I lived in Spain for around sixteen years. My Spanish is quite good; but I’m not a native in the language and never learnt it formally.
But the poem below, for some reason today, I felt obliged to write in Spanish: that is, castellano. Because there are a number of sometimes quite different languages the Spanish state and peoples communicate in. I know only castellano.
Mainly, in the street — and then receiving correction via an assiduous daily reading over the years of a linguistically ferocious Spanish newspapercalled El País.
sí lo es una huída hacia delante sin querer en absoluto y sin preocuparse por nada
porque es hora de ver si tienes razones por pensar si hay personas e instituciones que te quieren
y que quedan -como debieran- para que quererles a su vez y de vuelta sea sensato o no
porque he llegado a la conclusión que necesito estar sólo con gente de buena fe
NO las que te hacen reír ... pero entonces nada más que desde sus estupideces y desde sus más profundas idioteces donde crecen sólo sus mentiras cuando no las tetas de sus nenas
por arte del instagram o del tiktok de las narices y de los gobernantes chinos que sólo te miran
porque sólo quiero estar ya con personas buenas quienes saben ya de mi mundo desde su interior: para que otras explicaciones ya no son necesarias
y porque ellos también lo han experimentado y sufrido en el presente igual que en el pasado
y entonces si eso significa que a la gran mayoría (que solo parece que sea la mayoría y -desde luego- constituida en nada de "gran")
me veo obligado a dar mi espalda es porque tengo ganas no de dar la espalda a nadie pero en su lugar mirar con firmeza de frente
a caras como la tuya: es decir a otra clase completamente de gente
gente que sólo cree en un mundo donde el jugo que se derrita no son las sangres de la población mundial entera ni de sus cuerpos frágiles
llenos de las bondades por encima de cualquier abuso cometido por vicio y por medio de la violencia corporal
de todos los hombres y mujeres autoritarios ... pero para que -de otro modo bien distinto y precioso-
lo que echamos no es nada de menos a nada que hemos valorado desde hace siempre como lo mejor de todo ser humano
ni que hayamos querido derretir los jugos de nuestras vidas en campos de guerra y en apartamentos donde bombas despiertan al bebé recién nacido
para que pueda morir en el acto en charcos de su propia sangre con los cuerpos de sus hermanos enfrente proclamando el adiós cruel de los violentos tan poderosos ...
pues NO: no ... no ... no ... no paso más tiempo con gente así
no es ésta la vida que elijo consentir: y estar con la gentuza que sí prefieren consentirla con las sábanas rojas de esos niños todos los días de las semanas tan agredidas
NO es donde voy a quedarme: porque ya pido más a la vida y no me quedo con el lujo de beber el mejor vino por un lado y derretir la humanidad por el otro
como HAMAS nunca JAMÁS debiera haber concebido y ya no digo lo que pudo llevar a cabo porque ellos sí han sabido siempre todo lo que han hecho y han querido hacer
y así -en profundo recuerdo de ukraine y de 9/11- damos la vuelta al verso anterior: bebemos todos YA de las humanidades que más nos hacen nobles
y derretimos únicamente a partir de ahora os ruego -por favor- sólo los vinos de mas esplendor
de los viñedos con más sabiduría y que nos sean capaces de bendecir BIEN con sus alegrías de amores bien vividos y de muchos ciudadanos y ciudadanas viviendo ahora
que deben luchar con una ferocidad que corresponde SÓLO a los que han intentado por todos los medios buscar otros caminos por esos medios e incluso cuando no queremos pelear así en absoluto
porque cuando la guerra te toca a ti tienes sólo dos opciones: ninguna es fácil pero sólo una conduce a una muestra de lo que es firmemente mantenerse humano
y puedes ceder en todo por supuesto y quedar con lo que te dan si eso o puedes luchar para otro futuro bien distinto
y aunque yo sé lo que es para mí y -ciertamente siempre será así- no puedo ni debo definirlo para ti ya porque ser un humano es eso: la elección de cada uno ... elección bien propia
pero lo que sí reservo -sin sentirme mal- es el derecho a decir a la fecha de hoy y la de mañana y el año que viene y desde mis escritos
que quizás durante cientos de años pueda que perduren o -a lo mejor- solamente en las mentes de muy poco gente y a lo mejor ni eso ... ni eso mi amor
pero a decir la verdad me da igual ya porque lo único que quiero de la vida que me queda en los años venideros (y espero llenos de amor)
es encontrarme con mis gentes y NO con sangres encharcándose y ni de hombres ahorcándose ... pero sí -y eso sin duda- con mujeres y hombres tiernos
capaces de vivir la vida correctamente y de manera noble incluso cuando nos han tocado los campos de la inhumanidad más espeluznante
when you see the world as it is you prefer to see the #whirled as it ain't
and then it's like a super-injunction 'cos it's not just you tell people there's something you can't say but 'cos honestly you can't even say you can't
i learnt how the world worked a long time ago when i was born or maybe when reborn not as a child but rather a man who for a period of time got sand kicked in his eyes by other men mainly but a few women too who chose to do ill 'cos that's what some of us choose to do
and in those days this man before you didn't wear glasses at all except perhaps when the sun would shine like no one's business might run
and so in those days when ray bans were the thing and prohibition of any activity didn't seem to be what the uk wanted to be about he just sipped sooo gladly on his wine glass fine and shiny and then slipped madly on his dad-ass of rhymes imploding and yet still managing in some way or other to conserve and to preserve a sense you kinda saw of that occasional semblance of dignity all humans should access occasionally
but what mainly he mostly learnt on rebirth when all was said and done and hurt was that people who know they do what's right and people who doubt all the time their might are not the same at all at all oh not the same at all
'cos it's the latter who when they think they're bad are really the best of humans by far whilst it's the former who demanding allegiance to their had are the people you'd never ever want to meet or see even at rally or show in full public view never mind that alley of ancient dark review
so if i had to say one thing just one about the world i now ignore it's that whatever happens next to me i know i was the latter yes i do i do
and although it seems a rank contradiction of humility's dreadful absence there are times in your life when you know you did wrong and even so equally other times more blessed when by golly you know you did right and right as rain and rain and rain and right as any rain at all
and so straight upfront and straight in place i wish right now that if we all had some other chance to make a #whirled of brand new utter from this tawdry world we have instead a world we have so me and you and maybe sadly so at that i'd be first in line to do some things and the two things i'd do 'cos two it would be would be these two cool things which surely could change all the bad there is into the good of this one and the fab of that other
and that number one would be really dead easy where first we simply tipped our hats even when we had no hats at all out of respect and deference but not to hierarchy nor a desire to avoid all creative anarchy but simply because in front of us we saw a human like ourselves and nothing more and yet again and yet again whilst nothing more and nothing more nothing less than anyone else we'd ever get to greet
and so that would be the first thing out there i'd try to inculcate quite differently being a respect for the other based on equality not position and so not on how much wealth you had to show or didn't care to manifest or even just to know but simply the fact that nothing was hidden and no one had power over any other person as a result of a violence of stealthy kinds and abusively speaking and never one's mind being committed again and again and again and so nothing of this sort would i enable at all in my #whirled ... of just so round tables and so arthurite haul and kiplingesque too ... and then all wrapt up proudly in one beautiful zoo
and so what then my dear would the second thing be? what next would i do to remedy the world? what next ... in my #whirled i'd imagine oh yes ... being this mad thing of grand ... could i attempt to right rightfully one good day standing as i stood and prayed?
simple really and simple as simple 'cos i think all i'd do is be a man who lived his own life on islands quite deserted and absent of human strife because if one thing i've learnt all these years it's a sad reality but a truth all the same and this is what it is i have to say and this is what it's come to weigh on me too like stone of anchorage or baggage of love's futility when we realise eventually that no one is to be trusted when push comes to shove and here not even love
for the only two ways in the world today we can trust another fully is either by blindly joining a tribe in which case nothing is real inside or alternatively never meeting another person out there ever or at least not more than once in your life and no more than that not even to doff that hat for where they only know how to deliver like carrier pigeon of conflicted nations a message of war unjustly conducted what's the point of trying again ever?
Hope today is a better day for us all, even as we must always commemorate its awful awful tragic and terrifying past.
Just to let you know, where books and content are your thing, and if so it’s fab that it should be like this, that my new quality control and documentation proofreading service is now up and running.
I’m currently focussing on two markets: Britain and Sweden. Note: this is NOT a translation service but a brand-new quality control plus more traditional proofreading service in one for English content, whether created by native speakers or by those for whom English is a second or third communication skillset.
To summarise
We take English-language documentation from our clients — whether developed by them in-house or with their agencies — and ensure it’s both functionally and linguistically fit for our clients’ target audiences: usually (though not necessarily) C-suite decision-makers.
So if you are starting to use interactive and other more complex documentation formats, we don’t only check the English (in multiple region versions, too), we check the navigation, the flow and readability, and the interaction between video, photos, and/or graphics on the one hand and the text-based information that makes it run on the other.
If this is something you’d like to use, and you’re not in the UK or Sweden, we can invoice in euros and US dollars, too.
Our plan is to focus on the first two markets and then expand to others. But if demand emerges elsewhere sooner, of course we’ll follow the trail wherever it takes us.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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 …
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:
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.
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.
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:
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.
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 …
me, at the moderna museet recently
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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