5G syncope

It was said on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme recently that the Huawei deal is a strategic defeat for the West of a scale not seen since the early days of WW2. David Davis has more recently remarked that it is "the worst intelligence decision since the Cambridge Five". I disagree. It's worse than that.

This is not about cellphones. It is about the technology that will deliver the Internet of Things 2.0: the Internet of Impacts, the seamless post-cloud connection of high performance edge analytics embedded in all devices that completes the digitalisation of our economies and renders them sustainable and amenable to growth without precipitating global catastrophe in the form of environmental degradation and climate change. This will be implemented by 2030 to grow our economy while reducing climate related risks. (To be clear, 2050 targets are re-assuring fictions, exercises in PR. The system crashes before it can deliver them if the pace is as slow as the targets imply, due to unsustainable losses bringing down, for example, the insurance companies that underwrite our infrastructure).

This setback to the West is a consequence of the inability of neo-liberal thought to accommodate decadal perspectives. Business models are updated on timescales determined by the quick buck. Risk profiles are revised on an annual basis when decadal changes are what causes floods such as those we have recently experienced, droughts, wildfires, desertification, and so on. Strategic objectives are beyond the comprehension of our accounting practices. The Huawei deal is typical of this: the technology relies on IP that has been relinquished by the West for short term gain, developed by R&D efforts that have been chronically underfunded.

As a result the West has just conceded the Exponential Decade, the decisive ten year period of human history hitherto. And to who? The Chinese have had the surveillance of Xinjiang as a sand pit for their AI. We have conceded the Exponential Decade to organisations facilitated by regimes that give them entire populations to experiment on in the development of their facial recognition software. 

The Third World War has been won and lost while we were sleeping, and the winners, from one point of view, are a racist superstate (for when they say Chinese they mean Han) with resources on the scale of two continents (China and Africa) at their disposal. But no human can draw comfort from a triumph secured through means as dehumanising as the concentration camps of Xinjiang and the mechanised hanification of the Uighurs.

Because all battles are ultimately battles of ideas. As Bobbitt points out (in The Shield of Achilles) the attrition of war favours societies organised along principles best able to unlock the material & creative potential of their members ... even wars fought without a single blow being struck, like this one (in accordance with the highest ideals of Sun Tzu). The West abandoned strategic thought in the early '80s, with the adoption of neo-liberal economics, & the crisis in our democracies today is one consequence, because it has left consumer choice, on the basis of Pavlovian gratification, as the only model for making decisions, & potential that cannot be harnessed to the interests of a privileged few is disregarded. We are now wandering down the 21st century, blindfold & bouncing off the walls, while those capable of strategic thought can see straight ahead & are sprinting to the end of the corridor.

The internet has not democratised society as initially thought. It has been a highly selective megaphone, amplifying the worst among us & in us, a tool for pornography & masturbation rather than the extraction & expression of genuine meaning, a platform supporting only the most solipsistic incel agendas. Why? We have withdrawn from conversation about meaningful things. We have adopted the enthusiasms of those who concentrate wealth rather than innovate & invest us out of crisis, because that is the principle along which our society has been organised for five decades.

Our democracy has been degraded as a consequence, because democracy is not the show of hands when called upon to vote, it is the quality of the conversation that informs it in between. This is our strategic error. We have refined our consumerist outlook until the show of hands has become a knee-jerk response to any dog-whistle, uninformed by periods of reflection & conversation with other who disagree with us. Our democracy has been reduced to a calculus of appetites. 

In the final analysis, this war is not one we need to win, but one we need to end. It is a war on ourselves. When we talk about requiring a new Manhattan Project to tackle the Climate Emergency, it is not because we need to wage war. For the last five decades we have been dumping 100s of times the total energy released by all the bombs dropped in WW2 onto the planet every day through anthropogenic global warming. We're it not for the fact we live on a blue planet, covered in water with a relatively high specific heat capacity to absorb this, the surface of the Earth would already be an uninhabitable wasteland.

So no, we don't need to win the war, we need to end it. When we talk about a Manhattan Project, what we mean is the ability to address strategic objectives beyond the ken of bean counters. The technology of this Manhattan Project, with which we tackle the Climate Emergency, is precisely the technology that supports the "Internet of Impacts" to enable "sector coupling," the penetration of renewable energy into all areas of economic activity. So, from a strategic & technological perspective, the analogy is not WW2, it's something more on the scale of the Pleistocene megafauna extinction, where we unleashed mesopredator release by eliminating apex predators, & then applied to the whole world the abstract concept of disposability we developed in association with placing artifacts beyond use as grave goods, precipitating materialist dialectics driven by artificial scarcity in a world of abundance.

(Which is, I think, where we came in, so I should probably wrap this up here)

Blue eyes

Imagine the history of a people. Imagine if, among these people, only those with blue eyes could perceive colour. Imagine everyone else was colour blind.

Now, imagine there are only two kinds of plant available to these people. One is the people's staple food. The other is deadly poisonous. Further, imagine that these plants can only be distinguished by the colour of their leaves.

Everything is fine when they forage for food. Yes, they must rely on the blue eyed people to find it but the blue eyed people are happy to help. Everyone can serve the common good in their own way. Musicians sing for their suppers. Lineage, and the exploits of the ancestors, are recited round the fire by old people to enraptured children. Someone in the corner is knapping flint to fashion some implement necessary for their simple lifestyle of hunting and gathering. Another weaves cloth decorated with elaborate patterns. A general sense of contentment and belonging prevails. 

When those who have blue eyes come of age and are able to perceive colour clearly, they go into the depths of a cave and leave a hand print on the cave wall with red ochre. This connects them to all the generations of those who had blue eyes that preceded them and those to follow.

Now imagine they don't want to forage anymore. They don't want to depend on luck, on the fortunes, good or ill, that may befall them as they subsist on what nature provides, but want to take control of what resources are available to them, and begin to deliberately cultivate food. It is grown in fields that belong to someone, fields that can be passed down from one generation to the next. Conditions have arisen where, if you happen to own a field, there is an advantage to controlling blue eyed people. Indeed, controlling the blue eyed people has to happen first, before you could establish a field. Controlling the blue eyed people makes fields possible. They must be coerced, one way or another, into supporting this new endeavour that is no longer undertaken for the common good, but for the benefit of the individual who owns the field, for what good is the field if the crop cannot be sold.

Elaborate behaviours emerge that people adopt to signal their acceptance of and compliance with this new system of control on which this new society of property and agriculture is based. New forms of mutual obligation arise to cement everyone in the system, both those with blue eyes and those without. Despite being central to the operation of this system, blue eyed people are excluded from exercising authority over it, as the system exists to control them, not empower them. Indeed, what power could they possibly wield that they did not already formerly possess? They must be dis-empowered. That is how the system perpetuates itself. They are central to its story but are relegated to the margins of its histories and its tales are told by others who disregard the contribution of blue eyed people in case they should understand that they are central to the operation of this system and it is entirely within their capabilities to take control of it themselves. Instead, they are told they are uniquely incapable, and that this subordinate, inferior, dependent condition is what it means to have blue eyes.

Nevertheless, only those who can see colour know who is and is not colour blind. Only those with blue eyes can see who has blue eyes. Those who cannot see colour think everyone is just like them. They can see no difference. They struggle more with the idea that people can be different than those who can see that difference with their own eyes. The system reinforces their solipsism.

In fact not all blue eyed people have this ability to perceive colour: some lose it, some never have it, but all are controlled because of it, because no-one else is able to see the colour of the leaves that indicate whether the fruit of the plant on which they grow means life or death, only blue eyed people. This knowledge is called sin by some of those who are not blessed with it, and need those who are so blessed not to believe it is a blessing, but a curse, so that they willingly relinquish control of it to others. Some curse the blue eyes with which they were born despite the gift of sight they bring.

And others wish they had blue eyes. They perform the roles and fulfill the social obligations normally associated with blue eyed people. They wear tinted contact lenses, or undergo surgical procedures to alter the hue of their iris. However, they never acquire the ability which being born with blue eyes may confer. Nevertheless, some of them insist that they enjoy every concession made to those born with blue eyes to compensate them for their condition. They insist they are recognised as being no different in any respect. They threaten to put out the eyes of any blued eyed person who demurs.

Those born with blue eyes were happy for these people to walk among them, but the demand some of them make that no difference between them should be recognised threatens to eradicate all recognition of every injustice that was ever inflicted on them on account of the eye colour they were born with, and so every provision that has been made to address those injustices. Indeed, those without blue eyes have other advantages that those with blue eyes don't, which they retain once they change eye colour.

None of this is inevitable. The colour of our eyes, their true colour, the colour passed from father to daughter and mother to son, is indeed immutable. But how we choose to see each other with them is up to us.

Post-script
The cave where the red ochre hand prints were made was recently discovered. A secondary characteristic of having blue eyes is having hands that are, on average, smaller than the hands of those without blue eyes. Given society is now organised around the subjugation of those with blue eyes, those who discovered the hand prints are not able to conceptualise their origin, and interpret them as having been made by juveniles without blue eyes rather than adults with blue eyes.

The prison

The Lord said "I shall make a prison for you,
and it shall be broader than you can ride
on the swiftest horse from the first dawn
of your open eyes to their final sunset;
and it shall be higher than the flight of an eagle
that surveys its entire breadth in a single glance;
and rich too, rioting with more abundant variety
than the most eloquent and inspired poets
at the height of their powers of expression
can describe, and you shall call it freedom,"
and the man told the Lord "in that case
I choose to remain a captive of the limitless,
to stimulate an appetite for the impossible,
to be unreasonable, to find misery despite beauty,
simply to make sure I never forget I stand in chains"

We live in the ruins of what might have been

We live in the ruins of what might have been.
We are correspondents reporting wars waged on ourselves
now we have forgotten how to disagree with each other.
Competing truths are banners around which to rally
in the twilight of our civilisation,
their contradictory demands shattering the prism
that would refract them, our discourse so degraded
it no longer accommodates difference without rancour.
Questions make you a proxy target in the crossfire:
we live in an age where doubt has become painful
and everyone seeks the reassurance of false certainties
and clamours for lies while damning the Lügenpresse
that threatens their Tausendjähriges Brexit
and we live in the ruins of what might have been.

Alone

Alone, in a well of solitude,
you stand on hard packed dirt.
During every airless drought,
you struggle to breathe.
Graves are stacked under you.
The well was once bottomless
and only an anonymous infinity
of antecedents can plug it shut.
One day they will tip in sand
making you just one more stratum
compressed beneath the feet
of their next captive. For now,
when it rains, you try hard
to keep your head above water,

but remember this, you are not alone.
This world is a honeycomb,
the shafts isolating us adjacent.
The well I'm in is next to yours.
We are a subterranean commonwealth
if we just believe in each other,
these cylinders an artillery of love.
from which we erupt, our hearts,
divided from each other, joining
as constellations on which gods look,
sighing for madness out of their reach.

The long con

The UK is a con trick. The phrase "precious 300 year union" is in effect a boast that it is longest con in history.

Comparing Scottish and British GDP figures that represent the relative economic position of Scotland and Britain before the Union (using figures from 1700 to represent the pre-union position) to the figures for now (using figures from 2018 to represent "now"), we can see that the con is worth about £100 billion per annum. That's how much the Scottish economy under-performs relative to its pre-union position.

So much for all that "Darien" bollocks. Interestingly, if you corrected that £100B discrepancy, Scotland's GDP would be almost exactly the same as Denmark's. Scotland has diverged catastrophically from similarly sized Independent countries due to the Union, which "costs" Scotland £100B per year.

Working:
Source of figures for 1700: Broadberry, S., Campbell, B.M.S., Klein, A., Overton, M. & van Leeuwen, B. (2015). "British Economic Growth, 1270–1870". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. According to Broadberry et al. (Table 5.06), in 1700 real GDP per head in England (Great Britain) was £12.68 (12.24) and population was 5.20 (6.20) million.

[(£12.24 * 6.2M) - (£12.68 * 5.2M) ] / 1.0M
= per capita GDP in (Great Britain) - (England)
= per capita GDP in Scotland
= (75.888M - 65.936M) / 1.0M = £9.952

Total GDP, 1700 = £12.24 * 6.2M = £75.888M
English GDP, 1700 = £12.68 * 5.2M = £65.936M
Scottish GDP, 1700 = £9.952 * 1.0M = £9.952M
= 15.1% of English GDP or 13.1% of Total GDP

Current positions: Scottish GDP, 2018 ~ £170B ~ 8.1% of UK total. The 5% difference between 1700 and 2018 corresponds to about £100B per annum. Danish GDP in 2018 ~ £270B.

Spectrum

Perennials of the genus Rosa
are characterised by radiation
with a wavelength around 700 nm,
whereas those of the genus Viola
by wavelengths somewhat more short,
and apparently these are pertinent details
if there's a woman whom you'd like to court.

What's the point?

I can't imagine being missed.
I do the things I ought to do
but someone else can do them too
so I don't think that I'll be missed.
Mistakes I make are all my own
while everything worthwhile I do
is something else I did with you.
while fucking up I do alone.
There's nothing really you can say.
What needs to be said comes from me,
but I'm an emotional amputee.
This really is the only way. 

For Dina

"Burial details unknown" the records say.
Born Chernihiv, 7th January 1911.
Occupation: actress, Kiev Puppet Theatre.
Kiev, where you lived "in love and happiness"
with Nikolai and your son and daughter.
Died 1977, precise location unknown.

But we know where you were buried,
the first time you were buried:
Babi Yar,
in a grave with thirty thousand others,
of whom we know the names of one in ten.

We know your name Dina Pronicheva,
born Dina Mironovna Vasserman,
because you crawled out of that grave.
"Don't be scared lady, I'm alive too".
Fimochka, the boy who said that, shot,
but you carried his name back with you:
Fima Schnaiderman, eleven years old.
You carried that name back from the grave
that consumed so many others.

"No monuments stand over Babi Yar,"
Yevgeniy sang, "a steep cliff only,
like the rudest headstone," but for you
it was another theatre, where puppets
walked upon a stage of corpses they had made,
shooting it if it moved beneath their feet.

Thirty thousand bullets for thirty thousand names
now made unknown by those puppets, dead themselves
and held up by sinews, not of hate, not of evil,
but of something worse for which there is no name,
something that consumes the names of others
and is never satisfied, from which you ran
by the ravine of Babi Yar one night in September.

Confiteor

Some words will turn our ink to tar
that slows our pen as we transcribe them.
Some subjects turn our mouths to scars
that gape to bleed words to describe them,
so silent we our counsel keep
that wounds are less inclined to weep.
Ask, if you hear us confess pain,
from what witness do we refrain.

Cuimhne leanabais / memory of childhood

I recall drawing water from the well before midnight
to last us through the Sabbath to Monday morning.
I recall having a TV with thermionic valves in it.
I recall monoglot Gaelic speakers, back in the days
before the street lights stole the stars from us.

I recall the mysterious liturgy of the shipping forecast,
silently communing with the others reached by the broadcast.
I recall wearing clothes until they had to be burned,
soiled beyond the powers of laundry, back in the days
before the street lights stole the stars from us.

The grouse erupting from the heather like a landmine;
the startled oystercatcher flying low like the shuttle
in uncle's loom; I recall the peat banks worked by men
who survived the trenches, back in the days
before the street lights stole the stars from us.