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.
I am minded to write this poem because of a small and discreet event I attended at Liverpool John Moores University, one evening some years ago.
The event was given by a chief constable of a nearby north of England police force.* The standout stat I remember he offered us was when he wanted to contextualise what differentiates the average experience of a police officer with the average experience of a democratic citizen — and perhaps, in so doing, making it easier for both sides to be less opposing and more conciliatory.
Most citizens, he said, experienced 10 to 11 “life events”: what he meant was serious incidents such as witnessing the horrible injuries of others, maybe their violent passing, one’s own experiences of near-death, and/or perhaps the death of a family member or close friend.
Then he asked the collected audience what they thought the stat was for the average police officer. Not even the attending officers themselves knew how to hazard a guess.
The figure was 400.
It sank in. He let it sink in slowly and quietly, too.
It will never be forgotten.
That is how much the average police officer suffers. And wherever they individually choose to remain servants of the citizenry, not enforcers of the same, is when we have the very best of our societies standing rightfully to attention in front of us.
Just this.
Have a safe day.
(And just that.)
* I also recall the fact that I was once very firmly informed by a community police officer in a suburb of Chester, UK, that whilst the public liked to see the British police as a service, the British police never see themselves as anything but a force.
“the 400: a poem about service”
i was told one evening
by a chief constable near where i lived
amongst an audience of people good and free
that 400 was the number
which for the rest of us was 10 or 11
being life events
that break our souls
and make us weep with heaps of tears
like babbling brooks
when nothing’s then right
and all is then took
and life is then no longer worth living at all
*
and this chief of big team
was the kindest of souls
and he knew how to roll with the times and the goals
I’ve been thinking a lot this year about my life. I’m now 61: an age at which one of my two favourite writers one day took his own life. This being Hemingway.
I love Hemingway. He’s himself. Grace under pressure. Whatever the reasons. And grace under pressure was the way he wrote his prose. A pressured prose, and yet so graceful. Graceful despite the pressure, never because of it.
I’ve lived a life of similar pressures, though grace was rarely my discourse. Lately a tad more. And I’ve been wondering why this, too.
I spent many months, on and off, in Stockholm Sweden in 2023. I learnt a lot from a culture which my own — British — had never been able to accurately prepare me for. We have a lot to learn from the Swedish way. Really we do.
I took advantage of this impulse — and it took me a while to settle into it and feel safe enough to deliver on it — to also bring together a whole bunch of historical online whitepapers which audit my progress in the ideas I have had around intuition validation since at least 2016, but probably since my first university degree in the early 1980s when I had studied Film & Literature:
Part of the reason I began to feel the UK was starting to respect me — instead of wishing to do me harm — was because of a place called Storyhouse in the northwest English city of Chester: modelled I felt (and then had later confirmed) on the Stockholm Kulturhuset: one of my favourite places to be in the Swedish capital.
I felt safe enough in Storyhouse to be able to begin to want to reengage with my homeland really profoundly.
So.
All good thus far.
The final part of my life, and my thoughts around it this year, involves the increasing number of people in my close and wider family who are submitting to and getting successful assessments of differing kinds of neurodiverse ways of being.
In 2003 I was ridiculously diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. I had already begun to suffer from epilepsy at the age of ten; though whilst living in Spain, and between the ages of 30 to 40, I was completely — and successfully — unmedicated for the condition.
Meantime, in that same decade and after my misdiagnosis, a member of my family was diagnosed with autism, level 1 — then called Asperger’s. On my Croatian side, such cases were already apparent. Then another relative was diagnosed with bipolar within a few years of my misdiagnosis. Honestly, I think hers was also a misdiagnosis.
From the 1960s onwards, one parent had suffered from clinical depression, whilst the other had experienced severe migraines and clear traits of autism/ADHD during their whole lifetime. More recently, this year in fact, two close members of my family have been positively assessed and medicated for ADHD, and yet another case of autism, level 1 has been uncovered.
A couple of members of this tribe I belong to now feel I should request a reassessment for ADHD, too. I’m in two minds. My original psychiatrist clearly made a mistake. After three years (ie, 2006 in my case) it became impossible to argue clinical negligence. I’d still be up for bringing a case of criminal conspiracy to court, but maybe I now have better things to do with my time. Either way, it’s pretty self-evident my family are brainy.
That’s how I now prefer to see myself: neither schizophrenic nor ADHD, nor autism nor anything else. Just brains in abundance.
What I am looking for now, after all these years of strife and denial, is the opportunity to put my brains properly to work in terms of my ideas re intuition validation, complex thinking, and in respect of being able to work on tools to deliver secrecy-positive thinking-spaces where an absolutely free thought can begin to enjoy its flight.
From a deep love of Hemingway and grace under pressure to secrecy-positive thinking. And a chance to stop the Putins of this world … forever.
Yeah?
And so to the poem that follows: it’s a visceral review of some of life’s most insoluble problems.
How complex and fractured family groupings come about when people refuse to ask for help; refuse for their whole lifetime to not believe it’s someone else who’s the problem.
Just what happens when the concept of the scapegoat as a narrative figure becomes the easiest tool in order to structure a network of individuals.
Just this.
Have a really safe Christmas … and the happiest New Year possible.
And do take care.
now comfortable WITHOUT others / the BOSUN’S pieces of infinity / no longer your necessary brother AT ALL
i spent my life as eldest of my family being the glue that meant i wasn't as i could've been
i had to be for every sibling and cousin i had the very best sounding-board they ever could have EVER had
understanding in all respects accepting all their holes of dark seeing as absolutely and utterly fair the roles i was assigned so stark
like lairs and dens of the dragons and monsters some of them have been to me and you really wouldn't ever believe
what i have actually seen and what i have actually witnessed and suffered to the extent they intentionally drove me mad
and so all this time i found it hard to do more than rhyme in order to survive the cruelty of my 61 years
visited on me and imposed on me and painted on me as if into a corner around my every boundary and residual sound
as never could i set my limits and find in time the core i needed and just be me for me at all and avoid the funeral pall
of man and son and father and brother and lover and done nailed brutally and abusively to the cross of quite another
and so after all that it came to 2015 and all i could do was scream silently to myself
and everyone thought again he's going mad or maybe he's just bad and maybe that was it
when really what it was this thing i began to do was realise that their VACUOUS holes like gruyère cheese
had prevented my mentioned core of apple-like pleas ever forming contentedly so that all i knew how to do
all this time for 53 years of foolishness too was to impale myself like stake to a soul in such a way
that their very real madnesses appeared mine all that time
and maybe to this day most would still find it easy to say that what they did to me in 2003 as my whole family stood aside
and let me suppurate as incarcerated foully by a state of extreme and vicious cruelty and how it did so
and how it was so neither good for them nor good for me as no one ever let me be neither in 2003 nor EVER since then
and as my monstrous lover of 2004 then took me to her web of evil spidery claw and the horrible things she then did and said
as she treated me badly and without remission and did all those things to me with zero permissions
i am reminded also of the techie folk who in 2002 in virtual sense and right to this day in quite parallel way
attacked me and my reputation it's true as they played their games with my achilles capacity for foolhardy hesitation for it's only the clever who ever wonder why
and only the foolish who can't find it in themselves to ever care more than a minimum expression for the lessons of an otherwise historical compassion
and so then it's a fast-forward right to today and christmas 2023 does approach in its way and so now my son is adhd and then a sibling that other thing they say
and my parents both undiagnosed but surely it was true and my younger relations both clearly that and good and even two others who claim to be hyper-sensitive
when really all they acted out was a fearsome them of brutal cold fish for all their multiple decades and years ... and so we do come finally to the VERY first
being me two decades before the worst when getting a diagnosis unbidden and unasked for and one of utterly beastly yore as i was assigned a violent assessment
of a ridiculously inexact psychosis when if all the above had come fairly to light first of all then first i wouldn't have been without my core
and second the family both sibling and parental and so wider and much more wouldn't have fucked me about
as they allowed me to die struggling on my feet drugged to the eyeballs by a country caring only to treat a clever man like myself
as if i were an elf to be tossed baldly aside like evil mischief far and wide because dear cousins
and siblings and children and wife and my life that's what you did to the man i should've been
whilst once i defended you all as i tried desperately to be that thing you all needed me to be when in truth the problem wasn't EVER me
but people JUST LIKE YOU who needed far more support than i ever would being far more support than a crutch to a cripple
and so as we come close to 2024 i realise with joy in no way a trickle that i need care for none of you any more at all because what was broken
and splintered and hurt was not my job you see to make complete in the end even then
because i was far less damaged all that time than you and yours and those you claimed were mine and i was far LESS incomplete and far less unseated
and far less nailed to that cross i mentioned before
when talking of awful loss and the cost of not talking to each other as we might've done and the idiocy of hiding
behind the unassessed and never embracing what actually you all were in respect of something that could have been
a completely beautiful diversity to treasure and measure against all other benchmarks where humans do hark to a GORGEOUS eternity
and so this is where i now found myself at last with no right at all to cast any stones
yet equally no duty remaining to ever help out anyone insane enough to want to stay
as a member of this sad sad tribe incapable of realising any of you in time that the very reasons you refused to defend me
were precisely the reasons why you should've protected me and precisely why no longer there's any point in my trying
to work with and for absolutely any of you in health and sickness or any condition left to me
nor in any kind of frame where being together could've been a worthy test of a humanity hugged close
to a seafaring bosun of chests of mysterious pieces of infinity where once upon a time
it was me that was seen to be the really crazed guy when it truth it's me who finds himself now catapulted
into a place of truthfully righteous change because family for me now irreversibly wanes as we all become
as diverse as each other thus meaning right on i am finally released from ever being again your necessary brother
Hope today is a better day for us all, even as we must always commemorate its awful awful tragic and terrifying past.
Just to let you know, where books and content are your thing, and if so it’s fab that it should be like this, that my new quality control and documentation proofreading service is now up and running.
I’m currently focussing on two markets: Britain and Sweden. Note: this is NOT a translation service but a brand-new quality control plus more traditional proofreading service in one for English content, whether created by native speakers or by those for whom English is a second or third communication skillset.
To summarise
We take English-language documentation from our clients — whether developed by them in-house or with their agencies — and ensure it’s both functionally and linguistically fit for our clients’ target audiences: usually (though not necessarily) C-suite decision-makers.
So if you are starting to use interactive and other more complex documentation formats, we don’t only check the English (in multiple region versions, too), we check the navigation, the flow and readability, and the interaction between video, photos, and/or graphics on the one hand and the text-based information that makes it run on the other.
If this is something you’d like to use, and you’re not in the UK or Sweden, we can invoice in euros and US dollars, too.
Our plan is to focus on the first two markets and then expand to others. But if demand emerges elsewhere sooner, of course we’ll follow the trail wherever it takes us.
My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.
And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.
Mil Willliams, 27th August 2023, Ellesmere Port UK
The difference between feeling secure and feeling safe. With gratitude to my eldest son, Guillermo, who narrates this short.
This is my position:
I will fight, always now, in favour of a state #surveillance and citizen #sousveillance that hand-in-hand serve to be each other’s keeper, where this becomes us and is at all possible.
That is to say, a process of permanent democratic observation — the million eyes of #opensource translated to societal re-engineering — which then exists to support and serve … never intrude and control.
Because this is why I have been condemned since 2017 at least — maybe before, too — to a life of vibrantly incessant failure. I realised then, in that year of Criminal Justice, that there was an alternative to #totalsurveillance and secular #originalsin. And what was more dangerous for the establishment in all of that was that I began to acquire the critical apparatus and appetite to deliver to the academic and technological satisfactions of the vast majority the alternative I had begun to shape:
But I realised this year I am not the only one any more. And actually I never was. After the past year’s events, I have been able to satisfactorily evidence, to myself at least, that I am not the only soul in the world who believes — not just in theory but in goddamn real-life practice — that #surveillance can serve to serve and enhance both the citizen experience and ENJOYMENT of life: not only re its securities, then; also, its deepest and kindliest safeties.
My most important experiences in my life, this year:
In the country I have been visiting since just before Christmas — Sweden — I found a society that had already legislated and implemented regulations in premises that ensured a certain distance between CCTV camera and the citizenry below; that already required private-sector street CCTV to watch only that square metre or so which ensures due and reasonable coverage of entry points; and that, above all, when travelling on public transport all footage thus gathered has public sell-by dates of tens of hours not tens of weeks, is only viewed by the police themselves, and is stationed so it FEELS, ffs, like something you can embrace wholeheartedly as part of a vigorous democracy, not something you must reject out-of-hand as signs of an all-too-evident encroaching authoritarianism.
And with all this, I am actually convinced, without knowing for sure, that they will have as much CCTV as we do in the UK. The difference there being that it’s designed to make citizens feel free and open in their sense of how these securities are intended to function, not imposed on by the overbearing and censorious guardians of the state as many here might feel.
Surveillance as an extension of the citizen then, not the state:
No. Sweden is not perfect. We are not perfect. We have virtues, it is true. So do they. What we can do perfectly, meantime, is learn the best of each other to integrate these things, encountered and assessed judiciously, into the best of our own.
Right now, the UK political system disables this purposeful approach to society-building and their sustaining. The current Swedish government is as right-wing as ours. But it’s not right-wing or left- that has to matter. It’s whether we choose to be questioning, querying, learning beings or not. Whatever are the politics we wish to espouse.
My message, then, to all UK politicians past and present? DON’T use your politics to obviate your HUMAN duty to be prudent emotionally; purposeful societally; and compassionate humanely. Because if that’s your game — that is, your politics is more an invisibility cloak than a badge of courage — you’re also, on top of not being all that, not redeemable either.
And if so, you don’t deserve to lead a dog, never mind a country.
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.
and maybe the real problem here is that it’s not my sensitivity that makes me personally dysfunctional but your insensitivity that enables putin, society-wide, over and over again, to leave babies in their cots, bleeding red and dead as they slept.
if i am right re #noi, it’s been undermining all our societies for decades:
our = western, as well as locally here
and where i am right, the owners of #neoterrorismontheindividual and its processes and tools collect data on everyone, without exception. however, their owners and users choose when to use this data: they pick their moments and actual targets really judiciously.
mostly, it only gets visibly used against those who notice: what happened to me in 2003 in the uk.
but imagine if everyone began to notice: what then?
then, all the data these bad actors have collected on you over the years — keeping their powder utterly dry, if you like, in expectation of inevitable future need — would allow them to rapidly up their game overnight: because then, for them, the threat level would actually begin to exist. to date, it’s been all one-sided: theirs.
so what then?
#noi would become a visible act of repression, not an invisible one. it wouldn’t be #neocrime any more. what before sociology and criminology called #darkfigure:
and maybe #ukraine is not a sign of putin’s strengths in longitudinal gaslighting, though it might be easy to come to this conclusion.
maybe it’s a sign of his ultimate desperation. for his version of #noi, even factoring in pandemic, banking scandals, and three wars of his making in the last fifteen years, haven’t led quite enough to the total dislocation of western economies he sorely — and i’m sure dearly — expected would be delivered after all these years of having being a kgb acolyte of the worst, turned thug in fancy suits of the most horrible and politically immobilising kind.
because #ukraine has never just been about territory. that is, not physical. equally, and maybe much more, it’s been about distracting and dismantling western unity and sense of time & place: all good people’s mental territories and landscapes.
in the end, putin and his ilk are not even spymasters: they’re chessmasters in the most terrifying traditions. it’s chess they’re playing, not politics. total surrender, but sometimes — right to the end — with you not even thinking it’s going to be your fate. like the jews in the ghettos: worse than this, it surely can’t get.
in conclusion?
i can live with being ignored. i can live with being gaslit daily, in the trivial and incompetent ways they do. i can live with the #ukraines we have awaiting us. i suffered the #balkan one. i survived that, even at the cost of being improperly incarcerated as a result of the another democratic dismantling in 2003: the terrifying lead-up to #iraq which led to my own provoked mental dysfunctionality.
and we can’t forget 9/11: we never must.
and we can’t forget #pandemic either, though we already are: how the mercilessly rich knew it was coming and prepared their supply lines to benefit.
but let’s just imagine that for every hyper-sensitive person you assume people like me are, what you’re really witnessing are canaries in the mine: and meantime, as you laugh at us, and those who cause pandemic graft, invasions like #ukraine, disasters like #iraq, tragedies like 9/11 … and #brexit, and #trump, and all that stuff … well, maybe we’re not sensitive to irrelevance; maybe, instead, you’re insensitive to the embedded criminality that starts with the smallest of communities, the tiniest of acts, the symbolic gaslighting of the idiot on the metro … and maybe the real problem here is that it’s not my sensitivity that makes me personally dysfunctional but your insensitivity that enables putin, society-wide, over and over again, to leave babies in their cots, bleeding red and dead as they slept.
‘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:
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!
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