‘truth is, if i accepted a label different from 2003, offered in good faith and so forth, then when i found something disturbing me in a public space, people would say, “hey we understand … you have a right to be disturbed …”
but since i think i’m just one more person with a right to have a zone of comfort within which i can feel consistently safe, i am accused of all manner of intolerances.
solo ojos: all we need, really
it’s not fair that society demands we have a label in order that we might be treated with equanimity. we should treat everyone with kindness, compassion and the awareness a wisely considered humanity offers our souls — whether we judge that person to be in particular need of support or not.
not only, that is, because they have an official neon sign that indicates they are human beings of the best (which they are, by the by: yes they are).
i really am not arguing against the concept of #neurodiversity. rather, i’m arguing against the fact it must exist in a corner in opposition to that which is frankly not human.
no one is #neurotypical. as laing & esterson said, when they pronounced in “sanity, madness and the family” that they didn’t even recognise the right of schizophrenia to be present in human thought as a concept never mind a reality, so i refuse to accept that #neurotypical can possibly be a cogently functioning reality of the #humancondition.
we are all #neurodiverse or none of us are. ergo, if some of us clearly are, all of us obviously must be.
why is this important? like a #mentalillness located primarily in the individual as opposed to a #mentaldistress emerging from a toxic environment, the solutions needed are different. with the former we focus on the person as cause of the dysfunction and the solutions are pharmaceutical. effectively, we blame the victim.
for me, you see, it’s the latter which is the principle cause of most #mentalillhealth these days. it’s not the individual we must fix: it’s the places and spaces, both physical and socioeconomic, both sociopolitical and criminological, both cultural and business-related, whose own profound dysfunctions have to be addressed.
an example: #rape is properly prevented by ensuring it’s the culpable men and other actors in truly bad faith we direct our attention robustly and unswervingly at, never the victim we inhibit through disbelief and victim-shaming.
equally, then, we don’t efficiently address #neurodiversity in the long-term by saying it is the challenge.
because #neurodiversity doesn’t need its space. it’s unthinking, unhelpful, dogmatic belief systems such as the idea of being #neurotypical — and that any human of minimal compassion can ever consider it proper and accurate to use the term “normal” about anyone — which need removing.
why? the dogma of normal, as sketched out briefly today, invokes its counterpoint: the process of abusive #othering that is being called “abnormal”.
and this is the high ground none of us humans must cede ever again.
Example workstreams and projects which may begin to form part of any work we collectively deliver
The first step to working on the projects under discussion
There is one condition we must all fulfil in order to work on these projects and workstreams in the future:
be aware — and practise daily this awareness — of #neoterrorismontheindividual. This means we realise completely and unreservedly that all our past and current decision-making processes and outcomes may have been the result of an embedded criminality and related zemiology, designed strategically to undermine — profoundly and covertly — our true capacity to act independently
“Neo-Terrorism on the Individual” — an overview … but now as defence tool, no longer research proposal
The two linked-to documents in the section that follows below, which originally formed part of a #phd-level draft proposal of mine from a couple of years back, may now be more helpful as descriptors of what I, and maybe many other people, have been experiencing over these years.
It’s more popularly and more generally known as #gaslighting: but I think in certain societies we’ve been suffering from an immensely technified version of it.
This is why I have given it its own name: “Neo-Terrorism on the Individual”.
That is, a tech-driven longitudinal terrorism delivered efficiently on specific human and organisational targets and marks, in order to shape societies over the years in the direction of certain toxic sociopolitical and business interests.
In this sense then, the two documents mentioned should perhaps be seen more as forming a manual of instructions than a research idea any more, in order to begin to foment and ensure a growing awareness of the tech-driven tactics which certain criminal and zemiological actors may still be using — and broadly at that:
Noted: the above is as true of organisations and nation-states in terms of their collective natures and interests as it is in respect of individuals like you and me, being persons with allegedly direct responsibility for our behaviours and actions.
If we achieve this goal, what should we do next?
If we get sign-up and buy-in, to what effectively is a CULTURE of working re all the #privacysensitive, #privacypositive, #secrecysensitive and #secrecypositive projects and workstreams I am proposing, then the organisational and agency law- and regulation-making which has to exist specifically for such projects and our own personal behaviours will be much to administer, inspect, ensure, and deliver on.
Why? Because CULTURE promotes the rule of laws which emerge from the same organically, and therefore make it much easier and possible for people to see them as their own: thus, compliance is achieved out of approval not fear.
Meantime, LAWS ONLY, created by ruling classes (whether elected or de facto) which attempt to IMPOSE what is surely only their culture, clearly outside the majority (the UK is an example ever since I was born; Ireland has become so over the years as a result of its incestuous financial dependence on global tech), only lead to the corruption and illegitimacy that facilitate authoritarianism behaviours and outcomes, where the same need for compliance — for society by definition needs its citizens to comply in some measure — here is achieved primarily, and sometimes exclusively, through tools and discourses of fear.
Just because you smile when you impose your authoritarianism doesn’t make you any less an authoritarian.
Now … does it?
To summarise …
“For anyone, including myself, to be enabled to work on any and/or all of these projects — which for the moment I shall globally describe as the #gutenbergofintuitivethinking, or the printing-press of intuition — we have to accept that our human agency during our personal present-past, in respect of the decisions we took both privately and work-related, may have been fatally compromised by forces truly outwith our ken.
Not mystical or mysterious forces. No. Not this. Just human beings and organisations acting deliberately to longitudinally benefit, in planned and roadmapped ways, their hyper-focussed and zemiological self-interests, prejudicing a much more shared and collective present-past which could have been. And in fact still could be: one, that is, which benefits every human being, and which will be firmly based on all individuals’ sovereignties.”
So … quite simple, really. Accept the thesis of #neoterrorismontheindividual as a potential reality we have suffered from without perhaps realising it in all aspects of our lives to date. Nothing we did, however apparently deeply thought, was of our own doing.
And so our human agency became anything but human.
Wouldn’t it be a quite remarkable achievement if we could, as a first step to remaking our civilisation in the image of the root word “to civilise”, eliminate compassionately not surgically all such #neoterrorismontheindividual in, say, seven years?
And parallel to all that, begin to deliver all this:
“the fallen warriors of ALL our souls” — a poem by mil williams
it's the apollo moonshot it's the manhattan project and we have to accept we might, yer know ... but we must try even so: we can be astronauts of the mind for this is where i want to go
this is about john forbes nash jr and what he could sense and why they put him away because he couldn't quite evidence his tense that day
and it's what i can sense too and it's what i sensed in 2002 onwards and it's why the british and others put me away but not because i couldn't evidence what i sensed then or did say no no no not at all rather, i mean, because they didn't want to let me try and evidence right and properly
would i be prepared now to die in the attempt? i'll try not to because i want to come back and evidence it full in order to bear witness to what john forbes nash jr saw in his time but couldn't prove dear people i say couldn't prove rightly at all them days
and what i saw from 2002 onwards and wasn't allowed by the british and others to share with anyone and anything and after means i know also what he couldn't share in his day with the rest of the people he met and did pray meaning i know too well how his best never did find a path where to shine fine was allowed its trace outside any kind of wrath
another dimension: one of the mind one some of us can access simply via our brains sometimes poorly so poorly that the authorities around us easily incarcerate us for what we say we see and what we claim to be and sometimes so well they may choose to dispose of us too as if a piece of scrap paper so scraggy, torn and weary and nothing more than tatty as hell and rattier than any role
well now it's going to be that apollo moonshot revisited and a new manhattan project too as we venture forth as astronauts of the mind for sure and we may die in the attempt it's true but by golly we'll surely try not to because this time we want to evidence it all for the memory of the fallen warriors of ALL our souls who died whilst being in the right and had their light extinguished by the most trite of all our hearts where everything was lost to costs with no value at all at all
and time it is as time it was to write the wrongs and read everyone's rights
for nothing is now to stay the same and whilst days of yore brought promises of outcome and even of judgments deeply felt the scores we scratch on sticks of loud hollow sound will only now keep metronomic time if we wish them to rhyme in this way because life is precious and starting again and time it was and time it's become
for the moonshot again and the project of stranger rains and sometimes it's going to hurt real bad and sometimes we'll cry as never before: for sure it will my dears be sad and maybe seem to be this bad but if we pursue with a goodwill of the best the rest will show us fine just one thing of grand and so what it is and what it will be is to stand and act out of true charity
now some reflections on the above …
what if all my projects and ideas for #secrecypositive and related … what if they have been attempts — maybe poor, but attempts all the same — to understand real experiences i’ve had and sensed before and since i was unduly incarcerated by the uk for having them and imperfectly expressing them in 2002 onwards?
what if some of us — those of us, for example, who have been, are and will continue to be accused NEVER diagnosed of mental ill-health at some point in our lives — are actually in some fumbling, stumbling way privileged persons able to access some other ways of being?
and what if when they medicate us, we’re having the shutters and drawbridges brought down almost violently on something which could otherwise have been utterly beautiful and radically life-regenerating?
as if we were talking, in fact, about creating software code in the shape of UN inalienable rights and charters, conventions and manifestos, and stuff with these kinds of discourses, as opposed to the more conventional laws and regulatory approaches parliaments and so forth generally prefer to come up with
from my iphone’s app this late morning / around midday:
introduction
yes
this is what we can embrace, if we choose to:
• one nation-state fully onboard
• one big tech partner, fully committed
• one local and regional web of finance, legislation, tax, accountability, delivery, and societal benefit: sweden
then once this is secured, we can discuss exporting
but not before
in respect of past deeds
not interested in the past in respect of those of us who deserve to be in CORE
am interested in collective future-present and deep partners who want a different future-present from the ones we’ve all been a part of in the past
this i repeat is also true for me, just as much as for anyone else or for any other org
good
on trust systems and their development
this means … we have to learn to trust each other, but always suspect everyone and everything
be childlike to the most if you like; but equally, not naive in the least
game-changing trust is built over time with tools no one has ever considered
this is why we need the brightest nonconformist brains committed to changing the world for the better: both gradually and overnight
that is, parallel processes
the value of cultural dissonance and internal respect amongst all parties
yes
true
everything is best when combined
not one or the other team
everything
cultural dissonance and cultural rub are the preconditions for both innovation and invention
but the condition being that different types of seeing and doing also learn to value the others interchangeably and equally
generously
truly generously
so as long as with this caveat upfront and conditioning everything we all do, we will also need conformists at the base of everything we do
my work / life expectations and aspirations
personally, i want to live modestly
i want to think untrammelled, obviously
so this is why i need the modest life to ensure the untrammelled doesn’t leak into my behaviours
a modest life, therefore
decent food
healthy exercise
and a dollop of joy every so often
the fields of action and play
the battlegrounds are various:
• resistance: putin’s russia and everyone who approves of its actions
• fightback: putin’s russia and everyone who approves of its actions
• long-term, however, the focus MUST be local and regional: embedded global criminals at local and regional levels who use symbolic communication as per mafias everywhere, to evade justice as it currently stands, need to be dealt with
why? these are the real funding streams that enable putin and his ilk everywhere to not only have the cruel ambitions they have but the capability, the financial muscle, to deliver on them: local crime turfs spread out across the continents and connected via 21st century digital means
implications
thus:
in my judgement, law enforcement and trusted private security need both to be involved at the start, at least with the 100-day rapid app development programmes that use existing architectures
but they have so much knowhow, the aforementioned security and citizen-safety orgs and their people i mean, that they deserve to be in deep, also from the beginning, re the scoping of new architectures and ways of structuring tech
but i am always open to other opinions and views
always will be, now
now we begin to propose having these foundations
my emotional life
i’d like an emotional life, yes
someone with a view of life i can engage with and which allows her to engage with my work and play, both
and me with hers in equal, and absolutely peer-to-peer, measure
and it’s obviously part of the whole, but firm foundations to the project as we are discussing today will help me be much much more patient and much much less needy now
so all good
it’s ok
with the two pillars we need to fight neo-terrorism on the individual (noi), trust will grow very quickly
spain sits curiously: i separate what i feel about the country easily from what i feel about the personal, which obviously has existed from the start
so it’s ok in this respect
i could travel to and from and work with people from there, despite the fact that i also had really dreadful experiences with businesspeople there once upon a time
and i don’t know why now ok. maybe there is a reason. maybe just time
maybe just the time that has elapsed
why sweden
for me, in my opinion, humbly expressed, sweden is objectively better as a collective built on individual rights than any other country i have ever known or lived in
whatever it is, the most important thing for me here in sweden is that i see people who strive to be good people every day. and even people with the power to effect change (eg in the uk there are also plenty of good people: none of them are powerful)
not all people here do this, of course. not all do good by any means, even in my limited personal experience
impossible that it should be so
maybe, even, not desirable: it wouldn’t be allowing for the human we sometimes imperfectly have to be
but enough do good to the best of their ability for the threshold to be far gooder than i have sensed intuitively at any other time in my life
anywhere else
and not just strive and then wave their hands foolishly when it doesn’t work:
• because you don’t fucking give up until it works here in sweden
• but you don’t get silly either. you wait until this moment arrives beautifully, and only then do you pounce supportively
it’s a series of behaviours i would love one day to emulate well myself
so again, here it’s true: people laugh a lot
and this is good
but sarcasm isn’t a national trait as far as i can see
inquisitiveness defo is
a thirst to uncover and discover
it’s refreshing
it suits my own deep ways of being and seeing
and maybe now much more possible, my ways of doing
a caveat or two re funding provenance
as long as we establish funding-stream provenance professionally and competently, i’m open to support from whom you judge trustworthy
even the countries i’ve mentioned in less glowing terms
yeah
and so i guess some covert part of the uk, which isn’t and never will be mi5 or have relationships with the unis that have bad-actor funding connections … even here we could propose some kind of engagement after the groundwork i’m sketching out today was firmly put in place
the evidence of good faith would have to be overpowering, tho’. absolutely incontrovertible and irreproachable … and right now, no one in the uk is in a position to offer anyone this evidence of their ability to distinguish between political right and geopolitical wrong
who may form part of CORE
none of them as CORE, for reasons that should be obvious (and if to you who are reading these words they’re not obvious, this pretty automagically precludes you from any participation at any level for a long time: certainly, until they do become obvious to you)
not that, then: not them inside CORE
this means, therefore, that none of the alluded to, i repeat, will have any CORE influence over how and what and when and stuff re product, service, platform architectures, and so on.
none will have the ability to impose their preferred approaches whereby innovation would become mere tweaking, and invention something we never even broach. ukraine can’t be won through a mentality of tweaks, after all (and if you believe it can, that’s why you’re automagically not going to be a part of CORE)
• such parties will only be enabled to participate — if we decide they deserve it — as right-at-the-end clients, in a covert marketplace if covert is needed
• and if not needed, a public marketplace of b2b and b2gov
• but no bespoke or consultative products, services or outcomes here
what CORE will consist of
this is my proposal, as it stands today:
• one committed nation-state: that is, yourselves
• your local and regional business, commercial, tax, legislative, delivery and sociocultural infrastructures as framework in perpetuity
• finally, where this is judged advisable and collaboratively intelligent, one big tech partner who wants to redo the world, including maybe what they did in other times which they’d now begin to question … (but then again, this will clearly be the same for most of the rest of us too, as already observed)
if it has to be eventually more oppenheimer than curie, that’s ok
i understand
but curie laid the foundations for oppenheimer, after all
and if it’s more global boiling than fighting directly the kind of criminality i’ve been discussing itself, i’d still say that to ensure our researchers feel brave enough and protected enough to deliver the killer blows to the climate denial we all want them to deliver, they need to know and feel they will be permanently and efficiently protected to the max from new kinds of crime and zemiology, potentially conducted on their persons day in, day out
so even if it’s now to become more a climate change / global boiling focus, it needs to remain a crime and zemiology one robustly in parallel as well
what CORE will consider and deliver
the CORE needs to strategise the castle & moat as well as the thinking-spaces and their architectures
our secrecy-positive spaces will be needed to protect our desired climate boiling people and outcomes
this is what i propose be our strategy from now on in:
• we should focus on creating an an impregnable theoretical, philosophical, practical and technological castle around the sweden-chosen big tech partner-local & regional partnership before moving out to other areas of endeavour and action — even at the risk of not doing as much for those in need as we might
• why? because you just HAVE to know you utterly CANNOT be undermined by anyone, before you reach out a hand to others however deserving
re precedents, we can follow the manhattan project, apollo moonshot, and darpa internet templates if we like
but i think we can learn from modern silicon valley strategy too:
• a flexible PLATFORM is the best research tool in the right hands
• out of which specific applications can be delivered, just as japanese car manufacturers first did with elements of a car
• example: separate workstreams for each element (eg dashboard design & functionality) identified as key, and then slotted whenever discretely ready in terms of their own timelines into what became new versions of the cars
• therefore, manufacturing a car isn’t a new car release every five years as in the olden days, but modulating and updating regularly
the intuition validation engine, then …?
do we go back to platform genesis and the raw READ.ME of the intuition validation engine? i think we do …
• a library of tools
• as already determined, a PLATFORM in order to enable ACCESS freely, not to tie in users to one software / hardware constitution or another
• equal sovereignty for all objects, whether people, code, or machines
as if we were talking, in fact, about creating software code in the shape of UN inalienable rights and charters, conventions and manifestos, and stuff with these kinds of discourses, as opposed to the more conventional laws and regulatory approaches parliaments and so forth generally prefer to come up with
and some would say this would lead to vague
i radically disagree
i would term it as being the “precisely ambiguous”:
• that is, an arts-based approach to real-world problem-solving
• a structure, but not one which deeply determines the kinds of outcomes
• something, instead, that will remain relevant and useful for as long as we do this: JUST like UN charters
in order for it to exist like this, it just needs to be considered for longer before — finally! — finalising its directives
🙂
but we will know when it is finalised
how? because it will be our eureka moment: it will just feel gobsmackingly RIGHT!
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.
It’s clear that #criminaljustice isn’t working. The fact of #putin’s #russia and its invasion of #ukraine — just one example of how malevolent experts in #loopholes are able to act in the very worst of bad faith — absolutely demonstrates that #criminaljustice manifestly can’t pursue and being to book the most serious #societalharm before it harms in the most serious ways.
Because #ukraine didn’t start the year of the invasion. It started a long time ago when the #kgb man #putin has always been firmly decided that any vestiges of #european hopes that a joint way forwards which might have been found between one side of the ex-#ironcurtain and the other needed to be longitudinally strategised out of existence forever. But also stealthily so: you don’t tell the enemy there’s a knife getting ready to be twisted deeply right in their back.
And so #ukraine was also enabled long-term by the richest centres of power on the planet: transnational corporations which had implemented the original way-back-when command & control #sovieteconomics — top-heavy and hyper-integrated economic structures — which in the age of supercomputers and their capacity to number-crunch in ways the #soviets never even dreamed possible made it possible for these companies to calendarise entire societies over periods as long as decades, never mind the crusty Lada-ridden 1984-style five-year plans.
What exactly am I getting at here?
Some of these corporations have more power than ANY country. Maybe not in the sense of the country GDP versus corporate revenue numbers themselves: but definitely in the almost authoritarian capability they have to make rapid decisions about billions of whatevers; and when I judge rapid I mean virtually from one day to the next.
And, therefore, in this sense in much more immediately impactful ways than any mere democracy will ever be able to engineer.
So this is power: and if knowing you have it you do choose to act, and you prevent #ukraines with your perspicacious even where secretive research data — even if only for bottom-line reasons, forget for the moment the rag-doll babies lying in pools of red at the end of a parent’s counterpane — it’s a massive power indeed exerted for the wider good.
But if conversely you don’t act; if you limit yourself to the role of spectator; if you trim and tack your humongous dinghy so any possibility of encroaching waves remains distant to your ship of shareholder stock … then effectively, when all those immense command & control buttons of the brightest are simply NOT being pressed, you actually are proactively enabling the #putins of the world.
Why is so hard for good people to do good? Really … why?
Well. There’s a thing, for sure.
I read a George Monbiot article in the Guardian a long while ago: it described a survey which said that most of us think most of us are bad people but, equally, most of us simultaneously see ourselves as good people.
Curious, huh?
Some weird disconnect, there.
For me it’s a question of access: the potential whistleblower needs to know their digital notes won’t be read by #badtech people (as mine almost certainly were on the metro this evening); equally, the #abusedspouse must know not only that her husband’s #mafia-behaving business colleague won’t be able to touch a friendly police office for a favour that needs to be called in, but that when it ends up in court and the husband’s word against hers, some kind of fair #tech platform for validating such assertions will also have been invented in the first place, so the pillar of the community he is won’t be able to sway the jury with his mere presence.
This is mostly why I want The Philosopher Space: so people – ALL of us, citizens and professionals, both — can recover our right to the secrecy of pencil and paper but with the 21st century advantages of digital.
That is, when we’re obliged to use digital, we aren’t forced by the system to strip ourselves naked in front of the #tech experts — as I might accurately observe, 70 percent men — who NEVER themselves have to perform the same humiliating acts of self-discovery.
What if the real reason the #elonmusks of our time are forcing #humans back into physical workplaces is because they know if it doesn’t happen more widely, then their long-existent, highly prized, and presumably immensely costly #secrecypositive thinking-spaces, based in such physical locations, will begin to lose their advantages over what was once a mostly blindsided European tech and socioeconomic sector?
Mil Williams, 9th July 2023, Stockholm Sweden
Background
From the slides included below today:
“Our defensible position is clear: all big #it companies long ago chose not to sell it. Instead, they preferred to use it for their own innovations. Perhaps not technologies or platforms as such – but certainly the idea: totally hermetic tools of creativity and business modelling.”
The full slide-deck can be found by downloading from the link that follows:
But not only that: #espionage, #nationbuilding, interfering with due #democratic process … and #cultural/#industrial #intellectualproperty/#ip, and its broader tracking.
Yes. The final image above says “With A Little Help From My Friends” …
And actually, really rather a lot. Because I do have them, too. Though some spread the half-truth it ain’t so.
Why this post today
However, I’m not posting again about this brief and perhaps not overwhelming slide-deck to repeat myself. No.
It’s because I had an insight yesterday evening, late. I’ve been reading surveys from PwC and others — really cool surveys which shape narratives and edit reality interestingly, well and deliberatedly — which talk of how #innovation amongst the less advantaged has increased. And then again, more generally, how #innovation in digitally connected and aware organisations is increasing leaps and bounds over the olde-worlde office-bound competition.
I wonder something else, in the light of my slide-deck’s thesis: what if for the first time — post-pandemic times, I mean — everyone is innovating? Not just the companies of #techbarons which own already, use habitually, and restrict the distribution fiercely of #privacypositive and #secrecypositive thinking-spaces. The spaces that mean 29 out of the top 30 Internet companies aren’t European:
No.
In this sense, partly so, with hybrid and working-from-home workflows, it’s become easier to hack into a part of the system but also — maybe even more — harder for intrusive #bigtech to establish the overall narrative arc of a potential new competitor, in respect of an equally potential #innovation — or even #invention! — in the throes of. Like the difference between traditional warfare versus guerrilla, perhaps?
The real reason #techbarons want their workforces back behind THEIR closed doors
What if the real reason the #elonmusks of our time are forcing #humans back into physical workplaces is because they know if it doesn’t happen more widely, then their long-existent, highly prized, and presumably immensely costly #secrecypositive thinking-spaces, based in such physical locations, will begin to lose their advantages over what was once mostly blindsided European tech and socioeconomic sectors?
What do I mean?
In the face of the #totalsurveillance #panopticon used by aggressive corporates — particularly #bigtech corporates — against anyone they decided was a threat, there was little the rest of the world — without a shield of some sort, I am saying — could do to protect its ideas. Or even develop them half usefully before they were gouged into non-existence.
But maybe, just maybe, that competitive advantage began to fizzle during pandemic. With everyone outside #secrecypositive and/or #secrecy-obsessed HQs, and the world all operating from home, two consequences emerged:
1. Everyone worldwide was in just about the same conditions, as far as the visibility of #innovation and #invention was concerned.
2. Suddenly a new openness — a confidence that it was OK to be nonconformists in front of colleagues — began to arise. We communicate via Zoom, in pyjamas, wild cats running across desks, children bursting in unexpectedly … and business, serious starched white-collar business, is suddenly exposed to real human life. In business contexts. And what’s more, it works.
Of course, collaterally, we’d gain equal confidence to THINK as WE TRULY HAVE BEEN THINKING all these years! Only they never let us shine … hardly once.
Should we then forget about our own #secrecypositive thinking-spaces?
Am I suggesting that there’s no need for #privacypositive and #secrecypositive thinking-spaces of our own?
No. I’m not.
Even whilst we are more dispersed and yet creatively so at the moment, and even as this makes the overall shape of a competitor’s #innovation more difficult to sense as well, sooner or later they will work out a way. But in the meantime, they need US all back in OUR offices and locatable, just as much as they need THEIR workforces back in THEIR offices, and once more hideable.
In truth, isn’t it the case that hybrid and working-from-home workplaces are to the #secrecy-obsessed #techbarons what #opensource at its most competent most competently was to closed source? A breath of collaborative and hyper-creative air in often challenging and anti-creative hyper-competitive environments.
Our challenge now
The question is: do we now have the balls to deliver for our humanity what #techbarons multiple have only ever cared to deliver for themselves?
And perhaps not even fully for their shareholders … not even this!
After all, the species is burning the planet, #bigtech has kept to itself this #freethinking on steroids I discuss in this post (and other places, too) for all these years … and all they’ve been able to use it for instead is making money out of a pandemic and putin’s three wars. As well some untold number of other human tragedies …
I’d guess since #totalsurveillance itself was implemented: 2003, says anyone?
Because NO ONE in the history of warfare has ever invented a sword without developing it’s related shield. So whilst the digital #panopticon was applied for reasons we all understood clearly in their day, #bigtech has sold global humanity short ever since.
How? I’d surmise by developing the aforementioned #freethinking on rockets — but for purely selfish gain.
In summary
Shouldn’t we all now REALLY feel cheated by the #techbarons of the world who act like this?
Actually, I think we should. Look. Give us all a break, guys. The planet needs us to be all at the top of our games much much more than rockets to Mars ever will.
How about we collaborate instead?
Ever heard of a philosopher kind of a guy called John Forbes Nash Jr?
In a nutshell — or a chipset! — what I propose we do asap is move radically away from the more recent division of power and hierarchies between admins versus users that has shaped #ai and #it ever since the arrival of the Internet, towards the suggested conflation of admin and user in one.
Mil Williams, 3rd July 2023, Stockholm Sweden
Proposal
Would anyone in #scandinavia, more specifically I’d be bound to say #sweden, like to begin work on designing and implementing, from scratch, a totally repurposed set of #ai- and #it-related architectures and frameworks in order to create absolutely future-proof ethical and privacy-positive #ai and #it frameworks?
That is: do for #ai what I have already suggested via the concept of a digital equivalent of the #privacypositive and #secrecypositive attributes pencil and paper have for centuries conferred on us:
The original “intuition validation engine” README on GitHub
In this case, in respect of #ai- and #it-#tech, I would suggest using a starting-point I already clearly described with the original 2019 specification of the #intuitionvalidationengine (i’ve) (currently on my GitHub account in private mode, and reproduced in full below):
intuition-validation-engine
The goal of this engine is to permit both human and machine intuition to be validated.
This will be done constantly, but not intrusively. People and machines will have a choice, always.
It is assumed that for the purposes of this project both parties will be encouraged to upskill the other in mutual dialogue and equal partnership.
It is also assumed, a priori, that the keywords for the processes involved will be:
1. A procedure of CAPTURE, controlled by humans on the one hand and machines on the other, where neither will be obliged to share ideas, content and personal data that they do not feel safe sharing.
2. A procedure of EVIDENCING, where the captured data can be stored, retrieved, shaped and patterned, and used for supportive purposes that expand the lives and experiences of the beings concerned.
3. A procedure of VALIDATION, where it becomes clear to everyone participating: a) why a human being might believe and act in a certain way; and equally so, b) why the machines that prefer to work within the framework of this project will arrive at their own particular positions and conclusions.
Finally, it is hugely important that everyone who chooses to work on the project might easily understand that it is not a traditional software paradigm: let us assume, instead, that people, code, machines and all other objects participating will form part of a new space we might call “i’ve”.
That is to say, there will be no distinction or hierarchy in this space between the individuality of the objects in question, with respect to their entity as sovereign actors. In this sense, all will enjoy becoming part of a multiple-perspective environment, and all will help to support and contribute to a wider and transcendental knowledge that both befits and benefits others.”
Alongside the clearly developed initial architectural philosophy stated above, i would then have us move on to working with the #platformgenesis progression of the original concept as it existed since 2019:
Then, with further collaborative actions, especially in the light of other technologies developed since, we could begin to properly propose an absolutely future-proofed #ai and #it-#tech which, as per their real-world template of pencil and paper, could never NOT become privacy- and ethically-sensitive, whatever the regulatory demands created in the future by any global or regional body.
This would be my objective from two directions: legal and technological; abandoning neither for the other. And making both future #ai and #it-#tech as firmly #ethical and #privacypositive by design as to make regulatory innovations that might challenge it impossible to design.
To summarise
In a nutshell — or a chipset! — what I propose we do asap is move radically away from the more recent division of power and hierarchies between admins versus users that has shaped #ai and #it ever since the arrival of the Internet, towards the suggested conflation of admin and user in one.
The division described has, in my judgement, severely — and increasingly — affected the citizens and workforces who strive to function and live creatively, despite the challenges, in Western corporates and wider societies when needing to think freely. These needs arise in many — if not all — fields of endeavour too, and in most during mission-critical moments and when decisions have to be taken using an unpickable #highleveldomainexpertise (something we sometimes are also happy to call #gutfeeling) which becomes the only thing we may be able to reliably depend on.
The real existential challenge for our democracies and business discourses and praxis then arises when we fail to think as freely as others who, with a clear and ongoing possession and enjoyment of #privacysensitive and #secrecysensitive architectures and technologies, maintain their capacity to beat us hands-down, at least on the #intuition side of societal and business activities:
• https://crimehunch.com/terror | concentrate here on considering which team would be best at a new “what and how” (I’m happy, meanwhile, to recognise that pattern-recognition capabilities in machines will inevitably process vast amounts of data better when focussing on more concrete questions of “who and when”)
If you want to find out more about my latest ideas, why not go to the #sweden located and focussed online whitepaper I’ve been using to further my thought around complementary strands of complex thinking?
OUR end-to-end thinking. The creative crimefighting we now need: bringing together the complementary and existent interests and skills of military, security and law-enforcement into one macro-team of defenders of the species.
Mil Williams, 2nd July 2023, Stockholm Sweden
On eliminating the Petri dish of Putin & Co’s creatively criminal strategies towards a European and wider longitudinal dislocation
Introduction
This is the current law-enforcement, security and military situation as I see it:
1. Organised crime funds Putin & Co’s Russia by embedding itself in local communities across Europe and other regions: it’s effectively the last mile of creative criminality:
2. Organised crime is then the deep connector of glocal (global <-> local) reach. It makes it possible for top-down and bottom-up approaches to moving illegal money around and in respect of its generation, capture, and delivery to easily acquire an almost impossible to unpick synthesis of seamless functioning.
3. It also allows Putin & Co to longitudinally gather data — on local turfs and from great distances — on trends, movements and rising individuals in democratic systems that might all prove threats to the established order he and his kind continue to strategise in order to achieve and sustain.
This is why I argue that in order to develop a capacity to prevent another #ukraine from ever being contemplated, never mind delivered on, we need to create human-enhancing technologies that empower good human beings like ourselves to fight back with a “War & Peace (II)” approach:
That is to say, for a change our kind of war on our sort of terms: but even so, permanent and ongoing; and then again, our kind of peace on our sort of terms: and even so, permanent and ongoing.
What will the process leading to these preferred outcomes consist of?
1. Identifying sources of power and wealth which to date could have contributed to #ukraine not happening and which, nevertheless, have chosen either a) to effectively sit on the sidelines and watch the region burn; or b) have proactively consented to and created the environments and frameworks which have led directly to #ukraine: nation-states; large transnational corporations and others with huge reserves of cash and wealth of various kinds; zemiological actors of multiple kinds.
2. With this information to hand, we robustly and firmly ringfence these actors future participation in:
a) our own future human-interfacing and enabling tech tools and platforms; and
b) the strategic and longitudinal reconstruction of a wider Western democracy.
I suggest, above all, that as a general principle we do NOT use the often self-interested advisory and consulting processes of tech and related corporate organisations when scoping, developing and configuring the natures of the architectures of our proposed new software and hardware architectures and frameworks.
Instead, from our own university and other research institutions we build up teams of our own consulting and advisory specialists consisting of human-related and tech-related researchers both — as well as others who may be chosen to be upskilled in such skillsets, in the collective democratic future-present we wish to forge anew — in order to create a permanent future-present capability in such processes.
The proposal would then employ big tech and related SIMPLY AND ONLY as implementers of, never participants in, our secret sauces.
After all, you cannot invite into the kitchen of future Western stability those organisations which have actively collaborated in the poisoning of Western democratic ways of acting and engaging with complex problems — either by default and their sitting on the sidelines, or through an affirmation on their part of criminal activity by their working alongside and continuing to gladly invoice such organisations in full knowledge of their ongoing zemiology:
We can however, I now firmly believe, use such corporations as simple extensions of fully formed projects which reach them with absolutely all the necessary specifications and requirements ready drawn-up by the aforementioned bespoke teams of OUR own researchers and in-house advisory & consulting experts.
To summarise
If we follow the above path, in this way:
a) we won’t lose the agility of large corporates’ manifest capability to deliver massively on clear specifications when everything is duly finalised and competently in possession of its always necessary roadmap;
b) but, equally, we don’t allow them to move us in the direction of solutions which continue to be optimal for their bottom lines but not for a European and wider security and safety environment:
c) nor will we lose the element of absolute internal and external secrecy we need if, in any reasonable way, we are to successfully fight back against Putin & Co’s longitudinal strategising in favour of the sustenance of his own brand of creative criminality and its related Petri dish.
Because it’s time to break into unusable pieces that serve zero purpose the Petri dish of Putin & Co that enables local-turf criminality from feeding — ultimately — into the pockets of their aspirations to global dislocation and domination.
Because it all starts from that neighbourhood you live in, where you enjoy shooting the breeze with the man you know, for sure, to be a gangster.
And it all ends in the bloodied baby’s cot in a Kyiv apartment block.
Let’s think as creatively as the criminals, for a change
OUR end-to-end thinking. The creative crimefighting we now need: bringing together the complementary and existent interests and skills of military, security and law-enforcement into one macro- and hyper-team of defenders of the species.
Just that.
And so then, finally, by both scoping and using new tech architectures which Putin & Co cannot bribe themselves into acquiring under any circumstances, we make it increasingly difficult for #ukraine to happen ever again.
https://www.secrecy.plus | for human-expanding and upskilling #secrecypositive software architectures and hardware
my ex- has two indian friends she used to teach spanish to. they lived close to where we did: a married couple.
we were invited to theirs on occasions, and would go over enthusiastically of course, for a full evening repast with other guests we might or might not have met before. they were immensely gracious guests, were her indian friends.
one time, we were introduced to what turned out to be a techie guy: an executive type, though.
yes … not a software engineer or anything like this.
i was clear i’d been invited by apple via the brother of the bebo founder, at a meetup in the wellcome foundation cafe some years before in london, to come onboard.
this time, the techie guy basically spun the story that all tech corps controlled the next ten years of tech … all tech corps. this wasn’t an apple thing, let’s be clear. this was all of them, including apple. (he did assert he knew the apple case from inside.)
so. big tech would rarely launch useful stuff, just for the good of the world. it would do so when a series of conditions were met.
for example:
• what — for them — was all-too-existent tech, but invisible and, indeed, unknown to the outside world, wouldn’t end up being revealed to anyone unless there was a sound bottom-line reason. they wouldn’t even float the concept publicly (that is, telling the idea but not saying they had developed it …)
• neither did they ever seem keen to express the desire, or be driven by the need, to apply such apparently non-existent tech imaginatively for the whole species’ benefit, before, that is, its time arrived as per their aforementioned ten-year calendarisations of the related monetisation opportunities and timelines
remember google glass?
research the year it appeared: go on.
dr steve mann invented it and used his own from 1984, if my memory serves me right:
google then had to finally retire its own consumer version from sale because of “invasion of privacy” concerns from the wider market (and perhaps, also, the wider mass media): and this, even when the version sold had an unnecessarily large and obviously clumpy camera.
do you think they weren’t using it far more covertly way before they launched a consumer version?
do you think they stopped using their own privately covert version after the consumer version was boxed off and deactivated?
of course they used it way before, covertly and more, on everyone.
of course they wouldn’t stop using such a powerful surveillance — and counter-surveillance — tool.
like exxon in the 1970s hiding the research that predicted THEN to the tenth of a degree the global warming (not climate change, ffs) NOW incurred due directly to their fossil fuels:
well. big tech behaves in exactly the same way. it has massive solutions: it had them decades ago. its bottom-line doesn’t need them now, though.
and it certainly DOESN’T want to democratise genius, as i have argued increasingly our species needs us to aim at doing, if we want to survive the cataclysmic climate and other challenges encroaching more and more our daily experiences of life:
so what do we do? if big tech refuses to change its ways 180 degrees — and it will refuse, i assure you — what do we do?
we do it ourselves!
we do it for the military and security, but also for a citizen force which uses sousveillance not to control the state but work with it.
we create relevant software constitutions to achieve it. we use the genius resident deep down in every human being to deliver unpredictable thought, predictably.
and ultimately, we will eliminate ALL loopholes.
and we will eliminate a wider zemiology from every community.
and we will cut back the dried-out deadwood of our societies’ most creatively criminal poachers.
we will make the woods of every community — whether professional or geographical — good again: all of them.
that is, make the timbers of a civilised society no longer anything to be shivered about by anyone.
look:
in sweden you already invented a cctv which is useful but, at the same time, doesn’t need to store the images to deliver law-enforcement support.
it’s this kind of shameless thinking — shamelessly free! — that i hanker after, and now really really do need.
this is why from here: from sweden. exactly this.
yes …
and i appreciate, too, that everyone needs to participate.
but i am angry at big tech for giving up on the species.
and i know how capable it is of getting into projects in order to mess around with them for defensive reasons and purposes: to protect above all the interests of its blessed bottom-line over the interests of, for example, war-torn victims.
the fortnite founder event in salford i attended some years ago proved this, when i was informed by an attendee that basically my idea of #hmagi had been bought up and closed down from another bright mind years before:
mil's page 