adult world. He missed I think that…

To be clear, I love both the Beatles and Stones. And they should keep playing as long as they like. My point is about the place of what was teen culture, in modern adult life and 'economies'. An indicator of a profound shift.…

Asia and particularly China is far and away the most important international relationship Australia has. But our populist ninnies prosecute an Anglo UK/US culture war against the Chinese, while expecting them at the same time to keep our…

It’s increasingly our culture. I didn’t invent the category, but it’s everywhere you look. https://t.co/UdmgmNMavB

What is the 'mainstream culture' of Australia? Just about everybody who says this is already part of a cultural minority here, and lives in a 'mainstream' suburb like Toorak. https://t.co/7mTGJBW7S4

You have to love the battle. To inject humour and intelligence into it. To reject the false promises of diversionary ‘fun’ culture, that try to keep you a teenager your whole life. Travel, recreation, good ‘markets’ for the economy.…

I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it down. They invented social media to make money and promote…

We're sadly relatively close to a time when there will be no living Beatles, Paul and Ringo now both into their 80s. Why I think there's a lot more meaning to this socially and culturally than is often said. /1 https://t.co/yshh7YOhfn Yes…

All of our culture and politics is shifting to social media. Either the platforms need heavy regulation to reflect this shift, or they need to be turned off. You don’t hand over the keys to society to a handful of deranged billionaires.…

The West outsourced much of its capacity to do anything useful at all. It now fights pointless ideology culture wars on social media, while the material reality of the modern world happens somewhere else. https://t.co/eGsGQPvLni

About a decade ago, Kodak went bankrupt. It invented digital photography, but decided to stick with film. Like current carmakers clinging to ICEs while Asian makers dominate EVs. The West is stalled fighting fake wars on social media,…

This seems like culture warriors stirring up already muddy and bloody waters. Everything apparently needs to have a 'side', team sports culture. Maybe the way forward here isn't apportioning blame to one or other side, it's to find root…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The…

Geoff's data is so useful to debunk the idea there's a meaningful 'mainstream media' now. I don't remember my own kids watching free to air TV for example in at least 6 years. Social media is the new public square. Which should terrify us.…

Albanese came to power trying to emulate Hawke, the consensus-builder. But Hawke was working with an older sort of opposition, still aiming for public policy outcomes. The LNP, like the Tories and Republicans, hasn't been like that for at…

We don't let inflation rip, we don't live with it. But we can infect every child in the land with a novel virus. Repeatedly. An entire generation, the future. A tool of our creation, the economy, does this. And we worry about AI. Bring on…

The proliferation of identity-based political grievances is no accident. Nothing is more plastic and manipulable than identity, and nothing more seductive in a world where all social and collective ways to define your purpose have been…

You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other facts make no difference. It’s not about Covid. /1…

A very good exploration of institutions, and trust. Societies are 100% social, and operate by the imitation and emulation of those we trust. Our institutions are the outcome, allowing us to live by trusting others with expertise in other…

Striking to watch contrasts between different political cultures. People from the US for example much more likely to believe change will come from mobilising lots of ordinary people. Australians focus more on accountability for their…

I grew up not far from major coal-fired power generators. I wanted to use them as an example of social shifts, rather than technological. The engineering case for shifting to renewables is a no-brainer. But it’s the social environment that…

Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact that I think goes unnoticed. The breaking apart of illusions of…

The anti-government conservatives worldwide are trying to start culture wars over nuclear power. If they win government it’ll have to be big-government owned and operated. Nobody else will touch it, it’s far too expensive, and there are no…

It’s slowly dawning on more people that social media is the infrastructure of perpetual adolescent life. All human culture is the tension between playground and classroom. Social media has destroyed the classroom. https://t.co/RSForD1t7G

All of modern populist culture is in this picture. The tension between playground and classroom, between group life driven by social status, and knowledge, doesn’t end with school. Populism destroys the classroom, our knowledge-based…

Once you see that all human life is social, and that the root of that social life is imitation, you can't unsee it. But the reason all social life (and thus pretty much all of life) is about people copying other people is…

I love the stories that show legacy companies struggling to adjust to a fundamental shift, sold as evidence the shift isn’t happening. Like Kodak pushing on with film over digital, all the way to bankruptcy. https://t.co/PO3naox0ow

I still haven’t found a better way to capture the stupidity of popularity culture than to watch people seriously arguing every day against getting free energy from sunshine.

Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to their own’. Nothing could be further from the truth. /1…

Strip away the fog of economic ideas, and go back to basic social ideas. Australia, for example. We’re still a frontier culture in too many ways. That’s why we turned housing into a casino. WW1 and WW2 made modern Australia, short thread.…

Still not seeing any critiques of AI that aren't just memories of a Hollywood movie somebody has seen.

In terms of death and suffering, deliberately entrenching a new ‘endemic’ disease is a worse crime against humanity than any war or genocide. Because it will keep killing for generations. Our lifestyle culture thinks only of the present…

Progressives tend to assume change comes from 'bringing the crowd along' in endless discussions. But major change comes when things 'go viral'. Rapid imitative behaviour, where large numbers of people get behind a cause, seen as a rival to…

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

Even the most Covid-cautious refuse to give up recreational travel. That's why the debacle we're living is not as simple as some dark forces, capitalist or otherwise, imposing sickness upon us. Our culture is incapable of giving up…

An obvious but not often asked question. Why do ageing societies allow so many of the old to die? Because ‘boomer’ culture denies age. It extends adolescent lifestyle culture to the grave. To save these people, the old would have to…

This is how our travel culture inexorably works. We invade one place, trash it and get bored, then move on to the next. The moment tourists move ‘beyond the usual tourist hub’, where they go becomes the next tourist hub. We don’t…

I think the Python boys could all lead us in rounds of their 'I Like Chinese'. Our idols in the UK and US are leading us down the path of empty culture wars, handing domination of the next 2 centuries to Asia. Domination they'll richly…

A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunition to promote their own social group, and to oppose rival…

Christmas is actually a festival of materialism. The Christmas story not only has gifts, it’s the story of the material embodiment of the deity, in human form. I’ve never understood the anger directed at ‘materialism’. /1…

My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for this sort of thing, scrolling through social media. Some…

I have huge respect for the law, it’s the last institution standing against the populist tidal waves of dumb destruction. Not because laws are rules, the libertarian obsession. But because law is a way of thinking. A story about Judge Judy…

Watching this series extension of the original movie it struck me how similar the narratives should be for possession and infection. Infection literally aspires to and often does possess your body. But there are even more resonances. /1…

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

Sydney joins the rest of the world in its annual celebration of Chinese culture, through fireworks. (China having of course invented them.) Not as good as our AUKUS fireworks though. https://t.co/gm17BqY7Zr

The narratives around AI seem mostly either a re-hash of a Terminator movie, or complete dismissal of it as nothing special. But when it starts discovering new classes of antibiotics...https://t.co/dd19TfQE9d

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, osmotically. Or some sight. The idea of ‘being there’. Climate…

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. This matters fundamentally in a pandemic. The example of…

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 that's happening I think is a powerful lesson about pandemics…

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. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

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 accountable'. About as much thought goes into saying that as putting…

All aspects of our cultures are connected. These are our modern cathedrals, sporting stadiums. Where we assemble in the tens of thousands, to watch two teams slug it out, and to cheer for ours. Our politics is the same, all of our culture…

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 be towed away, empty. This stuff goes viral quickly. Some…

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 seemed worthwhile to talk about why they may be like this. The…

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, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

Can we run a book on how long it takes for our prominent local minimisers to appear to reassure everybody that there’s nothing to see here? https://t.co/r565KsmZkx

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. There’s a very recent public health shift that highlights how…

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 forms, and ‘authoritarian’ Great Leader rule (kingdoms and…

In the idiot social media-driven culture wars that pass for adult life now, today is a red meat day. Ask the warriors, who on that First Fleet would celebrate the 26 January landing? None of the passengers. Maybe a handful of officers, but…

It’s slowly dawning on sensible people that social media’s economy of likes is just high school culture, and destroys adult life. Good on New York. https://t.co/aieobkLve9

UK Labour on TV saying that while other issues like the environment are important, ‘the economy’ is the bedrock of being able to do anything. Complete nonsense, and complete capture by conservative framings. The economy is how…

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 great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post…

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 with our ‘peace-and-production’ fake normality today. /1…

What changed with the Grammies? Why does an artist like Kanye have 24 Grammies, Taylor Swift 12, while absolute giants like Led Zeppelin, Queen and Abba got none?

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 no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

A culture obsessed with pulverising anything social into libertarian bits creates a continuous urge for collective attention. You need guns for gun deaths. But the tragic motivation for mass shootings seems more about creating a public…

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 planned from the start and succeeded. It was politics, pure…

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, Google Search is our gatekeeper. If it becomes compromised,…

Different country, same shit. The strategies are shared globally. Renewables spoil the view of the monocultural wastelands of modern agriculture. 'Pristine viewscapes'. Those bales of hay must be thousands of years old.…

What Joni Mitchell says about human relationships here also applies to place. Our obsessive travel culture is geographical speed dating. We accumulate sights, thinking this is us ‘experiencing the world’. But by not staying put, we never…

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 political action. But it’s deeper, culturally. /1…

A sad window today into the undergraduate culture-warring underbelly of Covid minimisation in Australia. A disgusting day. https://t.co/EvGd87tdG0

Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogans about them. Their measure of good government now IS the…

In a week where our local culture warriors used a laughable ‘study’ to deny Long Covid even exists, Jeff has produced an absolute tour de force here of the calamity Covid is for societies. A calamity being weaponised by minimisers for…

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 of the world. Where it had been for much of human history. /1…

The most disturbing thing about this is that it appears to be a deliberate hit job at least partially engineered by SKY News Australia. So we have mostly unregulated activist TV networks now interfering in international diplomacy.…

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 analogies. Both involve questions of individuals and populations. But…

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 overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal…

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. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

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 superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

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 ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

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-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been…

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. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

The collapse of the post-WW2 massive investment in public services is accelerating. And that complete reversal isn’t limited to economics and politics. It includes culture. You don’t need a time machine, we’re living inside one.…

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 did. To pretend there's no culpability here is disingenuous.…

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 deaths are not better once you add time back to the mix.…

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 simple life. It’s a desire for the same comforts, for less money…

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 to begin with. /1 https://t.co/5kG98SiyWc Because the stock…

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 the 'it's just a cold' folks. https://t.co/pk6CH6DB7H……

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 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

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, including the existence of companies. /1 https://t.co/GvBKOnIYha…

Catch-22 is the perfect pandemic novel. The insanity of enforced threat to life. Covid minimisers, nailed right here. https://t.co/cAywljIqLq

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 is enough, it’s time action was taken. /1…

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 strangers that prolongs the pandemic. /1 https://t.co/BNwb6mmavs…

The sort of place people travel to ‘see’. What made it worth seeing? A culture of not travelling, of continuous occupation and enrichment of place. Making the universe come to you, rather than go looking for it. (You’ll never find it by…

I have no time for the woke/anti woke culture battles, but when unis are offering students seven days extension on assessment deadlines because of the Bondi Junction event, even when the students have no connection with that event, I don’t…

The most obvious reason our travel culture must end is that physically, logistically, it simply doesn’t work. It only worked while the tiniest fraction of the world travelled as we do. The moment that fraction increases, the whole thing…

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 The places themselves are famous, in the same way. We want to…

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 fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

That headline was false the moment it was published. This is how the infection of travel culture spreads to consume more locations, before trashing them and moving on to the next. https://t.co/lK8hSX2zVk

“…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 that has very specific, manageable causes. 1/5…

Popular music as pseudo-politics coincided *exactly* with the dismantling of society's public institutions, from the late-60s. It was and still is the soundtrack to our own destruction. To this day we write songs about all the things we…

If the world seems bewilderingly stupid, start seeing it as kidult culture. We created this over decades by isolating schools from adult life. The culture kids learn there has now re-built adult life, as adolescent life.…

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: https://t.co/r0Gf4LC1Ks https://t.co/KVJ1SYiBap The general…

I find hitting the mute button when Angus Taylor is on TV significantly increases my understanding of the thing he’s talking about.

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 bollocks. Social media poured petrol on this fire. It’s now our…

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 to a society. And sometimes necessary disruption. But something…

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 libertarianism. Itself a victory for kidult culture, transformation of…

Most vaccines are not 'sterilising'. It doesn't matter. You just need to slow spread (including with other highly targeted measures), and exponential decay will do the rest. Social media culture encourages thinking in absolutes.…

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’ve provided no policy in Opposition. 1/4…

“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 power to change. Our normal politics merely delays outcomes…

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 flipped this, and it changed everything. /1…

The cognitive dissonance of kidult culture. Where 3000 people dying from avoidably infected blood is a 'scandal' attracting billions in compensation. But over 230,000 dying from deliberately infected air is 'normal life'.…

In the 1960s popular music was the vanguard of a supposed social revolution. It was BS. Those same musicians went on to become billionaires. Nothing has changed. Rock stars had the chance to lead a resistance to the pandemic. They did…

AUKUS the same. This is much deeper than politics. Many of these politicians are prosecuting ancient culture wars. https://t.co/KlFqQl3vdv

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 imitative rivalry sets in. 1/2 https://t.co/L2HQ1CIpU6 Or take air…

The psychological warfare that makes people equate deliberate and repeated infection with a lethal novel virus, with having a swim. https://t.co/8V0JkzvcMX

"And, think about wearing a mask in crowded places, such as supermarkets. It’s better looking like a dork than becoming seriously unwell." Mask wearing like everything else is driven by a kidult culture, created by high schools.…

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 process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

Most of what we call thinking is really imitation. Easily seen in citation networks. Like this one mapping RCTs on dietary fat in the prevention of cardiac disease. The big hubs are the most popular papers. Just like the most popular…

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. Said to be running ‘systems of government’ opposed to our…

'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 are not the political problems we think they are. That’s just…

Our obsessive travel culture isn’t about ‘seeing the world’. It’s about using geography to feed our imitative rivalry at home. The shift from being there, to being seen there. And even before social media did this, what did ‘there’ even…

(Spoiler: the AI won in a gallop.) Most AI public narratives are based on Hollywood movies people have seen. Most of what is called human intelligence is already just algorithms. Computers do algorithms orders of magnitude faster and…

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 to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

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. Why this matters. /1 https://t.co/sxrljQevJN The architect…

The absolute perversity of travel culture and its press. Where travel destroys locations, then publishes new as yet undestroyed locations for travellers to rush to, to destroy, while whining about travellers ruining the travel experience.…

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 the old. Another beautiful window into the actual culture we…

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 ignored basic human social behaviour. And malicious activity…

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 social descriptions. In reality Left-Centre-Right is a continuum…

‘Setting up a debate’ is ‘flooding the zone with shit’ politics. Designed to drown out expertise, while energising apathetic voters towards causes they previously had no knowledge of or interest in. But they love a fight. Team sports…

“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 out the standard economic line. /1 https://t.co/1ntb6pFiYv…

The US has 88,000 tonnes of nuclear waste it can't dispose of. It's adding another 2000 tonnes every year. Some of their enthusiasm for AUKUS is Australia maybe taking some of that waste. Nuclear energy is energy for culture warriors and…

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 wastes need to be stored for up to a million years. 1/5…

China will now do what Tesla’s Board and shareholders refused to do. Tesla’s EV development is embarrassing in recent years, reflecting a CEO more interested in culture wars. https://t.co/vjtSsNkHpA https://t.co/wAzzGhLz20

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. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

A travel culture won’t understand it. ‘Experiencing’ the theme parks they turn all locations into as ‘the world’. https://t.co/8rGjMAHHSZ

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 short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

I love when minimisers say 'nobody is talking about Covid any more'. Like everybody has changed to a different style of coat, or shoes. Reality cares diddly squat for what's trending in our adolescent culture. What we deem worthy of our…

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 entrenched with the status quo interests in big generation…

One of the most popular groups running for local government in my area openly describes Aboriginal Australians as primitives, who were ripe for colonisation. It was only WW1 and 2 that suppressed the dumb, violent get-rich-quick settler…

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 pandemic. h/t to @YouAreLobbyLud for a conversation that made me…

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. Being alone is the reality of all life. Even when being social.…

The same culture killing millions of the old with abandon, with Covid, today feasted on signs of age. A culture OF old people did this. Old people who refuse to age. Being old is the gravest sin in an adolescent/kidult culture. Competence,…

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 assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

Infection with the passion for the imitative rivalry of team sports culture can be subtle and insidious. Try it on yourself. With actual team sports. See whether you can genuinely wish for the better team on a given day, to win. Rather…

Team sports in its purest, most passionate form. This is the behaviour that drives our entire culture. The desire that our team win, no matter what it’s a team of. We’re incapable of breaking free of this. Catastrophe is coming.…

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 history was its rule by emperors. Its Republic was endlessly…

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. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

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 idiot idea that social change comes by ‘mobilising’ people. No…

Maybe 3 years of Tweets about how popularity culture is destroying societies, and now some think I'd be concerned about posting an unpopular thing. Leave high school behind, people. Be free. https://t.co/EYl6VR44RP

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 popular thing? Peoples' whole lives are infected by popularity…

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 connection into team sports. Then monetise the likes those…

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 that collective focus. It's why we don't fight pandemics or…

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’t understand Covid. And throw in climate change too. /1 There…

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/RSeTwfEBZX The cultures criticising it today are a bare…

China continues to be the catastrophe that our rigid culture of ‘the economy’ needs, to shock it out of its entrenched status quo. Western countries desperately putting tariff walls around this shock, to try to contain it. They need to…

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 everything into a fight. This is the team sports I Tweet about. Where…

Team sports culture in plain view. https://t.co/Z8R3MMWQ2s

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via…

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 themselves. Silicon Valley culture is proud of this disruption.…

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 this week. Once a week at work I buy my lunch. /1 A small treat.…

All of this cooker nonsense is adolescents complaining about being grounded. Adolescents view freedom as freedom from restraint. Rules. Adults see restraints as enabling much greater freedoms. Adolescent culture will win while its home,…

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 anger. But when you look at the numbers for these towns,…

This is our culture now. Threats to lifestyles are all that register as emergencies. (Tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph (UK) front page.) https://t.co/ZNBfafP72s

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 bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help…

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 ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

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 destroyed, institutions don’t get back up. And it’s among these…

I’m having a week off from work. A window into our culture, a person asked me what I plan to do in my holiday. “Nothing”. “Surely you’re going to DO something?!” Always gotta be doing. Never just being. Why staying at home in lockdowns was…

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 out over a longer time. The culture of travel was always…

For those interested in the background to the imitative rivalry of ‘team sports’ culture that I post about, here’s a nice summary of Rene Girard’s ideas. It’s only one, but a key component. A lot of our lives come into focus in mimetic…

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 we connect, the less cohesive we become. /1…

‘Closing the Gap’ is a weird framing. The clear gap is the total incomprehension European Australia has of the land it lives in. The gap is tens of thousands of years’ experience, vs less than 240 years. Without the land, we’re all dead. A…

It was the same politicians who'd spent years winning elections by closing borders, who then made hay electorally by opening them in a pandemic. Travel culture. Free movement to anywhere we want is an assumed absolute right. It's privilege…

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 from a range of infectious diseases. I feel the worm is turning.…

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 they survived by having strong restrictions on much social…

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 occurred to us yet that societies that appear ‘authoritarian’…

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. Which is a social question, not a physical science question.…

Imagine living in a poorer nation, looking on at us inside our social media bubbles, with our confected problems that are nothing but viral fodder for rival teams inside the bubbles. SM is our culture now. It's deeply embarrassing.…

This government still believe people 'want an end to the division'. The entire culture is a festering sewer of daily team sports. People LOVE the stoush. Why Dutton (and Johnson, Trump, Abbott...) start fights every single day.…

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 the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their…

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 controlled by strictly controlling access to territory. But that’s all…

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 connecting people will always create violence, not harmony. /1…

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 health and well-being of the public. Engineers change the world,…

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 Window of a social media-dominated 2024? I think we should. /1…

Gigs were one of the dam-breakers for Covid protections. Rock stars have been mostly enablers of the destruction of public health. Drunk on popular adulation. In a culture now of saturation populism. https://t.co/GfPBinQeHn

What the modern culture of 'the economy' refuses to accept is that pandemics destroy the status quo. You don't just manage them. They change life itself, how we live it. Reality will win this fight. There will be many cassualties along the…

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 identify causal factors. Here are 4 key indicators of collapse, seen…

The idea that only catastrophes really change societies is also true in our personal lives. Proust’s great novel explores that exact idea. Proust saw that only catastrophic change, such as a failed love, forces us to really assess our…

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 critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

One of the joys of modern streaming technology is that you can pause live TV when Jane Hume is on, and then fast forward right through her interview after making a cuppa.

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 discomfort. To continue the imperial model of accumulation of places.…

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 world was interrupted. So we took ‘revenge’ on that…

The thing an economy can never allow is a strong culture of 'home'. Economies need continuous displacement and dislocation. It's no accident having a place called home is now mostly unachievable for much of the population.…

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 Judaeo-Christian status hierarchies, with new names. AUKUS too.…

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 the top of material realities. Guess how home ownership became…

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 enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

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 power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

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 He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him…

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/9cXVQjGuZa When confronted with a view like this (photo:…

Just making breakfast for my wife and saw this. This sort of schema is one we love as a society, because it sets up two opposing teams. The solution to team sports culture isn’t more team sports. Sorry, just isn’t. https://t.co/O1M9njN2uj

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 retirement is to ‘see the world’. Even the world at home. It’s a…

Turnbull one of the few on the Coalition side of politics in modern times to have actually run a business and make serious money. Now widely hated by the culture warring zealots that remain in the party, whose only skill is undergraduate…

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 exciting social progress. And today? 1/4…

Superb insight into the actual culture we live in. These aren’t analogies. When Western societies decoupled education from adult life, they caused a transformation of the entire culture to high school culture. It’s all graduates of school…

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 reality. It’s an empirical observation of history. /1 A field…

An extraordinary animation looking at how team sports explains all of our culture. Including the role of social media., and how the bubbles it forms are actually much *more* diverse than real life. But why that becomes a disaster. h/t to…

If you really understand societies are 100% social, then you’ll understand why the Shark is a missile aimed right at the heart of our status quo. The truck/ute is a cultural totem for both US and Oz culture. The Shark is a brilliant…

Think about the catastrophic risk management of what we've done. The total absence of it. Infecting the entire globe with a novel pathogen. On a whim and a prayer of a 'hybrid immunity' strategy developed by libertarian think tanks.…

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 on ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. That framing is the same idea that…

#Insiders (and not just them, all political commentary and social media is the same), is like watching sports shows, discussing the various teams. It’s the ENTIRE show. How do people not see that team sports is our entire culture? None of…

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-risk situations. But quite a lot of people are not in that…

And again, those who said kids missing school was harming them haven’t set foot in one in a long time. We’re brutalising an entire generation. Infecting them all - the lot - over and over with a novel and lethal virus, is just the latest…

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 think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally…

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 toured in 1984 and 1986 (for the last time). Something wasn’t…

Why don't we see how perverse it is to 'win' an election? Like governance is a competition to be won. That's team sports culture, staring right at us. https://t.co/MYfhmuSxLb

There is no ‘we’ in an economy. That’s the point, to pulverise collective action into billions of little ‘free’ people buying novelty rubber ducks, in markets. https://t.co/jfP46LHW8G

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 teams for supremacy. And yet, the actual solution will always be…

When I say we live in a teen/adolescent culture, it isn't an analogy. Kidult culture. Adults increasingly have no adult reference points for how to live. https://t.co/WR9KsdTe0k

Another day dawns on kidult culture. Where playground groups battle for status. If we could stabilise our social status hierarchies, adult life could return. It’s not even on anybody’s agenda to do.

While nothing is done about the greatest problems facing societies, our mindless lifestyle culture of endless recreational travel continues on its merry way. Entire societies on a permanent teenage gap year from reality.…

‘Real life’ now is just social media, played out off the platforms as well as on them. We’re incinerating the planet and living with a pandemic, all so this bullshit ‘living your best life’ teen culture can carry on. https://t.co/IR4xNmNPQJ

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 issue pulverised into a granularity of grievance. But you need to…

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/1Wc9ZiCQJa "Events like these are often described as moral…

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 lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams…

We classify countries along a rough continuuum from 'freedom-loving democracies' through to 'authoritarian dictatorships'. And we assume these are either choices countries make, or have imposed upon them. Michele Gelfand has news for us.…

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 idea that ordinary people have the expertise to run a country.…

Did anybody elect CPAC to run the world? No? A world run by culture-warring social media zealots. https://t.co/mGEkxi2DLh

Murdered his mother to feed a status-driven social media lifestyle. These are the stories that define our culture today, rather than the pap about ‘the economy’. https://t.co/i7dUwqaMDj

When conservatives were still a considered intellectual position, rather than rabid culture-warring teams on social media. https://t.co/GRl2YGltwT

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 ‘authoritarian’, have the lowest amount of social restrictions in…

“Researchers say it's time for travellers and governments to rethink long-haul travel.” Good luck with that. It defines the culture, gotta be always moving, always doing. Can’t just be. Children of accumulating empires, now bucket lists of…

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 living in. Whether it’s homes, cooking, watches, cars - the…

Anglo nations are living a Judeo-Christian last gasp wet dream of symbolic culture warring irrelevance. Victory for Trump is total victory for China, and Asia more generally. Countries that build things societies need. We only focus on who…

I think there’s more to explore in that ‘lock-in’, the occupation of personal and social life by these platforms. Now even the most basic personal and social transactions are becoming dependent upon being on one of these platforms. They…

The idiot paradox at the heart of our travel culture is that most of the places we go to gawp at in wonder were made by people who just stayed home, for generations, and made them the wonderful places they are.

“Ordinary Australians will continue to slap solar panels on their roofs to escape the entire drama and decide the future without Canberra.” Chinese disruption allows you to bypass the idiot stalemate of our energy culture wars. Fuck…

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 grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

A culture locked in perpetual adolescence, in one photo. No elderly grandfathers filled stadiums when I was young. We don’t notice obvious things. https://t.co/Okg5joAf0Q

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 people together, they form a ‘culture’. That becomes their…

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 skill, like plumbing, that the majority of people should (and…

When societies actually feel existential threat, they act like adults, together. When they don’t, they act like children, multiplying grievances and complaints at every opportunity. We’re deeply in kidult culture now. You can’t take a crap…

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 societies. They can be the catastrophes I often say bring the…

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 view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political…

The most common question I see from good people here. Why don’t ‘we’ do obvious things? The culture of the past 50 years has been the deliberate destruction of ‘we’. That’s why. ‘We’ was a creation, post-WW2. https://t.co/lnaWoBlwZu

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 there will take you further from the ‘real’ Jupiter than…

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 literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of…

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. That literally inverted our cultures. At first schools…

Read through the executive orders and not one relates to an actual material problem facing the US. They’re all retributional culture war missiles. Our electoral system is now an online multi-player war game, decoupled from material…

I use Will’s book here so much because he captures so much of the work on status, so beautifully. It’s rank or status that drives humans. Not power, not wealth. It’s how rich you are compared to *others*, or how powerful compared to…

Because Trump is entirely a creature of modern social media culture. The team sports or status games of social media. His entire agenda is a series of vengeances in social media battles. https://t.co/HjRzMzwEIE

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 inside out. Social media. It manipulates our deepest social…

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’s even more to see here. /1 https://t.co/r4xdkH6DQW…

A friend tells me their GP prescribed ivermectin for Covid. Is there some change in the research I’ve missed, or is culture war now rampant in the medical community too?

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 American Dream. Of get-rich-quick, the dramatic escalation of…

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 gets missed. And here it is. ‘Competitive authoritarianism’.…

Doesn’t that businessman look dashing, unlike that bureaucrat-ghoul. The leadership of the free world has fallen to terrible Ayn Rand novels. Available through (dashing) Amazon. https://t.co/JnSdHHC7MN

Anti-vax person today, ‘so you’re wearing a mask, still paranoid about Covid?’ Then regaled us with the story of how her baby has just had Covid, and ‘all the hospital said she needed was Panadol, how bad can Covid be?’ Thinks Covid deaths…

“Seemingly insignificant changes to the Culture, which can have outsized impact on altering the status hierarchy of daily life. We are living in an age of memetic power and memetic war. Meme it and we will be it.” Elizabeth Boyle.…

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 solutions, which make status hierarchies in themselves the problem. I…

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 is democracy in its purest form. What can stadium crushes…

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 critical thing to understand. /1 https://t.co/hQqBRdf863…

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, as a beautiful example. The world’s largest ever alluvial…

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 politics worship small business. It’s a terrible mistake. /1…

Burning, looting, threatening, mob violence are the engine room of tyranny. It’s the same culture, not 2 opposing forces. Each fuels the other. https://t.co/MgUq75T2Qa

The activism which passes for most adult political life today, cancel culture, is the extension of schoolyard exclusion to grown up lives. Not by metaphor or analogy. It’s adults with no points of reference for adult life, falling back on…

Sounds like an Avengers movie. America doesn’t have much of a functioning public sphere, so pretty much everything there sounds like an Avengers movie. In other nations public institutions calmly get on with running countries, invisible to…

Victory in team sports is the orgasm of populist culture. It’s not an analogy, the exact same mechanism runs businesses, politics and ordinary life. https://t.co/StG4S74uNk

You stopped running your companies, disappeared into social media culture war fantasy, and joined an actual coup. Resign from the companies, so the people who build and use the great products can go back to doing that without harassment.…

Because all the things public institutions used to do for us, which we invented them to do, we now have to take ‘personal responsibility’ for. Which turns social life into a Western movie, guns drawn. https://t.co/H3yI8oic80

Frat boy culture is now public life. We can cheer it on when our ‘team’ appears to be winning. Ultimately nobody wins. Civic life is trashed. https://t.co/lyGgLAhOKt

“…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, and in populist cultures, that’s why it has to be said. /1…

Nothing changes in kidult culture. The only catastrophe is disrupted holidays. Not pandemics, not climate change. Just interruption to lifestyles. The daily team sports of manufactured identities is the only priority. Status games.…

The climax of populist culture is away, the election! 3-4 years of team sports foreplay, culminating in the great orgasmic rush of an election. ‘Politics’ is the central, master hierarchy of populism. Our ur-teams, ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. All…

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 ‘likeness’ or imitation achieved? There’s a fundamental magic in…

Daylight Saving was just one trial run of ignoring basic underlying material realities of life. Like living with infections now. Nothing is allowed to get in the way of adolescent culture’s only interest. Having a good time. Which isn’t…

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’ politics. Anti-trust. That’s the great American political delusion,…

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 infected in a fool’s game of attempted population immunity. It…

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 going OK, then suddenly fascist tech overlords somehow took…

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 culture. /1 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr Vehicles are a dominant…

When you live in a social media culture, at every scale, from the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political, there is only one rule. If it trends, it’s real. Reality itself becomes equivalent with popularity.

Mostly US gun deaths are attributed to the number of guns. Rather than to a culture of generalised violence. Without a functioning public sphere, there’s only violence. And performative violence, where people commit dramatic violent acts,…

That feeling of the world going absolutely batshit crazy is us reaching a specific tipping point. The tipping point where reality itself is defined by the fads and fashions of social life. Where what’s real becomes what trends. /1…

The US is wallowing in a basic misunderstanding that defines its culture. That groups of people, of any size, think and feel and act. They don’t. It’s not even possible, how would it work? The US therefore sees every emergence of a…

It’s not surprising to me that the people I know who argued that lockdowns are bad for us were the first to book an extra three days of leave over Easter.

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 society is imitative rivalry. Team sports. In sport, but also…

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 trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened is…

Why do we infect an entire generation of children repeatedly with a novel virus? Because we have a kidult culture. You can see it even in the memes, the most ‘dumb’ thing you can do apparently is have children. https://t.co/EcUL6Dpw2A

If you try to understand politics politically, everything is a surprise. If you try to understand it socially, as just one more way humans battle for status, it’s an open book. Labor won a landslide because the boomers no longer dominate…

What is often called ‘culture war’ politics, as the LNP plays, is really the transformation of politics into pure social status games. Team sports. Social media at work. Parties become teams, and ditch any attempt to be broad or even have…

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 if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

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 prevent matter (or chemistry) being endlessly complex. The lives…

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 me. However, this isn't quite what it seems. 1/5…

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. Cultures stuck in permanent adolescence. Not an analogy, this IS our…

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 they’re robber barons. Again, none of this will ever resolve…

Use status as your lens and the entirety of human life and culture will reveal itself to you. Because status is also identity. Status makes you somebody, rather than nobody. ‘Identity politics’ is really status games.…

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 ‘unelected’ judges. The worst insult to a populist is ‘unelected’.…

Social media warriors taking over our institutions. Populists, not fascists. They know making something popular is easy, and gives you the keys to the top jobs in a social media society, where the entire culture is run on popularity. Likes…

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, except social media has now spread it globally. A synopsis of…

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 went to war with the ‘establishment’ i.e. institutions.…

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 wanted to be Greeks, the Roman empire like all empires first looted…

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, communism etc. Australia is none of those things. And that’s why…

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 foundations of the US put mistrust of authority right at the root…

It’s not that people lack skills. It’s that the adult culture of society itself has been dismantled. There’s nowhere to apply the skills of being an adult, even if you have them. Social media IS our society now. Social media is high school…

The US Presidency is the most monarchical leadership position in the world. Hollywood movies venerate the position. The US has a Puritan hatred of any institutional power. But socially it reproduces the same pattern as all societies. A…

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 wreckage to our institutions caused by the same platforms The place…

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 first half of the 20th century drove the emergence of a…

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 mindset. The ‘elites’, it calls it. DIY culture is kidult…

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 winnowing process, to produce optimal outcomes. I call bullshit. /1…

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 Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

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 playground is where kids bring their outside social lives to…

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. is designed to substitute adult civilisation with the…

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’s ‘trending’. That in turn is usually determined by…

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 resistance, cyber criminals happiest emptying your bank account. Is…

Follow @IntegralAnswers for some food for the mind that rises above the team sports of much social media. I did a thread recently on how expertise is the thing status culture enabled by populism fears most. The key here for me is to…

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 high-status person or group, who millions of others then…

In populism (really schoolyard culture), there are continuously shifting allegiances between individuals and groups, jostling for status. None of it leads to any progress towards anything. https://t.co/TLHljUFbMu

Rather than see Trump as an aberration, isn’t the question more how the US managed to elect him twice, the second time with an increased majority? The culture is broken, it’s not an electoral glitch. There are profound social reasons not…

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. Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around…

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 in the office approached me in private to ask me to make them…

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 Declaration, a free market economic think tank. Let’s check with…

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 counterculture 60s. Still active today. Gig culture. Adult life as an…

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 countercultural movement, going back 70-odd years. Down with the…

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 wind. It won’t happen, until catastrophe re-forms another ‘we’…

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 teen rebels now the fabulously wealthy elites. It’s not…

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 mechanics of social life and change. And how deliberative human…

Adult life has become an extension of adolescent life, cosplay culture, where grown adults form actual identities from the fandom and fantasies of adolescence. Social media took a cultural shift towards adolescence long underway and…

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 it’s our culture. And it’s largely invisible to us, I suspect.…

The counterculture we live in commemorates every passing rock star, as it is already with Ozzy today. Meanwhile it gives the ‘establishment’ a kicking here, every day. Same culture, 70 years and still going strong. Teen culture.

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 populism. Popularity, used to bypass ordinary checks and…

Not only is social media a way to take over politics, it’s the location for our culture’s personal, professional and political transactions. And it’s modelled on high school culture. Likes and followers. It’s the final victory of the…

Using your own nation’s extraordinary natural advantages in renewable energy as a pawn in your pathetic social media culture wars is beyond contempt. These are crimes against Australia and its future. Against the future of civilisation…

Social media society is a 𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘥 society. That’s it. It’s a ‘vertical’ community, at war with a ‘horizontal’ community, to use Noah Smith’s terms. It’s a fan club, not a community. It takes schoolyard culture to its logical endgame.…

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 responsibility is replaced with symbolic ‘I Stand With’ hashtag…

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 greys and whites have dominated in homes. Why is that? Why do we…

‘Natural’ health lunacy is just one more manifestation of anti-establishment US culture. if there’s a problem in the US, you can put money on an institution somewhere being blamed. The culture is like an eternal Western movie. Always…

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, with crowds either silent or overwhelmed with euphoria…

Kidults aren’t adults. They’re children in an adult world. Thus they’re selfish. All the major powers derive their modern culture from previous revolutions. For the West, it was the counterculture. The taking over of adult life, by teenage…

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 destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness,…

The disaster in the US won’t make us learn anything if we keep interpreting it as a rogue regime imposing ‘authoritarian’ rule on Americans. Millions of Americans LOVE Trump. This is a culture problem, not a fascism problem. Our root ideas…

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 there until they reach adulthood. Throughout their entire…

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 companion. With all knowledge, always look at the conceptual…

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’. We’ve always misunderstood its origins. /1…

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 to consumers. You can’t ‘market’ your way to a revolution in…

If you replace all of the hierarchies of expertise and experience in a society with a social media blancmange of self-appointed experts on everything, you’re fucked. Not capitalism or any of the -isms at work. It’s anti-establishment…

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 ignore our own, thinking we’re somehow culture-free. All were in…

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 media is now the tool where this farce is carried out. /1…

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. That is its deepest, most unquestioned assumption. /1…

‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had already largely failed in all of those other critical areas of…

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 from the normative behaviour of the group. We never leave high…

Sydney yesterday had multiple crowds of people ‘standing with’ various causes. The day ended with everybody having just stood around. 1960s counterculture, still our culture. Protesting against the establishment. The empire of the kidult.

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 culture. The counterculture. When high school took over the…

It’s not difficult to see the human desire for status, via membership of various social teams. Just watch any sporting event. Very few just watch the sport. Instead you’ll find teams of fans, barracking for their chosen hero, who unifies…

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 experiment in the early 2000s demonstrated this in a novel way.…

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 ‘the people’ while these evil regimes are led by authoritarian…

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure…

No, it’s the violence. The culture of violence. Caused by a cultural hostility towards collective (public) life. Watch Western movies. They rehearse over and over the root culture. The enemy is always the ‘law’ i.e. institutional society.…

‘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 these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century…

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.) McCartney was the driving force in The Beatles. The one who…

‘All You Need is Love’ became a de facto anthem of the countercultural revolution. Still our culture in the West today. The Beatles split up after only 8 years, because they couldn’t work together any more. 60 years later the rest of us…

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 out for them, that they can’t adjust. Food just arrives every…

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 back. Mostly we see it as the danger of one or other teams in…

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 Usmani offer us a glimpse as to why that is. In this one chart. /1…

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 power structures that corrupt…”. We never left the 1960s. 1/2…

Here’s a window into the heart of our entire culture in the West. Our most sacred shrine, team sports. The social model of our entire societies. Look at the ecstasy here. They won a game, that’s all. But it’s like heaven has opened.…

#Insiders thinking a battle between Left and Right is a meaningful thing. Left and Right are being swallowed by populism. Populists will be swallowed by populism too. It destroys societies. Left and Right are only social media teams. Likes…

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, acting socially. Then labelling this behaviour in a variety of…

Given that most public thought these days seems to be just re-hashes of Hollywood movies, this is what Trump and Hesgeth’s trashing of their most senior generals made me think about this week. https://t.co/ZSB8oZpgjn

America is falling apart not because it’s been hijacked by tyrants, but because its culture was constructed to see anything that comes between a man and his God as a tyranny. ‘Tyranny’ is the lowest of low bars there. It’s pretty much…

The passion for ‘accountability’ is also the greatest weapon used by modern free market zealots to bury public administration in eternal processing. The idea lots of FOI increases ‘trust’ in public institutions is bizarre. FOI is the…

Nobel Peace Prize: Don’t Care Wars: Don’t Care Left, Right, democracy, autocracy: Don’t Care Culture and identity wars: Don’t Care Travel: Don’t Care Economies: Don’t Care Collapse of civilisation and ecosystems, by burning millions of…

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 same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine…

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 status quo becomes more visible every day. It’s even worse than…

When you superimpose Putnam’s observations on the shift between “I” and “We” cultures, and the fertility rate. Kidult culture doesn’t like children. They get in the way. Adolescence replaces all other life stages. https://t.co/rdC5pWfvXZ

AI can do extraordinary things. Unfortunately much of it is birthed in a grifter US culture, where the dream is to escape the Earthly public squalor of libertarian life, with fortunes beyond the dreams of Midas. https://t.co/bpgxOSXbwA…

US libertarian culture creates the mess of Trump. American politics only takes hold in other Western democracies, whose methods are mostly alien to the US, where populations are pre-groomed by social assault weapons like social media. Also…

Just more performative ‘trending’ instead of public life. Even with its own hashtag. Public life is institutional, not people flocking to the streets. American culture has always been hostile to institutions. Both Left and Right, in modern…

The political centre is a myth, an entirely relative position, defined by the constantly shifting extremes on either side of it. Our adolescent culture can’t conceptualise life as anything except a battle between two teams.…

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 backwards. We know from real life experience:…

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 opposite to what others think or do, that’s populism too, creating a…

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 need him again today, in a time where only what trends is real.…

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 been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

The most entrenched delusion in Western culture today is the idea that travel is anything except a remnant of imperial colonialism. Turning others’ homes into theme parks to tick off on our ‘bucket lists’. The old aristocratic Grand Tour,…

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 currency. That includes Western electoral democracies.…

"Before COVID, no modern public-health agency advocated deliberate infection of an entire population with a novel pathogen. It was considered unethical and epidemiologically reckless." ChatGPT

I spent time with AI on this not because I didn’t already know what it said here. After 5 years of having to listen to even some public health experts advocate for the infection of entire populations with a novel pathogen, I wanted…

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 even reached adulthood. Pandemics are defined by the number and…

As always our populist culture dribbles with excitement over who we do or don’t elect. Elections can’t solve the problems elections cause. Popularity fixes no problems, it creates the problems we can’t solve. https://t.co/B6l3dwX4tG

All of our major problems today are much smaller than the absolutist extremism of social media team sports culture can allow. Societies are networked. The problems are tiny hubs, in those networks. Target the hubs, the problems go away.…

The function of social media is to take US culture, which has never had its shit together, and spread that culture globally. Silicon Valley had already previously begun that cultural expansion, with its libertarian bullshit ideals.

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 refuses to see it. It’s living out the countercultural revolution…

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, as democracy. 1/3 https://t.co/a27CwmCq5t Jefferson’s “The tree…

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 same checks and balances. How could ‘the people’ like that?…

Progressive politics is determined to turn adult life into a Star Wars film, always with some evil dark force responsible for social ills. Conservatives *are* those dark forces in 2025, but by being hugely popular. They target status, not…

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 allows these idiot platforms to operate in the first place.…

I’m in the tiny minority who dislike travel. It feels like a violation to me, of my own groundedness and of the people whose homes we invade. As a culture we have no understanding of what it means to inhabit space. We pass through it, we…

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 minutes. None of that will lead to any meaningful, lasting…

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 10% at the beginning of the century, to up to 50% by 1975,…

Despite the great charm of this show from the 1970s, it’s also a window into the birth of our own Western post-revolutionary culture. The counterculture. There’s not one child in the show. Just two couples with competing ‘lifestyles’.…

Living inside the Culture of the ‘Feels’ makes me long for retirement. Fuck your feelings. Nobody cares about ‘your’ precious feelings. You don’t own a feeling, it’s a window to your connection to wider things. Things can be dire even when…

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 public debate? The West is an endgame imperial culture. It’s…

We don't use social media. We live inside it. The damage isn't just to children, it's to the entire culture. The medium is *always* the message. Civilisation is the deliberate separation of popularity and truth. Social media is…

One of the enduring disconnects in modern life for me is that most of us lived the culture of popularity in high school. And we refuse to see that electoral systems simply reproduce this same culture, in adult life. And then we wonder why…

It’s almost funny to me that so many continue to defend social media as ‘democracy’ in action. It’s a US libertarian assault weapon dismantling democracies worldwide. Silicon Valley culture has always been a libertarian Trojan Horse.…

Yep. And ultimately the purpose of social media is to destroy trust in existing institutional sources of knowledge. So that the culture of likes and followers (populism - high school culture) can replace institutions that took centuries to…

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 the world. Culturally, it goes one step deeper. 1/3 Compare…

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. Many experts and others reflexively despise it, because it…

Schools need the same sort of HVAC other major public and private buildings have already had for decades. It’s the likely source of much of the circulating respiratory disease in communities. It’s an easy fix that can be done without…

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 cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem…

My youngest child is 15 and currently has Covid, for the first time. I'm not allowed to have her vaccinated against this novel virus. She's another protective immune pawn for the wider kidult population. Those who did this can rot in hell.

Trump is the perfectly logical endgame of American culture itself. He’s not an aberration, stealing US democracy. US democracy has been a plutocracy for longer than any of us have been alive. In the fully technical rather than emotional…

America using European experiences of fascism to describe their own situation is increasingly lacking in self-awareness. America has always been run by business. It’s not being overrun, this IS the culture. There are just more rich,…

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 us don’t know. That learning is a socialisation, not…

Social media has always been a US libertarian attack weapon, to spread that culture internationally. Any attempt to regulate the platforms will be met by protest from whole populations, whose entire lives are now co-dependent with these…

Yep. America needs to have a much deeper reckoning with itself than just running fascism Memes. Trump is a completely logical extension of the culture itself. https://t.co/B0NGE7Mutj

The corollary of the fantasy idea of ‘the people’ being a thing, is that this same people will naturally get along. Our politics is a million miles from understanding or using the most basic empirical realities of human social life and…

The widespread disruption to social processes caused by social instability is a breeding ground for the generation and spread of novel pathogens. https://t.co/JQUqcHrj3e

We can live inside Hollywood movies and pretend this nonsense is ‘totalitarian’ politics. Really it’s just bog standard democracy, crippled by a populist mechanism (elections) coupled to social media, that bypasses any connection between…

Record crowds at everything now. Sporting events, gigs, travel destinations etc. As social media culture pulverises shared meanings and structuring hierarchies, we compensate with status-levelling crowd-events. We’re trying to release the…

Trump isn’t a fascist tyrant. He’s a conman. A grifter, selling snake oil. His pyramid scheme of bullshit is collapsing. The hysteria about him being the new Hitler is part of US culture itself. Its open hostility to institutional public…

The mostly undiagnosed rot at the heart of American culture derived from its Puritan origins. The fanatical hatred of institutional anything, any sort of public coordination of life. A hatred imported in the Puritan exile from Europe. What…

Life in a kidult culture. ‘I lost 7kg because of Covid, in 3 weeks.’ ‘Wow, that’s awesome, congratulations!’

America’s greatest casualty count by far is always self-inflicted. First it was the Civil War. Now overtaken by Covid. Everyday violence is orders of magnitude greater than any comparable country. The culture itself has fundamental issues…

Ben Stiller’s share highlights again how for US culture, everything is conceived as a stand-off between ‘we, the people’, and government. That’s a remnant of the country’s revolutionary origins. It’s trapped in that one mode of being.…

Societies have cultures, which are their true operating systems. Their ‘political’ teams are just subsets of that culture, politics is not culture. It’s a type of team sports within a culture. America is a revolutionary society. It was…

One of the incredibly useful things AI can do for you is provide quick, detailed summaries of books. There are exponentially more books in circulation than anybody could ever read. And the book itself as a form can be a very long-winded…

In a kidult culture socialising will be prioritised above all else. We just decided to live with a pandemic, to protect socialising, for example. There’s nothing healthy about being so dependent upon socialising. It reflects an emotional…

The Romans embraced people of all cultures. They didn’t try to enforce any culture upon those who arrived. It’s why their empire lasted for nearly 1500 years. https://t.co/FD1ctKNDm8

The greatest unsaid thing in debates about AI (notice like everything else, social media culture has transformed it into a team sport between two sides). Human culture has never been based on thought. Human life is based on habit, not…

Of course in social media culture, AI has become a fake ‘debate’ between two opposing teams. Everything follows that same pattern in social media culture. We’re puppets inside the platforms.

AI is clearly ‘trending’, another sign our social media bubble culture is at work. Ever-shifting trends driving imitative status game rivalry between social teams mobilising behind influencers. Another way to look at that is to say social…

I’ve never believed in the loneliness epidemic, it was just one more of the bullshit claims that shut down public health, for Covid: that public health action was forcing people into dangerous levels of isolation. All of that is a kidult…

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 people’. All change is led. Distrust in vaccination has…

This delighted me. Not because I’m a ‘Tesla fanboy’. Kidult culture can’t imagine anybody assessing anything except as a member of some social team in rivalry with other social teams. It delighted me because engineering triumphed over a…

The fanatical rejection of hierarchy in life in general leads to the culture of violence, crime and disorder in the US. It’s the obsession with freedom and equality, and the refusal to see that as what hierarchy enables, that creates US…

I still remember the rampant hubris of the George W Bush White House. The belief that those who served under that administration were untouchable, above due process, above the law etc. Creating fleeting culture war realities, rather than…

In a kidult culture like ours, where all historical precedent and tradition is replaced by trending fads and fashions, what happens with emergencies and disasters? Like pandemics, but also climate events, etc. They become platforms for the…

Our problems are all social/cultural. Not political, which is just a re-coding of these social and cultural problems into imitative rivalry team sports. Alas the entire boomer shift in our culture was towards this suicidal permanent…

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 experience and expertise. And the severing of the circle of life by the…

We’re in the end stages of status games now, where rivalry is amplified to such an intensity by social media culture that the material conditions of life are just like gambling chips for the battling teams. This isn’t fascists taking over…

We make our tools and then our tools make us. The medium is the message. The two battling mediums today are social media, and AI. A battle of ‘everybody knows everything about everything’ (opinion culture, social media) v they don’t and…

I shared Lawrence’s prophetic A Letter from Germany during the early pandemic. A good novelist feels a future coming long before it happens. I feel this today, and have felt it ever since Covid began. The hope of peace-and-production from…

In a populist culture, as a leader you’re doomed no matter what you do because popularity is intrinsically fickle. So just do things. Break things along the way if you have to. You’ll be thrown under a bus anyway whether you do them or not.

David’s is the only sort of thing I bother with on social media. Empirical, evidence-based, uninterested in culture wars. https://t.co/20IDk3e2Tu

Cutting off jet flights is the real showstopper for Kidult culture. That’s the one that broke the Covid public health action back. Nobody can stay home. Home would mean place being meaningful to us, rather than bucket lists of collectable…

The more imitation is allowed to operate in an uncontrolled way, the more status us uncontrolled, the more a culture will revert to nostalgia, in a search for meaning and status. https://t.co/IlaPMtr037

The redeeming thing about Musk is, unlike most culture warriors, he actually builds things. You can tolerate a lot of the culture war drivel because the net impact on societies of the building work is overwhelmingly positive. Which goes to…

So please, stick to that. The culture warring is undermining the future livelihood of those brilliant engineers. https://t.co/ro1L8bFqj4

In social media culture, something being ‘over’ simply means it’s stopped trending. Only what trends is real. We live inside social media now. https://t.co/rOJupm6DBY

Eventually reality prevails, in most things. Electric cars are (by far) the best cars, from an engineering point of view. And Tesla engineers the best electric cars. Kidult hashtag culture dented the reality for a while. ‘We don’t like…

The culture that the anti-immigration warriors say migrants need to ‘integrate’ with doesn’t even exist. It’s a Queen and Country fantasy from the 1950s. The true integration needed is a lot of old white Anglos needing to wake up and…

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 government movements that are really about entrenching established…

Covid revealed our deeper culture, it went well beyond disease. The collapse of a ‘we’-driven institutional response to critical threat. You can smell it all over the response to the Iranian fuel crisis. The abject terror at upsetting the…

Have we forgotten how to judge people by what they do rather than by what they believe and say? Elon Musk. Tesla is *doing* astonishing things. Vital, for civilisation. He walks the talk. Few do. The culture warring is tedious, but most…

Socials culture will of course turn this into a fake ‘debate’ about AI vs physicians. Remarkable things are happening with AI. The status fights will find every slip-up, every false step, and magnify them into the Apocalypse. Look to…

And you know what it outperformed by several orders of magnitude? Social media. Which hilariously calls AI ‘slop’. Social media is swill. AI may be our only hope of escaping the culture it’s produced. https://t.co/JDwAq18N6z

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 of idiocy, within the organisation. There’s real wisdom about…

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 be somebody, you have to invent new identities. ‘Identity…

American culture will realise much too late that ‘the people’ is a fiction. It’s a fiction that is destroying America. https://t.co/oe04pop6MI

In the 19th century Jules Verne excited people with visions of collective technological progress. Today we live in an adolescent ‘kidult’ culture of trends. No collective excitement of building anything remarkable. Just fights for social…

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 created ‘sovereign’ nation States. That Westphalian model is now in…

America has never been a secular democracy. It’s always been a post-revolutionary plutocracy, with lashings of Christian piety. It’s not being overrun by fascists. It’s maturing to its essence, as a culture. https://t.co/4YCjuLaqEE

Talk to your friends and colleagues. Sample the extent of AI use. The culture is shifting profoundly. Worth pondering where people were getting advice from before. AI may be all that can slay the social media civilisational wrecking ball.

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 unconditional love (which is really more pack loyalty). 1/3…

And we’re too quick to say this sort of thing is Covid. Sometimes it isn’t, but rather the generalised normalisation of infection of any kind. ‘Living with Covid’ was a political tool which will destroy the basis for our entire culture and…

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. AI is our only hope of rescuing civilisation from social…

Decided to take a break from hallucinating with AI, to get back to some more real living with infection, the free world run by a reality TV star real estate shonk, and coffee enemas of social media.

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 ‘politics’. In reality it’s the replacement of broadcast media…

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 succession. Cronyism tries to shoehorn the leader’s family into…

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 social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide.…

AI debates are framed mostly by Terminator movies. Intelligence and consciousness residing in opposing human and silicon brains. In reality AI is the latest stop in a long historical trajectory of humanity gradually externalising and…

One thing many years on this and other platforms has taught me is that outside people’s specific area of expertise, their understanding of how societies operate is mostly a script from some terrible Hollywood movie.

The explosive self-harm of American culture has two ingredients. Relentless, centuries-old hostility towards public institutions, and towards regulation more generally. Married to social media platforms which replace those institutions…

Trump isn’t a fascist takeover of America. He’s American culture in its purest form, its endgame. A plutocracy enabled by a constitutional hostility towards government, and ‘public’ anything. Without a public and institutions, you’re left…