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.
A very brief video that an unknown person or persons posted about me in 2015, just as I began to move closer to the UK Guardian newspaper
The day our security agencies decided that neo-crime and dark figure did not need a law-enforcement response was the day we opened the doors to a future Ukraine; an organised criminality in the UK where we now have an army of embedded criminals in all levels of society which outnumbers the British armed forces; and a broad and widely shared sense of citizen, perhaps even political-party, hopelessness about everything that happens quite toxically to Western and related democracies. That is, none of us can reasonably believe in better any more.
Mil Williams, Chester UK, 18th January 2024
Screenshots of a very brief video which piggybacked on an article the UK Guardian newspaper had just published back in 2015 on my relationship with the newspaper, being this latter the final screenshot in the above series
What follows …
What follows is a series of observations on a real case of targeted gaslighting on a democratic citizen — myself, being one of many similarly affected over the years by a nexus, I guess, of tech-bros and outlier security interests in the UK, and maybe other states and actors, too: a longitudinal case which already led to my undue and improper incarceration for a month in a UK mental facility back in 2003, after an experience in a broken-backed open-source community the previous year of 2002 called OpenOffice.org.
This open-source site was sponsored and paid for mainly by the then Sun Microsystems, but the dysfunctionality arose from both sides: corporate and independent developers in equal parts.
First, then, a poem about the impact this has had on me over the years.
“tech-bro”: a #poem by #milwilliams
in english a bro of the tech nature killed me
in swedish a bro is a bridge
*
if only i’d been able to make my life again
in a land like the latter where good people rule
*
but my pain and misery all came from the place
where i had the misfortune to be born
*
and whilst in swedish a tech-bro
would be a path to a better future
*
in english it’s better so much better
to be burned
*
but since i don’t believe in burning anyone
i reason the problem is myself
*
and so it’s myself
that mathematically must be removed
*
from any equation that includes
the future of humankind
*
this is why when the tech-bros
of english-speaking lands
*
burnt my person
in the manner of a most inflammatory form
*
of gaslighting imaginable
in its scorn
*
i never forgot
what they did to me
*
just as i began to fly
and just as i began to try
*
to lift my head higher
and fly to better skies
*
why now i burn those bros memories
even though arson is not my thing
*
but not as beautiful bridges of swedish ways
but as stupid men of patriarchal “hey!”
More on the video and how it continues to impact me
The video embedded at the top of this article was, as already alluded to, posted by an unknown person or persons, or an organisation, around the time the Guardian newspaper published a reader profile of me:
It was a clear example of self-interested gaslighting by those who didn’t want me to begin to build bridges to good and progressive discourses in British society such as the aforementioned newspaper, and therefore perhaps one day gain access to what for me would be a truly self-validating public platform.
Personally, I never forgot this video, and I believe as I write these words that if its creators were ever revealed, the two decades and more of neo-terrorism on the individual — by any other name, cognitive warfare on a specific and targeted individual such as myself — which I have been subjected to at today’s moment of writing this article would now have responsible parties, as well as a clear motive and notable set of explanations.
That is a world absolutely not fit-for-purpose. Absolutely not.
No?
So what do we do?
The day our security agencies decided that neo-crime and dark figure did not need a law-enforcement response was the day we opened the doors to a future Ukraine, an organised criminality in the UK where we now have an army of embedded criminals in all levels of society which outnumbers the British armed forces, and a broad and widely shared sense of citizen, perhaps even political-party, hopelessness about everything that happens quite toxically to Western and related democracies. That is, none of us can reasonably believe in better any more:
We need to believe in better, of course: but in order to begin to have a right to do so we must say enough is enough in the grey area of discretionary law enforcement and security where discretion is given a bad name in the interests of expediency. That is, in precisely that area of operational manoeuvres which utilises both dark figure and what I prefer to call neo-crime, whatever side of the law we find ourselves on.
We can only reacquire the authority Western democracy once had if we start to deliver on this: only this. And we shall not, until and if we do.
Ever again.
*
If you find what I have written today interesting and/or engaging, please do get in touch:
when you teach and reach out and don't preach but do advocate these certain ways that are different from all the differences everyone else sees and accepts and may reject or not then i am not you and you are not me
because what i am looking to do is change the "you and me" we have been so far in humanity's historical charter of what is good and what is not: i'm not prepared to settle any more for a relativism of core that destroys our capacity to construct good and bad in the measure they had once upon a crime and in rhyming couplets that mean something deeper than a ditty of shitty superficial resonances
i aspire to much more you see because i believe we humans are built out of cruelty and good depending on where we are stood and the challenge for me now (and how it is this challenge i see how it is for sure) is to make it possible for not just an individual to progress mighty and fine across the timeline of their person but for the generations too that they make up and inhabit true ... ... well ... that finally they may not need to reset and just about almost always reboot what we know from one to the next
because if the driver of humanity's improvement really is only ever the nonconformism of intelligent individual where corporate-style teamworks serve simply to only implement and make real the dreams of those who dream the unreal we need far more dreamers of the unreal than we currently have if we are to survive and thrive quite outwith ourselves one day when FEARful prayer would no longer be needed to deities sometimes just and in equal measure as cruel as gruel at least in the "sometimes" that history has loosened upon us
and so all i want for christmas is just the sense that together you and me me and cee (out of a love of the most real even where not expressed ever for whatever the circumstances which present themselves as a present that is current as well as wrapped up like no gift ever given) we might just soon enough be tough enough to bring enough truth and compassion and firm resilience to the science of building the FEARless CITIZEN
because me and you that's what we are and what we've been all these years they knocked us back like into a sack where good guys are tumbled by the really really bad and dumped into waterless wells (like we were rocks that don't ever get to) and some these guys and sometimes gals do no good but only stuff the neighbourhoods with more and more legitimated mafias of nearby cities and then again way beyond
so it's now time we put a stop to it all my love: time we said enough is enough and then did in consequential act what was needed and always has been and that the rough guys who were never tough but just cowards and only apparently hard when possessed of the full knowledge no one could properly stop them ever nor stop their awful cruelty born of power's abuse and total misuse as they winged our beautiful civilisations over and over again like icaruses of a sun which should only have embraced and instead was laced with poisons galore by the criminals of yore but also the mafias of RIGHT NOW
time i say to make love where we can and as women and men and genders-all we make these calls to love as practised where humans communicate with fabulous exes that become the kisses which seal the real human deal ...
... and then when we meet people who care not at all for all this it's time we became as firm as hell and gave them bottles of their own medications as we salvage the reputations of every civilisation of good good hood into a future-present of neighbour "should" and "want" and "wish" being the most at this time of year anyone has the right to see delivered and given and handed over and no longer feared no longer feared no longer feared ... at all
a world where it suddenly becomes possible and practical to rebuild once more the FEARless CITIZEN
Chester was a place that gave a lot to me and took a lot from me.
It allowed me to grow into adulthood, with an epilepsy that struck me at ten years old, and was medicated with barbiturates until a better solution was duly found six years or so later.
In the 1970s it was a place of little attraction for young people, at least people like me … though now it has vibrant sociocultural institutions, and a small-town vibe that works for very many people.
But small-town vibe cuts both ways. It can lead to the beauty of the gentle and the unsuspected: of people who reach out to you and want to be reached out to, equally. Or it can lead to the embracing of criminal and mafia-like behaviours. Where who you know is much more important than what you describe and experience, even when you communicate it with absolute accuracy.
Today I saw in this very same town of Chester its very best side and its very worst. In its remembrance of the sacrifices of two world wars, and more before and since, it was exemplary and compassionate.
In its defence of mindsets I myself recall from my childhood — for example, things that happened at school to me and my classmates, which today would lead to criminal prosecutions — it also showed such evil people are still alive and literally kicking.
Earlier today, I was walking into the Tesco in the centre of town and a woman cut closely into my path with a suitcase trailing behind her. I had to stop. I bided my time. I then headed away from her into the shop itself, and lo and behold, she drove her suitcase, now in front of her, into the back of my left leg.
I turned round and she asked me if I was all right, with a beaming smile. I answered I was, and asked her pointedly if she was.
She said nothing. We went our separate ways. But the mindset she had didn’t. It planes over this city of two curious parts. One part, beautiful and scenic, in the physical, emotional and intellectual, and with the cultural organisation it never had in my childhood and now, obviously deservedly, manifests to the max for all who wish to value it properly:
But there’s another part, a quite different layer of society in Chester. It’s a layer which mainly chooses to defend its own very restricting, manipulative turf at the expense of the innovation and invention the first half not only treasures as it always attempted to, but is now capable of formulating wisely and assertively.
The layer which looks to defend its always-has-been looks to the past as a justification of all current behaviours: the woman with the suitcase and her mates videoing the scene are just a silly example of how the past can be (wrongly) used to justify a #gaslighting present.
The other layer, the one of cultural vision and fabulous statements where every human being has value, meantime, looks to Chester’s past not as a justification of the nowadays and the cruelties these others are continuing to deliver, but as a way of intelligently informing a collective future-present of the most wondrous: a world where all of us fit in, strive and eventually not just live but thrive.
This is Chester UK, then: the marvellously creative, wise, generous, gentle and compassionate on the one hand. And on the very beastly other, what I experienced in Tesco in the town centre not long ago: a group of people who have nothing better to do than track, using mobile phone tech and related, the simple movements of people, like myself, who will not stop telling inconvenient truths.
It’s Brexit Britain right down the line too, is the Chester I experienced today: so many good people who just want the best for the world, on the left of politics and in the decent centre both, whilst on the extreme right the monsters who, in truth, have become one-bit mobsters.
I spent most of my youth in Chester. I’m proud of the sociocultural environment its good people have managed to fight into being in the past few years from practically nothing previous.
Today’s incidents, on the back of other things I didn’t report on other days, because even sillier, have made up my mind, a mind that was unsure, for sure.
My decision after the Chester #gaslighters of this afternoon? I now intend to work here too, to join the better half.
Why?
After being unduly incarcerated back in 2003 by the outliers and institutions of this city, you’d maybe wonder why indeed. I’ll tell you, then. Now I shall. The good people who’ve stuck it out, and made this place so much better, deserve other good people to join the fight.
The bad, the one-bit mobsters I mean, don’t deserve anything any more. They certainly don’t deserve that the good abandon them to their victory.
In fact, they don’t even deserve our disapprobation.
Just to be ignored, is what they deserve. Just to be ignored.
I do join, then. The movement of the best. Not a city of #gaslighters. Not a city of beautiful #roman even.
No. Rather, a city which has begun to learn to fight a layered criminality with ALL the tools to hand. Something which in my childhood never seemed conceivable.
All the tools. Absolutely all. And even with the written word, I say.
it takes ten years ramming a new idea down people’s throats for them to get it.
i started what would become the #intuitionvalidationengine back when a discovery interview with a #liverpool university. in the middle of this interview i came up with the phrase #industrialisationoforiginalthought. i didn’t know, then, the roots of this occurrence.
i do know now.
my first university qualification, of the three i now have, was a ba hons in film & literature, back in the early 1980s. i realised a few years ago now that this was the very source of my thinking around #intuitionvalidation.
film, until #generativeai, was an example of how, despite the temptations, movie technologists chose to make a tech that enhanced and expanded human beings, rather than diminished and automated them out of relevance.
the microphone made the voice more powerful; the camera, the eye more beady-eyed; the film language of close-up and long-shot making the actor able to express their feelings with more impact; and even the stage and a wider mise-en-scene serving to extend the ability for great actors to deepen their expressiveness using the surroundings designed specifically around them.
that, then, all a clear example of the #industrialisationoforiginalthought.
and with that, a direct precursor to the #intuitionvalidationengine, and what then became #platformgenesis:
if we take 2016 as my baseline of these later ideas, though not where the ideas originally connect back to, of these ten years i allude us to, ramming a new idea down everyone’s throats, i’m in year 8 of the aforementioned decade.
what next …
i’d like now to make something firmly tangible of all this.
and this, for two reasons and two reasons only:
1. under the current #totalsurveillance philosophies, 9/11, putin’s russia, and hamas all flourished. i’m not saying those who promoted these solutions, where machines have humans as extensions of their processes and procedures, wilfully ignored an alternative i’ve been proposing for a number of years now: that is, humans with machines as extensions of themselves. but if it does continue to be rejected, the ignoring of them does become wilful:
2. the second reason is more personal. i’d like to think that some good people at the highest levels of #tech begin to recognise that perhaps everyone — all of us, that is, without exception — should have considered other options sooner.
9/11 was a horrendous event we considered absolutely singular and, thankfully, unrepeatable.
but then came along the utterly illegitimate invasion of ukraine by putin’s russia, where we still even today — some of us, that is — choose to see him as a man who stumbles into one misadventure after another. only this isn’t true at all. he’s a horrible nonconformist whose awful capacity to think out of the box is left untouched by our machine-driven teams and ways of working.
and so, finally, 9/11 does repeat after all. with, you can’t say no, hamas’s dreadful attack on israeli and palestinian people, both. and under the very same philosophy of #totalsurveillance which didn’t succeed as it could’ve done the first two times round either.
my ask
so what do i say? what do i want? what can i get reasonably from you?
what can we all, ultimately, achieve together?
it’s not #totalsurveillance that’s the problem: it’s a #totalsurveillance which upscales exclusively machines over humans for every security, law-enforcement, and espionage process ever.
it’s the philosophy and implementation, not the need or the instinct to protect and defend absolutely: because the latter is absolutely spot-on. meantime, 9/11, ukraine, and now hamas surely question the former in ways we never cared to in the past twenty years.
this is why i am now looking proactively and openly for a powerful and paradigm-upturning partner who can provide the runway to get this blended approach to #totalsurveillance all underway: an approach which i have proposed with so many challenges to my own person all along.
and the aim of these ideas?
simple, tbh.
no more 9/11s, invasions like that of ukraine, or attacks like that of hamas on israeli and palestinian peoples both.
i want to save us all from future pain.
that is the gain i most want out of my legacy.
that is what i want my ideas around #totalsurveillance to begin to deliver: a more secure world which feels, also, so much safer …
I lived in Spain for around sixteen years. My Spanish is quite good; but I’m not a native in the language and never learnt it formally.
But the poem below, for some reason today, I felt obliged to write in Spanish: that is, castellano. Because there are a number of sometimes quite different languages the Spanish state and peoples communicate in. I know only castellano.
Mainly, in the street — and then receiving correction via an assiduous daily reading over the years of a linguistically ferocious Spanish newspapercalled El País.
sí lo es una huída hacia delante sin querer en absoluto y sin preocuparse por nada
porque es hora de ver si tienes razones por pensar si hay personas e instituciones que te quieren
y que quedan -como debieran- para que quererles a su vez y de vuelta sea sensato o no
porque he llegado a la conclusión que necesito estar sólo con gente de buena fe
NO las que te hacen reír ... pero entonces nada más que desde sus estupideces y desde sus más profundas idioteces donde crecen sólo sus mentiras cuando no las tetas de sus nenas
por arte del instagram o del tiktok de las narices y de los gobernantes chinos que sólo te miran
porque sólo quiero estar ya con personas buenas quienes saben ya de mi mundo desde su interior: para que otras explicaciones ya no son necesarias
y porque ellos también lo han experimentado y sufrido en el presente igual que en el pasado
y entonces si eso significa que a la gran mayoría (que solo parece que sea la mayoría y -desde luego- constituida en nada de "gran")
me veo obligado a dar mi espalda es porque tengo ganas no de dar la espalda a nadie pero en su lugar mirar con firmeza de frente
a caras como la tuya: es decir a otra clase completamente de gente
gente que sólo cree en un mundo donde el jugo que se derrita no son las sangres de la población mundial entera ni de sus cuerpos frágiles
llenos de las bondades por encima de cualquier abuso cometido por vicio y por medio de la violencia corporal
de todos los hombres y mujeres autoritarios ... pero para que -de otro modo bien distinto y precioso-
lo que echamos no es nada de menos a nada que hemos valorado desde hace siempre como lo mejor de todo ser humano
ni que hayamos querido derretir los jugos de nuestras vidas en campos de guerra y en apartamentos donde bombas despiertan al bebé recién nacido
para que pueda morir en el acto en charcos de su propia sangre con los cuerpos de sus hermanos enfrente proclamando el adiós cruel de los violentos tan poderosos ...
pues NO: no ... no ... no ... no paso más tiempo con gente así
no es ésta la vida que elijo consentir: y estar con la gentuza que sí prefieren consentirla con las sábanas rojas de esos niños todos los días de las semanas tan agredidas
NO es donde voy a quedarme: porque ya pido más a la vida y no me quedo con el lujo de beber el mejor vino por un lado y derretir la humanidad por el otro
como HAMAS nunca JAMÁS debiera haber concebido y ya no digo lo que pudo llevar a cabo porque ellos sí han sabido siempre todo lo que han hecho y han querido hacer
y así -en profundo recuerdo de ukraine y de 9/11- damos la vuelta al verso anterior: bebemos todos YA de las humanidades que más nos hacen nobles
y derretimos únicamente a partir de ahora os ruego -por favor- sólo los vinos de mas esplendor
de los viñedos con más sabiduría y que nos sean capaces de bendecir BIEN con sus alegrías de amores bien vividos y de muchos ciudadanos y ciudadanas viviendo ahora
que deben luchar con una ferocidad que corresponde SÓLO a los que han intentado por todos los medios buscar otros caminos por esos medios e incluso cuando no queremos pelear así en absoluto
porque cuando la guerra te toca a ti tienes sólo dos opciones: ninguna es fácil pero sólo una conduce a una muestra de lo que es firmemente mantenerse humano
y puedes ceder en todo por supuesto y quedar con lo que te dan si eso o puedes luchar para otro futuro bien distinto
y aunque yo sé lo que es para mí y -ciertamente siempre será así- no puedo ni debo definirlo para ti ya porque ser un humano es eso: la elección de cada uno ... elección bien propia
pero lo que sí reservo -sin sentirme mal- es el derecho a decir a la fecha de hoy y la de mañana y el año que viene y desde mis escritos
que quizás durante cientos de años pueda que perduren o -a lo mejor- solamente en las mentes de muy poco gente y a lo mejor ni eso ... ni eso mi amor
pero a decir la verdad me da igual ya porque lo único que quiero de la vida que me queda en los años venideros (y espero llenos de amor)
es encontrarme con mis gentes y NO con sangres encharcándose y ni de hombres ahorcándose ... pero sí -y eso sin duda- con mujeres y hombres tiernos
capaces de vivir la vida correctamente y de manera noble incluso cuando nos han tocado los campos de la inhumanidad más espeluznante
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.
Manchester, meantime, being for me a time of three hard-fought days, has finally demonstrated that in some notable places, places which I sense pride themselves on being as purposeful as the Swedish nation clearly is, this thing we globally term “security in the UK” can also have a heart and soul: a real humanity and application.
Mil Williams, 26th August 2023, Chester UK
It’s good, the last three days in Manchester — though for me utterly draining.
In my life, security in two places had given me space to tell my story. Neither of those two places were located in the UK. Quite the opposite: here, particularly in Chester, Belfast and London, my story had been bent out of shape to the outside world.
In Croatia, the US looked out for me, without me being a US citizen, during my journey back to Spain on a coach at the end of November, the beginning of December 2002.
British security and politics then ensured during the leadup to the summer of 2003 that it would become possible to lock me up unduly for a month. And drug me since then.
Sweden this year is where good people also looked out for my interests. The gaslighting and attempted gaslighting that took place on my person was watched and observed and witnessed and, I think, recognised:
Neo-terrorism on the individual slide-deck | A description of a tech-driven longitudinal #gaslighting committed by #bigtech and related (related means to some extent any and all other sectors of human endeavour) over the years
Manchester, meantime, being for me a time of three hard-fought days, has finally demonstrated that in some notable places, places which I sense pride themselves on being as purposeful as the Swedish nation clearly is, this thing we globally term “security in the UK” can also have a heart and soul: a real humanity and application.
It’s therefore my intention to begin to indicate publicly that the security which listened to me in Manchester should form a close partnership with anything that ultimately gets off the ground in my Swedish endeavours.
‘Happy to rewrite the rulebook, then. This is not me being tribal: this is me finding it possible to trust others because evidence is provided that validates that trust. As in Sweden all the time I’ve been there on-and-off recently.
And this being exactly the value-add I want to deliver with my projects.
For remember this: terrorist atrocities were delivered by humans using tools — machines — as extensions of themselves. They were not stopped by tech partners who said it was enough to have such machines supported by humans:
How humans with tools beat tools with humans hands-down on the big and terrifying occasions
And it’s not enough to slide easily over the fact that humans are the strongest link in criminality and the weakest in security. We have to begin to seriously question that if this is currently true, why we have been enabling it to remain unnecessarily so for such a long time.
Myself, I want to reconfigure #ai so that it makes us more important as players in the modern world, not less. Industrialise is humans back in, not continue to automate us out:
And my enemies — many in the field of #bigtech but also small too, I realise and now sense — have known all this time the buttons they had to press. Make me think the enemies were others, when really the paymasters have always been the same.
Manchester, Stockholm, a wider Europe, and of course the US, then? Institutions, agencies, organisations and governments all?
Open doors; but no longer open house.
Because we enjoin the battle not to lose bravely but win rightfully …
If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.
On why we need radically new secrecy-positive architectures | Mil Williams, 24th August 2023, Manchester UK
I think I’m being offered two directions to move forwards definitively on my projects. And I think in my mind it’s clarifying my view on what to do next, where, and how.
I think the two directions can both happen, too.
But for many reasons, only one can happen here in the UK, in Ireland and most other places we consider.
If my thinking isn’t mistaken, the security version must only happen in Sweden and countries which share the philosophy that is embedded firmly in a wider Scandinavian way of foregrounding the citizen and their rights when constructing and rebuilding democracies.
So.
What I think is being suggested:
IVP1
1. My #neurodiverse #complexproblem-solutioning proposals may sit in many and perhaps all cultures eventually. If you like, the B2C product and service, where the “C” of B2C equals “Culture”, and which the Swedish intuition corporation I am proposing we build as per The Guardian newspaper group’s Scott Trust would deliver, mostly, indirectly.
Here, in the wider field of using arts-based thinking for solving real-world problems, therefore, practically anything and anyone gets a hearing:
Meantime, the Swedish corporation I would like us to create would not, as alluded to, be involved directly in even a tenth of all the activities that might arise through this Intuition Validation Project 1 (IVP1), alongside its set of related workstreams.
We would only need to license the rights for using the core technologies and philosophies I’ve been thought-leading since 2016. That’s as far as we would go. No need, for example, to shape how any of this was to be implemented. No longer would there exist roadblocks on any side to arise.
It would, therefore, even be possible to make these platforms and architectures available from the starting-blocks for countries with whose security policies I, and a wider Swedish society quite separately and much before me, fundamentally find ourselves disagreeing on: for example, oppressive manifestations of total surveillance & CCTV, and the complete removal of public access to encryption and so forth, even in banking applications, being the approach the UK has been advocating and wishing to put into practice for decades.
Equally, the Swedish and similar, where total surveillance is employed, use it to enable the citizenry and make them feel safer and more empowered: never to make them sense, as we do get to suspect in the UK, that they are permanently being inspected and tracked in order to bulldoze voters and similar into good behaviours out of tools, primarily, aimed at inducing fear.
Seen in Vällingby tunnelbana station, Stockholm Sweden, 2023
And that’s a philosophical difference of import: in the UK, we trust that people will be bad: that is, secular Original Sin. In other countries, we trust that enabling the help of the citizenry is paramount; we trust that what we might call “good trust” needs to be promoted strategically. Here, then, it’s not enough to be secure at all; we need to be safe, too. We shouldn’t have to be looking over our shoulders all the time. And our policies should reflect this.
One Swedish example to underline: street CCTV on private and state buildings must look down only on the entrance itself to the building being surveilled. No dragnet across all passers-by.
So. If we think like this — IVP1 I mean — there’s no need to negotiate these matters any more, before we may begin, because IVP1 will be in the hands of creators of different kinds, even where what they create may deliver tangible and utilitarian real-world solutions.
And then again, just the one condition too: periodic licence fees, but ourselves, as an intuition-validation corporation, being utterly hands-off.
IVP2
2. Security — the project we might now call IVP2 — is a quite different matter, however.
My Criminal Justice Master dissertation (linked to here), from 2017, on the subject of secular Original Sin*, laid it out really clearly: in an ever more complex world there will be no edge obtained by law enforcement and security if we ensure citizens feel as pursued as the real criminals. The only way we can be collectively more than the bad guys and gals is if we get citizens deeply onside: enabling them to act out their proactive roles as joint defenders of the law. It’s not enough that they just nod their acquiescence to what we claim to be doing when faced by the horrors of modern criminality.
Until countries like the UK accept that our total surveillance-friendly software architectures (admins who see all; users who see nothing but even so are aware, all too aware, how they are being permanently surveilled) have fatally inhibited — impaled, even — our own capacity to think creatively in security, crimefighting and law-enforcement contexts, we cannot develop my ideas in respect of security where such acceptance is not forthcoming.
Because criminals like the Putins of this world do continue to enjoy their own deepest secrecy-positive spaces whilst they longitudinally plan our destruction, despite our own ongoing total surveillance strategies:
You get now, I hope, then, where my objections really lie; where they are firmly seated? If total surveillance and omnisciently intrusive CCTV serve only to inhibit us and not Putin et al, the new swords we must begin to develop must have radically new philosophies, much more than just beefier technologies.
Security for me, therefore, sits where the right philosophies existed prior to my own arrival. And my travails when writing the dissertation in question back in 2017, clearly caused me by British security, indicate, even post-Ukraine, that for quite a while they will not be enabled here in the UK.
To summarise:
IVP1 — just about everywhere
IVP2 — the kind of places and states where new swords may come into being from a prior and existent embedded instinct and impulse to openness and invention in the fields of tech philosophy and architectures
Yeah?
____________________
* Footnote: under total surveillance philosophies we are no longer innocent until proven guilty but incessantly, and permanently, considered guilty, whilst never to be proven innocent again.
I’ve been note-taking again; yesterday on the tunnelbana (Stockholm’s metro) and today in one particular Joe & the Juice I love because of the jazz playlist you often get in the mornings. The one near Hötorget.
I’ve taken a liberty, too. It may not be the right thing to do: but if it’s not, we can amend and choose something else. What follows I have headed as “Astrid’s Garden”, in its English translation. Because, just as Alan Turing was a man of good genius, and yet had to fight for his right to be himself, so Astrid Lindgren, in a different time, place and culture, chose to fight what she believed in. And like Turing, it was for and behalf of a society which one day might become of the good.
Here is the stream of thought I’ve had over last night through to just after this midday …
me, at the moderna museet recently
mission:
fight fire with water wherever possible; only fight it with fire when utterly unavoidable
1. all the participating organisations achieve representation in terms of the potential and promise of individuals who belong to each.
to achieve this:
we create a bespoke evaluation process which allows us to identify this individual potential and promise in ways no one dreamed of.
the basis of the project is neuro-diverse complex problems-solutioning tech architectures: hardware, wearables and software all.
we should spend as much money on people and their brains as we ever will on tech.
why does this feel uncomfortable? when did we ever feel spending massive amounts of money on tech was wrong? isn’t that the purpose of tech — to have money spent on it? ok. well. lots of virtues in that, for sure. but why not feel comfortable with doing the opposite? spending money on people: on our strengths and our capabilities.
spending directly, with salaries that allow for correct, humane, and moral conditions and sustenance; and then supportively, re technologies that upskill, expand and enhance the capacity for — ultimately — a wholly secrecy-positive “pure thought” that each person chosen will be chosen for because they already bring it – in more or less raw state — to the table at the start.
the projects and workstreams will then be enabled to first drive with efficiency (that is, leading to hyper-nonconformist hyper-performing person-focussed inside-out tech always) but along the way also creating regularly and inclusively (that is, what i have already conceptualised as hyperteam-delivering tech) as the programme progresses.
2. the goal is, however, also unremitting. completely so. as completely as the uk’s bletchley park during the second world war.
the targets as twofold:
a) bad actors; and b) preferred outcomes
a) the first target will focus on russia and china, and others who have, equally, allowed the criminality of the aforementioned to embed itself longitudinally throughout these years: from the russian wealth and war-focussed revenue streams in the uk alongside the collaboration at, and of, all levels of the conservative party to the chinese “police stations” spreading across supposedly sovereign britain and europe, with huawei and others as pure extensions of the chinese government’s aims to install surveillance within our internet backbones, never mind on phones, devices multiple, and so forth … all these are all examples of what i have called neocrime:
things we don’t see or even imagine until usually their creators have moved on to something else, at which point they lose interest in ongoing concealment. because whilst concealment exists, it happens for one reason: those committing such criminality are clever enough not to need to show anyone, ever, exactly how clever they are.
so we simply remain unaware, thinking “random” or “life” or … whatever.
3. astrids trädgård must therefore exist to anticipate, scope, identify, protect, and serve the interests of a real, good western democracy.
there is more we need to focus on …
b) in the best traditions of the united nations, we don’t only focus on detail, which is often passing. we focus also on the overarching and inalienable: the universal; the unchanging … literally and figuratively.
this is why i would add to the word “unremitting” already introduced one other word:
4. when we are able to fight fire with water, the word already mentioned. but when fire is our only alternative, then perhaps from a related org not open to astrids trädgård personnel themselves (for everyone’s mental wellbeing and sense of proportion and focus) we must fight this awful longitudinal fire that led to ukraine in the first place, and is sustained by the joint authoritarianism of russia and the chinese since much longer than we care to realise, with an equally merciless fire of our own.
so … proportionality always:
proportionate always, i repeat: but more than what “unremitting” tells us. and you may disagree, too; we may need to refine; we might have to finesse.
but in all cases, peter levine, the american civic thinker, and one of the most humane humans who ever lived, was right: good democracy demands we be inclusive, yes, but equally … we must be efficient.
so if covert spending exists to fund the fire with fire side, then it must have another name and mission quite different from astrids trädgård.
5 however, one thing must remain sharply clear: the final goal of both organisations will thankfully be shared.
it must be thus:
the objectives of both fire with water and fire with fire are to preserve, expand, deliver, share, and educate everyone globally — facilitating, also, that everyone become completely versed re these arts of learner and teacher — in the virtues of what i have seen in sweden these months:
a community spirit built on the absolute sovereignty of what we all hope are ultimately the nation’s most thinking citizens. and with this i mean … everyone in their absolute diversity and dignity to be enabled to express themselves of this diversity.
we MUST, similarly, trust that human beings will prefer their innate humanity over what we see in ukraine, in london’s richest money-laundering centres, in china, in places of similar authoritarianism across the globe — just so many, too many, far too many.
but in order for a human being to prefer humanity over inhumanity when the choice presents itself, we also MUST give the humanity we want to flower the tools to make it possible for all people to FEEL that it’s SAFE TO BE GOOD.
which is why i say: nation-building and citizen-building have to be accompanied by fighting crime and ensuring global security in the ways i will never stop advocating. ways which, to date, we have absolutely never pursued.
i hope this is ok. i hope for many reasons.
and i am always open to debate, to new ideas, to restructuring it all, if the evidence says it must be so.
but i also hold true to the reality that no one believed anything i said for twenty, and maybe more, years … but twenty at least.
and so i cry now not for me, but for the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions too, of other human beings who still aren’t believed in just the same way because we knowingly, negligently, make it possible for criminals (and all similar — including those who advantage themselves of loopholes and zemiological processes multiple) to be far more creative and nonconformist in their criminality than we have dared — ever CARED! — to be in our battle against the same.
one final thought:
just reconsider this.
just one more time.
why are criminals the strongest link in their criminality whilst the security industry consistently sustains the rest of us humans must be the weakest link in security?
it wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it’s easier to monetise a widely imposed, machine-based counterforce to criminality than it is to integrate machines closely and sympathetically with the actual needs of the most competent, existent crimefighters we already have.
finding themselves, it’s true, not only having to fight the rampant criminality that leads directly to authoritarian russia and ukraine but also the #it- and #ai-#tech which their manufacturers utterly refuse, even today, especially today, to make supportive of humans as we actually are.
mil's page 