THE WIRE TAPS THAT captured conversations between Daryl Maguire and Gladys Berejiklian were extraordinary. At various points, Maguire complained about the Icac’s powers, warned Berejiklian they could be listening in on their conversations, and said the watchdog was “marginalising the art of politics”.

This is actually right.

Despite the long twentieth century, all the Australian States inherit the basic makeup of colonial governments, and their continuing tension between the interests of the city and the interests of the country. In some ways our society is modern, cosmopolitan, urban, in other ways it hasn’t changed a great deal since the Goldrushes. Long before there were contemporary Parties, before democracy even, the point, the ‘art’ of politics was diverting the resources of the Colonial state towards specific geographic areas and interest groups. The modern Party system still reflects that colonial mindset: the Labor Party aim to the interests of the cities where the people are and the economy is, the Greens towards a sense of futurity, the Liberal Party aim to the interests of firms and landowners, and the National Party quite explicitly offers a promise: we will divert funding away from cities towards the regions, because that redistribution-out only happens with the art of politics.

(The Commonwealth has this makeup to a lesser extent. This isn’t because the Commonwealth level is less prone to corruption, or because Federal MPs are better people, only that the Commonwealth is less political, in the sense that it isn’t where the basic questions about who wins and loses, and how people live, are resolved. Local Councils, by far the most important level of government in Australia, are well known as the most corrupt, and the scene of the most bitterly contested politics, and also arena of the most contested democracy).

Corruption in the contemporary sense is an offence against the public. It’s a transaction between two people for benefit, at the expense of the people as a whole, and well understood by anyone who can see it. ‘Perceived’ corruption in the remit of the ICAC counts just as well as actual substantive corruption. But the ‘art’ of politics in the States, as Maguire rightly points out, is precisely the defining of benefits for some at the expense of others! This isn’t something that some training in ethics for MPs is likely to stamp out, it’s a basic quality of our history and geography.

LAST WEEKEND I PUT on my uniform, for the volunteer emergency services of which I’m a member, and attended an awards ceremony. It’s a strange experience but also at the same time an oddly familiar one. Some people take these civilian honours very seriously. The world of uniforms and medals, of long service awards, citations for service, of badges and recognition, is strange—it imitates military models unpleasantly—but to me it also mimics a world I’m too familiar with: the academic world where titles and qualifications and baroque regalia are joked at, but also taken deadly seriously.

I’ve noticed an odd phenomenon recently, of people in established careers and solid professional background, enrolling in PhD programs, though without any desire to actually work in universities or pursue an academic career. It clashes entirely with my own experience of doctoral study, which involved enrolment at a time in my life when I had no better prospects, and led to subsequent failure, with all the career setback that entailed. (What I got: crippling low self-esteem and anomie. What I did not get: a doctorate.) I had always understood doctorates to be a grounding in research, the beginning of a career in exactly that, research. But what I think is going on is the change in what people understand the doctorate qualification to be. It’s no longer the certificate you get after Basic Training as a future professor, but rather an add-on to other certificates.

For a subset of candidates academic study is no longer an entry qualification to a career in research-teaching at university, but rather an accomplishment in a professional life that acts as proof of one’s intellectual credentials (let’s call it smartness). It was a cliché of mid-20th century firms that they proliferated titles and meaningless awards, things like ‘third assistant deputy vice-president’, and yearly award best-employee ceremonies with trophies, through which professional workers could identify status; but outside fusty throwback fields like the law, where grown adults wear wigs and silk, they’ve ceased to do this, and we must all find other ways to be humans in a hierarchy. Enter the university system, and the doctoral gown.

There used to be ways in which relative strangers could assess one another’s commitment to a shared set of values, and of knowledge production, and in which people in a society could establish a hierarchy of respect (which is I think, despite our egalitarianism, a real human need). It was the capital-E Establishment, the world of actual titles and peerages, which also expressed itself in odd byways like Freemasonry, where men could indulge properly in dressing up and acts of communal belonging-ness. The Establishment has gone, and in its place is a neoliberal competitive arena, in which accomplishments must be tested and serious and above all, real.

By ‘real’, I mean these badges and accomplishments must reflect, in a neoliberal world, some value or quality more than itself (rather than being self-referential in the way of aristocracy, a Lord is a Lord because they’re a Lord); degrees in a university reflect on their face the amount of study put in, and at a deeper level reflect the ‘smartness’ and virtue of the person claiming the title. They can be relied upon to respect scientific method, for example, or serious academic review. They can approach a topic as a disinterested inquirer. At the basic level, it’s proof they aren’t a plagiarist.

Most of all, it means that they belong to a class of professional workers who have a commitment to producing knowledge in a hierarchy, and of respecting each others’ intellects as a proxy for virtue. The neoliberal competitive arena, not coincidentally, is a world where ‘belonging’, especially in the world of labour, is made very difficult. No wonder we grasp at the last vestiges we have, even if they’re difficult and expensive.

‘CAMPING’, THE ACT OF leaving one’s house to sleep outdoors, for the sole purpose of recreation, is a very recent thing in human history, that nobody did before the Victorian era. It’s associated with the late 19th century development of cities and the anti-urbanism that is part of ‘modernity’, that grab-bag of new attitudes to living as an industrial species. I enjoy the irony that I, a professional old building noticer, really enjoy it.

Of course people have always slept rough, deliberately and out of need: but before people left their houses to ‘go camping’ there were only conditions like ‘being homeless’, work-like activities like ‘travel’, and leisure-activities like ‘hunting’ and ‘pilgrimage’, not to mention the camping that was part of the most ancient kinds of war. The Romans ‘camped’ all the time, but unlike us, they set up for the night behind a palisade, and drew up a small city instead of deliberately leaving city-ness behind. It took absolute sickos like Baden-Powell and the youth movements in Europe to actually rough it for the fun of it; and the kind of things the Edwardians and Wilhelmine young people enjoyed—singing masculine anthems in khaki shorts or lederhosen, their knapsacks on their backs—is probably best left in that vigorous era.

Nowadays ‘camping’ is a colossal industry of commodities, marketing, holiday planning, and worst of all, ‘lifestyle’ influencers. Ugh. Can’t we just cook meat on fires?

Build a fire, a hot one, with a three or four decent-sized pieces of hardwood. Let it flare up and create a decent base of heat, then let it burn down for a base of coals. Great. What you want is a big thermal mass without the flames and smoke that go with fast incomplete combustion. Now put your metal cooking grill over the top and make your dinner. Pictured: first, a pork loin done in chilli, lemongrass, fish sauce and sugar marinade, and second, the makings of hamburgers.

Now that’s civilisation.

TWITTER HAS BECOME ANOTHER Elonian project, which is to say, a heroic and misguided attempt to build a personal brand out of someone else’s work, and great grand ideas replacing the ordinary work of upkeep and repair. Whether it’s rockets or websites, they’re about overvaluing ideology over maintenance. And it’s becoming more and more obvious, as less of it is being done, that the everyday invisible maintenance of the moderators at twitter was critical to its success. That should surprise nobody who remembers talkback radio.

In another lifetime I studied media history. The orthodox way of explaining the function of talkback radio, which was incredibly popular and dominant as a broadcast genre from 1930s origins into the 2000s, was that it offered a simulation of an audience. Combining the telephone and the radio was a breakthrough of interwar techno-populism. Though the point of the show was the audience listing to callers who were also audience members, the number of listeners vastly outnumbered callers, by the nature of the medium. So the producer-host had to, implicitly, make a selection: sometimes it was very careful and deliberate, sometimes it was neglected, but always there. The great imaginative leap was that talkback listeners took the broadcast for representation; that these people are saying what other people are thinking! The callers are the same as me, and people like me (for better or worse)! It was the classic genre for broadcasting in a society of masses.

Callers were unpredictable by definition, and that was the point; the most popular shows were usually the ones offering the unexpected. But they were always mediated by a host, and the attraction was the engagement. A host would begin a segment by offering an opinion or a cue—‘what do you think, call in now’—and would then become the mediator of a conversation. Even on the loosest late night shows, where things got very heated, often offensive, sometimes prankish, sometimes obscene, and every now and then extremely weird, the host was central and necessary, and was often the object of an informal game of limits-testing, to see what would be put up with. The hosts were minor dictators of their hours and became, especially toward the end of the 20thC, quite politically powerful people in their own right: Alan Jones and John Laws in Sydney exercised gross influence over party and media by right of their pretence to ‘speak’ for their large audiences, to set media agendas, and to set the media cycle. Similar figures existed throughout the world. Donald Trump tweeting late at night through his Presidency may be the last true talkback mass broadcaster simulating (‘many are saying this’!) his own audience.

The fragmentary nature of smaller social media instances (fediversal ones e.g. mastodon/pleroma, Tumblr, and others) have much less potential for central, celebrity talkback hosts. The moderation, though, remains key to the experience. What will be put up with? What are the limits?

TWITTER HAS BEEN BOUGHT, and will become, presumably, Elonian, meaning heroic, disorganised, and centred on the self-image of its owner above any function. As it, and other highly-centralised social media ‘places’ appear to be at inflection points of utility, perhaps we can find other smaller and disaggregated places to be.

I post at aus.social, put pictures up at flickr, and at instagram (though rarely). And I aim to blog here more frequently…