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

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

thenerdreich.com/the-network-st… Gil rightly identifies the focus of the tech bros as the dismantling of democratic *institutions*.

Those institutions ARE democracy. Without them democracy is just what it’s become now. A facile popularity contest every 3-4 years. /2

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 interpretations I’m sure. /1 Initial analysis shows the trend being driven strongly by women, enabled by their use of software via their mobile phones, to ‘leapfrog’ their usual cultural options.

That sounds extremely plausible. Women wanting a better cultural deal. But I think it’s more than that. /2

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 for society. /1 These platforms operationalise a view of society. It’s what IT more generally has always done. Technologies embed a view of the world.

They promote and produce a view of society that says ‘the people’ generate society. /2

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 only real change. But…. /1 They’re not good change. They can sweep away existing status hierarchies. But they just replace them with new ones. Orwell’s Animal Farm was about that.

Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution of that time were prescient too. What did that revolution lead to? /2

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 used to) avoid. /1 Lawrence’s critique of education bears little resemblance to any of the dominant educational narratives today or even of his own time.

His greatest problem with education? That we massified it. /2

We had these books as kids, and would sit for hours absorbing strange locales from around the world.

Now we increasingly all just travel there. Because we don’t understand place, we have no conception of the violation this is. 1/6 If we admire people, for example, we might look at them in the pages of magazines, or online. We admire them, from afar.

If we camp outside their home to get a more ‘authentic experience’ of them, what’s that called?

Stalking. 2/6

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 see. /1

abc.net.au/news/2024-12-2… Something that seems one of those classic stories of ‘community’, people apparently making the effort to offer the community (whatever they think that means) something special.

Christmas lights. How’d that work out? /2

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 world.

/1 By segregating childhood off from adult life, we created places where children developed a culture of their own. School culture.

That became their world. When we then universalised schooling, that became all of our world. /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 a beautiful concept, rarely used analytically. It’s a rendition of the actual reason societies hold, or don’t.

They’re a semi-stable equilibrium of competing status hierarchies.

/2