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definition, design philosophy, rationale

When AI claims prediction and means proscription

2. How can you make out you’re predicting a person’s future when you’re not? By dismantling their agency: that is, their ability to exercise free will. If we agree with my hypothesis around nudge theory and the picture superiority effect … that is, by using tools and strategies borrowed from traditional espionage and spycraft, and then technifying them with a data network of private development, we can make it possible to know what someone is going to do in almost every key decision of their professional and personal life both … but NOT by foreseeing their actions at all … simply by persuading, shaping, nudging and if necessary provoking the target into actions they always consider will be their own choices.

When in fact, if truth be told, they are self-fulfilling prophecies gaslit into being by the blurring of lines between digital and the real world.

3. Why would you want to do this? Frankly, what’s the business model? And so this is the easiest of the three questions I’ve posed for me to explain. Control. Authoritarianism. Disembowelling Western and related democracies from within. Setting up the conditions for a multitude of future Ukraines. Seeding distrust amongst those who’d otherwise be capable of coming together, and making of this broken world a much better place for everyone. Because when you can get a doctor to incarcerate a citizen who tells uncomfortable truths to power, and the doctor — a truly honest man or woman — sincerely believes no one has influenced the processes relating to that incarceration, then the crime committed is literally a perfect one which Hitchcock couldn’t have bettered if he’d tried to.

And done once it’s a horror film you’d eat popcorn to.

But done, as I suggest firmly now is the case, maybe thousands and then again maybe hundreds of thousands of times, throughout an ever more brittle and fracturing Western democracy, and with the support of a deepening private-sector tech developing its own hidden data models which make prediction completely unnecessary now whilst the proscription of inconvenient minds becomes much easier and cheaper to deliver on, then motivations are really not difficult to perceive.

Control. Authoritarianism. Organised crime. Criminal revenues. Ukraines galore. Dislocated Western economic and sociocultural activities. Permanent war. And unending profit. For those, I mean, who have learnt how to control both the public and the private.

Welcome to an AI which predicts nothing and shapes everything. Where human agency no longer effectively exists. And where data is what you literally become an extension of.
Mil Williams, 3rd September 2023, Chester UK

Definitions:

A prediction (Latin præ-, “before,” and dicere, “to say”), or forecast, is a statement about a future event or data. They are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction

Proscription (Latin: proscriptio) is, in current usage, a ‘decree of condemnation to death or banishment’ (Oxford English Dictionary) […]. Its usage has been significantly widened to describe governmental and political sanctions of varying severity on individuals and classes of people who have fallen into disfavor, from the en masse suppression of adherents of unorthodox ideologies to the suppression of political rivals or personal enemies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proscription

The background to today’s post …

By the last quarter of 2017 I had completed my MA dissertation on digital and other surveillance.

This was the title and abstract:

And here is a selection of the Conclusion’s pages:

In late September of 2017, after completing the dissertation in question, though I can’t recall how or why what happened actually did, I was given two complementary tickets — if I remember rightly, the face value being more than €200 each — to the Predict conference of that same year, held at the Dublin Ireland RDS conference centre:

This was how it presented itself to the media that year:

Now. Before I continue, much more than the detail I am posting here today I already communicated to a country’s security agencies back at the beginning of this year, as well as, separately, directly to a major global investigative newspaper.

Three people representing private-sector interests in Ireland, one grouping in particular being those behind the Predict conference of that year, remain front-of-mind. These actually talk in the preamble to the 2017 conference about having built their own platform which can “develop models for any sector”:

Alongside at least one British security agency, I firmly suspect them now of having worked together over the years in bad faith re my person. But in the case of British security, whilst earlier this year I had come to the conclusion that these were choosing quite deliberately to cause me real grief, specifically whilst I was in Sweden on and off over the past eight or nine months, I now believe the British had become the unwitting dupes of the real actors in this story.

Because at the conference in question there was, I remember, much talk around how AI could predict the future. I don’t believe now that those deeply driving this association of interests had any intention of predicting the future at all: mainly because it’s too costly a task. What would be much easier is what I believe they were testing on me: a series of systems they designed then, and continue to operate now, which has demonstrated it can shape the future — and therefore is able to give the impression of predicting what people do when in reality it is nudging them into doing what benefits these actors aforementioned. Not governments either, primarily, but private-sector interests of potentially the murkiest kind. Just keep in mind how the Russians embedded themselves over the years in the British establishment and financial systems, as they set up their revenue streams to fund Ukraine and a couple of other wars in the past fifteen years.

Because there’s a lot of organised Eastern European criminality in Ireland: it connects well with the criminality of certain big tech business models which headquarter there too; criminality that has also helped Trump and others massage their messaging into privileged places from which to springboard long-term political aspirations..

So not a prediction machine, nor ever intended to be, but a self-fulfilling prophecy machine: just that.

Let’s call the three of them Michael, David and Sean …

I met a close friend of Michael’s in 2016. It wasn’t, however, until early January 2019 in Dublin itself, just after a quiet Christmas I had spent there, that I got to meet Michael. The encounter was disagreeable for me, but I can’t say how he saw it. The meeting lasted for a brief 45 minutes or even less; and I didn’t then return to Ireland for more than a year as a consequence of how unpleasant he had managed to be.

Over the years since I started going to Dublin, I have met David often, and without exception the relationship at the time seemed genial enough. He’s a genial man too, with an easy smile, and well-manicured and dapper appearance. He seemed, however, in hindsight, often to play to some degree the environmental and touchy-feely fool. This is why on one occasion early on in our relationship, two things he said remained incomprehensibly out of place to me:

“We’re clear you are of value; but we’re just not sure about you yet.”
“I have a good friend at the heart of British intelligence and government.”

And it wasn’t even what he said that stuck out as unusual to me later on: it was the fact that its thrust was totally unlike most of what we ever discussed. These topics being my then love of all things Irish, the Irish character and cultural achievements, drinking Guinness, the good food you could find in his country, and stuff of a fairly general nature like that.

Finally to Sean. As with David, I had met him first in the breakout sessions of Predict 2017. Sean has an astonishing capacity for recalling the history of all kinds of tech: most usefully, its failures and dead-ends when promise seemed all that it might deliver.

I met him quite regularly after that: we discussed the Rail Tap app’s toolbox gamification in Terminal 2 of Dublin Airport once; a summer in between we had a good and lively discussion at a Liverpool macro-business conference; and most recently, in Limerick during late autumn 2022, he helped me discover the very real promise and joys of asynchronous metaverse implementations, after inviting me to a handover meetup, again in Dublin, sponsored by Facebook, and which their public policy representative attended as one of the main speakers.

I hasten to add that the handover wasn’t to me! But I don’t think you needed me to say this.

🙂

After attending the conference Predict in 2017, where David approached me in a breakout session in his always amiable way, I struck up what I considered for a long time was a relationship of equals with little to suspect.

Sean, meanwhile, seemed sharp but not wrong-headed nor deceitful in any way. As I say, he had — still does, as far as I know — a fabulous capacity to rewind recent and current tech praxis into the corners of its history: a matter and ability most tech people who prefer to hype the new which actually isn’t prefer to avoid, ignore, or positively eschew in themselves and, indeed, any others who “try it on”.

Now you may wonder why I consider them necessary to this story. I was uncertain myself, and didn’t continue to write this post first started whilst in the Moderna Museet in Stockholm itself, until returning recently to the UK. But I don’t think in the event I was uncertain about whether to include them. More, it was that I wasn’t sure about the UK side of things: MI5 and related, I mean. Sufficient unpleasantness of a street psychology sort had happened on quite a few occasions whilst in Sweden: one specifically involved well-dressed London voices on the Stockholm commuter train as they attempted to surround and hijack me. I only escaped because of local support. As on quite a few other occasions.

But in truth, I don’t think it was London. I think it was Michael, David and Sean paying someone to press my buttons. The usual ones follow the KGB strategy of getting people to sit down near you and speak loudly, but only just a little loudly, in a clearly foreign language that upsets you for historical reasons. It happens once, and you say random. It happens twice, and you say coincidence. It happens every day … that’s a different matter.

Above all, therefore, if we accept this version of events, I was to be made to consider that those to blame were anyone but Michael, David and Sean, and their crowd.

So what’s the tool? What’s the platform exactly? How can you make out you’re predicting a person’s future when you’re not? And why would you want to? I mean frankly, where’s the business model?

Because these people only ever do think of business … why we never really were ever going to get along.

Let’s take each question one by one:

1. What’s the platform exactly? The tool and/or platform is what I later realised was happening to me. As a result, I constructed these observations — from lived experience and auto-ethnography — into a PhD proposal that described a tech-driven long-term form of gaslighting, conducted simultaneously, but discretely even so, on thousands and maybe hundreds of thousands of people, simply because certain organisations might consider them to be threats to their ongoing business models. Useful possibly to sell onto governments at some point as well, but surely best to keep the latest versions within a secretive private-sector space of common political and socioeconomic interests. Just like the space and network described previously, in fact.

my first #phd proposal: #neoterrorismontheindividual: my first delivery of a #phd proposal (document); #neoterrorismontheindividual: my first delivery of a #phd proposal (slide-deck)

2. How can you make out you’re predicting a person’s future when you’re not? By dismantling their agency: that is, their ability to exercise free will. If we agree with my hypothesis around nudge theory and the picture superiority effect … that is, by using tools and strategies borrowed from traditional espionage and spycraft, and then technifying them with a data network of private development, we can make it possible to know what someone is going to do in almost every key decision of their professional and personal life both … but NOT by foreseeing their actions at all … simply by persuading, shaping, nudging and if necessary provoking the target into actions they always consider will be their own choices.

When in fact, if truth be told, they are self-fulfilling prophecies gaslit into being by the blurring of lines between digital and the real world.

3. Why would you want to do this? Frankly, what’s the business model? And so this is the easiest of the three questions I’ve posed for me to explain. Control. Authoritarianism. Disembowelling Western and related democracies from within. Setting up the conditions for a multitude of future Ukraines. Seeding distrust amongst those who’d otherwise be capable of coming together, and making of this broken world a much better place for everyone. Because when you can get a doctor to incarcerate a citizen who tells uncomfortable truths to power, and the doctor — a truly honest man or woman — sincerely believes no one has influenced the processes relating to that incarceration, then the crime committed is literally a perfect one which Hitchcock couldn’t have bettered if he’d tried to.

And done once it’s a horror film you’d eat popcorn to.

But done, as I suggest firmly now is the case, maybe thousands and then again maybe hundreds of thousands of times, throughout an ever more brittle and fracturing Western democracy, and with the support of a deepening private-sector tech developing its own hidden data models which make prediction completely unnecessary now whilst the proscription of inconvenient minds becomes much easier and cheaper to deliver on, then motivations are really not difficult to perceive.

Control. Authoritarianism. Organised crime. Criminal revenues. Ukraines galore. Dislocated Western economic and sociocultural activities. Permanent war. And unending profit. For those, I mean, who have learnt how to control both the public and the private.

Welcome to an AI which predicts nothing and shapes everything. Where human agency no longer effectively exists. And where data is what you literally become an extension of.

And in my case, it’s Michael, David and Sean’s business and sociopolitical interests which in my judgement have shaped my life and my reactions since at least 2016; and maybe, in collaboration with possibly unwitting others, for many years prior to that.

If true, it’s selfish, cruel, intolerable, and practically nothing more nor less than a psychopathy delivered with the highest levels of aggression from the most secretive of undemocratic spaces, in order to remove any remaining semblance of citizen intimacy and privacy for what I can only consider a financial gain of the most utterly unacceptable.

Anything to be done, then …?

Surprisingly, I think there is. Below, a few slides from a slide-deck I created in July whilst in Stockholm, Sweden. The third of three intimately connected, it argues for a tech, legal and sociocultural response I have called “The A.I.M. Proposition”.

You can download the full slide-deck here. | You can find the online whitepaper here.

And so thinking back along the timeline of my own life in the past decade, and maybe since my undue incarceration in 2003, committed perhaps, yes and after all, by unwitting accomplices subjected even then to a primitive form of neo-terrorism on the individual, where as a professional in some transaction you consider every decision of weight you’ve been taking over the years has been yours, and where, in truth, absolutely none of them were … or worse than this perhaps, it’s impossible for you now to establish to what extent they weren’t then, nor will be in the future … well … that timeline of mine does make me think. And more than that, it makes me determined to act.

Doesn’t it you, too?

Doesn’t it?

aside

i asked what more … and THEN i saw

i asked today

what more was needed

what more i needed to do

and i realised it’s the wrong question

quite the wrong one

because when all is done and said

and everyone seems now

to be scratching their heads

in fact what they wanted all along

was never to sing but be sung

there’s nothing more i want of here

and everything i want of there

and still i can

and still i shall

attempt to make a bit of a mancunian well

where pebbles may fall

and sounding not at all

for ages and ages

even so make a final splash

and allow me to give something back

to the country and people

who are so savagely bullying

that it’s hardly surprising their grand legacy

is called brexit

but even when i recognise this fact

and even when it’s all said and done

and even when in the uk

fun is just about

as prevalent as the sun

in parts of the world

where when they hate your guts

even garters ain’t yours to have

without them sticking their fingers in your eyes

so the bridge of sighs

becomes the abusive bridge of signs

in a place where mafias are invisible

only because nothing ain’t some kind of mafia …

didn’t yer know

and so that’s all i need to say:

my experiences on both sides of that sea

have been for me quite enough

and quite the same

involving and invoking

cruel and stupid men

who could’ve been people to be publicly proud of

and instead are people who privately sound off

without ever taking ownership

for the gaslighting they commit

hiding as they do

in the tribe that means

if you’re in you’re a lout everyone treasures

and if you out you’re the only brave one

they will ever see in their lifetimes

and this is when

i asked once more

and this is when

what i asked i saw

before the lazy slob

who considers himself so cool

actually in slovenly manner

befitting his kind of gruel

and coming from that old school

so very redolent of the fallen wounded

you’d think they’d express compassion

like a mother with a child and their milk

when instead the value of woman

for them never existed

because the women they live with

are not to be treasured

but beaten so awful

as if carpets trod regularly underfoot

and only sometimes taken and shaken

in order to deliver some sooty craven

because for this sort of man

the only thing he knows

is how to enforce his will

as if it’s good and always goes

when in truth this man and his pals

know only how to live in hell

and perpetuate it

for the object of their ire

and aspire only to the dirty dirty

of auden’s novelist

where hatred bursts out

like an explosion of pus-ridden lust

and so ultimately for me

this is my homeland

and ultimately for me

this is why i may no longer work here

and ultimately i tell you

what’s really what i missed all this time

was the opportunity

to rhyme something good

about the men who should make up bravely

and fine

this thing we call brotherhood

and fatherhood

and cousinhood

and all

and all and all and all …

and so you do see what i mean

and so of course you do you do you do

and so when in fact the only thing

in gross reality

they’re capable of making up

without equally gross finality

are the lies and rank dishonesties

of their tiny little crimes

which their tiny little minds

do so enjoin our neighbourhoods

to participate falsely in

it’s cool yer know

to know them so:

these men of tribe

and winsome smile

who grin out of hatred

and depose out of love

for the beginning

and the end

that is the fallacy of brutes:

the brutes of britain

who will never win the day

because all they can ever say is:

“hello luv … give us a kiss”

as they miss the whole goddamn point

because when they do

and when they presume

and when they assume

it’s right to demand

all i can say

is i’m ashamed on two counts:

to be a man brought up

like so many others in the uk today

and to be a wider brit of smallest silly mind

which is all i can now think

is all i must now get away from

why my place is no longer here

and so wherever it might one day become

at least i won’t be sitting on my backside

in some parochial park

where only the idiots line up their beamers

as finally and totally

their sociopathic easing

repeats and repeats

unceasingly their fleecing

of all sensible community and true life lived

as they prefer to beat the wife

before night reaches another fleeting glimmer

of what it could all have been

if only the purposeful had even just once

reigned in the british isles

of foolish signals and trivial spies

definition, design philosophy, rationale

An open letter to all UK politicians, past and present

My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.

And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.
Mil Willliams, 27th August 2023, Ellesmere Port UK

The difference between feeling secure and feeling safe.
With gratitude to my eldest son, Guillermo, who narrates this short.

This is my position:

I will fight, always now, in favour of a state #surveillance and citizen #sousveillance that hand-in-hand serve to be each other’s keeper, where this becomes us and is at all possible.

That is to say, a process of permanent democratic observation — the million eyes of #opensource translated to societal re-engineering — which then exists to support and serve … never intrude and control.

Because this is why I have been condemned since 2017 at least — maybe before, too — to a life of vibrantly incessant failure. I realised then, in that year of Criminal Justice, that there was an alternative to #totalsurveillance and secular #originalsin. And what was more dangerous for the establishment in all of that was that I began to acquire the critical apparatus and appetite to deliver to the academic and technological satisfactions of the vast majority the alternative I had begun to shape:

Download a PDF of my 2017 MA dissertation on Secular Original Sin and #totalsurveillance

But I realised this year I am not the only one any more. And actually I never was. After the past year’s events, I have been able to satisfactorily evidence, to myself at least, that I am not the only soul in the world who believes — not just in theory but in goddamn real-life practice — that #surveillance can serve to serve and enhance both the citizen experience and ENJOYMENT of life: not only re its securities, then; also, its deepest and kindliest safeties.

My most important experiences in my life, this year:

In the country I have been visiting since just before Christmas — Sweden — I found a society that had already legislated and implemented regulations in premises that ensured a certain distance between CCTV camera and the citizenry below; that already required private-sector street CCTV to watch only that square metre or so which ensures due and reasonable coverage of entry points; and that, above all, when travelling on public transport all footage thus gathered has public sell-by dates of tens of hours not tens of weeks, is only viewed by the police themselves, and is stationed so it FEELS, ffs, like something you can embrace wholeheartedly as part of a vigorous democracy, not something you must reject out-of-hand as signs of an all-too-evident encroaching authoritarianism.

And with all this, I am actually convinced, without knowing for sure, that they will have as much CCTV as we do in the UK. The difference there being that it’s designed to make citizens feel free and open in their sense of how these securities are intended to function, not imposed on by the overbearing and censorious guardians of the state as many here might feel.

Surveillance as an extension of the citizen then, not the state:

No. Sweden is not perfect. We are not perfect. We have virtues, it is true. So do they. What we can do perfectly, meantime, is learn the best of each other to integrate these things, encountered and assessed judiciously, into the best of our own.

Right now, the UK political system disables this purposeful approach to society-building and their sustaining. The current Swedish government is as right-wing as ours. But it’s not right-wing or left- that has to matter. It’s whether we choose to be questioning, querying, learning beings or not. Whatever are the politics we wish to espouse.

My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.

And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.

Now do you?

“there’s a mourning … which isn’t”: a poem for #prideweek by mil

in death life does sometimes emerge
and when people you loved
hate you back
and hurt you in fact
over years and years
and all you heard was
your week
of weaknesses unbound
and unleashed
like the tease of the cruellest universe
and the poetry of decaying stanza
then nothing seems as sound
as a knife to the throat of the words
you wish someone heard in time
all those rhymes ago

but in truth
personal revelation of this sort
comes from the expectations
you cede to the past
and once you can do this
and once you learn how to do this
and once you yearn to do this
nothing can stop you ever again
because nothing is able to hurt your soul
and because no part of you plays a bigger role
in the human you are becoming:
the transformations are complete
and the neatest of neat
meets up with your generation

you were neither good nor bad
just madly had
as they coveted your thoughts
as the mad frequently do
and as men of alpha range
plainly play like tigers with helpless woman
of beautiful nature:
because although i am ugly as hell on the outside
inside my brain and thoughts
and my ought and my would
and maybe my could too
are the marilyns of undesirable monetisation
and so all these alpha idiots have been able to do
all my goddamn life

is covet these gorgeous wisdoms of mine
(which should have been thine
so long ago)
in order to stop the world knowing them too
because when a wisdom wails silently
anyone however resistant to evil
is easily bedevilled
by the need to screw you royally
as they toy awfully with the plain truth:
they are utterly wrong in their manly hatreds
and we in our kindly compassion
know the passions of our side of the fence
and just where the rest of humanity
needs to be
with you at my side my dear my dear my dear …

because in death life does sometimes emerge
and when people you loved
love you back
and like you in fact
over years and years
and all you heard was
your week
of strengths unbound
and unleashed
like the reasons of the most gentle universe
and the poetry of inspiring stanza
then nothing seems as sound
as a wife to the throat of the words
you now know someone heard in time
all these rhymes you PROCLAIM today

out of the deepest love
for people who are
and people who’ve been
and people who’ve seen what you have seen
and then again
and once more said
the people who grin and smile and laugh and make it out loud a thing of a fab head:
so proud and true
of their emotions and their course
and their beautiful beautiful thinking
and their utter utter lack of unwrought haughtinesses
but instead just the happiness joyfully experienced
of human beings everywhere IN LOVE

me, at a very young age; my father out of focus, in the foreground …

definition, design philosophy, rationale

The day #europe made #bigtech human-sized

Manchester, meantime, being for me a time of three hard-fought days, has finally demonstrated that in some notable places, places which I sense pride themselves on being as purposeful as the Swedish nation clearly is, this thing we globally term “security in the UK” can also have a heart and soul: a real humanity and application.
Mil Williams, 26th August 2023, Chester UK

It’s good, the last three days in Manchester — though for me utterly draining.

In my life, security in two places had given me space to tell my story. Neither of those two places were located in the UK. Quite the opposite: here, particularly in Chester, Belfast and London, my story had been bent out of shape to the outside world.

In Croatia, the US looked out for me, without me being a US citizen, during my journey back to Spain on a coach at the end of November, the beginning of December 2002.

British security and politics then ensured during the leadup to the summer of 2003 that it would become possible to lock me up unduly for a month. And drug me since then.

Sweden this year is where good people also looked out for my interests. The gaslighting and attempted gaslighting that took place on my person was watched and observed and witnessed and, I think, recognised:

Neo-terrorism on the individual slide-deck | A description of a tech-driven longitudinal #gaslighting committed by #bigtech and related (related means to some extent any and all other sectors of human endeavour) over the years

Manchester, meantime, being for me a time of three hard-fought days, has finally demonstrated that in some notable places, places which I sense pride themselves on being as purposeful as the Swedish nation clearly is, this thing we globally term “security in the UK” can also have a heart and soul: a real humanity and application.

It’s therefore my intention to begin to indicate publicly that the security which listened to me in Manchester should form a close partnership with anything that ultimately gets off the ground in my Swedish endeavours.

‘Happy to rewrite the rulebook, then. This is not me being tribal: this is me finding it possible to trust others because evidence is provided that validates that trust. As in Sweden all the time I’ve been there on-and-off recently.

And this being exactly the value-add I want to deliver with my projects.

For remember this: terrorist atrocities were delivered by humans using tools — machines — as extensions of themselves. They were not stopped by tech partners who said it was enough to have such machines supported by humans:

How humans with tools beat tools with humans hands-down on the big and terrifying occasions

And it’s not enough to slide easily over the fact that humans are the strongest link in criminality and the weakest in security. We have to begin to seriously question that if this is currently true, why we have been enabling it to remain unnecessarily so for such a long time.

• www.secrecy.plus/fire

Business model and an easy monetisation, anyone?

Myself, I want to reconfigure #ai so that it makes us more important as players in the modern world, not less. Industrialise is humans back in, not continue to automate us out:

• hmagi.com | www.secrecy.plus/hmagi #hmagi

And my enemies — many in the field of #bigtech but also small too, I realise and now sense — have known all this time the buttons they had to press. Make me think the enemies were others, when really the paymasters have always been the same.

Manchester, Stockholm, a wider Europe, and of course the US, then? Institutions, agencies, organisations and governments all?

Open doors; but no longer open house.

Because we enjoin the battle not to lose bravely but win rightfully …

____________________

when stuff doesn’t #onlyeyes

when stuff doesn’t stuff it’s something for sure
and maybe all life can offer
is to get by after all:
maybe greatness was never our thing
and maybe it shouldn’t ring out
and maybe from the first day we should give in
because in the end being hurt
is what life’s about
and the rerouting of a social re-engineering
is a quimera of meaning’s total absence

because why should anyone want to be purposeful:
why should anyone have any right
to expect a better shirt
than the one a man loses
when he lies in the gutter and fails to see the stars
as things of beauty
but rather sees them blinking furiously
like rabbits in the presence of horrifying headlight
whilst these encroaching tears fall
no longer tall and proud
from person with straight back
and some kind of ability to tack brave sails
which navigate something of use

and then neither burgeoning out loud
those emotions fine
that truly redeem
in an instant of grandiose compassion
absolutely every ill
that precedes still
and now even so
all these humiliations
this INhumanity dares to impose on itself

yes it’s true:
love is all you need
but it needs equally to exist not attacked
by petri dish of incessant and illogical
bacteriological warfare
where every kiss imagined
only serves to sustain the unreal

and in an existence
where true love is mainly non-existent
every kiss imagined is mainly unreal:
each becoming something
just about wholly falsified
and hardly enjoyed
and usually reprimanding
and generally rejecting
of the other person
who strives even then
to pen a love note
or speak a kind word
or have their truth somehow heard

for in its requesting and ultimate denial
the kiss is lost to the ether
and either it never had a right to exist
or it never had a right to be thought up
in the first place
where one idiot considered a space existed
whilst a savvier soul knew it didn’t
because mainly that’s what it’s all about:
love’s natural state should be one
where kindness is communicated
and passion only rides
when permission becomes a deep embrace
as a taste of freedom
is enjoyed by the parties concerned
as if with no concerns

and if mostly love
is a matter of unrequited fates
and this is its natural state
still we should not believe such a situation
or this sort of location
damns us inevitably to an experience
of poverty-stricken absences

because it’s also quite true
that the real absence of love in our lives
truly makes us value our memories more
than otherwise
we might have been able to

and so it’s clear
that whether love is real
or love is a mirage of painful fool
when the old adages tell us
it’s the only thing worth fighting for
in the life of any human being
they are absolutely right:
because if we can survive and stay alive
in the utter incompleteness
of a messy and unsustainable trajectory without love
just imagine what its presence might move
were this thing we call stuff
not stuffing us at all

definition, design philosophy, rationale

Two directions

If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.
On why we need radically new secrecy-positive architectures | Mil Williams, 24th August 2023, Manchester UK

I think I’m being offered two directions to move forwards definitively on my projects. And I think in my mind it’s clarifying my view on what to do next, where, and how.

I think the two directions can both happen, too.

But for many reasons, only one can happen here in the UK, in Ireland and most other places we consider.

If my thinking isn’t mistaken, the security version must only happen in Sweden and countries which share the philosophy that is embedded firmly in a wider Scandinavian way of foregrounding the citizen and their rights when constructing and rebuilding democracies.

So.

What I think is being suggested:

IVP1

1. My #neurodiverse #complexproblem-solutioning proposals may sit in many and perhaps all cultures eventually. If you like, the B2C product and service, where the “C” of B2C equals “Culture”, and which the Swedish intuition corporation I am proposing we build as per The Guardian newspaper group’s Scott Trust would deliver, mostly, indirectly.

Here, in the wider field of using arts-based thinking for solving real-world problems, therefore, practically anything and anyone gets a hearing:

• complexify.me

• complexifylab.com

Meantime, the Swedish corporation I would like us to create would not, as alluded to, be involved directly in even a tenth of all the activities that might arise through this Intuition Validation Project 1 (IVP1), alongside its set of related workstreams.

• www.sverige2.earth/unified

We would only need to license the rights for using the core technologies and philosophies I’ve been thought-leading since 2016. That’s as far as we would go. No need, for example, to shape how any of this was to be implemented. No longer would there exist roadblocks on any side to arise.

It would, therefore, even be possible to make these platforms and architectures available from the starting-blocks for countries with whose security policies I, and a wider Swedish society quite separately and much before me, fundamentally find ourselves disagreeing on: for example, oppressive manifestations of total surveillance & CCTV, and the complete removal of public access to encryption and so forth, even in banking applications, being the approach the UK has been advocating and wishing to put into practice for decades.

Equally, the Swedish and similar, where total surveillance is employed, use it to enable the citizenry and make them feel safer and more empowered: never to make them sense, as we do get to suspect in the UK, that they are permanently being inspected and tracked in order to bulldoze voters and similar into good behaviours out of tools, primarily, aimed at inducing fear.

Seen in Vällingby tunnelbana station, Stockholm Sweden, 2023

And that’s a philosophical difference of import: in the UK, we trust that people will be bad: that is, secular Original Sin. In other countries, we trust that enabling the help of the citizenry is paramount; we trust that what we might call “good trust” needs to be promoted strategically. Here, then, it’s not enough to be secure at all; we need to be safe, too. We shouldn’t have to be looking over our shoulders all the time. And our policies should reflect this.

One Swedish example to underline: street CCTV on private and state buildings must look down only on the entrance itself to the building being surveilled. No dragnet across all passers-by.

So. If we think like this — IVP1 I mean — there’s no need to negotiate these matters any more, before we may begin, because IVP1 will be in the hands of creators of different kinds, even where what they create may deliver tangible and utilitarian real-world solutions.

And then again, just the one condition too: periodic licence fees, but ourselves, as an intuition-validation corporation, being utterly hands-off.

IVP2

2. Security — the project we might now call IVP2 — is a quite different matter, however.

My Criminal Justice Master dissertation (linked to here), from 2017, on the subject of secular Original Sin*, laid it out really clearly: in an ever more complex world there will be no edge obtained by law enforcement and security if we ensure citizens feel as pursued as the real criminals. The only way we can be collectively more than the bad guys and gals is if we get citizens deeply onside: enabling them to act out their proactive roles as joint defenders of the law. It’s not enough that they just nod their acquiescence to what we claim to be doing when faced by the horrors of modern criminality.

Until countries like the UK accept that our total surveillance-friendly software architectures (admins who see all; users who see nothing but even so are aware, all too aware, how they are being permanently surveilled) have fatally inhibited — impaled, even — our own capacity to think creatively in security, crimefighting and law-enforcement contexts, we cannot develop my ideas in respect of security where such acceptance is not forthcoming.

• www.secrecy.plus/fire

Because criminals like the Putins of this world do continue to enjoy their own deepest secrecy-positive spaces whilst they longitudinally plan our destruction, despite our own ongoing total surveillance strategies:

• www.secrecy.plus/why

You get now, I hope, then, where my objections really lie; where they are firmly seated? If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.

Security for me, therefore, sits where the right philosophies existed prior to my own arrival. And my travails when writing the dissertation in question back in 2017, clearly caused me by British security, indicate, even post-Ukraine, that for quite a while they will not be enabled here in the UK.

To summarise:

IVP1 — just about everywhere

IVP2 — the kind of places and states where new swords may come into being from a prior and existent embedded instinct and impulse to openness and invention in the fields of tech philosophy and architectures

Yeah?

____________________

* Footnote: under total surveillance philosophies we are no longer innocent until proven guilty but incessantly, and permanently, considered guilty, whilst never to be proven innocent again.

aside

Two women

Poem 1:

the day i was born

not on wings
because that's a different word 
and never simple
because that wasn't to be my fate
but to my mother for sure
in a place distant from the shores 
which my soul already knew about 
and deep in the shires 
of an oxford old and sometimes wise
and then again sometimes not 
but always where i was begotten
even where more likely forgotten 
than remembered 

and although they say your birthday's yours
it ain't as far as the memory's concerned 
because way-back-then 
is much too far 
for one's adult ken to ever recall 
whether real or not 
whether unknown or set
in the stone of societal acknowledgement 
because what's yours indivisibly 
is not yours to reproduce 
and so the only thing you have to go on
is the deepest love however expressed
of the one person who'll always know

and so i reckon this thing 
and it's this thing i now wonder 
if for the rest of our lives 
it's something we strive for 
and then again
something we fail generally to achieve at all
being the return in some way 
to the womb of that woman 
who made us the man we now see 
and being something 
that some see as a beautiful attempt 
whilst others much more coarse 
choose to resist all impulses to accept 

and if i am right about this matter of mothers 
and how we must choose 
between either embracing with equal love 
or ejecting brutally from further contact 
the reality of their power 
so compassionately ceded 
and yet also seeded 
absolutely generously and fine 
to the children we grow into 
and the adults of much later ...
for it's then when we realise the truth must become us
NEVER to eject anything brutally 
in respect of the women 

who bring us ALL into a world 
we should learn to treasure much more freely 
than we have been able to do until now
because oh -- how wow! -- 
if we follow another path from this minute on
the world in so many ways
shall right itself 
like burdened vessel
no longer slumping like sad human soul
balled out by cruel words 
and embattled by selfish business models
whose only aim
is to maim our hearts 

so let's end on a high note
being that one of birth 
and motherly strengths
and the things we know 
and the things we still don't 
about how the power that is and the power that won't 
can become the power that will and the power that shall
when people like me
being humans and men 
learn to pay attention 
to the wisdoms of those 
who know much more about THAT then:
when each of us came first into this world

Poem 2:

And so what follows is the poem which forms the second part of this pair. And yet another description of a powerful woman: but powerful out of measure and enquiry and love and reality, not out of an ambition where skies might acquire castles of siege-like mentalities …

11 lines of love, truly kinder

No, I'm not brave at all
But I find courage when I need to
Except in this matter 
Of expressing to the person 
I'd most give up my life for 
The reasons why that life would be worth giving up

So once again, in lines of black and white
No greys around
And no uncertainty in sight 
Here are the wherefores of my love for you:
The wherefores I find myself
Unable to ever rue

Because since we met
It's always been you 
And since we were separated 
That second time of awful pain 
And since all those words 
That indicated absolutely no more 

And no more forever 
And no more for a day
And no more for a minute 
And no chance to say 
Even so for my soul 
It's always been you 

Even so for my heart
My art has flourished broad 
And grown like an unseemly soul
Engaged not by ring
But blocked with stony stall
As if the marketplace 

Had to be my funeral pall
And yet all this time
In rhymes which I wrote I conserved my hope
That I was mistaken 
When I considered the chance 
You were my breaking-point

Instead of my making-point:
That fabulous moment in every lucky man's life
When he finds not a wife 
Or chattel to own
But rather a spirit who must liberate and free 
As everyone knows every woman must be

And so then no further 
May I avoid the subject of these verses
Because for many a long time 
The rehearsals have been in vain
And you can't say in any way 
(Not even myself in truth may I claim)

That more time is needed
In order that I clarify properly my view
About the person of beauty and grace 
You'll always be for me:
That's all it is, my dearest friend
If friend is the word I have a right to now use

Because really deep down and really profound 
All I now wish for is this:
That your indivisible rights 
To resist further furrows and fearful frowns 
Become the proudest signs 
Of your liberties unbound

And as in all good films, the name is under the actor it isn’t, because otherwise we’d be fighting not to be second in everything … 🙃

definition, design philosophy, rationale

“astrids trädgård”: the swedish-located bletchley park

I’ve been note-taking again; yesterday on the tunnelbana (Stockholm’s metro) and today in one particular Joe & the Juice I love because of the jazz playlist you often get in the mornings. The one near Hötorget.

I’ve taken a liberty, too. It may not be the right thing to do: but if it’s not, we can amend and choose something else. What follows I have headed as “Astrid’s Garden”, in its English translation. Because, just as Alan Turing was a man of good genius, and yet had to fight for his right to be himself, so Astrid Lindgren, in a different time, place and culture, chose to fight what she believed in. And like Turing, it was for and behalf of a society which one day might become of the good.

Here is the stream of thought I’ve had over last night through to just after this midday …

mission:

fight fire with water wherever possible; only fight it with fire when utterly unavoidable

1. all the participating organisations achieve representation in terms of the potential and promise of individuals who belong to each.

to achieve this:

we create a bespoke evaluation process which allows us to identify this individual potential and promise in ways no one dreamed of.

the basis of the project is neuro-diverse complex problems-solutioning tech architectures: hardware, wearables and software all.

• https://www.sverige2.earth/unified

stepped in stages from the first privacy-sensitive structures through privacy-positive and secrecy-sensitive to the final goal: secrecy-positive.

• https://www.sverige2.earth/complexify-roadmap

we should spend as much money on people and their brains as we ever will on tech.

why does this feel uncomfortable? when did we ever feel spending massive amounts of money on tech was wrong? isn’t that the purpose of tech — to have money spent on it? ok. well. lots of virtues in that, for sure. but why not feel comfortable with doing the opposite? spending money on people: on our strengths and our capabilities.

• https://www.secrecy.plus/hmagi | hmagi.com

why not?

what could it mean?

spending directly, with salaries that allow for correct, humane, and moral conditions and sustenance; and then supportively, re technologies that upskill, expand and enhance the capacity for — ultimately — a wholly secrecy-positive “pure thought” that each person chosen will be chosen for because they already bring it – in more or less raw state — to the table at the start.

the projects and workstreams will then be enabled to first drive with efficiency (that is, leading to hyper-nonconformist hyper-performing person-focussed inside-out tech always) but along the way also creating regularly and inclusively (that is, what i have already conceptualised as hyperteam-delivering tech) as the programme progresses.

• https://thephilosopher.space

2. the goal is, however, also unremitting. completely so. as completely as the uk’s bletchley park during the second world war.

the targets as twofold:

a) bad actors; and b) preferred outcomes

a) the first target will focus on russia and china, and others who have, equally, allowed the criminality of the aforementioned to embed itself longitudinally throughout these years: from the russian wealth and war-focussed revenue streams in the uk alongside the collaboration at, and of, all levels of the conservative party to the chinese “police stations” spreading across supposedly sovereign britain and europe, with huawei and others as pure extensions of the chinese government’s aims to install surveillance within our internet backbones, never mind on phones, devices multiple, and so forth … all these are all examples of what i have called neocrime:

• https://crimehunch.com/neocrime

things we don’t see or even imagine until usually their creators have moved on to something else, at which point they lose interest in ongoing concealment. because whilst concealment exists, it happens for one reason: those committing such criminality are clever enough not to need to show anyone, ever, exactly how clever they are.

so we simply remain unaware, thinking “random” or “life” or … whatever.

3. astrids trädgård must therefore exist to anticipate, scope, identify, protect, and serve the interests of a real, good western democracy.

there is more we need to focus on …

b) in the best traditions of the united nations, we don’t only focus on detail, which is often passing. we focus also on the overarching and inalienable: the universal; the unchanging … literally and figuratively.

this is why i would add to the word “unremitting” already introduced one other word:

4. when we are able to fight fire with water, the word already mentioned. but when fire is our only alternative, then perhaps from a related org not open to astrids trädgård personnel themselves (for everyone’s mental wellbeing and sense of proportion and focus) we must fight this awful longitudinal fire that led to ukraine in the first place, and is sustained by the joint authoritarianism of russia and the chinese since much longer than we care to realise, with an equally merciless fire of our own.

so … proportionality always:

proportionate always, i repeat: but more than what “unremitting” tells us. and you may disagree, too; we may need to refine; we might have to finesse.

but in all cases, peter levine, the american civic thinker, and one of the most humane humans who ever lived, was right: good democracy demands we be inclusive, yes, but equally … we must be efficient.

• https://peterlevine.ws/?p=6359

so if covert spending exists to fund the fire with fire side, then it must have another name and mission quite different from astrids trädgård.

5 however, one thing must remain sharply clear: the final goal of both organisations will thankfully be shared.

it must be thus:

the objectives of both fire with water and fire with fire are to preserve, expand, deliver, share, and educate everyone globally — facilitating, also, that everyone become completely versed re these arts of learner and teacher — in the virtues of what i have seen in sweden these months:

a community spirit built on the absolute sovereignty of what we all hope are ultimately the nation’s most thinking citizens. and with this i mean … everyone in their absolute diversity and dignity to be enabled to express themselves of this diversity.

we MUST, similarly, trust that human beings will prefer their innate humanity over what we see in ukraine, in london’s richest money-laundering centres, in china, in places of similar authoritarianism across the globe — just so many, too many, far too many.

but in order for a human being to prefer humanity over inhumanity when the choice presents itself, we also MUST give the humanity we want to flower the tools to make it possible for all people to FEEL that it’s SAFE TO BE GOOD.

which is why i say: nation-building and citizen-building have to be accompanied by fighting crime and ensuring global security in the ways i will never stop advocating. ways which, to date, we have absolutely never pursued.

i hope this is ok. i hope for many reasons.

and i am always open to debate, to new ideas, to restructuring it all, if the evidence says it must be so.

but i also hold true to the reality that no one believed anything i said for twenty, and maybe more, years … but twenty at least.

and so i cry now not for me, but for the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions too, of other human beings who still aren’t believed in just the same way because we knowingly, negligently, make it possible for criminals (and all similar — including those who advantage themselves of loopholes and zemiological processes multiple) to be far more creative and nonconformist in their criminality than we have dared — ever CARED! — to be in our battle against the same.

one final thought:

just reconsider this.

just one more time.

why are criminals the strongest link in their criminality whilst the security industry consistently sustains the rest of us humans must be the weakest link in security?

• https://www.secrecy.plus/fire

it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it’s easier to monetise a widely imposed, machine-based counterforce to criminality than it is to integrate machines closely and sympathetically with the actual needs of the most competent, existent crimefighters we already have.

finding themselves, it’s true, not only having to fight the rampant criminality that leads directly to authoritarian russia and ukraine but also the #it- and #ai-#tech which their manufacturers utterly refuse, even today, especially today, to make supportive of humans as we actually are.

would it?

definition, design philosophy, rationale

and what if i am right in respect of #neoterrorismontheindividual (#noi)? and what if people like me are simply canaries in the mine?

and maybe the real problem here is that it’s not my sensitivity that makes me personally dysfunctional but your insensitivity that enables putin, society-wide, over and over again, to leave babies in their cots, bleeding red and dead as they slept.
mil williams, 14th august 2023, stockholm sweden

• neo-terrorism on the individual: how to undermine society without society ever realising it’s been happening | #darkfigure #neocrime | slide-deck version here

our problem

your problem is as follows.

if i am right re #noi, it’s been undermining all our societies for decades:

our = western, as well as locally here

and where i am right, the owners of #neoterrorismontheindividual and its processes and tools collect data on everyone, without exception. however, their owners and users choose when to use this data: they pick their moments and actual targets really judiciously.

mostly, it only gets visibly used against those who notice: what happened to me in 2003 in the uk.

but imagine if everyone began to notice: what then?

then, all the data these bad actors have collected on you over the years — keeping their powder utterly dry, if you like, in expectation of inevitable future need — would allow them to rapidly up their game overnight: because then, for them, the threat level would actually begin to exist. to date, it’s been all one-sided: theirs.

so what then?

#noi would become a visible act of repression, not an invisible one. it wouldn’t be #neocrime any more. what before sociology and criminology called #darkfigure:

• crimehunch.com/neocrime

and maybe #ukraine is not a sign of putin’s strengths in longitudinal gaslighting, though it might be easy to come to this conclusion.

maybe it’s a sign of his ultimate desperation. for his version of #noi, even factoring in pandemic, banking scandals, and three wars of his making in the last fifteen years, haven’t led quite enough to the total dislocation of western economies he sorely — and i’m sure dearly — expected would be delivered after all these years of having being a kgb acolyte of the worst, turned thug in fancy suits of the most horrible and politically immobilising kind.

because #ukraine has never just been about territory. that is, not physical. equally, and maybe much more, it’s been about distracting and dismantling western unity and sense of time & place: all good people’s mental territories and landscapes.

in the end, putin and his ilk are not even spymasters: they’re chessmasters in the most terrifying traditions. it’s chess they’re playing, not politics. total surrender, but sometimes — right to the end — with you not even thinking it’s going to be your fate. like the jews in the ghettos: worse than this, it surely can’t get.

in conclusion?

i can live with being ignored. i can live with being gaslit daily, in the trivial and incompetent ways they do. i can live with the #ukraines we have awaiting us. i suffered the #balkan one. i survived that, even at the cost of being improperly incarcerated as a result of the another democratic dismantling in 2003: the terrifying lead-up to #iraq which led to my own provoked mental dysfunctionality.

and we can’t forget 9/11: we never must.

and we can’t forget #pandemic either, though we already are: how the mercilessly rich knew it was coming and prepared their supply lines to benefit.

but let’s just imagine that for every hyper-sensitive person you assume people like me are, what you’re really witnessing are canaries in the mine: and meantime, as you laugh at us, and those who cause pandemic graft, invasions like #ukraine, disasters like #iraq, tragedies like 9/11 … and #brexit, and #trump, and all that stuff … well, maybe we’re not sensitive to irrelevance; maybe, instead, you’re insensitive to the embedded criminality that starts with the smallest of communities, the tiniest of acts, the symbolic gaslighting of the idiot on the metro … and maybe the real problem here is that it’s not my sensitivity that makes me personally dysfunctional but your insensitivity that enables putin, society-wide, over and over again, to leave babies in their cots, bleeding red and dead as they slept.