as a by the by, these days in tech they often talk of something called “zero trust”. they never even broach the concept of “total openness”.
why …?
mil williams, johan & nyström coffee shop, stockholm sweden, 7th April 2023
a) i accept you are good
ok.
you’re right.
but you sometimes act using fascist tools, without really realising you are.
not taking ownership is a fascist tool.
pretending you’re something you’re not: this is fascist.
so fascists, then, can be right sometimes? is that what you prefer me to conclude? (btw, i don’t think you are fascists at all. but you’re so used to the right an admin has to admin a system that you can’t see why i should sincerely object.
why it could be in good faith, too.)
b) the nub of the issue
you feel i should trust you absolutely as if i were a catholic and you were the church. i don’t want that relationship with anyone. look what it brought us.
i want a trust built on a right to get it. and that means information-sharing.
look.
if you believe i am less able to comprehend what you already all comprehend, why work with me in the first place? why want to work with people less able than you?
one reason. just one.
but evidenced … not on trust.
c) what i mean by “not on trust”
i don’t want to take such important things on trust. i’ve done things on trust and they’ve just not worked out. i did when i got married. i did in 2002 in open source; and then in late 2002 in my mother’s homeland, and in the uk re my father’s wretched establishment’s prejudices from 2003 to the current day.
i also foolishly and stupidly used the tool of trusting in others in 2004 in both cases then given: i) media-related in respect of the new labour government at the time; and ii) a horribly personal example, as well.
d) what i mean by an “open society”
we shouldn’t have to build a democracy and society on trust. an open society, yes. of course. but a society where a person does what they do without evidencing to another it’s cool … no … not that. it inevitably leads to corruption. it inevitably leads to abuse of all kinds of powers. in all contexts, public and private. it enables rape. it enables the police force we now have in london.
we need openness precisely so we DON’T need trust. let’s get rid of trust and your demand for it. why? simple: it’s a lazy euphemism for faith. and faith comes from a time before gutenberg. and gutenberg brought science to us all. and now it’s time we gave arationality its place, and by so doing facilitated openness to the very maximum.
now it is. it really is.
e) my preferred timeline
first, do away with faith.
then, do away with trust.
and then make of our world a magnificent, peer-to-peer society of an EVERYTHING that it is to be UTTERLY egalitarian.
openness is beautiful. trust, meantime, is a tool to be turned against you by the powerful (at home and outwith, tbh). and faith is rarely more than what blinds you to what’s really out there. this being what faith always has been throughout human history: the bedrock of religions’ abuses. (not only that. good too, yes it’s true. but what i have seen in most of my life is that the good do good whenever they can, whilst the bad rise to the heights that serve almost inevitably TO CAN the striven good of the good. over and over.)
f) conclusion
anyways.
just that.
just this.
not much more to say today.
just as a by the by, though: these days in tech they often talk of something called “zero trust”. they never even broach the concept of “total openness”. why …?
and so to one final final thought, as i walk the streets of stockholm after posting: if i’m right in what i write here today, trust is a component of faith but not of openness. those of us who want open societies should, therefore, ensure we take note.
if you’d like to contact me, try email: we can start there … yeah?
i just got a message from microsoft (linkedin) which asked me to consider and/or explain how what i was about to post (what you see below in the screenshots) related to my work or professional role.
why nudge in this way
is this a stealthy attempt to remove the ambiguities of #arts-based thinking patterns from contaminating the baser #chatgpt-x instincts and what they scrape?
more than personally, quite intellectually i think it’s wrong — in a world which needs lateral and nonconformist thinking — to define, a priori, what a thinker who wishes to shape a better business should use as a primary discourse.
because this discourse may include how much we follow or no the traditional way of framing information: where we state what we will say, say it, and then summarise it, we fit the needs of machines and people trained to think like them.
art should be used to communicate in any forum
‘truth is, when we choose a precise ambiguity (one forged out of the arts — not the confusions — of deep communication), where such ambiguity and the uncertainty it generates may in itself be a necessary part of the communication process’s context — and even content — what value ever is added by telling the speaker and/or writer they are ineffective?
in any case, the public will always have the final vote on this: and if you prefer to communicate in such ways and be not read, why not let it happen?
why choose this kind of nudge to upskill writers in the ways of the machine?
using automated machines to do so, too …!
so what do YOU think? what DO you?
me, what follows is what i want. what no one in tech wants to allow. because i’m not first to the starting-line: i’m last. they decided it didn’t suit their business models decades ago. i decided i didn’t agree. and i still don’t. and neither should you.
on making a systemically distributed intelligence and genius of all human beings … not just an elite
i trained in spain as an editor in the early part of the 2000s. but as someone who always blogged better than he authored, i already had the custom of attributing my ideas through the tool and habit of hyperlinking.
attribution is really important: not because it inevitably takes us down a peg or two, although it does. more importantly, an outcome with shape to it is more valuable than an outcome, full stop.
the memex machine
i realised this consciously ever since reading vannevar bush’s treatise on human thought: “as we may think”.
in it, using the immediate post-war tech available, and any future tech extrapolated from the same, he suggested a machine called the #memex. it would enable human thought to the extent that we would not only be able to store outcomes — what those most interested in making money would consider a product or service to be scaled up massively — but store the trails of thought that would always lead up previously (and to my mind — and bush’s — also preciously) to such outcomes.
because when a thought is a reel of thoughts not just a pic which snaps shut on time … this is when we have a human being rather than a machine.
the implications of attribution’s fact
the result of all the above? NOTHING we think up is independent of ANYTHING. as a consequence, it is tantamount — just about — to daylight (and more importantly, night-time) robbery to claim one has an exclusive right to make money out of any idea “you might EVER have”.
you don’t agree? then it isn’t. but then you’re a genius in the divisive sense most of society understands: that is, very few of us can or will be this figure; and most of us will never be anywhere near.
which is elitism to the max, in fact.
only i don’t agree with this. i don’t believe such elitist approaches accurately reflect the human brain and how it best works. and when leaders in different fields impress on us to believe that they do reflect the state of human thought, and then build business models on such belief systems, we get a type of tech-kryptonite thrust into the most vulnerable core of human experience.
my experience, meantime, as a language teacher, then facilitator, then enabler (the progression taking place out of what almost became a fanatical frustration with the rank incompetence of traditional learning paths) showed me ALL humans can radically improve their thought processes, given the right environment.
and where processes can be improved dramatically, surprising — even shocking — outcomes can be achieved. and so i saw it happen. and was a convert.
platform genesis
this is why both my son, from whom i am now deeply estranged, and myself worked together for a while on a platform we named “platform genesis”.
the idea is that all of us, all human beings, can find the right tools to uncover some aspect of genius in our souls, hearts, and grey cells. it’s not the preserve of intellect: it’s mainly the preserve of confidence in oneself — whether one has it or not. if one doesn’t, intellect cannot follow. if one does, a happy series of accidents — where a given — will lead to your genius in some way or other.
a few minutes after the photo that follows was taken i met the muse of my life. it’s hard to admit that nothing i have thought up since 2016 that evening in dublin on the banks of the river liffey would now exist if we hadn’t met and spoken for three hours, as we shared a meal on the roof terrace of “the woollen mills”.
i had lost my fear of flying the day before, you see: the 15th of june of that same year, when i flew into dublin on ryanair for the first time, for precisely the meeting that would then take place on what was my birthday the following day. being the 16th. coincidently called, in ireland mainly, “bloomsday”. (and so don’t you think it’s cool to have a birthday called “bloomsday”? the day you are born being that, i mean.
don’t you?)
and so i literally lost my fear of flying that june. actually, truly, in a second. a total flip. a click of the brain’s chip that’s never clicked back.
and therefore in my wider life, too: because i assure you, quite objectively, i have a better brain now at 60-something than i have ever had the whole of my life before. and it’s NOT because of intelligence that i am far more intelligent than i could once have imagined myself becoming. it’s because of the confidence that slowly seeped into and then infused my brain, my heart, and my soul … as an utterly natural consequence of meeting the muse of my life.
the meaning of this … for me
bringing together the threads of this article, then, i now conclude:
1. none of my ideas since are mine to exploit exclusively for my own benefit.
2. none of my ideas since are mine.
3. none of my ideas are yours.
4. none of my ideas are yours to exploit exclusively for your benefit.
5. all of the ideas which have emerged after this meeting of ours, and precisely because we met, belong to no one — and therefore belong, altogether, to a whole planet and creative ecosystem.
because it WAS a sort of magic: and magic, the genius of genie, once uncorked CANNOT be boxed into a business model for the benefit of the few.
conclusion
when we upturn a paradigm, we can choose to leave the business model — and therefore the hegemony — untouched. or we can choose to upturn two paradigms simultaneously: the “thing” itself (for want of a better phrase), and how we get it out there as fast as possible.
what’s the problem i’m looking to solve with the #gutenbergofintuitivethinking and the #intuitionvalidationengine? and #intuitionvalidation more broadly?
it’s not #darkfigure and #neocrime (only). it’s not #wastefulmeetings (only).
it’s not #loopholes and other zemiological activities (only).
it’s not the inability of #specialisms to duly and safely communicate across their knowledge lines (only).
rather, it’s something which informs all these use-cases — and many many more.
one UNCOMMON denominator: a denominator that connects everything in human experience since the dawn of rhymes:
truth. a concept of an absolute and indivisible truth. so we kick relativism finally into the long grasses, where it may be admired and remembered but not treasured. nor missed. again.
mil williams, stockholm sweden, 5th april 2023
accept and underline, therefore, and deliver on and re-establish, as a result, that a VALIDATED truth may be something we can establish ABSOLUTELY.
not universal truth: i’m not sustaining this. we can still be dependent on circumstance and context. but in each of these, an unattackable truth.
just this: impossible to break.
this i believe. deeply. firmly. and now till i die.
and if so, even if only gently, this then leads this article to its final statements.
all of the above says to me only one thing: i need to know what i owe my muse. because if any of the above can happen to any useful degree one day, it will happen one day only because of the impact she had on me, that day.
it’s consequently NOT a fixation at all i have for you, my dear muse, but an almost overpoweringly intellectual — as well as obviously emotional — demand to work out to what extent i was just a lever someone pulled.
not that YOU pulled it, either. i don’t think this for a minute. no.
but a tool or extension of someone or something out there … why is this so impossible to propose or contemplate? or prosper as an assertion to be justly considered?
they say we human beings, over and over, stub our toes on the same stones.
we do it with #meetings, for sure: all the tech that has ever been developed aims to reproduce the weaknesses — even deepen them — of the original beast.
why tech-enabled meetings don’t work right now
three examples:
1. whatever your level of hierarchical importance, you will find it a challenge even to coincide with one person’s calendar … never mind ten or maybe more. then multiply this up over a year: the waste spent negotiating just timings — never mind agenda! — is dreadful.
2. ensuring everyone is duly prepared, and therefore focussed, for a #meeting is a herculean effort in itself. but even when it is achieved, we have the problem which follows, expanded on in point 3: if the structure is strong enough to deliver a reasonable ratio of time versus usable outcomes, it may — equally — be too fierce to enable the potential for tangential leaps of faith that lead to true invention … and so, possibly world-beating innovation.
3. as alluded to in point 2, an developed here now, the inability which current #meeting structures have to ensure that the thoughts and ideas of some of the most significant thinkers a company may employ are ever registered, never mind taken advantage of, is … well … criminal.
whose thought — exactly! — we are criminally wasting
here we are talking about the more reflective thinkers amongst us — and on all teams, everywhere. the ability to freely and vulnerably think up paradigm-shifting ways of running an organisation, and then the ideas such capacity moves us collectively towards in the future to ensure the organisation will thrive always, is wholly dependent on our ability NOT to:
a) talk over the creatives to keep control of our hierarchy;
b) organise the direction of a conversation so the gathered listen to us, instead of us to them;
c) command and never properly enquire.
so why don’t we ask a different question? instead of saying how we might do meetings bigger and better in remote and hybrid ways, why not ask:
“how about we don’t meet again, ever?”
that is, upturn the #meeting paradigm for once in our human history.
it wouldn’t work for everyone: not all company cultures are actually interested in the #truth, and what i am proposing is effectively a company and organisational #truthmachine.
but some companies are: recently pwc published a fabulous workplace survey which shows that forward-looking and forward-acting corporations see the freedoms of, for example, hybrid- and fully remote-working as enhancing almost everything related to company organisations and hierarchies one could possibly imagine. including retaining an evermore picky and supremely skilled digital-savvy workforce.
my call to action: a startup which upturns ALL #meeting paradigms
so here’s the idea:
add into this perfect and virtuous storm the idea that we might remove — for those organisations intrigued and engaged by verifying and validating the #truth of #business — the hierarchy within the #ideasgeneration #thinkingspaces and nodes that traditional #meetings are sometimes capable of enabling …
well … you MUST find engaging and intriguing whatever we might be able to achieve …
i had an idea way-back-when. i posted it and then talked about it in various forums. i think the first time formally was a berkeley skydeck submission.
then i did an online whitepaper called crime hunch:
it contained a number of different ways of doing crime, ways which lent themselves particularly to the almost infinitely malleable — and therefore unimaginably criminal — world we now live in.
without asking the question as clearly as i could have at the start, the image that follows is really what was at the back of my mind … what i was gnawing away at without being so clear as i could have been at the time:
after the crime hunch page on terror and before the above slide, which in truth was created for a euro-event sponsored by the british organisation PUBLIC, i also had a lengthy video conversation with seven or eight american tech corporation executives. i never saw their faces or knew their names. but the conversation, even so, was valuable. before and after this conversation, i have found it easy to rate positively and highly the corporation in question.
anyway. i asked the assembled the conundrum which the crime hunch terror page poses. however, none of them was prepared to say anything; not even address it to say that it shouldn’t have been posed in the first place.
this was when i began to realise i might have gone too far.
so recently i decided i, myself, would address what could have been hurting people out there: people who otherwise might have seen themselves through to considering it useful to work with me.
i realised, too, i needed to finesse not only my words but also how i might address the challenges being raised: the tool or tools — or conceptual positions — needed.
squaring the circles of human intuition-enhancing #ai (and therefore of creative crimefighting) with traditional #datascience views
less than a month ago i produced a presentation about three kinds of human brains and how we might make it easy for them to work together. i was interested in exploring the weaknesses in my hollywood writers idea, and maybe bring onboard as well the strengths of a more traditional and exclusively automating #ai.
because one of the replies those people who do answer the terror conundrum have previously given is that using both teams of resources is the best solution.
the problem with this however is that it’s not necessarily a solution. we have cultural challenges of simple workplace interactions which inevitably kick in, where differing professional mindsets — necessarily conformist crimefighters (someone has to want to apply the rules) versus nonconformist creatives, for example — may struggle to understand, or even minimally validate, the other’s work and approaches.
what #datascience finds easy — and then, what it really struggles with
i then deepened this perception specifically in relation to the #datascience brain and how it values other, more intuitive ways of thinking.
and this formed the basis of the three brains presentation i mentioned: “fighting fire with fire”:
and what follows from the presentation itself on what i honestly now believe are cultural NOT technological challenges facing us:
i’d like us to focus for the moment on the first slide above:
without intending to or seeing at first what i had done, i was delivering finally on a solution to the conundrum i had — maybe a year or so before — ended up using in good faith but, at the same time, unintentionally hurting the sensibilities and feelings of more than a few.
in this slide we see a process emerging at last where two cultures can work profoundly well together, without having to negotiate anything ever of their own ways of seeing, or of their professional praxis and therefore often unspoken assumptions.
so. to the nitty-gritty.
how would it work?
we take the sorts of minds and creatives i’ve already typed and labelled as “hollywood screenwriters”. but not just hollywood, of course. more widely, the intuitive thinkers; the ones who go with hunches and inventing new future-presents on the basis not of experience exclusively but, rather, in tandem, and deeply so, with what we could call the leaps of faith of what often necessarily leads to genius — whether good guys or criminals.
and then with these brains, in the first stage of our newly creative part but never whole of crimefighting, law enforcement and national & global security, we also type the increasingly unknown unknowns of #darkfigure, and related, which the what and how of terrifyingly unexpected creative criminal activity surely involve.
and with this approach and separation of responsibilities — traditional #datascience and automating #ai on the one hand, creative #intuition-focussed humans to the max on the other — we may now propose using traditional automating #ai as it has functioned to date: that is, where the patterning and recognition of past and present events serves to predict the who and when of future ones. and so, leaving the frighteningly, newly radical and unexpected unknown unknowns of what and how to the creatives.
the value-add of this new process-focussed approach to humanising #ai
never the twain shall meet, maybe? because in a sense, with this separation of responsibilities, established and necessarily conforming security and law-enforcement organisations can advantage themselves of the foresight of creative #intuition and #hunches without losing the purity — if you like — of tried and tested security processes.
and the creative second and third brains below can create and forward-engineer the real evil out there before it becomes a bloody fact — yet without inhibitions or compunctions.
and then, what’s more, both parties — rightly conformist security professionals and effectively nonconformist creative crimefighting professionals — can do to the max, without confusion or shame, what best — and even most emotionally — floats their boats.
initial steps to delivering this process
this is the first steps of process i see and suggest:
final words
so what do you think?
is this a fairer, more inclusive, and frankly practical approach — as well as a way forwards to a real and potential implementation — of the original crime hunch terror conundrum i outlined at the top?
and if so, what would those first steps actually look like? #ai technologies and approaches like this, maybe — coupled closely with an existing #ai where no one would have to change their spots?
ai’s proponents and advocates — of the human-insensitive version of this set of technologies, i mean — have kind of decided on a necessary battlefield between #machines and #humans.
as a #teacher, #trainer and #facilitator during decades this has never been my way. for me, knowledge isn’t how big yours might be but, rather, how well — how pointedly — you learn how to use what you acquire over the years.
speaking well in a language doesn’t require more than 800 words. it’s true. ask #chatgpt-x. what makes the difference is the baggage we bring to each word; the connections; the semantics; the allusions and how we choose not to say exactly what’s expected.
back in 2019 i lost my middle son’s affections. i had to borrow money from him to keep my #startup going. i’ll never get him back — for this and one other, unrelated reason. it was to get the below project off the ground.
in the event, the organisation i submitted to said it was unique (in a good way) and, simultaneously, that it didn’t advance science (in an opposing and bad sense, obviously). they informed me of this unofficially one morning early on — that is, that all my hopes and dreams were dashed — as i stood on a train platform whilst a train came in just that second.
the cctv would have seen me: the organisers themselves could also have seen — if they had wanted or cared to — the cctv of where i was and how i looked. it was obviously a terrible coincidence i resisted the temptation to take advantage of.
none of my three children now speak to me because of #startup-land. but the #philosophy — not the #tech — of the project attached deserves to speak to us, five years later.
let’s allow it to encourage us to be better #techies everywhere. change is inevitable, of course; but in #tech its nature never is. in such moments, in #tech we’re always choosing.
maybe #ai can do a few things humans are paid to do. but that doesn’t mean what we’re paid to do by businesses everywhere consists of what our real creativity as unpredictable humans is being exhibited — or even widely fomented.
the proposition:
maybe #it-#tech’s architectures have for so long forced us — as the humans we are — into undervaluing, underplaying and underusing our properly creative sides, that what #ai’s proponents determine are human creative capabilities are actually the dumbed-down instincts and impulses of what would otherwise be sincerely creative manifestations of human thinking: that is, where given the architectures i suggest we make more widely available — for example, just to start with, a decent return to a secrecy-positive digital form of pencil & paper so we DON’T consistently inhibit real creativity — and therefore encourage a return to our much more creatively childlike states of undeniably out-of-the-box enquiry …
augmentedintuition.com | a historical whitepaper advocating an augmented human intuition
in this sense, then, the real lessons of recent #gpt-x are quite different: not how great #ai is now delivering, but how fundamentally toxic to human creativity the privacy- and secrecy-destroying direction of ALL #it-#tech over the years has become. because this very same #tech did start out in its early days as hugely secrecy- and privacy-sensitive. one computer station; one hard-drive; no physical connections between yours and mine: digital pencil & paper indeed!
it’s only since we started laying down cables and access points for some, WITHOUT amending the radically inhibiting architecture of all-seeing admins overlording minimally-privileged user, that this state of affairs has come about: an #it-mediated and supremely marshalled & controlled human creativity.
no wonder #ai appears so often to be creative. our own human creativity has become winged fatally by #tech, to the extent that the god which is now erected as #ai has begun to make us entirely in HIS image, NOT extend and enhance our own intrinsic and otherwise innate preferences.
summary:
its not, therefore, that #it-#tech has been making #ai more human: it’s that the people who run #bigtech have been choosing to shape humans out of their most essential humanity.
and so as humans who are increasingly less so, we become prostrate-ducks for their business pleasures and goals.
an alternative? #secrecypositive, yet #totalsurveillance-compliant software and hardware architectures: back, then, to recreating the creativity-expanding, enhancing and upskilling tools that a digital pencil & paper used to deliver:
secrecy.plus/spt-it | a return to a secrecy- and privacy-positive “digital pencil & paper”
a final thought:
in a sense, even from #yahoo and #google #search onwards, both the #internet and the #web were soon designed (it’s always a choice, this thing we call change: always inevitable, true, it’s a fact … but the “how” — its nature — is never inevitable) … so from #search onwards, it all — in hindsight — become an inspectorial, scraping set of tools to inhibit all human creative conditions absolutely.
the rationale? well, the rationale being that #bigmoney needed consumers who thought they were creators, not creators who would create distributed and uncontrollable networks of creation under the radar.
and then with the advent of newer #ai tools, which serve primarily to deliver on the all-too-human capability to bullshit convincingly, #it and related are finally, openly, brazenly, shamelessly being turned on all human beings who don’t own the means of production.
we were given the keys to the kingdom, only to discover it was a #panopticon we would never escape from. because instead of becoming the guards, that is to say the watchers, we discovered — too late — we were forcefully assigned the roles of the watched:
and so not owning the means of production, with its currently hugely toxic concentrations of wealth and riches, means that 99.9 percent of us are increasingly zoned out of the minimum conditions a real human creativity needs to even begin to want to function in a duly creative manner at all.
that is to say, imho, practically everything we see in corporate workplaces which claims the tag of creativity is simple repurposing of the existing. no wonder the advocates of #ai are able to gleefully proclaim their offspring’s capabilities to act as substitutes of such “achievements”.
i’ve been thinking a lot about redemption, ever since a messenger and intermediary said to me in 2016 that my problem was guilt.
she was, on due reflection, wrong. guilt is good, if its reasons for provoking can be assuaged in competent and compassionate manner.
what i still suffer from is an absence of process, in the secular society i cherish, for redemption.
my supposition:
let’s presuppose the following: let’s say that religion served a real positive purpose which in its relative absence now in many of our societies has not been supplanted with other processes as compassionately. i say compassionately with circumspection, of course. religion itself has effected many horrible historical — and even current — events in humanity’s journey.
an example, then, of the redemption i mention?
well. here we are!
discretion is a very humane aspect of criminal justice systems, when used in the spirit of the law and its kindly interpretation.
i studied international criminal justice in 2017 at master’s level and on one occasion stumbled across the following anecdote in the academia i was reading: italy, well known for the misuse of family power and structure, may also invoke the good of family leading to a better criminal justice praxis there.
most crime in all criminal justice systems is committed by young men between the ages of 18 and 26. after that age, almost automagically, its incidence tails off. some suggest there may even exist physiological reasons for this: that young male brains get hard-wired to begin settling at around the upper age band quoted.
either way, we have a criminal justice reality: young men who commit crime are also victims of crime, in the sense that they are the most vulnerable group to enter criminality, and get very little proactive support to stay out of the criminal justice system. more often, in fact, they get targeted — maybe targeted into it — via prejudice and presumption of very many, damning and defining, societal forces.
in italy, then, this was the example: a law-enforcement officer heard of a young man around 17 who had just about committed his first crime; certainly infraction. the officer knew of the family, and instead of “inducting” the youth directly into a path which later would be heading irreversibly towards criminality, he went behind the back of the youngster and straight to his parents.
he explained the situation gently and non-threateningly, explaining that the family could help. here, we could argue, was good discretion operating to the max: even, that it shouldn’t have been necessary to use discretion to keep the young man out of being typed so young as criminality’s cannon fodder. maybe it could be conceivable that the officer’s own kpi-structure and law-enforcement praxis would consist primarily of keeping people out of the system — enabling and allowing them to redeem any initial acts so that criminality became something they themselves wanted to veer from — instead of counting up the number of criminals captured and banged away.
proposal:
on the of the above, and in relation to things i’ve already published on a new concept of criminal justice which i’ve termed natural justice, i’d like to propose that we take the renewed need for a societal infrastructure of redemption to be revisited.
in the absence of father confessors, that is in the absence of many people finding them unsatisfactory to their needs (where they work, no change needed of course!), we should create serious halfway houses between the criminality and zero good of #darkfigure and #neocrime as i understand them at one extreme (the 20 to 40 percent that is the crime and related loopholes invisible to criminal justice) and religiously delivered confession and relief at the other. which for secular societies no longer functions easily.
thinking more philosophically, it’s possible that the behaviours acted out as described in this post, which may then duly and rightfully lead to criminal prosecution, are encouraged because we need to be redeemed — to feel it, i mean. and unless in secular society you enter the criminal justice system, a societal-level redemption is not within reach. if we provided other ways which had nothing to do with criminal justice stigma, perhaps — too! — fewer would wish to be criminals.
i’ve often felt, as a by-the-by and in analogous way, that open-source and social-networked online communities have become so popular and active because in such spaces — the really competent and well-run ones i mean — we find the reality (or even just simulacrum, but at least this) of a democratic discourse that real democracy increasingly is lacking.
what’s clear is there are exist basic human instincts and impulses, and they must always act in pairs.
doing democracy is one; where nowadays the reward for its practice where this doesn’t invoke the relationship of abused partner?
and so doing ill is another; where nowadays the redemption which doesn’t involve punishment and disgrace?
i’m beginning to see a way forwards for my ideas on intuition validation in the context of inspectorial it-tech architectures.
the latter are great at who and when; they’re not fit for purpose — 9/11 showed this clearly — when we’re talking about new kinds of what and how. this, in my view, is because they inevitably inhibit the capacity we otherwise had in pencil & paper days to think profoundly and fearlessly before we showed anything to the outside world. now we simply don’t know who is watching, so not everything we might think even gets thought.
i want us to make the unthinkable as thinkable as possible, in order to prevent the supremely — that is, creatively — bad people on this rock from turning their thoughts into real-world events.
attached some thoughts from my digital note-taking which i’ve delivered this morning.
meantime, here are the slides of one of my recent roadmaps for setting up a company or organisation designed to begin to shape how we might make some of these ideas much more tangible.
foucault said everything is dangerous: and more reason, for this reason, to study everything more deeply.
curie said we shouldn’t fear understanding: almost that it was our duty.
i want, now, to set up a national security facility which uses curie’s approach for its outer core, where our good people learn in supported ways to fight bad people.
and i want then, once we have fashioned the necessary tools, to develop an inner core which gets as pointed as foucault’s persistence re the dangerous.
at the #nobelprize museum today i saw two words on the floor near the entrance, amongst many others. the two i recognised and stood near were in english. i hope one day others i am able to recognise will be in swedish.
my words of preference were “persistence” and “disrespect”. of the two, the one i stood next to first was “disrespect”. not gratuitous: measured. that’s me. and that will always be me.
and that’s what i want to make of the aforementioned national security facility: something deeply infused with a profound lack of respect to the shibboleths of crime and … to what we can or can’t do to stop and dismantle them.
let’s do it.
it’s time we did. time to have confidence in our abilities. our competences. and our integrity.
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