Category: Technology

I alluded previously in passing to the Hollywood film Ex-Machina.  In case you missed it, the premise of the film is that a quirky I.T. billionaire has created a robotic human.  Visibly, it passes as a human but what he really needs to do is see if it passes a variety of tests from another human to be confirmed as a sentient being.

Subtle hints are there throughout about how illogical humans can be and whether it’s socially ethical to create a robotic human and mistreat it or use it sexually.  The subtext tells you exactly what to think.  The billionaire himself, clearly based on something Google-related, has cut corners and shown he has no ethics himself in exploiting customer data way beyond legality.  The tester, a social failure to some extent, believing that coming to the billionaire’s house gives him social status he has never had before.  Ah, us humans, how imperfect, with feeble emotions and needing to be replaced by something 100% logical are we?!?   Of course, the film proceeds exactly as you may expect, given the agenda.  The human tester, who doesn’t even realise he is part of the experiment, falls in love with the Robotic Scandic, Alicia Vikander.  I won’t spoil the ending, but needless to say everyone gets what they deserve.  Or what you are led along the path to think they deserve.

It’s a thought-provoking film, but what struck me soon afterwards is what was missing from the film.  The Tester is never allowed close to the robot.  All tests are conducted with a glass screen between them.  It’s quite a subtle but important omission, when you think about it.  Psychologically, most of what helps us decide if we like or dislike someone, can trust them or not, is non-verbal.  I read once that humans will sniff their hand within one minute of shaking hands with someone.  I can well believe it, what is gut feeling, if not actually based on exactly what it means.  While we don’t go sniffing around bottoms the way dogs do, we’re still mammals, still looking for and responding sub-conciously to the same cues.

What else is noticeably missing is facial expressions.  It took me longer to realise that.  The robot may indeed be defined as attractive, but is a woman who never smiles truly beautiful?  I doubt it.  Again, these non-verbal cues may be sub-concious, but it doesn’t mean they’re not an essential part of being human.  Not even smiles, but what about those other universal micro-expressions?  All of them related to emotions, negative and positive, but an essential part of human life and communication.

Start shutting these down and a large part of being human disappears.  That would never happen of course, though…would it?  Oh wait, it already has and is happening – think social distancing, handwash and wearing a mask.  Stick perspex screens up in the tills at shops, then one day, just replace the person serving you with a clone and as long as they can carry the interaction out in the correct sequence, how likely are you to even notice?  Then, eliminate the shaking of hands and insist that humans stay 1-2m apart.  That should stop you being able to pick up scents, or the existence of an aura.  Then, that just leaves the pesky problem of verbal and non-verbal communication between people, even children standing in soul-destroying distancing circles at school.  Stick a mask on them, now see how well they can read faces for what’s really being said as opposed to just the words themselves.

It was all so, so simple.  Millions of years of evolution suppressed, perhaps even destroyed long-term and people went along with it, cried for it even, to fight a virus with the same casualty rate as the flu.  Or so they were told.

Now, look around you now.  Examine those people closely.  Are you sure they’re all really still human?

I went to the loppe again yesterday.  More CDs and DVDs were bought.  Why not at those prices?  One charity shop even had a sign up saying they were holding a clearance of all DVDs / CDs.  Take that as a sign, if you will, of where the world has gone, never mind is headed.   I took it as a sign that at 5 for 20kr, I may as well stock up and found 15 items to buy.  I’ve been idly browsing fb marketplace occasionally, looking at hi-fi separates that used to sell for hundreds of pounds with comments such as “we’re moving to a streaming solution instead” (I can almost hear the sighed lament of the man who wrote it) and come to the same conclusion – people are removing the hardware from their homes and trusting in the internet.

When I refer to hardware, I should clarify here that I mean everything that has been historically the basis of knowledge and cultural enrichment.  Audio, film and books.  People have been spoilt the last 100 years, at no other time in history that is known of, have people had access to so much information, so much cultural enrichment, so cheaply and so immediately than at this point in civilisation.  Think back to 100 years ago, people were forced to rely on newspapers or whatever books the local library might stock – and remember, reading libraries for the masses were themselves only a late Victorian introduction.  For music, you had to attend the music venue, or gather round the piano and hope that at least one of the family was up to turning out a tune.   Families often invested a lot in making sure at least one member could.  All that changed – books, electricity, radio, gramophone, Television, record players, cassettes, VHS, Betamax, CDs, DVDs and now finally, the internet.

At first, it meant a great thing – people could invest in the cultural items they wanted to enjoy and bring them into their homes – a bookcase of relevant books, a CD rack of relevant CDs and a line of DVDs of what they enjoyed watching and rewatching again.  In my case, this would mostly be Auf Wiedersehen Pet 1 and 2, nothing comes remotely close in terms of being something I’d happily watch again and again, tirelessly.   I have a problem sitting through long films and even gave up on the 2.5 hour long Green Mile – apparently it has a good ending, but I’ve never seen it and I’ve always resisted watching Lord of the Rings, surrendering 13 hours of my life feels daunting, even if individual clips I’ve seen are well made.  Each to their own though.   Apt phrase, since each to their own is exactly what this kind of freedom meant happened.

The internet seems the next logical step then, as it allows homes to enjoy the benefits of a greater array of media publications than ever before, without the clutter and space consumption a good music unit, DVD player and Books, CDs and DVDs inevitably require.  However, I found myself wondering yesterday if that’s a good thing and concluded perhaps it isn’t, in the long term at least.   The internet was of course sold as a place of freedom – could be that was the only way to get people to use it in the first place, but more and more people are being herded like sheep into the official channels of facebook, twitter (where you can’t even write proper sentences), youtube, amazon, netflix, etc.  Maybe you’ve noticed it yourself, maybe not but the internet is becoming heavily policed.  So many youtube channels I know of are being demonetised if their opinion doesn’t fit the official narrative on something, or simply being deleted.   Another voice shut up, another media disappears.

I previously alluded to another of my favourite books, The Machine Stops.  A futuristic world where everyone is reliant on a machine to control their lives.  The machine network becomes too complex for people to reverse engineer and repair when things begin to go wrong.  It certainly could’ve been predicting the internet.  It’s not hard to see, with the complexity of the network that things could go wrong sometimes in future, or that in the event of war bandwidth could be rationed or even blocked off to non-essential services.  Then what are you going to do when that ever-so-elegant streaming solution can no longer be relied on?

The interesting thing here is that of course this couldn’t happen if you actually owned the media yourself and had it in your home and this is where I find the names of the Amazon devices for reading e-books interesting.   Censorship in days gone by meant actually burning the books that were deemed not acceptable to the prevailing leadership and train of thought.  The Nazis themselves did this in the 1930s, as did Stalin and indeed, so did the UK government with David Shayler and the Spycatcher book.  Censorship happens, but it was so, so much harder to do then than it is now, where burning a book doesn’t need to happen in order for a publication deemed unacceptable to simply disappear from the online shelves.  I’ve already seen it happen myself with several publications.  So to take it to a logical conclusion, Amazon’s first device, the Kindle, started the book burning process.  Their next device, Fire, got it truly underway.  So what’s next?  Flame, Ash?  I really have no idea, but I’ve concluded that having a good stock of physical books and CDs to feed you during possible harder times is well worth considering.   Just got to hope the electricity holds out if that happens.

I guess the personal thing that brought these thoughts to the fore was my own mini-burning this past week.  Recent events led to me having a major clearout, personal items with a relevant past needed to be discarded so I can move on.  I simply couldn’t carry them over my head any more – quite literally, in this case, as most were stored in the loft, but there were also others – a picture, drawn for me, placed on the fridge door that felt like the start of something big, but instead was just the beginning of the end.  I sent emails asking if anyone wanted these memories – a photograph of 5 generations of a family together is impossible to replace in my opinion.  Clearly just my opinion though.  I only got one reply and that was a clear, saddening no.  I even found an old tortoise garden ornament I’d held onto – I remember this one because my son really wanted it when the deceased great-grandmothers house was being cleared.  My daughter accidentally dropped it one day and to ease the tears, I spent a whole evening gradually superglueing it back together.  Spild af min tid, as they say in Denmark.  The fire burnt well yesterday.  Even Sunderland stripes were put to the flame.

So here’s a question to finish on – does a book, CD or film still exist if all copies of it have been burnt and all digital traces of it erased?  If the answer is no, then you might want to save hard copies of your personal favourites just in case the Machine Stops.

Footnote : I reread this and will add blog posts to this list.  I’ve read some great ones over the years that are now consigned to the digital dustbin, never to return.  I best export this blog again…

After the events of recent weeks, both public and personal, I am reminded of one of my favourite electronic era songs from the late 80s-early 90s, Kissing the Machine.  At the time you could sense you were part of a new era of something, that things were changing and now 30 years later, I see the change happening, I helped cause it and I am beginning to doubt it’s direction.

The old saying about never waste a good crisis has never been truer than ever with this fake Corona crisis, where a ton of freedoms have been removed and society is being re-engineered down a technology-based, AI direction and few seem to care or notice.  I’ve already alluded to this, but it’s worth examining in greater detail because longer-term, we are all destroyed if it continues.   A great wave of change is taking place where technological advances are huge (and that’s just the technology we are allowed to know about yet), yet at the same time human ethics are hitting an all time low in terms of individual rights and personal freedom.

Let’s start by looking at social distancing.  Ostensibly, it’s claimed to be to protect the public from spreading the virus to each other, but I see it as fulfilling at least two agendas.  One is facial recognition software.  People standing 2m apart are definitely going to be a lot easier to pick up and identify using this software.  The police have been gathering their database, especially in the UK, where two recent stories stood out for me as examples of the police state – in one, the Metropolitan police were just doing their everyday innocent gathering of facial recognition data, as you do, you know, when you live in a police state – how anyone thinks this is OK is beyond me, but one innocent citizen had the temerity to pull up his hoodie, then got arrested and fined.  For what exactly?  Secondly, someone in Cardiff actually took up the fight in court against having his facial data harvested.  He lost of course, both incidents should also get you thinking about what the law courts really do and who they are really representing – it’s certainly not the common human law, but something much more sinister.  My own forced experiences in the Danish family courts attest to that too.

Little did I realise when I watched Person of Interest some years ago, how close we were to reality.   Yet again though, Hollywood plays it’s part in softening us up, opening our minds to what is about to come or what is even already happening, just that we haven’t been told about it yet.  Many films are worth watching just for trying to identify the agenda and the underlying message, but sometimes it’s only years later that you realise what it was really about.

The second part of it is both dehumanising and soulless, two human words that mean exactly what they say, when you think about it.  All humans have an aura, that is indisputable, an invisible energy field around their visible being.  Science has proven it with the right cameras, but of course we all knew it really, it’s there in the language we’ve used for millennia.  It’s also why handshakes and physical contact are so important in binding families, assessing someone as a friend or someone you can trust in business.  There is of course no doubt why they’d want to remove that and re-engineer society on more distant, technocratic lines.  Hollywood has played it’s part for years, with various clues.  2 films immediately spring to mind – Westworld and Ex Machina.  Westworld scared me a lot when I watched one Monday evening, aged about 10, with my Dad.  I was expecting a typical cowboy film, not fully functioning humanised robots that turn nasty.  Ex Machina is probably the best example of something deeper being implied on film, but not explicitly mentioned.  The basic story is that someone has created a female robot and invites a tech expert of his choice out to assess whether the robot can pass the tests for being a human.  Of course, she does and he falls in love with her.  It eventually costs him everything.  The clue that is there in this film by not actually being there is the one thing that probably would’ve instantly identified her as being not human – he is allowed to ask questions, listen to her responses, see her actions, but all of these interviews take place at a distance and with a glass screen between them.   Had he been allowed within 2m, or to shake her hand, he would’ve known without a word being said that she was not human.  That the female role was played by a Scandinavian woman is no real surprise, many of the women here are a bit like that, perhaps they already added something to the vaccines years ago to make it so?

The entire thing fits with my own feeling – that us humans, even those working in IT, are now reduced to being a voice on skype and a jpg image of ourselves.  That’s what the customers are currently seeing and it does nothing to build a meaningful relationship between people.  I think I get the real meaning of the corporate phrase #itsinourDNA, because soon it will be – our voices and imagery are just data that can used in AI versions of ourselves.   The hidden hand must be laughing at the ease with which society is being reprogrammed.  Danish schools returned yesterday, with all the new rules of society being firmly instilled into traumatised young minds.  2m distances, no contact between pupils, no cuddly toys, wash your hands constantly.   Forget Reading, ‘Riting and ‘Rithmetic – The new 3 R’s that children are sent to school to learn now are Rules, Regulations and Robotism.  All this for a virus – something which many mainstream medical people believe is an internal cell response to external factors in the environment and cannot even be transmitted between people.  Mainstream medical people who aren’t in tow to big pharma and who the mainstream media will never bring on TV for an interview, that is.

Paralysed…another variation on the Coldplay song.   While never stopping thinking, a state of paralysis seems to have descended over the world with this corona crisis.  Myself included.  To some, I may seem to be one of the lucky ones, still coming to work but honestly, I would much prefer being furloughed – what a nice medieval-sounding term that is, but it’s fake – and be at home, sit in the limited sunlight and maybe do some DIY, than try to work while thinking hard about what the future may hold and what plans are the best ones.  If anything, being on 100% pay for 100% work feels more like slavery than 75% pay for 0% work and does little to assuage the feeling that I now carry even more unproductive Danes on my shoulders than ever before and that the burden is only going to increase in the coming months and years.  Atlas will definitely shrug someday.

I will add at this point, that I totally disapprove of government interventions on anything, especially paying people to do nothing.  Best said before someone reads this in 20-30 years time and believes I became Danicised eventually, but the rubicon wasn’t crossed by paying people to do nothing.  In this case, it was first crossed by a number of guidelines, vaguely written and different to the actual laws that were passed, that the police now interpret and apply.  There are some horrible videos of police state actions out there, where’s Amnesty International when you need them?  Oh, you mean they were just a fake NGO all along?  What a surprise.  No, those guidelines are the real breaking point of the UK I remembered and hoped to some day return to – those guidelines stopped the basic principles of freedom, where individuals could transact and interact as they see fit.

What’s struck me most is that people are proving themselves to be strange, dangerous and untrustworthy.  The UK and Denmark have both turned into East Germany, with neighbours happily spying on and reporting each other for minor infractions of draconian rules.  Even some politician in California said that “snitches means riches”, without anyone seemingly protesting, although I was heartened to see last night a major protest in Lansing, Michigan where people took to the streets, blocking them in protest at the new police state.  Did BBC report that?  I have a feeling not.  Meanwhile people on Facebook scream in support of the police dragging citizens to the floor in headlocks for the heinous crime of trying to keep a shop open and earn a living.  Time to remind myself of Benjamin Franklin’s famous quote :-

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety

He was right, they really don’t.

I also see a major change in UK law has occurred and no-one anywhere seems to have spotted it.  Coming to Denmark, one of the first things that struck me was that it’s more of a society where you assume something is illegal unless the state says it’s legal.  One of the most striking examples is in city centres, where the places you can park are marked and the assumption is – if there’s no markings you can’t.  Contrast that to the UK, where people normally assume that no markings means it’s fine to park there.  Yes, the UK was always a society where something is assumed to be legal unless the state explicitly forbids it.  The forbids part being established in a court of law, with 1,000 years of case law to refer to when assessing any possible infractions.  That has changed, the UK has now come out with some guidelines and the police are applying them in the most awful ways as if they are laws.  it’s possibly the clearest example of the old UK law book being thrown away and European law coming in, after 50+ years of gradually sneaking it in through the back door.  To me, it proves yet again that the UK hasn’t left the EU and never will.  Plus isn’t a time when protests are disallowed and can be dealt with in the most violent manner a great time to water down the Brexit deal to the point of remaining?

One of the other most worrisome laws sneaked in in the UK was an amendment to the Mental Health act, allowing an individual to be detained indefinitely without trial, on the say so of one doctor and one other medical professional.  The second part of what defines a medical professional is vague – but you can assume it’s most likely to be a nurse going along with whatever a doctor says.  They usually do.  I remember being shocked about this when I first heard about it, when I worked on Mental health software in 2002-03.  As were the people explaining it to me, as it was already so open to abuse with 2 doctors needed to detain someone indefinitely in a cell, with forced medication of whatever they saw fit.  I wonder how many lives have already been ruined by that and how many will be in future.  Plus, let’s guess what constitutes being “bad mental health” in future.  Someone who won’t take the vaccine willingly?  Someone who doesn’t believe the official story on 9/11 or 7/7?  Definitely.  With that 7/7 link, I am glad the website still exists, but it was harder to find on Google – always found it funny how the official story provided a video of the alleged terrorists taking a specific Thameslink train to London from Luton, then being exposed by commuters pointing out that on that day that particular train was cancelled.  Seems you can’t even rely on the railways to run to time when you’re planning a major false flag event.

In summary, the world looks a bit of a grim place and may be heading to somewhere even grimmer.  I find myself with so many thoughts on this that I’ll leave them for another post.

Prior posts have alluded to Denmark’s major role as a test bed for the policies of the hidden hand, before they get rolled out to bigger nations.  Perhaps it’s to do with being a country of 5.5m people, not spread over a huge area, or maybe it’s even to do with general level of (misplaced) trust, built up over many years in the framework and institutions.   Size, perhaps in this case, is everything, as it’s interesting that some of the countries I see as elite test-beds are Denmark, New Zealand and Finland.  Similar population sizes and look at how all 3 currently have identikit female prime ministers – out with the old guy in a suit and in with the new model to help prove to the masses democracy is working and their vote does count.  It doesn’t of course, but a new broom every now and then to sweep clean helps maintain the illusion.

I had an argument with someone at work today.  Or at least I raised my voice a bit.  I really have had enough of condescenDanes, who think they know it all and the udlændige are second rate.  I had mentioned to him last week, in response to his comment that he couldn’t believe the UK still allowed people to gather freely, eat in restaurants and go the pub, that I actually agreed people should live their lives freely.  That I’d seen no evidence of this illness yet and that anyway, how come the world didn’t stop for the flu?  This week he saw me again and was keen to mention how the UK now had the same disease as Denmark – no not the lovely COVID-19, but the disease of lockdowns, restrictions and closed businesses.  Except he didn’t see it as a disease, but something that had to be done for the good of society.  I’ve not changed my mind at all, in fact I said, come back in a year and we can discuss how many of these freedoms that have been taken away you have actually got back.  The conversation turned to democracy being a wonderful thing, which I also disagreed with and got told “If you don’t like it here why not go and live in Saudi Arabia?”.  This is the standard response of Danes, when they find you disagree with the things they hold dear and is, I suspect how they’ve always achieved their concensus.  If you disagree, you’re an outlier and need to be got rid of.  Maybe the Vikings dealt with outliers in more direct fashion – an accidental axe to the head while raiding Lindisfarne, killing the peaceful monks and stealing the booty, perhaps?  It’s why all the rich danes live abroad – they could never be comfortable here with the envy, criticism and desire to bring them down to common denominator level.   It’s why, at this point, I snapped and told him this – I have encountered this stock answer about leaving the country many times.  Accept people have different views and are entitled to voice them.

Watching this crisis unfold, along with hearing the calls of citizens for further curtailments to their freedoms, got me thinking that I really do see the future here.  As much as I really don’t want to see it and wish I wasn’t really here at all.  I’ve lived through various taxes, intrusions into my private life and forced introductions to new systems such as nem-id and e-boks, to realise that I should write it down and try to warn the rest of the world.

So let’s look at what’s happened here in the past week or so :-

• Borders locked down – only Danes and foreign workers allowed in
• No gatherings of more than 10 people.  So no konfirmation.  unlucky
• Schools, Universities, Restaurants, Hairdressers, tanning salons – all closed
• Mandatory vaccinations for anyone suspected of having the virus
• Up to 75% of salary paid for employees as an alternative to firing anyone
• Extension of all this to April 13th, at the earliest

Let’s ignore that officially, at least, the vaccine hasn’t even been invented yet.  On a personal note, I am one of only 2 or 3 people who goes into the office now and of those, I’m the only one who does a full day there.  I really refuse to work from home, it does me no good and besides, zig while the world zags – petrol prices are down 20% in 2 weeks, the roads are empty and I can assess the situation outside.  Drive while I can – that may well be an unaffordable luxury at some point in the future.

The clues were there, if you looked closely and worked it out.  Denmark built a 5ft high border fence across the border with Germany last year.  Ostensibly to keep out the swine flu, but it did seem a bit suspicious and ensured all border traffic went through official chokepoints only.  Considering the rest of Denmark only has access by sea and air, it’s relatively easy to lockdown this nation if you really want to – interestingly, you can say the same of another elite test-bed, New Zealand.   The surveillance society tightened it’s grip with the mandatory implementation of smart meters – every house had to have one by December 2019, due to a law that was signed in 2015.  One house avoided that bullet, at least for the time being.  Then there’s been the war on cash – a gradual enforcement of policies to ensure people pay with debit cards, contactless preferred, of course and finally, the tracking of people with mobile phones.  Yes, Denmark has been big on this, and the global sharing of mobile information became clear to me back in 2018, when I received a letter from Skat, informing me of my English bank account – doesn’t matter that it only had £20 in it, Skat was keen to tax the interest.  How did they match up this account?  Why, using my mobile phone number of course.  Think about that when you happily gift this important personal identifying key, a new world social security number, to any website out there.

Longer term, they are implementing so many horrific policies in the style of an expert sleight-of-hand magician, that it’s impossible to keep up.   I saw the UK also implemented a salary bail-out of 80%, just like Denmark (see how these test bed policies catch on?).  Why, to me this could almost seem to be an implementation of the new Universal Basic Income policy they’ve been talking about for a few years.  It sounds great (and free) on paper, to just give a basic income to every citizen, but next up it’ll come with conditions – with deductions for socially unacceptable behaviour and rewards for really, really good socially acceptable behaviour.  Define socially good – they will write the rules for that themselves in the year ahead and if you want that money, you better read the right books, newspapers and be a good citizen in exactly the way that they want.  Then there’s the isolation and separation of old people, Logan’s run is coming.  Then when, if ever, do you think airlines will be reopening?  I had to say goodbye to my trip of a lifetime to Panama last week, and I seriously wonder if I’ll ever get that chance again.  Then what about being socially distant and working from home?  I see the dehumanisation agenda, a future world where AI and robots come to the fore being another step closer, when your colleagues are nothing more than photographic pixels on a computer screen.  How long before some of them are replaced by robots and you never even notice?

Amongst it all, the saddest thing is that a lot of people are clamouring for this – please give us our free money, please lock us in our prison cells, please, please, please.  Just like my Danish colleague there.  I don’t blame him actually and I’m sure our little spat will be forgiven – with a lifetime in one of the ultimate test beds, of course he will love his system.   No, the saddest things were probably :-

a) People reporting other people to the police for such serious infractions as – having a gathering of over 10 people in their own home, a business owner opening up his shop in contradiction of the new law and a supermarket that didn’t have a bottle of the now legally-required alcoholic handwash on the door.  These were all locally-reported cases in my area, so multiply that across the nation and, furthermore, the world.

b) The Danish queen being applauded for her wonderful TV-delivered speech telling everyone to keep socially distant from each other, never leave the house except to shop essentially and do as her various enforcement agencies (skat, police, government) say.  I’m sure someone in a 100-room mansion, with staff to do everything for her, is a great role model for us all.

c) An overbearing intrusion into my weekend from the Danish police and Danish health authority.  The police actually sent out an SMS to every mobile number in the whole country (they’ve got it on file and they are tracking you, remember?).  On the surface, it was to remind you they care, but underneath, it was sent on a Sunday and sent a message of omnipresence, with threatening undertones.  It was also a great data gathering exercise – which numbers worked, who had their phones switched on and who read it.  Should definitely help when they start the location tracking.

All in all, I am reminded of some quote from 1984 by George Orwell, perhaps, that says something like when the taking away of freedoms comes, the people will not be angry, they will be screaming for it, demanding it and just a few months ago I would have laughed and thought it impossible that it would come this way and so soon.  I was wrong.  If I was now to predict the future, I would say a bank is about to go bust – perhaps I need to refer back to my own book from 2007, How to Invest in Gold and Silver?  Perhaps it’s time to remember that…

When laws become unjust, just men become outlaws