I think outsourcing community for those people to social media platforms ‘enshittifies’ (Cory Doctorow’s concept) their community, leaving it wide open to abuse.

Absolutely, the exact same.

Possibly!

Turn the platforms off.

The US is wallowing in a basic misunderstanding that defines its culture. That groups of people, of any size, think and feel and act.

They don’t. It’s not even possible, how would it work? The US therefore sees every emergence of a hierarchy as authoritarianism.

Image from National Geographic of extnct animal skull.

Just as species don’t evolve and become extinct via their own agency, look again at the human world and re-imagine it as what it is.

A world in which we have little to no real control, and where change and progress is mostly imposed via catastrophic external events.

Humility.

Thanks Alan, I try to cross-post, and sometimes busyness gets in the way!

Thank you.

The original meaning of conservative, in Burke’s time, was somebody who understood this and therefore fought to protect institutions.

Today’s conservatives are thugs. Reactionary revolutionaries, smashing things with abandon. Capitalising on the damage, for self-gain.

/end

Always though it will have been a catastrophe of some kind that created the habit, the custom and tradition and institution. The domestication.

Only the threat to existence interrupts present-focused status games. Creating institutional stability.

5/6

The dreaded ‘red tape’ of ‘bureaucracy’, but also our inherited customs and traditions, the origins of which we mostly don’t know.

It’s like how nobody understands how animals became domesticated. Look it up, nobody really has a clue how it was done.

4/6

This is something populist (electoral) politics simply can’t understand. Nor the populist electors, who think human rationality solves society’s problems.

Institutions (customs, traditions, habits) are what holds societies together. Again they’re society’s nervous system.

3/6

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

“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

It’s too easy to win doing the wrong thing.

Even then, somebody will lead, others will follow. Lord of the Flies.

Bubbles I call them. Team sports bubbles.

If only the grass roots was a thing.

And our entire lives, from the most intimate and personal, through to the professional and political, are now transacted on these platforms.

They’re not ‘about’ the societies we live in. They are those societies now.

/end

Look around you, every day. If it trends now, it’s real. Not just popular. Everybody is now an expert in everything, because social media lets them be.

It gives us a place where anything is real, provided we can get the followers.

/21

When winning them is only about a victory in your current team sports. Not about making any material difference to peoples’ lives.

Look at Trump right now. His *entire* agenda is a set of revenge retributions for social media battles he’s been engaged in.

/20

This is also what makes public life now so flaky. Attention spans of toddlers. Entire populations lurch from one trend to another, sometimes within hours.

There is no public policy now. You can win elections having no policies at all. Why would you bother?

/19

This is also not just confined to the loon fringes. ‘The economy’ for example is just a trend, not an objective reality.

There isn’t a public issue today that isn’t just teams battling for status, in some latest trending outrage. Teslas, anyone?

/18

Expertise working in institutions. Now they emulate whoever is trending, on social media. Influencers will make up whatever outrageous fantasy they feel like, provided it gets likes and followers.

Reality is now literally only what trends. Reality is just fashion.

/17

We’re now ‘living with’ a pandemic, because that’s trending. The vast majority of people think the pandemic is over, because they use the metric they’ve always used.

Not science. Just ‘what everybody else is doing’. In the past everybody emulated hierarchies of expertise.

/16

Institutional life was the life where the Nobel prize winner had a priority say in how something panned out.

That’s gone. Now the chip-eating wanker is just as likely to be able to assemble a war chest of followers, and determine an outcome.

/15

And everybody is either on it or implicated in it. Science is here, engineering, politics, medicine etc.

Watch Nobel prize winners here having to argue basic things with guys masturbating in front of a keyboard while eating chips.

/14

We trusted that somebody, somewhere, was running things That’s what the institutions were doing (not the people we elected).

But social media creates a social world where status comes only from popularity. From likes and followers.

/13

The whole idea of social media, embedded in how the platforms work, is to destroy trust. The institutional world we evolved from relied upon hierarchies of trust or status.

We each did our own thing, and trusted that the basics were being taken care of.

/12

But how did this shift back to perpetual status games, to eternal fads and fashions and whims, manage to infect the deepest engine rooms of the institutions that actually run our lives, society’s autonomic nervous system?

Say hello to social media.

/11