Oil to one side, it’s worth remembering that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund is literally the largest in the world.

Larger that UAE and Kuwait’s combined.

So when you think about choosing your water supplier (oh, you can’t) ... or your electricity supplier (oh, it’s meaningless cos the price is fixed) ... or you get the train (oh, I’ll wait .. it’ll be here soon)...

... when you think about privatisation of utilities in this country ... and the proposals some make to grant new private drilling licenses, just remember that things could be different ...

... if the natural monopolies in this country were owned and shared by the country.

Private utilities are simply a means of wealth extraction.

Norway knows this.

Why don’t we?

To be honest, it’s hard to be positive when writing about technology and its inexorable impact on society…

We all know that we’re never going to put the genie back in the bottle … but when we are mindful to protect our autonomy, mastery and purpose, the genie looses some of its mischief.

Most of the scary things on the horizon exist because of only a handful of people. Their organisations exist to scale-up the exploitation of attention, the extraction of wealth and accumulation of control.

From Bannon’s “flooding the zone with shit” approach to politics … to Google, Meta and Palantir’s social-gerrymandering and mass-surveillance … these modern aberrations are not a symptom of social collapse.

They are the disease.

They are symptoms of weak regulation and they are not invincible.

It’s about time we stood up to these thieves of humanity’s future … and set ourselves on a different path.

Mastery 𝓋 AI

There is no doubt that modern AI is both incomprehensibly impressive … and enormously problematic.

I’m not going to get into the weeds on its moral or technical benefits or whether it can count the ‘r’s in a strawberry.

Instead, let’s talk about its direct impact on you, your mind, your kids …

… and your mastery of thought.

As far back as 2023, there were studies into the damage using things like Google Maps and predictive text keyboards does to your spacial memory or vocabulary, respectively.

Since then, conversational AI has become entirely mainstream — from ChatGPT to Google search results. In our billions we’re asking AI complex questions and accepting the answers with blind faith.

Ignoring the inherent, often deadly accuracy risks for a moment - consider how much work your brain is no-longer doing in order to arrive at that answer.

What’s consistent about these studies is that when people stop using Google Maps or predictive text … their spacial memories and dynamic, personal vocabularies do not re-emerge. The skills are gone forever.

You spend decades building the neural pathways that make you you… that give you your character, your joie de vivre … your mastery of thought.

Assistive technology - your maps app, your phone keyboard or the AI you’ve come to rely on - reformats the pathways of your brain. It undoes decades of learning that you will never get back.

I know we’re all busy ... but if you want to save the very essence of you, before it’s gone forever … turn off AI responses in your search engine and do the work to find the answer.

Do the research. Spend the time. Sweat the effort.

Don’t let haste delete your mastery of who you really are.

Purpose 𝓋 Social Media

I’m old enough and nerdy enough to remember how sociable the internet was before social media came along.

Before 2005, the internet was a throng of blogs, forums and chat rooms where people coalesced around subject-matter interests and a fundamental, inquisitive and altruistic drive to help and learn from each other.

Internet growth was accelerating. Social media did nothing to help that growth… it simply extracted attention from the millions who had built the momentum necessary for the internet’s inevitable mass-adoption.

Unregulated advertising-funded social media changed everything.

Social media is, to the internet, like cigarettes are to fresh air.

Of course, the draw of tobacco smoke is fulfilling to the lungs of the addicted … but the reality is that its harmful to our health and absolutely unnecessary.

Try to think about social media with the same framing Chris Van Tulleken uses for junk food…

Social media neither social nor media - it’s an intentionally addictive industrial product, specifically designed to extract your identity and attention in order to sell you to the highest bidder.

First, we need to understand that the selection of content your feed provides you is, in no way whatsoever, chosen because it will, in any way, benefit you …

… because it’s not. Not. At. All.

Worse - if your maps and keyboards can prune your brain’s spacial awareness and memory, it’s a safe bet that social media will prune your brain’s capacity to maintain a wide social circle … shrinking your awareness of your friends and family … and making your world smaller.

The solution is not as scary or difficult as you might imagine.

You don’t need to quit social media. You can use social media if you must … but you really should try to do two things:

First – if you can … quit the really creepy things like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube where the algorithmic feeds are intentionally toxic … and switch to something like BlueSky where you have full control over the feed algorithm.

Second – REMOVE THE APPS FROM YOUR PHONE and block all notifications.

Quite aside from the fact that every notification you receive is a tracking beacon, even with GPS turned off … when you remove these apps from your phone something remarkable happens.

You will get back all of those small moments … at the bus stop, while the kettle boils, on the loo or when you collapse into bed … and those moments build to reconnect you … to quality sleep, to the people around you …

… and to your purpose in the moment.

Autonomy 𝓋 The News

I hinted at the top of this piece that the insidious penetration of social media into our lives is inextricably linked to the predation of authoritarian-adjacent, usually right-leaning political movements across the West.

The nexus of this movement is the news.

Over the last two decades, news media has been battered from all sides.

Editorial quality has been driven down by the need to accede to the demands of the advertising algorithms. Meanwhile, the political classes increasingly game the system to hide the erosion of civil liberties behind a tsunami of egregiously stupid and banal behaviour.

Meanwhile the American tech conglomerates we all know like Google, Amazon, OpenAI and Meta … and the seditiously evil ones we don’t know so well – Thiel’s Palantir and ClearviewAI, Musk’s Tesla1, Starlink and X and TikTok, now largely under the control of Larry Ellison – are able to consolidate total control over the eyeballs of billions unimpeded by a US government on the brink of collapse into monarchy.

These organisations are not invincible. But time is running out.

While they have always fed on the content the news media produces, they are now beginning to consume the news media itself. With Amazon’s destruction of the Washington Post and Ellison’s purchase of CBS and now CNN, America’s news media is being conglomerated, eroded and silenced.

For some years now I have been playing with various ways to un-fuck the news.

Our goal is simple: give readers a platform that meets their needs to understand the world around them … and in so doing, deliver a sustainable revenue to human journalists who do the vital work of reporting on real-world events.

We are not journalists. Heck, we even use AI to summarise others’ content and reduce our cost to market.

But the motivation for us isn’t money … it’s weaning journalism off its addiction to advertising revenue by giving readers something that’s actually informative, rewarding and elucidating … while distributing whatever the reader is willing to pay to the original journalists and publishers.

Access to balanced, informative social and political news is the absolute cornerstone of a democratic society. Without it – why bother holding elections.

Orwell was right. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

If you only read one newspaper … if you rely on TikTok … if you only click the headlines that Google gives you … then it’s all too easy to start believing that two plus two really does equal five.

Nourish exists to help people do their own political maths.

Our nascent platform is built to give readers a broad spectrum of sources, from all over the world. To remind you that there are more than two plus two sides to every story. To remind you that there are more stories going on in the world than the myopic firehose of Trump’s latest nonseplosion.

… to remind us that it is understanding our choices that gives us autonomy.

Humans 𝓋 Tech - Finding Hope

For all the tech that pervades modern society – there is hope. We just need to demand a different approach from our leaders. We need to change the focus.

What if we focused on social growth — not just economic growth? It would force us to reframe every decision in the context of what impact it has on the fabric of society.

A happier, more motivated, more purposeful society would surely become be more economically productive … but reframing our politics around social growth would also, almost certainly improve health and social care, reinvigorate education and increase social cohesion far beyond any blinkered economic policies or a giving you a little help with your electricity bill while taxing you a little more next month.

But none of this changes until we deal with the elephant in the room: tech.

What if we focused our relationship with tech on its regulation, rather than simply bending over and letting it plunder our social capital.

What if we actually set human-friendly rules for the algorithms that drive attention farming, advertising and the erosion of the news media?

What if we recognised that the use of AI is as harmful to the mental fitness of the user as junk food and a lack of exercise is to our physical health.

What if we actually regulated the tech that harms humanity?

In the end, the government works for us. It exists to promote the autonomy, mastery and purpose of its citizens … and regulation is really the only tool it has to fulfil its responsibilities.

What if we actually started taking that responsibility seriously?

Watch the clip first ...

... and then consider ... that for decades ... perhaps forever ... we've been sold a dangerously misleading story ... of personal responsibility over all else.

The value of satire is not to influence how people behave ... it's to influence how leaders behave.

There's lots that's been/being written about Jimmy Kimmel and yes, Trump's juvenile insecurity is the kind of petrol that engulfs whole societies in the flames of authoritarianism, so America is right to be terrified...

... but I slid into your feed for a different reason... because Jon Stewart's point runs deeper.

His point about satire influencing leaders rather than people fits a pattern of rhetoric which correlates to the rise of authoritarianism throughout history.

The people are not responsible for the direction of democracy - they are passengers to the will of a tiny cabal of leaders of industry.

It doesn't matter how judiciously you separate your recycling - ocean life will still die out under the weight of microplastics.

You can try your best to make wise choices in the supermarket but you and your kids will still get overweight and die from preventable, diet-related disease.

Change your electricity provider if you must but the world will still cook on the alter of endless oil consumption.

And sure, read the right papers, rail at the same headlines and I can promise that Gazans will still be cleansed from their lands and Putin will still escalate on the western flanks of Europe.

You and I are not - in the end - in control.

From Cicero to Trump, social mobility and influence is an illusion. Real mobility is fleetingly rare: a fairy tale told to convince us that we too could change the world if only we wished hard enough ... It's no different to the illusion of saving the turtles by putting our Evian bottle in a different bin.

What is happening today ... the precipitous lurch to the right here in the UK, in the US and across what remains of the democratic states ... is the beginning of the end of the illusion.

Wealth and power will always protect itself. It always has. Through world wars, colonialism, slavery, medieval fealty right back to Rome and beyond ... wealth has never really changed hands ... it hasn't distributed ... it hasn't evened out.

Our system of occasionally balloted democracy is part of that system of protection, invented by the system as a means of regulation and coercion. Part of the illusion.

We don't ever get to actually vote for policy detail, we don't get to chose regulation, we don't control industry, drive out exploitation, moderate taxation or choose anything that would meaningfully enable the social mobility or the economic equity that we are forever promised is just around the corner ...

... we only ever get to cast one vote for a ludicrously limited selection of near-identical parties or leaders ...

... and while they might make promises, they need not keep them because in the end they are all funded by the same small group of industry leaders determined to protect their position ...

... and once in government they all must bend the knee the bond markets - a system of absolute institutional inertia as old as time - above all else.

For as long as most people believe that they have would have power to change things if only they mustered the will or skill to do so ... nothing will change.

In fact, it seems clear to me we really only have two choices:

1. absolute, permanent subservience to the self-preserving power of the institutional wealth of a minuscule group families who control our natural resources (oil and media, above all else) and industry ...
   
   … or …
   

2. an absolute reset of our system of governance and leadership selection ... the rigorous regulation of industry and the total dissolution of the international debt system that will otherwise stifle any meaningful change to humanity for centuries to come.

It might feel alarmist to put your choices in such stark contrast ... and perhaps people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones ... or perhaps that phrase simply exists to prevent change.

What I will say is that if you really think there's a middle ground then you're lying to yourself ... and I challenge you to spell out what you think that middle ground is ... because I don't think you can.

And if you don't have the stomach for choice two ... then I'm sorry but you're basically choosing choice one.

It's that simple.

What remains of yesterday’s graffiti on London’s law courts is probably a more enduring, meaningful, poignant image than the Banksy original.

First - a piece of art commenting on the role of justice in the subjugation of lawful protest and dissent.

Now - a reminder to everyone, including those in authority, that when protest swells on a tide of injustice it's much harder to wash away than one might expect.

You would be a fool to think we were not heading for dark times.

I'm in the business of helping people avoid "breaking news" ... but the headlines in the last 24 hours are inescapably alarming ...

➜ our PM undermining his already lacklustre credibility protecting Mandelson: a man who appears far, far too close to Epstein (and probably Trump, Maxwell et al) …

➜ the horrific and almost certainly incendiary shooting of Charlie Kirk in the US just an hour or so ago which, however ironic it might be (Kirk is quoted as saying gun deaths are fair price to pay for the Second Amendment), will only stoke the authoritarian crackdown Miller et al have been trying to foment for months …

➜ and all of that on a day when Poland has been compelled to invoke Article 4 of the NATO treaty following countless Russian drone incursions into their territory overnight …

➜ not to even mention Israel's incursion into Qatar 24h ago and the full-scale annexation of Gaza City and the north of the strip getting underway this week.

As the world descends into crisis we should ... no, we must ... be able to trust our government to act for the people ... which includes listening to dissent.

The more Starmer and his team stick their heads in the sand, ignore the moral hazard of supporting Israel's military, of supporting close friends of Jeffrey Epstein or prevaricate about pushing back Putin ...

... the more they undermine their credibility on any front whatsoever.

And the only people to win from that? Reform. Backed, it would seem, by the same people (Thiel, Putin, Trump etc) who are the root cause of most of the terrifying headlines above.

This country needs some real leadership - leadership that can take a Banksy for what it is - a criticism of the parlous state of our social contract - and leave it where it is until the problem it describes has been addressed.

Trying to rub it out solves nothing.

It makes the art more.

It makes our future less.

The stench of oil.

But what the whale? 🐳 Maybe they are environmentalists after all?

In recent weeks Trump has done so much more than railed at the scourge of windmills overlooking his golf course in Turnberry, Scotland.

He’s ramped up a vociferous war of punitive tariffs, legal aggression and permit stripping to do one thing and one thing only:

To take the wind out of the sails of renewable energy.

Now though, as if to soften the blow and add some kind of credibility to this brazenly corrupt misappropriation of the levers of state, RFK Jnr has come out in support of the whale population. Bless his organic cotton socks.

I have no doubt that the (already ~completed) construction of 65 massive turbine pillars is temporarily disruptive to marine life … much as the construction of a power station would disrupt the mice and cows that live in that field … but I can find no proof whatsoever that offshore wind has a net negative impact on marine life.

In fact, by restricting fishing and creating artificial reefs, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that they enhance marine biosecurity in the long run.

Oh - and they generate ~free electricity.

In the case of the almost-finished east coast project Trump’s team have halted: enough for “350,000 homes in Rhode Island and Connecticut”.

And that’s the point. 350,000 homes burn a lot of oil.

2.3 million barrels of oil per year, in fact.

That’s $150,000,000 of oil per year (or ~$450 per home).

So my question is this: do we really think that if one of Trump’s donors wanted to sink an offshore oil well in the Long Island Sound … to extract 2.3 million barrels of oil every year … that they would be so worried about the whales?

I doubt it.

Shipping, rising sea temperatures, shifting climate patterns and falling marines stocks are all contributing to the die-off of large marine animals. Earlier this year over 150 false killer whales were stranded and drowned off Tasmania due, they think, to high winds and abnormal sea swells…

… but let’s not confuse Trumps dislike for renewables as being anything but what it really is – the protection of the oil interest that put him into power.

And for those of us in Britain …

… yes, this abomination of a human being is coming for your clean, cheap energy too. Farage and Tice have “declared war” on the “the madness of net stupid zero”.

Why?

Because they work for the oil lobby.

Because, as I’ve explained before, making clean energy ~free at the point of use (which is what having solar panels on your roof kinda does) is absolutely incompatible to a vision of global socioeconomics built almost entirely around the extraction and consumption of fossil fuels.

Make no mistake people.

In Britain and America the same pattern is being played out for the same reason:

1. Victimise a minority and paint them as the enemy: Immigrants.

2. Use tech to sell your populist agenda an sieze the levers of power.

3. Rewrite science & the law to protect and increase oil production.

That’s it. That’s the script. That’s what we’re living through.

It is that simple.

Our society, our freedom — and the planet — are paying the price.

I’ve just been catching up (“dogfooding” we call it) on my little news app — Nourish – and came across this rather good summary of harms.

See; it’s not just then four-letter “p” word that’s down ~33%.

Content relating to the other “p” word – the one in West Asia that’s being systematically obliterated – and even websites like Wikipedia are being beaten with this blunt stick.

The harm of harm-protection…

I understand that the ideology put forward for this legislation has spurious things to do with protecting minors but I have always found that disingenuous.

Like a lot of modern legislation it’s shaped by shadowy lobbyists and poorly understood by fickle-minded politicians. The rather populist notion of protecting minors masks the real harm of all this harm-protection.

1. Bottom Trawling

First, the reality is that it is not just the restriction of harm in perhaps the very real sense (addictive, exploitative adult entertainment) but the restriction of speech … and moreover: the restriction of ideas, criticism and dissent.

The government has used terror to outlaw supporters of generally peaceful and quite frankly demonstrably-legitimate protest … in such a dragnet-way that these age restrictions are biting down on anything even remotely adjacent to those ideas.

That is silencing dissent — plain and simple.

2. Gerrymandering Constituents

Next, the whole thing is remarkably, dangerously contradictory since the government is, on the one hand, trying to emancipate 16 and 17 year olds to bolster their constituency … while on the other hand: restricting 16 and 17 year olds’ access to understand the fundamentally important values on which these young adults might be expected to vote.

How can we trust young voters with a decision when we can’t trust them with the material on which to base that decision?

3. Perversely Inverting

Finally, in practice this legislation is not just an age restriction: it’s a demographic throttle too. The misguided presumption about real-world behaviour fundamental to the design of this law’s application would be laughable if it weren’t, presumably, intentional.

We all know 99% of people just click “yes” to cookies and the frequent failure of the “no” to actually work is never punished. This real-world pattern renders those cookie laws dangerously flawed and utterly meaningless.

Well, this is the inverse.

No-one, unless their either stupid our desperate, is going to show their face, their passport and ultimately their sole to an anonymous website which, almost by definition, is of dubious repute and not really to be trusted.

This doesn’t restrict teens (who would be the first to circumvent such restrictions anyway)…

… it restricts adults who value their “online safety” (of all things!)

I hadn’t realised, in the noise, that this law extended to things like Wikipedia or support for legitimate protest but it does.

And so, in the application of “online safety”, we’ve ranked the safety of the government to avoid criticism above the safety of its citizens to protect their privacy and anonymity.

That is almost textbook 1984 behaviour.

And it won’t end well.

The PA ban, in the shadow of the OSA, describes a clear path to silence dissent.

That, in and of itself, is a terrifyingly chilling, utterly corrupting influence.

Remember: when tomorrow’s government gains power they will inherit the levers of the past, including this one.

Remember also: it’s never power that corrupts, but the fear of losing power.

No government with give this power up.

Why would they?

Personal note: yes, I know I was in the middle of a four-part three-parter and yes, I’m sorry it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything. (Thank you for all you smashing people who’ve been subscribing regardless xx).

Anyone who knows me personally knows that I habitually take on far more than I can manage and the last few months has been a confluence of all manner of shit that’s rendered this little newsletter bottom of the pile.

Rest assured that, like everything in my life, I have dozens of started-but-not-finished posts waiting in the wings! Ha. I will try and finish some and hit send.

In the meantime, thanks for reading — I love to hear what you think so do, please hit the comments — and please do spread the word. Every new subscriber is a slap round the face to finish all the articles I’ve started.

Stay safe - at home and online! 🔞

If you were Indian, you’d understand Modi’s drive to reassert Hindu values, Brazilian’s know that Bolsonaro promised law & order …

… and we all know that Trump is on a mission to Make America Great Again, whatever that actually means.

This post isn’t about the rights and wrongs of populists and authoritarians…

… it’s about why it works …

… and it’s the start of a three-part series exploring the nature of autonomy, mastery and purpose: in selecting leaders, in developing our own minds … and in creating a better future for the whole of humanity, now and in the future.

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The purpose of motivation.

In 2005, a group of MIT researchers lead by Dan Ariely conducted a study into the role of incentives in driving performance. The Daniel Pink talk, illustrated above, gives a great summary of the findings…

What this study shows is that, in a work setting, money is a an extremely poor motivator of performance. In fact for tasks that require even a tiny amount of thinking … increasing monetary reward reduces output.

The study found that to motivate employees: autonomy, mastery and purpose were much more powerful tools to motivate better performance.

Why is this?

My contention is simple: money is an extremely abstract concept … it’s not hard-wired into our mammalian brains and it’s not been part of our biological evolution.

Purpose, on the other hand, is an innate, evolved part of what it is to be human.

In fact … when you boil down anything you do in life, anything you do today … even your choice to read this article … what you find is that “purpose” drives everything. Why you get an early night, why you work hard, why you go to the gym and why you have kids.

Underneath every decision there is a purpose - it is the foundation to everything.

Hacking Humanity

So why does this matter today? Why did we start talking about populism and suddenly get onto motivational sales training?

Because it’s only when you understand our deep, primordial need for purpose that you understand why populism works. Populism hacks that need.

In fact, it’s more clever than that.

A true populist, like Trump or Farage succeeds not just because they have a sense of purpose … but because they create a vacuum of purpose around themselves that makes it difficult, if not impossible for anyone else to get or keep your attention …

Opposition to populism is never effective, because the opposition is so distracted by trying to examine, critique or undermine the populists message … that any sense of purpose the opposition has evaporates.

Any opposition is left being the people without any more purpose than criticising the populist … and that just doesn’t win hearts, minds … or votes.

Here’s how it works:

Make America Great Again.

Okay, no-one really knows what this means and when was America great in the past anyway? What’s actually changed? What defines “great” ..?

In the end, it actually doesn’t matter.

We can all imagine what it means and unless there’s a real debate on what it means (which there isn’t), what we’re left with is just a feeling.

That feeling is of what?

Direction of travel - that’s what.

In one short statement what this statement does is set out a problem (America is not great), and ideal (America should be great), a goal (become great) and in fact, a goal that is demonstrably achievable (“again” implies it’s possible because America was apparently “great” in the past).

It’s a perfect message of achievable, desirable (but in fact, entirely unknowable, intangible and unmeasurable) purpose. Who can argue with it?

Now, remember your Maya Angelou folks:

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

What Trump’s statement does is make you feel something: direction, intent, clarity … and more than anything … as sense of purpose.

It doesn’t matter that he says it while taxing the poor, giving to the rich, pardoning criminals, eviscerating environmental protections, destroying America’s soft power, collapsing the markets, embarrassing himself and the nation and violently rounding up and deporting innocent civilians as a pretext to martial law … because you still feel like: “Hey, at least this guy knows what he’s about — let’s follow him”.

The strength of feeling, is so persuasive and pervasive, that MAGA followers — often turkeys voting for their own Christmas — end up deploying a kind of ‘Zen’ political trust that only Douglas Adams could have imagined.

“He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of ‘Zen’ navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.”

– Douglas Adams, Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Keep America Terrible Forever

Okay … so we probably know all that … deep down. We innately like to follow people with purpose … much as we like to work for companies with purpose.

We like buying cheese from farms with a sense of purpose, football teams lift trophies when the coach has a sense of purpose - heck, the whole genre of sport is built around a sense of purpose: winning.

Leadership, success, awards, art, wars … humanity is built around purpose.

But Trump, Farage, Modi … these people don’t exist in a vacuum. In America’s case one would expect things to be far more balanced than they are.

MAGA can’t be the only one’s with purpose?

Can they?

In fact, the Republican’s control of congress is razor thin, most of the economic strength of the United States still sits firmly in deeply blue states and less than half the population actually voted for Trump in any case.

So where’s the foil? Where’s the counterpoint, the resistance, the rebuttal?

There is none.

It’s not that it’s in disarray (as many pundits characterise the Democratic Party)…

… it’s non-existent.

But why?

Well… the “why” here is critically important to understand.

What is the counterpoint to “Make America Great Again” ..? How does a Democratic politician really counter that? Don’t you want America to be great again?

The real reason that populists succeed is not, in fact, just because they have a clear, strong sense of purpose (which people might see through or with which people might disagree) … but that the strength of feeling their sense of purpose engenders sucks any other purpose out of the room.

The reason populists rise up against flailing competition is not because they succeed but that they force others to fail.

And yet, when we look back at 1930’s Europe, perhaps with some confusion, and think “how could it have happened” - we all too often loose sight of the broader political landscape.

Can you name any opposition politicians - heck, even other political parties - in 1930’s Germany?

In America there is no cohesive response to anything Trump, Miller et al are doing. There’s no unity in the Democratic party. There’s no opposition leader. There’s no vision. And: there’s no sense of purpose from anyone in opposition beyond complaining about what The President is doing…

In 2024, did Biden or Harris actually have a slogan? What was their vision?

Where we they offering to take the country, the electorate or the prospects of the people?

The bottom line is this:

When a politician comes along with a strong sense of purpose, it doesn’t matter how problematic that purpose is … the gravitational pull of the certainty itself sucks the air out of the room so that no-one else looks like a contender.

And of course, not everyone is fooled. But invariably, enough of the swing vote that exists in the middle of every democracy, gravitates towards the sense of purpose … the sense of how it makes them feel … and away from all the other politicians who are duped into a feckless “but we’re not them” approach … which inspires precisely nobody and alienates almost everybody.

In the end - our mammalian, gut instinct is to follow the sense of purpose first … before we even have the time for our intelligent upper brains to rationalise what we’re hearing.

By then, it’s too late. The feeling has its foot in the door.

Populists know this … and hack this instinct with ease. That’s why they win.

With purpose.

Where next?

So where do we go from here?

This is part of a three part exploration … of Purpose, Autonomy & Mastery … and my plan is to publish the next few parts over the next week or two.

I’m going to move on to our sense of mastery in an increasingly AI saturated world … because it’s not just populism that’s on the rise … the machines are coming for us too.

If you’d like to read that - hit subscribe. It’s free.

And if you’ve any questions or ideas … since there’s so much more I could have said … please hit the comments. They’re free too!

Have you noticed?

In the early 20th Century, the great philosopher, Winnie the Pooh, asked:

It’s a poignant question with a remarkable depth … and like a lost bear, it’s a thought that’s followed me around for most of my adult life.

What happens when society forgets to think for itself?

The suicide of Socrates…

In 399 BC, another of the greats, Socrates, was tried and convicted for his critical thinking. The septuagenarian philosopher was found guilty, buy 501 of his peers, of questioning the Athenian gods and corrupting the youth.

Declining the opportunity of escape, Socrates accepted death by suicide and ingested the poison hemlock to end his life … and yet, in many ways, he inspired a new era of critical thinking which empowered the modern world which we now inhabit.

Over the intervening millennia we have tried — often succeeded — to disentangle the dogma of state religion, we have enshrined the freedom of speech (and freedom of 🍑 peach)…

… and ushered in an era of critical thinking that has lead to an explosion of culture, the emergence of empirical science, a deep understanding of the universe and our place in it … and even, recently, a period of relative peace, prosperity and liberty for a decent chunk (though by no means all) of humanity.

While Socrates was killed for thinking outside the box, I think we can all agree that in the last 100 years at least, we’ve all been pretty free to think what we like and even do and say what we like, within reason.

The war on critical thinking…

But nothing lasts forever.

Western society has lurched, in the first quarter of this century, from an enlightened, liberal democracy … towards dogmatic, protectionist and increasingly feudal authoritarianism.

But this piece isn’t about what’s happening in the US right now … the suppression of dissent, the corruption of the constitution or the antagonism of civil war…

… this piece is about how we’ve got here … and for that you need to look at the media and the way we consume information.

It used to be that a few newspapers, even a few TV stations, had access to the levers of power … and intermittent access to their audience.

On a daily basis, our news would be disseminated. We would be given time to think critically about what we’d heard and read. We would discuss it with those around us - most likely people with similar perspectives - and the world would move relatively slowly most of the time.

Today, we are subjected to a 24h 6h livestream news cycle… it’s piped into every interaction we have with the devices to which we are glued: TV, radio, podcasts, social media, email … wherever we look, something has happened.

I often write about the impact of the livestream news cycle on mental health (in fact, I’m building a healthier option) but there’s actually something more intentionally pernicious than the psychological detriment of perma-fear that the economics of news causes…

… it’s called “flooding-the-zone”: Steve Bannon’s infamous philosophy designed to confuse the news media.

Coupled with the always-on firehose of news that our devices promote, “flooding-the-zone” collapses our capacity to think critically about anything — to dissect, discuss, interrogate, question, consider and understand.

We cannot think critically if we cannot stop to think.

That’s why Pooh Bear stops: to think.

The artificial thought…

But what happens to our brains when we stop thinking critically? … we forget to start again. That’s what happens.

Back in 2023 I wrote a piece about the dangers of one particular subset of technology that I saw as a risk: predictive or assistive AI.

I cited two studies in that piece related to the homogenisation of language in people who use predictive-text keyboards … and the damage to spatial memory caused by the use of GPS tools like Google Maps.

What I predicted then … though I perhaps didn’t understand the scale of it … was the explosion in the use of GenAI … and our lazy acceptance that it should start doing all of our thinking for us.

Creativity, in all it’s forms, requires time.

Time to ruminate, time to discuss, time to forget and time to think. Yes, of course, if we’ve achieved mastery in a skill - whether that’s live-drawing or hitting a print deadline, then we can sometimes be creative on the fly… but again, that comes from putting the time in … the 10,000 hours … to achieve mastery in the first place. There are no shortcuts.

In my industry, the same is just as true. As a software engineer, I know that fixing a bug sometimes requires stepping back from the machine and going outside to think … or forget. Sometimes the solution comes to me in the car … sometimes I talk it through with a colleague. Ideas often come from collaboration, from articulating, from dreaming... Solutions often amalgamate things that might seem irrelevant in isolation but dovetail perfectly when you fit them together.

Using AI to write your code, write your essay, think up your slides, plan your meeting, take your notes …

… it might seem convenient in the moment … but I promise you - just like you lose your spacial memory every time you drive along the blue line … you lose your ability to debug every time you let AI fix your code, you forget how to think every time you let it do your thinking for you.

GenAI is designed to please. It’s squeezed to provide an answer. It would rather hallucinate a proof than tell you you’re wrong. It will not be critical of you, even when it should be …

… so if you let it do your critical thinking … not only will your thinking not be critical … but you will lose your ability to understand that it’s not.

The coming storm…

So where does this leave us?

It’s not good news, sorry. Nearly 2,500 years ago, the forced suicide of Socrates may have unlocked the defining era of humanity … but eventually, we found Pandora’s last box — the capacity to build a machine that surpasses supplants our ability to think.

Meanwhile those who stand behind Trump and JD Vance — and behind so many European right-wing pretenders — have been very clear about their intention to “flood the zone” and disrupt societies ability to think critically about their actions.

They’ve also been very clear about their intentions.

This is Peter Thiel (Musk’s BFF, Vance’s patron, investor to Meta, Palantir & Clearview) speaking in 2022.

We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilateral change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.

Meanwhile, in our millions, we are turning to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity to do our work, to take our notes, write our essays and think our thoughts.

We live in a world submerged by media designed to erode our ability to think critically though pace, anxiety and chaos …

… and rather than face the challenge head on … we’re all becoming addicted to tools that actively prune our ability to protect ourselves against the flood.

If you value yourself … for heaven’s sake slow down your consumption of media and stop relying on someone something else to do your thinking for you.

As I said back in 2023:

For every few seconds you save doing a task … a few pathways you took time to develop get washed away. Eventually there will be nothing of you left.

Slow down. Do more things yourself. Think whole thoughts. Be you and only you.

And don’t step away from this article in despair … that’s not the point.

Step away from it with a renewed vigour … a new faith in your own ability to do your own things, a renewed agency to think your own thoughts.

As Pooh says:

The tariff maths is just so stupid that it can only be: misdirection.

Here is Peter Navarro – architect of Trump’s tariff scheme — and convicted idiot.

“Vietnam sells us $15 for every $1 we sell them”

But wait?

He’s forgotten some words.

“Vietnam sells is $15 of stuff, worth $15, for every $1 of stuff, worth $1, we sell them”

— which is a ZERO SUM GAME.

Who’s winning here?

Vietnam isn’t making a $14 profit … or 14x profit … or 1,400% profit on its relationship with the USA.

The US is: buying stuff of value … for what it’s worth.

I might just as well tariff my pub.

They sell me $15 of beer for every $0 of beer I sell them.

I’M BEING RIPPED OFF … aren’t I?

Here comes the magic… 🪄

Okay … so we’re all agreed. The logic behind the tariff hikes is not logic at all. It’s all so utterly banal that, for the world to make any sense, there has to be something else going on.

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So what’s really going on here?

Let’s break it down:

The Pledge

The world is ripping us off, we want to make America great, re-establish American industry, recalibrate the dollar … whatever. There are lots of pledges the administration is making … and much like the bird or the coin … they’re just for show.

The Turn

Anyone who’s been watching the news over the past few weeks knows that, whatever the pledge… someone is getting filthy rich from the tariff about-face.

On Tuesday, the whole administration – particularly Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary – were adamant that the tariffs would say, despite global markets having plummeted…

Nevertheless someone knew things were about to change because a huge volume of trades, betting the market would rise, were placed on Wednesday…

… and just moments later, Trump posted this …

… and then Leavitt and others announced that tariffs would be “paused” sending markets through the stratosphere.

The S&P had its biggest jump since 2008. The NASDAQ: it’s biggest climb in 24 years.

Trump even bragged openly about how much his friends made yesterday…

But wait! … that’s not the trick …

Fiddling the market was just The Turn …

The Prestige

… every magic trick has a third act,
the hardest part,
the part we call "The Prestige".

While everyone’s looking at tariffs and trade, there’s something else going on in America. While all of the papers are talking tariffs. While congressional hearings talk insider-trading, while reporters interview AOC about MAGA profiteering … while we talk penguins and retaliation from China …

… there’s something else going unreported. Well. Nearly.

While the world is getting sea-sick just watching the markets rise and fall … Elon Musk’s team of crack 20-year-olds is up to something far, far more nefarious that stealing people’s pensions (or 401k’s as the Americans seem to call them).

They are stealing data.

They are ransacking the government, firing staff, closing down federal offices … and all the while, they are sucking up trillions upon trillions of datapoints – data on every person living and working in America.

Where you live, what taxes you pay, where you and your parents went to school, how successful you are at gambling, who won in your divorce and why you got divorced, who you know abroad, what kind of porn you like, why you got arrested, where you’ve ever worked …

… and there’s every suggestion that they plan to mobilise this data rapidly.

Yesterday, the Department for Homeland Security announced they will start screening immigrants' social media for signs of un-American sentiment … including those already resident in the US.

The day before, Leavitt, extolled the virtues of Trump’s free thinking when she suggested the administration would love to deport born-and-bred Americans to the El Salvadorian gulag where so many – often seemingly innocent – Venezuelans have been summarily sent to die in the past few weeks.

What she actually said was that this would be restricted to criminals … which would seem fine until one understands two things…

First: America has 1.8 million people in prison … the largest prison population in the world … so the scope for deporting “only criminals” is already astonishing.

Second: the definition of what is criminal changes. For instance, the Texans are already trying to criminalise transgender identity as some kind of federal fraud.

Leavitt and The White House seem aligned with this specific change. On Tuesday she stated that she will not, as a matter of policy, correspond with reporters who simply include pronouns in their email signatures, telling the New York Times that such people “ignore scientific realities and therefore ignore facts”.

To be clear on the “scientific realities” … the incidence of genetically intersex births in the human population is the same as the incidence of red hair. It’s not common, but it’s hardly that uncommon: ~135 million people … equivalent to ½ the US population.

Where does this leave us?

It’s a perfect storm.

An executive which, based on the Trump vs USA 2024 Supreme Court believes the president — and his orders — are beyond the reach of the law.

A judicial enforcement willing to round-up and summarily deport innocent people against court orders.

A president openly considering deporting citizens to off-shore torture-centres for “criminal” behaviour.

An open drive amongst state legislatures to criminalise personal choice and a federal crackdown on peaceful protest.

…

And all of that is before we get to the prestige above …

The DHS’ announcement that it will start scanning the social media accounts of visa applicants (both those abroad and those already living in the United States) should be taken in the context of the technological coup going on under the headlines.

They have yet to announce who is going to get the contract to run this scanning service — but you can make an educated guess.

The whole point of Musk’s “DOGE” effort is to strip the public sector of its capacity. The defence tech sector is no different. In fact, only last week, the director of the NSA was fired, seemingly at the behest of a far-right friend of Trump, and will no-doubt be replaced with someone more compliant. Compliant, I suspect, to award the contract to someone like Palantir or Clearview.

Palantir is in the business of AI-analysis of public data. Sound familiar?

In the UK, they have already sucked up all of our NHS data and are now trying to get into our police databases and even our prison data to do such things as “calculate reoffending rates”. In the US, in 2019, during the first Trump term, Palantir were involved in the rounding up of hundreds of migrant workers by ICE.

Clearview is in the business of AI-stalking via CCTV. Globally.

In fact, Clearview has been taken to court or fined by the British, Dutch an Australian governments for their total disregard for personal privacy or domestic privacy legislation… but they don’t care and don’t bear any responsibility because they sit outside each jurisdiction.

More recently, Clearview has been working with the FBI and ICE in their efforts to round up migrants.

But. Clearview’s ambition's don’t stop there. Clearview’s founder Ton-That is about as extreme as they come. A eugenist, obsessed with IQ and racial-purity, Ton-That’s Clearview is not just a security company — it’s an ideological engine of change — designed not only to target immigrants but also people of colour and the political left.

I could fill this newsletter for years just focusing on Palantir and Clearview but we don’t have time. There is however one last thing to say…

… where do you think the money came from to build Palantir & Clearview?

Yes, you guessed it: Peter Thiel.

Square One: PayPal.

So we’re back to square one.

Behind all the bluster of tariffs and market manipulation, there’s something far more sinister brewing.

The PayPal Mafia — a group of white South Africans1 including Peter Thiel (who believes, amongst other things, that women shouldn’t vote and the welfare system shouldn’t exist), Elon Musk (who I’m assuming we’ve all heard of) along with David Sacks, now leading Trump fundraiser … and Ken Howery who is picked to be Trump’s ambassador to Greenland and lead Thiel & Musk’s efforts to create a new “network state” on the island — has taken over the United States of America.

And no-one’s paying attention …

… because they’ve put Trump out, front and centre, to play the crowd.

Trump … was never running the show.

Peter Thiel has been pulling his strings since 2015 … tested his tech on Britain’s 2016 Brexit referendum, via Cambridge Analytica, before hoisting Trump into the White House later that year.

And when Trump goes, Thiel’s protégé, former employee — JD Vance — will be the drop-in “CEO-dictator” that the prophet to all these weirdos, Curtis Yarvin, has advocated for publicly for years.

We are 80 days into the second Trump presidency.

There are 1,380 days to go.

America is less than 5% into this storm … and there is already little left of most major federal institutions, the presumption of innocence, due-process, freedom of expression, data-privacy or the right to protest.

Meanwhile, a handful of greasy billionaires are working tirelessly to turn America into a pure, white, high-IQ apartheid state … where women are subservient vassals, destined only to solve the greatest crisis facing humanity: the falling birthrate.

If you consider what these loons have achieved in 80 days … just imagine where they will get through in another 1,380. There will be nothing recognisable left.

Meanwhile, stay entertained, distracted or distraught if you must.

But remember that Trump — let alone Navarro, a man so stupid, the only expert he could find to corroborate his inanity was Ron Vara, an anagram of his own name — is just the side show.

Trump is PT Barnum. All show. No truth. No clue, really. The man is clearly an idiot — and a bunch of high-IQ obsessed eugenists will not have backed him ’cos they think he’s smart…!

And in the end: whatever he does never amounts to more than a pledge and a turn.

It’s all he’s capable of.

If you want to know what’s really going to happen…

… look for the prestige.

“The Trump administration has sent a letter to some large companies in the EU warning them to comply with an executive order banning diversity, equity and inclusion programmes.”

When SM (presumably “Stephen Miller: the white nationalist at the heart of Trump's White House”) says that the administration will need to make clear to Europe what they “expect in return” for strikes on Yemen, one has to assume that he’s not really only talking about extorting “economic gain”.

Make no mistake: the US administration (esp. the people behind it; Miller, Mercer, Thiel et al) are going to use the economic, military and technological clout America has to export and impose their darkly racists, homophonic and misogynistic ideology across the last remnants of western liberal democracy.

If, like me, you live in the UK - know now: you are not safe from a darker future.

You cannot afford to pretend this won’t happen here. Musk is already stirring the pot of hatred and mistrust across the UK, Germany and elsewhere.

You cannot be complacent in believing it is someone else’s responsibility to solve the problem.

You cannot allow the storm of media chaos to turn you away from understanding the truth. Do not cow from the fight. Lean in. Resist.

Start each new day by reaffirming your own beliefs (if you have them) that we are all born equal, that we are all entitled to the quiet enjoyment of a safe, purposeful and prosperous life … and ask yourself, as you get yourself ready each day: what are you actually doing to help.

Because if you don’t, then you are, in your silence, voting for Miller, Musk and the Mercers … for Trump, Thiel and even Putin to successfully build their plutocratic autocracy on the ashes of democracy …

… and you need to be honest with yourself (and your children) about the consequences of your inaction.

And I don’t mean a translation from Ukrainian to English - I mean a translation in the mind of the listener. In fact, it’s a textbook example of why the unaware children of narcissists make poor diplomats — and terrible leaders.

Because the worst part of this specific exchange is that if you listen carefully, Trump has misunderstood what Zelenskyy is saying...

He talks over Zelenskyy, responding to a misapprehension - probably a projection - of what he thinks he's trying to say … before he actually finishes saying it.

Zelenskyy: “First of all, during the war, everybody has problems, even you. But you have nice ocean and don’t feel now. But you will feel it in the future. God bless –”

Trump: “You don’t know that. You don’t know that. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel. We’re trying to solve a problem. Don’t tell us what we’re going to feel.”

Zelenskyy was using the word “feel” to mean “notice” … “you will feel it in the future” ... as in: pressure will be exerted which American will notice, externally. It will be apparent. It will have an effect.

What he’s not doing is pre-judging Trump — or America’s — feelings on the matter.

Trump however, assumes he's saying “you're going to have feelings about the pressure of Russia” which is something subtly, but crucially different.

Again. That’s not what Zelenskyy is trying to convey.

I suspect, given Trump’s close relationship with Putin, almost it seems as a father-figure — giving approval, compliments, noticing him, playing the part that Trump craves — that Trump feels immediately defensive about the idea that he might feel something negative towards this paternal character.

Trump clearly gets quite angry at the sense that someone is telling him about his feelings (towards his source of paternal approval) — which is a massive trigger for someone brought up by a narcissist. He immediately proceeds to burn the conversation to the ground.

A grown up would have listened carefully, avoided taking offence, considered what was really being said … and then reacted carefully and diplomatically.

A petulant man-baby on the other hand ... will get angry at their misapprehension and throw their toys out of the pram because their projections are stronger than their grasp on reality.

And the 21st century — and the future of 100’s of millions of innocent people — will certainly have pivoted on that one, juvenile moment.

As Zelenskyy repeats again and again … “God bless” … God bless us all.

First published as a Tweet thread/rant in ~September 2020
Republished here because, well, I deleted twitter but still want to refer to it.
Stay tuned for a post about Gaza, Ukraine, Greenland… and what lies beneath.

Humanity is not having a good century so far.

Endless wars, global pandemics, rich dying of disinformation, poor dying of famine & flood, rising populism, declining freedoms and occasional economic collapse & austerity.

There is a simple solution..

..but first a little “why”.

In the UK & US we like to think that we live in a practical democracy; that it’s “a place where the people really decide regularly how to be governed”.

This myth is based on the facade that depicts a real, meaningful choice at the ballot box.

Here’s why it’s no real choice:

Putting aside your red-team / blue-team politics for a moment; let’s look at the construct of our “political elite”..

Predominantly white, privately educated, wealthy men.

So why the demographic skew?

Well, for one thing, politics here and in the US wasn’t built to a truly democratic design.

Democracy is an illusion.

In both cases it has evolved from a monarchic/religious power base which still holds most of the wealth and power today, especially here in the UK.

But I vote don’t I?

Yes; but consider the myriad of things you care about… your job, health, tax, commute, kids’ education, digital privacy, local forest…

… not to mention foreign policy, aid, views on immigration, deforestation, space travel.

5 years is a lot of trust on a binary choice.

Would you sign a fixed 5 year contract on your first day in a job?

Would you agree a fixed 5 years of cohabitation before a first date?

NO.

Our system of democracy isn’t designed to provide democratic choice – it is designed to consolidate & retain power by providing the illusion of choice at regular intervals.

But in the end our leadership knows that no-one wants that much choice anyway so all good? Yes?

NO. Why?

Because the system – and our society – has been corrupted by a new power base that has even out grown the old power structures of monarchy, religion & state.

This is the century of the corporation.

In both the UK & the US, public policy is bought & paid for by a few dozen corporations.

Through donations, revolving door employment, lobbying, research funding, foreign policy manipulation, bribery and judicial bullying corporations are now firmly in control.

Don’t believe me?

Consider for a moment what it takes to reach the cabinet, the Lords, the senate or the presidency..

Put aside the financial aspects of campaigning and consider the deals made, the friends collected, the favours called in – the sheer work to reach the top.

Our politics are corrupted by our corporations cos that’s where the money and power is.

It’s not fanciful to assert that this will never change while we treat leadership as a right, while we associate leadership with power, while we keep voting for the status quo.

So what then?

Leadership is a duty not a right.

A true leader confers power on others – they do not accumulate power for themselves.

The right model for democracy is “jury service” not “X-Factor”

In short …

If you want to fix society, education, poverty or the environment then you MUST accept that choosing once every 5 years between two rich, white men who’s only qualification is the giving & receiving of private favours will not achieve your goals.

So what then?

A simple, collaborative, truly democratic, open approach to policy & politics based on consensus, duty and the will of the people.

I’ll try and explain …

Consider a party where everyone has a voice, where there is no “leadership” and yet where no decision languishes unmade nor gets made in haste or because of dogma.

If you don’t think that could work then why do you accept the idea of jury trials for high crimes & misdemeanour?

My vision is simple.

It works like this…

All policies, large or small, are discussed in the open on a wiki (just like Wikipedia).

Things that are complex (“Health”) are broken down into smaller, more manageable policies (“orthopaedic post-op care”) each with their own page.

Every policy has an adjudicating panel, picked at random, rotated regularly, from the whole pool of volunteers.

No candidacies, no campaigning, no corruption, no background dealing. Just names in a hat and a jury selected.

Over time, policy is formed, refined, agreed, updated, considered, tested, discussed, critiqued, adjusted and reformed.

• Everything in public.

• Everything written down.

• Everything transparent.

• Everything open to contribution.

• Everything built to improve society.

All the while the influence of corporate lobbying on policy design is mitigated because…

… if you take away the need for the accumulation of power & favour from those who make decisions, those with money & influence no-longer have anything of value to offer.

Then what!?

Election – that’s what.

Candidates picked by the same rules, at random from a pool of volunteers and under contract to do two very important things…

• First: to act as the spokesperson for a panel of peers, not as the only seat of power in their constituency. This ensures the same adjudication process exists at all levels of power.

• Second: to resign their seat for by-election at a pre-determined, randomly selected time within the 5 year term. This will create an asynchronous, continuous rotation of MPs as well as panel members.

My assertion is that:

1️⃣ This system will provide vastly more transparency & accountability to public policy.

2️⃣ This will deliver a fundamentally more accurate demographic representation of the population to government because it removes the need to “campaign” in public, to amass power & favours or to invest a whole career into reaching the top…

… more accurate in terms of gender, ethnicity, socio-economic background, education, profession, family geography, life stage, age, experience, attitude & disposition.

3️⃣ Most of all – this will break the unrealistic relationship between “the policies we need” in order to fix the environment, social equality, education, health and well-being of our planet, our society and our relationship with our neighbours… and “the accumulation of power”.

… we need to govern ourselves according to what SOCIETY needs, as a whole and as a people – the things that make the world a safer, cleaner, more fulfilling place for everyone.

… we CANNOT continue being governed by a small clique of corporations and their “political elite” puppets who facilitate the endless farming of our privacy, or naïvety, our time and our attention.

There lies the end of humanity, the rise of fascism… or both!

Stay with me… it’s important.

Nobody would argue with your right to plant a tree, right? Anyone should be allowed to gather some earth, a pot, some seeds … and grow themselves a peach tree.

And when your tree grows and produces ripe, juicy peaches then I think we’d all agree that no-one should stop you eating them, right? In fact, I would go further and say — you should be allowed to give your peaches to anyone you like. That is your right.

So yes, I believe in Free Peach.

I also believe that if you would like to offer your peaches to others, you should be able to do that too. In likelihood you would probably find a grocer to take on your stock of peaches and give or sell them to others. That’s the beauty of a free society.

So okay: if I believe in Free Peach as a principle then it’s fair to say that I also believe in your right to sell or distribute your peaches as the market will bear. Fair enough.

Rotten Peaches

But what happens when your peaches are rotten … what happens if they ferment?

Are you still okay to sell them on the open market? Peach wine is alcoholic … and that should be regulated, yes? It’s ABV should be known and labelled, it should be manufactured hygienically, it shouldn’t be marketed to minors.

I’m not anti-peach-wine, I’m not anti-alcohol. You should be free to drink and I should be free to sell you my carefully rotted peaches.

But there are standards.

Alcohol is dangerously addictive and acutely lethal if it’s not manufactured properly. In the west it is distributed only under license, it’s illegal to distribute it to under-18s (in America, under 21s!?).

We take rotten peaches seriously. We are still free to make homemade hooch and we’re all free to drink. But we regulate distribution. It matters.

Bootleggers

By now I know you know what I’m getting at here. The issue is not your right to grow, sell or buy peaches — rotten or not — no-one is taking that away.

The issue is about the total lack of regulation around the artificially-monetised distribution of free, dangerous peach wine to minors and peach-wine addicts.

Free speech is just the same.

For all Musk and Zuckerberg’s hype of being free speech absolutists, they’re really showing themselves to be grotty backroom bootleggers of rotten, unregulated, harmful and often downright dangerous rotten speech.

Why?

For Zuckerberg, because it’s politically expedient to bow to the MAGA call for “masculine energy”. As I wrote earlier in the week, he is just obeying in advance.

For Musk, it’s all part of a broader strategy to wrest control of the American state and further his commercial and ideological interests.

Neither of them give a flying fuck about what you say, think or believe. They’re not protecting your rights. They are protecting their own interest and literally nothing else.

Anarchy branded as “Freedom”

The bottom line is this: the concept of “Free Speech” that Musk and Zuckerberg are now selling is snake-oil.

You were always free to say whatever you like … they don’t control speech, they control reach … and those are very, very different things. You can say what you like with or without their help and you always could.

The question is whether or not you have a right to have your hate-speech amplified by an algorithm that is singularly interested in selling your attention to advertisers. They are not interested in what you say, nor are they offering you freedom to say what you like.

They are only interested in deregulation to improve the potency of what they can sell.

They are only working to exploit your propensity to react to hatred.

And at what cost? Probably at the cost of a free and fair society, ironically.

With no regulation of the kind of speech that is artificially amplified across these vast networks we are putting free society at massive risk.

Content that encourages suicide or toxic masculinity or violence against those of a different race or gender or political leaning is all fair game according to Zuckerberg.

Consequences be dammed…

We can’t do much to fix all of this, of course. But you can stop supporting hatred. For fuck’s sake please stop using Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Today, one of the most influential people in the world, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta decided his platforms Facebook and Instagram should ignore that rule.

Despite having propagated a genocide in Myanmar in 2017, by recommending content without oversight, Zuckerberg has today announced that they are rolling back their fact-checking apparatus across their entire platform.

They have abruptly removed most of their content standards, to allow — and presumably promote — hate speech towards minorities, the characterisation of women as “household objects” and homosexual orientation as a mental illness.

And they have added a number of Trump’s acolytes to the board.

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The rule. No exceptions.

This is not a minor, incremental policy change.

Nor is Meta an outlier.

Obeying has become the rule, not the exception.

In fact there is little or no media left in America that hasn’t decided to obey in advance. Trump isn’t even inaugurated yet.

• Disney (ABC News) capitulated in December to settle defamation suit they were widely expected to win rather than irritate the Trump administration.

• Musk (Twitter) invested $275 million in the Trump/MAGA movement and is serving as First Buddy to the president-elect.

• Bezos (Washington Post) lost his Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist this week because she drew him where we all know him to be: down on one knee.

• Zuckerberg (Facebook, Instagram) has flicked off the safety catch today as I mentioned above and onboarded a number of Trump loyalists.

• Kevin O'Leary (TikTok?) plans to buy the besieged Chinese social media platform after a request for Trump’s help on Fox News today.

With Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (X), TikTok in the hands of sycophants and major publishers like ABC and WaPo already capitulating to the incoming administration’s expectations there is already little resistance.

The War on “Free Speech”

Meanwhile, despite the constant talk of “free speech”, the Trump machine is doing everything to bully everyone into keeping their mouths shut.

Aside from the ABC defamation case, they are also suing The Des Moines Register for publishing Ann Selzer’s Iowa poll that turned out to be wrong.

… and today they appear to claim, in court papers relating to the potential release of special investigator Smith’s report into Trump’s alleged criminal activities, that the republican’s new-found “Presidential Immunity”, cemented by the Supreme Court in 2024, extends to public opprobrium.

Yes, that’s right.

Everyone on social media has the right to “free speech”, however false or harmful it is, just so long as it’s positive about Trump because the president is now legally immune from criticism.

If that doesn’t sound like authoritarianism to you, I’m not sure what will.

… and there was no one left to speak for me.

So, why does all of this matter? Isn’t this all just a natural cycle? Aren’t these just nice fun guys who say crazy things because they care so much about freedom and love and stuff?

It matters to America… because everything that protected Americans from tyranny is in tatters.

Trump/MAGA now holds Congress, they’ve stuffed the Supreme Court, they’ve won the White House and they will eviscerate the civil service, FBI, DOJ etc. come 20th January.

Whatever you think of them, if you believe they would take total control of the entire American administrative infrastructure and then casually hand everything back in four years out of politeness and deference to a free-and-fair election process then you’ve never read a history book and you’re probably deluded.

It matters to the UK, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Hungary and Ukraine… because Trump and Musk are fully engaged in regime change to benefit what can only be described as the ascendancy of Russian and OPEC interests across Europe.

It matters to Denmark, Greenland, Panama and Canada… because Trump is aggressively threatening trade wars or military intervention for the annexation of geopolitical assets he has unilaterally decided would benefit the US economy.

… and most of all …

It matters to the rest of the world.. because there’s no-one left to speak for them. The vast majority of people in the world, especially the younger generations, are entirely conditioned by the content they are recommended on social media … and there are fewer and fewer mainstream publishers and virtually no social media outlets which aren’t - for their own economic expedience - bending over to service Trump’s agenda.

And again, whatever you think of Trump now … if there’s no-one with a platform, who dares speak for anyone other than Trump, then soon enough there will be no-one left to speak for you at all.

And of course, there’s nothing you can do to sway the mind of Zuckerberg, Musk or Bezos … but for your own sake — and for the sake of your kids, if you have them — get off Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok.

They are not your friend. They were always addictive but if they were like heroin for the brain before, now they are laced with fentanyl and likely to cause real harm.

… politics and populism and media and commerce are so tightly woven together, their interests so aligned, that we, the people, are usually forgotten of ignored.

We are useful for a vote - for supplying a mandate - but otherwise we’re a unit of someone else’s economics most of the time. A resource to be farmed and exploited.

So what happens when someone in leadership actually looks at what’s good for the population they serve?

Not good for their reelection war chest.

Not good for their donors.

Good for their constituents.

This 👇 … this is what happens.

And while this is a brilliant illustration of what can be done to fight pollution on a microscopic scale … with good leadership that serves the people — not the false god of endless economic growth … with good leadership the same change can be achieved elsewhere.

We can fix our cities.

We can fix our environment.

We can fix our diet.

We can fix public health.

We can fix education.

We can fix our sense of purpose and hope.

But if you honestly believe that any of these things will ever actually get fixed … while we continue to embolden the vast industrial complexes and the oligarchs … while we continue to vote populists and plutocrats into our national leadership …

… then you are just plain lying to yourself.

If you want to know why the world is going to shit … the answer is: because you are allowing it to happen.

Through your action or innaction you are contributing to the inexorable decline of humanity into the distopian storm on the horizon.

As you wind down for Christmas - have a think about your role in all the disaster around you.

Have a think about what you could do differently, how you can get involved, how you can actually make a difference…

… because if you’re not actively helping the world become a better place — you are empowering those few determined to exploit the many, you are complying in advance, you are voting for the eventual end.

Stop for the Christmas break.

Relax.

And think.

And when you start again …

… FFS do something to help.

But what if I told you that there was one person who probably knows more about you than anyone else — more than your family, more than you know yourself?

He knows more about me too. About everyone.

A politically active person… with family ties to apartheid, with a close relationship with Vladimir Putin… and an even closer bromance as “First Buddy” to the US President-Elect.

Oh, and he’s also the richest man in the world.

The question you need to be asking yourself isn’t “is this really possible?” — I’ll explain that in a sec. The question you need to ask yourself is “is this okay to ignore?”

Location. Location. Location.

You are under surveillance all day. Everyone’s tracking you. Every time you say “okay” to cookies — and even if you don’t. Every time you park your car. Every time you get a ping from WhatsApp, even with privacy settings on full and GPS turned off, your location can be established.

And it matters. I can tell a lot from your location history.

I can figure out your gender1, how much you earn2, your fitness level3, how much you’re worth,4 if you have dog5, when you break up with your partner6, where and when you have an abortion7, how many kids you have,8 where you go on holiday, all of your interpersonal relationships… I could go on.

In 2019 the New York Times bought some open-market, “anonymised” location data and ran a series of studies to reverse engineer it.

The findings were alarming - they identified individuals, they named them, they tracked them to work, to school, identified their kids, spotted their breakup, where their ex lived, where the new partners lived… and worked… even their trips to WeightWatchers or the doctors.

There’s nothing anonymous about anonymised data once you have enough of it.

Your location allows me to piece your life together — with remarkable accuracy.

Coverage is King.

We should be clear that the New York Times investigations relied on only anonymous data, in a territory where that data collection is relatively easy and legal, collected from apps that are not, necessarily, ubiquitous.

But there are other methods for tracking that don’t even require a smartphone.

The most obvious is cell-tower triangulation. All day, every day your phone is chatting away to all of the nearby cell towers, shifting amongst them as you move. Using timing data from three or more towers, your government and mine can accurately triangulate and track your precise location any time your phone is switched on.

Keep this technique in mind for a second…

Cellular Constellation.

Okay - so by now you might be wondering: what does a background in location tracking and cell-tower triangulation have to do with Elon Musk? He’s busy shooting rockets, crashing twitter and buying elections isn’t he?

Well, in 2018 Musk’s started putting tiny “Starlink” satellites into orbit around the Earth, ostensibly to provide internet to far-flung parts of the world (although he’s reneged on that promise already).

Today, there are 7,000 of these satellites in orbit with another 12,000 en route.

And while they do provide internet access (including access to Russian and Iranian drones striking Ukraine or US sailors circumventing onboard security to watch porn) they are capable of something far more interesting.

Yes — these satellites are also little cell towers capable of providing terrestrial cellular telephone services … with all the triangulation capacity that comes with talking to your handset.

Cluster Fuck.

So this is how I answer the question you don’t need to ask: “is this really possible?”

Yes. Not only can you use these satellites to GPS yourself … they are, in fact, cell towers, capable of passively listening in to cellphone handshakes across the entire habitable surface of the planet.

Every human with a phone.

All day. Every day.

Without anyone knowing.

Kompromat.

But really? Why would he?

So, the reality for those of us in the west is probably no-one cares directly about your movements or mine, yet9. But with just a cellphone number (or by doing a little digging in the data), Musk and anyone to whom he grants access, can track anyone who carries and uses a phone.

And if you can track someone you can learn their darkest secrets … and as soon as you uncover some secret they want to hide … well then you have complete control.

The Russians call this kind of information: Kompromat.

Kompromat is the currency of extortion and coercion. It is used as a means to exert control and there’s surely no real expectation that the world’s richest man, who telegraphs his comfort with surveillance and his contempt for democracy and the rule of law on a daily basis, would not resort to using kompromat to meet his ends, is there?

Call me an Uber!

The reality is: this kind of shenanigans is not new to Silicon Valley.

In 2015, Uber (a company funded in part by Musk’s Twitter and SpaceX investor Fidelity Investments and old [pay]pal Peter Thiel) was caught and fined for letting employees “spy on ex-lovers, politicians and celebrities.”

Ten years on, Musk’s SpaceX is making deals with the Americans to launch a spy-sat constellation, he’s also openly in contact with Putin and he counts the Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal as the second biggest investor in Twitter and he has the ear of Zelenskyy and Netanyahu.

Just that list of names represents an enormous market for the kind of kompromat and live location data SpaceX could readily pull off their network. That’s obvious without even contemplating the kind of mass surveillance his friends in India or China might choose to leverage.

Is this okay to ignore?

It’s a tricky one isn’t it.

Part of me resisted writing this because, up to a point … what’s the point?

We all travel around with our phones in our pockets. We’re all in blissful denial of the level of surveillance-lead conditioning we undergo each day and (I assume at least) we all feel that we haven’t done anything worth blackmailing.

But as I keep saying — we are proverbial frogs, boiling slowly.

We’re all sipping the Kool Aid. We’re all addicted to digital sugar. We’re all incapable of leaving our phones behind for a day.

For as long as we’re glued to our phones we are enslaving ourselves to the coercion of a literal handful of creepy guys. We are sacrificing our freedom on the alter of convenience and entertainment.

We are heading, inexorably to Musk’s ludicrously dangerous vision to give up on this planet and all of the humans (and other species) living on it … to “Occupy Mars” and to focus on the trillions of interplanetary humans of the next million years.

You, me and our families be damned.

It’s true - we don’t have much control. But if you live in Canada, France, Germany or the UK you would do well to campaign vehemently against any party or narrative that has Musk’s fingerprints on it.

He doesn’t care about you — only his vision — and his vision is already all-seeing.

It’s easy to feel despondent. It’s easy to feel out of control. So I offer this post as a little ray of hope on an otherwise rather gloomy horizon.

Human culture has been suffering a kind of ‘algorhythmia’ of late. I believe, despite everything nasty you read about in the news, our culture is about to get the jolt it needs to knock it back into a more rational rhythm.

The curse of the algorithm

I have written before about how susceptible our brains are to conditioning, how predictive keyboards simplify our own internal voice and GPS reduces our cognitive spacial capacity.

In the same way that our brain relinquishes spacial autonomy to GPS or linguistic autonomy to our iPhone keyboards — social media algorithms demand that we relinquish autonomy over what interests us, who to interact with and what to believe.

And I’m sorry: you cannot pretend that social media algorithms don’t effect you — even if you’re not on social media.

The algorithm is the beating heart of our 24h news culture and — whether you pay direct attention or not — the rules of the algo drive the way we speak and the civility with which we all interact. The algorithm creates the rules for a good headline, for political discourse and the tone our politicians must take to get attention.

Our culture reflects the algorithm. It’s not the other way around.

Can they all be all bad?

There are of course half a dozen sizeable social media companies and technically they don’t act in concert: they compete. But they each amplify each other’s impact because in the end it is incentives that define outcomes.

The incentive of most social media companies is to sell your attention to advertisers.

Everything else is irrelevant. And if Facebook causes genocide in Myanmar or YouTube propagates riots in Germany who really cares?

Indeed, big systems are never more complicated than looking at the incentives:

• Food producers exist to sell food. This has created an obesity & health crisis.

• Oil companies exist to sell oil. This is leading us to towards climate collapse.

• Social media companies exist to sell you. This is collapsing our pluralistic culture.

So while social media companies are each different, they share a common incentive: to get you addicted to their platform so that they can sell your attention to advertisers.

It there light on the horizon?

Yes. In short, I believe there is.

In July 2024, Twitter’s algorithm seems to have been intentionally changed to over-promote Musk and Republican talking points above all else. The obvious intended consequence of this was, presumably, to put Trump back in the White House.

There has been an unintended consequence of this manipulation however. 20 million people are now using a Twitter alternative: Bluesky.

Sure, Bluesky looks and feels very similar to Twitter but there are some important fundamental differences. The most important of which is this:

You choose your algorithm … or you build your own.

The real differences of Bluesky are worthy of a whole’nother post — they are important too — but the most fundamental thing is that, for the first time in human history, we have a thriving, open source, federated1 social media network, already attracting newspapers, journalists, senators and congresswomen … without onerous centralisation and without the divisive commercial incentives that have, hitherto, warped the conversations of the public square.

Does this actually change anything?

Yes.

Remember: incentives define outcomes.

The incentive to drive advertising revenue through social media has driven our social construct towards the precipice. Algorithms that feed on our attention degrade our ability to think for ourselves and drive all conversations to the extreme.

By letting the user chose their own “feed”, Bluesky offers you the opportunity to define and control your own experience, to shape the algorithm around you.

You can focus on Science or Art or Gardening … you can just see what’s interesting to your friends, to those of a common cultural background, those who don’t say that much or just those who like cats.

And you can block out what you don’t want to see just as easily. Block trolls and fake accounts, even block out politics and news altogether. Moderation is up to you.

Of course there are challenges ahead — no system is perfect and so far the platform does not attract the same audience that Twitter currently clings onto (partly because the moderation tools are so effective that trolls can’t find a voice) so of course it’s politically a little lopsided… but this is not about that.

I’m not advocating for apolitical social media, nor do I think it’s a great idea for the wings of politics to come to rest on different platforms — in different silos — because that presents all sorts of different problems.

What is different — what is at stake here — is a question of choice.

Do we want to live in a world where our culture is just a reflection of some weird billionaires manipulative algorithm? I don’t. I want to live in a world where our media reflects our culture, not the other way around.

The only way we do that is to get out from under the algorithm. Stop following the little blue line on your GPS, stop using predictive text and for pity’s sake … delete Facebook (and Instagram), Twitter and TikTok.

And if you have to socialise online at all … do it somewhere you have some control.

Elon Musk & Peter Thiel won this election. They did it to put Musk into cabinet and put former Thiel employee and investee, JD Vance, next in line to the White House throne … and they succeeded.

They didn’t win with policy points. They didn’t they win with a better vision for the economy. They won by making a very precise incision into the minds of a tiny number of key voters and inserting a slightly different world view that drove behaviour at the ballot box.

In the end fewer that 275,0001 votes, just 0.08% of the population, decided the election.

That’s one person out of every 1,200 Americans deciding for the other 1,199.

🗳️ Three tricks to put an 𝕏 in the box.

So how do you ensure votes? There are three key techniques at play:

1. Basic Instincts

2. Short Stories

3. Reality Distortion

Basic Instincts: Resistance is futile.

There’s a reason old car adverts showed a beautiful woman in the first three seconds.

Your basic, emotional, subconscious brain is much stronger and faster than your more complex conscious intelligence. You want the car long before you see the price… and your brain remembers that feeling even after you calculate it’s unaffordable.

“Their eating the cats” is the same technique as the supermodel in the car. By the time your brain has time to work out how ludicrous the statement is, your body has already felt and recorded the fear and revulsion.

By repeating that your opponent is “lazy as hell” or referring to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage” again and again and again, the emotional reaction becomes deeply embedded — irrespective of how ludicrous your brain knows it all to be.

You can’t escape the subconscious programming. Resistance is futile.

Short stories: No-one gives a fuck about facts.

Storytelling is about the most basic function2 of the human part of your brain. It is more basic even than language. It synchronises social bonds, correlates time and emotion and defines our memories and identity.

When we hear stories, even if we don’t believe them, they are deeply memorable on a level we don’t understand. We don’t even notice the feelings the story inspired, still lingering the next day.

Facts, on the other hand, have no longevity, no potency and no value in politics. They are just not processed by the brain in the same way.

It’s why orators matter - and intellectuals don’t. It’s why insurgents win and incumbents fail. It’s never about policy or performance, it’s always about the narrative.

The intellectual approach is to tell facts and then expect (or help) the recipient to fit those facts into their story. It’s remarkably presumptuous on an intellectual an personal level and it’s not effective.

When MAGA supporters tell stories about strangers “eating cats”, about monsters under the bed, and then confidently say they will fix the problem, we remember that narrative without realising.

They don’t say how they’ll fix the problem (they don’t offer policy facts) but nevertheless you remember the narrative — the sense — that somehow they will.

Democrats meanwhile talk about facts… and then gives facts about their policy… and no-one gives a shit, no-one forms an emotional connection… and when voters hit the ballot box their hearts want to tick a box their heads simply don’t understand.

Reality Distortion: How to gerrymander a brain.

But here’s the kicker: you don’t actually need either of those two techniques when you control the environment. You can change some people’s vote without even attempting to change their mind3.

Ultimately, our survival instinct to conform to our tribal world view is more potent than our cognitive, rational individuality.

Under normal circumstances these two desires are not at conflict with each other, because we socialise with like-minded people and our people perpetuate like-mindedness.

But what if I could artificially distort your crowd? What if I had a list of all of your friends, had a list of things they’ve said … and I only showed you the things that fit a particular world view? I would change your understanding of your tribe and your instinct to fit in with the crowd would start to override and alter your individual beliefs.

Well that list is exactly what any social media platform has: endless amounts of content from people you follow and an algorithm that slices just a tiny selection to show you — content which defines your perception of social and political norms.

🎯 Precision guided munitions.

For these techniques to be effective they need to be carefully guided to target. You need to get the right message in front of the right people. How does this happen?

Musk and Thiel are uniquely well positioned to do just that.

Musk owns Twitter and therefore has total control over the algorithm that defines the feed, full access to analyse everything that’s ever been posted on the platform and a purpose built AI model (Grok) plugged right into the back of it. If you’ve ever been on Twitter he already knows more about you than you do.

Thiel is cofounder of Palantir — an AI research and development company with numerous dark US defence & civil government contracts. In the UK, where procurement is marginally more open, we know that they hold - or are in talks to acquire - contracts to process our NHS patient data, police & crime data and income tax and benefits data.

Thiel and Palatir have been tied to Cambridge Analytica, either through staff consulting or funding of PACs that enabled Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in Trump’s 2016 campaign.

With all of the data and technical skill they command between them, modelling the electorate precisely enough to give the right message to the right people seems trivial.

Where Kamala Harris’ campaign ran on a monolithic, often vague policy platform more reminiscent of the 20th century approach, Musk’s super-PAC was precisely targeting voters with often diametrically-opposing messages, tailored for specific audiences.

Even off Twitter, Musk was able to target people down to the ZIP code.

This example shows two adverts found running on SnapChat: one aimed at mainly Arab residents, the other at mainly Jewish residents…

Just hours after the election, Black people across the US started receiving text messages “telling them that they had been ‘selected’ to pick cotton and needed to report to ‘the nearest plantation’” — and while Trump’s campaign has sought to distance themselves from the affair it’s a stark reminder of just how known every individual really is. How tightly they had their eye on the ball.

Game, set and match.

And indeed their game was so tight that at 22:30 Eastern on the evening of the 2024 election, Elon Musk tweeted: “Game, set and match”.

He wasn’t kidding. He knew he’d won.

… and with a confidence that illustrates the exacting control over the narrative of a precisely targeted audience, presumably in only a tiny number of counties.

When you know your data well enough, you can extrapolate outcomes from small amounts of new data with a very high accuracy.

In just 10 years the Republican party has been replaced with a new, apolitical industrial machine run by Musk and Thiel and if anyone (Democrats or Republicans of old) wants to supplant the new MAGA machine next cycle they have to understand what battlefield they are actually on.

When you’re competing against a team that knows the intimate story of a each individual electorate’s lives, can reach every person and tailor a message specifically for them — with no qualms about the truth of the message — can wrap that voter in a cocoon of noise that fundamentally shifts their world view… and has endless resources and skill to do all of this without breaking a sweat…

… no amount of policy introspection is going to make a blind bit of difference.

The rules of war have completely changed, forever.

In a rush? Enjoy the funny video at the bottom of the post ... 👇

Why? Because our socioeconomic construct is a complex Ponzi scheme. It’s circular system that requires the relentless illusion of ‘growth’ to function. That growth is largely based on the consumption of finite resources and the most obvious of those is fossil fuel.

What this means in practice is simple: anything we do to combat climate change is in direct conflict with the survival of almost every major economy in the world.

Seldom is this more apparent than today’s expected announcement by the UK’s Government: a plan to spend over £22,000,000,000 (that’s 22 thousand million pounds) of tax payer’s money on “Carbon Capture & Storage”.

But this is good right? This is good for climate change?

Well, no. It’s bullshit. It’s like managing a tear in your bicycle tyre by paying someone to ride alongside you working a pump.

The solution is to stop the leak.

Fixing the tyre costs you once. You can then ride fast and free for years.

When it comes to climate change, we should be investing in solutions that reduce our emissions — not solutions that give the appearance of mitigating emissions because that just encourages creating more emissions for longer.

The challenge is that CCS probably has a great economic model … because it costs money in and of itself and it enables the ongoing consumption of gas and oil.

The alternative — to reduce consumption and thereby reduce emissions — reduces economic flow-rate, reduces tax inputs and looks really bad on a spreadsheet.

In the UK, when it comes to tackling climate change, one of our major leaks is our poorly insulated housing stock. We burn fossil fuels to heat our homes and then we piss the heat out of uninsulated roofs, poorly fitted doors and single-glazed windows.

There are around 30 million homes in the UK. The government could therefore invest £1,000 towards the insulation of over ⅔ of every single home in the UK for the same price as their investment in CCS.

Why should they do that?

Because insulating a home is a single fixed cost investment that improves the energy efficiency of the home for the entire lifespan of the building, reducing emissions (and running costs) forever. CCS on the other hand, is an endless ongoing costs that does nothing to reduce emissions, particularly from poorly insulated housing stock.

I should add that, quite apart from the environmental benefits, there’s a massive social benefit to insulating homes too - since our energy companies often charge their poorest customers the highest unit price1 and the poorest customers often live in the most poorly insulated homes. Insulating homes benefits the poorest in society the most.

Will they do it? Of course not.

Insulating homes reduces electricity and gas consumption and reduces economic growth. So let’s burn more fossil fuels for as long as we can get away with it… and if people complain, let’s pretend we’re trying to bury a tiny fraction of the CO₂ we produce in the ground.

This is what the Auzzies think of the same scheme… expressed with far more humour than I can muster. Enjoy!

Government oversight + regulation is demonstrably feeble even in the face of even really obvious, slow-moving and tangible threats:

• obesity

• smoking

• climate change

• education

• etc…

We are incapable of doing obvious things well.

So if you truly believe that we (humanity, the UK, the West, whatever) has even the will, much less the wherewithal to weather the storm we're brewing ...

... you need a serious rethink.

OpenAI's new o1 model - which is as good as free to use - already demonstrates an IQ of 120 (above ~90% of all humans) ... and they literally described it as an experimental approach to a new modelling technique.

… and they're in a competitive landscape with #Google and #Meta and #Anthropic and #xAI and that's just what the US is cooking up...

We have literally no concept what's about to hit us.

We have literally no concept of how quickly it's accelerating.

We have literally no plan for 8,000,000,000 obsolete humans.

The only thing we can know for certain is that we're totally unequipped to manage socioeconomic disruption well ...

... and if you really still don't believe me... listen to Helen Toner (below) who puts it much better (perhaps less drastically) than me ... because she knows a lot more about this than me ...

... and if you still don't believe me, come talk to me (or read my next post) about how I select and write 1,000 current news articles a day with zero staff ... or how I'm starting to replace a dozen lawyers and a team of accountants with a 90:10 AI:human split ... and that 10% is frankly: on the rocks already.

The world is about to change with a big bump. We. Are. Not. Ready.

At least the dinosaurs can't be blamed for throwing the rock themselves. 🦖 ☄️ 🤦‍♂️