Much of the lockdown effect was not imposed by top-down fiat

This is an excellent analysis. For me the key quote is “One of the trends that’s jumped out is that lockdown orders have tended to ratify public behaviour as much as prescribe or circumscribe it”. The author argues quite convincingly (with transportation data) that the decision to lockdown is, as he writes, ‘crowdsourced’ and coming from a groundswell of micro-decisions made on the individual level, and that consequentially the debate on lifting lockdown orders is rather moot: people will likely continue to be very prudent after the orders are lifted just as they were very prudent before they were officially promulgated.

In my case, the government mandate was necessary because my employer was dragging its feet to generalize work from home, even though everything was in place to allow it and we're the kind of business (online) that's pretty much ideal for it.

There are things I would like to see come out of this. I have a compromised immune system and I saw a lot of benefits for me. My life mostly carried on as usual. A few things I typically attend were cancelled, but I already work from home and don't get out much.

I hope the pandemic leads to certain hygiene things being take more seriously and improved, like public bathrooms. I hope it continues to be easier for me to avoid certain things post pandemic without it raising an eyebrow.

But if people were better about not doing awful things like blowing their nose in crowded public spaces, I don't think we really need a lock down, honestly. I have a serious medical condition and I habitually avoid large crowds and certain other things, but most people don't really know how much my life choices are driven by my medical situation. I look sort of "normal" in some sense. I sure as hell don't run around wearing a mask and gloves when I go out.

The only practical remedy for this in the US is free antibody testing for asymptomatics and free infection testing for those with symptoms. Ideology will prevent this from happening even though the same actors never bat an eyelash over blowing trillions on pointless wars.

That's a very interesting graph, but I think it's not a complete story. Here's another graph: https://www.endcoronavirus.org/countries

In particular, compare Sweden and the US with other countries (Norway, perhaps, or South Korea).

Given the lack of correlation between government lockdown policy and public transit ridership, there's a couple of conclusions you could draw. One, as the author does, is that government lockdown policy doesn't effect behavior. Another, based on the second graph, is that none of the four cities the author shows had a meaningful government-mandated lockdown - that yes, as the author says, people didn't change behavior on their own, but that we can't conclude that government has no leverage here because none of those cities tried very hard. (As an NYC resident I can tell you that the government is sitting quite firmly in the unfortunate valley between leaving people alone and actually having an effect: there's a lot of people out of work and enough stories of nonsensical policing like throwing people in a crowded jail for not social distancing, but there are a lot of people, including our mayor himself, who are out and about in public that it isn't obviously helping with R₀.) Another possible one is that public transit ridership is a limited subset of behavior and changes for its own reasons (it's hard to maintain social distance and avoid touching metallic surfaces on a subway train) that don't necessarily track whether people are staying home or whether they're going around by means other than public transit.

While I do agree with the author that the model of the government having a magic lever is simplistic, I also don't think it follows that the government has no leverage. There are a number of policies well within the powers of government, from unemployment eligibility to literally giving out food, that I'd think have a much more effective influence on whether people stay home than whether they're told to stay home. (I suspect the author will agree with me that it's better to use government levers other than "we'll send armed men after you if you don't," if you have any.) The lockdown protests from people who want to return to work (to be distinguished from the protests from people who want others to return to working for them) are from people who need to work to survive and don't have remote work options - there are other things the government could do to meet the underlying demands besides saying, okay, you can go to work. In general, it's not that they want to leave their house, it's that they have to.

And while I do agree with the author that it's the people and not the government who make or break the lockdown (see also Hong Kong, where the citizenry realized that their government wasn't taking the problem seriously, for a particularly good example), I don't really think that ends the debate at all. I think the author is pretty wrong about whether it's safe to send kids back to school, for instance!

"I am told by reliable sources within my own family that some of these parents are even pressuring their neighbours to do likewise, and are shaming dissenters on social media as bad parents. It’s lockdown by mob.

To some extent, I find this attitude of populist hyper-vigilance to be exasperating, because sending your young kids to school is now generally safe (and, selfishly, because I think my own seven-year-old could benefit from getting back to a structured education environment). But we got into this mess by letting our guard down, and so it’s not surprising that many ordinary people want to err on the other side of the equation for a month or three. Whatever your views, though, if you’re all in a fuss about lockdown policy, please remember that the real lockdown was never imposed by government. It turns out that it was inside each and every one of us all along."

This is a real slight of hand thinking. People were primed for lockdown, even shamed, and then the claim that it was never imposed by the government.