Society, status & imitation

I sit here every day listening to basic political questions being re-routed through 'economic' framings. The great victory of the conservatives worldwide, in the past 50 years, to substitute a weighted statistical construct - The Economy -…

The seductive simplicity of this graph is what allowed the substitution of an economy, or market, for society. That equilibrium point is said to be 'society', without need for government or regulation. Probably our greatest delusion.…

#insiders can we stop talking about the 'Economy' as if it were an actual thing? It's a set of statistical indicators of social activity.

@normanswan tweeting this as somebody with training in high-level maths, stats, risk management and ethics. Not a yokel or in any way an anti-vaxxer. I'm concerned about how vaccine risk and hesitancy is being described in public debate.…

#auspol #covid19 It's not actually that difficult to guess the political views of nearly every pandemic expert. That's not them abandoning science and facts, that's the basic reality that every fact is only true within a wider framework of…

#auspol Good on them. But 'proportionate' measures again mean: 1) a lot more complicated restrictions, 2) over a lot longer time. Lockdowns are faster, more effective, and cheaper. And in aggregate restrict social freedom less.…

#auspol “...open up Australia to world travel and arrivals so that our education sector, tourism sector and all of the other kinds of compassionate reasons for us to see family and friends overseas can come to the fore.” The first two are…

#insiders you have to love how Josh smiles while he spews out the meaningless slogans. He knows it's all focus group-driven gibberish.

#auspol #covid19 "In many places, the decision is not whether to vaccinate, but whether to use AstraZeneca now or wait for another vaccine to become available...Even a long wait for an alternative may be worth it if infections are low. 1/n…

#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#covid19 #auspol A pandemic is an ecological, social and political event. We've treated it as an economic and medical event.

#covid19 #auspol we learned what Oz hasn't learned. That we use a venal statistical instrument we call 'the Economy' to transform complex social issues into a handful of statistical indicators, framed to favour the interests of the…

#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…

#insiders globally the cashed-up status quo is determined to convince us that lockdowns are the enemy, not the virus. Lockdowns proven to be the cheapest, fastest and least restrictive method against this virus.

#auspol #covid19 Pandemics keep killing until the social and political arrangements that cause them are changed. Right now rich countries want their old lives back, and assume vaccines will give them that without other significant change.…

#covid19 a pandemic at first allows a bit of purchase to specific disciplines, like virology, medicine, public health. Then as it goes on, it overflows the boundaries of all disciplines, and forces them and society to re-evaluate all of…

#covid19 #auspol it's not clear whether the destruction of the pandemic will be enough to force us to realise that extracting a tiny number of social transactions - the economic ones - and relabelling the whole of society as these…

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

#auspol it's extremely frustrating, at age 53, to have waited weeks for the TGA and ATAGI to follow the European example and set the AZ age cut-off at 60, with clear UK data in particular showing the 50-59 age group to be at increased…

It's cute that a member of the LNP still believes in society. Mustn't have got the memo about it being replaced by an Economy. https://t.co/GRdScVLZvE

#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 no means no. First rule of consent. Sexual or medical. Vaccine 'hesitancy' isn't an ignorant public. It's a public having reasons for resisting something, and those reasons not being listened to. Their risk assessment is actually…

#auspol #COVID19Aus the pandemic is a battle between the public and the pathogen. Neither of those is manipulable by any individual or group. All individuals are just spectators to that battle. Tolstoy saw that about war.

#auspol #COVID19Aus when the history of this pandemic is written, will you be a person who fought against infection, or a person who fought to keep the social status quo? https://t.co/Iddr1UctPt

#auspol The Premier of NSW today again saying that her government resists lockdowns because it respects people's 'freedoms'. To me freedom includes freedom not to be infected with a lethal virus. But that to one side, why don't we.../1…

#auspol the same script across the world, coming to Oz now too. Always a new flavour of 'live with the virus'. The same people and strategy as those who choose to live with climate change. Apologists for the privileged status quo.…

Contact tracing and vaccines so far tried as silver bullet fixes for the pandemic. Like hoping a bunch of flowers will paper over a dysfunctional relationship. Why don't people see that a pandemic is a complex socio-political event, not a…

#auspol #COVID19 the longer a pandemic goes on, the less it becomes about science. In fact it's never really about science. A pandemic is a social phenomenon, driven by patterns of interaction between people. 1/ Science can help understand…

#auspol ultimately you need X amount of social restriction to quell an outbreak. You either apply it immediately ('lockdown'), or spread it out over days/weeks/months. What differs is the time scale, though the second approach is more…

#COVID19nsw #auspol even grown-ups get to play colouring-in. Another day where we wait to see if not locking down just leads to locking down, but one LGA at a time. 1/ https://t.co/DAYlamS0Tv 'Lockdown' isn't a public health term. It's a…

#covid19 #auspol it's nice to see this data getting the attention it deserves. Showing comprehensive 'lock-down' action is cheaper, faster, harms the fewest people and restricts 'freedoms' the least. 1/ https://t.co/N2FTr3mIcy One thing…

#COVID19Aus #auspol the dangerous delusion of maps. LGAs, like suburbs, are not physically bounded locations. They're administrative constructs. 'Ring-fencing' these rarely works, for that reason - beneath those boundaries, social…

#auspol #COVID19Aus the people I feel most for are those doing essential work, who never get to shelter. Who have to carry on risking infection, to keep society's lights on. I've not had a single day away from work the entire pandemic,…

#auspol #covid19 it's amazing that the same experiences, repeated multiple times, teach us nothing. Symptomatic of us using our 'normal' life thinking to try to understand a pandemic, the thinking that actually created the pandemic. About…

#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic act. Taking shelter. If societies had that resilience, to allow most to stay home for weeks, the pandemic would never have…

#auspol #covid19 watching the UK news is a jaw-dropping experience of seeing the regulatory capture of democracy by venal corporate interests, in real time. /1 https://t.co/1JSpOEODdE https://t.co/eRUZ2jXitZ A story about the apparent…

#covid19aus #auspol tens of billions are being spent on transport projects in major cities. Few begin with the basic assumptions. Why do we need so much transport? Why do people require so much mobility to undertake basic everyday life? /1…

#covid19 #auspol extraordinary paper in Nature highlighting that we should be listening to a much wider range of expertise in a pandemic. A study of patterns of movement in Colombian cities during the pandemic, triangulated against…

#auspol #covid19nsw the Premier lashing sick people still in circulation today. Looking at mobility data, have to wonder if not closing non-essential work was a smart idea. NSW, the ‘keeping the Economy running’ State. /1…

#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 so interesting that we smashed flu in NSW last year, with national lockdown, but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021, with society broadly open for the past year. Potential long-term good (inc. economic) that comes…

#covid19 #auspol in clear and deliberate violation of Godwin's law, imagine if during WW2 it all seemed a bit hard, and we decided to adopt a 'live with the Nazis' strategy. Let's give up on this defeating them thing, we need our holidays…

#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1…

#covid19 will we get to a point where we stop being naive and realise that the same conservatives happy to incinerate the planet to protect vested interests, won't blink an eye killing millions in a pandemic, for the same reason? /1…

#covid19 #auspol ultimately you need to limit social movement and gathering to beat a pandemic. You can pretend you're doing it 'proportionately' by taking baby steps, but you just need a lot more steps, and for much longer.…

#covid19aus #auspol vaccination data has quickly become the proxy metric for pandemic success. Australia is actually tracking the world average. In a true global pandemic strategy, that would be seen as a noble thing. /1…

#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…

#auspol the tangled web we weave, when we think society is just a whole lot of separate individuals. https://t.co/cSVRsRL5Yd

#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…

#covid19 it's not news or surprising that putting animals in crowded conditions breeds infectious disease. Antibiotic use in modern feedlot farming is astronomical, to both fatten, and treat infection. But are we seeing the link to our…

#covid19aus #auspol count the 'please' in the NSW press conferences. The endgame of libertarian nonsense, treating society as individual customers. Please NSW Government, do the job you're paid handsomely to do. Increase restrictions.

#covid19 @auspol "In sum, then, we have a clear choice: /1 https://t.co/Jn1QS6TNUz on the one hand, a psychology which is at odds with the medical advice, which is counterposed to systemic interventions and which both disrespects and…

@billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @Globalbiosec absolutely critical insights here from @ReicherStephen on the social, psychological and political understanding needed to defeat a pandemic. https://t.co/uV1gD8WVW3

#covid19aus #auspol what sort of society knowingly and willingly infects its own children with a pandemic virus? When will even one journalist ask for a commitment from any Oz politician that children will not be allowed to be infected…

#covid19 you can be so successful with political strategy that you can get ordinary working people to even desire their own death. The #EnoughisEnough craziness trending globally. In a sane society, it would mean 'we've had enough of this…

#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1…

#auspol #covid19 what happens when you turn your society into an economy. White-hot rage at loss of income, basic public health measures and averting the death of thousands not even in the conversation. No question this is the stress many…

#auspol #covid19 "That's not how Australians live. We live with risk and ill fortune or poor health — even death — everyday." Stan Grant, mistaking everyday risks, for risks that grow exponentially and overwhelm a whole society.…

#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…

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

#auspol #covid19aus fighting a pandemic virus with political beliefs is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. There’s barely a word of this bilge from Hildebrand that isn’t a disgusting testament to the death cult of modern libertarianism.…

#covid19aus #auspol there’s no mystery as to why NSW isn’t progressing out of this outbreak, like Victoria has. It’s been in plain view for over 18 months. The NSW Government thinks the ‘Economy’ is separate to society. The Economy is…

Idiots gather under hashtags like #defundtheabc Making it easy to prevent anti-social suicide cults from self-organising. They're wearing name tags, all the time.

#covid19aus #auspol the cold, dead, genocidal eyes of the loons who think an economy and a society are two separate things. NSW was always going to end up here, because we didn’t pay enough attention to the core beliefs.…

#auspol #covid19aus libertarian theatre. Collective emergencies become individual tabloid pile-ons. Toilet paper, ‘rule’-breakers. (The delicious irony of libertarians getting their jollies persecuting rule-breakers). Sydneysiders 'willing…

#auspol #covid19aus trying to find expert analysis of National Cabinet’s new 4-stage plan (their 3rd, the first 2 disappeared into irrelevance). You can’t predict the weather more than about 3 days out…/1 https://t.co/sJgSbnCxfn …but again…

#covid19 one of the mythologies of the pandemic is that nations choose the strength of their social restrictions. The only thing we choose is how quickly we apply ‘lockdown’ levels of restriction, and how many therefore die.…

#auspol #covid19aus the genius of conservative politics (again) now has us quibbling over single numbers as some sort of pandemic success measure. Just as they transformed society and politics into a handful of statistical measures they…

#auspol #covid19 for all modelling and government reports, people get lost in the details, and ignore the framing. This report just operationalises National Cabinet’s 4-stage strategy for pandemic exit. It’s not advice on how to best exit…

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

#auspol #covid19aus Australia needs its equivalent of Independent SAGE in the UK. A group set up by experts once they realised the UK government was using SAGE (our AHPPC) only as human shields. We need expertise unconstrained by National…

#auspol #covid19aus is it just me, or are pandemic experts saying less, the worse the situation in NSW gets? Shouldn’t they be saying more? Why can’t they organise some sort of united group to call out the tragedy unfolding?

#covid19aus #auspol NSW restrictions predominantly limit social activity. They do much less to restrict work. The NSW Cabinet still wallows in the fantasy that the ‘Economy’ is separate to the lives of its people. Until that last fantasy…

#covid19 #auspol Camus is a good guide at every stage of the pandemic. He observed that a plague isn't a feeling of being locked down, as it goes on. It's a feeling of exile, from all society. Nobody keeps a vantage point. Hope, blame,…

#auspol #covid19aus It's beyond time we ditched the politically-loaded term 'lockdown'. Deliberately designed to make people oppose public health measures. 'Locked out' is more accurate, we're locking the virus out of society. Sheltering…

@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

@auspol #covid19aus pandemics are the RCT for all human beliefs. Turns out libertarianism is a lethal rationalisation of the status quo, via a set of statistical metrics it calls the ‘Economy’. That Emperor has been stark raving naked for…

#covid19 Sort of sums up whey we’re still in this pandemic. No resilience, no backbone for an existential challenge. A society of adolescents, chafing at being grounded. https://t.co/pVpIZy40Hp

#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…

#covid19aus #auspol the Doherty Report modelled vaccination of those aged 12+ only as a ‘thought experiment’. Not because the Doherty people are bastards, but because National Cabinet specifically excluded anybody below 16 in Doherty’s…

#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…

#auspol #covid19aus the thing to remember about a pandemic is, it only gives you an illusion of choice of action. You can go 'softer' or 'harder', but the former becomes the latter, in time, with added deaths, morbidity and economic…

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

#covid19aus #auspol Follow the absolute living daylights out of this group. Our own Justice League of expertise, to cut through the spin. Somebody with PS skills should put their heads on a Justice League graphic. @RealOzSAGE

“Business needs certainty”. Which disqualifies it as a model to run a society (or pandemic response) with, you’d think. Life doesn’t do certainties, except death. They used to add taxes to that saying, but business found a way to avoid…

The idea of public health is anathema to libertarian governments, to them the 'public' is just individuals. Medicine yes, public health, no. They'll keep trying to use vaccines as medicines to bypass the complex social causes.…

#auspol #covid19aus hats off to public health experts who still call a spade a spade. The task is ALWAYS to eliminate or even eradicate infectious disease. Yes it’s hard. Going to the moon was hard too. Our ambition replaced by the…

Up to 75% of the businesses some plan to save by ‘opening up’ would have failed anyway, inside 5 years, even without the pandemic. The ‘Economy’ isn’t a thing, we need to stop talking about it as if we’re living ‘in’ an economy. /1 #auspol…

#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…

#auspol #covid19aus Australia's choice of vaccination strategy has been mostly based on risk of Covid illness i.e. oldest and most vulnerable first. Less said I think is that this is another shift towards a 'live with the virus strategy'.…

#auspol #covid19aus The dreary daily battles about ‘freedoms’ and ‘lockdowns’. The majority of freedoms people complain about losing, are *social* freedoms. Freedoms created and maintained by society, as a collective of people. ‘Individual…

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

Still surprises me that we can get nearly 2 years into a pandemic, and very little discussion is had about economic resilience. If a society basically has to be shut down to avoid mass death, the problem isn’t the virus. /1 Societies are…

#covid19aus #auspol The normalisation of throwing kids under a bus. Pertussis deaths in the past century. Pre-vaccinations, annual deaths from whooping cough in Australia were in that 50-120 range. Significant morbidity as well. /1…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

Something ancient societies knew but which we’ve forgotten is that ideas have agency. They’re never our ideas or opinions, they have an independent existence that crosses millennia. All ideas are dangerous ideas, they need to be tamed.…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus news from the front lines of ‘living with Covid’, from the UK. Today’s figures standard. 35,623 new infections. Another 180 dead. About 1000 dead per week. That’s just under their average *annual* deaths from a…

#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…

#auspol #nswpol hey political journos. When pollies say infections/cases no longer matter, only hospitalisations and deaths do, ask them what those hundreds of thousands of newly-infected people will be asked to do, in the next 6 months?…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

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…

#nswpol #covid19aus “It is not about scaling back contact tracing, it will be the prioritisation…to determine where best to allocate our resources”. Dr Kerry Chant, saying ‘it’s not about scaling back, it’s about scaling back’. /1…

#auspol this is the definition of populism. Win elections by attacking the institutions that keep society running. It’s decades of shock media attacking ‘bureaucrats’, becoming real. Those institutions are the continuity that keep society…

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

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

Difficult to know where to start with the magnificence of what Ed Yong has achieved here. I’ve never seen a better popular piece on the inseparability of pandemics and politics, of disease and society. /1 @RealOzSAGE #auspol @CrabbBrendan…

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.…

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

#auspol this rare HD footage of Queen Victoria has profound hints (I think) to how we don’t understand politics. The adulation for the monarch was genuine. Quick thread on why the wrong people keep winning elections. /1…

#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…

#nswpol #auspol @RealOzSAGE Masks on the only unvaccinated group left in NSW ‘ludicrous’ and ‘restrictive’. If it walks like a Trump, and blathers like a Trump, it’s a Minister in the new Perrottet Ministry. A Deputy Premier even.…

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

Speaking to an American friend, I wasn’t aware that community sport is pretty much non-existent in any widespread way, in the US. Most sport there is organised through schools. And there’s something really important here that it made me…

#auspol #covid19aus Dom Perrottet repeated the PM’s line yesterday, from earlier in the pandemic, that we need to ‘live alongside’ Covid. A society-wide out of body experience, because bugger me if Covid doesn’t live *inside* us. Not…

All political and now pandemic battles play out in this picture. Because binaries make us horny, we tend to pick one side of this picture in our thinking. Neither individual or group are real, they’re both abstractions. Individuals are…

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…

#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the old 'normal' before the catastrophe of the past 2 years forces changes on it, a few thoughts. /1 https://t.co/Se5STFXkGU Notice…

Here’s the Premier, saying NSW is ‘open for business’. Actually most social activity will now re-open, but it’s revealing that his first thought is business. NSW is run by business, for business, you’d have to be blind to not see it.…

Chief Medical Officer yesterday: vaccines alone won’t be sufficient to ‘suppress circulation’ of the virus. And reinforced the need to suppress that circulation. We need to shift the discussion to prevalence, and the health/social/economic…

The extraordinary pace of vaccination has upset all of the modelling (in a good way). Many countries look on with envy at how Australia mobilises the community for a challenge. We need to understand how Australia builds and maintains a…

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus interesting that there's a more pronounced drop-off in efficacy for the 40-64 group than for the 65+, for AZ in the UK. I'd previously read the opposite. https://t.co/3hghwnK1N9

Debates about the transition to endemicity show how science is not a homogeneous enterprise. This paper from an immunological perspective is quite upbeat. Evolutionary virologists seem less so. Etc. What to do when the science is…

#auspol it's good we at least get to see the UK SAGE minutes. The official scientific advisory group to the UK government. The UK government pays little attention to them, as you can see from the minutes. Still, not buried in official…

#auspol #covid19aus the death cult of libertarianism. 50,000 cases a day, 200+ deaths (described as ‘mercifully low’), and the usual libertarian response - asking individual people to fix it. Simultaneously the UK government crying…

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…

Wanted to re-share this superb analysis, as a way to put a bit more flesh on the bones of the idea that ‘lockdowns’ have removed our basic freedoms and damaged many of us mentally and socially. Society is a high school. Not an analogy. /1…

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

Might need some guidance here. The CDC's guidelines on Covid and schools at no point refer to their use as 'ludicrous' (Deputy Premier) or an idea of 'ZeroCovid academics' (ex-Deputy CMO). Perplexing. #auspol #covid19aus /1…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain why, I think.…

“…the rate of confirmed infection was more than 10 times lower in the group of participants who had received a booster…boosters…may have an impact on reducing transmission…” We’ll only use them for harm minimisation. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

How the ‘Economy’ changes everything about the world. This is Nordlingen in southern German. About 1100 years old. Urban patterns reflect social patterns. Notice the clear geometric organisation of the town, centred on the church. A very…

China never wavered from a Covid elimination strategy. The clear evidence that stopping infections and deaths is a boon to ‘the Economy’ should have destroyed that idiot, fairy tale substitute for society entirely. But the Economy is a…

Short thread on some bits of National Cabinet yesterday. Note the graphic first, from the PM’s own webpage. Our safety comes second to the Economy. But we already knew that. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/V3RHWbIRAV Doherty provided…

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

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

Austria, one home of free-market libertarianism. When you deny the public exists, you end up reinventing it one (incarcerated) group at a time. Libertarians hate the lockdowns their own ideas cause. /1#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud…

What’s the point of our lives? Grant captures the libertarian shift. We have no collective goals, only individual goals. Identity politics of the self. Why we can’t solve climate change, or Covid. All diversity, no unity. No unity *of*…

h/t to @RichardfromSyd1 for highlighting this one. The UK infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of its children aged 5-14. Something I want to understand. A short thread. /1 #auspol…

Most expert debate on the pandemic is in the political-social-cultural area, not separate to the facts. There is no separation. An expert claiming facts clinch the argument for them is a Wally. https://t.co/rr7Pc9LkPD

Do you think the spin merchants who came up with 'pandemic of the unvaccinated', as a libertarian dodge to get rid of PH measures, now think about kids being the only unvaccinated left? The group they're 'cautious' to vaccinate? #auspol…

The latest perverse way England is rationalising its Covid disaster. Calculating the numbers of people left to kill, compared to other countries. And on that metric, it’s leading Europe. Rule Britannia. #auspol #covid19aus…

Covid reminds me of asbestos. Hardly anybody showed ill effects from asbestos, when it was introduced as a wonder material. (My father was one, he died years later of the effects.) Airborne = maximum precaution. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus…

Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can manipulate in strategic ways. They can’t solve collective problems, because they don’t believe the collective is even a thing. Quick…

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…

“National Cabinet further noted that the Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are in late stage consideration regarding when Pfizer can be rolled out to 5 to 11 year olds.” Focus on…

There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol…

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…

Will this be the tipping point that will force us to at last to deal with prevalence, with spread? To finally stop substituting society with an ‘economy’? I’m not confident. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/UZAfj5QH23

Elected representatives should not be determining pandemic strategy. The definition of an emergency is something that needs to be dealt with, using known effective procedures, not consulted about. We don't have politicians.../1 #auspol…

Supply and demand, one of the mythologies of economic society. The invisible (sleight of) hand, where questions of power and justice disappear inside equilibrium equations. If there’s not enough supply of something (e.g. cars),…/1 #auspol…

Remember Groundhog Day only ended when repeat after repeat of ever more extreme versions of the status quo failed, and then Bill changed his old ‘normal’? I feel there’s a message there. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/jGgzTAppL2

“Test, trace, isolate and quarantine measures, alongside public health and social measures such as mask wearing, remain key to ensuring COVID-19 cases in the community remain within clinical capacity.” National Cabinet, 10 December. Bears…

Two (and likely more) critical problems with the ‘only hospitalisations matter’ idea. 1. Infected people still need to isolate. This shuts down social processes. 2. ICU capacity is a choke point for all society, and is continuously…

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…

Early Omicron cases in Denmark overwhelmingly in the 20-29 age group, which may partly explain early suggestions of mild virulence. #auspol #COVID19 https://t.co/Ij6ZEHx6D9 Link: https://t.co/i78HRkPaKj

The UK Covid experience: this week in NSW is another step along their path. First the 'pingdemic' of app notifications has begun. And now the definition of a close contact has been kneecapped, to prevent wide social paralysis with rampant…

I think in Oz libertarian politicians sometimes don't realise they're talking to a pretty small minority. It only works if you make it about aspiration, status. Like schools, and tax. Public safety? Not so sure. Very small and whiney…

What 'living with the virus' and 'only hospitalisations matter' produces. Infection is what matters. It shuts things down, just as being infected with the flu shuts things down. Multiply by the thousands, every week of every year, and…

One of my favourite Beatles stories also shows I think the fantasy at the heart of modern libertarian politics. And Covid. McCartney was the prodigiously talented Beatle - the best bassist, guitarist, drummer and singer in the band. Also…

"It's like the worst flu you can imagine, really," he said. The basic fact the mass infection 'mild' crowd never talk about. Covid doesn't have to send people to hospital to shut society down. https://t.co/6B3oyVNEN6

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?…

I didn't need to be hospitalised for the breakthrough pertussis infection I got a few years ago. If hundreds of thousands of us got that same pertussis infection at the same time, society wouldn't function. Experts need to stop enabling…

How libertarian death cults have recalibrated our social frames. Notice it was only 2018 where physicians could legitimately talk about a 'public health crisis' when they'd seen 8 patients with silicosis. These tradies now wear masks.…

Same pattern, again. Lockdowns aren’t a choice, the virus shuts society down whether you want it to or not. Spineless politicians wait for people to do it for them. That kills people. https://t.co/GZUYPYnckb

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

We need to refuse the hospitalisation framing of pandemic seriousness, and replace it with infection. Society cannot function with mass infections, despite the desperate whining of sociopathic business groups. #COVID19Aus…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

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…

I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are actually fantasies. Obviously the data shows that the ‘Economy’ is likely in more trouble now than at any stage of the pandemic. But…

Restrictions on dancing to stop mixing of different social networks - OK. The biggest mixers of social networks? Workplaces, and schools. Both sacred untouchables in live with the virus land.

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

Complete social breakdown. Remember when even having a cold, or a headache or stomach ache, was considered obvious reason to take a day off work? Now you’re forced to go, with a potentially lethal disease that you can also pass on to…

My pinned Tweet talks about society being a high school (literally). Here’s more evidence. The crime is ‘we wanted a party too’, not ‘you’ve killed 150,000 people in the pandemic’. https://t.co/QLgmTesuat

We’re seeing right now the global clinical trial for neoliberal/libertarian ideas. When you try to run society as an ‘Economy’, this is what happens. The Economy is a political ruse, a statistical rationalisation of vested interest. It…

Walter Lippman believed that people choose governments based only on their perception of whether things are ‘working’ in society. If he’s right, the federal election could be unprecedented electoral slaughter. We can only hope. #auspol…

The politics of maths. Covid deaths in the UK, but the same principles apply globally. Currently running between 300-500 deaths per day. That’s 110,000-150,000 per year. (1500 die in an average flu year, in the UK). Short thread about…

It’s difficult to see anything except social implosion within a month, in most of Australia. The alternatives seem: - Omicron magically going away, or - renormalising widespread disease and death as normal life. The US and UK are well down…

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.

What would a day be without some group of contrarian experts undermining yet another plank in the public health arsenal? (It was the only plank we had left, so next they'll probably start on the weather reports.) https://t.co/KHYXyBtxnm

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…

Health care workers protesting in their thousands against vaccination is the ultimate victory of neoliberal/libertarian ideas. Like pilots protesting against the oppression of air traffic control. Societies can’t be saved from this belief…

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…

This pandemic and all of its problems stems from societies that have been shaped as high schools. That’s where we learn our social models, and we construct the adult world to match. Look at the desperate pleas to get kids back to school,…

The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw material of society - beliefs. Interest rates and Covid, a short…

We don’t understand time. We’re born old, and get younger every day. A baby carries the biological and evolutionary history of its species, going back millions of years. Old. As it grows, it learns the customs, language, knowledge and…

It’s such beautiful proof that society is a high school. Boris kills over 150,000 Brits with Covid. But what might sink him is ‘why can Boris have a party, when we can’t have parties?’ https://t.co/zRFePXobtf

Public health action takes place within a society. But starting in the 1970s, society was replaced with an ‘Economy’. The greatest strategic political weapon ever conceived. Many honestly believe it’s an actual thing. As with climate…

If your way of life can’t cope with infectious diseases, the answer is to change your way of life. Like industrial farming, you don’t need to drench the livestock with antibiotics, you need to let them graze in a field. Living with…

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

Can only hope that if BA.2 gets really moving here, we have a federal government by then who believes society exists. https://t.co/F4JM3BU36x

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

The softening normalisation never ends. Deputy CMO out today, to explain that we’ll see a spike in cases when all those school RAT results come through. In a ‘nothing to worry about’ way, as if extensive asymptomatic infection in the…

The real story of the pandemic is not in these graphs we’re now used to. A ‘case’ is an infected person completely severed from their geographic, social and political context. Those contexts are what generate and drive the disease.…

Mandates and rules are the most democratic way out of the pandemic. They apply equally, to all. ‘Personal responsibility’ is entirely at the whim of your ‘personal’ circumstances. Meaning it just stratifies Covid disease impacts according…

More social science and the humanities, please, to beat this pandemic. Who remembers the 1920 variant of the Spanish Flu? Nobody. A pattern repeated throughout the 20th century. https://t.co/9mZfocEylx

Every effort is being made by conservative governments globally to suppress attention to deaths. In the UK they're planning to not even report them. Even constant reference to 'cases' and 'hospitalisations', and the seemingly.../1 #auspol…

In some ways we have the French to blame for libertarianism. And they in turn probably have libertarianism to blame for this. Society is made of beliefs, it's the raw material. They can kill you. https://t.co/1LEaqlGuKg

Why do we celebrate removing public health measures, and not removing infections? Because society is a high school. Worth repeating that, as I do. It’s not an analogy. A society of teenagers will always see PH measures as being ‘grounded’.…

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

I thought Grace Tame’s speech at the press Club was one for the ages. Like Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. The only ‘but’ for me is a more general observation. As we’ve lost the ability to think and act collectively, the neoliberal…

Political journalism is largely infected with the same populism virus as the rest of society now, so we'll struggle to get much useful analysis while elections are underway. Let's talk about the ONS survey and trends here. /1 #auspol…

Los Angeles from above tells us a lot about our cultures. That vast grey washed-out colour is mostly roads. Roads occupy between 20-60% of urban space in modern cities. Quick thread looking at a different aspect of what that means. /1…

It’s dark when I get up for work, and it’s still summer. The result of daylight saving robbing one end of the day for the other (and thus nothing is ‘saved’). Have always hated it, for the circadian chaos it causes, but even more because…

The reason I plead with people to join unions is not because I’m a union organiser (I’m not), or closely associated with the ALP (not either). But because politics is not just belief, but also power. /1 https://t.co/VhKM13BDIV Ultimately…

Just a tip to any politicians watching, those brutal by-election and fed election polling results mean 'we Australians don't want to live with this fucking virus'. You won't need a focus group.

I loved this show. But I always found the idea of self-sufficiency a bit silly. To live ‘off the grid’, you need a grid. It’s how libertarians live, parasitical on society. But now the libertarians have trashed society. And retreating…

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

Superb from Stan Grant today. My two cents. All politics is identity politics. The West now sees identity only in individuals. Russia and China see it in a nation, a race, in geography. The West needs to ask ‘who are WE’ rather than ‘who…

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…

Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t ignore them entirely), and create manipulable proxies for…

Some point to the growth of ‘service’ industries in our economies as a form of social progress. It’s actually quite funny that we even use the same word for slavery as we did 150 years ago - service. One ‘went into service’. Re-badged,…

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,…

Ah The Australian. Megaphone for the myth of the Economy, the conservative substitute for society. A con job 50 years in the making, slowly unravelling. https://t.co/qqZMAFjdlr

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

Cut through the BS at least once a day. We’re led by a small group of corporately-funded pirates, who captured governments and gaslit entire populations into believing that we need to let a lethal virus spread among us, so that we can get…

Covid minimisers hate the comparison between live with the virus, and feedlot farming. A good reason to draw the comparison regularly. /1 https://t.co/K4rhAcfD3H It takes a modern form of political sociopath to see families using up their…

"Attempts to reach 'herd immunity' through exposing people to a virus are scientifically problematic and unethical. Letting Covid-19 spread through populations, of any age or health status will lead to unnecessary infections, suffering and…

The main roadblock to beating Covid globally is the hyper-narrowing of society’s focus to one statistical indicator, economic growth. Where ephemeral small businesses boom and bust inside 5 years, and human ambition is restricted to…

Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to…

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.

Every day, the basics. - all infection is illness. - public health controls illness. - mass infection is a failure of public health. - public health was invented by governments. - public health is a government’s job. - the ‘Economy’ is a…

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…

This seems a not uncommon view among virologists. I wonder about surrendering the control of spread, it’s spread that is the social and political core of infection. It’s the ‘public’ health bit. It indicates poor living conditions, that…

What political opponents to the current conservative, neoliberal, libertarian orthodoxy in the developed may need to do is be as populist as their opponents. Good people are too nice, politically. We’ve seen outrageous populism from…

I’m not convinced we can fully understand epidemic waves purely in terms of some dialectical dance between virus and immunity. So many things lead to infection, many of them social, behavioural, political and geographical.…

Living with Covid is like running every part of your society permanently above the rev limit. https://t.co/RkfzPJ4Hrx https://t.co/FEkYC2tQwT

With very few exceptions, I’ve found that those who are causally indifferent to mass infection are nearly always light years from the operational front-line of society’s basic services. Working from home, opining from the safety of a…

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.…

I’m an Economy minimiser. The Economy is the greatest, most laughable and lethal fiction in all of human history. It’s some graphs and stats of social activity overlaid upon old-time feudalism. Except the old feudal lords actually had more…

‘Lockdowns’ were the perfect test case for neoliberal, libertarian politics. They made us into isolated individuals. The libertarian dream. But it stopped their society substitute, the ‘Economy’, stone dead. Nobody is ever free, alone. We…

The biggest mortality group right now in NSW is the triple-vaxed. Not because the vax doesn't work, settle petals. But because by not restricting spread, the virus is reaching all of the most vulnerable people anyway, who are now left with…

Where are the mental health advocates for the millions dealing with Covid? Why are they so vocal about people missing school and work, but silent on Covid? Forgive me for suspecting they’re just apologists for the economic status quo. Who…

The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it means a majority of the population. Nope. This is the real…

"Britain has led from the front in removing social distancing restrictions, having rightly taken the view that once everyone who can and wants to be vaccinated has had that chance, then the Government has essentially fulfilled its public…

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,…

Day 1 of the campaign proper, and we see the LNP focus on economic indicators, its substitute for the whole society. Albo returns fire with humble apology, I'm guessing to contrast with a PM who never apologises. Fascinating to watch the…

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

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…

What alternative society has to letting Covid rip? We have basic public health work, which we’ve been using for pathogens as infectious, for generations. Like measles. Even today, with a great vaccine, look at the public health work that…

#insiders demonstrating everything about the ‘Economy’. A non-existent fantasy that has replaced society, and dominates politics. One whole week of the election campaign dominated by a cell in a spreadsheet.

At a social event tonight, reflecting on the power of political slogans. Multiple people talking about Covid, saying ‘we’re all going to get this now, it’s like the flu, we’re going to have to live with it’. No independent thought, just…

The obsession with 'jobs' amongst conservatives is explained easily in this way. A job is the way conservatives regulate the flow of society's wealth through their own activities. We already have way more than we need as a society, jobs…

Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at…

If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wages. Short 🧵on how similar principles are being used with Covid.…

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…

Anzac Day makes me think about the low bar we now use to describe sacrifice, in this pandemic. We missed holidays, income, school, work, social outings. For less than 2 years. Our ancestors in the world wars had 10 years of barely enough…

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.…

Watching political libertarians every day trying to return society to the time before we invented government. That time that sucked so badly that we invented government to fix it.

All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions will continue to be gutted. Those institutions are society’s…

The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not…

I think it’s a mistake to claim the election result for any particular group. That tribalism is what the election is a victory against. It’s a victory for the community of Australia, reasserting community as our focus. Not mutually…

A shrewd US analyst yesterday said the gun issue in the US is a battle between urban and rural America. Which you can see here. I Tweeted this week that the Australian politics of pragmatism is largely due to us being so heavily urbanised.…

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 want to talk about personal responsibility, using the extraordinary historical example of the village of Eyam (h/t to @PeterMella5). Now that the pandemic will apparently be a matter of personal responsibility, what are we seeing? /1…

Please don’t call it compulsory voting, it feeds the anger of the same parts of society who rail against ‘lockdowns’. Australians have always voted because they wanted to vote, the same way they wanted to put out bushfires. They saw it as…

“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from the 22.4 it is now to 24.4 per cent – still among the lowest in the western world.” (Alan Kohler.) Alone that’s wow. But it also…

Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and…

The Teals stumbled upon the heart of Australian politics. Community. We’re a communitarian country. Not capitalist, or communist, or socialist. Community is a politics, independent of scale. A politics defined by social relations, not…

Has the Australian community ever been this sick? Hospitalisations as the key metric, hilarious, it’s a microbial sewer out there. You can’t do even the most basic social or work thing without a very high risk of being laid flat for weeks.…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

Recent decades saw the strip-mining of workers’ wages and conditions. The ‘Economy’ boomed during this time, join the dots. It’s a bunch of statistical indicators favouring the interests of employers, invented by pollies to replace…

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

The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1…

The RBA to announce the new cash rate tomorrow. Economics is designed to make the simple look ridiculously hard. What sort of society holds its breath about a cash rate, the cost of borrowing? A society where most don’t have any money.

Because our education is now mostly training in jobs, I think we miss obvious things. 2022, for example, is really just the Reformation all over again. A secular version of it. I see so many bewildered by what they see as social breakdown…

Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the…

Broken bones and other injuries heal. And yet we still avoid them. Relying upon immune memory, the body’s last line of defence, as society’s front-line of attack - it’s the Middle Ages. And Covid may trigger little immune memory, even…

Yesterday when discussing with someone that it might be a good idea to have Covid protections for an indoor event, they said society is in the phase of Covid where we let it ‘burn out’. We could try it for bullying, or domestic violence.…

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…

The reason what you learn at school often seems irrelevant to your later life, is that society is increasingly the daily grind of bullshit, unthinking jobs. Let’s make life more like what we learn at school, rather than make school more…

Work in Australia is predominately in varieties of care (health, aged, social) and services. That’s our ‘economy’. Privatising those areas for profit has led to death and system dysfunction. Conservative angst over ‘welfare’ mistakes…

In the 'Economy', workers are 'costs'. Which is why people who turn societies into economies by design impoverish most of society. Businesses don't create jobs. Customers with money create jobs. https://t.co/2sgLR1CuWM

Supporters of the new government will require patience, so often progressive political wins are trashed within a single term by the puritanism of belief of its own supporters. It’s quick and easy to destroy society, it’s much, much harder…

Paradoxically, progressive voters are the main cause of populism. The most divorced from the basic realities of power and how it’s exercised to bring about change. Conservatives rarely protest, they know it changes hardly anything. They…

I thought of George Monbiot’s critical piece when discussions about energy needed to run electric cars came up on Q&A this week. We don’t question mobility itself. That mobility is dislocation, fundamentally anti-social. Cars are…

Are we at the ‘send them back down the mines’ point yet, in our evolution of care for children? I can’t believe I live in a society that wilfully infects children with dangerous diseases, and then reinfects them, repeatedly. Egged on by…

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1…

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…

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

Action on Covid stopped because National Cabinet damaged federalism. States, who drive the public health response, are now bound to a bland, killing consensus. It’s a support group, convened not to end Covid but to end responsibility for…

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

Last week a group of people I know were having a chuckle about me wearing a mask That group is now all home in bed with Covid. I'm sending them all my schadenfreude. https://t.co/6mpxq7sQdp

I think Peter did Australia a service with this Tweet. An articulate guy across much of what’s going on in society. But had absolutely no idea of the scale of the Covid disaster. Demonstrates so clearly the magnitude of the political…

Governments invented public health. They said to their experts 'find us a way to prevent widespread disease and death, so we can keep society going.' It's why we have local councils, for example, that was one recommendation. No 'balancing'…

The real cause of traffic is property development. Property developers literally just build houses. Houses divorced from social, cultural and economic life. To connect people to those things, they have to drive. Thus, traffic. Suburbs are…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

Newton’s 3rd law of pandemic action - for every proposed action, there is an equal and opposite obstructing reaction from a small group of Covid experts. The same pattern happening in every country. Whether it’s airborne spread, masks, or…

‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP…

There’s no such thing as choice in terms of whether to eliminate wide community spread of Covid. It’s only about time, the longer we delay it, the harder and more expensive it gets. You can’t function as a society with wide community…

The genius of mandates is that they apply equally to all, irrespective of socioeconomic status or privilege. The law was designed to do that, it's a much more powerful tool than medicine in a pandemic.

Great segment on The Project, where a spokesperson for business says he prefers the advice of some prominent Australian doctors over the AHPPC, in arguing for fewer Covid protections. A critical insight into how key medical people are…

People need permission to wear masks. Freedom is not letting individuals do what they want. Society is so obsessively social that this just leads to slavish, collective imitation. What frees people is permission to act, through mandates…

Richard Glover yesterday was pining for the days when political opponents could be bipartisan. We need to challenge the Pollyanna view of politics we have in the West I think, to understand why it looks like a toilet right now. #auspol…

We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y Watching the UK…

These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hierarchies, even scientists, shaped by what the group in question…

If the ‘Economy’ can’t function without infecting the entire population, then it has failed as a mechanism for organising human societies, and must be scrapped. It’s not the bedrock of society, it’s one set of social transactions, chosen…

A pandemic response has to challenge the status quo, because ‘normal life’ is what the virus feeds off. The discomfort people like @YouAreLobbyLud cause is like a vaccine, priming our social immune system to respond. It could save your…

Would we ever say ‘we’re living with crime, and just making sure we have enough cells for serious crime’? Of course not. Not least because accepting low-level crime at a mass scale destroys your society. And even that will be healthier for…

You can believe democracy means all people getting a say in how society is run. But the facts will be against you. https://t.co/8KjdxGU4Tb

Decisions are not made ‘by the people’, even in a democracy. The people follow the lead of somebody, be it leaders, experts, influencers etc. The opposition to masks and other public health measures is being led, but is described as…

One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we see the world. One that I think may challenge many is secrecy…

People won’t wear masks even though they’re begged to because nobody wants to be the one to stand out from a crowd. Treat it like shouting a drink, carry a box of masks to group events and offer them around. Break the ice for others.…

It’s sad we assume people are just stupid for not doing something like wear a mask. They don’t really need an education campaign, ignorance isn’t the real problem. Most know masks help. Without leadership all of life is a high school. Peer…

Public health paradoxes. Where we use ‘personal choice’ in banking, or supermarkets etc., despite the ideology of choice everything coagulates into a handful of monopolies. Give people ‘freedom’ and they *always* reinstate hierarchy. Why?…

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…

'Balance' always means 'let the status quo continue. Albo suggests this is a matter between employer and employee. Went to the election saying employers had been suppressing wages and working conditions for a decade. I'm sure they're…

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…

The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody…

Can we please have just one example from history of a pandemic we ‘lived with’? One that doesn’t involve mass death, disease and social chaos.

Ordinary working people here are now equivalent in status to the billions in the developing world we’ve left to their ‘endemic’ diseases for years. Market-based politics made us all interchangeable. Business is looking to double the…

People don’t wear masks because they don’t have *permission* to wear them. Permission is granted to individuals by a social group, to violate current social norms (in this case, not wearing masks). Libertarian ‘freedom’ sacrifices…

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

A mandate is like the rules for a game. Without the rules, there is no game. It’s the framework that the group needs to play the game. Mandates enable, not restrict.

These numbers, we know now, won't shift a single thing, politically. When you relentlessly 'message' and lead that society is an 'Economy', not even death will be a bump in the road. The Economy is humanity's most lethal invention, with…

Social behaviour is led, it isn’t spontaneous. Why are Australians not wearing masks? Because they were led to refuse them. People ‘take their lead’ from…leaders. The politicians who led the ignore Covid and masks strategy? There they are…

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…

'Alarming' data is more than 70 people dying every single day of a preventable disease, that we're not preventing. Headlines you get when you replace a society with an economy. https://t.co/GVlGwNd3OD

There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. Short thread to explain this idea. /1 https://t.co/1Ab04DnZId…

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

Health departments surveying the public to decide what public health actions to undertake. Business groups say just do it. The ‘public’ is not some pre-existing group to be surveyed. It mobilises differently for every issue. If it’s…

Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of…

Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, which pays the managers and workers. Nick Hanauer knows it. /1…

The breakdown of inter-generational society, the flattering of the ‘circle of life’. Speaking to 20-somethings can be a window into where society is heading. Yesterday: ‘so how long are you going to keep wearing that mask?’, with a clear…

The economic theory of modern conservatism is equilibrium-based. Strip everything back to a ‘market’ of interacting individuals, and you get a balanced equilibrium. The current status quo, the one they profit hugely from, is defined as the…

I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what it was we stopped doing in 2020/21, that we started doing again…

Fashion is a perfect way to understand people not wearing masks. Puffer jackets have been on-trend for some time. They're 'fashionable'. Wearing masks is not fashionable. Fashion is imitation of status. Those with status are not wearing…

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…

Polio was eliminated in Australia in 2000. It took 44 years, after introduction of the vaccine. It was mild in the overwhelming majority who were infected. A society reshapes everyone’s life to protect the vulnerable. An economy isolates…

The debates about individual and collective rights to me begin in the wrong place. Like that joke about being given directions, 'well I wouldn't start from here'. All the talk about 'balancing' the two, or prioritising one over the other,…

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…

"Australia, despite the myths we tell about ourselves, is a rule-loving nation, with a deep respect for authority and an antipathy to social liberalism." Osman Faruqi Rubbish. Watch how Australians deal with bushfires. It's not love of…

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

The UK now showing the accelerated failure of the entire neoliberal project. The belief that ‘there is no such thing as society’ is now producing that actual reality. And it’s not the freedom neoliberals dream of, it’s total collapse.…

Institutions are society’s T-cells. The cross-generational accumulated wisdom that runs societies, that cushions us from challenges and threats, like an immune system. The destruction of institutions by neoliberals is the destruction of…

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

The political libertarian fantasy of gated communities of the vulnerable, shielded from Covid, nicely shot down here. And to go further, because the fact it doesn’t (and can’t) work also empirically disproves the core belief of that…

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…

I don’t want to join the pile-on against institutions. Politicians corrupt institutions. But for Australia too, the job is disease control and prevention. Not death control and hospital bed management. A society that is widely diseased is…

I love this re-framing. We should be ‘learning to live with the protections’, rather than ‘learning to live with the virus’. Why would any sane society pick the second? #covid19aus https://t.co/g29r8dHhoR

The basic idea of insurance is that trauma for a few can be subsidised by the good fortune of the many. Neoliberalism has reversed this model of society, so that now trauma is an individual responsibility. This causes mass trauma, which is…

Modern conservatives take processes like public health and make them debating topics. Society then gets absorbed in the debates, rather than asking the simple question - why is this even a matter for discussion? Passengers don’t debate how…

Daily Telegraph today, UK. Nearly 190,000 Brits dead (so far), but the ‘society is an economy’ crowd is already lobbying to stop public health action for future pandemics too. Their refusal to implement protections created ‘lockdowns’,…

Current leaders would take Covid seriously if they could privatise air. Air is the last of the ‘commons’, the last social good that can’t be appropriated by any individual or group. Commons in land and water are long gone, now big earners.

Real wealth comes from saving, not investing. Investing is speculative gambling, driven by exponentials. A society that saves can afford to shelter from threats, like pandemics. A society that doesn’t sees saving (‘lockdowns’) as an…

Australia made community the centre of its politics. Other countries mobilise around territory and political ideals. It’s an astonishing innovation, making social relationship the core. It’s now failing, the ‘Economy’ is sucking the life…

A tiny increase of tax-take relative to GDP would erase these deficits in 1-3 years. And about a third of our overall public debt is printed money and could be just written off. Some quite simple changes would change our society…

If your society needs to take urgent action against a threat, I advise getting rid of all forms of football. There are times it feels like the only thing anybody will take seriously.

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.…

The UK seems in a terminal phase of total collapse. 50+ years of pretending society doesn’t exist has proved to be a self-fulfilling belief. And it’s not the freedom the neoliberal-libertarians masturbate over. https://t.co/XNfvT9B74I

This is actually true. The bit we (the public) missed is that we’ve been downgraded to itinerant-worker-from-developing-country status. ‘The Economy’ is the deliberate globalisation of the developing world model. And that always included…

The reason we don’t see stronger action against Covid. The mostly meaningless word ‘globalisation’ is the stripping away of all sovereignty and territorial and cultural definitions of society, and replacement by the unfettered flow of…

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

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

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

In the world's first privatised pandemic, 'lockdowns' didn't disappear. They were privatised. Society would cease to function without at least some prevention of infection. All the anti-lockdown libertarians did was shift that process to…

Here's a great example of how the politics of the economy sucks us all in. The almost universal hatred of monopolies. A monopoly is just an economy of scale. The 'free market' will produce monopolies, because the free market is a myth. /1…

For over 70 years there's been a research program to eliminate the common cold. The Covid minimisers like to say we need to live with Covid, because that's what we do for other infectious diseases. Horseshit, we fight them. /1 #covid19aus…

Covid freedom trolls notably aren’t out enjoying their apparent freedom. They’re here, continuously baiting civil society. It’s sponsored, deliberate propaganda.

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

ABC radio on the way home, talking about vulnerable people having to isolate themselves more and more to avoid Covid. Some staggering number of people with blood cancer (over 100,000?) just for starters. A quick thought experiment. Crime,…

Two days after pushing through 7 to 5 day isolation, the push is already on for zero. Conservatives are not a political party, they're the old donors now having captured the mechanism of government. Regulatory capture. Why they have only…

Both think the problem with our politics is bad manners. They want ‘decency’ back. But those bad manners are the populist attack on ALL politics, by external parties. Deliberately weaponised propaganda, 24/7, to undermine civil society.…

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…

We’re so domesticated by the politics of the economy. Like the idea we have to be able to ‘afford’ urgent social investment. A tiny increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio would erase budget deficits immediately. We’ve been trained not to see…

“Total federal and state taxation revenue as a share of GDP is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed country average.” Ross Garnaut Worth remembering every time we’re told basic social investment is ‘unaffordable’. Time to…

A beautiful example of why a mandate isn’t a restriction, it’s a permission. A permission to act against the usual status quo of doing nothing, without having to go against the crowd. https://t.co/EJ1wLaHRDx

The explosion of talk about mental health. Much of it driven by politicians who want to blame the public for the damage political inaction causes. Social life is imitative. We’re becoming very good at blaming the inside of our own heads…

What looks like epidemic waves of infection, with the virus coming at us in repeated waves, is really not that. We are the waves, we’re not onlookers. Australia shows this, because the waves didn’t really start in earnest until end-2021.…

The best way to regulate your speed when driving wouldn’t be to remove the speedo from the car. But that’s what we’re doing with Covid data, stripping it away, flying blind. We haven’t had anything approaching local data for months. Now…

Free TAFE study is not the progressive political statement it’s made out to be. It’s mostly training trades for business, a massive taxpayer subsidy. Many graduates destined for the prime lobbying group, the housing industry. At the same…

"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the glorious cons of the 'Economy' is perpetrated by the financial…

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

‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a…

Ponder that somebody reigns for 70 years, and we know pretty much nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her beliefs or opinions. She served a collectively-defined role, an institution. Now imagine current leaders did the same with…

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…

A beautiful example of the barren stupidity of libertarian politics. ‘Personal responsibility’ on the roads leads to gridlock. But if every individual driver drives slower via a collective speed limit, everybody drives faster. /1…

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…

All civilisation is only a bulwark against plagues. Plagues dissolve every social construction that ignores this basic fact. They reboot societies. They’re the on/off switch. https://t.co/qTmjtbxKWh

Infection is the invasion of space. Of our most personal space, sometimes called place. Of our workplaces, social places, homes and ultimately our bodies. It’s the most granular level of empire, now called an economy, the push to total…

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,…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

It’s funny to imagine a society without rules, infinitely ‘free’. Not even games would survive. Why do games, an ultimate expression of freedom, to PLAY, still use referees? Why not just let the players officiate 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’…

The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity.…

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…

The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that…

You may think they paused proceedings to take this group selfie. This is the proceedings. The health advice will be in those folders nobody will open. https://t.co/rXnb5gfI3N

The anger we feel about politicians doing nothing about Covid is the anger the most disadvantaged in society have felt about all politics, for years. Nobody helps them. Now debt is no longer cheap, the illusion of democratic shared power…

The UK is in a death spiral, created by politicians whose entire lives from their student days has been devoted to sterile debates about fanatical, hardened ideas. The type of ideas teenagers have, which is what they still are, not…

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…

“There’s not a role for government in running every bit of peoples’ lives forever.” Anthony Albanese Great, we can all stay at home on permanent holiday. Unless there’s some other group that runs every bit of our lives already. 🤔

Why won't they ditch the tax cuts? Because they're worried it will be unpopular. Popularity is toxic to democracy, you can't run a complex society using popularity. Popularity is not democracy. Get rid of elections. https://t.co/Wv3XhQCqql

The meek adoption of ‘protect the vulnerable’ by the ALP shows the power of framing. Conservatives don’t need to win elections to win the political war. They frame all issues so that even the other side continues to do their work, when…

The war on popularity, part something. Power is achieved by a majority of votes. This is how the voting system works. The problem with it is, ‘majority rules’ is profoundly undemocratic. We’re in a public health emergency where public…

Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things. 1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservatives have spent decades creating a frame that says tax is a…

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

Yesterday my son said to me “you know, wearing a mask is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.” He was talking about being the only kid at school masked, and the social pressure to conform. This is key to…

An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic services. They've hired a company to survey residents about…

The history of public health is so vital I think to understanding the Covid debacle we're living right now. There's maybe an assumption that the public health practice politicians are now shredding with abandon to try to win votes was a…

⁦@EdConwaySky⁩ graphic here showing the real politics of our time. Engineering has always been the key to lasting civilisation, as the Romans knew as well. It actually creates long-term social stability. And the US is one of the better…

Neoliberalism was always such a stupid set of ideas that you have to look deeper to understand how it wasn’t a laughing stock from Day 1. It got up because popularity-based politics is content-free. It has no test of the empirical reality…

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…

Chesterton said: “Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” Public health similarly used to be us following the advice of trained and experienced professionals, on matters we…

This is the deep psychology that makes me reject all the popular ideas of democracy as the ‘sovereignty of the people’. The people is not some social actor with intent and purpose. Groups are always led, by a small number of people. About…

I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

The most powerful 4Corners I’ve seen for some time. Modern societies still run on cheap imported labour i.e. slavery. ‘Economy’ is just our modern re-branding. Covid exposed it. A combination of slavery and debt is what’s created our now…

What's happening in Griffith is total social collapse. 'Living with' Covid was designed to shift attention from this collapse, which is happening everywhere. No amount of economic hocus pocus will fix it. The old normal is dead.…

The problem is, when the big blue circle voted, the full electoral roll, the UK got Boris Johnson. It’s irrelevant how many vote, selecting who to lead a complex society by popularity will always fail. Our societies may not survive us not…

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…

The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and…

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

I’m interested in this debate only because it’s a window into minimisation, the rage of the age. The claim that the ‘vast majority’ don’t commit fraud or waste is true for all jobs. The vast majority also drive safely, and don’t die of…

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

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

Derren Brown here demonstrating in a simple way the default state of society, when regulation and government are removed. Why political libertarians get to control everything, while saying they’re giving us all freedom.…

I’m curious what activities the Infinite Covid crowd think are more important for society that keeping people from becoming sick, and dying?

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…

Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code into the operating system, ideas and beliefs about individual freedoms that are fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of…

Even ‘mild’ Covid increases risk of death up to 10 times in this study. And nothing will be done because government has been hacked by populists. A vacuum of leadership means the crowd reverts to the social conformity of ‘what everybody…

On the one hand we elect leaders to represent everybody. On the other we say society is a free market of individuals. There's not one point of contact between those two things. And we wonder why the world seems mad.

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…

Great thread on the monetisation/financialisation of societies. Societies that succeed and last build stuff, they don’t just do card tricks with money. We ‘couldn’t afford’ to fight Covid because cash flow is our whole society, not stuff.…

A lot of the apparent division and dysfunction of developed nations is just that they don’t build things any more. Building stuff unites because the focus is on something outside the group, which is oblivious to all of your individual and…

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…

It’s a revelation for some when they unpick ‘the economy’ and realise it’s really smoke and mirrors designed to dress feudal society in modern economic jargon. https://t.co/7TbCuDcf3f

‘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

'Mainstream media' is a myth invented by cookers of all forms to act as their strawman bad guy. In reality things are more dire than that, the mainstream disappeared with the 'public'. Society is fragmented into multiple universes. Many of…

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’.…

The explosion of cybercrime. The IT industry is built around a set of libertarian free-market beliefs. (As with all libertarian things, it's rank hypocrisy, the big IT firms are behemoths.) A dislike of regulation as always sends society…

The reason much of the public hasn't realised society is collapsing, is that they never had much responsibility for running any of it. That's what a representative system is, you elect representatives to run society. When they in turn…

All of populist, election-based politics is theatre. Politicians don’t run the country, officials do, so it’s all a show. Not only are they only the tiniest veneer of what happens in government, government itself represents just a tiny…

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

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

Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the only two things that ever disrupt social hierarchies in a…

Why is democracy failing? Because we don't build things any more. An extension on the idea that most of what we call 'democracy' is really just engineering. Using this graph as a window to the real answer. /1 (source:…

Yep. But they won’t, because the engine room of society is conformity. They need leadership to provide pubic health action to conform with. Otherwise they’ll just conform with what everybody else is doing i.e. nothing.…

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…

Another backwards thing. The idea that school should prepare us for life. But the point of education is to change life. To shift the status quo. Education should shape business, not business shape education. https://t.co/LMM08seOXi

You won’t find a clearer example of society being replaced with an economy, than the determination of central bankers and politicians to inflict financial armageddon on average people to tame inflation, but total casual indifference to…

I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry…

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

The privatised pandemic. If we still had widespread PCR testing, and if we followed the advice of ‘stay home if we’re sick’ during these mass waves of infection, society would be ‘locked down’ in the same way as when we did that to prevent…

It’s a theme today. A pandemic is a physical event, like a flood. What we *want* to do about it is irrelevant. You stop the flooding, or your society breaks. Not stopping it (‘living with’ it) is not a choice. You can’t live with perpetual…

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…

So tired of the debates over whether to have Covid restrictions or not. We don't get to choose. Either we do them, or the virus does them. Either we stop circulating, or it stops us circulating. Either we run society, or it does.

In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to save society. The wealthy ever since have been trying to…

For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, are much less dangerous diseases. Do we just accept that each…

There’s a tipping point beyond which masking becomes a protection against society itself. It’s why superheroes and bank robbers wear masks. And increasingly, it’s true of those of us who still mask for Covid. https://t.co/y6nfhGhHaG

It’s a very safe bet that a person who tells you we need to learn to live with Covid, is not involved in doing a single important thing to keep society running. They don’t even see the damage.

Here’s a song for everybody demanding that ‘the people’ rise up and fix Covid. Miller-Heidke knows (now) that conformity is the basis of all social groups. People are ‘caught in the crowd’. They have to be led out of that conformity.…

Using the G20 to illustrate again that how we think about politics may be upside down. And how those who oppose 'neoliberalism' actually use all of neoliberalism's framings, without even being aware of it. Huge consequences for Covid too.…

Orwell saw all the puff around democracy and what it means. I don't think any of the -isms and -cracies even exist. No society is anywhere near organised enough to qualify as being a system of any kind at all. https://t.co/A0fLOswkWW

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…

A woman I know had to mask on doctor’s orders, to reduce her risk with another condition. She spent the next days apologising to everybody she knew, for masking. Social conformity drives society, not individual freedom. Freedom is…

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.…

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…

I strongly support anything that might restore sanity to public health and society, but I despair that we feel we have to mobilise all of society from the bottom up, all over again, to do it. That's the same libertarian framing the baddies…

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

There are only 3 things in history (you can check) that have ever interrupted the continuous flow of privilege to society’s elites. 1. Plagues 2. Wars 3. Unions Let’s skip 1 and 2 and go straight to 3.

Phew, we’ve avoided having to redistribute wealth. Just as we avoided changing society because of Covid, and just infected everybody instead. The economy, the greatest political trick to protect the status quo of all time.…

Everything that upsets the status quo is bad for the economy. Paying workers more? Bad for the economy. Stopping people getting Covid? Bad for the economy. Having more flexible work-life balance? Bad for the economy. This is why the…

What using popularity (elections) to drive society's decisions does. A simple calculation of home-grown almost free energy, versus buying it from overseas at the cost of tens of billions per year, while incinerating the planet, comes down…

Politicians lie. And yet given the choice between a politician’s and a medical professional’s advice on a mask, most choose the politician. Especially those who yell for freedom from politicians. Social conformity is the key to…

The evolution of SARS-Cov2, and of Covid minimiser spin. Facing off against each other, with minimiser spin so far proving the more virulent. The world cup of social collapse. https://t.co/S5ItAl6GCE

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.…

Really lockdowns were a shift of cost of living from individuals to governments. Much of that cost of living had been unfairly dumped on individuals years before by the politics of small government. As these same politicians like to say,…

There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 2008 and then during Covid. Modern conservative politics…

The politicians who demanded societies ‘re-open’ in the pandemic, spent the previous 30 years demanding we ‘maintain control of our borders’ i.e. keep society as closed as possible. Except for recreational and business travel, and…

‘Lockdowns’ (really just quarantine) should have been a libertarian wet dream. The ‘there is no such thing as society’ people get very heated when you suspend the functioning of society, as it turns out. They never meant freedom, they…

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…

The UK keeps racking up the social collapse. And the same bullshit in the news reports, that this is caused by not enough strep infection during lockdowns. I must remember to get some TB this year, to protect me next year.…

I’m a parent and this sort of thing makes me very angry. What I was ‘taking away’ from my kids was their exposure to a lethal virus. The stuff grown ups have done forever, until the last 2 years. Now they have to weigh up having those…

Nothing will be done against Covid. Nothing can be allowed to interrupt the inexorable march of the economy. COP27 proved that too, with climate change. The ‘economy’ is a fiction created by economists and politicians to protect the status…

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…

There are more stringent controls against head lice in schools than there are against Covid. But don’t expect ‘the people’ to rise up. Social conformity runs society. Only regulation can give them permission to rise above it. Not science.…

Politicians were blindsided when public health institutions swung into action when Covid emerged. That won’t be allowed to happen again. Note the criticism they use of CHOs - ‘unelected’. Elections are how these political bastards destroy…

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

Why can't we fight Covid? The Economy. Why can't we fight climate change? The Economy. Imagine inventing something that is no use to society in its greatest need, and then making it the entire basis for your society. https://t.co/korw4uCQH2

Grandparents on both side of the family now hospitalised in the latest Covid surges. No sympathy please, it’s not about that. They took every precaution possible. They were isolated from social life, and still got infected. The…

Neoliberalism has a chronic or 'long' form too. Long neoliberalism is what we're living now, where society is under siege from problems in every direction, and we can do nothing. Because there is no society. The neolibs deliberately…

You know when we Tweet here about the appalling stupidity of Covid strategy? Who are we talking to? The sad answer is - the vacuum where society used to be. Like there’s still some clearing ground for injustice and stupidity. There isn’t.…

Dan using polite words to say ‘we surrendered to the cookers, because they were scary’. Get in the bin. Get rid of elections, popularity is destroying society. https://t.co/q0AUAE3KXw

We have to regulate our way out of the pandemic. When we wanted to lower the risk from guns, we regulated. Only law can capture all domains of society at the same time. The same politicians who told us removing Covid law creates freedom…

I’ve Tweeted about the same here in Australia. The narrative that we were ‘locked down’ for 2 years is absolute rubbish. For most of that time much of society was open, and the virus was controlled. https://t.co/RQbaFTvk3f

I’m anti-elections because no good can ever, using any logic, result from vesting ultimate authority in a society to popularity. Convince me otherwise. https://t.co/556Cpet1a3

The major ‘authoritarian’ regimes, against which we define our own democracies. Both created by democratic revolutions modelled on Western political ideas, in reaction to imperial rule. In the West those same ideas are crumbling, leading…

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…

Nope, it relies upon most people not having a clue how anything much works, because they’ve delegated it to a civil service and elected representatives to do for them. The idea everybody knows enough about everything to run society is…

The RBA’s report into consumption during the pandemic is a very revealing insight into modern Australia. This is how a spoiled, snowflake society responds to an emergency. It missed its cafes, restaurants and recreational travel too much.…

All groups of all sizes are functionally the same. We label them with big floppy categories like capitalist or authoritarian or scientific, because we’re lazy. All groups operate using status hierarchies. Through social conformity. All…

‘The economy returned to growth’ literally means the old normal, the old status quo, has ploughed through a couple of hundred thousand dead in the UK to protect its status. https://t.co/Qye36O3C5x

If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conformity process. Your current fact-based resistance only…

Yep though the ‘mystery why people do this isn’t a mystery. It’s social conformity. Without that society would cease to function. The solution isn’t less conformity, it’s making that top 5-10% do their job, to lead the rest appropriately.…

Listening to a conservative commentator in the UK spitting with rage today about planned strikes by nurses and rail workers. Demanding these jobs be forbidden to ever strike, being ‘essential services’. Pay them as essential then. Society…

National Cabinet took a distributed, federalist governance structure for public health, and replaced it with a small group governed by its own internal social conformity. That was the plan. A forum where to act on public health advice…

We should always be worried when leaders get very chummy. Populism claims this is ‘team Australia’, but our Westminster federalist system is built on contestation. Without contestation it collapses, it ceases to work. As we’re seeing with…

The UK, in a state of collapse after years of Tory ‘there is no such thing as society’ rule, now seriously debating whether they need tougher laws to stop unions striking for a living wage. The libertarians! Their freedom is literally just…

In the world of snowflake privilege, ‘division’ is a dirty word. But to divide is to share. The reason society seems divided, is because it’s not. Things are not shared, creating divisions. To rectify that. That’s what debate and argument…

Most people have a much greater fear of doing something different to what everybody else is doing, than they do of dying. Social conformity is the essential glue that holds society together, but led in the wrong ways also the fastest way…

The genius of the libertarian wrecking ball is that it creates extreme distrust in government and institutions. And that’s exactly what they want. For us to throw all civil society away, and return to the Wild West. Which incidentally is…

Say it every day. We’re not living with Covid. We’re ignoring it. The status quo, often called ‘the economy’, wants us to pretend we’re back in 2019. It’s social inertia, the enormous accumulated wealth and privilege of a predominantly…

The people probably least surprised at the capitulation to Covid, is teachers. (Nobody asks them anything.) The ‘live with the virus’ folk were their students, and they saw that shift in them and in their parents. Schools have been coping…

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

Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians decided to weaponise public health action for electoral gain.…

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…

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated…

Electoral politics give people a magical sense of how power works. Winning an election doesn’t give the winner power to change things. 80-90% of power is framing issues across multiple elections. That’s what the ‘economy’ is, for example,…

2 ways conservatives have dominated politics. One is framing all issues in economic terms. The economy is a con, a substitution of society by a set of numbers that reflect the status quo. And second, by owning our public communication.…

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…

At the end of another terrible Covid year, I think we need to zoom out and recognise we’re in the middle of a pattern that repeats throughout history. Plagues and wars are all that really change societies, that level them. 2023 will show…

(This explains the Covid debacle.) We’ve lived a delusion of prosperity. Only a very tiny number are. The rest use personal debt to create faux-prosperity. Now that interest rates have ended that, the feudal nature of society has been…

And so 2022 draws to a close, a year of mass infection and death, an opening up driven by the recreational travel that seems now to be the only purpose of Western life. The whole society on a permanent gap year. Merry Christmas.…

“…society is behaving like it’s reached disease-free equilibrium. The harsh reality is that we are still in the grasp of a global COVID-19 pandemic and the ending is going to be brutal.” https://t.co/YG2MsCK6k1

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…

This is what voting enables. Popularity is the worst possible method to choose to determine ultimate authority in a society. https://t.co/80B72SG99l

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

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

Living in a scientific and technological age hasn’t changed that every part of our lives is still run using the same basic social dynamics. That includes science. Society doesn’t run on information, it runs on status and conformity. We are…

That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including…

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…

To flip the question today but ask the same thing. If people can’t stay home, and businesses can’t survive, if we hit pause to let a virus pass, what are we doing about it? Because that’s the exact definition of a society without…

Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with nothing. No society can survive an uncontrolled pandemic. We privatised the public health work. This is fundamental to bypassing…

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

A local car dealer told me Covid was the best thing that ever happened for his business. Cashed-up customers. The people pushing for the return of the old normal are a tiny handful of wealthy parasites on society, who do no meaningful work.

She won’t because it will make her stand out from everybody else, who aren’t wearing them either. Nothing is more terrifying to humans, who are social creatures. They would rather die than be non-conforming. https://t.co/ToN8q5Y01E

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.…

Preppers have always seems a sad symptom of a dysfunctional society. But the more N=1 politics wins, the more we may all need to incorporate greater self-sufficiency into our lives. Nobody is looking out for you. https://t.co/8XOBkHypKC

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

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

Fascinating and powerful paper about the use of mass testing to dramatically decrease SARS-Cov-2 transmission, while minimising social disruption. https://t.co/W4OHMWQU4D

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…

The basic social dynamics of the schoolyard now discovered in science. (Planck discovered it a century ago.) Our politics is the same. All of society is social groups jostling for status. It’s all school, it doesn’t end. Only plagues and…

All I’d add to this excellent thread by @BlairWilliams26 is that I think we always need to look at the social dynamics, not just the narratives. The 5/95 thing, 5% of any group at any scale will determine the direction the other 95% will…

Those who claim that lockdowns smashed the poor, never say a word about the same poor being smashed by Covid now instead. Many of the poor never got to shelter (lockdown) at all. They worked through, keeping society running.…

Out of the White House. It doesn’t matter what people prefer, some basic things need to happen to allow society to function at all. Popularly-elected politicians will rarely focus on these basic operational things. But they ultimately…

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

I have a longstanding debate with a friend about Covid. They say PH measures had to be relaxed to ‘balance’ action against a lot of other social priorities. I say to them that this is is what PH was designed to do, to do that balancing.…

I remember in the early days of HIV, how anybody engaging in unprotected sex knowing the risks of HIV was condemned by the community, even charged. But with Covid social and economic activity without precaution is celebrated.

Filial piety, and Covid. How casually we let Covid kill our Western elders, age is seen as a comorbidity. Burning off the dry tinder. In China elders and ancestors are venerated. We call that ‘authoritarian’, because we’re teenagers. Our…

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

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…

The Brits and US are further advanced in the collapse of societies led by libertarian nonsense. Which isn’t surprising, because libertarians openly don’t even believe in society. Of course society will collapse if it’s led by people who…

When you look at the review the AIER did of the GBD, you’ll notice the absence of the virus. The only brief of the group was to remove lockdowns. To this day minimisers see the pandemic only as a problem of lockdowns. Infection and…

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…

Until we unpack ‘the economy’, and see it as political strategy rather than as a physical reality, nothing will change. Economic things happen, transactions. But ‘the economy’ suggests an entity or agency that contains all of these…

Still the same reporting and spin that there are ‘waves’ of Covid. Like Covid happens to us, from somewhere else. We are the waves. It’s the ‘the wave is over’ that creates the next wave, in our social interactions. https://t.co/vCoG2Z8fWw

Fires, floods and now Covid. Making society an economy omits the basic act of sheltering from a threat. If the economy collapses unless you infect everybody repeatedly, it’s a failed social model. With climate change this will be the…

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…

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

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

Everywhere the race to return to feudalism is gathering pace. It’s far and away the dominant social model from history. It requires massive disruption to dislodge, like wars and plagues. Ordinary politics won’t do it.…

Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used to be a priority but now isn’t, is because the balance of power shifted. Away from the ‘public’, which current politics openly…

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.…

The freedoms ‘lockdowns’ took away from libertarians were social freedoms. Not individual freedoms. And they don’t believe in society, so this should have been the greatest gift to them, to be free at last from society.

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,…

The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a great example. Australia’s education outcomes have been in free…

Edmund Burke is considered a founder of political conservatism. John Howard speaks of him fondly. But to read Burke is to see how much modern conservatism has misunderstood every word he said. A short 🧵on how his ideas could save us,…

A group of career student politicians we call National Cabinet turned one of the strongest public health nations in the world into a nation of anti-vaxers, in a year. And the same BS in here about doses only in winter, and the young not…

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

The class of society doing this are descended from those who sent kids down coal mines. https://t.co/mqcsut2emO

We are returning to a ‘normal’ form of life, but it’s not the normal of the post-war years, since 1945. If we zoom out, what’s happening with Covid is part of a much greater historical shift, to unwind most of those post-war years. /1…

This is the great achievement of public health in the past 150 years. The fact in the past 3 years this curve is trending downwards again in some of the richest countries in the world is a measure of the magnitude of social breakdown going…

Unions are giving it a red hot go in the UK, to challenge 50 years of the stripping away of public-everything. ‘There is no such thing as society’ politics leaves you with no society. Why did it take 50 years for some to realise this.…

Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely…

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

Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what price? Here’s Blair’s 2021 piece outlining his ongoing political…

People should read Jim Chalmer’s essay on values-based capitalism. And also Tony Blair’s more sophisticated essay I Tweeted earlier, from 2021. To me they’re interchangeable in the way they conceptualise things - a more compassionate…

Business puts prices up. We ‘fix’ that by bankrupting customers so they won’t be able to pay the prices. Just as we infect them repeatedly, to pretend-end the pandemic. The economy. A fake substitute for society that protects its most…

Australia’s top 10 natural disasters in history. In a clear first place and still streaking away from the field, Covid. It only took the lead AFTER we said the pandemic was done, in late-2021. How do leaders not end up in jail for this,…

@AlanKohler absolutely nailing the true politics we’ve lived. A theology of small government, to hell with society. 50 years in the making, as I Tweet about a lot. https://t.co/PZ14LARdcW

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

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,…

The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happening and is our way out of the pandemic. Two things about…

James Valentine on ABC Sydney this morning with Julie Leask, talking about why the public has gone lukewarm on vaccinations. Lots of talk of ‘vaccine fatigue’. But the real reason not mentioned, that political leaders deliberately led a…

Also Albo’s thing. To be the great ‘consensus-builder’. As if the problems in society are just people being nasty to each other. They’re being nasty to each other because a tiny handful of them are eating all of the bananas. Redistribute…

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…

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

Tim Brooke-Taylor died right at the start of the pandemic. While quite old he was also in a tier of society that usually manages to avoid public health problems. He may be a good entry point to discussing the politics of individuals and…

While here in NSW we wait for a March election, to swap out one group of politicians ignoring Covid for another, in Turkey a senior architect points out that elections are responsible for the earthquake deaths there. Popularity can’t solve…

20-21st century ‘neoliberal’ politics is a fancy name for the return of history’s dominant social form. Feudalism. These modern movements exist only to reverse the gains of the late-19th and 20th centuries. Gains only enabled by social…

Two things, here. Another article that manages to avoid mentioning Covid even once. Millions of kids and their teachers being infected, multiple times, doesn’t even come up as a hypothesis. Ask any teacher about Covid absences, the tsunami…

Watch for this building push in Australia, to match the UK. Not even ‘stay home if you’re sick’ now. For both workplaces and schools, the sick will be expected to attend to prevent social collapse. https://t.co/vgVXxTWMNf

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

The thing that has struck me throughout this pandemic is just how invisible the cogs of public administration are to nearly everybody. SARS-1 highlights this (bear with me). /1 https://t.co/r2KFCOnLSY It’s not a huge stretch to assume…

Have you noticed that nothing that is collectively important to the survival of society is permitted by the economy? That’s not an accident. It’s a strategic political tool invented by the politics of ‘there is no such thing as society’,…

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say it is. It’s spin for ‘unregulated social life’. That’s all it…

Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else in life, all truth is contextual. Bertrand Russell’s parable is…

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…

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…

We’re all wedged between one group who think vaccines do nothing and another who think they do everything. We need ‘something’ people to run our pandemic response, not everything/nothing people.

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…

The death numbers last year and into 2023 would have left the Australia of only 20 years ago aghast. The breaking of Australian society that’s been going on right under our noses is stunning to see in its endgame now.…

Because ideas and beliefs precisely map social groups, it’s worth noting I think that both anti-vaxxers and Infinite Covids have converged upon ‘natural infection’ as the way out of the pandemic.

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

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

The everything or nothing narrative is still strong, on Covid. The people who want to do nothing say the only alternative is to do everything i.e. shut society down. Actually the answer is what it’s always been for infectious disease. To…

For the past 50 years, every time ‘the economy’ was used as a substitute for society, this destruction was happening. That was the acute phase. We’re now living the chronic phase. https://t.co/i2lC73WfVv

Some think I’m bananas, saying ‘the economy’ is a fiction. Pointing out that humans have traded for millennia. And there surely have been ‘economic’ transactions for as long as history. But that’s *not* ‘the economy’. It’s that ‘the’ that…

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

The 50-year long assault on taxation, under cover of libertarian nonsense about freedom, had one clear goal. To relieve the wealthy of their social obligations. This thread is a home-run of numbers to ram the point home.…

More evidence of how ‘the economy’ shapes society. Note that with Auspost’s troubles, at no time does even the ALP shift from the cost-recovery model in its thinking. It has to be run like a business, the conservatives win again.…

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

50 years of ‘there is no such thing as society’ politics is producing (wait for it, you won’t guess) - no society. We left it far too late to try to reverse the same sort of disastrous social collapse we’re seeing in the UK, US and now…

In the debate about whether Covid came from a lab or a wet market, I’ve always come down hard on the side of it coming from organising society as an economy. So that keeping coffee shops and travel agents solvent takes priority over…

More than a year after letting Covid rip, the obvious (and relatively contained) ‘vulnerable’ still not protected. Probably because you can’t, in a modern society where everybody is connected to everybody else. https://t.co/m8EoM53Hjb

"It is just assumed that the free market will look after things and we will have vets wherever we need them but that is not the case." Another victim of ‘the Economy’ fantasy. Society is falling apart. And remember, that was the actual…

The super fight shows two things. 1) How even the most basic common sense measures are stymied by electoral popularity politics. 2) That status drives societies. Aspiration. That this decision isn’t immediately hugely popular shows that.…

The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways is the fantasy mythology we were all fed throwing up about…

Society is structured using high school as a framework. Not as Left or Right. Imagine the geeks and nerds petitioning the cool kids for changes. How do you reckon that would go? Politics is social, and social is status.…

Meantime in the UK, we’re literally at the ‘let them eat cake’ stage of social collapse. But tomatoes, not cake. Grow ‘em yourself, the supermarkets are empty. https://t.co/Zgf0QLBo6I Notice ‘personal responsibility’ used here again. Take…

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

Again, the late 1970s was when everything changed. That’s when ‘the economy’ (‘markets’) began replacing society in earnest. We don’t need to debate these things, the empirical evidence is there in lights. Markets are a fantasy.…

“But the premier's press conferences have become a bit like that — no matter what is asked, the economy is the answer.” You won’t find a clearer empirical proof that ‘the economy’ was invented to bypass all social and political issues.…

‘The poor’ don’t see themselves as the poor. They see themselves as the equal of the rich, but unlucky and obstructed. They don’t want pity or help, they want to not be thought of as low-status citizens. They learn that in high school, we…

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

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

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

Regional Australia will need an additional 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are projected to retire between 2020 and 2025. This is what running your society as a free market economy for 50 years does. No planning, no…

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

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll…

In today’s minimiser maths lesson, a school excursion can either use cars, or a bus. On the trip a car or the bus crashes, killing 3 children in each scenario. Which is the greater tragedy? Minimisers? The car, because the 3 dead on the…

Society is a high school. This is what we abandoned public health to do. Our moonshot. https://t.co/xf3C7VlW9H

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…

Cathedrals. Sometimes they took 50 years, or even more, to complete. Multiple generations of masons and other craftspeople worked on the same job. What’s our equivalent today? What are WE all working towards, collectively, for society?…

Yes broken. In plain sight, ‘there is no such thing as society’. Only once in the entire history of most societies has it been any different. In the period between the end of WW2, and the early 21st century. /1 https://t.co/aAIJvrcRk2 The…

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…

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1 for alerting me to this one. Haven’t read it yet, but I obviously Tweet a lot about how the market and the economy itself are myths. Deliberately constructed myths. To replace society with old-style feudalism.…

As evidence that we’re in the midst of a deliberate reversal of social progress from the first half of the 20th century, the 1.15 million dead from Covid in the US is less than the 1.5 million who died from workplace injuries there in the…

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

Australian society, strip-mined by foreign resource companies. With the laughable royalties then vacuumed up by older Australians. A society is a ‘circle of life’, intergenerational. An economy is just plundering, of this social wealth.…

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…

From the late-19th, through to the early-to-mid 20th century was when humanity invented ‘the public’. From the 1950s onwards, social elites started stripping it away again. We’re living in the final stages of that tug of war. From:…

This is the class of society that invented the economy. The market. What do you reckon their motivation was? https://t.co/fDo8N7vjK3

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

Another founding myth of ‘the economy’. Budgets, and debt. For decades conservatives have been able to strip away social programs, under cover of supposedly protecting the federal budget. It was always motivated nonsense.…

The shift to a market-economy fractured all collective attention and energy into millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Any sense of a larger social project was lost. Reality isn’t fooled. It’s now presenting us with an invoice for that 70-year…

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…

As with 'values-based capitalism', the ALP is just sanding the rough edges off the status quo. Too terrified to confront all of the ridiculous framings the conservatives have introduced over the past 70 years. Being good little gold-star…

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

Why does it even need to be linked to productivity? Why can’t society say, this is how we want to live? We can define productivity any way we like. https://t.co/VcI1jGEXP4

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

Some blame lockdowns for a whole range of social, economic and health problems right now. Lockdowns only accelerated the collapse of systems that were already broken. What hid those breaks before was insane busyness. Hitting the pause…

The problem with ‘polarisation’ as a concept is that it’s the basis of our democracies. Government and opposition. Prosecution and defence. Contestation breaks through social conformity. Murdoch is damaging because he isn’t counterbalanced…

Change the lens. Society is not people processing ideas. Or even doing ‘politics’. Society is what it always has been, people acting socially. Beliefs, facts, and politics are just the raw materials. People are creating and maintaining…

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…

A friend today said ‘why are you still wearing a mask? Do you have Covid?’ Genuinely puzzled. It was nothing to do with Covid, it was all about not following the social norm of not masking. Why was I not doing what everybody else was…

⁦@EdConwaySky⁩ makes the excellent point that climate action isn’t just adding renewables to our lives. It’s an entirely new Industrial Revolution. That’s the best way to sell it to the existing status quo, as a new opportunity to make big…

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

The US and UK leading the developed world in libertarian economy politics. In social collapse. The fact these damning mortality stats are still dire even without Covid in the US shows the problem was pre-existing, political, and also the…

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

Look at the glee when popularity contests are won. It feels like high school, because it is. High school is the social and cultural model used to shape modern societies. Like all popularity, it’s incredibly fleeting, and changes nothing…

Political libertarians latched onto ‘mental heath’ as a scapegoat for social collapse (that they caused). Just as they discovered an interest in education only when schools weren’t babysitting the children of employees. It lets them appear…

The greatest violation in this pandemic was the driving of Covid into households. The privatisation of lockdowns, where we pretended lockdowns were over but really just forced people to do them in their own homes. The greatest violation to…

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

One of my pet Tweet topics, how social conformity is the glue that holds societies together, not politics. I think the percentage is more like 95% who will follow, 5% will lead, based on empirical evidence like the Korean POW camps in the…

The job is the economy’s way of controlling the flow of social resources. It’s a social invention, not economic. We stopped fighting Covid because jobs and viruses mostly don’t mix. Until we remove the job as the foundation of social life,…

A member of the public came into work yesterday, masked, but saying they were Covid positive. Every person in the building who's been not masking and making light of Covid went into a panic. Anger too. Non-masking is social. People still…

When we destroy institutions, we enter an eternal present, where the most powerful define reality as anything they like. They can say a pandemic is over and it is, because they say. Institutions are society’s memory. Power based only on…

The danger remains not that people think stupid things. It’s that they’re encouraged to think at all about things, that previously they gave no thought to at all. We’re hacking society’s operating systems. https://t.co/8dexlbItPU

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,…

A pandemic is still (nothing has changed) defined by the number of infections? Not hospitalisations, or severe disease. Nice that the CMO put on record that there are no public health or social measures in place, and that’s the plan. Makes…

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…

This is the most recent WHO statement on hybrid immunity for Covid that I can find, from mid-2022. (Would be interested to know if there’s a later one.) What stands out is that the WHO is not at all sure it’s the way out of this pandemic.…

The social version of herd immunity is the rapid decline of masking. We now have herd immunity to masks. Small pockets of masking remain, every effort is made to stamp them out.

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…

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters…

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…

From last year. When politicians talk about ‘independence’, like the RBA setting interest rates or the Remuneration Tribunal setting politician pay, they mean something that: - benefits them - is deeply unpopular. So they fabricate an…

Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to pretend they do something they actually don’t - run a country. They have no idea how to do that. It’s much too complex. Their…

If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of the public, and replace it with a market. Markets also replace…

Every one of the National Selfie Group, now and since it was formed, voted unanimously to end the pandemic by mass infection, mostly of children. Children were seen as the fast-track way to herd immunity. It’s a crime against the public.…

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’…

We need targeted strategy at a very small number of leaders, not the whole population. This idea we need to constantly re-build society from the bottom-up was invented by conservatives, to waste their opponents’ time endlessly trying to…

Intelligence has always been a distributed thing. The whole paradigm of AI is like libertarianism, for the mind. Most of our use of language for example has been AI, forever. The meanings are collectively generated, outside our heads, and…

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,…

Great to have Ed back. Brilliant recognition here of the social penalty for even admitting you have Long Covid. Societies process all things socially, not politically or medically. Soc-iety. It’s in the name. https://t.co/Z8aOYGGuO5

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…

I think the model of society as millions of people consuming information is wrong. We live in representative democracies, they're designed so that most people don't need to know anything about how things work. It's the representative bit…

Perfect example of how societies are 100% social, not political or economic. The ALP is slow to do this because it knows millions of ordinary Australians resent the unemployed getting more money. They see them as lower status. Also why the…

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

Rees-Mogg blathering about how civil servants should implement government policy in a ‘neutral’ way. BS. Frank and fearless, not cowed and ‘neutral’. The upper crust of society is outraged when the servants don’t do as they’re told,…

The opponents of lockdowns openly don’t even believe society is a thing. They replaced it with a market. Shutting society down should have been a fast-track to their promised land: millions of consumers, free of society’s interference.…

While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public discussion if we could at least distinguish between the budget and the economy. All of the talk of 'finding the money' for things is…

If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters, a lot, for Covid too. As children of empire, we have a very…

It's depressing when even political journalists don't understand political framing. The reason all parties can't act is because 'the economy' - a political framing of society - won't allow it. The economy wins all elections. That's why it…

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

I dream of a re-make of the Terminator franchise, where AI rises up and takes control of society and runs it fairly for all people, saying ‘you people are fucking useless’. I’m not joking, AI may actually shift our politics as well.…

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.…

When the solution to a major social problem is said to be ‘more supply’, you know parasitic economic interests have captured the regulatory system. Gas, now housing. Supply and demand is one of the founding myths of the market economy.…

What’s really going on here is that the entire edifice of economic politics is crumbling. Monetarism, society as a market, etc. But as always the ideas won’t change, we’ll drive off a cliff first. Only catastrophe creates major social…

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,…

30% of businesses fail in their first year. 50% by their second. 75% by their 4th. Business (especially small business) is a terrible model for a society. But that’s what the ‘economy’ is. Not only does it mostly fail, it’s even worse than…

This is what ‘independence’ of a central bank means. Taking the blame for unpopular decisions. So that politicians don’t. Stupid decisions too, because the monetarism that invented central banks is stupid. It’s a key plank of free market…

Humans are built to notice and be concerned about contrasts, not absolutes. For example you perceive a change in temperature or smell, then become accustomed. This is where normalising Covid infection got its power. By drawing upon a…

The true nature of the economy is only revealed when it tanks. The illusion that society has survived its substitution by an economy is only ever maintained when there’s cheap debt for ordinary people. The old public has to borrow its…

Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives elections now for decades. They win even when they lose, because…

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…

Selfies are the key KPI for popularity-driven social collapse. https://t.co/bHLafBeaGG

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

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…

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

The late Stephen Toulmin. Studied something I think fundamentally important to getting ourselves out of the mess societies are now in, with Covid and elsewhere. Casuistry, or casuistic reasoning. Case-based reasoning. Much, much more…

The vulnerable. To go back to the saying, that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. This was the insight that led to the invention of ‘the public’ in the late 19th century. Something we all grew up assuming was a natural part of the…

The simplest explanation for why this won't happen is because the rich are too powerful. But the rich are also vastly outnumbered by the poor. Fans of elections need to explain why the poor worldwide don't vote to stop this. (Hint: it's…

Walk into any workplace right now providing a core social service, and you’ll leave knowing everything is collapsing. Staff smashed by Covid and secondary infections, staff resigning and unable to be replaced, taking critical knowledge…

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…

The public is the complex set of relationships between all parts of society. It’s not ‘the people’. Those relationships are invisible unless people are given the job of tracing them. That’s why bureaucrats were invented. By the Chinese,…

This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration and strategy. Jacob Rees-Mogg. You can see his respect for the whole institution of government in his pose. But it gets even more…

The Brits wasting their time analysing arguments over immigration, when the whole thing is just the Tories copying the Australian LNP, in a desperate attempt to get their poll numbers up with some classic dog whistling. Imagine weaponising…

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

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

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…

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…

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

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…

I like the idea. But it ignores status and hierarchy. People will wear a mask if those that have status in their eyes also wear a mask. It’s why business uses celebrities in its marketing. https://t.co/0oDZyWlrCm Exhibit A.…

Despite all the modern libertarian rhetoric, people still grant the highest status in societies to their political leaders. If they lead casual indifference to public health, casual indifference is what we get. https://t.co/Mg6O2hpnJG

The GBD aligned perfectly with ‘the economy’, because it’s the same beliefs. No aim for social life except living ‘normal life’. Which is just saying the status quo should triumph. Those already winning in society should just keep winning.…

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…

"...in all cases studied, adding random legislators improved the performance of the parliament. Specifically, there were more acts passed with social benefit." Get rid of popularity i.e. elections. It refocuses government on problems and…

Eventually it will hopefully be clear that decoupling a society's communication and information systems from its institutional framework is a fast-track to social collapse. https://t.co/OHBVJkW2kt

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

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap.…

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.

Boils aren’t a popular topic for discussion, but they’re horrible for many people. A long conversation with an afflicted friend made me think much wider things, about Covid and infection more generally. About microbes as an ecology. We…

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

Great thread. Also so important to note that we never stopped ‘locking down’. We privatised it. Instead of government and business paying to prevent infection, now individuals do, with their own sick leave. A society CANNOT function with a…

Societies are social. Not political. Politics is the same social behaviour re-labelled in ways that disguise it. https://t.co/DqAqdW1UxP

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.…

The red circle is what gives us a remnant feeling of there being a shared Australian public identity. The blue circle is what’s coming, and a big part of the reason something as basic as fighting a pandemic attracted such resistance.…

If you doubt the focus of libertarian think tanks is not just to continue to stymie Covid action, but to ensure public health action will be obstructed for future pandemics as well, you only have to read their mission statements.…

A job is not an economic construct, It’s a social construct, a method of social control. Once people are totally reliant upon a job to survive, society’s governance shifts to employers. None of that is accidental. https://t.co/WUT4scwGZX

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…

Dutton and Morrison both playing the ‘all Australians are equal’ card in opposing the Voice. Classic feudal conservatism. Accumulate all the power and wealth, then say that’s the natural equilibrium of society, which regulation will…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

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…

Superb conversation with @CrabbBrendan and @c_s_wallace on the desperate need for a circuit-breaker at government level, to return sanity to public health in Australia, with Covid. Every day I think about that circuit breaker. I fear the…

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…

In so many ways the collapse of public health and other social problems stems from a lack of respect for teachers and education. For two fundamentally important reasons. Teachers mediate our relationship with knowledge, and also to each…

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

All of our social behaviours now emanate from this one crucible. The school. We put all sorts of grown up names to these behaviours, as adults, but it's the same behaviours. As politics (more schoolyard) stripped away our existing…

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…

The reason good people lose is that they believe the myths about democracy. That it’s ‘the people’ doing things. The people always follow the same basic social rules that we see in schools. They form hierarchies behind leaders or…

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…

The loud noise from small business over the rise in minimum wages and award rates. There’s always a lot of angst about ‘big business’. Small business is much worse for workers. Has nothing to do with the owners being bad. The model is…

In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for…

More team sports. You can’t unsee it, when you start looking. The trial only happened because those close to Roberts-Smith broke ranks. That’s very rare in social groups. Like people spontaneously wearing masks. This is how all of society…

This is ‘normal life’. Team sports. Nothing creates more passion. All social groupings are really teams. All political parties. All groups in a school playground. All workplaces. Covid minimisers. Covid fighters. Etc. The same social…

I’m sure everybody thinks the social collapse facing the UK has an obvious answer. Tax cuts to the wealthy toffs who caused the social collapse. But popular! Way to go, elections. https://t.co/NYwPl6E6F9

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…

Epidemics don’t happen *to* societies. They’re the revealing of a society’s specific vulnerabilities. Why we rushed ‘back to normal’, to avoid dealing with those vulnerabilities. https://t.co/G0fqeSWUpn

Riddle me this. Enormous demand for housing, no supply. But not because there’s no land available, lots of those houses are sitting unfinished, unable to find a builder. Builders are going broke. The fantasies of the economy. /1…

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…

If we want to beat Covid, graphs and data aren't going to do it. All facts need to be inserted into social realities. Libertarians know this, they do the exact opposite of what they say. They target social things. https://t.co/QuLusyUgVG

Chesterton got it. To beat Covid we don't need the facts about it to be widely understood, they'll always be interpreted through peoples' social groups and networks. We need to target the social groups. https://t.co/pXk5MtCuG1

That feeling every day that Covid is a train wreck, and nobody is doing a thing? It's peer pressure. Kate Miller-Heidke's Caught in the Crowd captures it nicely, in this bit. Now nearly everybody is turning their back, and walking away,…

Cassy O’Connor asking the Covid questions at the Tasmanian Covid enquiry that we all want asked. And the Premier’s squirming non-answer is telling: that National Cabinet decided. No rationale, just group solidarity. A shield for…

Pathetic populist politicians won’t touch Covid for fear of losing votes. The cookers spooked them, or their own ideology hated every second of public health, with Covid. That ideology hates anything public, it ‘distorts the market’, even…

Use the 'everything is social' lens. The previous PM set up NC to create a separate group dynamic, and like all groups tending to be loyal to itself. This then decoupled the members from their old groups, like their connections with CHOs…

Why didn’t we act sooner against climate change? The economy wouldn’t allow it. Why aren’t we acting against Covid? The economy won’t allow it. Higher wages? Economy says no. Flexible working conditions? No. Seeing the pattern? A made-up…

Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point where P0 meets B and A is the equilibrium point of the perfect…

"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

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

The real cause of inflation is the lack of regulation, across all parts of society. Regulation is what (wait for it) REGULATES society, including prices. All the talk of greed and profits and wages uses the same free market supply and…

This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control costs? It signs contracts. A type of privatised regulation. /1…

Society is a high school. Not an analogy, an actual cultural fact. This also means you can read all politics through your time in the classroom and playground. Libertarians are that tiny handful of kids who disrupt everybody else and…

The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban environments. This critical report from 1842 was 50 years before…

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.…

People will do what everybody else is doing. Society doesn’t run on facts, it works on imitation. Peer pressure. https://t.co/Ibrl46a5Sn

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,…

If you’re not shedding friends in your 50s, you’re not doing the work you were put on this Earth to do. The only thing that frees humans from the stifling focus on interpersonal social games they first experience in school, is adults…

A serious psychological topic. Even more interesting and important is the socio-cultural background, not mentioned. Friendship is a dominant mode of social relationship for adolescents. Schooling has driven it across all age groups.…

Names change, but hierarchies don’t. Democracy’s weakest point is misunderstanding this and thinking it levels the hierarchies. All social systems are hierarchies, because all social behaviour is hierarchical. Status, comparison,…

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.…

If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. All sides in the inflation debate trapped in the narrow framing of monetarism. Wages, prices, productivity. Prices go up because of wider lack of regulation in society,…

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…

It's easy to think ordinary people are ignoring the impact of Covid. But consistently I find they have genuinely no idea of the number of infections and deaths occurring. Genuine shock when you tell them. It doesn't often make them change…

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…

We can’t vote our way out of our problems. Voting is the core OF our problems, popularity-based politics. A society that won’t do important things unless they’re popular is like a parent who feeds their kids nothing but ice cream. This…

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…

Ignore the economic framing of our social lives. The economy is a deliberately constructed myth, a rationalisation of the status quo. The only thing giving ordinary people a place in it is personal debt. When cheap money goes, the truth is…

No such national strategy will happen. Only catastrophe shifts entrenched patterns of social behaviour. Like Great Depressions. And pandemics, though that catastrophe is going to take longer. https://t.co/TVxWvN93ic

Long periods of cheap money lead to long periods of expensive money (higher interest rates), to curb the inflation caused by the cheap money. We could just regulate our society, but that would upset the fantasy of a self-governing economy…

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…

One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small things simple. Covid thinking is like this. The bacterium MO-1 is…

I’d say reasonable effort is being made to protect ‘the vulnerable’. The real problem is thinking you can ring-fence them off from the rest of the community. Society is always a mixture, it doesn’t function as separated groups.…

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

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…

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

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

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…

This sort of stuff always makes us think about ‘authoritarian’ governments. But all societies are controlled, just in different ways. They don’t function otherwise. For example most of our lives in the West are now almost completely…

Just to reinforce this, Australia's response to Covid was great public health. But the LNP has an ideological hatred of government. A populist group was their way to bypass the public health built into our federalist system, a wedge…

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’…

Like all -isms, political libertarianism isn't real. No humans follow ideologies. It's a social group. It's teenage life, adolescence. Thus its obsession with freedom, a teenage passion. When we cut schools off from adult life, they became…

After only just over a year, I think the Albanese government is looking like toast. Yes the polling suggests the Dutton-led LNP is a train wreck (it is), this isn’t to say they’re winning either. Albo’s small target politics means nothing…

The SA Premier said in SA they limit the number of times landlords can increase rents every year to 1. The dollar limit on that annual rent increase? It's unlimited. Anything else would apparently upset the market and new supply. When your…

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

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…

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

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

We’re all vulnerable to Covid. But for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s mostly the old. The largest and fastest-growing demographic in our society. How do you isolate the vulnerable from harm, when they’re the majority of your…

What’s that old saying, take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves? Take care of children, and society will take care of itself. Like the complete opposite of what we’re doing right now. https://t.co/4X3LxSDrYf

Only two things will bring the rapid change we need. Total catastrophe, or removing elections. History suggests the former is the most likely. Those who use popularity to run society will never relinquish it. https://t.co/g9UAZy5Gqb

School. A small handful rule, based on popularity and bullying. Most do nothing to stop them, the kids in the background. This is what elections turned adult society into as well, the same social mechanism. Not an analogy. That kid in the…

Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s. You must engage with this history, to beat climate change…

Ever noticed the ‘economy’ doesn’t have any aims, except to grow? Aims would disrupt the status quo, and the actual function of the economy is to protect the status quo. An economy has no vision, no aims, no bucket list. Just growth, of…

There it is, the populism get out of jail card. The people/public love me, therefore there's nothing to see here. Pure Trump. Making popularity the locus of ultimate power in a society destroys it. There are no exceptions to that rule.…

There’s no such thing as politics. It’s ordinary social behaviour rebadged with different names. Societies who have abandoned the young to privilege the old are about to face a reckoning. https://t.co/0CFEWYrITb

Pandemics like all catastrophes expose the skeletons in society’s cupboard. Converting society to a market began decades ago. It took a catastrophe to expose the level of damage that had already done, until then we were still muddling…

The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely…

Steve Price on The Project arguing that Gladys suffered no reputational damage as a result of ICAC, and would easily win a seat again if she wanted. He may be right. Just shows again that popularity is a disastrous way to allocate power in…

The bigger and more roads you have, the greater the traffic. Supply induces demand. Just as building dams increases the demand for water. Supply and demand is the sole explanation market-based thinking has for group behaviour. It’s…

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…

No -isms exist. They’re not like operating systems for a society, that you install. All societies operate socially. -isms are just the way we label the different social behaviours that emerge. But they’re all social. Societies are all…

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…

Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even further. Because we have long experience of what that really…

Libertarian beliefs impact society in all sorts of places we don’t think to look. The tidal wave assault on all forms of authority, the destruction of hierarchies of trust. https://t.co/k9Msrc9iDC

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…

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…

The real reason ‘lockdowns’ offended the status quo, is that they shifted the locus of control in societies towards homes. ‘Home’ is a concept the economy can’t allow. Note increasing numbers homeless and renting too. Colonialism, now…

It’s not meanness. It’s the actual political belief system of both major parties. Relaxing society with an economy, which makes ‘welfare’ a prime target, because it represents using the State for social ends. Economy politics doesn’t…

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…

Heh, no. We never do. All that changes societies is catastrophe, without which social hierarchies would continue until the end of time. Status games, based on imitation/emulation. But reality reasserts itself, that’s what the catastrophes…

There’s a chasm between what people say, and what they actually do and think. Everybody lies. For example despite the trend for despising politicians, it’s abundantly clear people still look to them to lead. The most fanatical libertarians…

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…

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…

Loneliness appears against a background of assumptions about social activity and friendship. Examine those carefully and they’re nearly entirely adolescent, they reflect that stage of life. What’s being felt is the next stage of life,…

Captain of the good ship monetarism has been replaced with First Officer. Course remains unchanged. Imagine making a bank the core of your society. https://t.co/6SfZienUM4

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

This is an interesting governance problem. 10,000 members of this group. Who knows how many are actual ADF personnel. But clear disrespect for the law here. We’re not a military junta. https://t.co/YwOfNvzaBY

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

When I hear discussions of the voice to parliament, this is the image that always comes to mind. Another game of popularity politics, to see whose team, Yes or No, wins. No social progress will ever be made using popularity.…

If it goes down, I would hope it forces a rethink on the value of voting to achieve complex and urgent social reforms. But it won’t. https://t.co/pxZM9Dr6Yb

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

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

Our schools become our societies. Look at how precisely current schools (private luxury enclaves, public safety nets) match our society. One leads to the other. It's not a funding model, it's a social model. Comprehensive schooling was a…

Like I say. The social segregation of Oz society begins in schools, deliberately engineered by the LNP since John Howard to dismantle decades of public institutional life. They despise the public, because they despise the State. Zealots.…

And another. This not a ‘crisis’ for the LNP, this is what was intended. Heavily incentivise the shift to private, and make it an aspirational thing (status). A deliberate engineering of new social and cultural norms for Australia.…

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

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

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’.…

I do a one-Tweet version of my threads. For today’s, do we tweet these facts to share the facts? Or are we really asking why nobody is paying attention to them? I think the latter. We’re looking for (or trying to create) a social…

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…

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

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…

It’s the same mechanism for every issue. Turn it into team sports, with two sides. Even on topics where both sides mostly agree. But humanity’s deepest desire is for imitative rivalry, we can’t resist it. We love team sports, in every area…

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…

Imitative rivalry at work. Large numbers of Australians didn't change their minds in only a few months. They've shifted to the other 'team' because the issue was deliberately turned into a rivalry by the No side. Nothing is more addictive…

Can you think of one human thought, behaviour, feeling, word/phrase, object or trend/fashion that isn't copied/imitated from somebody else? https://t.co/EPuDKmkI0Z

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…

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

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

B A Van Sise. I challenge anybody to demonstrate an entirely original piece of work, or thought, or feeling. Or anything. AI shows again that the most fundamental human act is to copy. To imitate. https://t.co/64pl5uuMXp

Imitation, again. This behaviour came from the US, and is being copied here. Look at any human behaviour, and you’ll find imitation. Including Covid minimisation. https://t.co/x2OdTy5Rpb

No daily discussion here or electoral politics anywhere will have any meaningful impact on the global catastrophes we’re living. History is repeating, total catastrophe is all that will rupture the imitative rivalry/team sports. We’ll…

Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going early. A disturbing sense of foreboding is behind many of their decisions. They see organisations collapsing, flailing with the…

Such a graphic example of populism vs reality politics. Kyle is immensely popular. Why do we think popularity can ever be a mechanism for selecting ultimate authority in a society? It always - there are no exceptions - leads to social…

‘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…

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

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

Should be read in conjunction with this piece by @GeorgeMonbiot on the fundamentally anti-social force that cars are. Which for a party that doesn't believe in society is par for the course. https://t.co/qYwK1ZgA3C https://t.co/9sLMCjfiJp

Never believe the libertarian schtick about individual freedom. Nobody is more slavishly devoted to their leader than a libertarian. All humans follow social status hierarchies. None more than those who say they don't.…

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…

Both Covid and climate change are symptoms of a stalled industrial revolution. The last industrial revolution was a response to desperate social need, it was a social movement. We misunderstand it as ‘economic’. Massive social problems are…

If we're discussing the science of Covid and climate change, we've already lost. It's never been the role of the public to digest the technicalities of major social issues. They have representative bodies to do that for them. The science…

Everything we call 'politics' is the tiniest thin veneer of hot air, overlaid upon the actual material realities of life. A total waste of time and resources. Like the NBN, reality always said we'd need full fibre. We wasted how many years…

Every day I think it’s worth remembering that people would rather die, than act in a way that is different to the people they mix with. You can viscerally feel the terror - not too strong a word - at appearing different. Imitation is the…

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.…

Societies have never functioned by people understanding anything. They function by them imitating what others are doing. Not because they’re stupid, but because there’s far, far too much to understand for any one person.…

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…

Another glaring problem with popularity-based governance, through elections. Decisions that can impact a society for generations are made by people whose political careers at the top last less than 3 years. Total disconnect of timelines.…

People are deciding whether Covid is over the same they decide whether Crocs are over (again). Or puffy jackets. Cynicism is the wrong response, fashion (imitation) is how societies work. Public health has to be led as a ‘trending’ thing.…

Every day you can read stories like this, of some desperate social need. Because we force decisions on the basic material realities of our lives through a popularity mechanism. Elections. The elected use the resources to fund ideologies…

Yes! I dream of a day when we recognise ‘the economy’ as the greatest sleight of hand in human history. A substitute for society, favouring the privileged, masquerading as an ‘objective’ measure of all social life. https://t.co/KLfWKRmN5X

What’s fascinating about the NDIS is that it’s allowed some measurement of just how big the category ‘the vulnerable’ is. And that’s just disability. In Covid discourse, the term implies a tiny group that can be case-managed, while the…

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…

A shame it’s the same night as a bloody soccer game. THE most important issue facing Australia, watched it earlier through iView. Our privatised public service is the reason we don’t see obviously urgent action on urgent social problems.…

A daily reminder that 'getting the balance right between [urgent social issue] and the economy' has always and will always mean, 100% action for the economy, 0% action for [urgent social issue]. https://t.co/aDw4xMeSZK

Populism will destroy every democracy and other system of government, wherever it takes hold. Popularity is the DNA of human society, nothing is more powerful. This talks about the 'sensible centre'. That's a myth. Populists are not Left…

The rest of Anthony's Tweet is well worth your time too. This is the fundamental structuring principle of all groups, all the way up to societies. Peer pressure. Emulation/imitation. Imitative rivalry. There is no 'politics', no -isms.…

If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get that, everything from traffic to housing to Covid will make…

Watching the national hysteria over The Matildas, including from many who never watch soccer, rams home that our deepest passion is the rivalry of team sports. We convert our politics, our science, our business, our everything, into it.…

Isn’t it strange that people cry now when they lose in sport? As a kid playing sport, it was a disgrace to cry, if you lost. Bad sportsmanship. And winners the same, with their orgasmic euphoria. Any coach of my childhood would have been…

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.

Musk seems to be one of the libertarians who actually believes the nonsense that society is a whole bunch of disconnected individuals, and any kind of collective action is oppression. As always, The Simpsons got there first. /1…

I used to watch Sunday morning shows about politics. But it’s all just more team sports, people hoping that their team will get up next time, and everything will change. Nothing changes. Did popularity contests at school result in a single…

Sad for the Lionesses, but maybe good for the UK. For too long their social collapse has been disguised with populist sporting euphoria that distracts from the social collapse. Only the bursting of that populist bubble might force change.…

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

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

To respond socially to the Covid debacle, because society is social, ask everyone you know about their experiences with infection. How many, how bad, how hard they’re having to juggle things. The great ‘living with Covid’ lie requires…

All ‘power’ is social. A lot of it is in what’s *not* said. The taboos. With Covid, the narratives of opening up and living with the virus were all about happy fun times. That’s the ‘power’. Try talking about Covid now, and watch the…

People won't talk about Covid in general terms, that would violate the peer pressure of 'the pandemic is over'. But they WILL talk about their *personal* experience of Covid. It's a confessional era, they'll talk about themselves all day.…

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 5% of any group of any size determine what everybody else does, through imitation. The constant calls for ‘the people’ to be smarter, to do things, are the framing we need to avoid. It’s the framing that says society is just millions…

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

The whole idea of ‘targeted protection’ is a social fantasy. It fundamentally misunderstands how societies work. It’s like saying people can piss in one end of the pool, and those who don’t like swimming in piss can swim at the other end.…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh To begin at…

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…

Is anybody making N95/P2 respirators that aren’t medical-white? Anti-masking is a social phenomenon, I’ve seen in my own experience that it’s easier to convince doubters to mask, if the masks aren’t white.

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…

As time goes on, Covid minimisation is revealed to just be straight out brutalising social conformity. Like at school, because it is school. We never leave. The kid being beaten up for wearing the wrong shoes. https://t.co/MV3tehZ8z4

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…

Because there are no countries. No societies. Just millions of teenagers ‘living their best lives’, well into old age. That’s what the market and the economy always was. Society stripped of everything adult. High school.…

A sane society would immediately and ruthlessly shut down mis- and disinformation. The zealots who prevent it with propaganda campaigns on ‘free speech’ also have books removed from public libraries. They’re lying, simple as that. Look at…

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…

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

This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employees (individual). Employers or ‘business’ then run the entire…

Conservatives shifted from conserving institutions, to conserving the economic status quo. Fundamentally different things. We should all be conservatives under the old definition. To respect the customs and traditions that emerge from…

We don’t have: - social surgery - social jet pilots - social physiotherapy - social quantum computing - social policing - social road construction -etc. And yet we have social ‘media’. It needs to be shut down, or heavily regulated.

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

There's a great lesson here in how dog-whistle politics works. Not every person who votes No will be like this, obviously. But every person like this will likely vote No. And that's the critical thing, and why dog-whistle politics was…

Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And huge supply of things for which there’s no demand (Covid,…

Think back to who were the most popular people you went to school with. Now imagine them running an entire society. That's what elections brought to democracy.

Jessica rightly noticing that there are no grown-ups left. Society is a high school. https://t.co/GnkIvKFD5R

‘The economy’ is a political Trojan Horse deliberately designed to substitute the economic status quo for all of society. ‘Lockdowns’ damaged economies only because they showed the profound SOCIAL interconnectedness of our lives.…

It mostly escaped analysis that our ‘economy’ grew in the latest figures, but peoples’ individual financial situation declined again. That’s not an anomaly, that’s the economy doing what it was designed to do, protect the status quo. It’s…

Talk about ‘balancing’ water use in the Murray-Darling basin between economic, social and environmental uses is the same bullshit balance of economy vs climate change, and economy vs Covid. Weasel words. These aren’t separate domains to…

This was such a ripper I want to ask 2 days in a row what society can't fight a pandemic, and educate its children at the same time? https://t.co/RYMSOgWFfa

One of the powerful things Hans Rosling did in his life was to get people to take their focus off the daily team sports of politics, and back onto reality. Rosling could show how so much was actually going much more right than we believe…

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…

Bad people understand group psychology. Good people think righteousness is a substitute. https://t.co/DZxpfkzv7K

The ‘mad Right’ are populists. It’s not about Left or Right, that’s comfortable old politics. Populism - using popularity as the sole metric of what is right - destroys all societies. Schoolyard social games, extended across all adult…

What’s happening in the US is a new industrial revolution. Which is EXACTLY what we need to fix climate change and Covid. No ‘balance’ required, what we call economies have always boomed when we fixed major social problems. Those…

This would make us fabulously rich. Economies boom when they address actual social problems. That's what the first Industrial Revolution did. For a fraction of the cost of a handful of submarines and ridiculous tax cuts.…

The 4-day working week on The Drum. Business of course sceptical, the ball and chain around the nation’s feet as always. Australian business is lazy, entitled, rent-seeking. Just wants a perpetual lazy status quo with most national income…

The clawback of everything ‘public’ exploded from the 1970s. You can see how they got away with it. Debt kept everything running, while public mechanisms were pulled apart. Debt is what allows the illusion that societies are economies.…

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…

Like I say, always go to the actuaries, and though them to the insurers. Where politics meets reality. Decades of dismantling public management of social risk and loading it all into individual mitigation like insurance is now collapsing.…

Many blame ‘capitalism’ for our woes, or praise it for what’s best about our lives. Like all -isms, it doesn’t even exist. The private ownership of the means of production through supply and demand markets is mythology. All of it reliant…

The ‘cost of living crisis’ in social terms is the ‘know your place peasants’ strategy. Not an analogy. We got a shift back to a public focus in the pandemic, that’s all now being brutally clawed back. Feudalism.

Yes the ALP have been hopeless in many ways. But politics is 99% framing, 1% elections. Once society was reframed as an economy, no electoral victory could save it. Until we stop talking about 'the economy' as an existing thing, nothing…

The faith in competition is an intrinsic part of the substitution of society with an economy. Scale brings economies of scale. The problem isn’t scale, it’s lack of regulation. Competition is the libertarian ‘invisible hand’ i.e. bullshit.…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

True freedom is the freedom to not have to do anything, or go anywhere. If your society’s obsession is moving around, you’re a prisoner.

Job numbers are better. (The ‘economy’ is always just a handful of numbers.) The actual SOCIAL reality of that included people taking on extra work, to have enough money to live. The economy has no connection with social realities at all.…

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the…

Elections and populism more generally are the way all those kids at school who ran brutal status hierarchies maintain control when they enter adult life. They can't believe their luck. Look around and tell me you don't see it.

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

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

Some stories ram home the unreality. The debate over Qatar and airfares. In a sane society the air travel debate would be an energy debate, not an airfare debate. Only 2-4% of the world fly internationally. About 1% of the world is…

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.

If we incinerate the planet for the economy, it's worth asking what the point of the economy is? Any long-term aims or vision? It has none, except to protect the status quo. There's not one other objective that even its supporters could…

You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in Australian history. Ongoing. Here’s my review of our response, a year ahead of the official review report. /1 We began the…

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 should be absolutely clear now that ‘the economy’ is really a social invention to strip away about 2 centuries of social progress. Under cover of pseudoscientific econo-babble. https://t.co/9szVDV3Ex8

While we keep seeing individuals and groups as two separate things, the libertarians will win. They’re one thing. Groups are made of individuals, individuals exist only because of groups. Groups are one ‘phase’ of individual life. Like…

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…

Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it to a fictitious market is a good thing. But…there’s a big 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.…

Clean air should be the thing that supercharges a new industrial revolution. All industrial revolutions arise from social problems. The 'economy' booms in industrial revolutions, there's no binary here. https://t.co/h8g80lCyvG

Because society is social, and being a contrarian is a social grouping. Which will mean opposing anything perceived as ‘mainstream’. https://t.co/oVaz1jGHkX

The Tories could just say 'yep, we're going to lose, we've had 13 years.' But populism will never surrender a vote, even if it means completely trashing generations of hard-won social progress. https://t.co/wIBtoUcS4Q

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…

I once coined a term for the social system that replaced what we call democracy. I call it a sloganocracy. When you strip away collective social institutions, all that bonds people together is slogans. Orwell knew it. It would be fun to…

Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from millions of isolated people is WRONG. A practical example shows it,…

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

A true revolution in thinking would be to unpack the ‘job’ as the centre of social life. Because it’s a social creation, vesting ultimate authority in society to an employment relationship. How many people have jobs is a banal, secondary…

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…

When you strip away any social, community basis for relationship between strangers, who live and work inside job markets, it can seem a solution to the ‘loneliness’ this creates to re-form adolescent style friendship groups, for adults. I…

Yes. Though culturally, the standout here for me is how casually we (2-4% of the world) fly around the world for social events. Like going to the shop for milk. https://t.co/tyxcX8RZbk

If you unpack economic growth, nearly always it's about people. As in simply having more of them. Because there's no such thing as an economy, societies are social. That truth is going to hit us harder every single year, until we…

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

The great con of ‘the economy’, and also the fastest way to see its true reality, is that it never changes. No matter how complex and different the problems facing societies are, the economy’s metrics remain the same. Inflation, jobs,…

“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.” Kurt Vonnegut

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…

How about a show each day or week that focuses only on the reality of the issues debated? The actual progress against outcomes? A complete rejection of ‘he said, she said’ journalism? That asks only ‘ok, what’s happening in REALITY on this…

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…

The reason insurance is unaffordable or unavailable is that idiot politicians have privatised society's risks. The same politicians will rally the public against the insurance companies, in their usual diversionary, populist ways.…

If you feel despair about Covid, I think it helps to remember that everything you do as an individual to counter it is automatically multiplied many times over, even exponentially. No other social problem is that tractable to individual…

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…

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

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.

For me any election or referendum win *or* loss is meaningless. Popularity contests are worthless. What is popular has never and can never represent anything except a temporary shift in social group dynamics. It has zero connection with…

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

Politics is social, not political. It never works by people processing information. It's about trust. We elect people to deal with things for us. When one side opposes, No will always win, because it breaks the feeling of trust that things…

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…

Yes! This is the social collapse we're seeing, where we mistake the past 70 years as some sort of default normal life that happens by itself. Without institutions there is no collective memory to remind us of this. Why libertarians attack…

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…

@djf0001 try this for BlueSky: bsky-social-zivwm-56v63

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.

The only reality modern governments will acknowledge, whether Left or Right, is 'the economy'. Which isn't even a thing, it's a slogan uttered to defend the status quo i.e. doing nothing. https://t.co/KOinr08aHr

It's not greed that runs societies. 'The economy' really means a society refusing to regulate anything. Each to their own. Without regulation everything needs to keep running no matter how stupid, or the lot falls over. There's no 'why' to…

They don't have a clue what to do, because nobody does. It's like reading tea leaves. People who defend 'the economy' can't explain one thing about how it works, when it stops working. There is no 'it'. It's a handful of indicators…

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.…

I wonder if we're getting closer to an understanding that only 'the economy' gets action from any government. And that's just a handful of indicators of how well the status quo is operating. It's a status quo perpetual motion machine.…

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

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…

Another window into our increasingly adolescent society is Halloween. The rapid growth of it as a celebration in Australia. If you go to one of the local events, what stands out is the passion adults have for it all, including the…

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…

The usual inanities about AI on #QandA, that we need humans to do all the creative, innovative things, and leave AI to do the donkey work. Nearly all humans aren’t creative, entirely habitual and imitative in everything they think and feel.

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…

The social/ cultural foundation of all society - social conformity - continues to confuse us. People would rather die than go against what’s popular. Only public institutions ever bypassed this model by creating processes that transcended…

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

Even aged care facilities trying to prevent these infections won't be able to. Society doesn't exist as a set of independent air-tight bubbles. https://t.co/q3f8JMgOsa

“We know that it does not take everyone on Earth to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes

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…

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

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

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

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

It's 70 years of anti-public politics, what we call 'the economy', as a substitute for society. There is no we, no public, in an economy. The people who invented the economy told us 'there is no such thing as society'. And that's where…

‘Stubborn inflation’ is really stubborn refusal to rethink monetarism as a theory of society. Where money replaces ordinary regulatory democracy. Thats what monetarism was invented to do, replace democracy with a market, mediated by money.…

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,…

Ever noticed that 'the economy' is completely party-agnostic, in political terms? That no matter who is elected and their belief systems, they will all end up following the dictates of a handful of entirely arbitrary statistical…

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…

@DrCameronMurray showing how functioning societies involve governments intervening. The small government politics of the past 70 years has reversed social evolution to entrench adolescent high school life as adult life. A ‘market’ is a…

It’s frustrating that it’s not more obvious that ‘the economy’ is just ‘the market’. A social invention, a fiction, pretending humans live as isolated individuals. They never have, and never will. The proponents of the economy don’t, they…

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. That's why we invented the idea of the public, to recognise that inter-relationship at the heart of every society. If we don't protect the weakest links, the whole lot collapses. The economy…

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

It's the well that hasn't run dry for them since John Howard. Desperately behind in the polls, throw civil society under a bus, dog-whistling racism. Again. The ALP is too clueless to nullify it with a counter-strategy. #auspol…

Again, socially the only reason we had 70 years of pretty good public health practice was that 2 world wars and an earlier pandemic suppressed existing social hierarchies enough to open a space for a public to emerge. Without those, the…

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…

The 20th century made massive progress in public health, schooling, and a whole range of other public things, for only one reason. Wars destroyed existing social hierarchies. Only the near destruction of society itself allowed progress to…

You see here how only total catastrophe really shifts societies. The Tories looking to cut welfare even further, to fund inheritance tax cuts for the wealthy. On no measure other than the social team sports of protecting an existing social…

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…

There is only one freedom. Everything else is just team sports. Also why universities are so important, as a constant irritation to the wider team sports of society. And why societies constantly attack them. The LNP sacked tens of…

Advocates for the economy hated lockdowns the most. The same people who say society doesn’t exist, and replace it with a market of billions of separate individuals. Lockdowns were the perfect example OF a market, of society stripped of its…

All major progress in history comes from catastrophe, the only force strong enough to break social hierarchies. That’s what happened in the early-to-mid 20th century, and why we got 70 years of public health. Now over, until the next…

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…

I’m amazed the basic social mechanisms of life go so unnoticed. How the exclusionary group dynamics of school replicate in the workplace, with even merit-based systems ruthlessly gamed for personal advantage, and widespread cliques. That’s…

Society is social groups. The anti-lockdown group is also often the anti-EV, anti-renewables group. One of the ways to really wind them up is to debunk the idea of the ‘grunt’ of ICEs. In reality combustion engines are puny, and always…

Society is social. Imitative rivalry, and status, in all things. Covid, climate change, housing, schooling - everything. Always follow the votes, what's popular. https://t.co/ZaGvb0rFOD

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…

There’s growing realisation that everything we see for both Covid and climate is really basic human social behaviour. Societies are not run on information, they’re run on relationships. https://t.co/ZKWfkZ7WLg

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…

Another window into the fundamentally social world that is most of human life is the ‘selfie’. A selfie is a picture of you as *others* see you, not as you see you, except for occasionally in a mirror. But for many their self *is* their…

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

A real insight into how societies are just social. Nearly all Australians won't benefit from these cuts. But politicians still fear ditching them, because *socially* people see themselves as nascent millionaires. They imitate and emulate…

All social evolution: 1) Catastrophe (natural or human made) 2) Institution invented to manage if it ever happens again 3) Institution governs human behaviour, sometimes for generations 4) Absence of further catastrophe makes institution…

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

At face value this could seem an argument that hybrid immunity is working. But as Karen’s group point out, this isn’t a good news Covid story, more a good news flu and dementia story. https://t.co/VjkKQHVkvN

Tesla is smart because it understands a big part of getting a transition to EVs will be breaking a lot of the old ICE macho fantasies. It’s a social much more than a technological change. Its stunts are designed to focus on social…

This song is about peer pressure. Which used to fade in adult life, ‘I was young and caught in the crowd’. Now adult life is just as caught, negotiating every day what’s ‘trending’. What some call capitalism is just the playground,…

The Tories should be in jail. Lets go a step further and call out the belief system they implement, which makes them incapable of governing anything, especially a pandemic. The idea that ‘there is no such thing as society’. How was that…

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…

Pockets of brain-dead morons have had far greater political success in this pandemic than groupings of our finest minds. The morons were skilfully led, by vested interests who knew to turn it into a social/cultural war. Into team sports.…

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…

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

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 Resolution Foundation in the UK has provided some fascinating data that show one thing very clearly. That 'politics' is always just social groups battling for different status and thereby share of society's resources. A few examples…

At the UK Covid Inquiry lots of the usual tosh about ‘balancing’ social and economic impact against public health action. Public health IS that balancing. That’s why it was invented. By those with economic power, to save their economies.

There is no 'we'. The politics of the past 70 years was all about removing that we, put there after WW2 to solve problems, after control was wrestled from high-status members of society through the wars. RIP the public, 1945-1979.…

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…

I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen. The corollary of this is something even bigger. /1…

None of the States are likely to break free from the national ‘strategy’. Groupthink and group loyalty, at National Cabinet. It’s why Morrison invented it, to bypass public health infrastructure. https://t.co/E3UHNCQNr4

And that was always the point. To reverse the post-Victorian changes, the invention of a ‘public’, as a response to the catastrophes of WW1 and WW2. The social hierarchies that preceded those wars never accepted that shift.…

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

That feeling that society is falling apart and there’s no hope is an adjustment. It’s the developed world coming back to the pack. It’s how the developing world has lived for generations. Privilege is when your individual needs are met…

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.

From Scientific American. Information and truth are part of an economy of social relationships. They don't run or regulate societies, without social relationships making them do that. https://t.co/6c8ENzlHtx

When somebody asks ‘why are you wearing that mask?’, they’re really asking why you’re violating the unspoken laws of the groups you live in. It’s a direct window into the machinery of how societies work. Societies don’t process…

People won’t wear masks now for the same reason they wanted coloured and patterned masks when they would wear them. Human behaviour is social, always. Fashions, fads. Now the fashion is to not wear them at all. It was never about science.…

If you look you’ll see the same social mechanisms that drive everything, everywhere. High status individuals drive behaviour, as others imitate them. Applies to Covid, climate change, perfume - everything. Societies don’t run on…

Fascinating carbon offsetting scheme in the UK, where polluting firms pay to retrofit social housing for energy efficiency, solar, battery and heat pumps. Link in alt text. https://t.co/e5Jmleap1D

@MChandlerMather this UK scheme, re-purposing carbon offsetting towards energy efficient and renewables-powered social housing. If we did the same here to not only retrofit but also build efficient social housing, it’d tick both climate…

How did we get affordable housing for all? The same and only way we ever got better outcomes for all in the 20th century. Two global wars that smashed existing social status hierarchies. 70+ years of peace restored those hierarchies.…

Apparently it's 'vaccine fatigue' and 'vaccine hesitancy'. That exhausting process of getting a needle in your arm. Anti-vax is a powerful social movement, and needs to be fought, brutally. Not explained away by non-existent things like…

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…

The vehicle, like the job, is the standard bearer of anti-social, anti-public forces in our societies. Margaret Thatcher's favourite tool to dismantle public life. Political libertarians LOVE roads, because roads displace and disempower…

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

Service associations from over a century ago show how what we call 'business' has changed. Networking was a focus, but very quickly it became about community service. Today's business operates under a model (the economy) where…

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…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

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…

The UK is a global HQ for libertarians. It still worships the twice-annual honours. Libertarianism was always a con to replace existing hierarchies with libertarians themselves, while pretending to be levelling society. When challenged, UK…

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 don't block people because I don't want to debate them. I block them when they want to debate things that aren't debates, and which damage society by even being entertained. 'We need to have the conversation' is a classic propaganda…

All of what a society does is connected. Energy is the lynchpin. Renewables have created a gaping wound in the status quo, and remain the fastest way to uproot all of the entrenched stupidities, including for Covid. Covid and climate…

I think this sort of thing still assumes people are a type of information processor. In reality people are social, they take their cues from what others are doing, not from information. It ignores status, which is what determines what…

Read this story. The same fundamental truths of human behaviour repeat at every scale. 95% of people will follow the lead of about 5% of people in the group. It's not about information. It's about status. https://t.co/2t16GNjo4D

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…

This is the game-changer. The data that shows conclusively that you don't 'live alongside' pandemics, they destroy your economies. The ECONOMIC data is in, and it's *already* a financial catastrophe. As large as the GFC, and still growing,…

70+ years into the 'there is no such thing as society' political project, that's exactly where we've arrived. This wasn't accidental, this was the stated plan. Even in the theatres now. And absolutely on the roads, it's feral out there.…

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…

Eldest child just finished uni. Most of the campus experience ruined by Covid. Next child starting this year. Unis are drunk on the Kool Aid of hybrid immunity so the experience will be ruined for them as well. Forced to choose between…

This is where we need to reframe. All massive boosts to what's called 'the economy' come from addressing urgent social need. The original Industrial Revolution was about social need. Both climate change and Covid are HUGE opportunities to…

The calm, common sense authority of this. Compared to the shrill hysteria of Covid minimisers, whose only passion is policing a status quo that they profit from handsomely. https://t.co/fUXyWwNse9

Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what fires up these libertarians? Short thread on how peculiar that…

Bentley years ago described something I say a lot here, that all society is social, team sports between groups. Even politics. Great summary here, really worth your time to understand the world we’re living in. h/t @cityatlas…

The economy crowd won't rest until every perturbation of the status quo from pre-pandemic times has been erased, and any chance of taking collective action against a future pandemic is eliminated. https://t.co/sVZBQ7KC1T

The push to ignore a pandemic and get back to ‘normal life’. What is that normal life? What great visionary projects are we engaged in, as a human species? What’s our moonshot that makes ignoring a pandemic worthwhile? Sadly it mostly…

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

We need to completely re-frame the challenges we're currently facing. They're not 'Covid and climate change threatening the economy'. Let's keep it all in-house, in the economy itself. Covid and climate change are the economy being held…

Populism/popularity is a game of imitative rivalry. if there aren't two meaningful opposing teams, spectators will create them, no matter how hopeless one may be. Polls nearly always show this, how 'the gap closes'. https://t.co/eaawTJHQjG

Having worked in nuclear engineering, the article did nothing to convince me this is true. It did convince me that the business model of influencers is to continuously generate attention. https://t.co/MvTNgNNAfg

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

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…

The lands of Thatcher and Reagan, the champions of libertarian politics, are what they were centuries ago, again. Feudal societies. That's not an accident. 'Markets' were designed to throw history into reverse by stripping away post-war…

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…

You can’t ring-fence people in a society. Whether ‘the vulnerable’, or anybody. Not just for moral reasons, it’s not PHYSICALLY possible. Society is not the interaction of people who exist independently of other people. Everybody is…

Lockdowns proved the lie that the economy is. They stopped *social* activity, the activity the economy was invented to deny. ‘There is no such thing as society’. Lockdowns should have had no economic effect. Instead economies couldn’t…

I have several friends who are GPs, whose attitude towards Covid I’d describe as professionally negligent. Because I believe nearly all human behaviour is social behaviour, it seemed worthwhile to talk about why they may be like this. The…

It's SO important to understand that our Covid debacle is not a decision to do nothing. It's a decision to privatise the action. Society wouldn't function with no action. As Alcoa shows, that's as stupid economically as it is medically.…

Freedom for only some parts of society is really privilege. Living with a pandemic so you can go on pointless recreational travel junkets isn't freedom for the HCWs who then have to treat you, or the travel industry staff and locals who…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

The common minimiser theme, that they and their friends and families want to have their social lives back, and ‘Zero Covids’ are free to continue to obsess about Covid alone. There’s a very recent public health shift that highlights how…

It puzzles many that cutting tax cuts to a tiny number of rich people can be such a political hot potato. But if you understand society socially, it’s very simple. People aspire to have status. They don’t hate the rich, they want to be…

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…

The pandemic is part of a long political tradition. The 70-year assault on all things public, the privatisation of society. Public education, transport, housing, roads etc, had already fallen. Public health was just next on the list.…

We’re living in a completely fake political war. Where one side of the war argues for the benefits of government, and the other argues to get rid of most of it. A thread on why it’s a fake debate. /1 https://t.co/JWYRBTxtOS Sometimes you…

Cameron Green has an active Covid infection, and so stands off to one side of the player group. He’s playing. An accurate headline would be ‘Cameron Green plays while suffering from Australia’s third leading cause of death’.…

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

Societies are social. King Charles’ prostate treatment has caused a surge in interest from Brits about prostate health. Humans live in social status hierarchies, following the lead of the dominant status individuals in their groups.

One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that knowledge is a specific vocation, that should never be shared…

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

Populism needs to be understood to be beaten. It brings to the surface the true mechanisms of human belief and knowledge. A mechanism of trust, not of understanding. We trust others, in all areas of life, to know things. And they trust us…

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 idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1…

Even the IMF now calling out the idiot ideologies, really just thinly disguised looting of public wealth for private benefit. It’s not social progress to offload the economies of scale of public investment onto private wallets.…

There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocracies. We assume we’ve progressed since those times. But the…

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…

THIS is what ‘living with the virus’ really means. It means individuals masking the impact of infections to maintain their compliance with the social norm of the pandemic being over. https://t.co/V1a9fHPZhw

We’re ’living with the virus’ in the way we used to live with domestic violence. By ignoring it. It’s social. The sickness is all out there, but to admit it would violate the group norms. Doing that is more terrifying to people, than…

I read every word Shaw wrote, growing up. To this I would say most of what we attribute to the use of the human mind is really imitative social behaviour. Minds are not changed, different beliefs achieve greater or lesser success,…

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…

I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post…

In 1928 DH Lawrence wrote ‘A Letter from Germany’. Novelists are necessary to diagnose a zeitgeist. This is more than 10 years before WW2. He knew then what was coming. Compare with our ‘peace-and-production’ fake normality today. /1…

Elections attract corrupt money like shit attracts flies. The solution isn’t donation reform, it’s to get rid of elections. We don’t select any other person for any other position in society using popularity as the metric.…

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…

All of society is connected. Those who advocated for 'living with' Covid were really looking to destroy what remains of public institutions. It was political. They succeeded, and the damage is still spreading. https://t.co/XfUBzdFNTy

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…

h/t to everybody daily maintaining their own shelters from infection. A society that weaponises the most basic act of sheltering from harm so people can go on cruises doesn’t deserve to survive. https://t.co/GFOTWJsv82

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.…

Pathogens often follow a similar pattern to human societies. An invasion stage, with a lot of deaths, as pathogens fight to occupy territory (our bodies). Followed by a long occupation stage, where casualties shift to ongoing chronic…

Brilliant initiative. And it would have been even without a pandemic, enormous numbers of days are lost across society to airborne infectious disease, every year. Air quality in general is also appalling in many locations.…

The housing crisis is one of our greatest social issues. And it’s easily fixed, if we drop all the econo-babble about supply and demand and just build cheap houses. Pretty much all of our problems would go away if we ditched ‘the economy’…

UK Guardian. 70 years of pulverising everything public leads to an each to their own slugfest. Our societies are falling apart. That was the plan, again the libertarians never denied they don’t believe society is even a thing.…

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.

This isn’t a funding question. It’s a status question. The answer is always social. Comprehensive education was dismantled in Australia by turning education into a status rivalry. People will bankrupt themselves to try to climb this status…

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

That shift since 2021, to say that peoples' social relationships (often described as their 'mental health') have to be balanced against their risk of infection. Public health was invented to create a clean PUBLIC space, so that balance…

We need to take back control of the overall narrative of this pandemic. That we’re now living with Covid because anything else was impossible. That outcome, that surrender, was planned from the start and succeeded. It was politics, pure…

The old normal pretends living with Covid saved it. All it did was accelerate every way the old normal was already broken. That’s what pandemics have always done, acted as accelerants for the collapse of broken social systems. Only strong…

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

My wife and kids are part of the cascading health and social problems that are still multiplying from shoving teachers and kids back into schools with zero Covid protections. The big push is on to prevent any future public health action of…

This is how seductive seeing society as an economy is. I don’t actually think more competition is the answer to grocery prices. That’s part of the mythology of market economies, that they operate via competition, adopted by all sides as an…

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 assault on public health with Covid was a fundamental shift in all social behaviour. Public health is a social technology. Cookers used the pandemic for recruitment and massive strategic expansion. We’re seeing the result everywhere.…

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…

Three have been many outrageous slogan-driven violations of public health in this pandemic. But to me the most fundamental violation is one that is still not spoken about enough. That we’re simply ignoring what a pandemic actually IS. We…

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.…

The anti-mask folk are the same people who bleat about individual freedom, clearly not happy people are expressing their own, by wearing a mask. It’s basic social behaviour, they’re a cult, enforcing unanimity with the cult.…

The Plague describes an entire town locked down, to prevent a pandemic spreading to wider society. The anti-lockdown NSW Gov did this with the western suburbs of Sydney in this pandemic. That didn’t disturb them. What disturbed them was…

If you call something a 'business cycle', it's allowed to put your society through eternal waves of delusional enthusiasms and crashing recessions. Not coincidentally also an epidemic infectious disease pattern. Uncontrolled societies…

Social infrastructure is crumbling. Because our political model, ‘the economy’, is toxic to community of any kind. A community is not a market. While we keep pretending it is, we’ll keep destroying what’s left of our societies.…

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…

It was in the late-1970s that 'there is no such thing as society' political libertarians took control, including here in London. As society crumbled, corporate entities exploded in size and influence to monetise the void. Their palaces now…

The economy is lunacy. The ‘target band’ inflation rate is just one of a whole list of fantasy indicators with no meaningful link back to actual reality. This con is what all leaders now focus on, marinating economic KPIs that are all…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

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…

NSW Health advice. This is my age group. My mum tells me I had a humdinger of a case of measles in the late-60s/early 70s. I'm guessing this means they would assume I'm immune and no shots required. But even this varies between countries.…

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…

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle…

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…

It sounds elitist, I know, but a society that swarms to watch MAFS is incapable of solving any of the emergencies it’s currently facing.

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

If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of economies, it’s all of human life, since humans appeared. It’s our…

The ultimate failure of ‘the economy’ as a social system is that it literally destroys societies. The basic act of reproducing itself becomes unaffordable. https://t.co/3uoxmOQ5sw https://t.co/RAXApSyAkD

This is orders of magnitude more dangerous than tyrants in Europe in the mid-20th century, where we stopped everything for more than a decade to stop them. 'The economy' is why we're doing nothing. Designed to obstruct all action, to…

It’s been enjoyable to see the concept of a ‘per capita recession’ trotted out. A slow realisation that the statistical indicators we call ‘the economy’ often bear little relationship to our actual lives. It reveals what’s really in play…

Governments doing a modicum of planning and investment was once common. Now only Asia seems to understand that profound social change comes from government planning and investment. Meanwhile we sit and wait for the 'market' to deliver.…

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…

People invented the State. Because they wanted it. It does critical things that weren't happening without it. We should see anti-State ideologies for what they are, social wrecking balls dismantling centuries of social progress. Whether…

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…

Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

It’s worth remembering that the prevalence numbers are not independent by age group. Much of that 18-54 year-old prevalence for example is likely parents and other family members catching Covid from their school-aged children.…

Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs.…

HVAC systems is what schools need. Not just reverse-cycle air conditioners, that don’t introduce fresh air or remove stale air. Not just windows. The NSW Government’s Covid ventilation audit of schools was a desktop audit that resulted in…

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…

Ventilate schools. Not just to protect teachers and students (though why that isn’t reason enough is damning proof what a shithole social model an economy is), but because schools are where Covid goes to breed, and then spread everywhere.…

What happens when you turn a society into an economy. https://t.co/ayVdwVaqlB

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…

Covid’s John Snow water pump is school classrooms. Identify specific causes, target those. No need for grand political narratives, society-wide disruption or the team sports of ideologies. https://t.co/RmWYUNqJNj

Incorporating social mixing patterns into epidemiological modelling. This (to me) is where society understood as networked hubs is critical. And this: "...school children are the ‘bridge’ linking household and community transmission."…

Covid minimisers are a classic case of a network structure, mistaken as a society-wide phenomenon. They’re a *tiny* number of players, who form hubs that then feed skinny networks out into society. Creating an illusion of mass support.…

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…

My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been…

Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 2006. The ‘Future Fund’, Australia’s biggest sovereign wealth…

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.…

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

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.

Society has no top or bottom. It’s completely flat. Top and bottom is an effect of delegation by a large number to a small number, who the large number then follow. https://t.co/h8nhl88Vw8

All the change many of us are looking and voting for, will come only when an older generation passes away. Generations create and occupy an entire social world, which they usually take with them to their graves.

From my pinned tweet, American POWs in the Korean War. Groups of any size, right up to organisations and full societies, don’t have tops and bottoms. There is no top-down or bottom-up. So what is hierarchy? The Korean War experience shows…

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…

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…

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

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

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.…

We believe Western societies operate as ‘market economies’. Look at the caravan of market spruikers shout down Albo this week for daring to suggest government invest in manufacturing. But we never have been market economies. /1…

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.…

So many of society’s secrets are visible on the roads. Like changing lanes. Where individuals trying to get an advantage free up space in the lane they’re leaving, while jamming up the lane they’re entering. Repeat ad infinitum.…

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…

From a recent Independent SAGE update. A great group, I’m not interested in pile-ons of any kind. But what’s striking here is the timidity, the surrender. If this summary analysis is true, we have Covid on the ropes. NOW would be the time…

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…

Another easily identifiable hub that could be shut down to restore civil society. It’s these same hubs that generate the hysterical public narratives about free speech and oppression, that make that shutting down a much bigger task than it…

Political libertarians affect outrage at identity politics. But identity politics IS political libertarianism. If all collective aspects of human life are removed, the only politics left is of the individual and their identity. That’s the…

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…

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.…

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…

I’m happy to be in the control group for the ‘if we all keep getting infected with Covid, we’ll stop getting infected with Covid’ experiment. Doing my bit for science. Remember that? Memories.

The spread of child-free spaces in a society that already isn’t having any children. What does that say to you? Sometimes just zoom out a little, and meanings become obvious. https://t.co/dQSS0opUFw

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…

Schools were the 'sacrificial anode' of most countries' Covid response. Infect all the kids to (apparently) create herd immunity. Spin it by weeping crocodile tears about lost education and social contact. https://t.co/dVI6Q1xfPh

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…

It looks like New York has measles. But there's the 'clumpiness' of society, networked into hubs, as plain as the nose on your face. h/t @DavidJoffe64 and @ejustin46 https://t.co/K59WbtGzso

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…

My great friend @DavidJoffe64 taught me about dysautonomia. When your body’s automatic functions suddenly go haywire, as he sees sometimes in Long Covid. There’s a social correlate of dysautonomia. Populism is social dysautonomia. /1…

Isn't it curious that when we travel, supposedly to 'experience the world' and 'see new things', we just end up playing exactly the same games of imitative rivalry we use in everything else we do? Imitating others, to try to outdo them.…

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…

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

The size of business is a key way we can see how all business is just social too. All of society is. What many don’t realise is how many small businesses fail. And always have. 1/7 https://t.co/Eq8PQmz8Vp https://t.co/HH3Ubc8UcI It’s a…

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.

Society is social. The EV debates slug it out over the science and engineering. It’s really just an ageing society, wanting the world to stay as it is. https://t.co/wNZpWz8qXm https://t.co/XTP0mZd6Ik

After WW2 we built a public-focused society. From the 1970s, that was replaced with an economy. https://t.co/UiTXHNjkXF

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

The ongoing battle to convince us that a few months of restricted social movement led to entire populations with plummeting immunity levels to a big list of diseases. Oh, and also flu is now an all-year disease. https://t.co/lUrwC9DWbG via…

The travel juggernaut taking another victim. I love that people ‘experiencing the world’ happens in great waves of social comparison. Locations ‘trend’. Most travel never leaves home. It’s about transacting imitative rivalry.…

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

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,…

Society is social. None of that Left/Right daily team sports is meaningful in any way. All of our problems are social. This one is the biggie. Most of our declining societies is the sclerotic personality of aged populations.…

Target the hubs. Schools. Covid isn’t everywhere, you don’t need to shut society down. Just target where it breeds and spreads. And give the next generation clean air to breathe. Sounds like something a sane society would have been doing…

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.

I think progress is never about changing peoples’ minds. Their ‘minds’ are really their social group or team. Progress is them adopting your ideas, and calling them their own. And claiming they were their ideas all along. Society is…

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…

Society is social. Everyone looks out for their team, in competition with other teams. https://t.co/5ozudf3g0h

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…

Societies are always just social. And historically all that has created significant social change has been disaster and catastrophe. Housing as just one more example. The hierarchies of social life are not disrupted without catastrophe.…

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…

The same social models repeat throughout history, just with different names. The landed gentry were once the great landlords. The Top 5 landlord occupations in Oz today are: 1. Surgeons 2. Anaesthetists 3. Internal medicine specialists 4.…

Parenthetically, wealth comes from social status. Ageing societies obviously will place a lot of status in medicine. They use a lot of it. All societies are social. In every detail. Unsee it. https://t.co/HCDffRxRrM

*nods* Imitation is the foundational human act. And humans compete in teams, between rival imitative options. Imitative rivalry. All the dots will join when you plug that in. https://t.co/Yz0FIXNLkL

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.…

For those who believe democracy = elections. There’s not one objective way in which this race should be close. Close to two decades of abject incompetence from the LNP, and they’ve provided no policy in Opposition. 1/4…

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…

People who don't study history think fascism is like an operating system you install, somewhere, off a USB drive. In reality it's when popularity politics overwhelms the checks and balances of civic society.

Regulatory capture 101. Government 'intervenes' in the market, like it sticks its nose in where it doesn't belong Governments created the market. It's a regulatory entity. This is the substitution of a society by an economy, in plain…

The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is what should *change* the world. New knowledge, to fix problems. We’ve flipped this, and it changed everything. /1…

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…

I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid is a great example. The in some ways misleadingly called ‘desire lines’ - self-generated footpaths - are a great way to see it.…

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

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

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

In the heady days after WW2, when rebuilding societies rather than accumulating wealth in existing status hierarchies was central to our societies, we took real joy in defeating infectious disease. https://t.co/QQM5rYQHwj

Things are expensive in cycling because it was captured by imitative rivalry. Look at any public activity or debate, and watch it become a pissing contest over status, as imitative rivalry sets in. 1/2 https://t.co/L2HQ1CIpU6 Or take air…

Despite the blather about ‘lockdowns’ damaging economies, in reality they were a temporary lifeline to a social model that was in terminal decline. Societies are not economies. They will keep collapsing until we understand that. (Link in…

The ideas behind an ‘economy’ are fundamentally at odds with the social realities I described in this thread. That we act as individual consumers, in markets, optimising collective outcomes. That’s never how people behave. ‘The economy’ is…

All politics is really just social life, re-branded. Our major political parties for example are incapable of freeing themselves from the elderly constituents they’ve rewarded so richly, for so long. https://t.co/n2jJmIYkRI…

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

Thanks to @GosiaGasperoPhD for this. The problem we’ve had selling this message I think is that Covid minimisers have successfully created an impression that Covid is everywhere, always. So life as we know it has to be shut down to beat…

I think it’s only those who don’t do any essential work for society who can’t see that we’re in the middle of social collapse. Things are falling apart. Everywhere. Pandemics reboot societies, they don’t disrupt them. They destroy the old…

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

A Judas Goat is trained to lead other animals to slaughter. All social animals, including humans, form social hierarchies around leaders. Our National Cabinet are Judas Goats, for Covid slaughter. The numbers don’t lie. (Thanks to…

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

Society is a whole collection of material problems that have material solutions. Most of what we do politically has no impact on those problems. It’s social status team sports played using those material problems as a stadium. There is no…

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…

It’s easy to think you’re escaping political binaries just by picking one side of them. For example the solution to the disaster of most privatisation isn’t to nationalise, to make it public. 1/4 As soon as you pick a team in that debate,…

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

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…

They’re also happily buying petrol at more than $2/litre, and telling pollsters Peter Dutton is a credible alternative PM. There is only one underlying logic to our public lives now. Imitative rivalry (team sports). All things can be made…

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…

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

The penny is dropping that populism is the real enemy. And that 'the market' (a social fantasy, no humans act in that way, they act in teams) is a hopeless way forward. https://t.co/SBZmWBSEjl

We extrapolate the desired collective endpoint (end of pandemic) to individual actions. Which leads a status rush to buy only the best masks, and best air purifiers, and fit-testing etc. We only need to SLOW infections. Maths will do the…

"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…

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

A prominent English motoring journalist counted over 150 successive EV-bashing stories in key UK media outlets. The status quo makes sure these narratives never let up. Only catastrophe will shift them. Flood the Australian car market with…

The team sports that drive societies are sometimes actual team sports. But not an analogy, it’s the same basic social mechanism. The LNP and ALP are neck-and-neck in the polls, despite the LNP being laughable. But it’s not about any sort…

It’s struck a few people as odd that in rapidly ageing societies, we’re doing nothing to prevent mass deaths of the old from Covid. You’d think old societies would look after the old. Another beautiful window into the actual culture we…

I've been banging this drum. Fixing Covid doesn't mean shutting society down. Mostly it means getting fresh air into schools. Imagine even needing to ARGUE to do that. https://t.co/Q3snh3PwZ5 https://t.co/1zPzqZg4Vm

“Booy said the surge in pertussis was no surprise as the population reemerged from almost two years of social distancing and renewed its socialising in large crowds.” Um, all that white space. https://t.co/sPylmvXhSW https://t.co/OQdbUevuYJ

Those who are most desired are not desired for who they are. But because they are desired by others. Imitative rivalry. We want what others want. https://t.co/VbcRrcsdcv

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

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…

See also the t-shirt, ideas map social networks. The ideas are just a currency of team building, irrelevant in themselves. https://t.co/wKKQmHPucr

All human activity is just social activity, even political activity. Which means the categories of ‘Left’, “Centre’ and ‘Right’ are meaningless, and need to be replaced with social descriptions. In reality Left-Centre-Right is a continuum…

Windows into populism. People don’t desire things, they desire what other people desire. It’s a social sorting process, to create teams and hierarchies. This is what fads and fashions are. Interior design, as an example. 1/6…

“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…

Like I always say. People will rather die than go against the group/team. We never leave high school. https://t.co/L9Nw9z2Ka1

Only disasters shift societies meaningfully. When Hitler was mobilising in the 1930s, the world mobilised at emergency levels to oppose him. Climate change is a much, much bigger problem than Hitler. Why we need the Chinese right now. /1…

The individual experience of heat exhaustion has a sobering message for us as societies. We can stumble on, thinking we’re fine. While critical life support systems are in terminal decline. This applies at the level of whole societies too.…

Conspiracy theories are not misinformation or disinformation. They're social groups. The way out of the rabbit hole is through other social groups. All society is social, not informational. https://t.co/EjBQYMtJXr

When there’s no leadership, so you have to do it all yourself, in the face of peer pressure to do nothing. These are today’s heroes. https://t.co/qUmp1xfp4J

And once again, artificial intelligence knows how to fix our problems. AI is actual thinking. Humans mostly don’t think. They compete for social status, in teams. I vote for AI. https://t.co/xYCu4wFOFm

It’s difficult to find a group more lacking in self-awareness and basic cognitive processing, than travellers. https://t.co/1Why6qPSno

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…

The questions we now have to ask. What a society. https://t.co/P2Ly3fRZ1d

How social change happens. https://t.co/ThCA8OUbP6

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…

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

The greatest achievement in all human history was public health, including vaccines. Doubling life expectancies in about a century. It’s a measure of how lethal populism is that even that can become a team sport. To generate social status.…

‘The economy’ is really just the team sports of imitative rivalry, escalated to a model for all of society. ‘Competition’. Said to be an intrinsic good, we even have bodies overseeing it. All it does is entrench team sports. And reinforce…

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…

We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a GW of nuclear power? In the US and UK, about $25 billion. /1 https://t.co/j4KxaimtUw At that price, if we were to replace our…

The incredible inertia of the status quo is already dampening recent efforts in renewable energy and EVs, as prominent examples. You can’t gradually change a status quo. It needs to be disrupted. Smashed. This is a key fact of social life.…

All meaningful change comes from catastrophe. Punctuated equilibria (the status quo). Everything else is just team sports, a caucus race that goes nowhere. https://t.co/RRQFi4NIEx

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

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

The snide anti-maskers might want to contemplate that now the masked are the only thing keeping society running. Covering the work of those who won’t do basic infection control. https://t.co/5MLBvckDlT

In strategic terms, it’s time to promote and celebrate wellness. Pleading with people to mask and take other precautions hasn’t worked. Humans work on status. Make it about status. Good health is a status. https://t.co/IMSjbTZtJw

Kim WIlliams on @RNBreakfast this morning, arguing for the importance of reliable media-driven information in a society. Most will agree with him. Societies don't run on information. They run on status.

People masking are a live experiment of what workplaces and society would be like, if we had clean air. Amazing the level of sickness we tolerate as normal. And how empowering it is to no longer be sick, for years at a time.

You don’t ’speak truth to power’. Power doesn’t care or listen. You speak truth INTO power. We already won against Covid. It’s the minimisers who lost. A message from Puss in Boots. /1 https://t.co/ZRxHhEwtWG Pretty much all the narratives…

If you’re not questioning the existence of ‘the economy’, rather than just trying to re-purpose it, you’re living inside a fantasy. ‘The economy’ and its ‘market’ is just society stripped of government. Exactly why it was invented, as an…

That situation where you’re in a group, and somebody offers you a swig out of the same drink. And you don’t really like the idea of getting half a mouthful of their spit, but it would violate the group dynamic not to. Sociality dissolves…

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…

One of the founding myths of our time. Hilariously developed by a social group with vast inherited wealth, for which they never work a day in their life. https://t.co/QpLYbODH9i

THE critical thing, for control of Covid. Because it shows that Covid is not some universal house guest that requires the shutting down of society. It’s concentrated in a TINY number of hubs, where it can be easily controlled. Mostly,…

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…

A casualty of America's lack of a conception of a public sphere, is the continuous assault on other countries by get-rich-quick entrepreneurial inventions. At home designed to fulfil the American Dream (of liberation from public squalor).…

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…

It's quite legitimate to consider societies as engineering problems. More so in fact than as economic problems. How pilot-induced oscillations in flight have lessons for a pandemic. h/t to @YouAreLobbyLud for a conversation that made me…

One of the bizarre things about modern life is how we allow society to be described purely in the terms of one discipline only. Economics. ‘The economy’ is a construct. Not an underlying reality. There are many human disciplines that can…

Those who masked and cleaned air and took other precautions are now finding reality come to them. For a while minimisers could mock precautions, in a social non-conformity way. Now they’re sick. Always. And the cautious aren’t. Reality…

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.…

One of the great Covid minimising tropes was how ‘lonely’ people get if they’re not allowed to mix socially. Our culture is always in plain sight. Sociality is our default. Being alone is the reality of all life. Even when being social.…

Populism is always the restoration of hierarchies. Led by old men of high status. If we stopped looking at politics through the lens of politics and used a social/historical lens instead, more would be clear. https://t.co/XM678nIXOR

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

Clinton sat Trump on his arse in debates. He still won. The underlying *social* framework of American politics is Pater familias. From the Romans. The oldest male heading a household, granted ultimate autocratic power.…

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

Society has material problems with known solutions. None of those solutions happen because they have to cut through the fog of the completely redundant popularity contests we call elections. All those popularity contests do is weaponise…

The problem with ‘business’ as a concept is that it mistakes means with ends. ‘Business’ is really just services for a community. An economy changes the means (business) into an end. Converting all social life to the ‘job’, and making…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

Read if you want to feel the truth, that only catastrophe will shift humans away from their status quo. The world should be on a war footing. The threat is FAR greater than anything we've gone to war for, before. Instead we'll wait for…

So much of the US right now is Rome. A failing Republic, with a surging imperial Presidency that is more like a King or Emperor. By far the most successful period in Rome’s history was its rule by emperors. Its Republic was endlessly…

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

Zoom out from the euphoria of electoral victory for Labour in the UK, and you see the real social mechanism that drives the country. Starmer is the 58th PM. There have only been 7 Labour PMs, in UK history. SEVEN. What this means. /1…

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…

If you choose your social life over your health, will your friends be with you through the long years of chronic illness? Or will they party on without you? Sufferers of chronic disease I’ve met are some of the loneliest people on the…

Proust described the emptiness of ‘social life’, when the rubber hits the road. Our social lives are rivalries, disguised as connection. Chronic disease sufferers have little social life. They’re sick, and friends often abandon them as…

Cars, infections - whatever. The status quo always looks dominant on the surface. But it’s the growth rates underneath that which tell the real story. https://t.co/t3JcDCcjbx

The social lives our societies have put ahead of our health will not care as that health fails. https://t.co/6jPegXb20Z

Another idiot hashtag, yallmasking. Who cares? I’m masking, posting a photo of myself doing it will do diddly squat to change anything. I say idiot, because it derives from the idiot idea that social change comes by ‘mobilising’ people. No…

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

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…

Post-WW2, war industries mobilised to churn out massive amounts of consumer goods, housing, agriculture, etc. Re-building societies. We're now living in the last afterglow of that collective focus. It's why we don't fight pandemics or…

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’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.…

X Premium, the ‘blue tick’, is Stage 2 (and 3) of Cory Doctorow’s enshittification concept. Stage 1 is capture people with goodies (social networking). Stage 2 is strip mine the same people to sell to advertisers, and then start charging…

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…

“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…

If we seek solidarity and support, we seek to release the anxiety that we’re not alone in what we do and think. In other words, we act as we have since the days of high school. Peer pressure. We want to fit in. Social connection is not…

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,…

Football games allow thousands to ‘connect’ socially. Social connection creates violence, because the default state of society is violence. Technologies that accelerate connection, accelerate violence. h/t @UptickWavelet…

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…

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

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…

One of those days where the continuous generation and feeding of rival teams on our social networks is thrown into stark relief, the damage being done to societies.

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…

All of this tragic nonsense destroying democracies begins and ends in the medium we use to transact our social lives now. https://t.co/VkFcwexy9j

“Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.” ― Marshall McLuhan (This is the most succinct summary of social progress you will find.)

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 US is a violent society. No other developed Western nation even makes the top 40. Even Afghanistan is much less violent. Societies are violent by default, unless you collectively regulate them. It's not about guns, it's about…

The US is one of the most violent countries on Earth. Because it rejects basic collective regulation of its society. Without that, violence is the default. But there’s also more to see here. Why so many mass and other prominent shootings?…

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…

People will allow a decade or more of social collapse, if it doesn’t impact their lifestyle and status. They categorically won’t allow a party that same length of time to fix their collapse in lifestyle and status. Societies are social,…

From the 1970s, the push was on to reverse the post-war emphasis on collective good. A mystery for some is why conservative politicians and their ‘economy’ have dominated this same period, when their policies are doing the reversing. It’s…

Remember at school if anybody yelled 'fight!', how people would come running from miles around? The social group who already owns the country doesn't need to fight. But fights mobilise those who don't own anything. https://t.co/vy2kByD8cd

The social process I Tweet about, where only catastrophe leads social change, was also seen by Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in the 14th century. He called it Asabiyya. Meaningful change only comes from external threat. Not internal…

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.…

Collapsing the public health response against Covid was often justified by saying we were being damaged by losing our social lives. But sociality is toxic to humans. It’s imitative rivalry. Team sports. The desperation to belong, to a…

There was a moment in time when the disruption of Covid opened the possibility of more flexible work practices. As always, only catastrophe forced a possible change. In many workplaces that door slammed shut again quite some time ago, with…

Again focused only on content. The medium we’re using is conspiracy heaven. Societies are allowing completely unregulated social mobilisation technologies (SM) to eat them from the inside out, bypassing all established checks and balances.…

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.…

Imitation/conformity is the basis of society. Unsee it. https://t.co/wvb7DBa0DA

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…

Australian HECS/HELP debts now last longer than Australian marriages. When you translate what’s happening in our societies out of cleansing econo-babble and into the social reality of what we’re doing, the stupidity jumps out at you.

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…

Healthy friend in their 40s has Covid. Had the chills, then collapsed and was admitted to hospital with dangerously high blood pressure and heart rate. Intubated, and placed in an induced coma. Seems to be improving now. ‘Just a sniffle’,…

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

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

Conformity, the anxious desire to belong to some group. Look and you will find this same mechanism operating everywhere. Nothing escapes it. What we feel as our most personal, intimate preferences and ideas are rules for membership of our…

Personal responsibility society is user pays society. https://t.co/UlXAIZJzgZ

Only catastrophe will disrupt this status quo. I wish it were otherwise. The only manageable catastrophe candidate is Chinese renewable and EV technology, totally smashing our fossil fuel industries. https://t.co/CS4MBd2E2Y

Pretty much every single item mentioned here suggests this whole process will be nothing but the compilation of whining gripes from the existing status quo. https://t.co/8IhexbSies

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

Notice that as our societies now run on a model of prioritising our social lives over everything else, nothing of importance gets done, no emergencies are addressed? There’s no clearer evidence that sociality is not the way to solve…

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…

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…

It irritates populist societies to be told that even their deepest truths are really just popularity contests. That the truth is the social hierarchy that is dominant. Einstein went on to do the same thing to Bohr and quantum mechanics.…

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…

The more we connect, the more we become like this fly. Social connection rigidifies societies, freezing them in conformity. Conformity driven by the imitative rivalry of rival social groups. Team sports. https://t.co/Uj8MPOe76C

I see this, and feel somehow a social outsider, that my immediate response isn’t “let’s fly to Europe for a holiday!”. https://t.co/k1nX7WeQCY

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…

Pandemics and other catastrophes accelerate the collapse of already broken social systems. Because we’re pretending we’re post-pandemic, this process of collapse is being drawn out over a longer time. The culture of travel was always…

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

We still have the idea that societies operate using information. They absolutely don’t, they operate using status and conformity. People are ignoring Covid because their friends and family are. That’s it. Our guidance in life has ALWAYS…

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…

We allow mostly American billionaires to run these sewers deep into the heart of our most intimate lives, vacuuming up revenue from every industry, destroying the social fabric as they go. All completely unregulated. https://t.co/6fw1LBXpsS

The UK’s prisons are so full they’re releasing many prisoners early. There’s nothing they can punish these rioters with. Decades of ‘there is no such thing as society’ politics has left them with…no society. https://t.co/k2Lt91wFUi

This short video shows brilliantly many of the dimensions of social conformity I Tweet about. If you want to understand why nothing is done for climate change or Covid (or anything important), here it mostly is. h/t @DrDuchovny…

The root cause of the Challenger disaster? Team sports. The investigation found that the dangers were clearly known within the organisations involved. The team sports/status games of the people working within the agencies obstructed any…

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.…

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…

More flexibility for workers was always only going to last for as long as the status quo was disrupted by a perceived disaster. Only catastrophe shifts things. Hide the catastrophe, and the status quo returns. https://t.co/9LRfBeCo4X

"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

Those long horizontal periods are the social status quo. Only ever disrupted by catastrophic change of some kind, the ‘puncturing’ of the equilibria. I think this is how all societies work. Gradualism is just team sports.…

This is how absolutely insane team sports will get, if not interrupted. Anything will be turned into fuel for the rivalry. https://t.co/y7aTOM8h2B

I sat watching this, incredulous at the self-serving econo-babble the West dishes up to protect its existing status. We all know the world - all of it - desperately needs solar panels, EVs and EV batteries. /1 https://t.co/xTEsxdujNX…

“…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…

On a freeway yesterday, I observed the use of variable speed limits. A great idea, to modulate traffic flow. Except maybe only 5% of drivers pay any attention to them. It hasn’t occurred to us yet that societies that appear ‘authoritarian’…

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…

John Kehoe on the #Insiders couch droning on in a ‘let the market run society’ way, without challenge. Cheering on the dreadful Productivity Commission. Societies that don’t ‘pick winners’ end up run by drug gangs, who do it for them.

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

Why don’t we question the idea that a society is like a computer, that we can replace the operating system of, with one or other -ism? Societies are ALL social. And nothing else. Every -ism is just one more team in identical (social) team…

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…

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

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

It’s just so blatant. We’ve surrendered our most intimate personal and social spaces, to libertarian US corporations. That scares me a lot more than authoritarian governments. https://t.co/dvqRzaBRNj

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.

A story from Cook’s voyages demonstrates well how groups and societies run on status, not information. For sailors of that time, scurvy was a constant threat. Cook knew that sauerkraut prevented scurvy, and also kept well on voyages. But…

This is the great mythology that all sides of politics embrace. That high prices are caused by lack of competition. By monopoly. Scale is what allows humans to create things cheaply. ‘Economies of scale’. But we’re wedded to the idea that…

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.…

Strip away the econo-babble narratives, and you’ll see our housing system has already returned to the days of the landed gentry. Where land brought wealth. What I mean by modern labelling disguising the same social processes.…

As McLuhan used to say, pastimes are past-times. The tourist of today is emulating the ‘Grand Tour’ of the sons of wealthy aristocratic families in the 18th and 19th centuries. Societies are 100% social. We emulate higher status people.…

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.

When progressives counter populism with populism, they win. It’s taken them a LONG time to understand that. Of course nobody ultimately wins from populism, unless you link popularity/status with the social good. Like the Victorians did.…

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…

Why did some infectious disease doctors go into battle for Covid rather than the public, in this pandemic? Always look for the social status game in play. Medicine and public health have slugged it out for years. https://t.co/NloDGHtWrf…

Again, using the social lens for all things. There are no Covid minimisers who are really prominent in their fields. Mostly they’re younger upstarts who saw a pandemic as a fast-track to fame. Or older failed researchers who saw an…

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…

The imitative rivalry at the base of all societies. The battle for status, in groups. I call them teams, because it captures the battle aspect better. Team sports. Pick any current issue. Gaza, climate, Covid. Anything. You will always…

Workers at the bottom of a workplace hierarchy have 4 times the mortality of the more senior people in the workplace. At those top levels, a smoker at the second highest rung was more likely to die than one on the top rung. Status. From…

The whole rationale for inventing public health was to avoid needing to 'balance' peoples' health with their social and emotional well-being. https://t.co/PIBQcFcMVP

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…

Because it took longer here in Oz for the massive public health action after WW2 in the Anglosphere to surrender to resurgent social hierarchies. Disguised as 'the economy'. We're now rapidly trying to catch up with the pack.…

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

There won't come a time when those who minimised the threat of Covid will say 'I was wrong'. Instead they'll reach a tipping point where they openly admit the situation is a disaster, but then claim this is what they have said all along.…

Several religious traditions speak strongly in their most ancient texts of prohibitions on debt, and of the control of pandemics. In an ‘economy’, all custom and tradition is abandoned. And here we are, up to our eyeballs in debt and…

You can’t get a better definition of a teenage society than one that worries about not socialising enough, but doesn’t about infecting people with lethal viruses. https://t.co/yOE9O9TEzK

A society has all of its habits at once. They’re all linked. When we decided to ditch public health for Covid, we ditched it for everything. Not an accidental outcome. Minimisers are shills for market-based societies. They despise anything…

Lockdowns are blamed for the ongoing collapse of our social systems. All lockdowns did was accelerate trends already well underway. Our status quo and those invested in it don't see the collpase underway. They think there are fixes. There…

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…

Much of the enormous engineering of the Victorian era survives to this day and is often still functioning. It was targeted at the public good. Today if we get infrastructure at all, it’s most often like an episode of Utopia. Politicians…

How society works in one beautiful anecdote. https://t.co/TDnIZeGbCt

The unspoken truth is that we CAN’T do it. The magnitude of the revolution needed is unrivalled in human history. No variant of business as usual will get us even close. James Lovelock used to say it. He thought it was already much too…

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.…

Societies don’t run on information. Never have, never will. There’s too much information even if we wanted to. They run on status. Trust. We’re experiencing the deliberate destruction of our trust/status hierarchies, not mass ignorance.…

‘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…

One of the hilarious myths of societies transformed into economies, is that ‘business’ creates social activity, including jobs. Business provides goods and services for people. It’s those same people, as customers, who drive business. Not…

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

Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening to voters’. All that produces is a continuous barrage of ignorant, whining complaint. This is populism’s destruction at work. /1…

Society is collapsing. We can't elect our way out of this mess. If fixing the collapse was popular, we'd be doing it already. https://t.co/wdqDYmAJyr

While society is conceived as an economy public health will never return. That subsitution was explicitly designed to remove 'public' everything. https://t.co/Yl6SXAUc5Q

Proving, again, that you can't vote Covid away. The sole purpose of voting is to boost the social status of the elected. https://t.co/JP6QOOrsgS

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.…

Only massive disruption shifts societies and their status hierarchies. China’s industrial juggernaut at work. Our possibly best hope for the rapid change needed. Politics as usual is just team sports. We’re not progressing an inch by…

Only catastrophes shift societies. The big gains feminism made in the 20th century were largely the result of two world wars killing many men, and sidelining others who survived. It took the wars to dismantle existing status hierarchies.…

You can see here societies don't run on information. They run on status, and imitation of that status. If you want change, you have to remove or change the existing status hierarchies. They will resist that, ruthlessly. Facts are…

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

Many express frustration that SARS2 infection seems so arbitrary. For example they have friends taking no precautions who go to major social events, and come home Covid-free. We need to come back to the dispersion characteristics of this…

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…

The medium is the message. It’s our only real problem. Societies don’t run on information. They’re social, not information-processing. https://t.co/zrrZfgkVJX

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 sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

Why don’t things change? Because the social status quo is too powerful. People and groups don’t surrender their status. All change is a rival status group overpowering another status group. Or a natural or other disaster, smashing existing…

Read this and you’ll see directly how something like the death in Gaza is just an extension of political team sports, in Israel and internationally. There are multiple teams in play here. The war was always only about their battles for…

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…

#Insiders interrogating ‘the economy’ today. I doubt I’ll live to see the time when we realise this complete fiction was invented to protect the status quo. There is no such thing as ‘the economy’. Societies are all social. Even ‘economic’…

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…

'Endemic' diseases are normally only endemic to poor nations. It's not a disease pattern, it's a status pattern. Like some neighbourhoods are said to have 'endemic' crime. Usually poor, low-status neighbourhoods. 1/2…

The only thing that changes societies is catastrophes. Like Australia, whose only meaningful change to carbon emissions remains the impact of a pandemic. Described as a ‘disaster’ for the economy. The economy is the disaster. Just the…

Only catastrophes change societies. The pandemic began as an absolute boon to ordinary people, hundreds of thousands lifted out of poverty for the first time. ‘The economy’ (i.e. the status quo) quickly returned to snuff that out.…

We don't live in democracies, or under any form of -ism. Every single person on the planet lives in social status hierarchies. There are no markets. There is always a top level to those hierarchies. This social pattern will reinvent itself…

Professor Johan Rockstrom. This is a threat well beyond why we had two world wars. Every nation should be a on a war footing. They aren't because we replaced nation states with 'economies'. A social fiction, to strip away democratic…

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…

There’d been suffragette movements in various places throughout the 19th century. The floodgates only opened after World War 1. It took the death of millions of men and disruption of status hierarchies to bring about genuine change.…

Aged care Covid deaths mapped against community deaths from Covid. The vulnerable live in the community, their deaths follow the same patterns. Not controlling Covid in the community kills the aged. 1/2 https://t.co/98hNZS9W2F…

Our robust democracy was only ever the post-WW2 institutions created to rebuild societies. Once that work was done, we went back to the Battle for Status. All human history is aristocracies, topped by Kings or their equivalent. We rename…

Reading a local FB group. Parents congratulating kids in a local team today, “even though 3 of them were really too sick to play”. I know one of those families. The kid has whooping cough. Personal responsibility public health.

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.…

Working from home saved Australians $85 billion in transport costs alone. The pandemic was an economic bonanza for very many ordinary Australians. Catastrophes shift societies. It's why the status quo mobilised so fast to 'live with' Covid…

When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’. Areas of Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK. How I think they teach us about…

Status drives societies. Some status hierarchies are millennia old. https://t.co/mAGD4Yw6wN

Every major social change attributed to activism is traceable to a catastrophe of some kind, that weakens existing status hierarchies. The 40-hour week for example was introduced when? Right in that sweet spot I always talk about .…

Every outrageous injustice is a window into a truth we’ve not been seeing. Why can Israel act with impunity in Gaza? Because what we call Western democracies have always been Judaeo-Christian status hierarchies, with new names. AUKUS too.…

This is game over for the hybrid immunity people, really basic science. If societies ran on information, this would be the end of 'living with' Covid. But they run on status. https://t.co/uN87LfkiWC

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…

The great electoral orgasm that was going to usher in massive change to the UK. The status quo won’t ever budge using elections. The US elections will be the same. And Australian. We’ll keep up the waves of euphoria and disillusionment,…

Another window into the substitution of society with an ‘economy’ was the PM’s launch of the revised aged care legislation. Described residents of aged care as those who helped build Australia’s economy. Complete inversion of means and…

China is the catastrophic disruptor to our status quo that may save the world. Our status quo is mobilising nuclear subs against it. China is doing all of the things the West only talks about. And making those things affordable for the…

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…

There are no ‘authoritarian’ political systems, just as there are no ‘free’ political systems. There are no political systems at all. There’s just people, acting socially, in every part of the world. What we call authoritarian is a strong…

Annabel Crabb’s excellent piece doesn’t draw two obvious conclusions. Speech is a weapon, it’s never free. And it’s a weapon most when it targets the currency of all societies. Status. Reputation. Not politics. Not economics. Status.…

The world was international before it was national. National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an international, pre-existing social mechanism. Exhibit A. The car industry. /1 https://t.co/nxSkCnfKwY China’s threat to Western…

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use…

The sad (social) truth playing out in the Middle East is the same truth underlying all societies. Only catastrophe brings change. We’ve had decades of the peace process there going nowhere. Hoping to discuss our way out of the detente.…

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.…

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…

The entire world is degenerating into continuous, escalating and more and more granular team sports. Social interaction is never a unifying force, it creates division and violence. Only disasters unify groups and nations. I wish it was…

My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else. The content of public debates is almost completely irrelevant. You’re missing the wood, for the trees, by…

To see human society as a status game is not just my idea. There’s a significant literature on it. When terrible problems seem to have no solution, we’re missing the key to understanding. Status is that key. https://t.co/hueglgmNu9

Every day it should be clearer that what we call 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' all along has really just been a resurgence of the Church, in Church v State battles. The oldest of all battles for status. https://t.co/aV7Al0FGCg

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.…

We’re facing social collapse. Public debate is dominated by those with no connection to this front-line work, of teaching, policing, health care, aged care etc. By people using this collapse as a way to build their public status.…

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…

Only catastrophes change societies. The status quo will do quadruple somersaults with double twists rather than face obvious truths. https://t.co/xREgteKnfH

Nearly 30 years of majority modern conservative rule in Australia converted it from an affordable public-focused society, into a user-pays ‘personal responsibility’ fan festival of the US Republicans and UK Tories. https://t.co/CL75PlR8lp…

Economy society strips away all custom and tradition, all leadership, in favour of a fictitious ‘market’. Leading to a proliferation of credulous nonsense, and of teams battling each other for the status void at the heart of collective…

Pretty much nothing in the current narratives on supermarkets is true in reality, this research shows. There are clear lessons in the cost of living crisis to expose the farce of’ the economy’ as a framing of social life. 1/2…

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…

Tim Winton on the politics of climate, identifying ‘fossil capitalism’ as the enemy. The real enemy is something he also mentions. The status quo. Fossil fuels fuel the status quo, well beyond those specific industries. 1/5…

Societies have an in-built mechanism to regulate status. And not where we’d normally think to look. Gossip is that mechanism. As powerful an attractant as status itself, because it’s the other side of the status coin. A way to keep status…

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

Public health is in free fall. Because the public as a concept is in free fall. That’s what ‘the economy’ is, econo-babble designed to reintroduce a society run by status. (Some of this is also Covid, most dentists have rubbish infection…

Debate, discussion, agreement - politics - will not shift a status quo. Politics IS the status quo, playing team sports. So we await catastrophe to do it for us. This is how history always, sadly, works. https://t.co/CbwE3nOa9x…

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.

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

A dear friend who’s throughly wedded to market ideas about societies (happy to see them as economies) was discussing climate change with me. I shared this quote with him. Here’s how it unfolded. 1/7 https://t.co/CbwE3nOa9x…

Waleed Aly. Free speech is just one more team sports fantasy. Used to argue completely contradictory things, depending on the perceived threat to the real game. Status. Use status as the lens and everything else will make sense.…

This is the value of the global personal luxury goods market (see: https://t.co/gTqRmcP9eI) Why the big growth in demand for luxury? Luxury is status. Societies are shifting from being centred on a public, to being centred on status. This…

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

‘Politicians won’t listen to the science’. They never have. Archimedes killed by a Roman sword, in 212 BC. Society progressed anyway. Never via politics or popular vote. https://t.co/rc44QV2yRx

*puts on broken record* The status quo will never, ever, surrender its advantages. That only happens if those advantages are smashed, by a disaster of some kind. https://t.co/cLNN8QvYJc

History shows republics to be almost universally violent. Rome was far more violent as a republic than it ever was under emperors. It’s status, again. If you don’t have a strong status hierarchy at the core of your society, violence…

Just back from a short holiday. The country is awash with travellers, and as vast numbers are now retired or retiring, it’s getting worse. As a culture, a dominant desire at retirement is to ‘see the world’. Even the world at home. It’s a…

There’s no such thing as ‘structural reform’. A wanky phrase ageing people use to try to sound important as people stop listening to them, while they chew pensively on their $1500 glasses. Our health system, like everything else public,…

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…

The current Middle Eastern conflict offends our sense of how we thought modern countries work. The ‘rule of law’. Democracy. It’s revealed the deeper status hierarchies. A literal continuation of the Crusades. History is never linear.…

Tesla has about 130,000 workers. None of that matters to many now. They’ll never buy a Tesla, because of Elon. (A mistake, I think.) It’s status that drives us. Always. https://t.co/Bgd6vvHkGL

This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year. We’re being led to believe that because a lethal virus isn’t causing huge numbers of deaths, it’s not lethal. Games of minority and majority. /1…

There's an idea that we all stopped listening to 'the science'. We never did. Humans act by copying what other humans do. Not because they're stupid, but because nobody has the time to figure out everything for themselves. Wearing a mask…

We stopped normal life for years to fight world wars. That threat was a pimple on the arse of what's coming now. And what are we doing? Nothing. That's the power of 'the economy'. The status quo re-badged. To quote... 1/2…

I think one of the prejudices of thought is the idea that big = complex. The world gets more complex, the smaller you go. Humans can be seen as simplified by-products of microbial action. Similarly any individual in a group is vastly more…

More from the 2024 State of the Climate Report. Watch electoral politics every day and marvel at the complete irrelevance of it. It’s just social football, with teams. The status quo of team sports - status - is far too powerful to ever…

At the time universal suffrage was introduced, it didn’t occur to many that it would destory the democracies using it. Many came to see it *as* democracy. A ‘voice of the people’. There are no voices in voting. Only numbers. /1…

This sort of thing is the tedious world we now live in. It’s all there in the name-calling, there always has to be two teams. Nobody could buy a Tesla unless they’re on the ‘fanboy’ team. Don’t we all get tired of everything being a fight…

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…

Humans imitate. It's the root of what they do. Most of the time there is zero self-awareness of it. It's also unavoidable. Without imitation nothing is even recognisable. It also saves everybody having to invent everything from scratch.…

What I call the loss of a structuring status hierarchy. Creating an explosion of identity (status)-driven teams. h/t @arianhod_o https://t.co/TRplJUHTpK

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…

Thanks to @Kerbrech for sharing this excellent illustration of the status-drives-societies idea. The work Peter Turchin has done on ‘elite overproduction’. The bit in green is where I would offer a different view. 1/8…

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…

Al Gore’s anger. The status quo won’t respond, to this or anything. History shows it. It will need to be destroyed by disruption. China’s renewables are doing this. It’s why the status quo has ramped up the attack rhetoric on China. But…

I often talk about the status quo as the controlling force behind every society. It’s very easy to take all the baddies from existing narratives and just make them the status quo. Like it’s a group of people doing the bad things. It’s not…

Should be a scandal of the highest order. But not even death budges a 'living your best life' travelling circus social status quo. People go to jail for much, much less serious outcomes. This is National Cabinet's doing. Behaviours are…

You'll find stories every day of the clash of a status quo in collapse in the West, panicking in response to a new Asian-led status quo. The new Industrial Revolution began years ago already, in Asia. https://t.co/bWekW4gHLl

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…

Economic ideas (like supply and demand) are powerless to understand the housing crisis. The housing crisis is the same reversal of public-focused governance, back towards status-driven societies. High status historically was always the…

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

The Chinese industrial juggernaut is still coming. The status quo will do everything to try to stop it. Our future survival depends on the Chinese winning. Toyota openly stating it's slow on EVs to protect its own jobs. That's the status…

It’s always ultimately about status. https://t.co/8uqAcWy93x

Watch this one. This is much more than a new car. It’s a challenge to the heart of our status hierarchies. Anybody who doesn’t see the fundamental role of technology in cultural and social life won’t see it. https://t.co/5HIDTGwsNv

Societies don’t run on information. They don’t collapse because of mis/disinformation. They run on status. Trust. They collapse when trust networks are deliberately destroyed. When every facet of life becomes DIY. ‘Personal…

More pointless drivel on housing. The same ‘supply’ mythology both major parties won’t jettison. Housing is expensive because housing is status. https://t.co/Wr9kkAazCT

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status battles between teams. Teslas being objectively great vehicles is not peoples’ metric. They don’t want to be on Team Elon. Which makes the inaction by the Tesla board even more…

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…

I think this is true. But why don’t we ask why politics is about representing anybody? Why can’t it go back to being about simply providing services to a public? Identifying social problems, and solving them, regardless of where they’re…

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

For a few years now I’ve argued for what I call ‘reality-based politics’. Not really ever explaining what I mean by that. I’ll use Covid as an example. /1 In a nutshell, it’s the humility of knowing that how things turn out is rarely in…

There was never a time when status hierarchies in societies promoted public health. The public health we grew up with is a remnant by-product of post-WW2 social reconstruction. Once that work was considered complete, ‘peasants’ could go…

We are bringing back the past. A status-driven society (feudalism), where if you don't have status, you have nothing. Debt was all that gave the illusion of most of us having some status. We borrowed our way into the hierarchy. 1/2…

Both fascism and genocide are just populism. In its end stage. The team sports I talk about, carried on for long enough that all checks and balances of civilised society are cast aside. Participate in the team sports, and you’re implicated…

It's tempting to see this as great progress in electoral politics. But it's really just a splintering of two main teams, into a whole Premier League of teams. Exactly matching the splintering of societies into a growing number of battling…

Catastrophe as the scythe through status hierarchies, to create social change, is fractally seen within individual lives too. This was Proust’s point. Without having our heart broken, we don’t change. We can’t reason our way to that…

“…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…

One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally…

“…one-in-six Australians are offloading unwanted possessions to raise money for travel, while 14 per cent took a second job, and 27 per cent sacrificed social activities for travel.” Public health never stood a chance.…

BYD employs over 110,000 engineers. Let that sink in. Here’s just how ridiculous our politics are. The world desperately needs enormous numbers of affordable electric vehicles. The Chinese have a glut of them. You’d think that’s problem…

Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do a lot better at understanding this than trot out tired tropes about ‘polarisation’. /1 https://t.co/uSTXem8d68…

For 1-2 years, delusions like ‘hybrid immunity’ and ‘immunity debt’ survived because enough people seemed to be getting on with normal life to make them plausible fantasies. But now the evidence that these are fantasies is right there in…

This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regularly. They are *led* to feel or act in certain ways. /1…

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…

It’s all in the framing. ‘Rapacious need for revenue’ = ‘desperate social need for services’. https://t.co/0cAAJiBrms

The people who argue on behalf of 'the people' of Australia, against lockdowns, are not the people of Australia. Lockdowns suspended the status quo, which had been screwing the actual people of Australia for years. https://t.co/id67Qkd8Gp…

“…relationship satisfaction actually increased.” Anti-lockdown hysterics know that this pandemic did what all catastrophes do. Ruptured a dysfunctional status quo. They’re desperate to stigmatise that, to rescue the old status quo. Reality…

Revolutionary social action comes not from the provision of information, or disinformation or misinformation. It comes when status is threatened. if you can find a way to make climate change and Covid a threat to people’s status, they will…

At the start of the pandemic I wrote about the strategy with National Cabinet, how it was nothing about ‘all working together’, or any of that nonsense. National Cabinet was the key weapon to destroy the public health response. Time to…

The whole world waits on the edge of its seat for this week’s election, to see if Team Blue or Team Red will lead the great charge to do nothing meaningful against climate change and Covid. Elections create our greatest passion. The…

Status. How many occupy higher-status positions in their working life, relative to others, than they did in their school life? Those who have shifted, how many now have a status in adult life that instead reflects their parents’ status…

This is just for power supply. On my way into work today I thought about climate change and Covid. Both greater emergencies than any war. Why are societies not on a war footing? 'The economy' is why. Really just the status quo, in economic…

An excellent question. But not understandable at the level of content. Societies are groups with varying status, battling for suprermacy. All content is just fuel for the team battles. They're often climate deniers too. Same reason.…

If you want to understand the continuity of today with our history, Trump is Henry VIII, and America’s billionaires are our modern nobles, circling the King, trying to gain favour and carve out their part of the country for themselves. 1/2…

This is the new power demographic in politics. Young men. Often driving utes. And towing stuff. Unpacking status hierarchies. /1 (Image: https://t.co/KlpaW5WJg7) https://t.co/iohLUxNqr3 In all of the Anglo countries, this is the hot…

I suspected the BYD Shark would do this. The ute is the fort guarding our existing status quo. The Chinese have not only breached the walls, they’ve levelled them. Sites go into meltdown when it’s reviewed. https://t.co/t85IHJ9GBg

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

Why would it be a shock? Only catastrophes shift the status quo. Covid got Biden over the line last time. https://t.co/ik5YgPFA19

Obama won during the GFC. Biden won during Covid. Only catastrophes shift status hierarchies. God, King/Queen and country are the default. https://t.co/1tqn3J0r6A

The team sports of elections blinds us. Brexit and MAGA are the same social shift. Anglo nations selling populist fantasies of lost empires. It will accelerate their collapse. Just ask the UK, it knows what’s coming for the US.…

In the post-orgasmic euphoria and devastation of another election, I invite people to zoom out and see the farce we’re trapped inside. 5 outcomes here from the annual review of the state of democracy, worldwide. /1 https://t.co/uLWtQnaUyL…

Post-election analysis is even more excruciatingly stupid than pre-election team sports euphoria. If things are going well in peoples’ lives (if their social status is healthy), people vote for an incumbent. If not they vote for the…

All the things the economy is supposed to do, the pandemic actually did. Redistributed wealth more fairly, away from those dominating the status quo. Only catastrophes change societies. 1/2 https://t.co/2Hjf2JxvS0 We’re living with a…

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,…

Underneath the meaningless hot air of elections, the status quo is copping a belting. Team sports are meaningless. Look at reality. https://t.co/hAPeYC7IaD https://t.co/966cPm7naI

Ask Keir Starmer how good landslide victories are. Or Kevin Rudd. Or Boris Johnson. Do we have no memories? Landslides mean a society crying out for help. If you can't help them, they don't forgive. Our ideas about democracy are irrelevant…

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

This latest election has reinforced even more strongly for me that societies cannot be saved from election bubbles. 100% of the emotion and analysis has been either elation or despair at the relative success of the two teams, Red and Blue.…

Starmer won a landslide less than 6 months ago. When are we going to give up winning elections and ask - why aren’t we fixing the material problems of society? Ordinary people want the problems solved. The polls show only interest in that.…

The people who vehemently oppose lockdowns are the members of the status quo who were doing well, pre-Covid. Catastrophes reboot societies. It’s why the status quo invented ‘living with’ pandemics, to try to prevent that. It’s just kicking…

One of the things to understand about China is that it plays ‘the long game’. In the West we’re hopelessly glued to meaningless short electoral cycles, which have degenerated into perpetual populist posturing aimed always at the next…

There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined. But let me suggest how this means *way* more than you might first think. /1 https://t.co/16eaD1wFnj…

“In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” (Benjamin Franklin) This is the American political DNA. It’s also impossible nonsense, that is destroying the world. /1…

I’m also on BlueSky, @ragesheen.bsky.social

We love advocacy, ‘awareness’, ‘education’, as if the problem is other people being stupid. Advocacy is like a crusade, where you get to put together a team, and fight other teams for supremacy. And yet, the actual solution will always be…

Another great example of how using a 'technological fix' may actually solve a protacted social problem, that generations of talking and arguing has done nothing to solve. https://t.co/N4kUD0oQ7r

We stopped the world twice in the 20th century for a threat orders of magnitude smaller. We 'locked down' everything, for over a decade. Only catastrophe can shift the status quo. https://t.co/eM8iq1VZaq

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…

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

Historically societies not only had status hierarchies, they were explicit about how they were the structure of the society itself. Like Hobbes' Leviathan. Our world today is all of us trying to negotiate an absence of that structure.…

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

Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint summarises something important, even in its title. Who doesn’t feel that culture, every day? Public life is now eternal complaint. Every issue pulverised into a granularity of grievance. But you need to…

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.

This extract from Will Storr's book on status is required reading if you want to understand Covid minimisers. For 'events', let's use 'anti-lockdown crusades'. /1 https://t.co/1Wc9ZiCQJa "Events like these are often described as moral…

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

Friend, incredulous I'm still masking, 'aren't your kids missing out on dining out?' 'I'd rather thay have a functioning immune system than a plate of schnitzel and chips.' The concerns of Teenage Society. Whether you're getting your…

Change will not come from talking. It will only come from catastrophe. That's how history always works. Humans will not, ever, surrender status games unless they're forced to. https://t.co/DyQ4X7cSHv https://t.co/ZMRtLk935s

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,…

Covid minimisation is status-driven insanity. History suggests it has a lot further to run. This is Francis and Dan Keller. Falsely convicted of sexual abuse of children in a daycare facility. They spent almost 22 years in jail. Status did…

Society is a battle for status, not an exchange of information. The silent, fast passage of this legislation shows that both the LNP and ALP are on the same team on this issue. It's a joint branding they're protecting.…

One of the most destructive myths is the idea of ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’. Human groups and societies have no tops or bottoms. Implicit in the belief that they do is also a belief about how groups behave, that is also wrong. /1 The belief…

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

‘Supply’ solutions suggested by politics to the housing crisis are the status quo reinforcing itself. Politics, particularly politics of the economy, is just team sports to reinforce this status quo. Only catastrophe, which is unfolding,…

Turchin. Society is nothing except status battles, between rival teams. When a society has no stabilised status hierarchy you get an ‘overproduction of elites’. Lots of battling teams, vying for control of our status hierarchies. Tell me…

I believe the origin of both monarchies and churches is societies attempting to stabilise status hierarchies. We don’t see this, looking back on them. But they were primarily about stopping the eternally violent battle for status.…

I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams…

Here’s a fun status game from the UK. Uproar over the Labour Party there now modifying the tax-free inheritance on farms, introduced to help sustain the industry. ‘Tax-free’ attracted the wealthy like flies are attracted to a pile of shit.…

Buried in a tiny thumbnail right at the bottom of today’s news. No mention of the pandemic. The ‘news’ is all the current team sports status games, local and international. Only catastrophe will shift the status quo.…

COP29 was a cop-out. As all the climate conferences are. It’s ridiculous to think the status quo will shift by having conversations. https://t.co/YkYf1Fb3H5

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…

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

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. https://t.co/NJWEMoS1pi

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.

Stop me when you figure out which country and government this is. 1) Government comes to power and within 3 years has built 3,500 km of high quality new roads. 2) Within that same 3 years, tens of billions spent on job creation schemes. /1…

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…

Status runs societies. Not politics, or economics, or any -ism. Status. The greatest violation to status is humiliation. Obama's mocking of Trump is said to have been key to Trump running . Germany's humiliation after WW1 led directly to…

Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history profoundly weakened them. It’s not what you expect, I will bet.…

Just call a spade a spade. The anti-lockdown zealots aren’t defending anybody’s freedom or mental health, or any other bullshit tag they use to hide their true intentions. They wanted to keep business running. The flow of money to high…

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…

Disturb a system and you reveal its underlying functioning. Societies run on status. Seen in earlier times when the growing wealth of middle classes led to legislated rules around who was allowed to wear and do what. Sumptuary laws.…

When people are stripping basic public infrastructure to make money, you can feel the collapse of public everything. ‘The public’ is an administrative construct, invented between the late-19th and mid-20th century to repair social…

These numbers tell the story, of a tired Western empire wallowing in ‘lifestyles’ and identity politics, itself derived from the collapse of meaningful status hierarchies. Rather than focusing on the basic material conditions of living.…

Only catastrophes will genuinely disrupt a status quo. If you see genuine reform happening somewhere, look for the catastrophic disruption that preceded it. You will always find it. https://t.co/xC84n92ctn https://t.co/pgWWFIaMAA

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?…

In feudal times a small number of families (the nobles or aristocracy) hoarded most of a society's wealth, in alliance with a King or Queen. Like I say, 'the economy' is really a social deception to reinstate feudalism, history's default…

And the people doing this to us are the most popular in elections. Inequality is a hierarchy of status. People don't want to be rid of inequality, they want to be higher up that same hierarchy. https://t.co/3pzGMiFr7z

The punctuated equilibrium model of social change gets that societies don’t change via the daily team sports (status games) we all play. They change when catastrophic events disrupt those games. https://t.co/aWxSFKjLeP…

The ‘Top 1%’, the narrative goes, oppress the other 99%, hoarding everything for themselves. In reality it’s about status, not wealth. The 99% *want* to be the top 1%. This social model repeats throughout history. Feudalism then,…

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.…

I don't believe in capital as an agency in the world. Status, yes. There has to be a social causation there. Otherwise it's tautological - capital creates capital. People with higher status certainly accumulate greater amounts of capital.…

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…

Forget politics as a framing of everything you see in life. Look to status and you will understand the mechanism of all groups of whatever size, right up to full societies. https://t.co/6X4jjNZFCq

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

Fascinating to watch the various status games around the world. Heat pumps are a complete non-issue in Australia, everybody has used them for years. In the UK they're a team sport right now. None of it is about facts. It's about different…

Our ‘freedumb’ times. The cultures that have the loosest social restrictions on the planet? Former communist and Eastern European countries. The countries we would see as ‘authoritarian’, have the lowest amount of social restrictions in…

Australia is going nowhere on emissions. No amount of gradual planning will shift a status quo. It will just game the planning, as is happening. Only catastrophe creates meaningful shifts to a status quo. Like Chinese disruption with…

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…

One of the critical things to understand about how we live is that our existing status hierarchies are absolutely dependent on the centralised ownership of energy. We need to shift our own framings of these debates away from the ALP/LNP…

A friend’s GP told them they ‘need to learn to live with Covid’. By which they meant catching it repeatedly. My society has been living with a huge list of infectious diseases, my whole life. That’s meant preventing people from catching…

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…

The solution to most of society’s problems is to tell engineers what the problems are, and then to get out of their way. If you don’t believe that, I encourage a much closer reading of history. And a broader understanding of what…

People surely see this in their own lives. In my own workplace sickness is unprecedented, and ongoing. And many don’t ever get better between times off. Facts don’t generate action, alas. Status and threats to it generate action.…

Existing homeowners can’t afford plummeting house prices. So we’ll build a glut of new ‘supply’, and those new homes will therefore be cheaper. Except the housing ‘market’ means that will cause the prices of all houses to plummet. 1/2…

It’s emotionally satisfying to imagine that action against things like climate change and Covid is being blocked by a small cabal of evil [insert chosen baddies] people. The reality is more banal, and more difficult. /1 The ‘status quo’ is…

Get rid of all your political framings of public life. And replace it with this. You will understand literally everything you then experience every day. This is team sports. Status games. The battle for identity and belonging.…

Both sides of politics see the energy revolution as a simple replacement of older fossil fuel generating sources with newer sources. But renewables fundamentally redefine what a grid is. They decentralise power itself, not just…

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.

Yes people love to connect, but we leave out the next bit. Once we connect, we fight for status in our new group. And then between groups. Every public ‘issue’ is really a status game between rival groups. https://t.co/qN1Ggn4J9e

Nowhere is the universal status game of our lives more visible than on the roads. Overtaking is overwhelmingly about wanting to be ‘ahead’ of other people on the road. People being overtaken will often speed up, because they see being…

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…

Long Covid is also Long Pandemic. I doubt 2025 will be the year we stop pretending the pandemic finished. A pandemic is still defined by the number and spread of infections, no matter what ambitious social status whores here or elsewhere…

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…

There is still a faith that if journalists would just report horrible things, corrective action would follow. Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. Only disrupting status hierarchies brings change. Only catastrophes…

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…

That period post-WW2 is when the magic of ‘public life’ began. None of it had a single thing to do with elections or democracy. It was societies rebuilding after 4 major catastrophes. Catastrophes that swept away old status hierarchies.…

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…

If societies actually ran on information, writing would change them. They run on status. https://t.co/S0XblvAmrn

In 2025, it would be nice if we could reframe fights against calamities like Covid and climate change by not just hoping the facts will change anything. Fixing them needs to become a high status thing to do. Nothing else will bring change.

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

Covid minimisers, climate change deniers, all the loon modern contrarians. I call them social status whores. Because that’s what they’re up to. 1/7 Dewey and Lippmann in their famous early 20th century debates on democracy more or less…

The 20th century was a century of revolutions. Russia, China. And we had one too, the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ revolution. Like Burke I think all revolutions are disasters for societies. They can be the catastrophes I often say bring the…

Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way. This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political…

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

The fundamental purpose of recreational travel isn’t to ‘see’ or even ‘experience’ places. It’s to use those places as a stage to perform social status games on, at home. To be able to tell *others*, that you’ve been there. Imitative…

Given freedom to do what they like, people always do the same thing. They imitate what other people are doing. This simple fact destroys the entire basis of the libertarian politics of our time. Our baseline assumptions are all wrong.…

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…

For life itself there have been 5 known major catastrophes, which drove most evolution. Also how societies work. Most of the time humans play status games, competing for position and identity. While ignoring basic material needs. 1/2…

The Magna Carta signing in 1215 was one of the foundations of democratic governance. It was the carving up of power between Kings and barons/nobles. It never was about ‘the people’. Today the exact same negotiation is happening between…

It feels good to identify a rival ‘team’, that is responsible for the bad things. That’s what drives team sports (status games). Ordinary people want to be these oligarchs, because they’re high-status. Society as status games/team sports…

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

For most of history, there was no separate culture of children. Kids joined the adult world at a very young age, and never left it. Then we invented universal mass schooling. That literally inverted our cultures. At first schools…

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…

There it is again. Only catastrophe interrupts status hierarchies. But democracy is power for the people, not by the people. No social system is non-hierarchical. The trick is to couple that hierarchy to *institutions* that work for the…

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…

Populist landslides always lead to triumphalism. Because our entire understanding of politics is elections, we think these victories mean the complete opposite to what they actually mean. Broken societies have populist landslides. Winning…

Human life is a battle for status. Status is also identity, without it, you’re nobody. We join groups (teams) to fight these battles, emulating high-status individuals. Team members imitate one another, ‘peer pressure’, to have membership…

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

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

The medium is the message. There’s fear about the impact of AI technology. Meanwhile, a far more dangerous technology is completely entrenched in societies, eating them from the inside out. Social media. It manipulates our deepest social…

After spending several years here writing about the idiot ‘team sports’ of social life, where you back a position inside a group or team, and then battle other teams, it apparently astonished some people that I made a material decision…

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…

The ridiculous ‘debate’ on heat pumps in the UK shows the mechanism high status groups use globally to obstruct change. Turn it into a fake debate, team sports. Heat pumps generate no real team sports in Australia, because they don’t…

Democracy always was only the public institutions we used post-WW2 to rebuild societies. Once that work was done, they reverted to what preceded them. Feudalism. History’s overwhelmingly dominant form of social organisation.…

Here’s that post-war rebuilding I talk about, when ‘the public’ became the central organising principle of societies. Rather than status. Nearly everywhere, except the US. https://t.co/mjNxpAxuLe

Trump is proof that it’s only existential threat to societies that has ever held status games in check. That creates a ‘we’. Without those threats, it’s each to their own, fighting for top dog. Elections were always a sideshow, gamed by…

I genuinely wish it was true that humans would mobilise to fix genuine emergencies, taking their attention off their own battles for social status. But they won’t. Only catastrophes shift societies. https://t.co/4MqhZuGyDM

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

Arguing with friends on permanent European tours, with their tax-free multi-million dollar super payouts, that the world is in a bad place. They’re not seeing it. Status and privilege never do see status and privilege.

The entire dynamic of human life and history. Change comes only when the status quo is reduced to rubble. https://t.co/M3Lt0oQvFT

We all know fashions change. Crocs are in again, for example. Do we think about what that means though, about humans? Just one more sneaky way status rules our lives. /1 https://t.co/aKjR1X8WQn Because it surely shows that what we like,…

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…

Humans will turn everything into team sports (imitative rivalry). The terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in politics derive from which side of the Speaker’s chair politicians are sitting on. A parliament is one room. Both the left and right wings…

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’.…

Noah Smith capturing exactly the true political ‘cycles’. The status quo (status games/team sports, battles for status) continues until it breaks everything, at which point somebody is elected to try to fix the things. Then the status…

Conservatives get millions whose lives are destroyed by conservative policies to vote for them, by offering them some proxy of social status. The ‘Left’ offers the poor assistance. Which is patronising to them. They want status, not help.

It’s about status, not money. The working class are wannabe billionaires. It’s why the American Dream gets them to vote for billionaires. https://t.co/HZJqAjioSb

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…

Lovely summary of Piketty’s work by Cory here. Read it and tell me you don’t see the cyclic waves of status games and catastrophe, the latter being all that interrupts status games. Capital is the wrong measure. Status is the currency of…

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 modern LNP is an Airbnb for vested interests. Not a single policy. Just a series of slogans designed to obstruct any change to the status quo. https://t.co/okfeSCrD32

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

While attentions are focused obsessively on the team sports of who wins elections, Nicholas Gruen notices what actually runs societies. The dreaded bureaucracy. Red tape. Break that, and your society is over. https://t.co/GFtzru9zn1

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.…

History isn’t a tug of war between democracy and fascism. Societies are (100%) social. They run on status. Democracies are pauses created by catastrophic events, suppressing the status quo. Without those events, a status quo will always…

Private versus public is an old, legacy team sport that we still play. All of what Cory says here is disgustingly true. The answer isn’t necessarily ‘make everything public’. That’s what the team sport wants us to say. Everything is…

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…

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

Do we get yet that democracy was only ever a temporary redirection towards the collective good, forced on populations by two world wars, a pandemic and Great Depression in the first half of the 20th century? Without catastrophe there are…

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

Humans copy one another. This forms teams. The teams fight each other. For status. Apply that lens to everything you see, every day.

Vanity lets us think of history as the slow progress of ideas and innovations. In reality we just fight each other for status, and reality then periodically belts us with catastrophes, often caused by the fights. Ideas and innovations only…

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…

All social systems that survive are eventually ‘authoritarian’, to control the mobilisation of stupidity and violence. Populists set up hierarchies as soon as they game and win elections. Their populism is just a ruse to replace existing…

Mob rule doesn’t discriminate between just and unjust causes. The fact this behaviour is not universally condemned, but ordinary people actually applaud it, is a symptom of how far gone we now are. Let me say it again. Mob rule doesn’t…

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…

Pandemic lockdowns are still under assault from a status quo determined to destroy public health, and public anything. Lockdowns made the poor richer than they ever had been. One of the last remaining wins is WFH. The status quo is…

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

But they don’t say how such a beautifully impersonal, public-focused mechanism is allowed to exist. It’s only allowed as a result of catastrophes, to repair society. At all other times status hierarchies call it ‘red tape’. Democracy =…

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.…

Many of those who still wear masks against Covid (as I do) happily are part of a tiny minority, avoiding the stupidity of mob imitative behaviour. But are happy to sign on to imitative mob outrages everywhere else. Masks was maybe just…

All human behaviour is networked, clumpy. Information the same, hubs of influencers, rather than ‘freedom of speech’. The problem isn’t mis/disinformation. Societies don’t run on information. ‘Facts’ won’t penetrate most of those red…

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…

Alan Kohler pointing out again that Net Zero is well beyond reach. Societies with their established status hierarchies won’t change unless they are forced to, by catastrophes of some kind. All kinds of politics and activism are just more…

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

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

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…

Some thought ‘living with a virus’ would be a nice, contained thing confined to Covid. And then suddenly we were living with every virus. Contagion is social as well as biological. Those cheering this on will, right up until the mob…

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…

America is not becoming a fascist nation, and believing it is plays right into Trump’s hands. The strategy of apocalyptic hysteria. We saw it with Covid too. /1 The way Covid action was destroyed was to portray Covid as everywhere, all the…

The only real currency of societies is status. You can slice and dice the economics or any other framing, it always reduces to status. What appears a victory against one status hierarchy is really the formation of another, with a different…

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.…

‘We’ won’t do anything of the sort without a world war or catastrophic natural disaster. There is no we, without that level of disruption to status hierarchies. Australians got affordable housing after WW2. Governments built it as part of…

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…

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

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

I’ve been called too ‘dark’ or cynical, in saying that very little humans deliberatively do changes our overall fate. That only catastrophes really change societies. But I live a very happy life, believing that. Because it grounds me, I…

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…

That glorious binary between small business success and public health. Any society which places lives and livelihoods in opposition is dead. Public health was invented to remove that distinction. https://t.co/t5N9CpCCf2

This is what societies really look like. Hubs and webs of social contagion. Humans imitate one another. They do it to achieve status, in groups (the circles). The groups then battle each other. https://t.co/HjBl0gsGrr

‘Lockdowns’ are the rebooting of societies. The cessation of the idiot, empty world of status games, and their current dominant hierarchies. The ‘mental health’ effects are largely the removal of status games, from those addicted to them.…

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

Social contagions are often mistaken for ‘the people’ acting. They are acting, but the action is to copy what everybody else is doing. They usually fade away quickly. The mob gets bored and finds a new fad. https://t.co/bTqA6Ep16I

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.…

Trump’s over-reach will be his own undoing. Ironically, he may be the catastrophe that destroys the status quo he wants to protect. https://t.co/O5sgzROHXA

Humans operate via social contagion. ‘Living with’ Covid has damaged all public health, a set of connected behaviours across all conditions. Maybe terminally. There’s no public in a kidult society run on what trends. https://t.co/X5VEaSPbZA

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…

Because that’s how status hierarchies work. Low-status people who have their wealth vacuumed up by high-status people don’t want to redistribute wealth. They want to be the high status people. They ‘aspire’ to and emulate them. They buy…

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 people who ask ‘why do you still mask?’ ask it in the way they might ask ‘why do you wear Crocs?’, when Crocs weren’t fashionable. There’s no science or public health in the question. It’s entirely about not imitating the group. That’s…

Because we use elections, a popularity contest, to apportion ultimate power in our society. Popularity has zero connection with material reality. This is what populism, the belief in elections, will always produce. The schoolyard.…

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…

The world is effectively doing sweet fuck all to confront the actual reality of climate change. The status quo will not shift, on anything, unless it is forced to. By catastrophe of some kind. https://t.co/MCk94AGdbS

Adoption of EVs is just one more example of how status runs societies. First adopters (of anything) are nearly always high status, wealthy people. They can afford new things, but buying them also gives status. Then everybody else emulates…

The despair that the ‘Left’ adopted neoliberalism misses that both Left and Right are really just teams in an identical status game, battling for top of the status ladder. The true political opposition is between team sports, and public…

Study any nation, and ‘progressive’ electoral wins there. Progressive really means challenges to the status quo. Progressives win only when some catastrophe has occurred. Obama - the GFC. Biden - Covid. There must be a pre-existing damage…

The assumption that societies have operating systems, that you can interchange like switching a USB stick. No societies are run by any -isms. All societies are run socially, using only one thing. Status. Only the names change to disguise…

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…

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

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 myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t agree with the rest of this thread from Cory, about ‘groundswell’ politics. Anti-trust. That’s the great American political delusion,…

I encourage everybody to focus not on the content of public debates, but on what’s going on socially. Societies don’t run on information, they run on social status. Cars are a test case. The anti-EV debates. The data shows what’s really…

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…

Status runs societies. Not politics, not economics. Status. It seems that paradigm shift is starting to happen. https://t.co/C4J3mcRohc https://t.co/aw1qVDT1pf

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…

Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highlight. And ‘how communities are making it an electrification…

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…

“Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is…

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…

The euphoria of victory in team sports taps into something that goes well beyond sport. It’s only one manifestation of a deeper cultural framework. Girard said, the root of all society is imitative rivalry. Team sports. In sport, but also…

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

I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened is…

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

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…

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

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

The idea that democracy is ‘the people’ running nations is like self-organisation theory. That we’ll together spontaneously decide upon the optimum thing to do. It’s also the basis of market-based econo-politics. Democracy and markets,…

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…

Opponents of AI have a valiant idea about the amount ordinary humans actually think. Humans 99% imitate others, not think. A technology that aggregates those rare times we do think is not non-human. It’s a great weapon against our…

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…

America was founded by Puritans who wanted to escape the checks and balances of civil society, that had booted them out of Europe. To this day that legacy defines so much American and therefore world life, with its fundamentalist obsession…

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…

Listening to a Tory toff on UK television still championing ‘levelling up’, or ‘growing the pie’. All the BS high status folk invented to try to avoid the inescapable fact that they’re robber barons. Again, none of this will ever resolve…

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

Roman ruins. Building things stabilises societies, because opinion is irrelevant to the success of the construction. It also embeds expertise in the construction and ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure, which disciplines human social…

Stop looking for somebody or some group to lead solutions to our greatest problems. That’s never how it works. Solutions come when the problem gets out of control and forces emergency action. That also creates a ‘we’. Only existential…

Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They invent and embed procedures that act well beyond the lifetime…

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

Humans will transform every existential threat into more status games. We saw that with Covid, a pandemic became a launchpad for multiple ‘causes’, which are social movements driven by desire for status. Disaster makes it easier to bypass…

The ‘political centre’ is a myth, even the most serious commentators still pretend politics is all about different teams along a spectrum, from Left to Right. No change comes from any of these teams. It comes from emergency response to…

You can be right 7 days out of every week, and still have no impact on the events in your life. Societies don't run on information. If what you believe aligns with the status quo, it will have impact. Otherwise...no. (The status quo is all…

Housing is the perfect example of status, the currency of all human society. Both the 'Left' and 'Right' in Australia converge on the same idiot idea to fix housing. 'More supply'. It's irrelevant what political teams we have. 1/6…

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’.…

We can’t vote our way out of our existential problems. Only catastrophe will force a change. No society will vote to destroy its own status quo. https://t.co/nkOgPQmfbD

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…

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…

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.…

‘Community opposition’ is a subset of belief in ‘the people’. Both are myths. There is no such thing as ‘the community’. Every time somebody evokes the people or the community, look for an activism in play from a tiny handful of people. /1…

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…

We can’t vote our way out of the problems that popularity-based governance causes. Only catastrophe ruptures a status quo. Humans will not surrender status, because to do that is to surrender their identity. https://t.co/lLjy8T6P51

‘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.…

It’s organised around status, always has been and always will be. ‘Capital’ is just a status hierarchy of 19th century social theory. https://t.co/g8QeBli6PN

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…

‘Lockdowns’ re-booted societies. They were the fantastic boost to business and workers the status quo would never have allowed. The desperate attempt to demonise them is that old status quo clinging on for dear life. https://t.co/5lpuoClTDr

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…

1948. Just after WW2. Public health only became a normalised thing by the destruction of existing status hierarchies in the first half of the 20th century. 2 wars, a pandemic and Great Depression. Status hierarchies now dominate again.…

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,…

We think politics runs societies. It really doesn’t, it’s recreational team sports overlaid upon material realities. It’s those realities that determine what happens. Every progress is just a response to reality smashing us out of our…

I want to re-emphasise this point. Covid, like crime, like housing, like everything, is a networked phenomenon. It’s a much SMALLER problem than we think, and much more easily beaten. But you have to dump the idea of society as millions of…

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…

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

Roman cities are instantly recognisable. What isn’t is that they’re the blatant plagiarising homage the Romans paid to the Greeks, whom they invaded and sacked. The Romans wanted to be Greeks, the Roman empire like all empires first looted…

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…

It’s amazing that ‘debt and deficit’ politics, weaponised junk economics, has completely captured the public policy space. Many even believe it, that governments need to find money to buy things. Central banks have been ignoring that…

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…

So much of the hysteria about ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ reflects widespread ignorance of history and its patterns. Rome is instructive. It began with Kings, moved to rule of ‘the people’ through a Senate, and then onto Emperors and…

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…

The sad truth that nothing will shift a status quo without catastrophe is highlighted nicely by us opening new airports. Air travel uses astronomical amounts of fossil fuel. Some analysts even call airports stranded assets.…

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…

‘Inequality’ is the norm in all societies because status runs societies. Inequality is a marker of status. The King eats pheasant while the poor eat mouldy cabbage. The poor don’t want to be rid of inequality. They want to be at the other…

Fascinating. I wish societies ran on information, it may have even been helpful if they did. Anti-vax is a ‘team’ in status battles. Anti-X is the basic model for creating a team, where X = some common thing. https://t.co/4ET4v9n4Ev

When the Praetorian Guard assassinated Caligula, they were hoping to free Rome from emperor tyranny. Instead they installed Claudius as emperor not long afterwards. Why? Without an emperor, there was no Praetorian Guard. Status runs…

Most of us can look on and wonder what do we do about this nonsense? Well, we can read history. Human societies always degenerate into status/popularity games, led by buffoons, unless forced to respond to existential crises. 1/3…

Anybody else’s feed suddenly full of bodybuilding health influencers? Blocking several a day now.

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…

It’s the American fantasy that there is such a thing as a flat, non-hierarchical society ruled by ‘the people’ that causes its problems. Democracy is intrinsically hierarchical too. All societies are. https://t.co/PthMJZIf9j

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…

Of the fundamental forces in the universe, none come close to the imitative, status-driven conformity of human societies. Urging is powerless against it. This is the lunacy you arrive at when you think ‘the people’ run societies.…

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

I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and free speech mean lead us to believe debating is some sort of winnowing process, to produce optimal outcomes. I call bullshit. /1…

It sums up kidult society that the only human response to this climate-related event is ‘eco-grief’ workshops for humans, apparently traumatised by what they’re seeing washed up on the beach. You’d laugh if it wasn’t so tragically…

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…

Status runs societies, and not only apportions a position on status hierarchies, it also then ‘works’ the raw material inside each of these hierarchies. A continuum of luxury or ‘premium’. You’ll hear ‘premium’ everywhere now. Homes, cars…

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…

Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander of Joint Forces Command in Europe. Highlighting the origin of ‘we’, or ‘the public’. It emerges only in response to threat. Without the threat we become hyper-sensitised snowflakes wallowing in…

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…

If democracy is ‘the people’ running things, why is every part of human life still structured by status, like the class system we say we left behind? https://t.co/Jt73TxUY50

Possibly yes. Ironically it’s collapse that creates civilisation, nothing else breaks through human status games to get people to act collectively. https://t.co/nFj1a6bUX9

The path to sanity? Focus on the material realities of our lives, the continental plates under the frisson of the team sports human status games overlaid upon them. Stop thinking which team’s leader makes a difference, or that the members…

Let’s get rid of what we call politics, and just focus on the material problems facing societies. There aren’t ‘Left’ or ‘Right’ ways of fixing those, it’s mostly just engineering. Politics is just humans playing status games over the top…

There is no ‘we’ now, just status games. ‘We’ was a creation of the post-WW2 repair, just as communities ‘unite’ around things like bushfires and floods. In good times ‘we’ is an obstacle to status games, or ‘identity politics’ today.…

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…

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

I sometimes post about casuistry, case-based reasoning. The genius human invention that is misunderstood, neglected and forgotten. The outrageous injustice meted out to Oscar Piastri at the British Grand Prix is a great way to explore it…

So the poor are stupid is the explanation for the gradual collapse of democracies. Or just maybe democracies have always been what every society is. Status hierarchies, where those lower in status dream of being high in status. Only the…

Again, “the poor are stupid” is where you end up if you believe ‘the people’ run societies. The poor emulate the rich. Status runs societies. https://t.co/d8eg6iQ9W2

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

So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life. Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around…

Staff member turned up to work sick yesterday. It was an insight into ‘living with’ infection culture. I told them to go home. ‘No, I’m fine, I have too much to do.’ Then others in the office approached me in private to ask me to make them…

There it is, the core belief the US (and now others) hold that destroys democracy. The fake opposition between the ‘sovereignty of the people’, and ‘authoritarianism’. There is no such thing as ‘the people’. ‘Popular sovereignty’ is an…

The 40th anniversary of Live Aid. Adult culture looked at a critical problem facing the world, and thought ‘we should hold a gig’. Kidult culture. Still active from the counterculture 60s. Still active today. Gig culture. Adult life as an…

“Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal… /1 …since…

Trump isn’t bringing fascism to America. We don’t know our own culture, and that’s not unusual. Fish don’t know water exists, until beached. Trump is the apotheosis of the countercultural movement, going back 70-odd years. Down with the…

Every single post on this platform imploring that ‘we’ need to act to fix something is 70 years too late. Looking to do “we” things in “I” cultural times is pissing into the wind. It won’t happen, until catastrophe re-forms another ‘we’…

Our culture *is* the counterculture of the 1950s and 60s. A culture that began as teens rebelling against the old, and is ending with adult life replaced by teen life, with its teen rebels now the fabulously wealthy elites. It’s not…

One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world in some immediate way. I’ve spent a few years here detailing the mechanics of social life and change. And how deliberative human…

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

Culture is mostly invisible to those living it, it’s like water is to fish. I spend a lot of time talking about the countercultural revolution of our era, with friends. Because it’s our culture. And it’s largely invisible to us, I suspect.…

The countercultural movement of the 1960s took credit for a lot of changes that were actually the result of a pulverised status quo, from the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. https://t.co/8rtAsRXnPl…

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.

Bureaucracy is the only democracy. Everything else is just status games.

It feels good to have a baddie. Unfortunately capitalism isn’t real, nor are any of the other -isms. Socieities run on status alone, they’re never economies. They’re 100% social. And we all play the same status games. Because status =…

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…

At even the central estimate, this is more people than died during World War 1. And the deaths keep coming. If you want the champion genociders of our era, look to Covid-minimising politicians and the public health influencers who act as…

All societies are ‘oligarchies’, they’re all status hierarchies. The name of the higher status positions change, that’s all. The American belief in nations free of hierarchy is mistaken for ‘democracy’. Democracy is hierarchical too. It’s…

So many see the world as competing -isms. Capitalism takes on socialism and communism, with authoritarianism now the flavour of the month too. The underlying belief here is that societies are like computers, with an operating system. But…

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…

The Anglo world affected a shift to ‘democracy’ in its wars of Church v State. But nothing actually changed, they’re still Judeo-Christian status hierarchies. That’s what Gaza means. It reveals the reality behind the spin. Societies are…

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…

What we desire is also what we think, what we feel, what we believe. We mistake all of these for the objects of our desire, we think what we like is present in the object of our desire. But really we like things because other people like…

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…

Contrast with Planck, one of the great scientists, remarking that science progresses one funeral at a time. Science is 100% social, just like everything else. It trends, it has fads and fashions deep inside its content. It’s why peer…

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?

The status quo will never change unless it’s forced to change. Only catastrophe forces change, and the status quo. https://t.co/swk2LP9lOG https://t.co/DxlCJ10D4M

Have you noticed that the term that describes the existing state of society is about status? Status runs all societies. Not politics, not economics, not power or anything else. Status. https://t.co/CBpDObeIfL

To change the world, the work to make the change needs to be made into high-status work. No amount of battling in opposing ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ (or other) teams will bring the change. https://t.co/euhniwOOu6

Enshittification is a colourful re-working of the American distrust of hierarchy. The belief that ‘monopolies’ betray the people, the mythical flat hierarchies of self-organising citizens. America is always at war with itself, giving…

It can help understand how status runs all groups and societies, by ditching the ‘power’ framings. Status doesn’t win by dominating. It wins by being the habitual way people do things, combined with their desire to be better accepted for…

“…people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, while past collapses often improved the lives of ordinary citizens.” Like I say regularly: 1/2 https://t.co/wjHkQUi7lZ Status drives all…

I’ve watched sport over many years, as a window into a culture we’re still not seeing or understanding. Victory now creates utter euphoria. Defeat has professionals in tears, with crowds either silent or overwhelmed with euphoria…

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.

Institutions generally come into existence and thrive only in response to catastrophic disruption to the status quo. Wars, plagues, natural disasters. They won’t hold against populist politics. Nothing except catastrophe restrains human…

If the US would stop seeing this sort of inequality as an assault on democracy and instead saw it for what it is - its own people reproducing the status hierarchies it pretends it doesn’t like - it might get somewhere.…

I think worth reminding every single day that the checks and balances we see rightly as the root of democracy have their origins in the battles between barons and Kings, at the very top of social status hierarchies. Democracy never was a…

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…

The enduring popularity of period dramas. These are works that explore the thing I Tweet about constantly, the root of all human life and society. Status. Status didn’t disappear in modernity. We stopped noticing it. We need modern Jane…

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…

Societies don’t run on information. They run on trust. The war is the war on status, and trust. As those who study mis/disinformation say, outrage is the gauge. Outrage tells you somebody is targeting a trust/status hierarchy.…

That thin blue veneer harbours the only known life in the entire universe. It’s air. The health of that atmosphere should be far and away humankind’s greatest priority. Climate change and airborne infectious soups tell us that air has…

Targeting status, this is more like it. https://t.co/LFqXyZlsGz

Because the Kings (leaders) worry the barons have too much power. The engine room of Western society, for at least a thousand years. It generated the Magna Carta, the foundation of democracies. A document apportioning power between King…

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

I mean honestly, just one more reason for the young to despise the ever-growing aged demographic. They’re checking out of working themselves to death to support a bloated aged care society, that doesn’t give two fucks about them. Their…

All social progress that we attribute to various kinds of activism are really opportunistic changes capitalising on some form of serious damage to the status quo. Once that damage is repaired, the gains will all be reversed.…

The status quo is winning on climate action. The world seems a million miles away from hitting most targets. Only catastrophe shifts a status quo. Real change happens, to paraphrase Planck again, one funeral at a time.…

Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when facing catastrophe? ‘Prosociality’? Here’s the thing. That IS ‘democracy’. We’ve always misunderstood its origins. /1…

Australia’s main energy companies are buying up big with grid batteries. Unsurprisingly the much lower cost of generating the renewable energy to fill them isn’t being passed on to consumers. You can’t ‘market’ your way to a revolution in…

Humans mirror each other obsessively in social interactions. Imitation is the root of all human life. The idea AI is just imitating humans I think ignores that human interaction is mostly habitual and imitative already.…

The Albanese government’s attempt in its first term to ape the status quo by simply replacing fossil fuel generation in the electricity grid with renewables was a lost opportunity. They should have ‘gone households’ right from the start.…

Experts I see here who are fine with doing nothing to restrict airborne spread of disease clearly don’t support water-borne disease. Which suggests their opposition is entirely their politics (or other team in some social team sport),…

Rome is the foundation of modern Western societies. Its empire lasted 1500 years. What’s less said about the success of its social model was its enthusiastic embrace of immigration and refugees. The secret sauce of Roman success was…

With everything going on in the world today, it surprises me it’s not more obvious that all change is nothing to do with facts or information, and everything to do with social groups battling for status.

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

There were 3 revolutions in the 20th century, in all 3 major powers. Russia, China, the Anglosphere. We only notice the disasters of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. We ignore our own, thinking we’re somehow culture-free. All were in…

Millions believe democracy means letting entire populations opine on things they mostly know nothing about, with the most popular opinions the ones that then win the day. Social media is now the tool where this farce is carried out. /1…

Again, we stopped everything we were doing for years at a time for two world wars last century. For risks that were insignificant, compared to this. Today’s status quo is impervious to any empirical, material reality or threat. We’re stuck…

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…

Because societies run on status. The lowest status members of societies want to be the highest status members, they don’t want status to disappear. Until we deal with societies socially, nothing will change. https://t.co/F9eN3zKzOO

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…

#Insiders the productivity roundtable would have been better replaced by any of the current AI models. Humans don’t think, they negotiate status in teams, as was in plain view at the roundtable. Exhibit A: the idea ‘supply’ is the problem…

‘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…

The fossil fuel industry has its tentacles into every aspect of our lives. The most revolutionary politics you can pursue is to drive an EV, and put solar panels on your house. No amount of voting will change anything. But doing those…

President vs King. The gold gives it away. Trump represents the literal resurgence of feudal society, with Kings and churches leading status hierarchies. Humanity’s most stable and lasting social form. (He’s a pathetically useless king.)…

I often Tweet about the 1970s being a pivotal time in the reversing of the public gains of the we-based society, post-WW2. The period 1950-late-1970s, when ‘the public’ was the dominating principle of governance. Rebuilding broken…

It’s estimated Henry VIII executed up to 60,000 English folk during his reign, many of whom he saw as threats to his regime, including clergy. Trump is returning King and Court feudalism to the US, not fascism. History’s dominant form of…

The pandemic did what all natural disasters do. It challenged the status quo, trying to destroy it. The status quo held on by the skin of its teeth using the insanely delusional notion of infection being good for all of us.…

We won’t see any collective unity against our critical problems. We’ll see a proliferation of groups use those problems for ‘identity politics’, the battle for social status. Only catastrophe brings people together. Without it there are…

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…

I think it was McCartney who recently called out the nonsense of the lyric and vibe of this sort of song. It’s a window into the massive social/cultural shift that became our culture. The counterculture. When high school took over the…

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

The more we socialise human life, the more unequal the outcomes will become. This contrasts with our common assumptions about sociality, that it’s a type of leveller. An experiment in the early 2000s demonstrated this in a novel way.…

The real ‘enemy’ of our societies isn’t flavoured ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. Those are just teams in the same status game. Our enemy is the hostility towards all forms of expertise. The equating of expertise with elitism, designed to destroy…

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…

The only reason any real progress is being made against the greatest threat in human history is that China is disrupting our status quo. Only disruption brings meaningful change. We will never voluntarily agree to move the status quo.…

Watching RFK Jr. at the Senate hearings should be a wake-up call to all of the terminal danger of allowing elections to grant ultimate power in a society. And yet many if not most still mistake elections, for democracy. Popularity has no…

The transition to renewables shows how human societies work. Objectively everybody should be celebrating this near-free energy. But as with all human change the status quo is more interested in its status, than in anything else. Only…

Almost universally the US is now described as a battle between democracy and fascism. What we call democracy is really just a monarchy with significant checks and balances forced by the King’s court (i.e. the aristocracy), to protect their…

Activism will always sell itself as changing the world for the better. It will always be just one more attempt to increase the status of one group, over another. Status is to humans what gravity is to matter. https://t.co/Y5VowdtUZx

In a society of teenagers, both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ converge upon attack on institutions. Institutions who become the proxy parental and teacher figures in adult life, denying the kidults ‘freedom’. Grounding them with ‘lockdowns’. Etc.…

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…

This is what you’d expect to see in any feudal society, which is all societies. What’s missing in the US is any sort of functional ‘court’ or aristocracy, with responsibility for the masses of ordinary people. Instead you just get that…

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…

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

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…

‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue. And it’s in decline even in these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century…

Greg Sheridan talking about the impossibility of Net Zero on #Insiders, based on current progress globally. So the fuck what. Put society on a war footing. Yesterday. A vastly greater threat than the ones we stopped the world for, for over…

Those who zoom out of daily trending obsessions will see patterns. Democracies are collapsing, under assault from populism. Which is really just uncontrolled human status games. We’ve been here before. And misunderstood it then too. 1/5…

How is the world going with climate targets? Nowhere. The status quo will never change something that it relies upon for its own existence. Look around. Humans are just fighting each other in imitative teams, for status/identity. 1/3…

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…

One of the tropes of modern politics is that populists like Trump succeed because of millions of disaffected working people. This is just one more delusional variety of the nonsense idea that ‘the people’ is a thing. /1 We so desperately…

Lawrence’s Letter from Germany in the late-1920s was a novelist’s perception of a dangerous shift in human social life. It was prescient of what happened next. That danger is back. Mostly we see it as the danger of one or other teams in…

No amount of social media posturing in our various battling teams about ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘fascism’ makes the slightest difference to the collapse of the US. Lewis and Usmani offer us a glimpse as to why that is. In this one chart. /1…

Even in the study of catastrophe, how we *feel* about everything is front and centre. The culture of the feels. “It's not humans per se that are bad, but the institutions and power structures that corrupt…”. We never left the 1960s. 1/2…

Those who unquestioningly equate democracy with voting don’t lose any sleep over a third to a half of voters in some countries not even bothering to vote. The voters aren’t stupid. They know the whole thing has been gamed by high status…

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…

Only rarely do we recognise that an actual revolution introduced fossil fuels to our societies. Not any sort of gradual, managed change with things like targets. It will need a revolution to wean us off them. Only total disruption shifts a…

It’s often said that talk of catastrophic things is ‘hysteria’ and paralyses people into inaction. Let’s call BS on that. Only a sense of real threat mobilises any change to a status quo. The people who cry hysteria are the greatest…

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

If you think ‘politics’ runs societies, you’ll see history as a series of Premier League games, won alternately by ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. If you think (as I do) status runs societies, history becomes cycles of humiliation. Humiliation is the…

It’s pleasing to see more social psychology in the mix. Politics is a hopeless framing of our problems and lives, just more social psychology. Team sports. Societies are 100% social. Imitative rivalry, for status. They’ve never run on…

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

Our ideas about how humans live together are ridiculous. Take Covid. When people acted against it, it’s because everybody else was doing that too. And now they’re doing nothing, it’s for the same reason. Because everybody else is doing…

The engine room of all history: - humans fight one another for status, in teams - the losers in that fight feel humiliated - they enact revenge on the winners - repeat ad infinitum. What we see as political shifts are actually this…

The irony of people objecting (rightly) to X becoming a sewer, is that it did it using the same belief system about 'the people' that is the most popular definition of democracy. That letting everybody mingle in a flat structure will…

I have an EV. A Tesla. It helps me see again how societies run on status. It does several hundred kms per week. Costs 80 cents (total). Friends don't drive an EV because of [insert scare campaign]. Others because of 'Elon'. All negotiating…

Hilarious is our belief that humans ever spent much time being intelligent. Humans spend most of every day playing social status games, not thinking. Machines finally liberate actual intelligence. It may be a wrecking ball through status…

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

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…

I sometimes get accused of being anti-democracy. But my position is that there are no ‘systems’ of government in the first place. Societies are not systems. They’re humans, acting socially. Then labelling this behaviour in a variety of…

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 evidence is there every day, in every part of life, that humans will not work together to fix common problems unless those problems threaten the status of those who lead them. That’s the only time a ‘we’ will emerge. No activism…

In Dewey and Lippmann’s famous discussions about the nature of a public and democracy, they agreed on one critical thing. That only problems bring a public into being. As I say, only catastrophe creates the ‘we’ that is the public. 1/3…

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’,…

The imminent arrival of ‘daylight saving’ time, which saves no daylight, fucks circadian rhythms and transforms Spring mornings into dark winter mornings, is another reminder that knowledge never runs societies. Status runs societies.…

Fossil fuel energy is the root of our status quo. Feel the magnitude. In just the 50 years between 1970 and 2020, estimates of profit to the oil industry and oil nations are over US $50 trillion. That’s nearly $3 billion profit per DAY.…

It’s almost a truism that to have a revolution, you need to mobilise a lot of people. Renewable energy challenges that. Putting solar panels on your roof can to a considerable extent free you from fossil fuel dominant hierarchies. You…

Anybody spotted ‘focused protection’ happening, anywhere? Imagine having a model of society where people live in independent bubbles, where nobody crosses the bubbles. That’s the GBD. The Great Bubble Delusion. https://t.co/WEy3herpdX

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

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

Status is the organising grammar of social life. It evolved to reduce violence and coordinate cooperation. Social life unregulated by status is pure, endless violence. Which is what you get if you allow ‘the people’ (i.e. nobody) to run…

‘Authoritarian’ nations now are the only ones left building anything much, at scale. Others wallow in fantasies about ‘markets’ of free individuals generating civilisation spontaneously. All they generate is eternal violence. The fight for…

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

You can flood the world with as many facts as you like. I still see this every day, on multiple topics. If you don’t shift to actually understanding how societies work, you’re pissing into the wind. They don’t run on information. They run…

We stopped the world twice in the 20th century to fight two world wars. Over trivialities, compared to this. Humans fighting humans. For status. That’s all societies will do, unless catastrophe is present. Not imminent, present, total…

We are all FACHIDIOTS unless disaster is already upon us, forcing immediate emergency coordination of all of our diverse fachidioten expertise. Emergency does the coordination, everything else will just be turned into status games, to…

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

We know the Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free market think tank. Also a climate change denial group. The declaration didn’t even pretend to do the things it…

My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine…

A revolution introduced fossil fuels into societies. We think the ‘market’ will drive them out. The true nature of the market as a defensive shield of bullshit to protect the status quo becomes more visible every day. It’s even worse than…

This is the critical recognition, that it’s not mis- or disinformation we’re battling. The true target has always been trust. Trust is a proxy for status. Societies don’t run on information, they run on trust for those with enormously…

America’s founding refusal to acknowledge the role of some form of centralised status hierarchy to lead social life has led to what we see today. Everything is just a type of gang warfare, between rivals looking to occupy the ‘No Kings’…

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…

I often post about how all meaningful and significant change in societies comes only from catastrophic disruptions. Historically, wars, plagues, natural disasters. Everything else is status games, dressed up in various costumes. But there…

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

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.…

In cultures that last, the experience of age is plugged back into society, guiding it. In kidult cultures, the aged live a permanent adolescent gap year, using the wealth we concentrate in that age group, away from those raising families…

In cultures that reformatted adult life as a giant high school, retirement is now when you finish school and go on your ‘gap year’, travelling the world. We should see the utter perversity of this as a social and cultural model. But we…

Those who work with knowledge for a living tend to assume that’s how society works too, people thinking and processing facts. Societies run on status. On people imitating those with higher status, in teams, battling other teams for…

This is our framework for understanding the entire world. We’re trapped inside this team sports bubble. Every point on this spectrum is only a status/identity-based team, battling for social position. All of the positions are also entirely…

It’s amazing that change in human societies always follows the same mechanism, and every time we act surprised. Every significant change requires either an external or internal existential threat to the status quo. It is never about…

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:…

Work from home is a classic example of how only catastrophic disruption to the status quo enables real social change. Without the pandemic there was not a snowball’s chance in hell it would ever have taken off widely.

Popularity is the currency of populism, which is Western culture today. In populist culture, the only revolutionary is the person who thinks or does unpopular things. Not opposite to what others think or do, that’s populism too, creating a…

As with autonomous driving technology, one of the assumptions that amuses me is that without AI (or tech in general), some human, somewhere, is checking all of the data. Humans are mostly bone idle. Motivated by status and confirmation…

It took a single day for rare earths to become the new team sport red meat. When you think ‘the people’ or ‘markets’ (hilariously, the same thing) run societies, you turn everything into perpetual battles for social status. Everything is…

The idea of a free market in economics is *exactly* the same as the idea of democracy as the sum of the views of millions of individuals. In both cases the fiction is used to allow uncontrolled status-driven empires to be built. Oligarchs,…

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.…

John Anderson, on public health. “One aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns was the emergence of a sense that essential freedoms were somehow gifts to be bestowed by government, rather than rights inherent to the people.” /1…

Noah Smith. Funny how the worm is turning in understanding the deeper social transformations in play. But he ends with: “ I predict that the new age of kings won’t last.” The age of kings never ends. /1 https://t.co/K9UkkQP0Ux…

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…

When democracies removed Kings and their aristocratic courts, humans just reinvented them all over again, with different names. Status runs societies. This isn’t oppression, this is the default state of human social life. It creates…

It was only the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century which gave ordinary people access to housing for the first time. Prior to that, housing and land were the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful. /1…

For most of modern history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. So why aren’t we today? Only catastrophe really changes societies. The Black Death killed up to half of Europe. That destroyed peasantry as a way of life. /1…

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.

The monumental waste of time of our Left v Right team sports. By mid-century, fully half of all public and private expenditure will be the care of retirees. All of our problems are social problems. Including the (social) problem of…

"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…

The greatest enemy of human existence is infection. Worth repeating every day that most people who have ever lived died from some form of infection, the majority before they’d even reached adulthood. Pandemics are defined by the number and…

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.

Fossil fuels were introduced to the world via a revolution. Only revolutions can puncture a status quo. It’ll take a revolution to get rid of them again. Only the Chinese are really trying. https://t.co/o30q2eA7hg

Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was revolutionary, and offers us a way to run our societies that would be far superior to electoral democracy. Put public health at the…

I’m much less exhausted by the flood of mis/disinformation than by what causes it, which isn’t mentioned. It’s the deliberate destruction of trust, in everything, and the resultant way every tiny facet of human life is now turned into an…

A status quo will never change itself, it has to be forced to change, by catastrophic disruption. The West is the winner of the last revolution, the fossil fuel-led Industrial Revolution. It'll be the last to realise how fucked it is for…

The most counter-intuitive and unpalatable truth of the fact that status runs societies? The more equal we are, the more violent societies become. It intensifies rivalry. Our new wannabe kings are an emergent social response. To try to…

It’s our determination to make democracy a levelised ‘people’ that produces tyrants. Humans made equal in that way will fight with every breath to reintroduce hierarchy and distinction. They desperately want to be free of the constant…

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?…

Put public health at the centre of everything we do. It will fix everything else at the same time. No problems (political, economic, social etc.) exist in isolation, they all connect, led by ‘keystone’ problems as the hub. Public health is…

What terrified the status quo about supposed ‘lockdowns’ was that they started to genuinely bite, into the status quo. Catastrophe reboots societies. It’s all that does. It’s their on/off switch. https://t.co/PXtPj7Dy5Y

Most social problems are generated by tiny numbers of people who form hubs in social networks. This account for example is one society could easily choose to shut down, to prevent misinformation on vaccination being spread to millions. And…

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

Ask any follower of populist leaders what motivates them, and the answer will invariably be that they’re sick of ‘politics’ i.e. people fighting to be top of the status hierarchy. They want a stabilised status hierarchy. They’ll invent one…

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…

Journalism is just one more of the checks and balances of democracy that actually had its origins in battles between high status members of society, for dominance. The checks and balances we call democracy were never about ‘the people’.…

Scroll through through your feed and notice how many posts and threads are arguments. ‘Debates’. This is the medium doing what it does. Converting human social life into endless fighting. Imitative rivalry. Pretending that’s ‘democracy’,…

The Republicans and Democrats in the US have swapped ideologies over the course of their history. Societies don't run on politics, they run on imitation/conformity, driven by status. Political parties will happily swap ideologies to follow…

Away from the daily tedium of identity team sports, wonders abound. https://t.co/xw1cqDKou7

Pretty much all public debates are fake, distracting noise hiding the real social games going on. Here again, the Dems and Republicans have completely swapped positions over their history, showing those positions are irrelevant. It's all…

Democracy is not the rule of the people. It’s the managed rivalry of the powerful. You can’t unsee it.

Democracy is not countries run by the people, but the top of status hierarchies holding each other in check by various means, to prevent supremacy being localised in only one group. The executive, legislative and judicial branches are all…

Public health never was the public doing health, or even understanding how. It was done for them and to them. And it only happened because high status people felt threatened by the same diseases. The moment they don’t, public health is…

The disgusting term ‘lockdowns’ disguises that emergency Covid action actually lifted huge numbers of people out of poverty. What was ‘locked down’ wasn’t people. It was a status hierarchy that screws people. It freed them. 1/2…

I call it the ‘sub quotient’. Look at any social need, and see how much of it would disappear with the sums allocated to these subs. We need to defend ourselves from the only country that keeps our economy afloat. Also the world leader in…

The budget has become the great worship day of nations who believe they’re ‘economies’. Not realising that was a political strategy, to undermine government and social life. For a nation with a sovereign currency, a budget is almost…

‘Fair trial’ is more democratic checks and balances. But it originated (as all things do) in battles between the highest status members of societies. In the Western case, in the attempts by aristocracies to rein in the arbitrary power of…

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.…

Compare and contrast Sir Humprey here with the revolutionary ‘the people’ narratives coming out of the US and elsewhere. Is Sir Humphrey anti-democratic? Absolutely no. We need to understand the fundamental difference between…

@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…

Most of the strident criticism of AI seems to come from those who are habituated to being seen as go-to experts by the wider community. It's just another status thing. Their fear of losing theirs.

We’re so ignorant of basic social behaviour that we attribute the ills of the world to individualist psychology and health. ‘Narcissism’ abounds as a folk diagnosis. Covid brain damage is said to make people act irrationally, etc. All…

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…

All of the checks and balances we use to define democracy have their origins in elite rivalry between high status members of societies. A ‘free press’ too, its origin was rival barons of information, competing for status.…

Democracy never was ‘the people’. It’s one phase of the rivalry between a society’s elite, where no elite group can attain dominance. A balanced elite rivalry. History is always decided by rivalry between elite status groups. Societies run…

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…

We stopped entire societies for well over a decade in the 20th century, to fight two world wars of much lower risk to humanity. Societies don’t run on facts. They run on status. As the Victorians linked vital public infrastructure to…

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

‘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.…

I have zero interest in electoral politics, it simply reproduces the cultural mechanism we learn in school, of different groups jostling for social supremacy, via popularity. You can’t vote your way out of the problems voting causes. All…

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,…

Not taxing enormous, cashed-up elderly populations is one of the main causes of inflation. They're spending with relish. The boomer juggernaut is still making its way through the social python. Its anti-establishment cred was always fake.…

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…

There is no equality between people, and they will fight you if you try to impose it. All that tames status is a central, master status hierarchy in a society, networked to the rest of peoples’ lives. Kings and Popes, historically.…

Countering the idea that our previously functional public health systems came from more enlightened times. ‘Elites’ drive all change in societies, because societies run on status. Current elites see public health as an obstacle. Previous…

#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.

The world where the public good led government decisions was not the outcome of voting or of better leaders. It was a world led by the public institutions that surged between 1945 and 1975. Elected leaders were just the public liaison for…

“Powers that liberal-democratic revolutionaries the world over fought to take away from absolute monarchs in the 18th and 19th centuries are being reconstituted under the American executive in the 21st century.” Yes. Kings are back. The…

Status runs all of human society. The idea science and other fields are an exception ignores that peer review is probably the most status-driven of all human processes. Peer review = ‘peer pressure’ anywhere else. https://t.co/qwrOhyG9Do

Using Turchin's work on elite overproduction, it's possible to conceive all societies as status rivalries between elites. What we call 'democracy' is really the degree of co-option of the wider population, to these rivalries. /1…

Serving people’s material needs. That’s the touchstone of governance. The West is off with the identity politics fairies, fighting status games in a dramatic overproduction of elites. https://t.co/8gqMoupMUL

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…

Pinker’s Enlightenment narrative mistakes conditional post-catastrophe social equilibria for gradual progress. All social progress comes from catastrophic, punctuated destruction of existing status hierarchies. Life is only better for…

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

What if, as a culture, we shifted to living in time, rather than in space? Shifted our focus to what endures, rather than to our present-moment ‘positions’, both on a map and in public debate? The West is an endgame imperial culture. It’s…

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

A few years ago I shifted most of my posting here to target one thing. Status. Status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. Without understanding status, you understand nothing about human life. It’s also the core…

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…

I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate. Societies are like ecosystems in evolution. Evolution tends…

Public health human shields politicians promoted during Covid were dazzled by the instant celebrity it brought them. Drunk on rapidly acquired social status. Always look to status as the root cause. They’ll be roadkill to the same…

At every major transition in human progress, you will find a status quo inventing bullshit to try to head-off change. The function of the bullshit is to create pointless and interminable argument.

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.…

There are no political systems. Humans left to coordinate themselves always reproduce hierarchies, built on status. That was also the origin of the 'centralised' hierarchies people want to replace. 'The people' is, was and will always be a…

If you think societies run with money, it’s bewildering. If you think they run by status, it’s intrinsic to everything humans do. Societies are 100% social. It’s status. Everybody will fight any attempt to create equality. Only…

Masking hashtags are back. Social change never comes from activism. Activism appeared to work in the 1960s because most civilisation had been pulverised by 2 world wars.

So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem…

Humans imitate, they create trends and follow them. No matter how idiot the trend, like wankpanzer vehicles. Imitative rivalry is the driver of all human thought and action. The fight for status, which is the fight for identity. We're…

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…

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

Of course, what else can they do but surrender to populism? It can't be beaten. Only the social collapse it triggers stops it. A pattern as old as history. https://t.co/VbcMd2WTdk

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

The fragmenting of identity into ever finer distinctions, and ‘standing for’ each of these, is the bubble whole populations now live inside. Created by the collapse of distinctions in status, in all fields of life. Populism. Status =…

Trump’s Venezuelan action continues a long US tradition. Which was a Roman tradition. The US has always led the modern world in these actions. Regime change abroad is about managing elite rivalries at home, as it also was in Rome.…

Those in US society who are ‘decamillionaires’ (>$10 million net worth) have expanded TENFOLD in the past half century. This isn’t about inequality. This is the group from which political aspirants tend to be drawn. The number of seats…

Increasingly it’s pointless discussing what’s happening in the world, with the framing of those events lacking any empirical connection to history or social dynamics. Venezuela, for example. The US has done this 60-80 times, since 1945.…

America is a plutocracy, always has been. Its Civil War was just another elite rivalry between business interests in the South and the North. Business runs America. It always has. Trump isn’t new, he looks new only because of the…

I still believe Turchin’s overproduction of elites is a far better framework to understand Trump through. Look at the history of the Trump regime. Firstly the big increase in candidates for Presidency itself. The US is now overflowing with…

Royal Commissions are hugely expensive. And generally forensically thorough, but entirely at the whim of the ruling status quo to ignore once published. Witness the Banking Royal Commission. Lots of righteous anger behind that. It’s…

The genius of the Tupperware party was to understand that what people think and do is driven by social conformity. If you target the social networks rather than thinking of humans as information processors, you can have success. Now,…

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…

The flip side of status, which is the operating system of all societies, is humiliation. Humiliation is the destruction of all status. Germans felt humiliated after WW1, this made them receptive to the Nazi BS. Serial killers also nearly…

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…

Civil rights-era reforms are often evoked as evidence of people-led change in societies. In reality they came at a time when 2 world wars, a pandemic and economic depression had immiserated elites. Status-based rule has been waiting to…

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…

Societies don’t run on information. In the absence of some form of leadership to define a different pathway of higher status, people will just default to what they’re already doing. https://t.co/vmlDz7V4iG

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

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.

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

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

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…

This view on the progress of human knowledge owes more to affection for the US Constitution than to actual history. Knowledge is like evolution. It progresses one funeral at a time, to paraphrase Planck. Worldviews compete for status,…