Thread by @davetroy

1/While we are facing serious challenges and it seems a lot of things are falling apart, I'd like to offer a few possible reasons for optimism.

Much of what's driving global uncertainty now is being driven by people like Bannon, Dugin, and Putin.

2/Without their agitation (and with the pandemic as a variable we'd possibly have either way) things would be considerably more stable if those people, and the network they've built, did not exist.

So, what are they doing to destabilize the world?

3/They are amplifying division, attacking financial stability, promoting geopolitical realignment, and destabilizing democracies. They are doing this primarily via information warfare seeded via the internet, which ripples throughout the information ecosystem.

4/But they are doing this at a time when our global "information metabolism" is operating faster than ever. This both helps and harms their goals. On the one hand, they are trying to make the world "sick" by injecting mind-viruses. And we are often "getting sick" very quickly.

5/However, as our immune systems learn how these attacks work, each new round of efforts requires new levels of stealth and strategy to sicken the population.

And as our metabolism keeps increasing its speed, we are ingesting and spitting out infections faster and faster.

6/Most sources contend that the "disco era" lasted from ~1970 to about 1980. But it ended abruptly, as other forms, like punk and other rock forms, quickly gained dominance.

What took a decade then might take a year, or months, now. Cue Warhol's quote re: 15 minutes of fame.

7/Bannon and friends have been trying to 'wobble' the world with his destabilization strategy for about 10 years. And it's taken too long to figure out what the hell he was up to. But the assault is essentially a "fashion" attack, trying to alter culture.

8/What we see now is that Bannon's cultural artificial insemination is only really taking hold in pathological social subsets with excess social capital. QAnon extremists, crypto bros, and paramilitary fascists are all-in, but most other people just want reality back.

9/It is possible, especially if we assist the process, we might expel the Bannon/Dugin/Putin infection much more quickly, and before it has any chance at all to gain real organic traction — which he is counting on, and which may be aspirational only — and move beyond it.

10/Every single day that passes where Putin is kept in check, Dugin's prophecies fail to materialize, and Bannon's crypto fever-dreams are sh!t on is a day closer to the day we reject these fashions. Given that our information metabolism is arguably faster in every way today,

11/it seems likely we can increasingly throw off infections before they can really take root at scale. I'm not sure if folks in national security are considering this strategy to stabilize societies, but it seems viable and one that could be enhanced.

12/Obviously, the amount of noise and pathologies we're dealing with now may diminish hope for improvement, but that may also be something of a temporary condition while we acclimate to faster and faster processing of information attacks. Overall, this may have two effects.

13/Increased "social volatility," where ideas move extremely fast through the ecosystem and have outsized unpredictable effects; but also increased "social stability" where we become less susceptible to large scale social engineering, thus lowering incentives to pursue it.

14/If we can ingest, chew up, and spit out Bannon/Dugin/Putin's mind virii, then we may have passed an inflection point of resilience. If, however, we spend another 10 years mired in bad fashion and worse ideas, we are creating huge incentives for societal engineering.

15/Each day that reality pushes back — but more importantly fashion rejects revanchism, illiberalism, propertarianism, and anti-democratic movements — is another sign we're learning to ingest and reject fashion/information more quickly.

16/I hope this is the case, as it is perhaps the only hope we have for getting past this precarious time in human history. The faster we can process and reject passing trends, the more stable the world may ultimately become. Every night should be disco demolition night.

17/And of course, that really means living in a world less subject to long term manias, while sticking fast to ethics and science. That is possible to achieve, but it will take effort and conscious choices on the part of many. But that is achievable. And...

18/with any luck Bannon/Dugin/Putin have simply missed their window of opportunity for their demon seeds to take root in the global womb. They are aiming for a "100 year rule," and frankly, our metabolism is now operating on a much shorter time horizon.
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19/They've been at this, depending how you want to look at it, for the last 50 years. That's quite enough, and we can now metabolize it out and expel it as the waste product that is. We are digesting things much faster now, and that will only accelerate.