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 …
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
I’ve just had a conversation with my mother. It’s redrawn my sense of my whole life. And therefore of myself.
Nine months after I was born — my birthday being the 16th of June 1962 — I was placed in a secure facility in Warneford Hospital in Oxford. I was there for a month: so not, in the end, the only occasion I was placed behind closed doors, after all.
My mum was suffering at the time from acute post-natal depression. I knew already that in 1968 she had received electro-shock treatment. What I didn’t know till today — because I had never been told — was that at the age of nine months I stayed with her in the aforementioned hospital, whilst she underwent a course of eight separate electro-shock events.
However, the seventh one went really badly wrong: she had such a painful headache as a result that she passed out. They tried to explain; but faffed, tbh. Her words, not mine.
So she refused the eighth, and after a month in Warneford, we left.
She’d married my father in 1961, but couldn’t recognise him during those weeks in 1963. I wonder now if at the time she was able to recognise me … or perhaps not at all.
Or not clearly enough for it to make any difference.
And then if not, when actually it was that she finally became able to remember and know me — her son — again.
Yes. It’s important to speak to people. You don’t know what you don’t know. And others, even close others, might never know what maybe you did need to have known, but didn’t get the chance to comprehend ever.
Because history is important, and people who tell it well are dangerous. Telling history right is a subversive act, too.
In this case, though, maybe a healing act more than anything else.
I am closer to my mother now than I was half an hour ago. And half an hour ago we had already been as close as … well … thieves. Thieves not of trinkets or jewellery or gold: thieves, rather, of our truths.
Because I see I was broken for the rest of my life because I see she was broken on becoming a wife. And no one of any decent mind can attribute any blame to the broken for breaking another. And here, though it’s still hard for me to admit, I really must include my father as well.
And so I am at peace.
And I know today … so is she.
I’d suggest you went to the original post, too. The comments are some of the most valuable ones I’ve ever had.
Anyways.
Today, just this last half an hour or so, I’ve been thinking now: reflecting on fallen veils.
‘Had the night to do so. ‘Reasons to do.
I once worked with a beautiful mind whose job was one-to-one in a local prison. Their goal, their unique and only goal, was via a personalised conversation over a period of sometimes lengthy time to help a prisoner find their core: what had driven them in their life to do good and what had driven them in their life to do not so good at all.
I’ve had a lot of therapy in my life, tbh. Fits and starts: either ameliorative which is an excuse for not addressing a clearly systemic challenge at the same time; or attempting to find core whilst never being able to.
Along the journey this has taken me I have wondered whether a lot of people, who manifestly chose to hurt me, were the cause of my melancholia or the result of it; that is, that their behaviours were the result of my own and the blame was better located in me, or instead that their acts served primarily to deepen my core — at that point, for me, still undiscovered — and therefore meaning the blame for all the pain still present in my daily life, even today, lying equally deeply with them.
And so after yesterday’s conversation with my mum, I realise this morning on awakening just three things:
1. This thing that was revealed yesterday in conversation with her is my core. A nine-month-old baby suddenly not recognised by his mother. And living for a month with this very same mother I continued to recognise for sure, even as she could not see herself to consistently providing the flicker of reciprocation, that in its presence makes a life and in its absence breaks a young heart. This is my core: why rejection is impossible for me to survive, never mind thrive after. Rejection of any kind in any area of human endeavour: rejection by all in the smallest of ways, too, wherever.
2. If you cannot work out how to thrive after rejection, everything anyone does to you will be interpreted sooner or later as being such. And the people who have most broken me since … well … most of them I still believe did it deliberately. Businesspeople who chased me in bad faith whilst manifesting a superficial good; a lover who knew only how to shame and ridicule and pursue and condemn and gaslight me over decades, and who never ever let me be free — not even to this day; and then again, half of a family that knows only button-pressing and knife-twisting, yet is capable of calling it “simple advice”; and still more re a security state — that of my homeland — which decided early on I needed neutralising, and when I didn’t kill myself, realised reputational disgrace was the next best thing; and finally, maybe worst of all, all those people who stood by all those decades, so many of them on all parts of political and sociocultural spectrums, in full knowledge of what and who was doing what to whom … in full knowledge of the pain being deliberately delivered.
3. And yet my final insight is this: spending a month in the same room as my breaking mother, with the hospital-smelling, former lunatic asylum breathing down our necks all that time, isn’t a matter of assigning blame. My mother broke me that month for the rest of my life; but she was broken by my father the year before; and he was broken by a bullying upbringing that had failed to treasure what in hindsight should’ve been a beautiful gender- and neurodiversity. And so it reaches back … so it reaches back.
On building the FEARless CITIZEN …
And so this, then, is where I am: where I find myself this morning. All the people who hate me now, and have actioned so much deliberated ill on me all my life, maybe since birth too, will find plenty of reasons for them to continue kowtowing to their hatred: still profoundly embedding in their deepest places.
I, meantime, realise equally now that what I need to do is accepting that this thing we call rejection is my core — because for a month all I experienced was the deepest kind: that of a mother blanking her baby — my future job must then be to find some way of acquiring a different skin: but not a thicker one … no.
Rather, an osmotic one that leads me to manifest much more finely and grandly and enthusiastically that better capacity to love everything human, which our humanity today so sorely, so surely, needs.
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 …
when stuff doesn’t stuff it’s something for sure and maybe all life can offer is to get by after all: maybe greatness was never our thing and maybe it shouldn’t ring out and maybe from the first day we should give in because in the end being hurt is what life’s about and the rerouting of a social re-engineering is a quimera of meaning’s total absence
because why should anyone want to be purposeful: why should anyone have any right to expect a better shirt than the one a man loses when he lies in the gutter and fails to see the stars as things of beauty but rather sees them blinking furiously like rabbits in the presence of horrifying headlight whilst these encroaching tears fall no longer tall and proud from person with straight back and some kind of ability to tack brave sails which navigate something of use
and then neither burgeoning out loud those emotions fine that truly redeem in an instant of grandiose compassion absolutely every ill that precedes still and now even so all these humiliations this INhumanity dares to impose on itself
yes it’s true: love is all you need but it needs equally to exist not attacked by petri dish of incessant and illogical bacteriological warfare where every kiss imagined only serves to sustain the unreal
and in an existence where true love is mainly non-existent every kiss imagined is mainly unreal: each becoming something just about wholly falsified and hardly enjoyed and usually reprimanding and generally rejecting of the other person who strives even then to pen a love note or speak a kind word or have their truth somehow heard
for in its requesting and ultimate denial the kiss is lost to the ether and either it never had a right to exist or it never had a right to be thought up in the first place where one idiot considered a space existed whilst a savvier soul knew it didn’t because mainly that’s what it’s all about: love’s natural state should be one where kindness is communicated and passion only rides when permission becomes a deep embrace as a taste of freedom is enjoyed by the parties concerned as if with no concerns
and if mostly love is a matter of unrequited fates and this is its natural state still we should not believe such a situation or this sort of location damns us inevitably to an experience of poverty-stricken absences
because it’s also quite true that the real absence of love in our lives truly makes us value our memories more than otherwise we might have been able to
and so it’s clear that whether love is real or love is a mirage of painful fool when the old adages tell us it’s the only thing worth fighting for in the life of any human being they are absolutely right: because if we can survive and stay alive in the utter incompleteness of a messy and unsustainable trajectory without love just imagine what its presence might move were this thing we call stuff not stuffing us at all
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