it's good to burn bridges when they're built by bastards who occupy cozy offices in central london office blocks
it's good to burn bridges when they're built by agencies who occupy anything but spaces of self-reflection
and who are incapable of respecting the enemies we face to such an extent that they then see ... ... they always see themselves
as better than anyone else and thus will remain inferior forever to everyone out there far or near who ever you'll find out here at all
because british intelligence is anything but ... and british intelligence is stuck in that rut ... well it is ...
... of empire and suchlike and then it's the pleasant island and verdant and stuff and so well ... they say and oh they may
but actually not at all at all and so then again as eyesight dulled and vision quite blinded and sullied and hidden and quite blinkered and suffering
as if the tree of oak itself is rotting from the core and nothing more is to be done when all is sung and said
and just the well-read remain as saviours who actually can't any more anyways in a country where the rule of law is no longer treasured by the enforcers of the same
never mind the citizens they once said they served and so it's as if it's a stain on the country's disdain in respect of anything that might truly lead to life and its wily interventions
greater now it's true than the declensions of the idiots who run this country through influence not politics like the strata of medieval wastes grossly uncovered
as they make haste oh they do to run the lives of me and you as badly as one might wish to conceive
because they have no idea at all and they really have none worth talking of whilst instead of chasing the real criminality they prefer to focus on you and me
saying our desire for privacy makes us just as dangerous as those they let slip in cities of the north and others of balding and silly nick
and as they did so terribly that day and as they claimed to rue the horror anyhow and every way they let the bad they lost sight of at such cost
bomb to awful bits the innocents of terror whilst all this time they've feathered their own closets and offices into things quite truly grand and fine
as if the most important thing today in all our democracy of hey and wow is to show how good their taste in interior decoration
enables their decidedly stylish and cool creatively fabulous comforts of label rule over the safety of the ordinary citizens who find themselves utterly unable any more
dying hopelessly in the gutters as they are of the homeless and the buggered that end up left all to one side by the men of british intelligence
who knowing all they have all these years of strife actually and truly and forcefully and cruelly really really don't give a fuck
What MI5 assured us in 2020What the UK and US authorities now argue just this weekWhat I argued in 2023What I have experienced since 2002How they do itThe final outcome
A very brief video that an unknown person or persons posted about me in 2015, just as I began to move closer to the UK Guardian newspaper
The day our security agencies decided that neo-crime and dark figure did not need a law-enforcement response was the day we opened the doors to a future Ukraine; an organised criminality in the UK where we now have an army of embedded criminals in all levels of society which outnumbers the British armed forces; and a broad and widely shared sense of citizen, perhaps even political-party, hopelessness about everything that happens quite toxically to Western and related democracies. That is, none of us can reasonably believe in better any more.
Mil Williams, Chester UK, 18th January 2024
Screenshots of a very brief video which piggybacked on an article the UK Guardian newspaper had just published back in 2015 on my relationship with the newspaper, being this latter the final screenshot in the above series
What follows …
What follows is a series of observations on a real case of targeted gaslighting on a democratic citizen — myself, being one of many similarly affected over the years by a nexus, I guess, of tech-bros and outlier security interests in the UK, and maybe other states and actors, too: a longitudinal case which already led to my undue and improper incarceration for a month in a UK mental facility back in 2003, after an experience in a broken-backed open-source community the previous year of 2002 called OpenOffice.org.
This open-source site was sponsored and paid for mainly by the then Sun Microsystems, but the dysfunctionality arose from both sides: corporate and independent developers in equal parts.
First, then, a poem about the impact this has had on me over the years.
“tech-bro”: a #poem by #milwilliams
in english a bro of the tech nature killed me
in swedish a bro is a bridge
*
if only i’d been able to make my life again
in a land like the latter where good people rule
*
but my pain and misery all came from the place
where i had the misfortune to be born
*
and whilst in swedish a tech-bro
would be a path to a better future
*
in english it’s better so much better
to be burned
*
but since i don’t believe in burning anyone
i reason the problem is myself
*
and so it’s myself
that mathematically must be removed
*
from any equation that includes
the future of humankind
*
this is why when the tech-bros
of english-speaking lands
*
burnt my person
in the manner of a most inflammatory form
*
of gaslighting imaginable
in its scorn
*
i never forgot
what they did to me
*
just as i began to fly
and just as i began to try
*
to lift my head higher
and fly to better skies
*
why now i burn those bros memories
even though arson is not my thing
*
but not as beautiful bridges of swedish ways
but as stupid men of patriarchal “hey!”
More on the video and how it continues to impact me
The video embedded at the top of this article was, as already alluded to, posted by an unknown person or persons, or an organisation, around the time the Guardian newspaper published a reader profile of me:
It was a clear example of self-interested gaslighting by those who didn’t want me to begin to build bridges to good and progressive discourses in British society such as the aforementioned newspaper, and therefore perhaps one day gain access to what for me would be a truly self-validating public platform.
Personally, I never forgot this video, and I believe as I write these words that if its creators were ever revealed, the two decades and more of neo-terrorism on the individual — by any other name, cognitive warfare on a specific and targeted individual such as myself — which I have been subjected to at today’s moment of writing this article would now have responsible parties, as well as a clear motive and notable set of explanations.
That is a world absolutely not fit-for-purpose. Absolutely not.
No?
So what do we do?
The day our security agencies decided that neo-crime and dark figure did not need a law-enforcement response was the day we opened the doors to a future Ukraine, an organised criminality in the UK where we now have an army of embedded criminals in all levels of society which outnumbers the British armed forces, and a broad and widely shared sense of citizen, perhaps even political-party, hopelessness about everything that happens quite toxically to Western and related democracies. That is, none of us can reasonably believe in better any more:
We need to believe in better, of course: but in order to begin to have a right to do so we must say enough is enough in the grey area of discretionary law enforcement and security where discretion is given a bad name in the interests of expediency. That is, in precisely that area of operational manoeuvres which utilises both dark figure and what I prefer to call neo-crime, whatever side of the law we find ourselves on.
We can only reacquire the authority Western democracy once had if we start to deliver on this: only this. And we shall not, until and if we do.
Ever again.
*
If you find what I have written today interesting and/or engaging, please do get in touch:
I am minded to write this poem because of a small and discreet event I attended at Liverpool John Moores University, one evening some years ago.
The event was given by a chief constable of a nearby north of England police force.* The standout stat I remember he offered us was when he wanted to contextualise what differentiates the average experience of a police officer with the average experience of a democratic citizen — and perhaps, in so doing, making it easier for both sides to be less opposing and more conciliatory.
Most citizens, he said, experienced 10 to 11 “life events”: what he meant was serious incidents such as witnessing the horrible injuries of others, maybe their violent passing, one’s own experiences of near-death, and/or perhaps the death of a family member or close friend.
Then he asked the collected audience what they thought the stat was for the average police officer. Not even the attending officers themselves knew how to hazard a guess.
The figure was 400.
It sank in. He let it sink in slowly and quietly, too.
It will never be forgotten.
That is how much the average police officer suffers. And wherever they individually choose to remain servants of the citizenry, not enforcers of the same, is when we have the very best of our societies standing rightfully to attention in front of us.
Just this.
Have a safe day.
(And just that.)
* I also recall the fact that I was once very firmly informed by a community police officer in a suburb of Chester, UK, that whilst the public liked to see the British police as a service, the British police never see themselves as anything but a force.
“the 400: a poem about service”
i was told one evening
by a chief constable near where i lived
amongst an audience of people good and free
that 400 was the number
which for the rest of us was 10 or 11
being life events
that break our souls
and make us weep with heaps of tears
like babbling brooks
when nothing’s then right
and all is then took
and life is then no longer worth living at all
*
and this chief of big team
was the kindest of souls
and he knew how to roll with the times and the goals
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.
I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.
I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.
I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.
I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:
Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.
I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.
So.
All good thus far.
The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.
In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.
Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.
From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.
A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.
That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.
What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.
From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.
Yeah?
And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.
How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.
Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.
Just this.
Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.
And do take care.
now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL
i spent my life as eldest of my family being the glue that meant i wasn't as i could've been
i had to be for every sibling and cousin i had the very best sounding-board they ever could have EVER had
understanding in all respects accepting all their holes of dark seeing as absolutely and utterly fair the roles i was assigned so stark
like lairs and dens of the dragons and monsters some of them have been to me and you really wouldn't ever believe
what i have actually seen and what i have actually witnessed and suffered to the extent they intentionally drove me mad
and so all this time i found it hard to do more than rhyme in order to survive the cruelty of my 61 years
visited on me and imposed on me and painted on me as if into a corner around my every boundary and residual sound
as never could i set my limits and find in time the core i needed and just be me for me at all and avoid the funeral pall
of man and son and father and brother and lover and done nailed brutally and abusively to the cross of quite another
and so after all that it came to 2015 and all i could do was scream silently to myself
and everyone thought again he's going mad or maybe he's just bad and maybe that was it
when really what it was this thing i began to do was realise that their VACUOUS holes like gruyère cheese
had prevented my mentioned core of apple-like pleas ever forming contentedly so that all i knew how to do
all this time for 53 years of foolishness too was to impale myself like stake to a soul in such a way
that their very real madnesses appeared mine all that time
and maybe to this day most would still find it easy to say that what they did to me in 2003 as my whole family stood aside
and let me suppurate as incarcerated foully by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty and how it did so
and how it was so neither good for them nor good for me as no one ever let me be neither in 2003 nor EVER since then
and as my monstrous lover of 2004 then took me to her web of evil spidery claw and the horrible things she then did and said
as she treated me badly and without remission and did all those things to me with zero permissions
i am reminded also of the techie folk who in 2002 in virtual sense and right to this day in quite parallel way
attacked me and my reputation it's true as they played their games with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation for it's only the clever who ever wonder why
and only the foolish who can't find it in themselves to ever care more than a minimum expression for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion
and so then it's a fast-forward right to today and christmas 2023 does approach in its way and so now my son is adhd and then a sibling that other thing they say
and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true and my younger relations both clearly that and good and even two others who claim to be hyper-sensitive
when really all they acted out was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish for all their multiple decades and years ... and so we do come finally to the VERY first
being me two decades before the worst when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for and one of utterly beastly yore as i was assigned a violent assessment
of a ridiculously inexact psychosis when if all the above had come fairly to light first of all then first i wouldn't have been without my core
and second the family both sibling and parental and so wider and much more wouldn't have fucked me about
as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet drugged to the eyeballs by a country caring only to treat a clever man like myself
as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside like evil mischief far and wide because dear cousins
and siblings and children and wife and my life that's what you did to the man i should've been
whilst once i defended you all as i tried desperately to be that thing you all needed me to be when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me
but people JUST LIKE YOU who needed far more support than i ever would being far more support than a crutch to a cripple
and so as we come close to 2024 i realise with joy in no way a trickle that i need care for none of you any more at all because what was broken
and splintered and hurt was not my job you see to make complete in the end even then
because i was far less damaged all that time than you and yours and those you claimed were mine and i was far LESS incomplete and far less unseated
and far less nailed to that cross i mentioned before
when talking of awful loss and the cost of not talking to each other as we might've done and the idiocy of hiding
behind the unassessed and never embracing what actually you all were in respect of something that could have been
a completely beautiful diversity to treasure and measure against all other benchmarks where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity
and so this is where i now found myself at last with no right at all to cast any stones
yet equally no duty remaining to ever help out anyone insane enough to want to stay
as a member of this sad sad tribe incapable of realising any of you in time that the very reasons you refused to defend me
were precisely the reasons why you should've protected me and precisely why no longer there's any point in my trying
to work with and for absolutely any of you in health and sickness or any condition left to me
nor in any kind of frame where being together could've been a worthy test of a humanity hugged close
to a seafaring bosun of chests of mysterious pieces of infinity where once upon a time
it was me that was seen to be the really crazed guy when it truth it's me who finds himself now catapulted
into a place of truthfully righteous change because family for me now irreversibly wanes as we all become
as diverse as each other thus meaning right on i am finally released from ever being again your necessary brother
when you teach and reach out and don't preach but do advocate these certain ways that are different from all the differences everyone else sees and accepts and may reject or not then i am not you and you are not me
because what i am looking to do is change the "you and me" we have been so far in humanity's historical charter of what is good and what is not: i'm not prepared to settle any more for a relativism of core that destroys our capacity to construct good and bad in the measure they had once upon a crime and in rhyming couplets that mean something deeper than a ditty of shitty superficial resonances
i aspire to much more you see because i believe we humans are built out of cruelty and good depending on where we are stood and the challenge for me now (and how it is this challenge i see how it is for sure) is to make it possible for not just an individual to progress mighty and fine across the timeline of their person but for the generations too that they make up and inhabit true ... ... well ... that finally they may not need to reset and just about almost always reboot what we know from one to the next
because if the driver of humanity's improvement really is only ever the nonconformism of intelligent individual where corporate-style teamworks serve simply to only implement and make real the dreams of those who dream the unreal we need far more dreamers of the unreal than we currently have if we are to survive and thrive quite outwith ourselves one day when FEARful prayer would no longer be needed to deities sometimes just and in equal measure as cruel as gruel at least in the "sometimes" that history has loosened upon us
and so all i want for christmas is just the sense that together you and me me and cee (out of a love of the most real even where not expressed ever for whatever the circumstances which present themselves as a present that is current as well as wrapped up like no gift ever given) we might just soon enough be tough enough to bring enough truth and compassion and firm resilience to the science of building the FEARless CITIZEN
because me and you that's what we are and what we've been all these years they knocked us back like into a sack where good guys are tumbled by the really really bad and dumped into waterless wells (like we were rocks that don't ever get to) and some these guys and sometimes gals do no good but only stuff the neighbourhoods with more and more legitimated mafias of nearby cities and then again way beyond
so it's now time we put a stop to it all my love: time we said enough is enough and then did in consequential act what was needed and always has been and that the rough guys who were never tough but just cowards and only apparently hard when possessed of the full knowledge no one could properly stop them ever nor stop their awful cruelty born of power's abuse and total misuse as they winged our beautiful civilisations over and over again like icaruses of a sun which should only have embraced and instead was laced with poisons galore by the criminals of yore but also the mafias of RIGHT NOW
time i say to make love where we can and as women and men and genders-all we make these calls to love as practised where humans communicate with fabulous exes that become the kisses which seal the real human deal ...
... and then when we meet people who care not at all for all this it's time we became as firm as hell and gave them bottles of their own medications as we salvage the reputations of every civilisation of good good hood into a future-present of neighbour "should" and "want" and "wish" being the most at this time of year anyone has the right to see delivered and given and handed over and no longer feared no longer feared no longer feared ... at all
a world where it suddenly becomes possible and practical to rebuild once more the FEARless CITIZEN
because when you love unconditionally is when you arrive not at bill gates but at real pearly gates where your place isn't a state of vatican embezzlement but of true affection and amusement and of honest kindnesses expressed like the best espresso you ever sipped being your lips that day on dublin river and so this christmas i hope to find you on stockholm isle and maybe we spend a while together where everyone can see us holding our palms out not in surrender or white flag but in the glorious colours of blue and yellow one a sanctuary from all that is bad and one fighting on behalf of us daily by the minute and to the second never seconded from anything that wasn't a deep belief in the fact that putin is not mad but just entirely and completely bad without redemption and without ascension and only awaiting if some day a justice of a natural kind may be delivered duly: the descent to the darkest embers of unending fires
and so all that's being left for me to say is how much i love you and always shall and if you cannot show yourself now or cannot yet or may not any more then there will always be a time i will find time for you when you can finally hold my hand again and make me the happiest man who ever walked this rock proud and tall and amongst it all because that's what this is all about dearest soulmate of forever where our shared and intrinsic souls our fabulously intertwined souls become arts of the heart and our work then finds itself never-ending
and our life is always of utility now even as distances make the kiss on the lips quite impractical for the moment still one day we may one day say it's time to hug each other in beautiful lacy embrace NOT of the poison-laced juliet or romeo but being just the moments when utterly chilled together on common sofa we end our days in an uncommonly handsome conversation of a meeting of minds and body night after day and in all our joyous beams not of foundation or construction but actually just of sun where your eyes glisten and shine with happiness and mine weep and sob as finally i am accepted exactly for what i am by the only woman who knew what made me right again
just that state out there (if you're ever so lucky and if fortune blesses you and if your life is one of fortunate outcomes and not of war nor conflicts horrific) but that state that one which makes you unconditionally beloved without further recourse to the cruel and without further imposition of those gruels of incarceration i suffered once upon a crime but just a hand again a hand outstretched never clasping or grasping but compassionate and warm and slender-fingered and SO elegantly yours after all
and so i do await that moment one day in the near future when maybe soon and if not then well ... then maybe later you may grace my presence and give me the notion and opportunity to remind you of all that you have meant to me and mean verily still not out of illness or infirmity but simply the veracity of knowing the soul IS where it all lies in truth: a very human redemption ... for us all
I’ve been following recently #elonmusk’s #tesla’s attempts to tell other countries with different approaches to #labourrelations how they must conduct their businesses.
I’ve been reporting on it, too. Sometimes gleefully, as you’ll have noticed I’m sure:
Today, at #manchesterairport I supported two people as they flew to foreign climes. I had booked a train ticket well in advance to make the return journey directly back to #chester on a #transportforwales train.
There’s a strike today by #aslef, the trades union, on #transpennineexpress trains. I wasn’t taking a #transpennineexpress train, but my beef today is nevertheless still with the people working at the airport’s railway station who work specifically for this company:
Not because of the fact of the strike, mind. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t know the details of this particular one, but train people are generally hugely responsible professionals: I’ve worked with them on station platforms and concourses in #liverpool for months in a #securitylight role. They combine #security with #customerservice roles, often immensely intuitively. And therefore, seamlessly.
I’m still not with#elonmusk on this one, as you can see.
🙂
So the problem wasn’t the strike at all. Not for me. What was it, then? And what is it?
The splintered nature of the #uk train network, which a long time ago used to be called #britishrail. Now it’s a mishmash of competing operators. It was broken up in the interests of introducing competitive dynamics into a system that did need a shakeup, it’s true. But the result these days is serious problems with information flow across operators, and accountability amongst them when there’s no desire to duly deliver on it.
The way it works is that each major station enables the arrival and departure of trains from all the operators which want to use it. But it’s not as simple as it could have been. Because each major station is not run by a common separate body across the country. No. It’s run by one of the operators on behalf of the rest. And where you are determines which one runs your station.
What happened today was how the system manifestly doesn’t work. The #tfw operator wasn’t affected by the strike, but it was. Because the #transpennineexpress personnel were only interested in getting bodies out of THEIR airport’s station: the one, that is, that they are responsible for overseeing and running.
The one who was controlling the flow of people onto the platform said to me at one point he worked for #transpennineexpress and couldn’t offer information on any other operator and the validity of tickets except those of #northerntrains.
Their interests as overseers of the station clearly didn’t coincide today with the interests of #tfw, and therefore its passengers too: people just like me.
For this reason, he wasn’t interested, either, in whether half the madly grouped passengers he finally let en masse onto the platform had tickets or not, and thus clearly didn’t care whether or not they were just taking a short hop improperly to get to #manchester centre on another operator’s trains, squeezing legitimate passengers off the rest of this journey.
To make things worse, the trams — usually #manchester’s most exemplary part of its #publictransport network — were also delayed by disruption at just about exactly this time. The only way out for a while was an hour-long bus journey or onto a platform not being marshalled correctly IMHO, by a station operator which had no intention of supporting travellers who legitimately were going with a competing operator.
In the end, I waited for the trams to be up and running again, went to #manchestervictoria station where I received exemplary #customerservice from a #northerntrains employee, and was then redirected by the same to #piccadilly where I got equally brilliant service from two #avanti employees. One wrote me the ticket you see below:
So even in a stupidly splintered service such as the #uk’s good #customerservice can be delivered, when the will and professionalism chooses to exist.
One final observation: the only person at the airport railway station prepared to offer a categorical assurance that I would be able to travel without cost on another train, whatever the operator in the end, was a #security professional I am very grateful to and whom I was sure to thank — even whilst myself unsure whether anything would turn out right.
It shouldn’t be like that: but that’s how it was.
In the end, #security was compassionate, the strikers’ cause was just, and the man who was there acted only out of self-interest, and not on behalf of all parties involved.
What really puzzles me, though, is why a power like the #uk, once I am sure world-beating in so many respects, now settles so often for being proud of a self that doesn’t work … or at least, maybe worse than not at all is, simply, not quite …
I’ve been considering how to move forwards with traditional #proofreading and a more complete #qualitycontrol of different channels of #contentdelivery.
• qcdocu.com (my new proposal, as it stands right now)
Background
I got into this in the first place for two reasons:
1. In the early 2000s I studied, whilst living in #spain, a #spanish University Master in #publishing. I’d always been interested in content of all kinds: when a child and adolescent, almost engulfing my local library’s bookshelves; and when older, blogging every day on a whole range of subjects in response to the imagination and occurrences of many known and many relatively unknown writers.
The Master then served to put me in touch with #editors of the very best: I even interned for three months or so in the University of Salamanca’s fabulous #publishing house. This only sharpened my interest in the role and activity of #editing #reality.
2. From about 2012-2013 onwards, I started working for a major #london-based #marketingagency. This was in the field of #bigtech, and involved ensuring that the #sales #documentation which ended up in front of the #csuite clients of my client’s clients was in the best condition possible — including grammar, flow and related, and even in some cases picking up on domain-related inaccuracies.
This second activity has been the mainstay of my working-life since then. Until this autumn, that is. The most recent relationship — volumes and so forth — which I had with my main client was settled for over a year or more, at levels which enabled me to deliver an exclusive dedication. Then staff changed, agreements were left by the wayside, #generativeai seemed to promise a world of automated #csuite-competent comms, and two things happened … or at least, my client tried really aggressively for two things to take place.
The new revenue stream and NDA
One, reduce substantially my income over a period of two months with minimal warning; and two, demand I signed a new #nda which not only required me not to work as #proofreader for my client’s clients — most of the #bigtech corporations and quite a few niche ones, too, being an absolutely reasonable and understandable condition — were I ever to leave the relationship, but also demanded I did not work in any #tech field which my #proofreading over the years might touch on … or, maybe even, have touched on. And remember, the only documentation I ever came into contact with — or would be coming into contact with, for sure — was sales & marketing documentation aimed at the #csuite. Never manuals, never secret sauces … none of this at all, in any way whatsoever.
I couldn’t sign, obviously; and so I didn’t.
And so I guess, because the #marketingagency is influential globally, that locks me out of future work of this nature elsewhere.
Yet I love the industry. Still.
Next steps …
So what next? Well. I’m considering moving into bigger-project publishing: I’m already editing the translation of a #croatian 20th century novel on behalf of a family member. We have obtained the rights to proceed with the translation’s publication, and now we’re working through final versions of the same.
But this, for the moment, is clearly a side hustle. ‘Keeps my brain ticking over, I guess. (Something I am grateful for, too.)
The question itself
A question then, to you all. Whilst #openai and #microsoft have wilfully upturned the world on the basis of presumption and unvalidated notions around the utility of their #generativeai escapades, people who have worked skilfully and with deep wisdom in the industry of #content and #publishing more widely have seen their livelihoods destroyed in less than six months.
I now hear of a case where a smaller agency which automated their content processes using #ai a year ago are not only continuing to pay out for the #tech, but are having to take on four more people to revert back to a manual and human delivery, as well as pay for lawyers to identify any injuries these obviously fairly unwise changes may already have incurred for clients over the past twelve months.
As someone has observed of the #openai/#microsoft nexus, a shit-show all round.
The question, then? Will common sense now ever return to high-level marketing & sales, and their related communication?
i was born without asking to the country i grew up to love as a britain which deserved the adjective of great because it strove to do good across the political spectrum for every citizen and so i felt proud of being british i did
but now the tawdry and brexit-ridden have renamed my nation-state and i can no longer call myself the nationality i was born to: for i am now officially uk-ish
but what prideful claim can that deliver when -ish becomes a "sort of" instead of a proclamation of historical courage and grit and of the terrible determinations forged in times of awful warfare where everyone of us cared for everyone of us and no one was ever less for owning less
for this is the patriot's lament: how the savagely thoughtless political class we now have upon us brutally operate on us as they do from the boardrooms of foul directorships and sailing-ships run with the dirty monies of foreign largesse embedded and encrusted in a society of the most debilitated
and as it witnesses the illegitimate invasions of not-so-distant lands we must remember that whilst hitler and that other russia (being the same russia after all) were enemies easy to espy and define as such today's dictators of equally abusive bent wear suits of the nicest and tread stages of the finest and rub shoulders with the tech monsters of the cruellest
and so as the patriot i am does lament the falling away of what it once was to be british and proud of the fact with tact too that in a hard world being such was a foundation stone of democracy still as that patriot of kindly encouragement i hold out hope that there may resurge good forces in the land i refuse to rename the uk because myself i never will be uk-ish in that ambiguity of reclusive criminality that i now bear witness to
because being british born and british bred my head tells me i shall always remain conscious of the FOUR nations that SHOULD make up freely our federation of beautiful and collective future-present wisdoms
where the past may no longer need to hang heavily over what we show to the rest of the world and our own heads all may equally be held higher than the recent past allows
for what has been and what we've seen can just as easily be a manual of instructions of what NOT to do as it currently serves those who serve themselves abusively of the rest of us in respect of how better to constrict our aspirations to do good in a world which desperately needs our would: being where we find again the bravery that being british once meant ...
... before the patriot's lament rang out deeply and profoundly riven as it now is with the gravity and sadness of lives disposed of cheaply and carelessly by business and political leaders both who continue to choose the roads of personal enrichment over public service
and so it is and so it may be that all of us being you and me and we together might find that retribution for evil deeds need NOT contain the vengeance of the gods of old for we could remember that british bred and british born and having once been the mother of all parliaments and so fine with this aspiration as we furthered a step-by-step process of moving slowly but utterly sure we may return once again to being ... this GREAT BRITAIN!
it takes ten years ramming a new idea down people’s throats for them to get it.
i started what would become the #intuitionvalidationengine back when a discovery interview with a #liverpool university. in the middle of this interview i came up with the phrase #industrialisationoforiginalthought. i didn’t know, then, the roots of this occurrence.
i do know now.
my first university qualification, of the three i now have, was a ba hons in film & literature, back in the early 1980s. i realised a few years ago now that this was the very source of my thinking around #intuitionvalidation.
film, until #generativeai, was an example of how, despite the temptations, movie technologists chose to make a tech that enhanced and expanded human beings, rather than diminished and automated them out of relevance.
the microphone made the voice more powerful; the camera, the eye more beady-eyed; the film language of close-up and long-shot making the actor able to express their feelings with more impact; and even the stage and a wider mise-en-scene serving to extend the ability for great actors to deepen their expressiveness using the surroundings designed specifically around them.
that, then, all a clear example of the #industrialisationoforiginalthought.
and with that, a direct precursor to the #intuitionvalidationengine, and what then became #platformgenesis:
if we take 2016 as my baseline of these later ideas, though not where the ideas originally connect back to, of these ten years i allude us to, ramming a new idea down everyone’s throats, i’m in year 8 of the aforementioned decade.
what next …
i’d like now to make something firmly tangible of all this.
and this, for two reasons and two reasons only:
1. under the current #totalsurveillance philosophies, 9/11, putin’s russia, and hamas all flourished. i’m not saying those who promoted these solutions, where machines have humans as extensions of their processes and procedures, wilfully ignored an alternative i’ve been proposing for a number of years now: that is, humans with machines as extensions of themselves. but if it does continue to be rejected, the ignoring of them does become wilful:
2. the second reason is more personal. i’d like to think that some good people at the highest levels of #tech begin to recognise that perhaps everyone — all of us, that is, without exception — should have considered other options sooner.
9/11 was a horrendous event we considered absolutely singular and, thankfully, unrepeatable.
but then came along the utterly illegitimate invasion of ukraine by putin’s russia, where we still even today — some of us, that is — choose to see him as a man who stumbles into one misadventure after another. only this isn’t true at all. he’s a horrible nonconformist whose awful capacity to think out of the box is left untouched by our machine-driven teams and ways of working.
and so, finally, 9/11 does repeat after all. with, you can’t say no, hamas’s dreadful attack on israeli and palestinian people, both. and under the very same philosophy of #totalsurveillance which didn’t succeed as it could’ve done the first two times round either.
my ask
so what do i say? what do i want? what can i get reasonably from you?
what can we all, ultimately, achieve together?
it’s not #totalsurveillance that’s the problem: it’s a #totalsurveillance which upscales exclusively machines over humans for every security, law-enforcement, and espionage process ever.
it’s the philosophy and implementation, not the need or the instinct to protect and defend absolutely: because the latter is absolutely spot-on. meantime, 9/11, ukraine, and now hamas surely question the former in ways we never cared to in the past twenty years.
this is why i am now looking proactively and openly for a powerful and paradigm-upturning partner who can provide the runway to get this blended approach to #totalsurveillance all underway: an approach which i have proposed with so many challenges to my own person all along.
and the aim of these ideas?
simple, tbh.
no more 9/11s, invasions like that of ukraine, or attacks like that of hamas on israeli and palestinian peoples both.
i want to save us all from future pain.
that is the gain i most want out of my legacy.
that is what i want my ideas around #totalsurveillance to begin to deliver: a more secure world which feels, also, so much safer …
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