Social media & internet

It feels like the less actual impact people have on political decisions, the more strident their views become on places like Twitter. Like a compensation. As if these little dialectical ideas wars online can substitute for actual political…

@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

#auspol #covid19 @CrabbBrendan all wise words. I sometimes wonder if the pandemic would be as good as over if the world quarantined and vaccinated countries with high viral load and spread. Ring-fence them. As we do for Ebola and other…

#covid19 #auspol the narrative about vaccination to prevent outbreaks. Is it dangerous? US, UK, Israel, the fast vaccinators. 5-6 months in, still only 40-60% of populations vaccinated. Vaccination isn't a speed tool to prevent and control…

#auspol #covid19 Nobel laureates are usually very welcoming of debate, as are experts without a prominent public role. But those who have gained a profile during the pandemic in the mid-range are often show-ponies, who use Twitter for…

#auspol #covid19 "This race between the vaccines and the virus, it isn't over yet." Matt Hancock. Vaccination is orders of magnitude slower than viral spread. The danger of having a single-pronged pandemic strategy, based on vaccines.…

#auspol I've had first dose AZ, just as context. This isn't a pro-vax/anti-vax question for me, or even pro-AZ/anti-AZ. Twitter turns everything into debating binaries. It's about public health strategy. 1/7 https://t.co/vj7QfwoECO This…

#auspol #QandA and other similar formats end up stifling a productive clash of ideas by just providing a platform for speeches from different viewpoints. Not much interaction. The Pledge puts prominent advocates of viewpoints around a…

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

#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

#covid19 #auspol two definitions of freedom doing battle in this pandemic. It IS the pandemic, the virus is just opportunistically hitching along. Developed nations, infected with an extreme libertarian virus about 50 years ago, generated…

#covid19 Eventually all debates if they continue return people to first premises of arguments and ideas. In this case, ideas in health care around individual vs collective have also collided with political ideas in the same area. . /1…

#covid19aus #auspol I used a sophisticated algorithm to track the flow of Covid around Sydney in lockdown-lite. https://t.co/oDExCkot59

#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think we reached this point by turning our societies into economies. Where every social transaction is routed through a tiny handful of…

Modern conservative politics isn't government at all. It's regulatory capture, plundering of the treasury for vested interests. These parties have no real policy platform except cut taxes, cut regulation. Thus they can't manage anything,…

#covid19nsw #auspol looks like the mole responsible for leaking NSW Health data on daily cases may have been the same person who publishes the daily case numbers to Twitter...

#covid19 the WHO renamed viral variants with Greek letters to remove the geographical references. That's nice. But actually they should be named after the fuckwits of the pandemic, who generated them. The Trump, Bolsanaro, Johnson etc.…

Twitter often feels like a daily battle against sound bites and slogans. Putting flesh back on weaponised bones.

@covid19aus the glory of a pandemic is that all of society's greatest dickheads self-identify. Like in this Tweet and most of the comments on it. Who needs a census. https://t.co/81HENPIcfH

#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations. Watch Yes Minister, the show is all about that web. If that…

#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…

#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus police would have orders of magnitude greater impact on containing the pandemic in NSW if they sent only 2-3 officers to Macquarie Street to arrest the NSW Cabinet. Cabinet cares even less about viral spread…

#auspol social media is brilliant in many ways. But what it's also done, which may mean we should seriously turn it off, has allowed vast pockets of ignorance and intolerance to mobilise and organise. It may be the tipping point that ends…

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

I’m one of thousands of experts on Twitter. Some engage with the public and with other areas of expertise, others, not so much. The thing to remember with a pandemic (I think) is, it’s the public who will physically end it. With what they…

#auspol #covid19aus some thought the fires might force a change in climate thinking by the LNP. And then Brittany Higgins and the Respect@Work movement might change their thinking on women. And UK and US deaths might change their 'live…

@RealOzSAGE these are the types of online presentations Independent SAGE do in the UK that I think you could do in Oz? Would fill the void left by the NSW Government too. I also think Gabriel’s message here is a powerful one.…

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

@RealOzSAGE #covid19aus Brett Sutton gets a lot of eye candy comments, but you know, Dr Greg Kelly - come on people. Smart too, and heals kids! https://t.co/8pWutNZLbh

#auspol both the Liberal and National parties were formed in response to the creation of the ALP in Australia, our first party. Both represented existing wealth in Australia, through farming and business mostly. They were formed to…

If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already…

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…

Superficially Twitter seems less beholden to the 'Spiral of Silence' described in the research. But it's intensely territorial in exactly that way too, when you look hard enough. Much of the apparent exchange of ideas is social posturing.…

#auspol bit of a sleeper in this week’s news, great article about the fracturing of communities, ostensibly by social media. Given the fractious nature of Twitter too, there’s something important here, being missed I suspect. /1…

I’ve forgotten who shared on Twitter today that Rotary gives more money to the WHO than most countries. Including Australia. https://t.co/bp56RZwNBq

#Insiders regulating social media. How about regulating media first? Some media owners use their licences as a platform for continuous political propaganda.

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…

Have watched and read numerous things on the apparent mental health and social damage done during the pandemic. A few thoughts about that, going back to some key assumptions. /1 #COVID19Aus Nearly all of this analysis makes the assumption…

58% of Americans were opposed to the idea of going to the moon. ‘Moonshot’ became the term for having a major collective aim. For the Neville Chamberlains who want to appease Covid, to ‘live with’ it, what moonshots do you offer as an…

Contemplating the number of hours of conversation generated on Twitter every day arguing over whether to do basic public health things. Like arguing whether to put out fires, or fix leaking roofs.

My son explaining why being back at school is better than online learning. “It’s easier to bludge at school, the teachers can’t tell if you’re doing anything”. #auspol #covid19aus

There is a fast-track way to change the world. It would take 10 minutes. Everybody join a union. And it’s not just about money. Political libertarian ideas are stupid. But they win because they’re organised. Unions have always been the…

Anybody else getting double-posts because Twitter keeps saying 'Whoops you posted that before'? Even when you haven't.

Twitter so often is just another venue for supporters of political parties to slug it out. Each to their own. The International Space Station (ISS) is an example I think of how politics, and our lack of understanding of it, hides…

“National Cabinet agreed that the Commonwealth and state and territory governments will continue to pursue a suppression strategy, noting the objective is to limit the rate of Omicron incursions into Australia, rather than eliminate it at…

All politics is identity politics. Dominant groups lose the visibility of their identity, they think their privilege is just ‘how things are’. They don’t have to fight for identity, so it disappears from their view. A few short thoughts on…

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…

⁦@RealOzSAGE⁩ and others, I hadn’t realised N95 masks can be reused up to 5 times, and even more in lower viral load situations? And rotating them and leaving them to one side for a few days may be sufficient to ‘sterilise’ them between…

No wonder the government is after social media. This leaked report from AHPPC to National Cabinet tomorrow is everything Twitter has been saying for at least 2 weeks. What’s the point of either AHPPC or National Cabinet?…

No matter what you think of Stan, this is the thing we need to talk most about, and good on him for continuing to raise it. The problems with democracy. I don’t agree with everything here, for example I think social media is a response to…

There’s genius-level parody on Twitter. And of course Covid minimisers who are a parody of themselves. https://t.co/SByl973x7A

Best resource for those interested in choosing a retail air filtration option. There’s also an online tool ⁦@DrPieterPeach⁩ has developed that I’ll check on. https://t.co/dPZO8Jh8w3

Here’s the excellent online tool ⁦@DrPieterPeach⁩ developed to assist people to choose good air filtration options, easily. https://t.co/YNulYvUPQy

The real power of Facebook and Instagram is as contact tracing tools. To track all of the 'please infect me' moments from peoples' social lives.

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…

Drove past my local drive-through PCR test site yesterday to see how it’s going. Not one person there. Probably all at home trying to buy RAT tests online.

We live in epidemic social systems. We’ve replaced a public sphere of institutions focused on multi-generational, often invisible action on collective problems, with a daily, even hourly, ‘viral’ spread of faddish ideas and enthusiasms. /1…

Isn’t this what every social media platform does as well? Twitter does, all variety of loons here. The same loons who are driving people off Spotify, people who then come here to Tweet about leaving Spotify. https://t.co/TIo7cUTxcV

There is an economic eugenics too. The one where you develop algorithms to pursue and harass the poor to the point of suicide for any apparent welfare anomalies, but allow businesses to keep $40 billion in JobKeeper payments that they…

The Twitter algorithm doesn't pick it up. But what's really trending in Australia? Death. https://t.co/6fqWxiPrvP

Nick Coatsworth on RN Breakfast this morning was much more circumspect than he is on Twitter. Talking about how endemic doesn't mean there won't be further epidemic waves; that we need to always be ready to bring new restrictions in etc.

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…

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed Western leaders like Johnson and Morrison see an opportunity to rescue their own careers, wars are tremendous platforms for populist politicians. We can walk and chew gum, deal with…

I love discussion and debate. If you respond to a Tweet of mine with just ad hominem sewage though, it’s instant block. Time for society to draw a line in the sand. I see it also as a way of adding some level of regulation to social media,…

Nothing says ‘society is a high school peopled with adolescents of all ages’ better than the social media response to Taylor Hawkins’ or any rock star’s death, compared to the silence about the ongoing mountain of Covid bodies.

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…

The Will Smith thing shows so well I think how neoliberal, libertarian N=1 politics has atomised society. What should be a case of common assault becomes instead a platform for a bewildering array of personal grievances. Everything is…

Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter.…

It feels like a sane democracy should preclude from running for office, any person or party whose platform is 'we hate government and want to dismantle it'.

This is the time to see the reality underneath what we call the 'Economy'. The government is campaigning on 2-3 economic metrics (unemployment, growth etc.), but people know their wages are still going nowhere, their jobs are insecure,…

The @AusElectoralCom Twitter feed is fabulous. The now famous response to 'can we draw dicks on the ballot paper' a case in point. Organising elections is a shit job, more power to these guys. https://t.co/wm9eIAbaDg

How does @elsadreisig have fewer than 800 followers on Twitter?

Is there a public health subject in the infectious disease physician curriculum? I’ve seen many rank amateurs here on Twitter who seem to have a better grasp of basic public health concepts than some of our prominent infectious disease…

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…

1) Undecided voters this close to an election are people who pay no attention to politics. Their vote is equivalent to ‘trending on Twitter’. 2) The parties who win elections spend most of their time pitching to people who *don’t* agree…

Social media is the only contact tracing we now have. I’ve also used it to avoid people who are obviously higher risk, because of what their SM feed shows about their activities. https://t.co/wny5Nv1dV2

I speak to people who say things like ‘we need to DO something about what’s going on with our society, with Covid. Twitter is just talking.’ As a society we do little BUT doing. “Just do it”. Without thought or discussion. What we need is…

That 140-character Twitter limit can be so frustrating, half the first sentence missing. ‘Josh’s team wargamed with Pete Costello at Nine, and @9NewsMelb…” https://t.co/IuT5QnncjK

If you’re never sure that your conversations can change the world, wealthy elites can prove it to you. They already own mainstream media, and now social media. They know what changes a society. It’s not money. It’s ideas, conversation.…

The rare soothing experience of somebody who knows what they're bloody talking about, on Twitter. https://t.co/MsXksMN2X1

@simonahac do you see candidates on a stronger action against Covid platform as within the boundaries of Climate 200 eligibility, for funding? Given the close links between climate change and the growth of pandemics.

Libertarian politics is fundamentally at odds with everything about Australia’s community-based history and politics. Australia needs to urgently look at stronger regulation of all media, including social media, to protect its unique…

Do you skim friends’ social media feeds and see them in high-risk Covid activities, like big indoor social events, with no protections? ‘You have to live your life’, they say. There was a time that included fighting for the well-being of…

I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform that reflects certain ideas and assumptions about society, that we don't always question. /1 Twitter and other social media mostly…

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…

“…being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims.” (Jonathan Haidt) Social media is a hate pump. It vastly amplifies tiny…

I think the minority of trolling Covid-minimising scum here on Twitter should have to meet with the families of the daily slaughter. https://t.co/qHCsGacEiz

The pleas on Twitter for Covid sanity are not looking for answers, because those are obvious. They’re looking for that disappeared place where those questions didn’t need to be asked. That’s much harder to solve.

If you want to change the world, join a bloody union. Twitter won’t do it. Organised political action changes the world. No matter how loudly you want to yell your opinions, it will change nothing unless the change is organised.

The most powerful anti-viral for Covid is to not saturate the entire community with it.

I don’t remember life in Sydney pre-lockdown including pretty much every person and place I know swimming in viral soup. Wait until we see how ‘scarred’ they are 5-10 years from now, from repeated infection. https://t.co/oR5xV1myXU

For those who cry ‘alarmist’ when Covid is described as a shitshow, what would concern you? A. More dead than World War 1, in 2 years? B. Mass infection, disease and death? C. Losing your Twitter platform of minimising trolls? Teachers say…

What makes it possible for governments to ignore public health processes in a pandemic is the suppression of information about what’s really going on. A short thread about strategy, about taking our society back. /1 #auspol #covid19aus All…

Wormtongue in LOTR whispers magical bullshit in the ear of the king so that it becomes the king’s entire reality. His eyes cloud over, no longer taking in what’s happening. This is now Australia, suffering from sloganitis. Twitter is full…

Was reading the NSW Health mission on their Twitter page while accessing today's numbers. "Healthy people, now and in the future." Hats off to them for continuing to try, with government refusing to back public health. 23 more today who…

Mark Butler on RN Breakfast, indistinguishable from Greg Hunt and the previous government, on Covid. 'Vaccines and treatments' appears to be the talking point spin. Protecting hospitals is the thing apparently, not people, like Sir…

Another #insiders that doesn’t follow the usual whining Twitter script of it (apparently) lurching to the Right. https://t.co/5978mOR9Fz

Twitter is a wonderful resource in so many ways. Apart from trolls, the only thing that makes me despair of it is how it becomes a game of team sports, with every issue converted into sides for and against. Most things that need…

Something about Twitter. I rarely use it as a mobilising tool to try to generate wide public action, because most of the public never use it. (Last estimate I saw was less than 20% of Australians). But the small proportion who do are often…

The expression ‘going viral’ was always assumed to be an analogy. But viruses never go viral. Going viral is always a social process. We don’t live ‘alongside’ viruses, as politicians say. We’re their hosts, they live inside us. They…

Is it too naive to ask when boosters and anti-virals will turn the death trends around? Can we make it a KPI? It feels like just waiting for the 'wave' to pass is what we did all the other times. #auspol #covid19aus

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…

How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doing it, generation after generation? Graphic from ‘The Gilded…

How did high school/adolescence practically become the model for all of society? Social media mostly, severing the institutional connections people previously made after leaving school, and perpetuating the always-on social network of…

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…

Social media is a set of beliefs, transformed into code. Most fundamentally, the belief that democracies operate by accumulating the opinions of 'the people', into some form of common will. Look around and see if you think that particular…

Imagine a butcher hiring a staff member who was a committed vegan, who said in their job interview they wanted to destroy all butcher's shops. And yet we elect governments whose platform is 'getting government out of peoples' 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…

All pandemics are social, from Day 1. Viruses don’t go viral, we spread them in our social activity. The main argument of the BMJ piece appears to be that pretending problems don’t exist has worked before, so that’s our best guide now.…

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…

Governments do nothing about Covid because they do nothing about anything. They represent privilege. Unions were always the counterbalance. They’re the way the politics of ordinary people are enacted. Like them or not, mass, even token…

My profile says 'anti-vax and freedumbs blocked immediately'. Just for the information of people I block in future, who whine about a 'thin skin'. Not that, love to debate. It's a de-platforming thing, not giving any space to their BS.

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…

Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phones we see what’s replaced it. A fracturing. Short thread. /1…

While technology is never simple determinism, gig economy software and also social media software were spawned in the highly libertarian environment of the US. They act as enablers of that social context when introduced in other countries,…

Every day on Twitter people desperately try to speak to a public that no longer really exists. It’s platforms like Twitter which helped destroy it. There are multiple publics (plural) now, including on Twitter. All speaking to themselves,…

This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’…

I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a…

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 Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for democracy, which is flailing on any fair measure, is whether it can get rid of popularity as its foundation. Elections have to go. /1…

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…

Now that public policy has been replaced with what’s trending on social media, I can only hope this reflects a shift. But I doubt it. https://t.co/VqtTsdBZ9h

A Twitter treat is a squadron of echo chambers swarming in to accuse sane people of being echo chambers, because they block their stupid immediately.

People like this only get traction in our societies via elections. Popularity is easily manipulated, it’s called marketing. Introduce even basic competency requirements for political leadership, or make selection random, and the keyboard…

Wrong ideas about democracy also lead to despair about the millions of followers of people like Trump, and Alex Jones. Because we believe democracy is some magical aggregation of all of our millions of views, we see Trump/Jones as…

On de-platforming, it’s what Twitter did to Trump. He’s been desperate to get back, his alternative social media network is a joke. The key to beating bad people is to understand they’re a tiny minority who don’t survive refused access to…

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…

Would love some expert Twitter views on this debate. https://t.co/X0fyxBVhLE

Social media encourages the idea that a crisis like Covid is fixed with public discussion. Most of the critical processes in our societies are not only not discussed by the public, they’re invisible to them. The problem isn’t their…

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…

A perfect example of how social media decouples the public from its institutional expertise is ivermectin and Covid. A drug that most had never even heard of became a household name and major obstacle to public health action. And fast.…

Because they can. We need strong media regulation, including social media, which I think should probably be shut down. Libertarians use ‘free speech’ to pretend continuous propaganda doesn’t damage societies. They know it does, it’s why…

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…

‘Immunity debt’ is really public health debt. Australia swapped an established and powerful public health approach in late-2021 for a neoliberal, libertarian political approach to a pandemic. It privatised the pandemic, as part of the…

The problem with US-based democracy theory is that it only knows the cartoon extremism of the US experience. So everything is these boring big binaries of authoritarianism vs ‘bottom-up’, ‘grassroots’ action, centred on elections. /1…

No need for foreign powers to even own social media for it to destroy Western societies. It does it fine all by itself. https://t.co/GREToGANWT

People on Twitter saying that ‘in November 2022’ Covid is no longer dangerous. Like the passage of time somehow has made Covid inert. Another variant of ‘living with the virus’, that if you live with it a bit longer, eventually it’ll be…

Useful idiots are in turn followed by thousands or even millions of useless idiots. Many of them resident on social media, which is an idiot amplifier. It even makes idiots into leaders of the free world. https://t.co/8iWCDLVXvW

The more followers a person has on social media, the less likely they are to be able to engage in conversation with them. These platforms show the fallacy they promote, that democracy functions by wide discussion among ‘the people’.…

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…

Today I’ve had close friends send me two lots of climate-minimising rubbish, both sourced from YouTube. Social media platforms are engine rooms of social destruction, despite the positives they also have. They must be strongly regulated,…

A university. And a ‘Trust & Safety Council’. Society entrusted stewardship of knowledge to universities more than 1000 years ago. Institutions. Social media employing well-meaning people with pretty lanyards is no substitute. This is…

I still think it’s vital to say viruses never go viral.

Sky News blathering about how ‘we need to learn to live with this thing’ (Covid). We do, it’s what we were doing, before the likes of Sky News decided to abandon the learning and just go back to what we were doing before there was a virus.…

The complex problems we face are untouched by popularity-based politics. We CANNOT elect our way out of them. The problems are independent of ideology. Even basics like local roads. Social media is accelerating the disconnect between these…

I re-watched Nosedive on the weekend, a great Black Mirror episode. About a society where nearly every transaction is carried out via ‘likes’, via popularity. This is us now. Populism IS this. Election-based politics for every granular…

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.…

Trump already at 60 million followers again, on Twitter. He's not using it yet, but that honeypot of dumb love will be irresistible to him. Leaving here will do not one thing to halt those tens of millions.

The engineering and the ideas are inseparable. Brilliant point about possible limitations of platforms like Mastodon. https://t.co/csgWIBi2w8

Another illusion of social media is that all of that 'free speech' creates power in some way. It doesn't, those with power and wealth are happy for us to talk or protest all day and night. It distracts us from doing things that actually…

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power…

Twitter is proof ‘the people’ don’t exist. Theoretically it’s a platform where everybody speaks. But like life outside Twitter, what gets read is only the tiniest fraction of what gets said. About 5% of Tweeters get read regularly.…

Can we regulate media and social media please? Ignore the gibbering free speech idiots, all of our other democratic freedoms are regulated. It’s the regulation that creates the freedom, without it the wealthy and powerful do as they like.…

Fact-checking with somebody who actually knows something about viral evolution. @TRyanGregory think you saw this clip, have we painted Covid into a mutation corner? https://t.co/JAeL6uAqx4

Karen’s forensic weekly dissection of the NSW epi report is a Twitter highlight for me. If you want one of the best windows into what’s really going on with Covid in the community, watch for this thread on Thursdays. https://t.co/XvSxb4ov1Z

The clear libertarian Trojan Horse that social media has been. That set of political beliefs frames the technology itself. It embodies a US-style libertarian outlook, in its idea ‘the people’ generate society. They don’t, the collision…

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…

Viral Parkinsonism, another piece of the chronic infection/impact of infection puzzle. Alongside other research suggesting Parkinsons and artherosclerosis may be Long Influenza. Causality being tested. It took over a century to find…

I don’t think social media is an information platform. It’s a technology for mobilising groups, socially. It’s a libertarian operating system, which is why it’s accelerating the collapse of democracies. https://t.co/qnarZDVOsl

If you think change will come by ‘mobilising’ people through social media, it’s worth remembering that the communist parties of Russia and China began as democracy movements, in the name of the people. Social media magnifies and…

RN breakfast this morning, a panel predicting ‘Chinese propaganda’ would say Zero Covid was a great platform to open up China from. That’s what our government said here too. Interesting that it’s ‘propaganda’ when the Chinese say it.

Often forgotten is that social media was designed to implement a set of libertarian political beliefs i.e. that interaction of ‘the people’ is democracy. But the people is not even a thing. It’s just a group of people, each acting in their…

Content moderation is social media trying to reinvent the institutions that used to regulate knowledge and information. It’s a very thin gruel as a replacement, hopeless. And often just algorithms anyway. Knowledge, like society, has never…

Replacing regulation with self-regulation is like replacing sex with masturbation. An unregulated social media is a wrecking ball through societies. Self-regulation is an oxymoron. https://t.co/bZCTGwrQNA

Perversely, it’s neoliberal/libertarian politics which laid the foundations for social media, by gutting communities and social groupings more generally. Then they monetised the desire for community, offering what people had lost, but for…

Yesterday a friend posted to Facebook how they were feeling rubbish with a dose of Covid. Tonight’s picture is them dining out in a local restaurant. Personal responsibility public health.

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 think powerful anti-virals might make inroads into many if not most chronic health conditions. https://t.co/my3btyTySP

Any attempt to regulate social media is interpreted as some form of authoritarianism. These tools are libertarian Trojan Horses, mostly from the ‘land of the free’, useful to us only because they fill a void hollowed out by the same…

To fast-track some basic social media hygiene, I suggest posting in favour of anything that seems pro-‘lockdowns’. It flushes out many Infinite Covids to block, especially if you examine the accounts they like as well. Makes for a…

Social media is the rotting carcass of traditional media. It’s possible to see each platform as a remnant of sections of old newspapers. Twitter is letters to the editor. FB is the old personal pages. Instagram is the social pages. Etc.…

Social media is the rotting carcass of traditional media. It’s possible to see each platform as a remnant of sections of old newspapers. Twitter is letters to the editor. FB is the old personal pages. Instagram is the social pages. Etc.…

Social media can mobilise anything, there’s no quality control, no filtering through established expertise. The bad and outright toxic will always vastly outnumber the good. And will be a lot more motivated. https://t.co/r5hZLaZ6x3

This thread is the sort of thinking that keeps me coming back to Twitter. Some serious questions here. https://t.co/1qQtKne1zx

Two major democracies now victims of insurrections in only a few years. Populism, fuelled by social media, did this. Populists can make anything popular, and call it ‘the will of the people’. It’s Marketing 101. Democracy can’t survive if…

Bah, Twitter technical issues, tweets disappearing, reappearing etc. Apologies for any confusion.

The joys social media makes visible to us. https://t.co/MnZqkNrdwz

Viruses don’t go viral. The untold story of Covid is that social media is one of its greatest enablers, by mobilising the forces of those who oppose basic public health action. Allowing that opposition to go viral.

The structure of a platform like Twitter makes a lie of just about everything said about it, by all sides. Tweets are ruthlessly hierarchical. Those with many followers get much more attention and visibility than others. This probably…

‘Nothing to see here, happens all the time, it’s a media beat-up’ was this morning’s take on Twitter. https://t.co/m7GFuMPHf0

First libertarians destroy societies (that they don’t believe exist). Then they mobilise the anger through social media to viciously attack anybody who tries to fix things. They’re bullies from high school, now running the world. I don’t…

I love Twitter, but it shares the life is a high school disease. Every day the focus is more upon somebody’s team or group outdoing somebody else’s team or group, than it is upon actual reality. With each team lining up its experts and…

Twitter is useless in dealing with most abuse, including doxing. For those who try to dox me, I’ve referred it to authorities now, I won’t waste time waiting for Twitter to do anything.

If you want a measure of the time bomb social media is in societies, think about where the sort of behaviours you see on these platforms would be deemed acceptable anywhere else. Not a reactionary thing, I’ve researched on these platforms…

Ultimately social media drove Ardern from office, and gave libertarians from the US in particular a foothold in the NZ door. Also how they mad inroads here. Just one more swing of the wrecking ball these platforms are, for all democracies.…

Again, the salute is just the result of mobilisation of far-Right groups via social media. Regulate social media. That will also help beat Covid, because you won’t have these same groups constantly undermining public health messaging.…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms…

The regulator overwhelmed by the sewer. And this is just kids. Social media operates in direct opposition to the basic operational realities of democracy. https://t.co/39MfoJXQrL

The Covid debate between suppressing transmission and focusing on severe disease is really a battle between two belief systems about society. One belief system says society is made of millions of individuals, each choosing their own fate.…

None of our problems will have a chance of being solved until we regulate media and social media again. To reconnect them to our other public institutions. https://t.co/OM6u04KzDK

Social media is tying society’s hands behind its back in trying to fix solvable problems. This is one way it’s doing it. https://t.co/0z1qdo2YKy

Populist politics, where we believe that politicians run countries (and not the thousands of expert officials they employ), has hit roadblocks in every direction. Faced with hugely complex issues to solve, it has nothing except symbolic,…

Another question for the expert community. Why has the stunning success of antiretrovirals for HIV/AIDS not been matched by other antivirals? Less money for the research? Other viruses more complex? Something else?

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…

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…

@Globalbiosec has been saying for a long time this disease will always be epidemic, never endemic. Instead government listens to experts whose focus is curating growing social media followings, for fame and profit. https://t.co/dGTbatIbF9

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,…

We might get somewhere if the response to the collective disasters facing us wasn’t always just using them as a platform to tell everybody else about our individual grievances. That’s part of the libertarian victory too. The worse things…

I have expert-fatigue. I can’t remember a time in the past year for example where NSW Health wasn’t recommending masking in indoor crowded places. But then the media is full of expert opinion directly contradicting the need to. Social…

I’m sure one of the Infinite Covids will point out this is yet to be peer reviewed. Because their passion is peer-review. All of their views are rigorously peer-reviewed by their followers, and monetisation algorithms.…

Rather than mobilising and monetising trolls, could expert Covid minimisers : - show us where ‘immunity debt’ and ‘hybrid immunity’ are in the textbooks? - show us where the same textbooks and even historical practice show the use of…

Our vaccination strategy with vaccines that don’t stop anything much except severe disease must at least possibly be turning us all into perpetual reservoirs for viral evolution. Keeping the hosts healthy enough to allow the virus to…

If Albo saw some of Australia’s most senior Covid advisers and their professional trolling colleagues online yesterday openly advocating for dirty air, to great international embarrassment and amusement, would he wonder if he’s been…

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…

Labor is proposing a statutory tort of invasion of privacy, that will include doxxing. Keep the receipts, people who have to endure that BS on this platform. And a heads up to both the platform, and the doxxers.

Just as an exercise in social media, if like me you don’t know enough about this topic to know who’s most right, at least trace the network of followers and likes of those who do, and make claims like this. If you want a sense of which…

Pieter ignores all of the crap of social media and patiently offers a vital service to the community every single day. If you want to improve ventilation, it’s your way in. https://t.co/gw2BvOUiHK

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…

Such beautiful clarity, shorn of all of the team sports of social media. Reality-based, grown-up reasoning. We need a lot more of it. https://t.co/VAH9OYTC4j

It’ll be no surprise that I think ‘the economy’ is hokum. If (as I believe) it’s just people, I’d predict that the countries who will flourish throughout this century and into the next, are those who aren’t in retirement homes. The…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

This is what those who called loudest for freedom from Covid protections do every day. Talk about Covid on Twitter. All day. Every day. There’s a panic about it, they can’t move away from the light. Trying to convince themselves I think,…

The astonishment that society won’t fight a pandemic is maybe a deeper pain. The disappearance of purpose from lives, except you do you. Party, drink, travel, curate your online persona. The hollowing out of civilisation. Who could care…

How the hell does @OmarHakimdrums have only just under 7000 Twitter followers, in 10 years? Come on people.

Most local government areas in Australia are starved of money to provide basic resources. While we give hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and to buy the US a missile delivery platform in the Indo-Pacific. Those lunacies aside, a thought…

Albo’s problem is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be Hawke, nationally adored. But Hawke achieved that on the back of major policy reform. While both Albo and Biden target ‘division’ in politics, as if the problem is people just not…

The path to saving societies won’t be through the idiot team sports of Left and Right, or the identity politics of using social collapse as a platform to express our individual grievances. It will be through rapid engineering works. We…

The Block, and the surge in interest in luxury. I’ve argued that what we call an economy is really a trick, the replacement of the public sphere with a fictitious market of free-floating individuals, interacting. Driven by a sophisticated…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

Is it possible that even Long Covid is just part of the acute phase of infection? And that the real slow burner here is ongoing chronic infection? How do we measure the setting up of viral reservoirs in bodies? I know it’s been done, can…

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

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…

This is such an important topic. Are infections which cause significant and relatively long-lasting immunity actually rare as hen’s teeth? The two most evoked examples, cold and flu viruses, seem to create little if any immunity. Have a…

Societies, including on social media, are not driven from the ‘bottom up’. Musk seems to believe that great democratic myth of our time. It’ll be the end of his platform. https://t.co/J1122mBpdu

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…

Several times over the weekend when researching topics, the first 3-4 pages of Google search results were all business pages. Businesses are getting good at gaming the algorithm. Google has always tweaked search to combat this. It seems to…

The way social media dramatically accelerates social collapse is maybe more obvious for issues like climate change and Covid. But a nice example today of the corrosive damage it does across the board. Was speaking with an insurer and…

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…

Re-Tweeting my own Tweet only because Twitter seemed to have a brown-out at the time of the original Tweet. https://t.co/KSW2HBypfX

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’…

In the talk about cybercrime, it’s not often asked whether it was wise to make many of the social transactions that are now being criminalised online transactions in the first place. Societies operate on trust, generated by hierarchy,…

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 COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of understanding the underlying mechanisms, both to reduce risks in adults with existing CVD or with acute viral infections, and also to minimize longer-term consequences from…

Chronic impacts of infection (and also chronic infection) seem to lack any rigorous conceptual framework to guide what would even count as data. Everything from asymptomatic viral reservoirs acting years later, to people being…

Anybody who believes that democracy functions or should function by ‘the people’ steering our society should read the comments on this (great) thread. Then block all the morons, to do your small part in sanitising this sewer of a platform.…

Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource,…

The more societies are 'engineered', the less we need any political ideology at all. Political ideologies evolved at a time when life was much simpler, and less technical. The ideologues would call that a call for 'technocracy'. Rubbish.…

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…

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…

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…

Fantastic description by David Roth of everything wrong with social media. Collapsing under its own spin, nothing but a vehicle for a quick buck for platform creators, and their libertarian beliefs totally at odds with their spin.…

Astounding that many young people I talk to are active, almost rabid, followers of Gerard Rennick. This is young people without any history of conservative political (or any political) belief. The Right in the US is using social media to…

For every good person on social media trying to mobilise action against Covid, or any other good cause, there are 200 others mobilising total social collapse. It's time to regulate social media. Or to shut it down. No society that actively…

I've been a heavy user of social media. But I now think the fastest and maybe only way we can save societies, is to shut it down. Have Tweeted lots about the basic premise of social media, that societies emerge from the 'bottom up'. They…

Social media IS high school, extended to every age of life. Not by analogy, it literally is. That’s why the bullies are winning. Their popularity games were how they won high school. Now they can win adult life with popularity too.…

The Tories dust off their only policy in response to this sort of disaster. Tax cuts , for themselves and their chums. Meantime we express outrage on social media, which achieves precisely fuck all. Social media is owned by billionaires,…

Humans are social creatures. First, foremost, and always. Even when they’re being ‘political’ they’re being social. For a long time that social life was a relatively independent domain of life, free of the clutches of commerce and…

1. Social media destroys public health action and messaging. 2. People use social media to try to keep up to date with the messaging. 3. People say without social media, they couldn't have managed the pandemic. 4. Rinse and repeat.…

More of the same 'social media is a vital source of information and connection' stuff. It broke the existing public processes and retains some of the remnants of what it broke, that's all. Even these remnants are then further pulverised…

Set to not able to reply, so will have to retweet. I get that people have found valuable information and connection on social media, I have too. My argument is it's giving back some of what it stole, in monetised fragments. And supporting…

"But they expressed their outrage in cyberspace so it had no effect. Because the algorithms made sure that they only spoke to people who already agreed with them...the radical fury...no longer had the power to change the world." h/t to…

Social media is a giant rage farm. Legitimate rage at societies being destroyed, re-directed and harvested for profit, by the people doing the destroying. Strategic genius. https://t.co/jjMEP6ocvE

The genius of Tupperware parties was to remove the natural resistance of people to marketing, and having their friend networks do it for the company instead. It was one of the original social networking business tricks. Social media is…

"Social media has distorted the public sphere beyond recognition. Each of us now has a deeply flawed mental model of our own communities." It's not about the content, or even the connection. It's about destroying the PUBLIC sphere.…

This person is putting words in my mouth and bores me. People who invent their own straw-man enemies, well - that's social media in a nutshell. https://t.co/bzdsaQ4giI

I think I’m going backwards with followers. This is the best visual metaphor I can think of to describe social media. The liquid is the public. The bubbles are all the tiny individuals and groups social media generates. Each seeing all of…

My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT emerge from the ‘bottom’ up’ That’s a libertarian fantasy. /1…

Yes let us all praise the billionaires who run these platforms, for allowing us some remnant of social connection that their businesses strip away in all the other areas of our life. https://t.co/de3IUxbRZr

Where do people think the misinformation and attacks on trust predominantly come from? Social media is NOT social networking. It's the monetisation and weaponisation of social networking. https://t.co/ikd0A7i2w5 via @ABCaustralia

'Social media' is like saying 'social brain surgery', or 'social piloting of planes', or 'social plumbing.' Media is a profession, a set of expert skills. Social media means dumping all that and letting everybody create their own news. We…

Car theft is a TikTok ‘challenge’. Social media is not social, it’s the opposite. It’s part of a movement that first pulverises existing community into separate individuals, then regathers those individuals around monetised fads. Like car…

Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, during the pandemic. What it MEANS is much more interesting. /1…

“I think we have the balance right”. If a politician says this, it means “this is as far as the focus group polling and party donors will allow us to go.” Two things will prevent action on Covid, climate change or anything else. /1 1) The…

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…

High schools decoupled from adult life converted adult life to adolescence. Social media entrenches and accelerates the shift. https://t.co/QIfZHNbUyj

Social media. Mobilising stupidity, anger, violence. But hey, some of my best friends are on social media. Or something. Right now undermining Australian democracy with loon brainwashing imported from places like the US. The platform makes…

People can ignore 200 Australians dying of Covid every week, but a rock star dying prompts an avalanche of 'vale' social media posts. From people well into and past middle age. Society is a high school.

I love that exclamation mark Twitter uses. It makes it a question many of us ask multiple times every day, right now. https://t.co/gAGONuKmdT

Social media has turned institutions full of experts into adolescent gangs. You only have to comment on one of the gang for all of them to suddenly show up as support. https://t.co/tAD3N3ZkhY

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…

Countries that maintain some form of public space of shared meanings will always be more stable. This is the danger of social media, it fractures that space into thousands or even millions of non-communicating bubbles.…

This is the pattern we see on social media, across all topics. Widespread segregation. It’s no coincidence that many social media platforms were developed in the US. It codes their underlying libertarian belief systems.…

One of the things about adopting a reality-based politics, rather than a popularity-based politics, is that you see clearly how the hot air of all elected politicians and social media debates are irrelevant to what actually happens. Covid…

Revisiting this story, you can see the strength of network/online politics is also its weakness. If the accounts of these 12 people were deactivated, most of the problem would go away. Just 12 people. https://t.co/3pHpazChni

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more…

Smart people here nailing what’s wrong with social media. It’s information decoupled from social relationships, replaced with social interactions. Information is a social relationship, ‘fact-checking’ completely misses that. h/t…

Mitigating the risk of extinction from mass stupidity mobilised by social media seems a far greater threat to me. https://t.co/UbieiDc0yb

And social media is away, in full wrecking ball mode. Did the Senator say these things? https://t.co/M6AoXMyAZt

Every day on Twitter we’re living the fantasy that everybody expressing their individual view will somehow aggregate into a changed society. It’s the same libertarian con, social media is a giant sponge that soaks up public anger and…

Talking to a family yesterday where fighting has broken out over who made who else sick. Because they’ve had Covid multiple times, they’re not happy to now all be sick again, and the blame game has started. Was it a family gathering? Why…

People at the front line of essential public services have to endure this every single day. Magistrates have ‘sovereign citizens’ in front of them quoting chapter and verse from some YouTube clip. Social media is making this the norm. h/t…

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…

How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘team sports’. Social conformity. Not politics, or rather that’s…

"I think we’ve stuck the fork of human frailty into the sparking light socket of social media enough times now to know that it’s not entirely good for us." John Birmingham

If you’re old enough, think back to life before social media. If somebody didn’t know something, what did they do? Often it never came up, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. If it did they could use a library, or Google search etc.…

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.…

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…

Peter Lewis in the Guardian today. Social media has created a 'hyperactive feedback loop hardwired to turn every interaction into a contest'. I say it a lot, many resist the truth of it because deep down they love the economy of popularity…

Higgins, bus crashes, all just fodder for the daily teenage team sports of politics. None of it actually matters to politicians, what matters is their team, extended out into social media, winning. Likes, and votes. No actual action…

And we're off on another day of elected populists achieving nothing for the country. Critical emergency-level problems to solve, but all we'll get is populist gotcha gameplay for likes on the socials, and votes. https://t.co/xpGaViVmMa

See how the daily teams identify themselves, across politics, the socials, and MSM. The whole thing is a pointless daily teenage game, for likes and votes. Meanwhile urgent national issues sit there unaddressed. https://t.co/cgKGloAyOe…

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…

It's not hard to trace the team each person sees themselves as part of, on Twitter. Their followers, likes and replies to their threads will identify them. And sometimes they even set up groups, which makes it even easier. /1 Once you do…

Australia is on track to have easily double the local death toll of Spanish Flu, with Covid. There are many reasons this is a public health disgrace. Starting with the most common objection to the comparison - that ‘we have a lot more…

The populist fanatics who increasingly occupy elected power are bred in online echo chambers. And they return there. They have almost no connection to ordinary people, and no interest in them. But they talk about ‘the people’ constantly,…

This is how social media more generally works. It opens to ‘debate’ the entire operating system of societies. Things people have not only no knowledge of, but didn’t even know existed, suddenly become weaponised topics of ‘debate’. It…

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…

Seeing lots of good people having Twitter holidays. Like fighting some sort of fight achieves something here. I don’t think it does. That’s the bullshit side of social media, the team sports. Knowledge is all that changes the world. Ignore…

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’…

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

Finally a piece recognising that social media is not about information. It’s a social process. No media is the transmission of information. Social media destabilises our existing hierarchies of trust (institutions), and replaces them with…

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…

This laughable to-do is amplified by the team sports antagonistic model of social media, itself loosely based on team sports. We’re at some sort of peak stupid now, our adolescent societies do nothing except team sports every day now.…

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…

I won’t bother changing platforms. If this one goes belly up, that’s it for me. Social media is a large part of the problem, and like many I also get a lot out of it. But the world would be a better place pretty fast if the whole lot fell…

Social brain surgery Social policing Social electrical work Social commercial jet flying Social building scaffolding Social legal representation Social media. Why does that last one not strike us as ridiculous, like the rest of the list?

As we all rush from a platform owned by one billionaire, to one set up by another billionaire. Social media takes a public fractured into millions of individuals, and provides the illusion they’re re-unifying through conversation. A hot…

The reason I’m on Twitter was years of frustration with Facebook. Facebook doesn’t discuss, in my experience, you’re firing ideas into a void there mostly. But over time I’ve come to see it a bit differently, and also as a possible…

The destruction of Twitter just another empirical test (which we shouldn’t need) of the complete emptiness of libertarian ideas. They don’t work. All that nonsense about ‘the people’ driving societies - here it is folks. It’s bullshit.…

In some ways Musk is actually correct about social media. Its worst characteristics come from anonymity, from the decoupling from real community life. That enables and excuses sociopathic behaviour. Opinions without consequences, without…

New platform, same shit. This isn’t me, I’m not on Threads. Thanks to @DarylTractor https://t.co/RfMFDfZIHQ

If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of control because we’re still wallowing in the last industrial…

It’s social media on the phones that is the problem, not the phones. And if those apps are a wrecking ball for education (they are), why don’t we realise they’re doing the same thing to the adult world of work too? Why not ban them across…

Crazy. 135,000 flights per DAY. The last estimate I saw said we burn about 400 *billion* litres of jet fuel every year. This is the kerosene-powered resistance to ‘lockdowns’, and you’ll find on social media that travellers feel more…

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…

So bored with all politics, particularly churned through social media. Debates on nothing of any actual significance, no problems fixed, no actual causes even canvassed. No consideration of any of the material realities of modern life at…

The Republicans not only attacking attempts to rein in mis/disinformation, they’re also now going after universities who even research it. Social media is the weaponisation of libertarian lunacy. And we invite into the core of our…

The most dangerous mythology of social media is that it’s an unalloyed good for all people to be allowed to express their views on all topics, in public spaces. Mythologies about democracy make this one very popular. /1 Like generations of…

And again from Threads. I think you can compare the output from the two accounts to figure out where the BS is here. Not least because the Threads posts mock my longstanding views published to Twitter. https://t.co/5lRaKN8Fq5

Is Twitter malfunctioning again, or have people mostly migrated to Threads? Seems uncommonly quiet.

Fantastic resource. Also a window into a time not that long ago, when calm passion for knowledge was a hit for kids. Now social media has turned their lives into hysterical battles over their own identity. Identity is a libertarian…

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…

Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide, point of view is irrelevant. /1 https://t.co/UycMdeRfxS…

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…

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…

The problem on social media is the same problem democracies have. Prioritising popularity over accuracy/expertise. Quite simple changes to reward structures could shift this overnight. https://t.co/AXA2jAiBjA

Hadn’t watched this until recently. Enjoyed it, social media and electoral politics destroy the world. Smart writers. https://t.co/bj8ZjvRjIN

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…

That’s the function of social media. To endlessly distract and divert energy from actual change. It’s owned by billionaires, isn’t this obvious? https://t.co/Whk69lnj3m

Boom. I try and fail to convince people this is what social media is really about. I need a better haircut. https://t.co/rjTagK3LNE

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’.…

Using my great friend David’s Tweet to do the same reframing. Here on social media we’re not fighting over the facts. We’re fighting to restore a social system that pays attention to them. We are all mostly agreed on most things, that’s…

When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a point to it, given we’re speaking into a void? I think it needs…

Remember when elected leaders, the media and social media not only all failed in Don't Look Up, but actually accelerated the end of civilisation? Did that not resonate? Why do we take to social media every day thinking that will do…

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…

People post the most intimate details about themselves and friends and family, to global platforms. It reveals how they perceive collective life. The ‘we’ is entirely ‘me’. The hyper-reduction of collective life to the intimately personal.…

Agreement, ‘but’ qualified to provide differentiation from the original. Imitative rivalry, society’s glue. Social media’s breadwinner. https://t.co/vJ3AZ2ZcNr

‘Fascism’ is one of those words sprayed around with abandon on social media. The 20th century’s two most famous fascists here. In reality fascism is just populism, in its endgame. Both hugely popular leaders, and came to power using…

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…

Total sympathy for Rachael. But I reckon if we were honest about the ways social media is not ever a community, we might understand better what we’ve actually lost. https://t.co/HrfJXLExkF

The best description I’ve seen of a school is as a ‘box of strangers’. It’s also a perfect description of social media. To strip away all social structure, and force people to reinvent one of their own. Incredibly dangerous, the gutting of…

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…

The true danger of social media isn’t foreign powers using it to spy. It’s that it decouples a society’s communication and information process from its institutions. It turns societies into a ‘box of strangers’, inventing their own status…

Albanese’s misdiagnosis of Australia’s problems as ‘division’ is catching up with him. Division is a political strategy, turning issues into team sports. People LOVE it. Twitter and all social media and elections exist because of it.…

My Tweeting for a couple of years now. All societies are exclusively social, and run through conformity or imitation. What we call politics is the same mechanism. It starts at birth, is refined and magnified through schooling. It runs…

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…

It would be interesting to see financial statements over the pandemic for prominent Covid minimisers. There are a variety of estimation tools online that say some of them have become very wealthy promoting bullshit. They created a ‘market’…

From an evolutionary biology perspective, where are we at with vaccines that mostly just suppress severe disease? Do they create the conditions for evolution of variants, and facilitate viral reservoirs?

Australia often mistakes jingoism for national unity. Social media is like petrol on that fire. Will be back when the collective orgasm subsides, and the unity with it.

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…

The Electoral Commission mentioned this one. You can see how much of the libertarian rubbish firing up many Australians now is actually driven from overseas. Social media is an unlocked door to our own democracy, eating it from the inside…

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…

One thing that’s clear through this pandemic is that expertise as a whole has no political power. Our modern societies run on expertise, they’d collapse in an instant without it. But expertise has zero coordinated power to shape what’s…

The probably irreparable damage social media is doing to societies. Through the lens of renewable energy development. Take the current objection to just about every pumped hydro project proposed. Lake Lyell, as an example. /1…

These fucking idiot platforms. Posted an image from the frontier wars in Australia, to FB. An image of Aboriginal Australians chained by the neck. The FB algorithm removed it for ‘nudity’.

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…

The whole 'MSM' thing is a bit weird. Nobody I know who's young consumes any MSM now, and hasn't for years. It's an older person's obsession, from the days when MSM did constitute a sort of public square. That's long gone. Splintered into…

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…

The difference between this referendum and the one in 1967? We have social media now, an institutional home for things that previously were rejected as disgusting, ignorant and absurd. It needs to be turned off. https://t.co/7ryNrNkhHf

As a thought experiment, imagine all social media turned off for a week. Or even two weeks. Seriously, imagine the shift you might see in societies. How it would pan out. It’s not a quick thought experiment, these platforms have insinuated…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

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.

An an ex-teacher, the tragedy of social media is maybe more visible. We spend 13 years of slow, hard slog socialising children into knowledge. Social media undoes it inside months.

I want to believe that old-fashioned people on the ground shifts politics in 2023. But I suspect it’s only people on social media platforms that really do. https://t.co/PYJIQ7o7g6

Yesterday’s big Yes turnouts aren’t even the main story in the major papers or news sites. Social media is where society is now made, and destroyed. The No campaign knows it. It’s an open door into every household in the country.

A 'man of the people' (pure populism, 'the people' is their invention). Populists use social media to organise the destabilisation of society. These platforms need to be heavily regulated, or shut down, why do we allow this damage?.…

This is what social media does. Unravels millennia of social progress. It decouples societies from their institutions, which are that history. I'm constantly amazed we don't see it, and that we allow it. https://t.co/eFjYlurAwm

The idea of being at war with your own institutions is one the US and UK are exporting to the world, mostly through social media. Nobody is winning, it's like a lethal social infection. https://t.co/JogeJWxUhh

The end of Twitter would be no bad thing. If all social media platforms collapsed the greatest obstacle to doing basic repair to our societies would be removed overnight.

Exactly this. The end of social media is built right into its beginnings. It has a laughable model of what social means, and so it’s always doomed to fail. https://t.co/H1DqJnSIzJ

If social media is the answer (to anything), why isn’t it ‘mobilising’ any action at all against any of our greatest problems? Why does it only seem to work like that, for those who cause these problems? No coincidences here.

Not said here is that ‘angry locals’ nearly always means ‘social media at work’. The loon idea that societies run from the ‘bottom up’ is destroying them. Nothing runs from the bottom, not plumbing, not societies. It’s a populist con.…

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…

While social media and MSM no doubt will spend the rest of the day salivating over the populist irrelevance of the resignation of a leader, this was pushed to the 'extras' section. We urgently need a reality-based politics.…

What nobody says is that one member of the family DIDN’T freeze to minimise risk. They filmed it. They even moved around to get better camera angles. That’s our social media world, even emergencies are just great platforms for curated…

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…

Ffs, lockdowns given as a possible cause. It’s the same shift to libertarian freedumb that’s the cause, magnified and accelerated by using social media as our dominant method of social transaction. The removal of ‘public’ everything.…

I wonder every day when we’ll figure out that societies can’t run via social media, with the team sports there pursuing increasingly insane anti-social campaigns, on everything. It’s a literal wrecking ball. https://t.co/n5nSI9HOzC

Coming back to this, the ABC has done a great job here, showing how public health used to be done. Leaders didn’t baulk at public resistance, they pushed through. But then, social media wasn’t a leviathan organiser of mass dumb for them to…

Tell me again why social media isn't THE problem in democracies. It needs to heavily regulated, or shut down completely. https://t.co/H9bk9GlxmX

You can’t see it more clearly. Social media is now running our societies. Which means anybody who can generate the likes, is in charge. Look at Trump. This, for the Voice debate, where an ex-Neighbours star is easily the dominant…

The same people who 10 years ago would have strongly agreed that media tycoons were using self-regulation to game mass media and take over democracies, will now defend to their last Tweet the free-for-all of social media that replaced it.…

Populism allows anything, including the definition of reality itself, provided it's popular. Social media then provides the infrastructure for populism to replace all social institutions. https://t.co/4VtdcpDwFE

The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between populist fantasy and reality gets too great. /1 The mechanism…

Rich pickings today for populism + its platform social media destroying the world. Why don’t people see it? Until we give up the idiot idea that ‘the people’ run societies, we’re fast-tracking our own extinction. https://t.co/WCUdmLAqsJ

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…

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…

I wish more public authorities had a decisive social media presence. Attack the BS at its source. https://t.co/ZdV9GwnJmE

Given the glorious confluence of electoral fundamentalism and social media, we could hold a referendum on whether we should wipe our arse after going to the toilet, and No would win.

Much of the ‘division’ is just the team sports of social media. Hot air. The division that isn’t is a corrective response to an undivided world where tiny numbers hoard most of the wealth. https://t.co/bx5SorXA7i

I love that reality carries on mostly oblivious to what social media thinks, about anything. For example energy companies rushing to solar and wind and storage, because it’s hugely profitable for them. While morons sit here every day…

Storage is increasingly the solution to energy grid upgrades. Much faster and cheaper than building thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines. Already happening out on the ground. Social media will mobilise resistance to every…

This is the problem, which nobody will confront. Social media is a wrecking ball, a corrosive assault on the trust that is the glue that holds all societies together. What we need to do to fix that is already pre-weaponised by the same…

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 recommend everybody attend their local council meetings, to see firsthand the incredible damage social media is inflicting upon societies. It’s the front-line of a collapse that’s happening frighteningly fast.

Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con.…

Still spot-on. We’re insane to allow unregulated social media loose on societies. It will destroy them. It already is. It’s irrelevant that some people find some good use for it. Far more really bad people find toxic uses for it.…

It can be lonely being Gen X, the smallest generation to boot. Wedged between an older generation who think life is an episode of The Love Boat, and younger generations off with the social media fairies. h/t @NobodyImpawtant…

Turn off social media. Most of our problems would evaporate immediately. https://t.co/vzCHV5J2Xm

We’re not going to get a choice, so long as social media is allowed to operate completely unregulated. It’s a libertarian tool to transform every country it enters into a libertarian loon wonderland. https://t.co/7eAdiviGdY

The pattern repeats and repeats. Social and community goods destroyed by social media activism. Social media is the problem. Look at local governance if you want to see the front-line of the assault. https://t.co/Qhw11o2b5z

4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables.…

Why are we letting Covid do whatever it likes? Because adolescence has never been interested in risk management of any kind. https://t.co/R3vmekOQ6S

Listened to an excellent discussion about clean air chaired by @dom_ma and including @c_s_wallace. A key topic for discussion was how to de-individualise public health again, to get scale and traction on topics like clean air. I think the…

You’ll feel less powerless if you stop thinking society is millions of independent people. 5% of people determine what happens, the other 95% imitate them. Anything can ‘go viral’ and be part of that 5%.

The problem isn't really mis- or disinformation. It's information. It's people having opinions on everything, including things they have no idea about at all, and which they then obstruct with their opinions. That's what social media does.

This is the libertarian project succeeding, dismantling institutions. Social media is now easily the most powerful weapon in their armoury, it replaces this trust with likes. Popularity replaces all of our institutional checks and…

The genius of the Tupperware party was that it bypassed peoples' natural resistance to being sold things, by getting their friends to sell it to them instead. Social media is this model extended to every part of society, including…

While social media is allowed unregulated existence, journalism, like all other public institutions, will be destroyed by populism. Also being ‘objective’ would be asking why a ‘proportionate’ approach ended up meaning doing nothing about…

There are signs the government understands that its only path to renewables in the time required is to target households. Electrify households, and install batteries at every scale. Will also address cost of living. Everything else will be…

The idea that ‘the people’ run democracies is destroying them at an ever-increasing speed. Fanned by bad faith foreign actors through social media. Dip your toe into any of the multitude of community oppositions to anything right now, for…

Of course it did. In social media societies, you can’t burp without it triggering outrage somewhere. That’s what these platforms are designed and funded to to do, mobilise constant opposition to everything. Name one thing ever BUILT…

It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it…

This is how social media works. Heat pumps have been around for decades and are superb. But 'this guy on YouTube says...'. https://t.co/F22ymA4eiX

Humans operate overwhelmingly more by word-of-mouth than they do by official information sources. If you construct a technology that takes word-of-mouth to scale, to the level of a country or even globe, you upend everything. And that's…

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…

The contrast between the superlatively good Andy Park on RN Drive and the increasingly tedious woke-gotcha journalism of RN Breakfast is stronger every day. I hate the word ‘woke’, but by woke-gotcha I mean focused only on social media…

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,…

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.…

This is why social media must either be very heavily regulated, or shut down. We’re leaving the door wide open to pirates who are using the platforms to mainpulate critical social processes at will, cheaply and fast. https://t.co/1WLaGLmdco

I believe Covid is the first disease in recorded human history that humans have deliberately chosen to ‘live with’. Because that’s an empty slogan, it deliberately disguises two fundamentally different meanings. /1 We have of course had to…

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and realised my rooftop solar was generating about enough electricity every week to get an EV from Sydney to Perth. I wanted to use that fact to open a window onto a set of beliefs that is…

The increasing infection of ordinary life by social media. A company in the middle of introducing EVs to its fleet. There were delays, because ‘we need to reflect the increased fire risk in our policies’. I asked what the risks were. ‘EVs,…

There are no grown-ups left to do anything about it. The Western world is now a giant high school where only bullies and show ponies get attention. Social media transforms all disaster into an attention-platform for more performative team…

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…

Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been accelerating the use of these methods ever since. It’s destroying what’s left of Australian democracy. Social media is populism’s…

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…

Social media has won another election. https://t.co/3e5tvwfGvb

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…

A policy platform comprising nothing but slogans found on social media. People are still sure these platforms do more good than harm? https://t.co/hN3oRFRyNI

Only catastrophe brings social progress. Look what the Black Death did to inequality in the 14th century. Humans are incapable of acting outside their own social status games of imitative rivalry. These platforms pour petrol on that same…

The role of travel journalism is to find places not already destroyed by tourism, so that the mob can descend upon them for selfies for their social media feeds, and destroy them as well. https://t.co/R7qWj8jdv4

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…

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

The world doesn’t run on information. It runs on relationships. Social relationships. On trust, on the people we trust to know different things. Replace that with popularity contests, such as elections and all of social media, and it’s…

Dutton, like the UK Tories, is back on Stop the Boats, like a dog returning to its own vomit. Remember a time parties spent time in opposition to re-build policy platforms? Under populism that’s over. You just scattergun slogans, hoping to…

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…

From this I take that 'authoritarian' States are way in the lead, unless they own fuck-tonnes of oil, gas and coal. Meanwhile democracies count the angels on the heads of pins, on social media. https://t.co/ji4UePLl79

As always, reality and social media are light years apart. In this case, on EVs. https://t.co/Usy1VxHTru

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…

There are several issues I don’t comment on because they’re entrenched as social media-driven causes. It doesn’t matter what you say about those topics, it’s pointless engaging with them here because the team sports is so fanatical. But to…

Any politician who actually believes the public don't like 'division' has never spent more than 5 seconds on social media. Playing the 'quiet' game is surrendering to the other side. (The whole 'sides' thing is team sports anyway, and a…

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

The income share of the top 0.1% of key (and representative) English-speaking societies. This history is usually written economically. But it’s much more interesting than that. A thread about the real origins of ‘the economy’. /1…

Come over to reality-based politics. It’s already ignoring pretty much everything elected windbags and social media influencers say. https://t.co/SLKcDiaSfX

We’re living through the greatest revolution in all human history. Get out of the social media fray and you might even notice it, stop listening to the great collective Wormtongue. Come over to reality politics. https://t.co/eafEXLfQYg

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…

Social media is infinitely more dangerous for humanity than AI.

Yes! This how mass change happens for everything. The change ‘goes viral’. (Viruses don’t go viral, human behaviour does.) Solar in particular is smashing existing fossil fuel interests. It’s our key to changing everything, not just…

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still…

Bernard Keane got there. Social media was always going to be a disaster, because societies don't work from the 'bottom up'. They're always imitative hierarchies. Social media has provided the lowest forms of pond life with a mechanism to…

The front-line of populist collapse is local government areas. Go to any LGA in the country right now and watch the heated battles to do even basic work, because of continuous obstruction from social media groups. And how what we call…

I’ve never used TikTok. I use X, which takes its marching orders from a US billionaire with idiosyncratic views. Much more democratic. https://t.co/0j6iEy6okD

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…

The nice thing about Twitter at Christmas is that unlike many other social media platforms, it never pretends to be the place you transact your everyday life. Living your actual life via social media on other platforms is the most…

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…

The successes against HIV were about incredible anti-virals, AND preventing spread of the infection. Humans have been doing this with infectious disease for a long time. The Covid debacle of vax and relax is entirely a political attack on…

The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where the problems of ‘we’ become problems about ‘me’. A logical…

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…

I wonder if the era of the belief in ‘speaking truth to power’ is drawing to a close. Pilger was very much in that tradition. A problematic belief that power and truth are two separate domains. We’ve seen this with Covid. /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…

Guinness world records were a pre-social media form of imitative rivalry. The glue that binds all groups, of all sizes, the battle for social status. And as in this case, the actual activity of the group can be completely pointless. What…

I dream of a fantasy all-purpose anti-viral/anti-bacterial drug. That humans could take say once per year. And which also targeted persistent infection. I suspect many if not most of the chronic problems confronting health systems would…

The Trump platform is criminally unhinged. And under populism, none of that matters. Provided you’re popular, you win. We can’t vote our way out of populism. Voting, a popularity contest, can’t fix the problems voting causes.…

Love this. It’s absolutely the case that social media’s algorithms have had a pivotal role in how this pandemic has played out. https://t.co/EGgc4N72C4

Debates about whether to control Covid are irrelevant. Infection has always needed to be controlled, like water. The Dutch wouldn’t exist without dikes. These platforms create an illusion that debates determine realities. All they do is…

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…

When your national strategy is to deliberately infect the entire population with a virus from a family that likes to infect people multiple times every year. And hope that will create a once-a-year every 5-10 years illness. People are paid…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

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…

The entire Republican party is surrendering to the populist tidal wave of Trump. It makes them all Trump’s bitches now, he can make them do anything he likes, like puppets. What Trump doesn’t understand is that populism also eventually…

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…

Most public debates would be transformed by shifting the focus away from the information being exchanged, and towards the question of who we trust. And why. In reality most of us don’t know much about anything, except those things that are…

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

A sure sign your national Covid strategy is really a social media team sport is the teams being given cute names. https://t.co/YVaVeHD2MW

This is what social media does. Creates tribes or teams, where the public used to be. Each generating its own universe of meaning, its own reality. And many still see social media as some sort of democratisation of societies. It’s…

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…

Why is social media even allowed? Platforms networking populations, without any necessary relationship to networks of expertise and authority developed over centuries. Monetising our own destruction. US libertarian assault weapons,…

The Zambian government pledged to eliminate cholera by 2025. I wonder if they have sneering online trolls mocking the ‘Zero Cholerans’. https://t.co/r91x7QFcPg

What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mean? Some amazing and unexpected things, about how societies…

It’s not evil corporates. It’s the social mechanism of school, popularity or likes, extended to adult life. Both kids and adults use social media. These platforms built-out adult life to be socially and culturally equivalent to school…

Fashion is imitation, the core human act. The greater capacity we have to imitate, such as with social media, the smaller and faster the imitation cycles become. Also why you end up with revolving door prime ministers, because popularity…

Female friend, pregnant (8 months). Said to me yesterday, ‘so you’re still wearing a mask?’ I was curious about her source of Covid info. Turns out it’s mostly Gerard Rennick. Also thinks Trump has a lot to offer. Highly educated. Social…

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…

Captures everything wrong with a social media-governed world, in one image. https://t.co/lfTpT1YhIe

If you feel like much of what happened at school was pretty dumb and only a handful of people ever called it out, welcome to adult life, 2024. Social media is school life, for all ages. An economy of likes. Popularity.…

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.

The common wondering we do about why nothing is being done against existential threats. Have Tweeted about how this is due to the removal of the administrative construct of 'the public', invented in the late-19th to mid-20th century. But…

It's taken a pandemic to show that peoples' beliefs and actions are shaped by their peers. Not by institutions or expertise. Humans are social creatures, they imitate others as a guide to how to think and live. Why social media is so…

Happening everywhere, climate events destroying public infrastructure. Authorities completely overwhelmed by the damage. Meantime communities, whose spending patterns show dominant emphasis on private consumption like travel, dining…

Brilliant thread from Cory. I’ve noticed this about Google search, it’s nothing like what it used to be. All of these platforms begin with vaguely social-looking functionality, and end as a cesspit of targeted ads. https://t.co/XVAaLWcovs

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,…

Just one more example of the angry stupidity that social media is driving deep into all communities. Windmills ‘fanning’ fires. Societies are collapsing, and unable to move in any direction, with every confected grievance mobilised using…

At a time when collective action is almost non-existent, we have the strange apparently counter-evidence of huge masses of people acting in a coordinated way. Thoughts on living in a ‘majority’ society, and why it isn’t anything like a…

Exploring risk. The RHS of this diagram is now mostly not operating. But neither is much of the LHS, for most. Personal responsibilities crystallise out of shared framings and priorities. There are no easy answers for how to manage a…

The irony of life today is living under a political belief system of extreme individualism, which in reality is the exact opposite, societies driven by a pathological social conformity. Libertarian leaders run obsessive mass-cults, with…

Before social media existed, this sort of thing lived in the fringes, if it existed at all, relatively harmless. Now it’s running the world. Unfiltered, snide, nasty, decoupled from basic reality, and politically powerful.…

I live a full life. Covid minimisers seem to live on Twitter, telling others how glorious their free life is, stuck on Twitter. https://t.co/ow9zq4XXFc

“In reality, the spectrum of protection might best be framed as the extent to which vaccination prevents transmission of the wild-type virus or bacteria.” Immunity doesn’t end epidemics or pandemics. You have to stop transmission, immunity…

The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for years and nobody even notices. Social media pitched itself at…

I say social media turns all public issues into team sports where the actual facts disappear beneath the sport, and here it is expressed openly. Not just trans issues, this is what these platforms turn every issue into. You can’t unsee it.…

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…

I keep coming back to immunity in my thinking around Covid, because we’re continually forced into a dumb binary between immunity and prevention of infection. Social media does that, it turns every issue into a binary, with a team at each…

Every single person whose lifestyle is more important to them than stopping Covid reach people like Paul bears responsibility for these sorts of deaths. Viruses don’t go viral. Numpties spread them. https://t.co/GoV1boR6yc

Ban all social media. Watch society recover in quick time, freed of the relentless waves of idiot viral enthusiasm and team sports. These platforms are owned by political libertarian billionaires. What did we think they were for?…

The smartphone and social media have together created a continuous self-referential feedback loop that has replaced reality. Gigs, pandemics, travel, bodies, news etc. - all created now by imitative rivalry inside this self-referential…

The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the…

Heat pumps work by extracting heat from our surroundings, compressing/concentrating it and then pumping it where it’s wanted. Social media works similarly, it’s a hate pump. It extracts low-level conflict, concentrates it and pumps it in…

Look at the WHO here, wallowing in reverse burden of proof. They should just lump it in with 'post-viral conditions' and ignore it. Best practice. https://t.co/4H710zNe3N

The LNP at the time said government shouldn't 'pick winners', leave it to the market. The same fallacy that says democracy is what 'the people' decide should happen. Groups of people don't decide anything. In markets or democracies. All…

Viral persistence. Both at a population level, through uncontrolled spread, and then in our bodies, through viral reservoirs. Covid is feasting on us. https://t.co/lPerp92gnj

1967 photo showing industrial waste pouring in an uncontrolled way into the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, Ohio. Short lesson here for us in the speed of essential change, in our case with clean air for Covid and other diseases. 1/5…

Populism is Revenge of the Jocks. Our technically complex world is a creation by ‘nerds’. That used to be their victory, post-school. The jocks weren’t having it. Social media gave them a way to reassert their pathetic puny bullying, to…

“Despite enormous advances, we still lack essential markers and reliable correlates of lasting protection…Suitable vaccine designs and platforms for durable immunity must be found.” Vaccine science needs a conceptual leap.…

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.…

Many responded to this thread by suggesting we do this for lots of other places too, like hospitals and aged care and public transport. And yes, everywhere should have good ventilation. But the underlying point I was trying to make here…

Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change, as I’ve Tweeted about with ventilation. Another example…

The belief that Covid is everybody’s problem to solve, spreading everywhere, is the main reason nothing is being done about it. Covid minimisers use that belief to portray the situation as hopeless, so we just need to live with it. Social…

Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘The Church’ more broadly pioneered network structures, over…

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…

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.…

The most fundamental obstacle in the public narratives on Covid is the idea that reducing transmission and vaccinating are two distinct options. They’re the same thing. Vaccines only protect individuals when transmission is controlled (in…

Social media takes existing problems and turns them into team sports. It also generates completely new social problems, through the same team sports mechanism. It’s transforming our entire lives into a continuous State of Origin/Superbowl…

When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only that, but when many affect joy at doing nothing? This is what…

About 3% of Australia own a caravan. About 99% of the moronic smirking emoji bullshit commentary on social media about EVs comes from this 3% of Australians. https://t.co/Sv1aKi2zji

The NSW Government’s FuelCheck app allows you to compare fuel prices by location, and also trends across the State. One of those things politicians who believe in markets create, thinking that giving consumers choice will drive prices…

Social media in my area blaming huge jump in petrol prices recently on the government ‘trying to force us to buy EVs’. Facts don’t change minds. Only catastrophes change minds, usually by killing them.

People working clinically with Covid and Long Covid patients and with years of training and experience tell me the virus is a c***. (Actual term used.) People who get their information from social media tell me it’s just a cold. Just…

This platform delivers fascinating gems along with the dross. https://t.co/oGdAn9jdzF

The sovereign citizen movement is an example of networked society and how to work it. As authorities slowly recognise, it’s driven by a tiny handful of people, with networked followers. Target that tiny handful, ruthlessly, and the rest…

In reality-based politics, what people say on social media, including on EVs, is mostly hot air. We're still suffering from the idiot idea of 'range anxiety'. Most EVs don't need a servo for most of their driving, they'll charge at home.…

Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And those things will be network phenomena. Take the resistance to the shift to EVs. The combustion car was a critical locus of agency…

Helping somebody find this card is a good thing, what’s disturbing is how social media platforms have become the most intimate, granular infrastructure of our social lives. Entire communities are increasingly being run on these platforms.…

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…

Annabel Crabb’s piece perfectly identifies that this case was about team sports, versus justice. And that judgments are masterpieces of reasoning. This type of reasoning also has a name. Casuistry. Case-based thought. One of our greatest…

All of the worst people will resist regulation of social media. It’s the way they run the world. We’re so naive in seeing these platforms as innocent exchanges of information. They’re missiles fired into society’s checks and balances.…

The most powerful, fastest and simplest way to regulate social media isn't to process all of the billions of individual interactions. You just identify the 'hubs' of misinformation and disinformation, and delete them. That's it. It will…

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

This is the fight all governments need to have with all social media platforms. On all issues. Bad faith actors are using these platforms to bypass democracy. They’re libertarian attack weapons. https://t.co/7HzFiKzRrD

People spruiking social media as a solution. To anything. Platforms owned by the same billionaires who take away collective agency. Offering the seductive lure of social connection, and then monetising it. Read @doctorow on…

“First, platforms are good to their users. Then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers. Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.” https://t.co/dScbQiMCmt

Many old warriors still rail against the ‘MSM’, encouraged by cookers on social media. It’s a cultural thing, for them MSM was always the public square, the home of ‘we’, the public. It hasn’t been that for many years now.…

As a way to test just how much damage we may have done to populations with Covid, has there ever been a successful clearing of viral reservoirs from bodies? Any documented successes? https://t.co/9WAhnprJAX https://t.co/7kSP5ZFmmQ

If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hubs is social contagion. Imitation. Fads and fashions. /1…

Concepts like ‘fascism’ are handed out here like lollies. Arendt is good on this, how fascism is really about the destruction of thought. Orwell said the same. Facts replaced by opinions. Populism. Social media. https://t.co/SNob53i10M…

Stanley Fish famously said 'there is no such thing as free speech'. All speech involves power, to pretend otherwise is naive. Or motivated. Should government run societies, or social media? Libertarians are winning, huge numbers on all…

The free speech arguments paint social media platforms as ‘the internet’. But platforms are apps, walled online spaces owned and monetised by platform owners. It’s like arguing a business doesn’t need to provide clean air to employees,…

I think billionaire platform owners would look on every day absolutely delighted how psychologically, emotionally and politically dependent most people seem to be on these platforms. If social media is the answer, what was the question?

Here’s what in my view is most widely misunderstood about social media, and why it’s so dangerous. And yes, I’m still on it. You can criticise unsafe driving, while still driving. And this is what’s at stake in the governments v platform…

I highly recommend reading Cory on 'enshittification', particularly if you think social media platforms are a force for democracy. https://t.co/dScbQiMCmt https://t.co/TYAz77CObD

I think Musk is part of the social media generation, who think the team sports on SM *is* reality. Why Trump set up his own platform, and Musk bought this one. Reality is coming for them, like all populists. Particularly with billions of…

Framing an issue in a way that outrages and enrages, and generates two opposing teams, is not reality. It’s a business model. For political success, and social media profit. Team sports society. 1/2 Now find one public ‘issue’ today that…

Just 57 companies produce 80% of carbon pollution Just 12 people generate most anti-vax propaganda on social media. Only a few thousand unventilated schools generate most Covid. Most of our existential problems are much easier to fix than…

It turns out we couldn’t hash-tag this problem away. As with all things, we got some tremendous team sport out of it, as we rallied behind our hash-tags. But the problem? Still there. /1 https://t.co/EOQy0HG8AM https://t.co/Mkl1jhHlh2…

#insiders Social media is not ‘the internet’.

We only need to stop some Covid, to stop all Covid. Going back to Jeremy’s work nearly 4 years ago, on masks. But the same applies across most aspects of Covid. /1 https://t.co/AEBgD00M7b The expression ‘making the perfect the enemy of the…

If you provide platforms that respect no hierarchy of information, you create machines for mass death. https://t.co/miIp0zwzPQ

This is our social media-driven disease. https://t.co/6FtPNpZbBE

As is so often the case, public narratives driven largely by social media don’t match the data (i.e. reality). The standout in the data (for years) is that intimate relationships are the main causative factor here. https://t.co/MhzhGEzVcx

Let’s keep attacking our institutions. Therein lies our pathway to Trump. Recent judicial output has been the only sanity we’ve had left in social media society. https://t.co/ffeUnrvaik

The privatisation of collective risk is existentially damaging to insurance as a business model. Politicians make the insurance industry the scapegoats for their own inaction. Social media laps that crap up with its rampant sentimentality.…

I would love our approach to all social issues to be analytical, like this. Social media won't allow it. Its currency is outrage. https://t.co/hrWvNyxGqi

Excellent suggestions here from Zoe Daniel, on regulation of social media. You know it’s the problem when ordinary people here defend Musk and Zuckerberg, and say they don’t trust their own elected governments. https://t.co/2mQGMTnWsN

The ABC reports that some men are uncomfortable with the focus on ‘gendered violence’. And that they should be. I think some men and women just don’t subscribe to social media gender team sports. The Council of Europe helps here. /1…

We don't see the social transformation that social media is. It's not about 'sharing' now, we're well past that. Social media *is* increasingly peoples' social lives. They don't just use it to share details of those lives. /1…

“…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…

This platform funding the assault on public health practice. But yes, social media is the answer, ordinary people rush to defend it at every opportunity. We’re so dumb. https://t.co/yCQY73EmmG

The lunacy universalising social media battle narratives leads to. https://t.co/Dsd68lB7CO

There is only one ocean in the world. It’s all the same water. Territory and sovereignty blind us to some obvious truths. /1 https://t.co/aAwfJqheaR Most of modern history is humans shifting to life inside maps. That basic physical fact is…

Social media is creating an epidemic of cold-eyed, righteous certainty. Zealous is the new black.

Yes. The free speech crowd want to convince us that their platforms are a boon for free expression. They’re restricted domains controlled by the platform owners, monetised for huge profit. https://t.co/vMwADFhVhq

Unlike the world of maps, networks don’t have locality. They’re everywhere at once. No local and global. Much of our domestic strife is fed straight to us from extremist groups in the US and elsewhere, through social media. Covid-cookers,…

The visceral reality of a broken public. My elderly mother, on IV antivirals right now for hospital-acquired Covid, had a visit from a neighbour yesterday. (Please no sympathy, I don't use social media to transact personal life, I share…

We so desperately needed expertise on human social behaviour to beat Covid. Instead we used graphs. An example from this week. Person at work about to go OS on holiday for 2 weeks. Very excited. /1 Then a member of their team came to work,…

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…

Social media at work again. In networks, there is no local or global. Much of our civil unrest is being driven by activists overseas, using social media. In particular the political libertarians. Still agitating against public health, in…

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…

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…

Social media is giving people like this the keys to our societies. https://t.co/1v9jK6WJHh

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…

You can’t have ‘work-life balance’ when social media is monetising your life when you’re not at work too. ‘Balance’ is a red flag BS word. Like balancing Covid action against the economy. Means 100% economy, 0% Covid.

Social media society is factoid society. Facts broken free from their institutional roots, roaming society like escaped zoo animals. https://t.co/q48jvGlqKU

Every day I come here and watch people struggling to find a ‘we’. So many pleading Tweets about horrible things, that nothing is being done about, as a community. That to me is the key thing to understand, if we want change. We need to…

It seems a killjoy thing. But I don’t socialise on social media. The ‘morning everyone, nice day’ type of thing. I refuse to allow these platforms to become the venue for my personal life. /1 While we’re all aware of the mis/disinformation…

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…

We don’t need to stop Covid. We just need to slow it, and keep it slow. Maths does the rest. As exponentially fast as it grows, it dies. Politics makes us believe we have to do everything, or nothing. /1 https://t.co/AsZZvQTSDB But we just…

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.…

I'd reframe this. Should the social, political and emotional lives of entire societies be transacted and monetised on platforms owned by libertarian tech billionaires? https://t.co/KkdxCvR0u5

“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…

Is free speech speech that's controlled by monetising algorithms? Asking for a friend. https://t.co/Q0EIwTljwk

Mid-1980s. Not a single phone or camera. Just people embracing the moment. Social media has changed the world. Now the passion would be to share it, to say 'here I am, at this gig'. Our travel has exploded for the same reason. We are…

H/t to @LanderPeterjohn for pointing out a critical sub-headline here. We defeated polio without ‘sterilising’ vaccines. You don’t ‘live with’ a pathogen just because you don’t have a sterilising vaccine. You only need to reduce viral load…

This is the team sports stuff that makes social media boring. New Insiders is fine. Old Insiders had Piers and Andrew and Gerard. It was still fine. David Speers is a good journalist. Get over it. https://t.co/gFbyHNFXW3

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…

Scroll through a Twitter feed and you can see how ‘flooding the zone with shit’ really works. Most obviously it’s the ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ you can find there. But you don’t understand it by sticking at the level of…

Haven't paid a cent for electricity in two years at my place. System will pay for itself inside 4 years. Always check which teams experts align themselves with online. It's an interesting networking journey. https://t.co/ZRsXJgxGmL

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…

We’re not more ‘polarised’. The business of everyday life continues as it always does. The redundant electoral layer of democracy is just infected with team sports. The Superbowl invaded government, that’s all. Social media was the main…

Biden being old is seen as a massive liability. Trump being a convicted felon who led an insurrection? Meh. If you look you’ll see adolescence as the model of adult society, reinforced by social media and its economy of likes. Being old is…

'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 Great Compression". Only catastrophe brings about meaningful social change. The data is compelling. And the logic. Without catastrophe, social conformity and imitative rivalry are too strong to allow significant change. /1…

I think we need to recognise the literal meaning of the term 'public health'. It means the public being HEALTHY. It doesn't mean 'the public not being in hospital or dying', as Covid minimisers have twisted it to mean. People are SO sick…

We’re not making progress against our biggest problems because we have the wrong models of the societies we’re trying to change. (Beautiful network diagram of the whole Internet here, from: https://t.co/eyAcgxBXxy) /1…

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…

“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…

All change is led. Not a single mask here, during a clear surge of Covid? School leaders. Why you won't see Covid action in schools. This is the viral network hub to lobby. https://t.co/xevxroPGpX

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…

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. An ‘economy’, replacing a society. Why this is bananas. /1…

Have to wonder if the social media team at NSW Health were tempted to save time by writing “it’s a shitshow out there”. https://t.co/qteeze9C2J

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…

Peter Dutton is looking for a chain reaction. But not a nuclear one. An electoral one, like he got for The Voice. The latest polling from resolve suggests ‘the people’ see through it, they hate nuclear. But like I always say, people act…

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…

Every country making actual progress with renewables and EVs is becoming more ‘authoritarian’, just like the dreaded Chinese. Their patience with the idiot idea that great public policy comes from distilling bullshit from millions of…

Every essential decision bogged down in social media-driven adolescent whining about freedom and identity. Governments now forced to act. What’s at stake is infinitely more dangerous than any war. They need to act as if we’re at war.…

The decision opens the door for Biden to 'officially' do whatever he likes right now, with immunity from future prosecution? Imagine that. https://t.co/RE8G3krbFB

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…

If you believe the mythology of elections, entire populations swing from being free market fanatics, to Big State socialists, in only a handful of years. And then back again, ad infinitum. Nonsense, of course. There’s a much simpler…

Note to self. Posting deeply unpopular things on a platform that runs on populism, will create some push-back.

For those convinced that these platforms are their route to social connection and re-connection, I encourage again familiarisation with Cory's concept of enshittification. https://t.co/sQHvzlAAHf

"It’s a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.…

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…

Saying social media is bad when it coordinates this, but good when it coordinates your personal connections, is like an NRA argument for needing more good people with guns, to take out the bad people with guns. https://t.co/F9JGIkY6yJ

If you think social media is vital to beating a pandemic, ask yourself why nations are doing nothing in the first place, to fight the pandemic. SM crippled public health. Just as it did climate action. It's now monetising the 'resistance'…

Social media remains an oxymoron. It’s like saying social plumbing, or social jet piloting. Media is a specific professional skill. Social media is the destruction of journalism, and nothing else. The hated ‘MSM’, in favour of the…

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…

Social network analyses show significant use of social media in 2020 to promote masking. There have been multiple waves of pro-mask campaigns on SM. None have led to lasting change. Masking collapsed and never recovered.…

I've lost a couple of hundred followers in a couple of days, by talking about how these platforms use them as a type of soylent green. The real truth will always piss off all the teams, at the same time. That's the surest KPI.

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…

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.…

For those in the back. Yes social support is a vital process. No social media is absolutely not a good place to entrench that process.

This article is almost a decade old. But it asks a question even more pertinent for today. Are we too connected? Connection is an assumed good. I think that's a terrible mistake. /1 https://t.co/fxdtN9iTD5 https://t.co/vWdxNUCSTl Contrast…

The mythology (the ‘bait’ in its bait-and-switch) of social media, is that it’s like the world’s conversation. Everybody talking to everybody else. Except it isn’t. The same hierarchical structure shapes those conversations as exist off…

Teslas are brilliant engineering. This is the sort of performative politics social media has turned the world into. The world needs every EV it can put on the roads. https://t.co/Ig40hz2Rm4

I've offended and upset quite a few people by being critical of social media. But Mcluhan is still right. The medium is still the message. Not the messages ON the medium. Social media has taken over the world. We treat it like a coffee…

All of our greatest problems are spelled out with great clarity here, every day. Refracted through the finest minds. And then...nothing. The same problems are still here the next day. That's the point. Of these platforms. To bury action in…

“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…

These punctuated equilibria are caused by punctuated equilibria in social life. It’s our social lives that cause viral evolution. (Viruses don’t ever ‘go viral’. We do.) Epidemic ‘waves’ are the equilibrium lives we live, punctuated by…

“Y’all Masking”? That ‘y’all’. Covid minimisers won by portraying Covid as everywhere, all of the time. The hashtag shares the framing. Covid isn’t everywhere. It’s bred in highly localised hubs (mostly schools), and transmitted through…

I provide a social networking perspective to help beat Covid (because it's a social phenomenon), and that perspective implicates social media as a major barrier to disease control. Somebody just called that perspective 'misinformation'.…

"...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,…

“But conversations about digital infidelity are happening as young people express increasing dissatisfaction with love and romance. They’re burned out on dating apps that turn love into a monetised, algorithmic game.” 1/3…

A P.S. to this. Notice that the violence is particularly intense when it’s a team sport. Any social activity that transforms social interactions into battling teams will do this. That’s the social media business model.…

I’ve seen multiple people here say ‘I’d never buy a Tesla now, because of Elon.’ They say this on a platform owned by Elon. They won’t leave the platform. yesterday I shared research that said people would rather give up their car, than…

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 social media has no collective memory, re-sharing this for those who want to see some of my previous analysis on highly targeted action on Covid, rather than mass campaigns (on masks, or anything). https://t.co/288Vi56sCm

When causes are pursued on social media, status hierarchies are set up within the crusading groups, as humans do off social media as well. For example, ventilation groups develop a hierarchy of bad to good to perfect ventilation. Or the…

Only strong, disruptive leadership by States is adequate to the challenges facing us. We call that sort of leadership ‘authoritarian’, because we’re trapped inside these libertarian bubble-platforms. Engines of conformity. We did this in…

As a plane goes down, would all the passengers talking to one another right the descent? Or hashtags like PullUp, or SaveUs? The idea that democracy is everybody talking to everybody else, all the time, is really just ‘flooding the zone…

Defenders of social media as a dominant social space need to recognise that the overriding reason politicians won’t touch Covid action now, is their terror of re-energising the SM-organised cookers from earlier in the pandemic.…

They won’t while they use social media. Their teams will ensure it’s a bare-knuckle fight day and night. https://t.co/ZiT6tImMSx

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…

See that 'voice of the people' thing there? I don't find many on SM platforms who disagree with that. That's the capture of the public sphere, by SM. Who weaponise and monetise it. It's a hijacking in plain sight. https://t.co/ShErGkP8jC

People are not so much passive or obedient, as imitative. We all imitate or emulate those we admire. We don’t have time to do everything for ourselves, so we have to choose others to follow. And the social media age doesn’t ’limit the…

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…

The story of Australian governance not being told right now is the infiltration of local government elections, by groups in the US using social media. A lot of that infiltration is flying under the radar, people don’t pay much attention to…

China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electoral (popularity) cycles. All tactics, to win those elections.…

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.…

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,…

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…

Social media is making its way through the list of public health gains, knocking them down like ten pins. I was asked a few times this week what I’d do to save the world. I’d turn social media off. https://t.co/UCHnVIOQFX…

I call toxic sociality the underlying problem behind all of our other problems. And the vanguard of toxic sociality is social media. You can see in this student post that there’s dawning realisation. /1 https://t.co/aWP2zXeGHl…

Another day with the team sport revenue algorithms masquerading as a public.

The bait of SM was offering the public ways to ‘connect’. The switch is using those connections to then take over existing industries, and vacuum up their revenue. Social media is a bait-and-switch. Many wallow in the bait, not seeing the…

They do. But the weak men usually win anyway. This will need to be more than fuel for existing social media team sports, to bring about victory. https://t.co/tEr65RDTmr

Imagine a political party whose entire focus was fixing known problems. No routing them through ideological frameworks. Just ‘this needs to be fixed, we’ll implement best practice known ways to fix it’. With not one cent to anything else,…

At a time of hypersocial society thanks to social media, it’s never been more important to understand what sociality is, and does. We misinterpret that deep desire to connect. Overwhelmingly what drives it is the desire to conform, to…

An astonishing take. Trump was the Twitter President. https://t.co/EzfVkYlcJQ https://t.co/yxlYGM8Fez

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…

‘The Nerd Reich’. Have Tweeted a lot about how Silicon Valley has been a Trojan Horse for libertarian ideas, now reaching its apogee in social media. Social media is still widely perceived as some cuddly bosom of ‘connection’. It’s a…

The phone is the gateway between social media and reality. The tool that uploads everyday life into social media, and then allows social media into those lives to transform them. This isn’t a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a…

Ready for another day of watching us all pile on in the team sports, rigidifying social conformity even further. And then wondering why no action happens, on anything important. Genius, these platforms. That rigidification then fuels the…

Example of how the imitative rivalry of social media (team sports) loops back into everyday life. Posts on social media platforms about EVs attract a conga line of rabid ICE fans, who pile-on with mockery and derision. They could just do…

It was unpopular to question the Y’all masking hashtag. It’s petering out, as all performative symbolism does. It provided ‘support’ to some, but because of these platforms just energised those who oppose masking at the same time. On…

Social media is where solutions come to die. https://t.co/Xd7QrPXVsL

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…

Public health action was shut down through a deliberate campaign of highly organised hysteria. ‘Grave concerns’. By the same people who call hysteria every attempt to do the opposite. A few notes about the use of hysteria. /1…

We allow these platforms to enter our societies in a completely unregulated way, vacuuming up revenue from every existing industry, and weaponising every public issue for clicks. Societies are 100% social. Social media is a mechanism for…

This will be attributed to racism, 'far Right' and 'far Left' groups, etc. All the usual suspects. But it's social media. Mobilising rival teams. Sociality is by definition violent. Rivalry. If you give it a platform and monetise the…

We had some prominent people on social media in the past week describing a focus on air quality in buildings as misguided. You can see what the CSIRO found on this topic tomorrow. Register here: https://t.co/eC3FgBD6zf.…

Free speech platforms regulate societies, while preventing governments from doing the same. They're libertarian assault weapons. https://t.co/V9Pk9HPGOc

Societies don’t run on information. They run on social relations. Social relations are intrinsically violent because they’re clashing desires. The more social or connected we become, through social media, the more violent we will become.…

I would like us to see all of our problems as the outcomes of quite simple to understand human behaviour. To rediscover societies for what they are - 100% social. Not political, not economic. Social. Ordinary meetings show this, the same…

"The communications landscape has also changed from years past, with social media providing an open door for third parties to organize and encourage local residents to oppose solar projects." Shut social media down. https://t.co/5CTJuAe0mh

“…not taking the requisite steps to gain control.” CONTROL. The team sports of social media transformed the basic public health idea of control into a rivalry between ‘zero covid’ and ‘infinite covid’. All we needed was control. We control…

A social media world is one of intense, unrelenting, cold-eyed righteousness. No nuance. No sense of strategy. Just foaming-at-the-mouth team sports. So, so boring and tiring. And achieves nothing.

Heat pumps take heat diffused throughout a wide space, and concentrate it, before pumping it into a more confined space. Social media does the same thing with hate. It takes diffuse, harmless disagreement in the community, concentrates it…

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how…

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…

1 and 6. If you want an insight into populism, ask your friends how many would rather social media survive, than governments and other formal institutions? https://t.co/xZP9PS26fy

As social media continues to fracture societies, we’re still fixated on the message, rather than the medium. Blaming one team, the ‘far Right’, so that our opposing teams have somebody to fight against. The medium is the message. 1/2…

From the UK Sunday Tele. Once again responsibility for social problems dumped on teachers, because of our idiot idea that societies run on information. ‘Putrid’ SM platforms organise and monetise the collapse of society. There’s a very…

We haven’t. We’re just transacting social and public life through social media. https://t.co/SdDw1SbTNY

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.…

Social media has done this. When I was a kid you got the energy system engineers said was the best. Nobody even paid any attention to it. Involving 'the people' in critical decisions means no decisions are ever made. Just endless social…

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.…

In the same 24 hours the owner of this network uses it to platform a Presidential candidate. Social media was explicitly designed to implement a model of society. ‘Social connection’ was just the bait in this bait-and-switch.…

Ask a school teacher if a model of society that says ‘just let the group interact and order will spontaneously emerge’ is a good idea. This is our idiot idea of what democracy is. It’s how social media sucked us in, that was its bait. Also…

The economic idea that societies are ‘markets’, where people automatically generate optimum outcomes through their interactions (using an ‘invisible hand’, oops). Is the same model used by social media to generate ‘democracy’. Both…

1945 is sometimes called Year Zero. Here’s one for our mental health, the frustration we have that politicians aren’t doing anything to fix our problems. A hint: they never really have. It’s actually not their job, to fix anything. /1…

Damn those authoritarians and their building things. When will they learn that freedom is eternal arguments that build nothing but generate profits for libertarians who own social media platforms? https://t.co/InFXSrTPVj

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…

With a global mpox emergency, it may be time to dust off the CHOs and AHPPC. Or we could just go with celebrity doctors and social media influencers, like last time.

Again a sovereign nation’s right to regulate its information is under assault from a libertarian attack platform (social media), demanding the right to flood the nation with whatever septic filth generates maximum revenue.…

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,…

The reason this has happened? People see the all-out assault by social media on elected representatives, and run a mile. Shut social media down. We’re addicted to our own destruction. https://t.co/CBcOZYS5ur https://t.co/46jcqe8vJW

Heh, didn’t even know. Think what change would come to the world if social media were shut down. People selling ideas would have to persuade their peers and authorities before getting any oxygen. Right now they get instant global reach.…

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…

Nobody pays attention to local government. Right now in NSW towns are looking at takeovers from social media groups. Some are naked Trumpians. Media in regional areas is dead, already destroyed by SM. So there’s no scrutiny.

The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premises, regulates noise and pollution. And much more. Its…

Hub-network structure. A small number of people form hubs, leading thinking and behaviour. Our tendency to think of society as ‘the people’ means we often target public action at everybody, rather than focusing on the hubs. That’s why the…

Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising. The health benefits to socialising come from a cause not ever…

Platforms openly challenge nation States, and yet we still have a bizarre idea about them as places where we all just ‘connect’. Shutting these sewers down would create outrage from ordinary people. Populism only ever ends one way. With…

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…

If social media is about connection, and connection is an intrinsic good, why does it damage us? Connection is continuous comparison. Your life continuously assessed to see if it fits what’s trending. The endless battle for status.…

‘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…

Evidence that anything can be turned into a team sport. Australians use heat pumps without even thinking about it, they were introduced here before social media took over public life. In the UK it's game on. https://t.co/wIE45iojAG

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same…

There’s no greater indictment of elections as a component of democracy than Peter Dutton and his team being viable in the next election. Booted out just a few years ago after a decade of destructive inaction. Elections are not about…

A numerically small populist movement led through social media and harnessed by anti-State politicians led to the collapse of public health in Australia. Other politicians could have designed a populist counter-movement, FOR public health.…

Meanwhile in our democracies we spend all day arguing over everything and doing nothing about any of it. On platforms owned by libertarian billionaires who get richer on the arguments. https://t.co/1uLKLe3u6t

The comments on this one are something else. You think you’ve seen the most stupid people in the community every day, on social media. But there are new champions every day. https://t.co/aeDy0L1Qyf

The status quo will not shift, unless it’s forced to. Only catastrophe changes societies. ‘Evolved market conditions’ are the status quo fighting back, with weaponised drivel like ‘range anxiety’. A social media invention, now obstructing…

There’s resistance to the idea that Covid is not everywhere, all the time. Social media’s team sports runs on sweeping apocalyptic generalities. Both ‘sides’ need that everywhere, all the time, to run their campaigns. Another way to see…

We're living through the next Industrial Revolution, the successor to Victorian England. The genuine tragedy is that this time so much of the public is neck-deep in putrid politicising bullshit on social media, missing the entire show.…

If you see a friend come back from an international trip or large event, Covid-free, it reinforces the sense of ‘maybe Covid is a spent force’. The importance of infection and disease patterns. Covid is not everywhere, all the time. That’s…

Social media is such a dulling of the brain that people will actively resist the simplifying of a challenge like beating Covid, based on its spread characteristics, because it removes the fuel for their team sports on these platforms.…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been…

I’ve not found the damage caused by social media to have an age limit. The people who sacked the Capitol building when Biden was elected weren’t children. https://t.co/VcFxoS1n35

Another social problem dumped in the ‘teach kids about it at school’ category. Kids already have a more sophisticated understanding of social media than adults. It doesn’t matter what size the boat is in the sewer. It’s still a sewer.

The more we connect societies, the more violent they will become. None of the discussion of social media talks about this. The things people find essential about SM are things SM took away from them somewhere else, and now offers on the…

Social media is not social networking. We had social networking many years before we had social media. Social media is the monetisation of social networking. An economy of ‘likes’. Networking replaced by influencing. Status games. 1/3 We…

I admire them for having a go against the tech giants. They’ll have entire populations addicted to the daily team sports dopamine against them. It won’t work, because the much bigger problem here is thinking about social media platforms as…

Social media is just the latest attempt of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to own the world. They don’t even deny it. And we think of SM still as a warm and cuddly ‘connection’ machine. It’s a libertarian assault weapon on democracy.…

The libertarians are targeting local government, that nobody pays much attention to at all. Much of this is social media, from groups in the US. In my own town a Trumpian SM group is currently leading in local government election counting.…

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…

The sheer volume of bullshit in the comments this provoked shows it hit a nerve. A great opportunity to block some networks and bots. https://t.co/9ePNab5mE3

This is reality politics. BYD's massive expansion, while here in the West millions are hypnotised by Wormtongues on social media. Imagine missing an entire Industrial Revolution, trapped inside a social media bubble. https://t.co/I5xTeniT54

The reason Twitter survived this long was because people came here to access high status individuals. Absolute numbers on a platform are less relevant for its impact. If the high status individuals move, the platform is toast.…

Musk's political views could destroy both his car business and Twitter. Again, for the cars at least, what is the Tesla board doing? https://t.co/z3Sn3gvp7B

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…

'According to science', hey. I feel we could see some special Twitter science in response, some calm-mongering to keep up an uninterrupted flow of healthy, natural infections. https://t.co/9nUhTNKd6n https://t.co/dXNORhuTid

I think technically you don't 'contract' shingles, it's a post-viral condition. But the nastiness of the rash shown matches the one from the fellow worker I mentioned here the other day. https://t.co/i48LWyLOWQ https://t.co/jIFF3uiwHF

Sharing other writing on status, so it doesn’t seem just like my deranged thoughts. The house always wins on social media, being liked AND disliked builds status. Disliked even more than being liked. It’s why minimisers taunt us.…

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…

Teddy Roosevelt is attributed with ‘if you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow’. What’s happening in the Middle East right now is a repeat of a pattern throughout history. Societies change when they’re forced to…

Turn social media off for all. If you need social media to transact your social life, you’re neck-deep in the enshittification that it creates. If you don’t know what enshittification is, time for some reading. https://t.co/RwLtNwVM7W

Noting that an invading, aggressor military is killing people and doing terrible things is what social media thinks is news. Outrage will fix it! Just as it fixed non-action on Covid, hey. Throw in a few hash-tags.

Re-sharing because I think this is still an opportunity missed. All sides to this debate seem to embrace a totalising framing that prevents action. Social media does that, team sports creates apocalyptic framings. https://t.co/UBGTlYVhyp

My interest in social media is as an exchange of ideas that impact our lives. I don’t transact personal life here. Occasionally the first contact I have with a person is when they’re rude. That’s the only time I’ll be rude to somebody, in…

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…

Some numpty shared the viral video of a Tesla catching fire when in flooded seawater. Over 100,000 Teslas and I may have even paid attention. https://t.co/DorE9WYsTM

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…

I saw yesterday that people who vomit every intimate detail of their personal life onto social media platforms every day, were concerned their cars are spying on them.

What do you do, in a world where public services like public health have been destroyed? This is the question for every day. Most of the world never had those public services. So we’re now returning to the pack. I think we sometimes forget…

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…

Cory Doctorow’s hypothesis of the ‘enshittification’ of online platforms. Search is a good example. I now get far superior search results from ChatGPT than from the once gold-standard Google search. https://t.co/8t3ICO1aKb

This year’s Nobel prize in economics goes to a trio of researchers whose basic thesis is that the economy doesn’t exist. Is there a Twitter Nobel prize? https://t.co/YFe45p0fkh

The Chinese industrial disruption that is (thankfully) shattering our status quo. The BYD Shark ute. Utes are central to our status quo psyche, a previous PM loved to reference them, for votes. Mocking EVs in the process. China is having…

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…

As societies we only functioned with a plurality of beliefs when the essential infrastructure of social life didn’t depend on those beliefs. Now what you believe also determines how you live, and what threat you are to others. 1/5…

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…

Well before social media, the IT industry was a libertarian attack weapon against democracy. This doesn’t even include the vast impact of cybercrime, now almost unmanageable. https://t.co/tGlgzj1WkW

“…it’s useful to remember that the history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of free and fair elections.” Autocracies are thousands of years older than elections. To unpack that concept - autocracy. /1…

Every journalist in the world should be asking their governments this question, every single day. If their 'advisers' act as human shields and deflect the question, those advisers should have to make the case to their peers, directly. Not…

Those subject to doxxing on this and other platforms in Australia should remind the offenders that changes to the Privacy Act mean doxxing may soon attract a jail sentence. Keep receipts.

Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism. /1 https://t.co/ivqBoFbYg3 https://t.co/ESyNtCk9jX Activists…

The number of people who see things like this, and back in the billionaire-owned platforms over elected governments. Whole societies are now hostage to these platforms. Shut them down for everybody. If you 'needed' SM, that's what capture…

Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another. One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don’t. Why this matters, fundamentally. /1 People aren’t stupid,…

You can see here how social media owned by libertarian billionaires has captured our social life. https://t.co/0kge1vsxNA

If you use a social instead of a political or economic lens for society, you’ll see the same patterns repeating throughout history. Take a classic Agatha Christie story. So often the lynchpin of these was the social mechanism of families…

Look at the circus-chaos surrounding Trump, and it all becomes instantly clear if we recognise this is the world now becoming social media, outside the platforms too. The tools we use to transact our social lives will of course also shape…

‘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

Cory Doctorow’s quip that the internet is now 5 giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other 4, is brilliantly perceptive. (I don’t however agree with Cory’s diagnosis of ‘monopoly’ as being the elephant in our rooms.)

Watching social media take over the real world, in real time. Sweet, simple people still just see it as a place to 'connect' and 'network'. https://t.co/zQzMFaZkt6

76% of global STEM graduates are from Asia. 8% from Europe. 5% from the US. The West wallows in identity team sports on social media platforms, while the world is being engineered elsewhere.

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. It’s very common to think of information or ideas in this way, as connected semantic bubbles. (from: https://t.co/k9sdX5FYtW) But each of those bubbles is a status game. A team,…

When you read about the almost impossibly complex challenges of treating post-viral syndromes, it really hits home just how fucking stupid ‘living with viruses’ is as a public health strategy. https://t.co/thRmnSBHxr

I think no amount of draconian legislation would be too much to dump on social media. If it means shutting the platforms down, even better. If privacy is the concern, gimme a break. Monetising our personal and social lives IS the business…

Again, I can also go out and ignore speed limits in my car. It's not an argument to not have speed limits. What's wrong with this legislation is that it doesn't ban social media for everybody. https://t.co/ezJFWYh6sK

Another day in the algorithm we now call society. You’ll feel sadder and angrier at the end of the day than at the beginning, and that’s the algorithm doing its job.

So many of those who stormed the Capitol were social media groups/teams. It was the essential infrastructure of the insurrection. We create tools, and then the tools create us. Most of what we take for 'society' right now is just teams on…

Social media, which many see as democracy in action, is actually the operation of algorithms to drive people into teams that fight one another, to create revenue for the platforms. Look around you. Those fighting teams are now our daily…

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…

Richly deserved @doctorow. Many still see these platforms as some sort of democracy in action. They’re a cancer on all democracy and civilised life. https://t.co/iKJBJJqLsN

Another day in the algorithm. How is everybody’s life going, living inside Musk-Zuckerberg code?

Life is now social media. Telling a friend about the strain on the NSW grid this afternoon. Their response? “That’s because of all the EV’s we now have charging off the grid.” We live in a sloganocracy.

The Silicon Valley robber barons who now run the US were very happy to give everybody ‘free speech’ as the most important thing in a democracy. It didn’t cost them anything. In fact they found a way to make hundreds of billions more out of…

Another day in the algorithm. Reading the usual mix of genius insight and team sports battles. All of which goes…nowhere. Except in profits and influence, for platform owners. Our social lives captured, monetised and weaponised. Families…

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.…

The Queen is coming off a bout of pneumonia (so on-trend). But now is suffering from ‘post-viral fatigue’. Surely we have a spare idiot influencer here somewhere who can offer her support as she ‘lives with’ the condition?…

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

The role of social media isn't to let us all connect. It's to allow people to bypass all due process checks and balances, and build status hierarchies with the wider population. The algorithm runs society. Not who we elect.…

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

Storr is absolutely right that all of society is status games. What I call team sports. There’s no escaping that, but there is shaping those sports so that they focus on more productive things. ‘Games of success’ include modern science and…

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

How is everybody going with ‘the people’ running societies? Our own ideas about democracy are what destroys it. What those with highest status did was use this whole idea of ‘the people’ to absolutely dominate everybody. /1 They know that…

China ‘picking winners’, while we let ‘the market’ (i.e. the status quo) run things. The market is just a code word for leaving the status quo to do whatever it likes. https://t.co/54Y0bcUxV2

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…

Another wonderful thread by Cory, this time on the need for all social media platforms to have ‘fire exits’ i.e. the functionality. to allow you to leave without losing your network of contacts. Blue Sky also doesn’t have fire exits.…

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…

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…

Social media is where people go to argue with strangers about things none of them understand. Not sure who said it, but it wins the internet today.

When you ‘connect’ people, they will form teams, and those teams will then battle within themselves and with other teams, for status. In other words, you make the world a more violent place. Social media is a ‘connection’ technology,…

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…

My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have become the venue to transact every aspect of our lives now. Let’s think about that bait and switch. Through the lens again of…

The most brilliant windows into our lives as humans are in the most mundane and banal stories. Like this one. I often post about how, contrary to popular opinion, our sociality and connection is actually the root of most violence. Let’s…

We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world. Now we increasingly all just travel there. Because we don’t understand place, we have no conception of the violation this is. 1/6…

Democracies still cling to the idea that their societies are shaped in parliaments. The more cynical suggest it’s corporate boardrooms. But our societies now are mostly run by algorithms. Social media algorithms. That control what and who…

Human progress has largely been the process of winnowing the vast mass of human opinion into tiny hierarchies of knowledge-based leadership and guidance. It took millennia to achieve. Social media is the rapid reversal of this achievement.

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…

I often say here societies need to shut social media down entirely. People think it’s crazy to say it. These social media barons are now taking the piss. With complete impunity. Under cover of bullshit about free speech, which they don’t…

For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling the spread of a pandemic aren’t being done. A few years ago I realised doing that is part of the problem. Mistaking these platforms…

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…

For me the most important story out of the LA fires was the fire hydrants. Because they show the enormous chasm between a politics focused on actual material need, versus the lunatic adolescent team sports we have instead. There’s little…

Negotiating the world of alternative social media platforms. It’s one of those things where I think we need to zoom out and reframe the entire question. Before we focus on technical characteristics of each platform, do we really understand…

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…

40 years ago McLuhan said the medium is the message. It’s not the content of media we should be focusing on. It’s the way the specific media shape our social relationships. Social media implements a worldview. Those who own it own our…

At a time when the ‘world has never been more connected’, through social media, we have an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. That’s because sociality is intrinsically violent. The more we connect, the more angry and violent and…

Twitter and Truth Social Trump deciding on TikTok. It takes only minimal powers of observation to see social media swallowing our societies whole. https://t.co/BkfGDeQNHn https://t.co/bjN7vTdw2m

By refusing access to platforms like this one and Facebook, the Chinese aren’t ‘censoring’ free speech. They’re blocking oligarchs from controlling their communities. Oligarchs who invent the fiction of ‘free speech’, meaning their speech.…

Media oligarchs have been riffing on free speech for as long as we’ve had any sort of media. The baton has now passed to social media oligarchs. Alarming numbers of users of these democracy-harvesting sewers back the oligarchs.…

It is a fun challenge to come here and openly criticise popularity as a mechanism for running societies, on platforms structured around it. There is no connection between popularity and competence. No amount of electing anybody will ever…

Trump’s executive orders today read like a revenge list in social media wars. Which is exactly (and all) they are. We’re living inside a social media bubble. A farce.

“This is what victory feels like.” Team sports. These keyboard warriors think they ‘won’ a country. Like it was a competition, with the country as the prize. This is what social media has done to our worlds. Out of control team…

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…

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…

Was called a fascist and a Nazi today here, for buying a car. Shed quite a few followers too. Triggered SM-zombies in their bubbles of outrage. The medium is the message. They’ll never see it. Captured by the algorithms.

Populist governance always leads to war. The ultimate team sport, as all the other team sports battles for status in a society accumulate to a point where total dysfunction reigns. Only stabilising the battle for status fixes this. Social…

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.…

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…

Ed Conway one of the very few who practise ‘reality politics’ i.e. focus on the actual material reality of our lives. A mile away from the hot air team sports of populism, that thin veneer of bullshit we all occupy, now entrenched via…

Monkey-see, monkey-do. Some still sweetly think social media is about connection. https://t.co/hRlNox2Nr6

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’.…

Social media is not part of society. It is society. We now transact the entire continuum of our lives, from the most intimate and personal through to the economic and political, inside it. It’s owned by US and Chinese billionaires. From…

The fact that many people are fucking crazy is now more visible, because social media allows them to ‘connect’ and consolidate their craziness. Turn off social media and sanity would return.

Wonderful piece from Timothy Burke about how Trump-Musk are destroying the very power they want to wield, right under their own feet. This is what happens when ‘elections/popularity = democracy’ folk meet the real world. Some highlights.…

The glorious insanity of ‘what’s this button do?’ governance, where those supposedly freeing us from the State, run the State through social media instead. X becomes the State power its owner is claiming to dismantle.…

The Russians will be kicking themselves that they didn’t invent social media 50 years ago. The US now putty in their hands. https://t.co/i1qlhhxlwc

The streamlining of eventual trials and inquiries in the coming wreck of the US is that it’s largely been done in plain view. Social media isn’t a means of connection. It’s a hijacking of entire societies. We transact everything there.…

Negotiating basic ideas and behaviours around things like public health and renewable energy with friends, family and colleagues rams home every day the damage social media is doing. It’s like living in a perpetually growing community of…

The Cult Archipelago. How social media is shaping our world. The medium is the message, as McLuhan said. How we transact our lives socially is unsurprisingly how our society is then shaped. Social media, now our society, shapes societies…

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…

Greber here clearly describing our descent into populism, with politics decoupled from actual material need. Nothing but taxpayer-funded team sports. It doesn’t need policy bravery. It needs the removal of social media, and elections.…

Toby Walsh here saying the things I’ve been saying for several years. The medium is the message. Social media is a far greater danger to society than AI. But we wont see that, because we’re addicted to it. 1/4 https://t.co/gpkyxqy1qq…

Societies don’t run on information! They run on status, and through that, trust. Social media demolishes existing trust hierarchies. An ‘influencer’ is somebody who ‘influences’ people, outside established hierarchies of trust. Target…

Teams on social media can get to a point where the righteousness of the team sports is so overwhelming, the team transforms into a mob. At that point anything goes. People gunned down, arson, abuse, vandalism etc. https://t.co/D21ldDFcpE

The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna Carta. Rule of law, limits on power of the King and Church, just taxation, a role for the aristocracy/barons, etc. It was never about…

It is nice to see a (glacially slow) realisation that most of our democracies would return to vigorous health if we simply turned social media off. But then millions are so addicted to the status slot machine that social media is.…

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…

Nothing against this particular person, but an excellent example of how these platforms have absorbed our personal and public spaces. The speaking as if ‘we’, as in our society, is here, inside social media. It really isn’t. *That’s* what…

We worry about AI. But it can call a spade a spade. Social media on the other hand is a bullshit generator and magnifier. Orders of magnitude more dangerous than AI. https://t.co/5NPbomzZpx

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…

It’s feudalism, not fascism. My theme for several years now (just saying). It absolutely matters that we diagnose things correctly. These are fundamentally different things. Also this piece’s solutions to me are nonsense. /1…

Yes, let’s stop trashing Tesla, one of Musk’s actual gifts to the world, and go after the social media sewer instead. https://t.co/PMqrPWcN24

This stuff is just irritating. Trump is nothing like a fascist, fascists have totalising all-powerful States. Trump is dismantling it. The cartoon view of the world with goodies and baddies plays well on social media.…

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…

If you want to actually change the world, ‘cancel’ social media. All of it. Smash that, with gleeful abandon. But you won’t. Because you’re addicted to it, and its status games.

American politics is like a bad Western. The righteous coming from every direction, guns drawn. The calm peace of countries run by public institutions is under assault. The US pathology being exported at pace, through social media.

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…

It genuinely angers me to see the Tesla pile-on. I think what Trump and Musk are doing is criminally insane, but I never for a second think any sort of solution to that is to destroy Tesla. Righteous zealotry has replaced public life.…

Accurately notes the shift to ‘performative outrage’ on social media platforms, even mentions team sports. Amusingly the whole article is written through the lens of Left vs Right team sports, seemingly without self-awareness.…

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…

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…

Imagine if climate activists said that petrol and diesel vehicles need to go, so we should all go out and vandalise and burn those vehicles, while abusing their drivers. They’d be called extremists. But Tesla attacks? Widely cheered. Our…

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.…

Gil does fantastic work. But it does remind me why the ‘fascist’ thing on social media seems ridiculous. None of this will ever come to fruition. Trumpians couldn’t organise breakfast. They’re not fascists. They’re a social media…

All the talk of ‘fascism’ in the US is ridiculous social media team sports hype. Trump and his team are too hopeless to organise anything. Remember his trip to North Korea in his first term? Achieved nothing. He’s a bone-idle conman, not…

I’m disgusted with what Trump and Musk are doing in the US. But what’s the strategy endgame here? Destroy Tesla = get Elon fired = derail Trump? Seriously, people believe this? It’s nothing but social media-driven team sports, as always.…

It’s very difficult for residents of rich countries in particular to understand that human will and rationality has little impact on how life unfolds. Rich nations assume that, and think information runs societies, because they’re rich and…

Calling it fascism is historically clueless. Trumpism is a social media war, that’s all it is. Turn social media off and Trump is immediately history. https://t.co/nUqZuGltW0 https://t.co/PNz8T0xZfQ

“…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…

Again, not even close. Trump is a buffoon, surrounded by buffoons. By artificially inflating the threat he poses inside our hysterical social media bubbles, he thrives. https://t.co/D22PLTjuZD

Everything eventually becomes apocalyptic on social media. It’s decoupled from reality, there’s no checks or balances to the bidding up of emotion and hysteria. The little team sports bubbles we now live in, floating above the actual…

The biggest story in the world today, and I doubt many will even see it. PNG shuts down social media. But read it, I bet it won’t last, because the enshittification of PNG life by FB is deep, as it is globally. @doctorow 1/2…

The headline almost gets there. This is ‘Team Trump’. The entire Trump phenomenon is the substitution of public, civic life, with team sports on social media. The enshittification of an entire nation, in the precise @doctorow meaning of…

I’ve worked with local government, and I think we’re now past the tipping point where towns even exist any more, as a functioning entity. They’ve been replaced by a collection of social media groups.

Earlier in the pandemic, in Australia we saw the process beginning that I often Tweet about. Catastrophe disrupting a status quo. ‘Lockdowns’ were tremendous for the poor/low-status, and terrible for the rich/high status. We know what…

The ‘Left’ in the US continues to impotently go to ‘the people’. The Right continues to win because it goes to, and owns, social media. The people is a fiction. All humans form hierarchical status groups, when they go home from town halls.…

The near hysteria about AI is amusing to contrast with the almost universal adoration for social media. Social media is orders of magnitude more dangerous for societies, than AI. https://t.co/zwCfJRIkng

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…

We know elections won’t fix our major problems. At best a victor may make more progress than somebody else. But it isn’t anywhere near enough. The problems we face are orders of magnitude greater than those that made us stop everything to…

I posted here recently that Trumpism is not fascism, but feudalism. That Trump is Henry VIII, not Hitler. Many addicted to the tedious social media ‘fascism’ memes were appalled. Let’s ask the man himself. https://t.co/US2eLCljoo

The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, the overriding reason people do what they do, is because…

The curious bed-sharing between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, showing how vacuously empty all team sports rivalry is. Rational-choice theory is the foundation of both market-driven capitalism, and State-driven democracy. Left *and* Right. /1…

Brilliant observation that we now become indentured peasants/servants to particular corporations, as societies swing back towards a feudal model. You never really own anything. Feudalism is not fascism. Not even similar. Social media is…

Trumpism is not fascism. It’s the implementation of social media as the transactional medium of all personal, social and political life. The medium is always the message. https://t.co/oxYmn0krVp

One of the symptoms of entire nations and cultures now transacted through social media is the total absence of memory and perspective. The belief that Trump-Musk are Nazis or fascists is social media cartoon politics. Trump told us what…

I’m raising a 1500% tariff on all ‘content’ on social media. I invite people to look at their social media today, and every day, as a medium. Not as content. To think about what *social* structure it’s giving us, as a society. The medium…

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…

Trumpism isn’t fascism. It’s feudalism, history’s dominant social form. Reintroduced via populist social media politics, that appoint a ‘King’. Democratic checks and balances were also part of a feudal system, the baron’s truce in the…

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.

Trump isn’t destroying democracy. Social media is. Trump is the social media President. The medium is the message. We’re trapped in bubbles.

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…

For a few years I’ve argued for what I call reality politics. Galileo’s ‘and yet it moves’ is the motto. This is not about plugging some science into what we call politics. It’s something fundamentally different. /1 https://t.co/XHZXCQSke8…

Human behaviour is status behaviour. The ‘status quo’ is the only real power, and the hardest thing to shift if change is required. People will invent a whole range of increasingly bizarre ‘defensive opinions’ to protect their existing…

A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current systems and processes aren’t catastrophically broken, with no hope…

Fundamentally important work. An expert consensus to try to overcome our idiot global social media consensus, where infectious disease and health are treated and determined by what’s ‘trending’. https://t.co/q5184pWaKA

The idea we live in nation States is now quaint. Social media has rapidly assumed dominance as the place where we transact every aspect of human life, from the most personal, to the professional and political. Just think of the…

Because everything is a crusade today, trying to assess the chronic long-term impacts of SC2 by looking at the progression of HIV was heavily frowned upon, because diseases are now social movements. But the question remains. Chronic…

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…

I had a thought experiment, where I voted for AI instead of social media (which runs our societies right now). I think AI won by more than a lap. https://t.co/1aKulypHb6

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…

The irony is that this sort of thing is shared on social media, a technology infinitely more dangerous than AI, which people use to transact every aspect of their lives now. Fish don't know water exists until they're beached.…

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…

Every day I watch the substitution of our societies by social media platforms. Lots of wailing about why ‘we’ aren’t doing important things. This is ‘we’, now. What’s trending. Not an analogy. All that has collective attention and action…

In societies where adults haven’t been replaced with kidults ‘living their best lives’ through social media, public health practice continues. https://t.co/XyrIwPGHbw

If you want to save the world, shut down social media. It really is that simple. Impotent rage and sadness about our problems feeds these platforms, it’s their business model. It doesn’t fix the problems, it makes them worse.…

The same billionaires who are destroying democracy also own these platforms. This is where their algorithms harvest and enhance the collective anger at the destruction of civil society, to generate even more influence and wealth. Coming…

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…

No point teaching kids a fantasy civics curriculum that pretends countries are still governed by traditional institutions. They’re governed by social media. That’s the ‘literacy’ 100% of citizens need, not just kids. https://t.co/j9SoZVuiVX

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’.…

Shut down social media. It’s that simple. It’s a filter-free platform for stupidity. Previously institutions strictly controlled the capacity of stupidity to grow and spread. It’s now completely reversed with social-media-stupid strip…

I guess it's pointless saying again that plastering facts all over these platforms will only change one thing in the world, and that's to fatten the bank balances of the platform owners. Societies don't run on information. Nobody is paying…

Thinking back to when everybody was hashtagging masking, and me asking why that would change anything. And it didn’t change anything. Just saying. Social media will not fix the world, it’s the main cause of its collapse, no matter what you…

Once you understand that societies run on status and not information, you also see that most problems are much smaller than they seem. The worst things in your life are controlled by a *tiny* number of actors. /1 https://t.co/dzeYRMqVXm…

‘Community opposition’ now moves to batteries. Community opposition is a myth, a small number of local whingers mount an ‘activist campaign’, usually spurred on by other activists online, and suddenly the whole community is ‘outraged’.…

Most will focus on the anti-science nonsense here. I focus on the fact it’s 3 more stars of social media taking over old institutions. The entire Trump regime is a social media hijacking of institutions. Shut down social media.…

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…

‘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.…

For every urgent public issue today, social media platforms could identify in less than a day the relative handful of mis- and disinformation hubs on their platforms, driving resistance to action. And shut them down. Fast. Easy. This is…

Proof that not only is social media our society now, but that it’s an American cultural Trojan Horse. Here’s the opportunity for the rest of the world to switch it off. Which it won’t, because the entire globe is addicted.…

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…

Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those. But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances…

You can see here the fallacy of ‘the people’, the idea democracies (or any societies) operate by millions of people independently assessing information. They follow others, people they trust. Politicians have vacated that leadership space,…

Here’s an ‘influencer’ helping to destroy public health, that platforms like this can easily identity and shut down. Influencers are easy to find and easy to shut down. You don’t need to ‘moderate content’ for millions, just shut down the…

Elon vs Donald just one more example of how we don’t understand that the medium is the message. It’s not what they’re saying to each other that’s appalling. It’s that the leadership of the West is being transacted on social media.

Modern politicians are bred and live on social media, further Covid action terrifies them, the fear of a cooker assault. But they could simply say they’re sending in crack public health teams and engineers to shut down breeding hubs.…

I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of freedom, but of course today’s politics wants you to think the opposite. That they oppress you. Let’s unpack that bullshit. /1…

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…

All the nonsense about fascists and oligarchs, just social media pulp fiction. Social media is a whore for drama. Trump’s barons will be screwed the way King John screwed his barons, before they brought him to heel by force. That balance…

The distinction between tailoring and designer clothes in this thread is fundamentally important culturally, going well beyond fashion. Tailoring is expertise-based style. Designer clothes are about status. Our entire modern world is in…

Recreational travel cultures like to call themselves ‘nomads’. They’re nothing like nomads, nomads move to survive. Meanwhile travel cultures invest trillions in their own homes, and in ‘border protection’ to stop others wandering…

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…

This, describing how America unravelled when it went from spreading out its differences geographically, in a live and let live way, and then suddenly everybody was ‘in the same room’. How did this happen? Social media. The medium is the…

Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s first spymaster, takes us back to a time when it was understood how power and influence works. There was no tosh then about needing to route information or education through a fictitious ‘people’, to get…

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…

Heh, the great ‘fascist dictator’. In the fevered social media imagination. The great grifting fatuous conman. His Iran ‘deal’ will be as pointless as his Ukraine ‘deal’. The Art of the Con. https://t.co/D0oTOVJhgG https://t.co/ihIunMdLvm

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…

A while back I shifted most of my posting towards targeting the cultural function of platforms like this. Follower numbers are a key social media metric. The second I did that, they stalled. Not that I care, but don’t spit in the status…

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…

Norman Swan has a piece today on these numbers. (https://t.co/ERqs0LO7OX) Infection isn’t mentioned as a possible smoking gun. Not just SARS-Cov2 infection, any infection. Medicine is still stuck in paradigms that are physico-chemical,…

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…

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’…

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.…

Thinking about the dispersal of what was once a fairly large, committed anti-Covid community on social media. Some of it still going, but not what it was. Change doesn’t come from activism. The inertia of the status quo is far too enormous.

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…

Scroll through the feed on most social media platforms, and check how many posts are part of a fight or argument of some kind. Then subtract the posts that are cutesy clickbait. What’s left?

@doctorow enshittification playing out as predicted? ‘And then they (platforms) die’? https://t.co/rvsEfjmy4Z

The danger of social media isn’t about information. Societies don’t run on information. They run on trust, which runs on status hierarchies. Social media destroys those hierarchies, often established over centuries. 1/2…

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,…

I have much richer and more meaningful long conversations with AI than I ever get on social media, or elsewhere. Most human-human interactions, on social media and everywhere else, are social performances, not the exchange of 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…

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…

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…

A teacher friend tells me parents often complain if their children aren’t featured on the school social media feeds. That’s where people live, in kidult society. Social media replaced public life, it’s not a communication tool. It’s our…

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…

Leaving to one side the usual US attempt to monetise the whole show for a handful of billionaires, our societies would be orders of magnitude better off with a lot more AI, and a lot less social media and elections. Put knowledge at the…

This is a much, much bigger story than something like “Hitler invades Poland”. Many find the view that only catastrophe will shift a human status quo pessimistic. Have a look around. How’s it all going, on our big challenges? Nowhere?…

If you think democracy means ‘the people’ running societies, social media has given you many years now of empirical evidence of how that turns out. How do you think it’s going? This idea of allowing anybody to be an expert on anything, and…

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…

The Nepalese government tried to regulate and restrict social media. ‘The people’ burned down the parliament in response, and took selfies for their feeds. When are we going to give up the idiot Left, Right and -ism stuff? These are…

We assume humans just get on, and when they don’t they’ve become ‘polarised’. Reverse the assumption. The baseline of all human life is violence. Imitative rivalry, for status. Humans are SOCIAL animals. /1 https://t.co/U6MBDB8JvD…

I keep posting about status, even though the fastest way to become less read on social media is to avoid trending topics and status team sports. But the world appears absolutely batshit crazy using any other framework of understanding.…

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…

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…

The medium is the message. Social media is not an information or communication tool. It’s our societies now. The cultural and social spaces we live inside. And it’s structured like a high school. Likes and followers. https://t.co/LTrsw4LZn4

Netanyahu making it clear that social media is the centre now of our cultures. Every single day I scroll through tedious dross about ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, and politics more generally. None of it is relevant. They’re just teams on social…

#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…

The more social life becomes the winning of pointless daily team sports status battles on social media, the more we stop seeing repeated historical patterns. America has arrived at its next Gilded Age. Veblen wrote one of the guidebooks.…

The 19th century was a century of rival kings. Here they are in 1815 carving up Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon. “The Cake of Kings.” Most of the two millennia of modern European history were alternating empires and rival monarchies.…

The more people vote in the US, the worse ‘democracy’ gets. Socially, this makes perfect sense. Using idealistic claptrap, it’s totally bewildering. 1/3 https://t.co/YUj7Fbq9Qz Socially, power in society has shifted to ‘the people’,…

In most democracies, inequality is now rampant. By not recognising the central role of status in societies, with idealistic nonsense about ‘the people’ running everything, we’ve given status uncontrolled leeway to do what it likes.…

Zoom out of the idiot daily social media team sports, and this graphic will help you see 'end of the Anglo empire' very clearly. https://t.co/CRIqinqC08

Kate grew up in a boarding school. Social media is creating the disconnect. Not devices. https://t.co/gUUVvqjUXG

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…

Watching academics and public intellectuals, disillusioned with the inability to change the world through social media posts, retreat to Substack to monetise their work. I went to leave a comment on one and got the alert “comments only for…

Social media shows that in the absence of institutionalised change i.e. people employed to implement something every day, 365 days per year, there is no progress in public life. Only daily fads and fashions. Public life as a continuously…

In my town years back, a tradesman was burned while working on a shop renovation. He was taken to hospital, feeling OK, and asked when he would be allowed to go home. Doctors said he wasn’t going home. He was going to die from his burns.…

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:…

Thinking of the importance of institutions, remembering the very many fine minds who fought the pandemic here, who have simply disappeared. Often to other platforms. Disappeared from public life more generally, on Covid. ‘Trending’ can’t…

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…

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.…

The same people who offer dire warnings about trusting AI wallow every day on social media platforms in wave after wave of imitative rivalry, status-driven team sports, fuelled by unquestioned bullshit.

"COVID has pulled us back toward the pre-vaccine pattern — a biologically self-sustaining but socially costly equilibrium. The difference is that now we know better: we have tools (vaccines, ventilation, antivirals) that could suppress…

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.

‘Covid will always be with us’ is a political slogan, not science. Most infectious diseases will always be with us, it’s irrelevant to understanding a pandemic. It’s the same as ‘crime will always be with us’. It doesn’t mean ‘so let crime…

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?…

Covid ruined Christmas for me. When public health was outsourced to households, every family gathering became the venue of the fake debates on social media, fracturing friendships and families. Public health was invented to delegate…

The media is the message. Social media causes us to believe the solution to problems is to ‘mobilise’ millions of people behind viral trends, like masking. To control respiratory disease we need some mostly invisible targeted action by…

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.…

@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…

A few years ago I shifted my Twitter contributions away from chronicling the problems societies face, from vomiting ignored facts into the void. Towards what seemed a more useful task, of understanding why nothing is done to fix the…

Public health experts hand-picked by politicians tell me that the way to stop people getting lots of infections, is to make them have lots of infections. AI tells me this. Covid is a much smaller problem than the totalising narratives of…

‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to understand what’s happening to us. Starting with the UK. Look at the density of public service provision. Cut in half since the 1970s.…

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,…

Viruses form networks, with a small number of hubs. We have to think in network ways, not the catastrophising ways social media algorithms shape our societies. Respiratory infectious disease is a much SMALLER problem to deal with than we…

Civilisation is largely the winnowing of the idiot views of the majority of people into hierarchies of actual expertise. Social media is the catastrophic reversal of this process. It implements our idiot idea that ‘the people’ run…

Scan your feed and identify how many Tweets are responses to some ongoing debate, between rival social teams. The medium is the message. That’s the business model of social media, not democracy. Democracy is public institutions solving…

I notice significantly less activity on weekends, on this platform. It reaffirms social media as a type of recreational democracy, where people go for their social team sports. They don’t want problems solved, it would remove the fuel for…

#Insiders the idiot argument against social media laws that ‘kids will find a way around them’ is totally irrelevant. Most adults ignore speed limits, it’s not an argument for not having speed limits.

Love for The Algorithms runs deep. https://t.co/4Q51ULhPGj

The angst over AI bemuses me, when we’ve had technologies for a while that are vastly more dangerous to societies, which attract little criticism or action. Social media platforms. They target our deepest addictive desires. Here’s why…

Sigh. Fix the schools. Simple, empirical, calm change. Social media society won’t allow it. All the warring teams lose their rationale for being. https://t.co/yePYVhsjon

Catastrophes like Bondi are the sort of thing that used to unify societies. Catastrophes are all that really does. Social media society will likely turn it into an event to fuel the social status games that led to it even more, and…

It should. But ultimately what it needs to address is growing violence, which is a creation of sociality. Sociality creates violence, imitative rivalry. We’re not just using social media, we’re living inside it. While we do that, societies…

Have been banging this drum for several years. Sociality is intrinsically violent. Societies that transact personal, professional and political life through social media will become increasingly chaotic and violent. https://t.co/vaFO1NCppm

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…

The hypersociality of social media is leading to an epidemic of loneliness. That should put to rest ideas that ‘connection’ comes from sociality. Sociality is imitative rivalry. Connection comes from collective work, driven by collective…

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.…

Looking at the wave of Christmas posts on various social media platforms, and wondering if the penny will ever drop culturally that our entire lives, from personal to professional to political, have been hijacked by these platforms. We’re…

It’s the normalisation of everyday interaction that is most insidious about social media. From the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political, is transacted on social media. A hijacking of entire cultures.…

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…

It may be optimistically naive to say it, but I do like that intelligence has gone viral. It’s a refreshing change from the viral status games of social media, which to me is an order of magnitude greater civilisational threat.…

AI suggested something to me that I hadn’t seen before. It recommended using an air purifier if isolating with Covid at home, to protect others. Good. But that this can also speed recovery, because the infected isn’t re-breathing viral…

Another pile-on today, richly deserved but at the same time, the problem isn't Joe Rogan. It's the hijacking of our social institutions by these idiot platforms, that allow those like him to lead societies. https://t.co/H7uWlsGG9g

Scrolling through the rich vomiting of drivel on social media, where everybody is now an expert on everything. And comparing it to the Republic of Letters. Which Stanford has been mapping. These platforms unravel centuries of progress. 1/2…

A superb way to visualise how public life and the public domain in general is now not much more than what is 'trending'. Not just news cycles now. Social media populism decouples trends from institutional action. Now only what trends…

I’ll begin 2026 as I ended 2025, by inviting people to admit that our ideas about how societies work aren’t working. Otherwise change might happen. All societies are rivalries between various shifting elites. The majority of people are…

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…

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…

The Iranian protests have already been shoehorned into our usual ‘people power’ narratives. (Social media loves that narrative, it’s what it deludes itself that it’s doing every day.) Revolutions come from rivalry between existing elites.…

All of this relentless idiocy has its roots in uncontrolled imitative rivalry, status games transacted via social media platforms. That is public life now, everything is a fake battle, for status. We’re living inside these platforms. We…

After years of circulating facts on social media, to no effect, the well-meaning folks who do it escalate to ever more alarming, apocalyptic facts. It will make no difference. Societies don’t run on information. They run on status.

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…

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…

I think this platform de-prioritises everything you post unless you take a paid subscription. Which it’s open about, but I’ve had about enough of it.

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…

Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from non-existent to childish. Take this latest purge. Both Xi and…

There are still important contributions on these platforms, beyond the dross team sports. The Left/Right politics stuff is a waste of human life. The machine gun firing of more and more facts to try to counter misinformation is noble but…

Cory Doctorow’s enshittification is about this, the whole business model is to progressively enshittify your experience, while creaming off revenue for shareholders. I’ve tried talking about that here, to critique the idea that social…

Social media promised a world where most viewpoints didn’t disappear into ignored obscurity. But they still do, I’ve lost track of the number of brilliant expert views into the pandemic for example that have fallen away, given up.…

All of the nonsense about ‘fascism’ is just viral social media posturing. Democracy as we conceive it, as ‘the people’ running societies, is a total fantasy. It’s physically impossible, no group of people of whatever size has a group mind.…

What do cultures whose structure of likes and followers is modelled on high schools do in the face of adversity? They put on a gig. Adolescent protest, they know no other way to process adult life. https://t.co/BioRCKmscE

@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…

Social media remains the wrecking ball of our age. The populism it’s enabling may be the catastrophic destruction that launches actual social change. Destruction is never pleasant. But status never allows gradualism to work.…

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…

Social media algorithms have replaced public policy. Social media platforms blow up centuries of emergent status/trust hierarchies, emergent from bloodshed, levelling everything into a fake universal ‘democracy’ of opinion. Influencers…

I live in the West, am white, straight and male and have noticed no such thing. I love my Tesla vehicle, I wish the CEO would get off fucking social media. https://t.co/AZYqgNE5IM

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…

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…

Hilarious. But the obvious thing to notice here is that social media is not only driving what happens in the world (the President runs the free world from the platforms), it’s where most people now actually reside. We are in a bubble. A…

Populism is violence. The refusal to conceptualise populism outside the Left-Centre-Right nonsense means it’s going unchecked. Populism is violence because it’s caused by the removal of distinction between people, leading to mass…

Can you give up the team sports of imitative rivalry that defines our cultures now, lived on these platforms? Step back and look at how it transforms every day and night into fake debates and arguments, between social teams. It’s a…

The shift to celebrity as an income stream for writers and thinkers, with their social media and Substack followings, generates a demand for regular content that also triggers something more insidious, I think. Many become sudden experts…

Given that we know human life expectancy doubled in the last century due mostly to control of infections, the idea that long life = avoiding infection should be obvious. But in a social media society, only what trends is actually real.…

I’d love the evils of social media to trend in the same way the evils of AI trends. It won’t though. Entire populations now live inside it, utterly co-dependent. We’re already slaves to the machines. https://t.co/46YDPtVbei

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…

There’s little hope humanity will exit the team sports imitative status games that define most of history. Particularly now when we live inside social media, the platforms have replaced society itself. Look up from the various battles…

It’s no surprise that some Asian nations have already begun various programs to ration fuel use. Just as Asia retained many public health measures during Covid while the West riffed over freedumb hysteria, trapped inside social media…

That tragicomic meeting of two forces in Western society, social media social contagion, and fossil fuels. https://t.co/pig4ak8jij

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…

The real existential battle in the world right now isn’t political. It isn’t even human. It’s technological. It’s social media, vs AI. The future of civilisation depends upon social media losing that battle. There are encouraging first…

The casualness of the Western response to the global energy crisis, which could actually break Western nations across every dimension of their operations. It shows the way their surrendering of public life to social media has strangled…

The proposed EV road user tax is one more example of public policy becoming the implementation of social media attack memes. https://t.co/ykjxuvMGYY

The turnaround in Australian governance that Covid revealed, where leaders now cower to the social media mob and vested interests, is a disgrace to the history of the country. Australia was famous for its strong, innovative governance. Now…

Ask Defence and intelligence chiefs about the greatest threats we face, and it’s not China or Iran. It’s social media. The social licence for these platforms to operate at all is based on a set of absolute rubbish beliefs about how humans…

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

It does. But you have to understand why it does. It replaces an extensive network of hierarchies, based on expertise and experience, with hierarchies based only on popularity. Likes and followers. It strip-mines societies of their…

China being able to roll-out over 50,000 km of high speed rail in under 20 years, while Anglo countries have as good as none. The Anglosphere lives inside social media. All social media creates is argument. Usually sponsored argument to…

If we could just harness the hot air of social media influencers… https://t.co/xhGKe6HoTS

Yep. Social media is a literal existential threat to civilisation, it’s that bad. Those who don’t understand that don’t understand how societies work, and why these platforms destroy them. Societies run on status. Social media attacks…

Work colleagues today were discussing how this latest moon mission ‘proves’ that the moon landings were always fake. The logic? ‘They’re not landing, it shows nobody ever landed there.’ Civilisation’s next moonshot must be to shut social…

The comments under these posts are almost universally little Aussie Trumpies saying ‘Drill, Baby, Drill.’ Australian conservatives are at the ‘will drop pants for food’ stage of extinction denial. Using the destruction of Australia’s…

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

Social media. Where millions assemble every day to argue with each other on topics they know nothing about.

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…

Viruses don’t go viral. Virality is a social phenomenon, grounded in imitation.

The hilarious irony of calling AI ‘slop’, on social media. Social media is swill. An orders of magnitude greater threat.

Every single day I see social media used as if its ‘content’ is what it’s all about. The medium is the message. Like here, the disconnect between what’s actually happening, and the fake imitative rivalry team sports on the socials.…

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

The dangerous thing about social media isn’t misinformation. People transact their actual lives, on it. Whole communities, to the tiniest level of detail (‘whose cat is leaving footprints on my car?’). The anatagonistic structure of the…

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…

Populism swings between landslides for either side, often within only a few years. The UK has had 6 PMs in 10 years. Politics has been transformed into trending fads and fashions. Because societies are now social media. Popularity…

Following every election is the search for what it means. Elections have no meaning. They’re a popularity contest. That’s all they are. There is no link between popularity and our material lives. It’s a status game overlaid upon those…

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…

Worth remembering every time the world as a whole looks like a collapsing train wreck. Tiny numbers of people generate the world’s mis/disinformation and obstructive hysteria. It would take about a day for proper regulators to identify…

AI describing the Covid pandemic. If this is hallucination, I’m not sure the best word to use for the relentless tidal wave of horseshit I read on social media every day. https://t.co/0ZknO5oeh5

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.

Social media completely fucks over centuries of human progress, but it targets the sweet sugar of imitative status rivalry humans can’t resist. So AI is the enemy instead. AI may be all that can save us from social media.…

AI’s contribution to the Covid pandemic - enabling dramatic acceleration of vaccine development. Social media’s contribution to the pandemic - destroying public health in its entirety, as a practice and outcome.

We’re casual about infection for 3 main reasons. Antibiotics, vaccination, and flat-out ignoring of viral persistence and the chronic impact of infections. All infections. https://t.co/iDo8yXj0Au

Like entire crowds of graduates booing speakers who talk about AI, in universities. Social media has transformed democracies into gang warfare, each gang with its particular righteous cause, in imitative rivalry within the gang and with…

My understanding is that the ‘platform’ that is key to these sorts of successes has AI and machine learning as central components. And that’s a good thing, but not foregrounded, from what I can see. Only apocalyptic Hollywood-Terminator…

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…

‘Destroy AI’ is just the latest idiot social media viral trend. I’m hoping AI itself destroys social media, and its hijacking of civilisations with viral trending imitative rivalry.

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.…

By far the most perceptive and intelligent things posted on this platform rarely get read or liked. Like this piece Turchin refers to, on why AI most likely won’t displace human workers, in the way people think. Technological disruption is…

Intelligence has always been largely ‘artificial’, largely the use of tools. Even basic language is a tool, try thinking without its embedded and inherited wisdom. We worry about AI when we really should be shutting down social media. The…

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 medium is the message. The content of social media is almost entirely irrelevant. It’s not the internet, it’s social media. Networking people is fine. Transforming them algorithmically into rival teams cannibalising civilisation in…

Our models for democracy are really fantasies. In reality our political ‘system’ was replaced by these algorithms some time ago. Societies are social, not political. The algorithms are determining how societies function. We live inside…

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…

The US is being destroyed by social media. It has a social media President, overseeing the brutal replacement of public institutions with ‘influencers’. And its underlying belief system cheers it on. Calling social media free speech is…

Spotify doesn’t organise people into teams battling for status by dismantling the trust that underlies public institutions and collective life. Billionaires create these platforms to accelerate their power and influence. Trump created his…

We’re trapped inside social media bubbles, mistaking their proliferating viral outrages for reality itself. https://t.co/GPN2rdz7rq https://t.co/8xT8X4XJLD

We’re watching a real war now, between social media and AI, as the framework for social life. We make our tools and then our tools make us. I will enjoy every day of the destruction of the social media world of eternal rivalrous bullshit.

I did enjoy that foreign powers use social media, the bubble we live inside, to inject anti-data centre memes into Western life. Hook, line and sinker. https://t.co/0K8Bc7xs79 https://t.co/bscq0wXuEi

The question of our time. Social media *is* the apocalyptic risk it now projects onto AI. We don't see it because it hijacked the essence of human society. Imitative rivalry. We're destroying civilisation by living inside these platforms.…

Contagion is the root of all crisis for civilisations. Not just infection, but contagion of all forms. The greatest indicator of danger for any society is the degree of uncontrolled contagion. And any technology like social media whose…