Philosophy & theory

Bruno Latour: "We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is…

#covid19 @billbowtell the pandemic mostly a battle of competing political philosophies, not a medical battle. https://t.co/Yk4xdmyMRj

#covid19 #auspol viruses spread through social activity. Social activity is governed by political systems and ideas. The seriousness of a pandemic is therefore deeply implicated in the political ideas used to address it. 1/3 The clear…

It's only the extraordinary genius of Gabriel Tarde that can really explain why the greatest existential threats to humanity are infinitesimally tiny. https://t.co/RdTxR7JKQv

#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,…

If you were asked ‘what is society made of?’, what would you answer? Many might say ‘people’. But you can have people, without having a society. A thread about ideas, and one particular idea that is destroying our socieities. /1 A society…

“Economic progress supposes...a growing number of different desires, for, without a difference in desires, no exchange is possible, and, with the appearance of each new, different desire, the life of exchange is kindled.” Gabriel Tarde…

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 infinitely minute...everything that constitutes the visible universe, the universe accessible to observation, proceeds, as we know, out of the invisible and inscrutable - out of a seeming nothingness - whence all reality emerges…

Such a rich vein of horseshit here to be mined. Most obviously ‘balance’ and ‘proportionate’ as weasel words again, where nothing is being balanced, and the only proportional weighing is just how sick workers can get before they collapse…

The embarrassing dysfunction of rich countries during the pandemic should force us to take stock of what we’ve become. But it probably won’t. Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander Joint Forces Command in the UK, is a good place to start. A…

The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with Covid strategy. And why we only ever needed about 3 days to be totally rid of Covid, but we’re into our 3rd year of it. /1…

Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great collective projects societies put on hold to fight Covid, that they want to get back to. Their moonshots. There aren’t any. /1…

Westerners are so used to peace and prosperity that they’ve maybe forgotten the idea of a ‘balance of power’. We see our democracies as naturally more peace-loving. In reality those democracies are held in place by force, mostly the $600…

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…

Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

As Michel Serres said, education can be in person or virtual. But what you learn, is always virtual. Knowledge. The entire point of education is to move beyond ‘face to face’. In most schools knowledge is buried in a jungle of…

The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate pump. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/zAzjeDwxTY The principle of…

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…

Some claim the greatest epidemic in human history is the surge in Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) in the 20th century. Heart disease is (many don’t realise) mostly unknown before that century. This may be an example of the danger of the idea…

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…

RIP the incomparable Bruno Latour. If you know his wonderful work, the choice of picture will make sense. One of the few minds who could still make sense of the world today, we couldn’t afford to lose him. Ah well, shit happens. A lot,…

The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be somehow shielded from it. Or that they can even somehow do that themselves. This is one of the greatest of all political libertarian…

If the truth was either obvious or popular, everybody would be a genius and society wouldn’t need governing. Spinoza provided the test of truth - it creates a feeling of surprised joy. A feeling of affirmation is just team sports.

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…

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.…

For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if…

Latour was writing about religion here, but also about all of society’s institutions. That feeling now of society collapsing? That’s the ‘ruins’ he’s talking about. ‘Once they’ve been destroyed, institutions don’t get back up’. There’s a…

There's lots of good in social media. But its core philosophy is lethal for societies, allowing mobilisation of every belief, no matter how toxic. It's a libertarian tool kit that undermines every country it's introduced in.…

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…

Fatalism is a childhood philosophy linked to powerlessness I think. Because often children can’t do anything about things. The fact it’s now our adult philosophy of life shows how adolescence has become our dominant cultural model.

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…

Societies have a geology as well as a politics. Deep, tectonic movements. The big political libertarian push of the past 50 years is deeply linked to one of the founding tectonic plates of all human history. The battle between Church and…

Centrists? There is no centre. It’s a relative position between two extremes. If one extreme sells lots of lemonade at its stand, and shifts to the far end of the beach, the other extreme will follow to keep touch with the customers. The…

I think this is going to be a cracking read. The material underpinnings of society is the massive shift we have to make in our thinking, to understand today. Keeping the lights on, more than who we vote for. Actor-network theory has been…

We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of a public, that whole…

Thoughts from Spinoza in these difficult times. “The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free…Do not weep. Do not wax indignant. Understand.” https://t.co/OPPPG1tlHf

Douglas Adams’ observations about technology are another way to see how the world we live in is 100% social, and 0% economic, capitalist, socialist or anything else. Nearly everything we don’t understand we attribute to some abstract -ism,…

My favourite portrait of Spinoza. His excommunication was brutal, he was never accepted again by his community. But his conviction, that only knowledge and understanding can ever set humans free, remained unmoved. This portrait is such a…

A common idea is that societies or groups are the sum of their parts. Like adding millions of identical points, to create a whole. Or instead we say ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’. But neither of those ideas explains…

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…

If there was a manual for social media, Gilles Deleuze’s passage here might be the guts of it. https://t.co/8kY3HN97ow

Social media gives us a dangerous illusion of a public space that we (rightly) feel has been lost. But the public we lost wasn’t random people talking to each other. It was those random people living peaceful and prosperous lives,…

Society is social, not political. What we call politics is hierarchical social status games, with different names for the different players. Just as Grease has its T-Birds, Scorpions and Pink Ladies, we have an ALP, LNP and Greens. /1…

Insights into public health, 2023, from Tony Blakely. Two quotes, ABC news today. The first, where using vaccination to protect the wider community is described as a ‘philosophical or ethical question’. I thought it was actually one of the…

Nearly all of the history of the staggering innovation in the US was government-driven and funded. Much of it through defence spending, directly or indirectly. Its political philosophy is totally at odds with how the country actually…

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 AI stories are still full of contradictions. Our greatest threat right now is stupidity. Intelligence is not a threat, it’s desperately needed. We’ve had over 3 years of evidence now with Covid that humans couldn’t run a lemonade…

Bruno Latour did a brilliant essay years ago to debunk the mythology around cognition that AI debate is currently wallowing in. We think more with our eyes and hands than we do with our brains. Intelligence has always been fundamentally…

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…

The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the people’ in various directions. Good people wait for the…

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…

Bruno Latour once told me that materials science and engineering was the cutting edge of modern societies. These examples back him up. A material that blocks sound, but not air or light. https://t.co/1ofrA1bSsq

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…

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.…

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…

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…

“…it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather too loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else. Consequently, they decided that it was…

Zuckerberg quote. Social media will never achieve this, on any platform. Its operational model is libertarian philosophy, that societies function from the ‘bottom up’. They don’t. The platforms erase generations of mediated knowledge and…

I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing…

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…

The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to Twitter, amazingly for acting within a day, on a weekend, to take down an account blatantly posting details of peoples’ personal lives…

Luke Burgis describing Girard’s concept of ‘imitative desire’. This is how societies all work, no matter what ideology they profess to. All that ideology nonsense is a distraction. Will Tweet a lot more about imitative desire.…

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’.…

To debate, you have to first mostly agree. That defines the terms. The function of debate isn’t to resolve the topic, it’s to position you socially in relation to it. The more two sides debate, the more assimilated they become to each…

State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change to Covid. For the rest of the world, any of the soccer competitions are equally as good as examples. Your most popular team…

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…

Spinoza’s lost message to us is that the true and right thing to do will always be unpopular. It will be unpopular to ALL. It’s the surest KPI for truth. If you think you’ve found the truth to a particular complex problem, and that truth…

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…

The real sleeper here isn't the money. It's identity verification that will likely come with it. It's not a bad philosophy in any organisation or system that regulates behaviour. It's a train wreck for X. Throwing all to the wolves.…

What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1…

The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’ shows it, the idea we create a global community by getting…

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…

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…

The internal combustion engine is rubbish technology, and always has been. Not only grossly and inescapably inefficient, but filthy and noisy, destroying our air quality and overwhelming all other sounds. And ridiculously complex. Michel…

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…

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…

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…

One of the useful things about this platform is that it gives you a direct way to see the myth of the idea that societies are made up of a collection of individual viewpoints. Like LEGO blocks stuck together. It’s absolutely not how…

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…

Michel Serres wrote of how noisy the body is, and how not hearing that noise is normal functioning. Social media is a pathology, surfacing and mobilising noise that societies need to be sub-audible.

There’s a total disconnect between popular political ideas and the reality of how societies work. The ISS is a good way to see the disconnect. Our politics is dominated by the idea of ‘economies’, (apparent) markets of individuals…

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,…

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.…

Social media is running a real-time experiment of what democracy looks like when ‘the people’ run it. Which as many South American countries can attest, just leads to marauding gangs running the country. /1 https://t.co/Y0OyGwjdCA The…

What I call team sports. Political parties are like peoples’ Ur-teams, their foundational team that shapes all of their others. You can waste a lifetime arguing topics with people, who really are just arguing for a team. There’s no actual…

Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe I have with @doctorow’s work is the belief I sense that ‘competition’ i.e. taking down all ‘monopolies’, is some intrinsic good.…

The world is networked. Hubs control most things, and that’s also not bad, it’s economies of scale. Most of the alternatives we’re presented with in consumer choice philosophy and politics are the same hubs, diversifying the brand.…

The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN The idea of a ‘public’ is historically…

Political libertarianism has quite a foothold in Australia. Thanks to @ColinKinner for the tip-off on this one. This set of ideas is toxic to civilisation itself. And also laughably illogical and self-contradictory. These ideas must be…

“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…

"Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires." Rene Girard

Did the French Revolution usher in a new golden age of freedom for the liberated masses? It created an Emperor even more powerful than the royalty and aristocracy it beheaded. Being non-conformist rigidifies conformity further. /1…

What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it because we’re using the lens of peace and prosperity that…

I think this is anthropology before it's psychology. It's the scapegoating mechanism Girard studied, used by all human groups as a way to absorb and then dissolve the tension of their imitative rivalry. https://t.co/Rwx9viNpDx

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…

'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…

For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n https://t.co/Rnzu2pY4Z9 Oops. In steady and quite spectacular…

Human activity is driven by desire. But we don’t desire the object of our desires. We desire something because somebody else desires it. It’s social, a rivalry. The love triangle is an archetypal form of this mimetic desire. And it extends…

“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…

Michael Mosley’s death was so often framed as him being tragically so close to reaching safety. What I don’t think is recognised with climate change is that the infrastructure we think will shield us from the heat, may not be able to. /1…

Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential public service, and turn it into a team sport. By offering political product differentiation. Now it’s energy. /1 #auspol…

The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Often from the crossbench. These campaigns also don’t produce any…

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…

Slacktivism. I don’t really like the term, because it suggests there’s a better activism people should be doing instead (more on that in a second). But the idea we can use these platforms to change the world is dangerous in multiple ways.…

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” (McLuhan) Our sense of inevitable failure to address our problems is due to them being badly understood. 1/4 https://t.co/uF2SqtrBSu…

Still the most beautiful meditation on the brutal tension between sociality and knowledge. Spinoza. Sociality uses knowledge as fodder, to build and unify teams. To fight other teams. The team’s success becomes what is true. /1…

"...40% of social media users would give up their pet or car before they'd give up their accounts...This is not healthy behavior. Social media is currently designed for virality and addiction." 1/4 https://t.co/mOTQb5ywGM Ironically,…

The political philosophy of the entire IT industry is political libertarianism. It builds its products to implement those beliefs. You won’t find many who will back government over social media or IT more generally. They’re winning.…

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…

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…

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…

True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go. The two cannot exist comfortably side-by-side. Knowledge will always betray…

To be social is to conform. To not conform is also social. You can’t avoid conformity, when you act socially, it’s the currency of social life. The more social we are, the more rigidly conformist societies will become. /1…

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…

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.…

Basic social games. Libertarians, whose schtick is individual freedom, end up right at the top of society’s hierarchies. It’s just team sports. It’s a philosophy designed entirely to make their team win. Nothing about freedom at all.…

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…

‘Chinggisid’ sovereignty is what I Tweet about in describing the perennial love of Kings. Trump-type populist leaders are this sovereign form, in modern clothing. This extract has so much to teach us. /1 https://t.co/HzabNd0V4Y…

Modern economics is a dry and barren retrofitting of societies with fantastical self-running equilibrium models. Models that are so insanely stupid that ‘invisible hands’ have to be invented to explain why anything happens at all.…

One of the most extraordinary inversions of all thought is this one, again by Gabriel Tarde, the forgotten genius. How the source of all complexity and also eternity is the infinitesimally small, not the infinitely large.…

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…

Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’ crises. The same problems recur in our supposed economies, with the same ideas useless to prevent them. Can status explain it? You bet.…

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…

Gil Duran coined a phrase to describe something I Tweet about a lot here as well. The capture of democracies by Silicon Valley. Duran calls it 'The Nerd Reich'. This has been going on for a lot longer than Musk, Zuckerberg etc. /1…

One of the most important parts of status as the mechanism of all societies, is the scapegoating mechanism that Rene Girard talks about. The relentless battles for status - status games or team sports - lead to chaos. We’re seeing that…

Heh, China doesn’t need to force anything. Any attempt to build something in the West now is called ‘picking winners’ by the idiot market philosophy we live by. Which means we build nothing useful at all. https://t.co/TZ2qspHKln

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

What you see behind the curtain of ‘living our best lives’ as a life philosophy. https://t.co/pgnnUDDxQw

Gabriel Tarde a century ago made the (mostly ignored) intriguing point that existence is best understood and managed through having, rather than being. Through possession, rather than identity. Our status games throughout life are all…

Bruno Latour once suggested ( think rightly) that we aim for an ‘object-oriented democracy’. What does this mean? Read on. His magisterial essay at the link below too. /1 https://t.co/F042joQa4O When we think about humans acting together,…

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…

Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an identity, we ‘belong’. Groups clash, their statuses collide.…

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…

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…

I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising team sports. Even those who previously seemed moderate now…

Rene Girard’s passion was to understand violence. Why are humans violent to one another? People who follow me know what he discovered. It had nothing to do with individual human psychology or emotion. Sociality causes violence. Humans…

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 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…

Putnam is one of the pre-eminent historians of social change. He recognises the alternating swings between ‘freedom’ individualism and collective ‘we’-based politics. The ‘upswing is triggered by catastrophe, destroying freedumb…

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons.…

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…

‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very specific conditions only. /1 When human groups are under threat.…

The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The founding mythology of ‘the people’ ruling themselves, what Graeber and Sahlins called the contradictory notion of popular…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

If you live in a modern democracy, I think the Magna Carta is necessary reading. Only half-a-dozen pages. The foundation agreement that invented the original checks and balances we call democracy. Read it and you’ll get a very clear…

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…

If you include the linear regression trend line, it’s clear that American democracy is getting worse, the more people come out to vote. I’ve Tweeted about how elections clearly have failed in their stated aims. But historically, if you…

@gilduran76 quotes Lincoln to fire up Americans against Trump. I get exactly the opposite feeling from what Lincoln said. To me it reveals the cancer at the heart of American society, which is why it’s always at war with itself. /1…

The truths of life are neither popular, or unpopular. The whole continuum of popularity is a status continuum, not a truth continuum. What is unpopular is just popular to another team, in the social melee. Popularity and unpopularity are…

Democracy was never about ‘the people’. Ever. It always was feudalism with checks and balances installed to limit the power of the King. We then began calling those checks and balances ‘democracy’. This is basic history, have a look. /1…

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…

@annabelcrabb here using the common belief that democracy is ‘the people’ thinking and acting, in this case to provide checks and balances on power. Why I think that’s a very dangerous misunderstanding. /1 https://t.co/OCFuRrJxZj…

We spent millennia ‘living with’ infection. Which killed most of us. We lost adult life through the massive demographic shift post-WW2. Now we only have the casual, cheerful ‘it is what it is’ fatalism of adolescent philosophy to guide us.…

Institutions run societies because they’re the collective intergenerational memory of the entire population. As institutions are undermined, authority collapses into imitation without command. A mimetic crowd replacing a stabilising…

Girard saw the 10th commandment as primary. You shall not COVET. All desire is imitative rivalry. We imitate what others desire. All crisis is mimetic crisis. Social media is a mimesis machine, burning our societies down from the inside…

The rapidly escalating pettiness of Trump's fights. He's doing us a favour, making visible the mimetic crisis that is the true threat to our societies. Humans desire what others desire. The object of desire is irrelevant, the toy here. We…

In the roughly 4 billion years that known life has existed, it's only in the past 100 that one life form believed it determined its own destiny. The Greeks called that hubris. Nearly everything in our individual and collective lives is…

The cycle of all human life and history. Drawing upon Girard, Burke, Tarde and Turchin mostly. Imitative rivalry. We imitate to have status. Past a threshold this destroys social order. Or that destruction can come from without.…

That ‘hell of social comparison’ is the imitative rivalry Girard wrote about, the eternal battle for status. Societies that don’t find a way to suppress status rivalry don’t survive. It’s not politics, or economics. It’s social. It’s…

McLuhan tried to teach us that the ‘medium is the message’. That first we make tools, and then our tools make us. The escalating apocalyptic narratives of social media made me remember this. Those narratives are symptomatic of our capture…

The role of spectacle and magnificence is to restrict wider comparison and rivalry in societies. It’s the control of violence, the creation of distance and difference. To restrict sameness and equality, which lead to intense mimetic…

Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it. Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations… /1 https://t.co/0ERRxaBh2v Hierarchy seems an evil when our belief is that…

Mimetic theory allows to see how what we (mis)take for democracy in action, mass imitative action, is really a more insidious development. Mass imitation is nearly always a precursor to violence and social breakdown. The function of…

The cycle of human societies, through the lens of mimetic theory, where rivalry between the similar creates mimetic crisis i.e. violence, and hierarchy’s role is to restrict the degree of similarity and imitation. 1. Hierarchy stabilises…

@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports. That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So…

The basic model of how individuals think, feel and act will determine how we understand societies to work. So today, we tend to believe individuals are reasoning agents, processing information about the world to optimise their individual…

The ‘scientific method’ was actually invented by philosophers of science, and then retrospectively applied as a descriptive framework by scientists themselves. Most progress in science comes from conceptual leaps, not methodological…

AI making everybody smarter will lead to violence and social disruption/collapse, because that’s always driven by mimetic rivalry between people made more equal. However AI could also do the opposite, if its intelligence goes so far beyond…

You can do a lot worse than choosing Spinoza as a guide in life. https://t.co/aWTX0r0z2W

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…

It fascinates me that Girard came to believe in a deity not through any faith, but via his study and analysis of the scapegoating mechanism in societies. He thought it was so deeply entrenched, that Christianity’s targeting of it…

It’s striking that the idea dreams (or memories) reside in the brain isn’t seen as rank mysticism. Henri Bergson more than a century ago said as much. As Bergson said, dreaming/memories return us to the past itself, which never passes. It…

Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is…

Anti-AI is the latest trending righteousness. Trends are Girard’s imitative rivalry, social groups weaponising things to create status/identity. Bruno Latour always said the technological is what makes us humans. Making tools is the…

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…

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.…