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 societies.

Housing no exception.

1/5 Look at how mass home ownership only emerged with massive government-led public housing programs, post-war. And how that ownership rate flatlined and then declined with the progressive removal of public housing programs, replaced by ‘the market’.

2/5

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 You can infect entire populations with lethal diseases, rather than deny them their ‘right’ to have a good time, with others.

That’s the relative moral weightings we’re dealing with. They point to the culture that drives this assessment.

/2

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 the name of ‘the people’.

/1

Most revolutions are, it’s the PR of the shift. Always it’s a small group who actually lead the shift, and then attribute it to the population.

Western culture *is* the counterculture of the 1960s. That was *our* revolution. It was the same disaster all revolutions are.

/2

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 framing first.

/1

scientificamerican.com/article/teens-… This topic attracts so much interest because of the framing, lost in the noise. The framing that says human-human interaction is ‘natural’ and ‘real’, and human-machine interaction is ‘algorithmic’ and ‘fake’.

That framing falls apart with even small scrutiny.

/2

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 themselves.

A culture in plain sight.

/1 Team sports culture. Kidult culture, the now entrenched imitative rivalry of competing groups or teams, not just in sport, but in every part of life.

The culture of the schoolyard. Status battles, for identity.

/2

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 go home.

/1 These others are the same people who most embrace the ‘living with’ infection culture that started during Covid.

In front of others they boast and bluster about how ‘you have to live your life’, and mock people in masks etc.

/2

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 sociality.

/1 The people who say that are part of a majority who feel it. That a proper life is a social life. One with total freedom of association, lots of mixing with other people, lots of travel and displacement.

I don’t think we see how much that almost defines kidult culture.

/2

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 it works. So what is it?

/1 Probably more by accident than by design, but also intriguingly possibly via osmosis with its Indigenous population, Australian life is centred around none of the social groupings that make up traditional ‘politics’, like class.

Australian life is created around community.

/2

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 mythology for nearly 20 years.

1/4 If a government needs money, it can ‘print’ it. It’s a mechanism of exchange, it has no intrinsic value.

This only comes unstuck if the country doesn’t have the resources and expertise to convert the money into goods and services.

2/4

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 infection follows patterns.

/1 Of course what SC2 does to the immune system may be entirely different to what HIV does to it. That’s NOT the question.

The question is - what is SC2 doing in *its* ‘clinical latency’ period, right now? Do we know? Some are trying to figure it out.

/2

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 actually very simple.

/1 In the 19th century and before, there was no real space or culture for children. They were just little adults, sharing life and work in the adult world.

Here they are, you can see it directly with your own eyes. Human life was just adult life.

/2

Our societies as a whole are suffering from dysautonomia. This isn’t just an analogy. Like bodies, societies are far too complex to be consciously controlled in most of what they need to do, to operate.

They operate via an autonomic set of social processes.

/1 Our social autonomic nervous system is our institutions. They are what evolves over time - nobody consciously creates them - to regulate how our society operates.

This was always Burke’s point. Our customs, traditions - our institutions - are what run societies.

/2

“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 shivering and naked.”

Edmund Burke

1/6 Human life is like a human body. The vast majority of it acts autonomically. Nearly everything a society does when it succeeds is an inherited custom or tradition.

A habit. An institution. Emergent from the blood and death of history, as what allowed us to survive.

2/6

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 We’ve had fads and fashions forever. In clothing, music, hobbies, food, pets, technologies, etc. etc. None of that mattered a lot, people even had fun navigating the perpetual shift of what’s ‘cool’.

But then something much more serious happened. An extinction-level shift.

/2

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 goes well beyond that.

/1 The worst thing you can be in the giant high schools we call economies, is either young or old. Lives, that previously progressed through inter-connected stages defined by age, are now lifestyles.

‘Living our best lives’. Permanent gap years, from reality itself.

/2

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, that is destroying the country.

/1

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1910399390612852789

All societies are really feudal aristocracies. Not because ‘the people’ are always duped or screwed, but because that’s what most people want.

Hierarchy. Hierarchy comes from status, which is the currency of all societies. People crave it more than anything else.

/2

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 ‘everybody else is doing it’.

/1 With Covid (or climate change) we didn’t move from a society running on facts, to one running on lies. Societies never run on facts.

They run on people imitating what other people are doing. That imitation gives the person status in a social group, and therefore identity. /2

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 think, in reality.

/1 We in Western nations constantly mistake the lived experience of the past 70-odd years, with life itself. Those 70 years are absolutely historically anomalous. Like no other time in history.

The lives many now feel spiralling out of control is not the apocalypse.

/2

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 time. So therefore impossible to control, and to try defined you as peddling hysteria.

Hysterical claims (Covid is everywhere) shut down Covid action. While labelling that action as hysterical.

/2

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 gold nugget. Over 70kg of gold.

/1 Found in Victoria, Australia, in the mid-19th century. What’s most fascinating about it isn’t the gold or the size of the nugget.

It’s that the Indigenous Australian population almost certainly found it long before that.

/2

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 into an archipelago of cults. /1 Social media, like all technology, was created with a framework of assumptions about how humans behave, individually and collectively.

Most obviously, it’s a fundamentalist belief in the idea that ‘the people’ create societies, by talking to and interacting with each other. /2