it's doing what you wanted but only hoped for and maybe you wanted more than you hoped for and maybe you expected deep down the sound of total victory and anything else for a while seems like less and maybe even feels like a failure of the deepest of all but in truth a total victory just ain't what humans are about when human is what we're about because a total anything is a pyrrhic everything
and so i begin to warm to you finally and the idea that without writing a single line of code i have convinced one of the biggest organisations in tech and those companies that work alongside them true that just my words and terms of english have been enough to show how a new world exists right out there and that it's no longer on my part a failure of the worst in any shape whatsoever nor a loss of the least to propose that i might accept working with disruption of this nature primarily because the culture of the big and the small in this case become us as one and the same and the same and the one since both of us converging separately anon have arrived at conclusions of parallel lines where arguments cogently strung together on two-pagers of simple a4 eschewing as we do the fancy graphics of "say what you're going to say and then say it and then summarise it" and where in fact the bullets pointedly hit the marks of zero innovation and even less invention because to follow these paths so well-trodden -- so religiously i mean -- is to die a death of a thousand mutts as dog-days encroach and shroud our thinking
for it's time once again to move well on from the old old old man's valley where even the youngest entrepreneur finds themselves trained up in the fuddy-duddy of the mere tweaking of tech so no one may rock the boats of existing portfolios nor business models galore (but actually hoary as hell)
because it's time the bells of brand new relationships consecrated on firm and financially win/win terms begin to bring to the world the teams and reams of the gutenberg of intuitive thinking:
the printing-press of arationality changing the way we do technology much more easily and being as there's no better way to do this than working back from the customer always in combination with a new lean that reasons with care and compassion and rationales of the very best to the very VERY maximum HOW to extract the truths NO ONE says but EVERYONE knows full well and all too well and as well as the next as we lie at night suffering the lies that tie the world up in knots and which have blotted our futures as they are held by their throats gory and cruel as the fossil fuels they freely promote even now by those who care only for planets outside and little for the one we all grew up on -- and here i mean all of us and how i mean it's clearly seen and how it's been! -- because this IS it i say: WELL time we found amongst the rich and poor the course that aligns our interests both and so nothing better than a brand new process that unleashes our humanity as never before
and so i'm ready to see what's next not as failure for another nor for me or them nor total victory for me or another nor us as we might see ourselves nor even as the outputs of the lyricists of ancient harps as they start to sing again out loud and proudly but rather quite instead a victory of the grandest for a GOOD citizenry wishing to bring about a humanity of the brightest by simply enabling our gut feeling and intuitive ingenuities in ways we never imagined ever
this is what it is then this text i write as i send this poem to the people who know much better than me what's happening on the inside-out and how this will affect the outside-in and so from me -- as this -- just as a missive of my final conformity and my capacity to embrace you now -- those of you who know (and how you do!) -- in my full cognisance of the scientific and evidence-based realities which (burnished anew) will renew and repair the horrors these warlike peoples have visited on the rest of us without qualms where to date only psalms are able for now to protect us with their prayers and beseechings and readings of the sacred stones and the rites that serve strangely to right our wrongs ...
because whatever happens now the killing-field will be levelled and new lean will become the tool we use -- shining as we will ... for sure! -- to release as we must and should and ought to and would have many many decades ago if only we had cared to listen to the equally sacred understandings in tow which we blithely ignored as stupidly tawdry attempts to go beyond making easy money and actually solving problems which weren't just making more money it's true in manners quite ill-mannered and foolish and unkind as we rewound to the past even as our tech is of now and even as we chose firmly to screw the world for everything we could scrape and make ours to the exclusion of a legacy we just DIDN'T want to make at all free in any way whatsoever whatsoever
and so now all this changes as i approach the companies which working together in common cultural dissonance and rub with different ideas yet common outcomes even so and uncommon sensibilities in beautiful consonances for these are the resonances which enriching now demand we hand over to each other our destinies not as passive fates too late to the party to do anything wise but instead to a common goal that SHALL be that of rescuing our species from its long-term idiocies by tapping into that fabulous skillset and virtue present all this goddamn time: the intuition of a humankind multiplied up a billion times and more being you and you and you and you and me and her and thee and tree and us ALL seeing clearly anew as if never before ... ... ever before: THIS all being our shared future-present collective fate awaiting us all from now on in and no longer too late to the party i mentioned because that party is the citizenry we will fully reconstitute not as brutal future robots of silicon but just sentient human beings achieving the total victories of me and you no longer gone ...
i have been racking my brains: what’s so different here in stockholm? why does the concrete feel so human? why do the humans feel so different? why is there such a sense of purpose — even when the purpose is not to be all that purposeful?
what does make it happen, after all? something tangible, i ask myself. something i can point to and show you how.
and so i realise, just now, two things which become quite clear for me. one i experienced one summer, decades ago in the northern spanish city of burgos: a continental climate and hot even 800 metres up. at least during the day. so everyone left the city in summer: to climes where you didn’t survive the weather but could thrive instead. the seaside, maybe. yep. there for example.
but i had to stay behind for work that july. and suddenly i had this sense of being at one with my environment. what was it? what was different? what had changed?
it was easy once i tumbled to it: everyone had taken their cars with them. not just that they weren’t there to drive them around: the cars themselves weren’t there to intervene in the visual landscape, and distract and divert and impact on your psyche, even when only subliminally; and then again, even hurt some of us because of a still undiscussed neurodiversity … and all as a result of their deliberately engineered capacity to attract our attention inescapably with covert ingenuity.
here, today, then, in central stockholm, there are two things which tangibly make me feel at home. the first is an absence; the second being a presence.
the absence, first:
no cars. very few anyways. no need for cars. just people using their legs. do you remember legs? remember what that was about? no. not the clutch and the accelerator. the pavement and the kerb and walking the line … and the dance.
the presence, second:
so many young people and children and elderly and other. and a young man with a boom-box, and then the coffee-drinkers on the terrace across the road smiling in recognition of their own youth, perhaps; and smiling, all the same.
and then bikes galore and bio-diesel buses, and trams and stuff, and within five minutes walk an underground and a commuter-train network.
so: this is purposeful living which liberates not suffocates. and don’t believe the anglo-saxon right-wing when they say sweden equals “smotherland”. what they say when they do … it’s utter bollocks.
more than any country i’ve been to, this is an intellectually, emotionally and socioeconomically free society. even today. even after everything we’ve all been through. even after what they think they have lost to a better past.
imperfections? for sure.
on the scale of other countries flaws and injustices? no way, josé.
just one example from the uk to illustrate. many years ago, foodbanks arrived to ameliorate real pain. a conservative minister even praised the fact: community coming together. she (i think she was a she but she only voiced what all her party, mainly men, also preferred to assert) … well … she could’ve said how terrible that they were needed in the first place. but she didn’t.
last year in the uk of johnson & co, it was warm-banks for those who couldn’t afford both food and central-heating.
and so this year, gordon brown, the ex-british prime minister, informs us of hygiene-banks: for those in the uk who already share toothbrushes, can’t buy toothpaste, and who find that sanitary products for women just ain’t something they can contemplate:
so DON’T tell me “smotherland” EVER again, when you discuss the fact of sweden and its ways of seeing and doing stuff. because if you do, if you dare to, you just really have no idea what you’re saying … no idea whatsoever.
and that’s a tangible fact for sure.
as tangible as the weekly death tolls that add up year after year, at the hands of the gun-holders who terrorise good american citizens in the name of spurious constitutional rights.
The real nub of the issue is this: in the absence of data, we can only use data that is present. Here, it’s clear when someone commits a crime and we catch them after the event with a certain number of mobile train security personnel on our payroll. That’s measurable: the ratio of events to arrests, for example. What’s not measurable by automated data science and analytics half so easily is when something doesn’t happen because a permanent guard is present to act as deterrent.
Mil Williams, Stockholm Sweden, 21st April 2023
Introduction:
There are strikes on the commuter trains — the otherwise fabulous pendeltågs — here in Sweden: even the occasional wildcat ones. The frustration is patent: more so, because the strikers are right.
This is why:
An aside:
As a brief by the by before I continue, I think the train companies are able to claim the numbers of security and safety staff would remain the same, and yet still want to go ahead with it all, because they’re changing the type of workforce: you still need to go through with rightful and rigorous measures to vet and upskill non-train guards of all sorts it’s true, but with a train guard it’s less easy to change and chop their working locations, conditions and so forth. Or outsource the workforce, even. Change overnight who employs them and how.
No?
So …
How a data-driven world can deceive:
The thing is, here we have a perfect example of when a “data-driven world” actually needs academia more than it needs an automated data analytics and data science as we usually understand them.
The train companies in Liverpool and Sweden both I am sure will have had long-term strategies to re-engineer the structures of their employees and related re in-house and outsourcing options, and whilst taking guards off the trains in the circumstances described wouldn’t deliver immediate economic advantage, as indeed they underlined in Liverpool for sure, long-term if I’m right it definitely would.
The real nub of the issue is this: in the absence of data, we can only use data that is present. Here, it’s clear when someone commits a crime and we catch them after the event with a certain number of mobile train security personnel on our payroll. That’s measurable: the ratio of events to arrests, for example. What’s not measurable by automated data science and analytics half so easily is when something doesn’t happen because a permanent guard is present to act as deterrent.
And this is the challenge here. It really is a challenge around what we do when the evidence base is incomplete: that is, how it leads us to take quite the wrong decisions.
To the solution:
There is a solution too; I alluded to it above. Straightforward academia gives us tools to codify absences, in for example qualitative data such as an interview transcript or video, so that what isn’t said is as significant as what is.
If we could create an equal set of tools for strategic decision-making when deciding if to take train guards off trains or no, perhaps we would avoid the strikes we’re having everywhere: and at the very least, we could validate, in a less conflictive way, the common sense most users of public services have that a “bobby on the beat” engenders an incomparable feeling of safety even where a car in the neighbourhood can be evidenced to deliver on objective data relating to quantitative crime events.
Summarising:
In crime and public safety, what doesn’t happen is as important as what does: and the “why” of both these matters, too.
So.
Let’s do something after the evidence bases for both aspects of the truth: that which has a visible side and the invisible events as well.
And then let’s achieve delivery of these aspirations sooner rather than later.
Another by the by: the promoters of today’s information are a further example of why we should act on the basis of what is not visible, as well as what is.
The Sweden Democrats started out as fascist and redolent of nazism of the very worst sort — at least according to the English version of Wikipedia. They themselves claim to have re-engineered their political DNA, which is not impossible but highly unlikely. Even so, medical professionals claim bespoke DNA of the human kind is very close to becoming a reality now; so we could argue that in politics it’s not unthinkable any more.
Let’s just say, however, for the moment unlikely and hard to do.
So. The risk from relying on present datasets instead of datasets relating to both what’s present and absent too? We allow people to hijack in bad faith what needs to be promoted in good faith.
The train personnel are right. Guards on trains deliver safety and security. This Swedish political party — in the current security conditions which China and Russia together have been stealthily laying out for decades together — are also correct to highlight the dangers of such, separate, narratives.
But they are wrong to a) conflate two issues like this; and b) lever the abuse and violence of both nation-states and their outliers in the fields of geopolitics to then promote an immigration narrative of their own re Sweden which delivers total obfuscation of our all too human reality and a zero confusion around their racist truths. Unless you choose to remain confused.
Sometimes it’s right to be firm: China — not all Chinese people — is a toxic regime. Putin’s Russia, too, has absolutely no redeeming qualities. But firm doesn’t mean we have to give fascism a place at the table of a wider collective progress.
Don’t besmirch the truth of the train staff by taking political shortcuts. And if this is what changing your political DNA leads to, change is what clearly you are NOT delivering.
Just occurs to me, too: even more reason to proceed with #intuitionvalidation.
someone asked me this morning why i write. i didn’t answer them.
maybe it was an example of new knowledge for me. my dissertation supervisor, a very brainy person, told me once that we should treasure those moments when we didn’t know how to answer someone: they were examples of new knowledge.
certainly for ourselves, and then again maybe for others too: a wider humanity. in either case, to be valued above almost any other lived experience. because the experience manifests itself in all our endeavours: a common denominator which is neither low nor common, tbh. in work; in academia; at school; in relationships; in a love at first sight … everything i tell you.
why write? not to be read. never. to write in order to be read is to almost surgically remove the very condition good and faithful writing demands to remain faithful and good.
freedom. that’s why i write. to be free. to remain free. to sustain a wider freedom. to ensure liberty remains a goal of all human beings.
you see … to be read is nice but dangerous. to be read is to enter into a dialogue. and in such dialogue we inevitably compromise, fudge, lose our trails of thought, forget the purpose of reflection — and, then, indeed, its power.
that’s not me. and after sixty years of trying to be a writer who is read, i realise it mustn’t be me. because my virtue is that i don’t enter into dialogue before i have my ideas.
actually, that’s not true. by writing, i speak to myself. and this, for me, is key: because it’s truer than true that without this mode of speaking with my being i never am able to know, until i follow the described procedure, what that being thinks.
so if i have to enter into a dialogue with the person who asked me this morning about why i write … well … i write to be free and find out what it is to be me.
is all.
enough?
i give no more.
except a video i just made and then a poem i just wrote this morning at breakfast in stockholm city, sweden.
i realised this not long ago. i don’t want to work with this company or that. i want to work with people who also, simultaneously, may work for one company or organisation or another.
when the institution overrides the individual from the start is when, even if all the starting-signs are cool, the individuals will one day — especially when huge amounts of money all of a sudden become likely — be inevitably and overwhelmingly overridden by their instituitional framework.
i don’t intend for us to start as i don’t mean us to go on.
so first i want to meet people. i want an organisational structure which generates a hybrid of #holacracy. and i want brains to show themselves the most important factor and matter of all, where the overarching #gutenbergofintuitivethinking and #intuitionvalidationengine projects are concerned.
because if you choose people first, and the people are right for you, then the institutions automagically will remain so too.
at least … whilst your people of choice remain at the institution in question. and they will do in general, for sure — if the institution remains worth then staying. for in the question of #intuitionvalidation there is no building-block which is more significant than the human as individual.
this is absolutely spot-on. it’s what’s driven me all my life. i have refused, under severe duress, from all directions, that is home and professional both, to accept that the way out of a world of horror is to mindfully and then abjectly disconnect.
the things i cannot change remain unchangeable where i accept my own wellbeing overrides being well with my conscience.
and at the age of 60, i feel firmly vindicated. the rest of my life needed the first 60 years to be as unsatisfactory as they have been. because unsatisfactory is the route to really knowing the truth: the truth that leads to judicious actions and gentle wisdoms. even if the latter simply tell us what we did wrong where once we could have done right.
i now focus on my work. i need no deep love; want to play no fields; want nothing closer to me than a cup of coffee or, at the very most, a shared good meal in a restaurant whose menu i am utterly unfamiliar with.
and so most of all, focus on my work. that’s what i want: what the beautiful woman below and her poster declaim. some of that for me now, please. and then a rest-of-life full of good deeds to SATISFACTORILY end it all.
vindication.
yes.
a satisfactory vindication … indeed.
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