In truth, whilst change IS inevitable — just as #siliconvalley and its dreadful hangers-on have universally, dogmatically and terrifyingly proclaimed for over half a century — its NATURE never automagically was. It’s just a fact, this: just a fact, too. For #bigtech is an only “half-the-story #tech”. And only ever has been.
Mil Williams, 27th April 2025, Arlanda Airport, Stockholm, Sweden,
It’s what I said a while ago.
There’s no courage involved in not feeling fear. And therefore no virtue whatsoever in being fearless.
There’s only virtue in doing something despite the need to overcome.
And one other thing I’ve learnt:
Not everyone should like you. If they did, you’d probably be doing something wrong.
Not wrong in itself. Wrong because in the first instance, in my experience, when you have an idea and are NOT stubborn enough not to have your course changed, it’s an error of crass proportions if and when you ultimately fail to persist in transforming the world, particularly when you ideas manifestly deserved to.
And sometimes, maybe often, we do fail to transform what’s around us with our thoughts and imagination precisely because, equally, we want to be liked: I mean, that is, that we tend to prefer to think not being liked is a sign we’re on the incorrect path.
But I now think the reverse. This is what I think. In two parts:
1. It’s always the bad guys who first see the dangers and implications — for them and their easy business models — of different and obstinately held ideas to their preferred future-present: the one they considered, out of their absolute sense of entitlement, absolutely theirs forever. Ideas like the ones, never necessarily originally but for sure always firmly, I’ve continued to propound over the years.
2. It’s always the good guys who last see the virtues and positives — for them and their terribly oppressed democratic communities — of different and obstinately held ideas to their assumed future-present: the one they were told was a result of inevitable change I mean, and absolutely NOT theirs forever.
In truth, whilst change IS inevitable — just as #siliconvalley and its dreadful hangers-on have universally, dogmatically and terrifyingly proclaimed for over half a century — its NATURE never automagically was. It’s just a fact, this: just a fact, too. For #bigtech is an only “half-the-story #tech”. And only ever has been.
This is why, when you want to deliver transformation, you have to accept you won’t be liked.
Firstly, the bad guys won’t ever do anything but hate you with their casually polite, practised and breezily easy business smiles.
And this will happen for perhaps the first five years.
And their goal is to break you, and make you stumble, and then dispirit you to the extent, perhaps, you kill yourself.
But then they have a problem. If they sense there will, after all, be a “next five years”, they realise the sword they wanted all that time for you to fall on no longer usefully, or at least reliably, exists.
So they will try to get closer to you and maybe even persuade you that all the while the smiles they sent your way with minimal financial breadcrumbs attached were actually, all the time in question, offerings of real dough.
And some of us out here give in at this point and take the money and run. And then the bad guys close down the ideas, and life continues to get worse for everyone else. Despite our ideas. Despite their coming originally into being. Despite what might have been.
The thing is … this is the thing. If you are stubborn … not original at all … just irreversibly firm in your preferred outcomes, even as fabulously flexible in your means and ways of getting there … well … you may end up concluding what I did when I got to the second and third and fourth and fifth “five years”: you only need to be liked by one group of people.
That’s all it ever takes.
Just one group is needed.
This group being?
The good guys who one day will realise that the #meliandialogue can be upturned: the islands of the world can beat — hands-down — the totalitarians.
Islands?
Places where we continue to understand that once in our histories we built fortresses in order to expand outwards with security and safety first and foremost. And that this was a good idea. And that this was the best idea. And that this is our next best step now.
And then we shall be … NOT #athens, ever … no. Not that. Not the #valley that causes so many tears. Never that. We never could be.
Rather, people called #melians who no longer shall have any regrets.
it's doing what you wanted but only hoped for and maybe you wanted more than you hoped for and maybe you expected deep down the sound of total victory and anything else for a while seems like less and maybe even feels like a failure of the deepest of all but in truth a total victory just ain't what humans are about when human is what we're about because a total anything is a pyrrhic everything
and so i begin to warm to you finally and the idea that without writing a single line of code i have convinced one of the biggest organisations in tech and those companies that work alongside them true that just my words and terms of english have been enough to show how a new world exists right out there and that it's no longer on my part a failure of the worst in any shape whatsoever nor a loss of the least to propose that i might accept working with disruption of this nature primarily because the culture of the big and the small in this case become us as one and the same and the same and the one since both of us converging separately anon have arrived at conclusions of parallel lines where arguments cogently strung together on two-pagers of simple a4 eschewing as we do the fancy graphics of "say what you're going to say and then say it and then summarise it" and where in fact the bullets pointedly hit the marks of zero innovation and even less invention because to follow these paths so well-trodden -- so religiously i mean -- is to die a death of a thousand mutts as dog-days encroach and shroud our thinking
for it's time once again to move well on from the old old old man's valley where even the youngest entrepreneur finds themselves trained up in the fuddy-duddy of the mere tweaking of tech so no one may rock the boats of existing portfolios nor business models galore (but actually hoary as hell)
because it's time the bells of brand new relationships consecrated on firm and financially win/win terms begin to bring to the world the teams and reams of the gutenberg of intuitive thinking:
the printing-press of arationality changing the way we do technology much more easily and being as there's no better way to do this than working back from the customer always in combination with a new lean that reasons with care and compassion and rationales of the very best to the very VERY maximum HOW to extract the truths NO ONE says but EVERYONE knows full well and all too well and as well as the next as we lie at night suffering the lies that tie the world up in knots and which have blotted our futures as they are held by their throats gory and cruel as the fossil fuels they freely promote even now by those who care only for planets outside and little for the one we all grew up on -- and here i mean all of us and how i mean it's clearly seen and how it's been! -- because this IS it i say: WELL time we found amongst the rich and poor the course that aligns our interests both and so nothing better than a brand new process that unleashes our humanity as never before
and so i'm ready to see what's next not as failure for another nor for me or them nor total victory for me or another nor us as we might see ourselves nor even as the outputs of the lyricists of ancient harps as they start to sing again out loud and proudly but rather quite instead a victory of the grandest for a GOOD citizenry wishing to bring about a humanity of the brightest by simply enabling our gut feeling and intuitive ingenuities in ways we never imagined ever
this is what it is then this text i write as i send this poem to the people who know much better than me what's happening on the inside-out and how this will affect the outside-in and so from me -- as this -- just as a missive of my final conformity and my capacity to embrace you now -- those of you who know (and how you do!) -- in my full cognisance of the scientific and evidence-based realities which (burnished anew) will renew and repair the horrors these warlike peoples have visited on the rest of us without qualms where to date only psalms are able for now to protect us with their prayers and beseechings and readings of the sacred stones and the rites that serve strangely to right our wrongs ...
because whatever happens now the killing-field will be levelled and new lean will become the tool we use -- shining as we will ... for sure! -- to release as we must and should and ought to and would have many many decades ago if only we had cared to listen to the equally sacred understandings in tow which we blithely ignored as stupidly tawdry attempts to go beyond making easy money and actually solving problems which weren't just making more money it's true in manners quite ill-mannered and foolish and unkind as we rewound to the past even as our tech is of now and even as we chose firmly to screw the world for everything we could scrape and make ours to the exclusion of a legacy we just DIDN'T want to make at all free in any way whatsoever whatsoever
and so now all this changes as i approach the companies which working together in common cultural dissonance and rub with different ideas yet common outcomes even so and uncommon sensibilities in beautiful consonances for these are the resonances which enriching now demand we hand over to each other our destinies not as passive fates too late to the party to do anything wise but instead to a common goal that SHALL be that of rescuing our species from its long-term idiocies by tapping into that fabulous skillset and virtue present all this goddamn time: the intuition of a humankind multiplied up a billion times and more being you and you and you and you and me and her and thee and tree and us ALL seeing clearly anew as if never before ... ... ever before: THIS all being our shared future-present collective fate awaiting us all from now on in and no longer too late to the party i mentioned because that party is the citizenry we will fully reconstitute not as brutal future robots of silicon but just sentient human beings achieving the total victories of me and you no longer gone ...
I’ve been considering how to move forwards with traditional #proofreading and a more complete #qualitycontrol of different channels of #contentdelivery.
• qcdocu.com (my new proposal, as it stands right now)
Background
I got into this in the first place for two reasons:
1. In the early 2000s I studied, whilst living in #spain, a #spanish University Master in #publishing. I’d always been interested in content of all kinds: when a child and adolescent, almost engulfing my local library’s bookshelves; and when older, blogging every day on a whole range of subjects in response to the imagination and occurrences of many known and many relatively unknown writers.
The Master then served to put me in touch with #editors of the very best: I even interned for three months or so in the University of Salamanca’s fabulous #publishing house. This only sharpened my interest in the role and activity of #editing #reality.
2. From about 2012-2013 onwards, I started working for a major #london-based #marketingagency. This was in the field of #bigtech, and involved ensuring that the #sales #documentation which ended up in front of the #csuite clients of my client’s clients was in the best condition possible — including grammar, flow and related, and even in some cases picking up on domain-related inaccuracies.
This second activity has been the mainstay of my working-life since then. Until this autumn, that is. The most recent relationship — volumes and so forth — which I had with my main client was settled for over a year or more, at levels which enabled me to deliver an exclusive dedication. Then staff changed, agreements were left by the wayside, #generativeai seemed to promise a world of automated #csuite-competent comms, and two things happened … or at least, my client tried really aggressively for two things to take place.
The new revenue stream and NDA
One, reduce substantially my income over a period of two months with minimal warning; and two, demand I signed a new #nda which not only required me not to work as #proofreader for my client’s clients — most of the #bigtech corporations and quite a few niche ones, too, being an absolutely reasonable and understandable condition — were I ever to leave the relationship, but also demanded I did not work in any #tech field which my #proofreading over the years might touch on … or, maybe even, have touched on. And remember, the only documentation I ever came into contact with — or would be coming into contact with, for sure — was sales & marketing documentation aimed at the #csuite. Never manuals, never secret sauces … none of this at all, in any way whatsoever.
I couldn’t sign, obviously; and so I didn’t.
And so I guess, because the #marketingagency is influential globally, that locks me out of future work of this nature elsewhere.
Yet I love the industry. Still.
Next steps …
So what next? Well. I’m considering moving into bigger-project publishing: I’m already editing the translation of a #croatian 20th century novel on behalf of a family member. We have obtained the rights to proceed with the translation’s publication, and now we’re working through final versions of the same.
But this, for the moment, is clearly a side hustle. ‘Keeps my brain ticking over, I guess. (Something I am grateful for, too.)
The question itself
A question then, to you all. Whilst #openai and #microsoft have wilfully upturned the world on the basis of presumption and unvalidated notions around the utility of their #generativeai escapades, people who have worked skilfully and with deep wisdom in the industry of #content and #publishing more widely have seen their livelihoods destroyed in less than six months.
I now hear of a case where a smaller agency which automated their content processes using #ai a year ago are not only continuing to pay out for the #tech, but are having to take on four more people to revert back to a manual and human delivery, as well as pay for lawyers to identify any injuries these obviously fairly unwise changes may already have incurred for clients over the past twelve months.
As someone has observed of the #openai/#microsoft nexus, a shit-show all round.
The question, then? Will common sense now ever return to high-level marketing & sales, and their related communication?
I 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
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.
meantime, the geneva convention, in the real-life world, expressly prohibits the power-plays that involve an aggressor weaponising their bodies against the aggressed in this way. so whilst #tech reserves the right, in order to defend us all, to penetrate the enemy with the tools the enemy habitually uses to penetrate our #tech, the real world and its legal framework consents to no such thing between humans. not even in times of war.
yet #tech is a tool with which humans act on humans. so where the difference, pray?
mil williams, 4th august 2023, stockholm sweden
background
#generativeai is about penetrating knowledge and benefitting from such penetration.
right now, artists and creators — also more generally, those who equally are being penetrated thus — are attempting to fend off such acts of intimate intrusion into their life’s work by taking the owners and developers of such tools to court for #copyrightinfringement, #copyrighttheft, and much more: because if they’d listen to me, even #plagiarism. why not?
4th august 2023: monica sjöö, moderna museet, stockholm sweden
the thesis of this post
we’ve just established, then, that this kind of #ai is essentially analogous to the dynamics of rape: one that inserts itself into the very existence — the profoundest and sometimes most mysterious existence — of the inserted.
#tech even uses the term “penetration” and the verb “to penetrate” when it talks about bad actors — or good, as sometimes against a common enemy such penetrators are seen to be.
meantime, the geneva convention, in the real-life world, expressly prohibits the power-plays that involve an aggressor weaponising their bodies against the aggressed in this way. so whilst #tech reserves the right, in order to defend us all, to penetrate the enemy with the tools the enemy habitually uses to penetrate our #tech, the real world and its legal framework consents to no such thing between humans. not even in times of war.
yet #tech is a tool with which humans act on humans. so where the difference, pray?
really … where?
more historically speaking
more widely, and more historically, #it too has always employed such penetrative approaches.
an example: the software i am using to write this post says “insert”: why not, more gently, “add”? (it’s anecdotal, of course: but even if you’re now just beginning to “wonder whether” … in my mind it’s a kind of progress for us all.)
there has therefore existed, in such #it spaces, no instinctively familiar place for those more easily and more usually penetrated — often quite against their will (see the rates of abuse against particularly women and children in any culture, if you doubt my position on this) — to begin to develop a different kind of set of technologies: and then, perhaps, as a result, outcomes for us all as well.
how this makes me feel as a man and therefore potential aggressor
i think this is wrong. we need to defend ourselves, mainly against bad actors who mainly are men, with the same tools: that is true. just because we have the right gender policies doesn’t mean that putin’s awful awful version russia, stealthy china’s current approaches, and incomprehensible north korea’s dark hackers will — all of a sudden! — stop penetrating us.
but whilst the single, where not singular, focus of a set of tools to anticipate and prevent such intimate intrusion probably does need a mindset where intimate intrusion is second nature to be effective, the big problems — the #complexproblems i discuss in the slide-deck linked to below — will never be solved efficiently by mindsets which think firmly that intrusion and its prevention are all that, under it all, matter in the final analysis.
• example complexify.me roadmap | on using #neurodiverse #tech #architectures to solve #complexproblems beyond traditional #startup ecosystems’ capabilities to deliver
what i suggest we do next
to our quiver of tools against the bad actors who we know are out there and need to be deviously penetrated in return, we surely ought to add (NOT insert …):
1. new startup approaches which redirect us to contemplating that which needs resolving whilst being enabled to remain complex in all their fundaments:
2. new procurement and tendering processes which don’t lock out the innovations and inventions that those who run such processes are unaware of: something far more explorative therefore; much less prescriptive than we’ve had unchanged since the industrial revolution at least.
3. and finally:
a) an absolute embracing of #neurodivergent philosophies and thought-patterns as the rule, not the exception;
b) a move — also! — to assessing not diagnosing such skillsets (ie NOT seeing them as things to be considered responding well to being ever diagnosed as disorders — they simply aren’t!); and
c) firmly seeing anything that claims to be #neurotypical as simply one more kind of #neurodiverse state of mind. but not representative, either, of any other state of parallel #neurodiversity.
summary
this is my opinion: but it’s also a point of view. it’s my voice, above all: not aggressively expressed at all. i’ve experienced what it is to be diverse in a world which DEMANDS conformity — and what’s more, mainly controlled by the gender i am myself. and even so, it whitewashes its inability to truly embrace all humans as equally deserving of the powers some have to shape this world.
the three points expressed above are, therefore, my roadmap to enable us to escape this quagmire. because it’s led to global boiling; the throwaway economy; and the “cut-down virgin forests [sic]” policies with a pure brutality that delivers on consummate insanity.
my voice, then, is one forged out of auto-ethnography: that is, personal experience. so of course i would believe it would work, too.
why my assertions in this respect: if we become capable of returning our future-present civilisations to their twin building blocks, the sovereignty of the collective built firmly on the sovereignty of the individual, very slowly, but hopefully surely, we shall begin to move from what we could call a fundamentally and systemically, where not deliberatedly, #neurotypical #it and #generativeai towards a properly diverse and inclusive technology landscape, capable — maybe! — of even saving the species.
i just saw an example of the power of culture over rules & regs when looking to achieve a particular outcome.
a human being removed a box cover and fluffed up some bags of crisps not because they had a rule saying when, but simply because their culture said now.
why conflict in the first place, for goodness sake?
an #ai designed to foreground the functions of machine-approaches to #complexproblem solutioning uses rules & regs always. it will do what you want it do as long as you have told it once. and told it in accordance with the needs of your domain. that is, all its needs.
a #humanbeing made bigger by #tech meantime — as per #film- and #movie-#tech has always chosen to do (the mic making the human voice bigger, the camera increasing the vision of the human eye, and even the stage extending great actors’ capabilities to express themselves powerfully via mise-en-scene) — will always operate better with the unexpected.
on the very human ability to deal with the unexpected
the unexpected doesn’t have to be: but it is. whether because it really was (9/11) or because you’re a newbie (me all the time in almost everything i do), our grand virtues as #humans supported by #machines (in this order), designed primarily to extend our existent virtues instead of deepen existent pockets (both are good, mind — when they coincide; but it’s my thinking the first is a problem to be solved and the second should never be permitted to become a solution in search of the former …), is that the unexpected is what engages us most deeply in life. and therefore what makes us reach our heights, every time.
in truth, it’s the kind of #machines we are if we were: except we’re not. we’re flesh and blood: we forget, only to remember a fabulous idea six months later; we frustrate, only to go on a drinking binge and then after hangover find marvellous beauty lodged amazingly in our heads; we get angry with another human for rejecting our beautifully formed solutions worked and reworked so often … and then after a sulk maybe of days we recapitulate and find an even better synthesis of both.
as #humans, the unexpected is what we are. only when we use #techtools designed to make their design cheaper to build and more profitable to hype, we act more like these #machines ourselves and may appear for a while to lose our capacity to surprise. to be different from machines, that is.
but it’s not true. believe me. an example. i’ve worked deeply in language learning for two decades in a previous life and know exactly what happens when the job of teacher becomes that of enabler; the task is no longer one of acquiring more data; and then, at last, it’s producing what we need as humans with what we’ve already got as thinkers that becomes the real challenge and delight.
and we don’t steal someone’s intellectual property to build an empire, either. it’s just not part of the gameplan.
no.
really.
we don’t.
and how many different types of burgers did #siliconvalley’s stand actually sell in the first place?
meanwhile, #siliconvalley has lately (“last three decades” lately, at that) delivered only one piece of money-making #tech.
when the #newspaperindustry was an industry, we called this “tech” #classifiedadvertising. this kind of #advertising had great virtue, too: to make people want to go to it and buy the products advertised and therefore pay the bills of what was actually very often a #publicservice, journalists wrote the greatest analysis and deconstruction of democratic and anti-democratic players; descriptions of things that were going just dandy and then again things that were going just frankly belly-up; and so finally we’d even get the most beautiful features and reportage that would manifest the world around us with #photography and #words that became #art in incredibly undeniable consonance.
and all of the above was rigorously original content.
#siliconvalley? hmm …
on the robbery of #ip
my question has to be this: why do we now go to the #classifiedadvertising we find on #searchengines and #socialnetworks and other sorts of apparent innovations?
well …
tbh, basically to read someone else’s unpaid-for content: what’s more, when a newspaper’s, quoted in full by a reader who in theory isn’t paying anyone for the honour, either.
this is not right. it happened with #search: that is, the robbery of #ip and content with clear #copyright. we shouldn’t allow it now to repeat with tools such as #chatgpt-x.
but can we square this circle to the satisfaction of all players?
why i’m of a mind now to propose a radically different approach to how #ai of any kind — never mind just #chatgpt-x & co — are trained and launched onto markets.
no. we don’t discard any #tech invented out of hand. ‘not suggesting this. but in #europe at least, in #sweden maybe to start with, the content used for the training of any #ai such as these must be duly paid for.
always. every use.
how? we could have a spotify-type platform which #ai developers could subscribe to, allowing for sanctioned access to all kinds of content, not just music of course.
and then the #ai tools would have certificates showing “denominación de origen” for all the #ip used to train up the #ai in question. and in their absence, the product could not be released in any legal form to the market.
this is practical; the streaming tools already exist and would allow for agile development to continue; and we would NOT repeat the daylight robbery conducted all those years ago under the banners of #search #classifiedadvertising.
wdyt?
there’s a business model in this too; not dissimilar at all to spotify as it stands.
introduction to my rationales for a new #neurodiverse-#it in order to solve #complexproblems:
my real concerns around being #secrecypositive, or not at all, have lately had nothing to do with governments and what they do with our right to #secrecy. after all, many citizens buy #secrecypositive reading- and sharing-machines of highly controversial content quite legally in all #european countries: we call them books, and they are made of paper. nothing more #secrecypositive than this millennium-old way of sharing and spreading, both in good and bad faith, information of all kinds.
so if it’s legal on paper, with pencil or ink, and has been for centuries, why not repeat in digital — and sooner than later?
you see, the problem isn’t discovering a digital burglary has taken place. because the removal of a digital privacy or object or piece of content like this is possible to achieve by copying exactly. the removal is consequently effected without removing. but its potentially prejudicial removal is a fact all the same. just as if in a life more conventionally real:
my problem is never a government access to my bedroom, and always instead a criminal usage of similar accesses:
no.
i don’t mind — really don’t mind — knowing good governments can see what i do. i wouldn’t mind, for example, the #swedish government watching me in this way, because they are a state which strives to legitimate itself always.
meantime, i have minded the british doing the same to me since they incarcerated me improperly back in 2003, using #mentalhealth legislation to achieve #nationalsecurity objectives: there really is no way the homeland of boris johnson, even now as it currently stands twenty long years later, can be called a legitimate world player of any standing whatsoever.
and certainly not for the rest of #europe. because in order to erect and democratically sustain a hierarchy of surveillance, you have to robustly aspire in an ongoing way to manifesting that same democracy of legitimation.
to challenges, then, which i’d like to answer with the project “complexify.me”:
but even governments and governances as immensely competent as the #swedish ones manifestly show themselves to be can’t respond wholly cogently to the following set of quandaries i and many others find ourselves both intellectually and emotionally suffering from right now:
yes, the governments of good nation-states like #sweden must act deeply to preserve the delicate balance of their societies which evidence this goodness: and more intelligently as a result of their delicacy.
for they, more than say the british (and not just now but, in hindsight, for much longer than we pretended was ever the case), are entirely vulnerable — out of choice … and rightly so! — to such ecosystems of goodwill being upturned by outsiders and insiders who prefer to take advantage of these profoundly democratic freedoms for their own criminal gain. for in the freedoms of such constituted trusts lie the essences of their wisdoms.
the quid pro quo, or the caveat if you like, is this: we must as essentially democratic peoples accept that sometimes in order to protect our treasured states there will exist a need to do less democratic acts. but for a limited period of time clear to all, and even then to proportionate measure.
because being this kind of democracy doesn’t mean you cannot maintain yourself with insight and firmness. you don’t have to limit yourself to rolling over and thinking of the northern lights because you are good and mustn’t defend yourself with decision on occasions. and so to deliver on this, you do need to have the ongoing capacity to gather any information and datasets that preserve these laudable states of fragile coexistence, without at the same time puncturing them.
summarising my thoughts on these matters a little:
understand me: i’m not saying don’t watch your citizens. i’m saying as citizens we have to watch each other, all of us to all of us: but as KEEPERS of each other’s human souls, so that necessary violent actions of the state are always, always, kept to a bare minimum.
finally, digital burglary — as described above — inconveniently can happen without us ever being aware of it: and in this “us”, i mean the state, its best professionals and its most intelligent citizens … all of us.
my issue, therefore, with deep surveillance is that if my government does it, even where immensely cleverly, in it will exist people with two dangerously connected roles:
a) rights of legal and proper access to state surveillance tools, datasets and infrastructures; and
b) illegitimate obligations, for whatever reasons, as humans possessed of covert and completely illegal relationships with an ever more embedded, organised, and creative criminality.
conclusions to the above:
if my state says it needs to surveill me to the extent that it can even see and hear me whilst i have sex, in order that it may protect me in more relevant matters, it will already exist as a capability of the aforementioned criminality years before. and so, as mil’s theorem suggests:
“in an almost infinitely malleable digital environment and world, if i — with my limited intellect and financial resources — can imagine a new crime, someone else with far more money and brains will already be doing it. i don’t need to prove this #neocrime exists to know it does.”
the consequences being …? we can’t fight this kind of crime only with good #neurotypical people who are naturally comfortable with such #neurotypical-#it platforms and tools.
we must include equally good people with #neurodiverse abilities and brand new kinds of #neurodiverse-#it, so they can then start to construct and tell the stories that describe the #darkfigure increasingly being committed out there in some of the ways i now describe.
stories which the existent #neurotypical professionals — properly and usefully so, too — can then begin to chase down and stop in whatever sanctioned ways the states of good faith in our #europeanunion judge to be necessary, at each historical moment in our collective future-presents.
if i work with a big corp, it must be a free-thinking big corp capable of having its own, totally independent, criteria in respect of innovation
mil williams, stockholm sweden, 15th april 2023
introduction:
i’ve begun to re-strategise how projects like #complexifyme might reach direct clients:
first, identify convinced #neurodiverse company cultures where such thinking processes are already considered potential — or actual — skillsets
second, filter in those organisations that already evidence, publicly and proudly, innovation criteria clearly independent of those big tech partners might offer
i’m talking here of following what we might term the “ronald reagan approach”: go over the heads of an establishment and speak directly with an interested set of parties
finally, address such potential clients’ existent concerns in relation to whether the implementation of current #it-#tech serves their #neurodiverse business cultures, philosophies, beliefs and evidence-base
why this proposed approach:
this is the conclusion i arrived at yesterday: “if i work with a big corp, it must be a free-thinking big corp capable of having its own, totally independent, criteria in respect of innovation.” that is, be its own jury passing an informed and independently sophisticated judgment on what the tech barristers are laying out as the truth.
and then, via a final judge also independent of such process, deliver a final, robust and game-changing sentence.
meantime, is the above — as i assert — really true, do you think?
is #ai probably the most #neurotypical construct in the digital world? and given its widespread use, what does this mean for the problem-solutioning space we offer #neurodiverse thinking and their thinkers?
before you answer the questions posed, look at the example roadmap and its rationales below:
full presentation here:
summarising:
so. what do we think?
is #ai actually — in its broadly accepted automation implementations, at least — the most #neurotypicalising modern tool currently being used by humanity … and maybe misused at that?
this post contains thoughts from a fortnight’s thinking processes more or less; plus the content of a synthesising presentation which is the sum of years of thought-experimenting on my part. i’ll start with the presentation, which is now where i want us to go:
fighting creatively criminal fire with a newly creative crimefighting
i created the slide below for a presentation i was asked to submit to a european digital agency pitching process, by the uk organisation public. the submission didn’t prosper. the slide, however, is very very good:
the easy answer is that obviously it benefits an industry. the challenging question is why this has been allowed to perpetuate itself as a reality. because real people and democratic citizens have surely perished as a result: maybe unnecessarily.
here is the presentation which public failed to accept for submission to the european digital process last october 2022, and from which the above slide is taken:
where and how i now want us to come together and proceed to deliver on creative crimefighting and global security
the second presentation which follows below indicates my thinking today: no caveats; no red lines; no markers in the sand any more. if you can agree to engage with the process indicated here, no conditions on my side any more.
well. maybe just one. only western allies interested in saving democracy will participate, and benefit both societally and financially from what i’m now proposing:
following on from the above then, thoughts i wrote down today — in edited format to just be now relevant only to the above — on my iphone notes app. this constitutes a regular go-to tool for my thought-experimenting:
on creating a bespoke procurement process for healthy intuition-validation development
step 1
pilot a bespoke procurement process we use for the next year.
we keep in mind the recent phd i’ve had partial access to on the lessons of how such process is gamed everywhere.
we set up structures to get it right from the start.
no off-the-peg sold as bespoke and at a premium, even when still only repurposed tech for the moment.
step 2
we share this procurement process speedily with other members of the inner intuition-validation core.
they use it: no choice.
but no choice then gives a quid quo pro: this means total freedom to then develop and contribute freely to the inner core ip in ways that most fit others’ cultures.
and also, looking ahead, to onward commercialise in the future in their zones of influence where they know what’s what, and exactly what will work.
and so then, a clear common interest and target: one we all know and agree on.
mil williams, 8th april 2023
historical thought and positions from late march 2023
finally, an earlier brainstorming from the same process as described in part two above, conducted back in late march of this year. this is now a historical document and position, and is included to provide a rigorous audit trail of why free thinking is so important to foment, trust and believe in, and actively encourage.
we have to create an outcome which means we know we think unthinkable things far worse than any criminal ever will be able to, to prevent them. we need a clear set of ground rules, but these rules shouldn’t prevent the agents from thinking comfortably (as far as this is the right word) things they never dared to approach.
the problem isn’t putin or team jorge. it is, but not what we see. it’s what they and others do that we don’t even sense. it’s the people who do worse and events that hurt even more … these things which we have no idea about.
if you like, yes, the persian proverb: the unknown unknowns. i want to make them visible. all of them. the what and how. that’s my focus.
trad tech discovers the who and when. but my tech discovers the what and how before even a glint in criminals’ eyes.
so we combine both types of tech in one process that doesn’t require each culture to work with the other. side-by-side, yes. but in the same way, no. so we guarantee for each the purest state each needs of each.
my work and my life/love if you prefer will not only be located in sweden but driven from here too. that’s my commitment. and not reluctantly in any way whatsoever.
[…]
i have always needed to gather enough data. now i have, the decision surely is simple.
mil's page 