The Truth About the UK Deep State
Our right to protest is under threat...
Our right to gather in non-socially-distanced, maskless hoards, breathing a potentially fatal virus on each other, and the public servants, such as the police, who have no choice but to be there to police the event - as they police all events, in any year, carnivals and gay pride marches, jubilees and remembrance commemorations - in the interests of crowd control and public safety, at the risk of taking said potentially deadly virus home to their innocent families, has been temporarily curtailed.
Do clashes happen? Yes they do, the police are human too. Clashes happened before Covid and they will happen after Covid. Policing in the UK is by consent, when the police get it wrong we can say so. No one comes in the night to take us away.
If we want to protest, we can still write to our Member of Parliament, any number of times we want to, whole hoards of us. We can't spread Covid by e-mail and this is a free country and our right to protest is a given, so the police won't knock on our door.
We can even post things about, or send things to, the Prime Minister, or our Head of State, the Queen. We can even be rude and call them names, we can't infect them by calling them names, so the police won't knock on our door.
Or we can petition parliament, the Deep State won't stop us, the Deep State has a page on its website to help us. Collecting electronic signatures won't spread viral infections, so the police won't knock on our door.
See the emerging theme, if you can protest without spreading Covid, knock yourself out. The right to free speach is still open for business in the UK.
Big Brother is watching...
Data collection is big business, the most valuable thing about us is the data that can be mined about our identity, our habits, our views and our interactions.
The Deep State recognises this and in 2018 brought in the toughest Data Protection rules anywhere on the planet: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Misuse of our data can result in heavy fines, the fines are based on global turnover, you can't hide by basing yourself outside of Europe, within months of the new protections coming in Google was fined £44 million.
The UK has exited the EU but is keeping the GDPR. In the UK the Information Commissioner is funded by the Deep State to be on our side against the tech giants and cyber-criminals.
Satellites are evil...
The UK Space Agency publishes case studies about the UK in space. The UK uses satellites to combat climate change; to help developing countries improve their lot; and to help improve the efficiency of the public sector.
And guess what, in the UK, satellite data is covered by the GDPR.
Smart cites will eat you alive...
Smart cities aren't new in the UK, the Romans built their urban environment to a set plan across their empire, including backwater settlements like London, which they founded as an urban environment. In the middle ages the powers-that-were also engaged in town planning, some of these planned towns succumbed to another, much more deadly, infection - the Black Death.
These days smart cities are about planning out congestion and improving air quality. Flood prevention and better living.
But what if we don't want to live in a smart city? Well under the Romans and in the middle ages, if you weren't enslaved in servitude, you could live where you liked, as long as you could afford it. Two millennia after the Romans arrived, the current UK Deep State no longer accepts slavery as an acceptable way of life, but not everything has changed, we are still free to live where we like, as long as we can afford it.
Vaccines will kill you...
Vaccination was originally invented in the UK. The term derives from the latin for cow - and cowpox played a part in its development. It was used to prevent smallpox - a disease that killed around one in three of those who contracted it and could leave survivors blind or with stigmatising and debilitating scarring.
For centuries smallpox vaccination was common in the UK. After World War II, the National Health Service ensured that both adults and infants were offered the vaccine for free. Millions were vaccinated. But the UK doesn't vaccinate against smallpox anymore.
Is this because the vaccine went straight to human testing without animal trials? No, although it did, it's because the vaccine worked. In 1980, the World Health Organisation certified the global eradication of smallpox.
After centuries of killing millions, effectively wiping out whole nations in the newly colonised Americas, smallpox is now dead. That is the power of vaccine.
Now we have another vaccine in the UK, as with that first vaccine, it builds on novel research, harnessing the power of our understanding of DNA. It uses RNA, RNA is not DNA.
On Earth, deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is the clay from which our mortal bodies are made. It doesn't matter if you are a plant or an animal, a blue whale or a microbe, you will have been formed using DNA. Ribonucleic acid, or RNA, is a messenger code and DNA can read it to make things, the way we can read a recipe to make a cake, or a set of instructions to put up a bookshelf. Viruses can misuse RNA to infect our bodies.
Like our bodies, our computers are full of code, but when it's a computer, rather than talk about mortal clay, we talk about 'software' and 'firmware' to describe this code. Some code is good, and enables our computers to function as they should, some code is bad, and infects our computers with code we call 'malware'. Some viruses use RNA to introduce malware into our bodies, and just as our computer virus checker can use code to defeat malware, this new vaccine is using RNA to defeat Covid.
This vocabulary isn't a co-incidence, early techies recognised the similarities of what they were developing to living organisms and adopted the same language.
If we aren't afraid to harness the benefit of a manmade virus checker for our computer, we shouldn't be afraid to harness the benefit of mother nature's virus checker for our bodies, after all, mother nature got there first.
5G & AI...
5G is the same as 4G is the same as 3G. Basically it describes the way our 'phones harness radio waves in order to enable us to communicate with each other. But it's the same old radio waves, we've just got better at using them. The ever increasing number scale is a marketing ploy to make rather dull incremental technobabble sound more whizzy. In the fifties the Mad Men of advertising would probably have called it 'Atomic G' - but it wouldn't have been nuclear powered.
So if we take the wheel instead of radio waves, it might work like this: I've invented the wheel, I've put it on a wheelbarrow. I'm rather pleased with it and I call it 2G (remember that), but if I stuck it on a cart, I might call it 3G, if I found a way of adding a fossil fuel engine to the cart, I might call it 4G - and when I discovered a way to go all electric and still maintain speed and range, I might call it 5G. But it's still the same old wheel. That's effectively what's happened to mobile technology.
There are very real concerns about who is marketing 5G, because some of the companies, just like a dodgy dealership, aren't very reputable, in fact some of them are down right dangerous. But it's the dealer who is dodgy, not the car. Just because a criminal can flog a Bentley, it doesn't make the Queen of England a criminal. The car is always an innocent and so is 5G.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is another phenomenon of our times, but our fascination with inanimate life is age old. So should we allow fascination to become fear? Well one of the dodgy companies mentioned above has been using facial recognition to help identify individuals belonging to a persecuted ethnic minority. That's quite scary. On the other hand, we know about it and the company is facing a huge backlash. And of course, in the UK, the GDPR already covers this. Hitler and Stalin slaughtered millions with no help from AI whatsoever (in fact, I don't think it would have benefited Hitler at all, since his definition of 'Jewish appearance' - whatever that is - was so racist as to be useless). On the other hand, he might have ended up rounding up quite a few Nazis, and the fewer of them the better!
But dubious humour aside, I think the fact is, like all technology, it depends on who's using it and for what purpose. AI that improves the performance of pacemakers, or allows prosthetic limbs to function more realistically, or improves the implants which enable deaf people to hear, sounds wonderful until you realise it can all be hacked. For this reason, I don't believe AI is the next technological revolution, I think cyber security will be. Human society evolved in a world without locks - until we needed them.
But that aside, there is the question of robots taking our jobs. Those of us of a certain age in the UK will remember Fiat's brilliant 'Handbuilt by Robots' ad, and this is not the first time automation has caused disruption to our labour market, the Industrial Revolution was born in the UK.
The disgruntled, disruptive, sabot wearing French workforce lent the name of their footwear to the word sabotage. In the UK, the Luddites sabotaged the machines which devalued their skills and put whole families out of work. But does this mean AI will do the same for us? Neither of these workforces had any political power. Modern representative democracy had yet to evolve and today the fortunes of neither nation depend solely on their manufacturing base. The world, and history, has moved on.
Jobs will certainly go, filing clerks were a thing back in the day, and temps in the typing pool, those jobs have already gone. But the UK is not under siege from embittered filing clerks and typists wrecking the machines they hold responsible for their downfall. Typists became data inputters and filing clerks became call centre warriors - on fairly comparable terms and conditions. The new technology created as many jobs as it destroyed.
So the key to both things is what we prioritise, in the 19th century we prioritised profit over people and could conceive of no other way. In the middle of the 20th century the emphasis shifted, and the general health of the populace improved, to the point where 19th century values became unthinkable. So in my humble opinion, the dystopian visions of an AI apocalypse will only become as real as we are prepared to let them. Which puts the ball very much in our court.
Our right to gather in non-socially-distanced, maskless hoards, breathing a potentially fatal virus on each other, and the public servants, such as the police, who have no choice but to be there to police the event - as they police all events, in any year, carnivals and gay pride marches, jubilees and remembrance commemorations - in the interests of crowd control and public safety, at the risk of taking said potentially deadly virus home to their innocent families, has been temporarily curtailed.
Do clashes happen? Yes they do, the police are human too. Clashes happened before Covid and they will happen after Covid. Policing in the UK is by consent, when the police get it wrong we can say so. No one comes in the night to take us away.
If we want to protest, we can still write to our Member of Parliament, any number of times we want to, whole hoards of us. We can't spread Covid by e-mail and this is a free country and our right to protest is a given, so the police won't knock on our door.
We can even post things about, or send things to, the Prime Minister, or our Head of State, the Queen. We can even be rude and call them names, we can't infect them by calling them names, so the police won't knock on our door.
Or we can petition parliament, the Deep State won't stop us, the Deep State has a page on its website to help us. Collecting electronic signatures won't spread viral infections, so the police won't knock on our door.
See the emerging theme, if you can protest without spreading Covid, knock yourself out. The right to free speach is still open for business in the UK.
Big Brother is watching...
Data collection is big business, the most valuable thing about us is the data that can be mined about our identity, our habits, our views and our interactions.
The Deep State recognises this and in 2018 brought in the toughest Data Protection rules anywhere on the planet: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Misuse of our data can result in heavy fines, the fines are based on global turnover, you can't hide by basing yourself outside of Europe, within months of the new protections coming in Google was fined £44 million.
The UK has exited the EU but is keeping the GDPR. In the UK the Information Commissioner is funded by the Deep State to be on our side against the tech giants and cyber-criminals.
Satellites are evil...
The UK Space Agency publishes case studies about the UK in space. The UK uses satellites to combat climate change; to help developing countries improve their lot; and to help improve the efficiency of the public sector.
And guess what, in the UK, satellite data is covered by the GDPR.
Smart cites will eat you alive...
Smart cities aren't new in the UK, the Romans built their urban environment to a set plan across their empire, including backwater settlements like London, which they founded as an urban environment. In the middle ages the powers-that-were also engaged in town planning, some of these planned towns succumbed to another, much more deadly, infection - the Black Death.
These days smart cities are about planning out congestion and improving air quality. Flood prevention and better living.
But what if we don't want to live in a smart city? Well under the Romans and in the middle ages, if you weren't enslaved in servitude, you could live where you liked, as long as you could afford it. Two millennia after the Romans arrived, the current UK Deep State no longer accepts slavery as an acceptable way of life, but not everything has changed, we are still free to live where we like, as long as we can afford it.
Vaccines will kill you...
Vaccination was originally invented in the UK. The term derives from the latin for cow - and cowpox played a part in its development. It was used to prevent smallpox - a disease that killed around one in three of those who contracted it and could leave survivors blind or with stigmatising and debilitating scarring.
For centuries smallpox vaccination was common in the UK. After World War II, the National Health Service ensured that both adults and infants were offered the vaccine for free. Millions were vaccinated. But the UK doesn't vaccinate against smallpox anymore.
Is this because the vaccine went straight to human testing without animal trials? No, although it did, it's because the vaccine worked. In 1980, the World Health Organisation certified the global eradication of smallpox.
After centuries of killing millions, effectively wiping out whole nations in the newly colonised Americas, smallpox is now dead. That is the power of vaccine.
Now we have another vaccine in the UK, as with that first vaccine, it builds on novel research, harnessing the power of our understanding of DNA. It uses RNA, RNA is not DNA.
On Earth, deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, is the clay from which our mortal bodies are made. It doesn't matter if you are a plant or an animal, a blue whale or a microbe, you will have been formed using DNA. Ribonucleic acid, or RNA, is a messenger code and DNA can read it to make things, the way we can read a recipe to make a cake, or a set of instructions to put up a bookshelf. Viruses can misuse RNA to infect our bodies.
Like our bodies, our computers are full of code, but when it's a computer, rather than talk about mortal clay, we talk about 'software' and 'firmware' to describe this code. Some code is good, and enables our computers to function as they should, some code is bad, and infects our computers with code we call 'malware'. Some viruses use RNA to introduce malware into our bodies, and just as our computer virus checker can use code to defeat malware, this new vaccine is using RNA to defeat Covid.
This vocabulary isn't a co-incidence, early techies recognised the similarities of what they were developing to living organisms and adopted the same language.
If we aren't afraid to harness the benefit of a manmade virus checker for our computer, we shouldn't be afraid to harness the benefit of mother nature's virus checker for our bodies, after all, mother nature got there first.
5G & AI...
5G is the same as 4G is the same as 3G. Basically it describes the way our 'phones harness radio waves in order to enable us to communicate with each other. But it's the same old radio waves, we've just got better at using them. The ever increasing number scale is a marketing ploy to make rather dull incremental technobabble sound more whizzy. In the fifties the Mad Men of advertising would probably have called it 'Atomic G' - but it wouldn't have been nuclear powered.
So if we take the wheel instead of radio waves, it might work like this: I've invented the wheel, I've put it on a wheelbarrow. I'm rather pleased with it and I call it 2G (remember that), but if I stuck it on a cart, I might call it 3G, if I found a way of adding a fossil fuel engine to the cart, I might call it 4G - and when I discovered a way to go all electric and still maintain speed and range, I might call it 5G. But it's still the same old wheel. That's effectively what's happened to mobile technology.
There are very real concerns about who is marketing 5G, because some of the companies, just like a dodgy dealership, aren't very reputable, in fact some of them are down right dangerous. But it's the dealer who is dodgy, not the car. Just because a criminal can flog a Bentley, it doesn't make the Queen of England a criminal. The car is always an innocent and so is 5G.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is another phenomenon of our times, but our fascination with inanimate life is age old. So should we allow fascination to become fear? Well one of the dodgy companies mentioned above has been using facial recognition to help identify individuals belonging to a persecuted ethnic minority. That's quite scary. On the other hand, we know about it and the company is facing a huge backlash. And of course, in the UK, the GDPR already covers this. Hitler and Stalin slaughtered millions with no help from AI whatsoever (in fact, I don't think it would have benefited Hitler at all, since his definition of 'Jewish appearance' - whatever that is - was so racist as to be useless). On the other hand, he might have ended up rounding up quite a few Nazis, and the fewer of them the better!
But dubious humour aside, I think the fact is, like all technology, it depends on who's using it and for what purpose. AI that improves the performance of pacemakers, or allows prosthetic limbs to function more realistically, or improves the implants which enable deaf people to hear, sounds wonderful until you realise it can all be hacked. For this reason, I don't believe AI is the next technological revolution, I think cyber security will be. Human society evolved in a world without locks - until we needed them.
But that aside, there is the question of robots taking our jobs. Those of us of a certain age in the UK will remember Fiat's brilliant 'Handbuilt by Robots' ad, and this is not the first time automation has caused disruption to our labour market, the Industrial Revolution was born in the UK.
The disgruntled, disruptive, sabot wearing French workforce lent the name of their footwear to the word sabotage. In the UK, the Luddites sabotaged the machines which devalued their skills and put whole families out of work. But does this mean AI will do the same for us? Neither of these workforces had any political power. Modern representative democracy had yet to evolve and today the fortunes of neither nation depend solely on their manufacturing base. The world, and history, has moved on.
Jobs will certainly go, filing clerks were a thing back in the day, and temps in the typing pool, those jobs have already gone. But the UK is not under siege from embittered filing clerks and typists wrecking the machines they hold responsible for their downfall. Typists became data inputters and filing clerks became call centre warriors - on fairly comparable terms and conditions. The new technology created as many jobs as it destroyed.
So the key to both things is what we prioritise, in the 19th century we prioritised profit over people and could conceive of no other way. In the middle of the 20th century the emphasis shifted, and the general health of the populace improved, to the point where 19th century values became unthinkable. So in my humble opinion, the dystopian visions of an AI apocalypse will only become as real as we are prepared to let them. Which puts the ball very much in our court.
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