Episode 1 | Careless Whispers

Wakefield. July 2025. Dusk.

I’d had a tip-off that an old friend had fallen on hard times. As I walked under the arches of a disused bridge, broken glass cracked underfoot. Dogs barked. Couples argued. And with every step, the whispering got louder.

As I rounded a corner, I saw the shadow of something that, once upon a time, might have been a man. But now? The hair was long and shaggy, like a rabid dog had been given access to Just For Men and a mental breakdown. Nails stretched beyond what any sane person would consider acceptable, and a guttural noise began to fill the alleyway.

It couldn’t possibly be, could it?

“Barry?” I whispered, the words itching to come out but struggling at the same time.

“Agruondkjbwoin.”

Right then…

You see, since our escapades in FC26 had come to an abrupt end due to the fact that, well, it’s a fucking terrible game, times had been… difficult for Barry.

He was offered the Andorran U15s job but declined, stating that the mountain air would cause such a severe allergic reaction that he would have to be placed into a six-month induced coma.

Since then, there’d been nothing. And with no outlet for his strange little creative-yet-analytical brain, he’d started to go a bit… loopy.

I’d lost all contact with him when I returned home to Wakefield, but I did sometimes think I’d see a man lurking around Trinity Shopping Centre, hiding behind bins and old men named Jim.

I’d brushed this off as just my imagination, but now? I know the truth was much more desperate.

I knew that I needed to do something. I couldn’t leave him in this gibbering state, primed to get sexually assaulted by a badger, or worse, one of Wakefield’s finest ladies on a hen night.

I put my arm around him slowly, gently, and cradled his head for a moment.

“There, there, Barry, we’ll sort you out mate.”

“Hear me, distant albatross, the winds of chakfoib2foinwl…” he mumbled.

“What’s that, mate?” I politely asked.

“Hear me, distant albatross… the winds of change may carry you… to far away lands… in search of eternal… glory.”

Oh no. A prophecy.

I’d not heard one of those since he saw Tim Howard in his cornflakes. But this time, I knew what was coming.

Football Manager.

The Pentagon

Sadly, Barry’s prophecies are never about lottery numbers or affordable energy bills. They are, almost exclusively, about ruining my free time.

His prophecy stated far away lands, which can only mean one thing. The Pentagon Challenge.

The longest, most difficult task in Football Manager, the Pentagon Challenge tasks you with winning the five major continental club competitions:

• The UEFA Champions League (Europe)
• The CONCACAF Champions Cup (North America)
• AFC Champions League Elite (Asia)
• CAF Champions League (Africa)
• CONMEBOL Libertadores (South America)

And the hardest part? Start unemployed. No prior experience. No coaching badges. Except…

I do actually have a UEFA C License Coaching Badge. So I’m using it.

The Beginning

We’re going to begin our journey somewhere that will actually take a Sunday League jobber and his washed-up, psychic assistant manager… Asia.

Once Barry had been hosed down, shaved in the areas legally required, and placed within shouting distance of a laptop, we got to work.

Our first three applications are Kumamoto in Japan’s second division, Tochigi SC in Japan’s third division, and YB Longding in China’s First Division (who, weirdly, can’t sign non-Chinese goalkeepers. No, I don’t get it either).

Ten long days passed with Barry and me sitting by our fax machine. I’ve actually no idea why, because it’s not plugged in and no one uses fax anymore. Instead, we sat bolt upright as an email notification popped up, only to find it was HelloFresh sending us an offer for 10 free boxes.

As enticing as that is, we need a fox in the box, not fish in the post. But then… A JOB INTERVIEW!

YB Longding have got back to us and offered us an interview. First question: why don’t we speak Chinese. It’s not a bad question, to be honest, as it’s hardly a niche language.

Luckily Barry did an internship at a Chinese fishery when he was 27 and learnt enough to get by, and I lied and told them I can pick it up quickly (I absolutely can’t).

I then got asked why I was in the market for a number of jobs, and unfortunately there wasn’t an option to say ‘obviously because I’m out of fucking work you morons.’ Instead, I told them I’m merely considering my options.

Next up, they asked if I’m comfortable working with limited resources. Well, I’m currently working with no resources, so yeah, go on then.

Then came the big one: could I take them to the next level? As someone who took Halifax to world domination on FM Mobile 2005, I’m pretty confident I can do the job. Next!

I was then asked what changes I’d want to make to the backroom staff… well, I think my lads like Fat Rob the physio would follow me to the ends of the Earth, so I told them I’d have to take a look at everyone should I get the job (and immediately bin them off).

Finally, I was asked if I was happy to work with Xu Bo, the director of football. Unsure if this was Susan Boyle’s Chinese cousin, I just said yeah, why not. At least there is a director of football.

I had no requests, so I closed the Zoom call and sat back in my chair. Our first interview was done and dusted, now it was just a waiting game.

For five days. When we found out we didn’t get it.

Fuck.

Two days later, the Tochigi SC board informed me we’d been unsuccessful, and this suddenly felt like it was going to be much more difficult than we first thought.

During Sacktober, when FM clubs start firing managers like it’s a government initiative, Fukuoka, Thespa Gunma, Jubilo Iwata, Nagoya, Peng City, Yokohama FM, Daegu, Dewa United and Incheon United reviewed our application and collectively decided: absolutely fucking not.

Barry took the news badly, by which I mean he spent three hours facing a wall and whispering “Incheon” into a mug.

Southport offered us an interview, we declined. We’re not going for Europe yet.

Then, come December, we get two interview offers, both in Japan. The format is largely the same as before, as both Hachinohe and Ryukyu grill me on why I don’t know Japanese, whether I can keep a happy dressing room, and whether I want to stay for a long time. Obviously I lie like a Prince to make sure I say exactly what they want to hear.

AND WE DID SOMETHING RIGHT. A few days later, Ryukyu got in touch offering me a £1k-a-week contract to take over in the J3 League.

Barry licked the contract, declaring it “legally moist” and immediately began learning Japanese by shouting at Duolingo. We are fucking back, baby.

Boiled Eggs & Betrayal

On our flight over to Japan, Barry spent the entire first half of the journey drawing tactical shapes on a tea-stained boiled egg. I didn’t ask why. You learn not to.

As the cabin crew brought our evening meal, Barry grabbed one of the poor air stewards, Colin, by the collar. Terrified, but somehow unable to pull away, Colin could only listen as Barry named the three players he believes will betray me. One of them is Brazilian. One of them is a 16-year-old. And one of them is, somehow, me.

With that, Barry snapped back into his chair and instantly fell asleep for the final three hours.

北の大地に着いた日の朝、凍った水の下で魚が凍っているのを見た。生き物の時間だけが薄い氷の向こうに取り残され、こちら側の時間だけが風に押されて進んでいるようだった。

その数日前から、妙なほど物事が滑らかに進んでいた。昨日一気に手続きが受理された辺りからおかしかった。手続きが一気に受理されて調子に乗っていたのだと思う。何か大きな流れに乗せられている気がして、執拗に学問を否定してしまったこともあった。理由を説明する言葉より先に、世界の方が勝手に答えを出しているように見えたからだ。

それでも不安は消えなかった。今日オーロラが見れなかったらがっかりしていただろう。だから私は、一応サーカスのチケットを保険として持っていた。夜空が空振りに終わったときの逃げ道だった。しかし本当はサーカスには興味がなかったのである。見たかったのは、人間の作る奇跡ではなく、空そのものが気まぐれに描くものだった。

宿では、ホテルマンの過剰な気遣いがどこか滑稽で、償いのつもりらしい振る舞いまで芝居がかって見えた。昨夜たまたま他人同士の接吻を目撃したせいか、人の感情がみな少し演技めいて感じられた。遮ることを前提にした歌のようなものが世の中にはあるらしいが、その仕組みを私は最後まで理解できなかった。

夕方になると、平原は急速に青さを失った。光を当てた方が良いと誰かが言ったわけではない。ただ遠くに怪しい影があり、懐中電灯の筋だけが雪面を撫でていた。私はその光景が絵ではなく線になるのを待っていた。静止した景色が動き出し、輪郭がほどけ、空へ溶けていく瞬間を。

待つあいだ、水筒を手に取った。以前なら暗い穴を覗くことに理由のない不安があったが、今なら水筒を覗くのが怖くないかもしれないと思えた。最後まで自分の近くに空気入れが転がっていたのも可笑しかった。旅の途中で必要になることは一度もなかったのに、なぜか捨てられずにいた。そんな些細な物だけが現実の重さを持ち続けていた。

やがて空に淡い筋が現れた。

それは最初、誰かが絵筆で引いた色の滲みに見えた。しかし次第に流れ、折れ、増殖し、光景は本当に線になった。初めて見るオーロラだった。頭上で静かに揺れるそれは、理解するための対象ではなく、ただ存在するために存在していた。食べ物の成分が分かるくらいなら死にます、と極端な言葉を口にしたくなる人間の気持ちが、そのとき少しだけ分かった。分解してしまえば失われるものがある。説明してしまえば遠ざかるものがある。

緑や紫の帯が空を横切り続けるなか、私は最後まで猫背の人の気持ちだけは分からなかった。あれほど壮大なものが頭上にあるのに、どうして下を向いて歩けるのだろうと思った。

結局、運よく見れたのである。

サーカスのチケットはポケットの奥で折れ曲がったままだった。誰にも使われないまま残った紙切れよりも、凍った湖の下の魚よりも、あの夜の光の方がよほど現実だった。空は静かに揺れ続け、私はその下で、自分だけが少し遅れて世界に受理されたような気がしていた。

The “AI” industry would like everyone to believe that we are experiencing a second industrial revolution. Up until recently, this was far from true. LLMs provided a significantly better way to do natural language analysis and transformations than traditional natural language processing. They definitely changed one domain, but produced garbage in others. The hype didn't match the reality, and, in a lot of ways, still doesn't. But things are going to change, and we should soberly assess why and how.

There are patterns that are similar to the Industrial Revolution, specifically around undermining independent skilled labor and destroying or enclosing commons. I think there's also a similar likelihood of revolution, if not even more revolutionary potential. The global wave of revolutions connected to industrialization mostly lead to some variant of liberalism, with greater or lesser degrees of compromise to prevent socialist revolution. The old order also developed an extremely authoritarian and system of crushing revolution that was, to some degree, internationally coordinated.

At the intersection of technology and climate change, we've already seen early waves going back to the Arab Spring. This was probably the first wave of modern revolutions. Back then, revolution in the imperial core seemed impossible with the rapid destruction of Occupy. Today, many of the countries where autocracies were overthrown rapidly returned to some autocratic form of government. But not all of them.

It's important to remember that the monarchies of their day also tried using authoritarianism to stop the future. Learn about Metternich and the Holy Alliance. There was a concerted international effort to crush the wave of liberal revolution that had been topping monarchies since the 1770s. In case you weren't aware, it didn't work.

Some monarchies were able to hold on to power for a while by tightly controlling technological advancement. This did not turn out well for them. While Belgium, the Netherlands, and the UK monarchs survived through massive concessions, the Romanov plan to hold on to everything did not turn out quite so well for, uh, anyone. The proto-fascism of various European powers from the late 1700s through the early 1900s could not ultimately save any of them.

Fascism is not sustainable. It is the fire of a collapsing star, growing even as it frantically consumes itself, a phase that can only be a prelude to explosion. The best it can hope to do is silence civil discourse, gaining some time in exchange for completely losing signal about when the collapse will come and by what means.

Of course, we all know that the liberal democracies that came out of the various Imperial collapses produced the more resilient aristocracy of capital. This aristocracy managed to untether itself from geographically local politics through “free trade,” where capital is free to roam the world while borders keep people in.

We see echoes of Metternich in regional governments supporting for the Junta of Myanmar against popular revolution. Even governments that otherwise (outwardly) disagree with the policies of the dictatorship, would still prefer a “stable trading partner” to a free people. In Syria, too, Turkey would prefer to annihilate Rojava while local powers look for ways to exploit the situation for their own interest. It's common to criticize people comparing Rojava to Anarchist Spain because they are such different situations. But there are parallels in how liberal democracies would prefer fascism to any alternative to liberalism.

There is, like Metternich believed, a natural order. That natural order is, of course, in the form of liberalism, not monarchy, but the underlying structural assumption remains the same even as the systems shift. Power is deeply uncreative.

It is with that lack of creativity that we should pivot back to the current moment. We keep being told that “GenAI” (the set of technologies based on large data sets and transformer models, of which LLMs are one such technology) will destroy art. They will not. Photography allowed anyone to perfectly represent an image. It changed painting, but it didn't destroy it.

Impressionism was a direct reaction to photography. Painters even emulated photographic elements, such as blur and depth of field, in ways that had not ever been imagined before. But the most important reaction was that painting focused more and more on emotion. A photograph with a skilled photographer can capture emotion, but it remains limited in ways that other visual arts are not. It is its own thing. Photography is a specific medium. People predicted that it would destroy painting. It didn't.

GenAI won't destroy visual art. They may change it. But there are feelings that can't be encoded in prompts because they can't be encoded in words. Visual art exists specifically because words categorically can't capture certain things.

But even art that is literally words, literary arts, are not something LLMs can do well. LLM text feels hollow because it is. Writing is, ultimately, a synesthetic activity (even for people without that specific neurodivergence). Words have sounds, they feel ways in your mouth, they're connected to other sensations. An LLM can say “kiki” and “bobo.” It can find statistical associations that make it almost seem as though it understands. But that's all it is, a statistical association. It's a stochastic representation of a hidden process. There's something underneath that, something that's ultimately indecipherable. That thing touches the nature of the universe.

You can't represent it statistically in one big model, because it's not even consistent. Language both discovers and creates those connections, which create and lead to the discovery of more. It's a tangled hierarchy. No LLM will ever be able to do that, because no LLM will have a body shaped by nature.

But not all writing is like this. Some technical writing is simply the dry regurgitation of facts. Bad technical writing anyway, and a lot of it is bad. LLMs can represent bad technical writing pretty well. They're trained on a lot of it. Where it's useful to have such things, LLMs can probably do that just fine.

And yet, a good technical writer is actually not far off from a good creative writer. They will tap in to emotions and images to make concepts obvious. They will be playful to make reading enjoyable (instead the expected horrible slog). LLMs will not do this. LLMs can construct metaphors that are optimized for LLMs, but they can't really optimize for humans because they can't experience the world in a human body. They don't have eyes, ears, or feelings connected to millions of years of evolution.

Even things we are told that LLMs are good at, like text summarization, relies on hidden context. Summarization is necessarily lossy. What you is chosen to keep vs lose depends on the purpose of the summarization. It also depends on the frame within which you're operating. A text can only be summarized well if the summarizer has a model of the reader that includes information about things that they already know (which can be safely dropped), things that they don't know or that may conflict with their existing beliefs (which are essential to highlight).

Today GenAI images and videos have become the ascetics of modern fascism. Fascists use GenAI because no one would actually put in the time and effort to make the horrible images they want to exist. But even more than that, fascists hate art and artists. They hate it because can't control it and they don't understand it. They tell everyone that GenAI will destroy art, in the hopes that it will manifest.

GenAI will not destroy art. It can't. But perhaps in a generation or two, after this wave of fascists succumbs to entropy, GenAI might become another creative tool. In the meantime, I expect art to emphasize what can't be replaced: oil paintings having more texture, writing more focused on emotion, etc.

But there are things that GenAI may well replace. Protein folding is essentially a solved problem now, specifically because of GenAI. It had required humans. There was a huge project where humans would manually fold models of proteins. That created a massive data set, which can now solve for arbitrary proteins. Humans are, of course, still critical to pharmaceutical development, but one boring job is gone.

Web design is “solved.” A human is no longer needed to make something that's “close enough” to customer expectations. If the cost is low enough, then people will compromise. A lot of web design has always been the awful work of just making things look the same, or at least look good, on different platforms. That integration problem should absolutely go away. It's not creative, it's just technical noodling.

However, a good web designer doesn't just “make exactly what the customer wants.” A good web designer makes the right thing for the client. They know that the thing the customer wants will look awful, will not work, will convey things that are not culturally appropriate to their target audience. Anyone skilled in any service role is actually good because they can convince their customer that the thing they want is actually bad. An LLM will never do that.

But if LLMs are “good enough” to do the basic jobs, and they're cheap, then designers never get to learn. They never get to build the skills needed to help people not just implement their vision, but shift it to integrate the knowledge of a skilled artisan.

And that's the shift I expect to see.

I think we're moving into a factory model of technology, where software and digital artifacts can be produced in a way that “good enough” but the market is so flooded with cheap garbage that people can't afford to learn to make things better. The same economics that drive planned obsolescence will drive digital artifacts. This is most obvious in software right now, with people creating mountains of unmaintainable code that does some basic thing then breaks as soon as features start being added.

We already live in a world where technology is always broken. That will only get worse, if we let it.

Technical security has always been arcane and mostly invisible. For decades everything was vulnerable and most people weren't aware. Over time people started to become more and more aware, both as security people started getting better at explaining the risks to media (see FireSheep), and as more stuff got visibly hacked. At this point, nearly everyone has had their government records, financial records, or medical records leaked on the Internet at least once or twice. Passwords get leaked so often that Have I Been Pwned is a whole project, with 17 billion records. And yes. The answer is yes.

There are a bunch of IOT automatic tank gauges (ATG) exposed directly to the Internet. Apparently if you log in and tell them they're rotated a whole bunch of times, they catch fire. I say “log in” as though they all have passwords set, as though those passwords that do exist can't be easily guessed or even derived. That article talks about 900 of them. These have been known about for a long time, and the same article cited 6k during their previous scan.

Your hospital has been owned. MRIs don't get updated because each update has to go through the FDA. Those machines get plugged in to the Internet, they're running some outdated version of Windows, and they get hacked. Hospital security lets them get hacked because, they hope, the hackers will patch to keep other people out and the legit admins can't patch.

That's where we were before all of this LLM stuff. What we have today makes that look like Fort Knox.

People are vibe coding MCP servers using LLMs trained on decades of insecure trash. Then they tell you to install their tools remotely, so there's code you don't control running on your system. Great, it's a chance for a supply chain attack every time you restart the service. But worse still, there's natural language malware. We can finally have an autonomously polymorphic worm. At some point that's gonna intersect with Spiralism, and we'll get a memetic worm that crosses the boundary between humans and machines and back. We already have tons of AI propaganda (which, was always predictable).

With malicious skills and agent files, malicious MCP servers, and people building systems with basically no isolation, it's just a catastrofuck. It's so deeply hopeless that half of the MCP github pages are just like “YOLO, just pipe curl directly into bash disabling all security checks, lol!” LLMs have essentially infinite attack surface since it's all of natural language connected directly to some code exec or another. But what's the proposed solution? Just put an LLM in the middle to review all the LLM generated stuff. Nothing could go wrong. Oh, right, the “AI security” agent is just an LLM, which means it's also more attack surface.

None of this is actually impossible to fix. Humans have been the weakest link in security for a long time. We understand how to design systems that assume compromise. We just aren't doing that because “move fast!!” Fixing these problems requires actual focused engineering from a human. You can't vibe this shit.

Unfortunately, it's not profitable to slow down. We already see that if everyone is always getting owned, then there's no incentive to distinguish yourself as a company with security. Clearly, no one cares. There's obviously no demand. Why waste the money? Just check the boxes and pay the fines. They're cheaper than the security spend anyway. Welcome to the yolo economics of late stage capitalism.

But we can only be forced to accept this state of things if we don't have any alternative. Which is, of course, why “AI” is trashing open source right now. I'm not saying it's intentional or that it's a conspiracy. It's not. But there is a systemic incentive to destroy those commons, to drain them. There have been very intentional efforts in the past, specifically by Microsoft, to “embrace, extend, extinguish” open source projects. LLMs provide an opportunity to hypercharge that.

Basically every company relies on open source at some level, and for most it's almost their whole stack. Most of them don't give back. Everyone freaks out when a tiny bit of investment into security reveals a bunch of kernel bugs. Yeah, “many eyes make bugs shallow” only works if people are actually putting eyes on it. Commons have to be maintained. People have to put resource in, not just take them out. And now we're seeing the extractive collapse of our critical digital commons.

Well, I say people need to put resources in, but it actually matters what goes in. If you take water from a lake and dump sewage in, it's not exactly “managing the commons.” But yeah, that raw sewage into our metaphorical lake is also happening at the same time. I don't know what the digital equivalent of cholera is, but get ready for it.

So there we have it: enclosure/destruction of the commons, attacks on skilled labor, centralization of power, growing authoritarianism. They keep saying it's like the industrial revolution, and, yeah, there are definitely some parallels. Those aren't the only ones, I assure you.

What do we do about it? Yeah, I don't fucking know. I'm just throwing this out here because no single one of us is going to figure it out alone. We're only going to create a better world if we know what we're up against, and we choose to build it together.

I had my therapy session again today, and it helped me recognize how a lot of the things that I wish I had Come from social media. It’s not actually real stuff, similar to how if I look at photos I take after social events I host or things like that it must seem like I have this massive wonderful friend group. Almost to prove my point, K messaged me after seeing my story saying that she wishes that she had friends like that. I think that’s like another sign of divine intervention here, essentially showing my lesson is true, because what she saw was the life that I wished that I had. And do you see the irony there? And so I kind of recognized that the lies that look wonderful are similar to mine.

Vi har allerede hatt full stopp i utbygginga av fornybar energi i mange år. Nå sørger Rødt for flertall med høyresida for å bråbremse havvindsatsingen også. Samtidig sørger “Norgespris” for at nordmenn dropper å installere solceller og sparer strøm, og vi struper utvekslingen med strøm med utlandet. Vi er landet som har blitt for dumt. 

Partiene på høyresida er svært ivrige på å bygge ut atomkraft, som vil bli langt dyrere enn havvind, og ikke er realistisk på minst 15 år. I mellomtiden skal vi altså stoppe havvind-prosjekter som allerede er i gang. Det er oppskrift på et fattigere og gråere Norge, som faller enda mer akterut i den globale utviklingen. 

Når Stortinget vil bruke titalls milliarder på å subsidiere strømsløsing og bruk av bensin og diesel skjer det uten utredning, og milliardene får rulle uten kostnadskontroll. Heisann, Norgespris ble dobbelt så dyrt som vi trodde? Ingen grunn til å trekke i nødbremsen! At solcellebransjen ligger med brukket rygg er en liten pris å betale. Hva skal vi vel med nye næringer? Olja tar vel aldri slutt? 

Rødt er glade i å skryte av den rene norske kraftkrevende industrien, basert på vannkraft. Men hvis denne industrien ikke fantes, og utenlandske kapitalister hadde foreslått å etablere smelteverk basert på vannkraft i vakre vestlandsfjorder i dag, ville Rødt garantert vært mot. Man kan ikke bygge ren industri hvis man er opptatt av å gå fremst i hvert demonstrasjonstog. Rødt fremstår hverken som et klimaparti eller et industriparti. Her er det viktigst å please Motvind, ikke industri og fagbevegelse. 

Hver gang oljenæringa mumler om “forutsigbarhet” kaster Stortingsflertallet alt de har i hendene, og gir oljebransjen MER enn de ber om. Oljeskattepakka er det grelleste eksempelet. I ettertid innrømte Erna Solberg at Stortinget hadde mistet hodet. Nå mister Høyre hodet igjen, og sørger for nøyaktig det motsatte av forutsigbarhet for norsk industri. For en farse.

It is still Monday in parts of Canada as I post this. And it sure as shoot is still Monday in Japan.

There are some artists that translate Japanese music from Anime and Video Games and just... rock it solid. So here are some favourites.

Mashle OP Season 2: Bling-Bang-Bang-Born (English Cover) Will Stetson also has a great cover of the Dandadan OP, but Mashle. This cover is just so perfectly executed, and inspired this whole playlist.

Kamen Rider 01: REALxEYEZ (FULL ENGLISH COVER) Have I mentioned I love Toku today? Zero One started off the Reiwa era with a banger theme, and Mark de Groot and Mr. Goatee just nail it.

Spice and Wolf – “Tabi no Tochuu” (FULL Opening) Amanda Lee, alias LeeandLie, alias AmaLee, alias Monarch, alias the Scuff Queen. I should have known you'd be here. Fits your MO, too. Take an awesome anime theme, translate it, and sing it over awesome orchestration. You're lucky I have other perps to deal with, scram. What? No, no I just got some sniff finger print dust in my eye...

One Punch Man Season One OPENING: The Hero – Jam Project Jonathan Young... did know Jam is a group, right? He didn't have to do it alone. I wonder what it took to prepare... I'm guessing here, but... 100 HOURS OF SHREDDING! 100 HOURS OF DRUM WORK! And, a brisk run up and down his ENTIRE VOCAL SCALE!

My Hero Academia: The Day FULL OPENING (OP 1) Nathan Smith, Nathan Sharp, NateWantsToBattle. This is here because Nate's cover made me actually give a bloody damn about anything My Hero related. I don't hate it, mind. It just never grabbed me. This cover does.

NARUTO SHIPPUDEN OPENING 4: CLOSER This is my favourite Naruto OP. It's also our first example of “translated by the original artist” as Joe Inoue did the original and this English version.

Fairy Tail, OP Season 1: Snow Fairy This song is literally the extent of my Fairy Tail fandom. To make this list, the cover had to make me do what the original did. Inexplicably tear up. And, well, Studio Yuraki gets the award.

Cowboy Bebop ED: Real Folk Blues Most covers either just do the TV size or otherwise abridge this. Caroline Gordan / Caroline Makes Music commits to the whole thing, and by sauce she nails it.

By Caroline Makes Music

Nero's Battle Theme (Devil May Cry): Devil Trigger I had to get Mr. “Can I stop playing Metrovania now” RichaadEB in here, and while his Bad Apple cover is great... this turns any voice call into karaoke. Lollia and LittleVMills on vocals, all these voices inside of my head...

Kamen Rider Build: Be The One (English Ver.) This isn't the only Kamen Rider song sung in English and Japanese by the same person. But it is scientifically the best one. I have already performed the experiment. Beverly nails the track again with Pandora's backing.

SPY x FAMILY OP 1: Mixed Nuts Hey, I didn't know the Scuff Queen's tech support guy could sing! What's next, a duet with John VTuber or Rin Penrose? Why are there angry VTubing fans at my door?

The Galaxy Express 999 (English Version) Welcome to the “We can do our own damn song in English!” club, Godiego. This is, of course, the END theme to the classic anime Fate/Stay— wait, an Iron Mouse fan from our previous entry has gently vetoed this gag... Hat tip to Rycochet for reminding me Godiego did this quite a few times.

Lower One's Eyes (English Cover) So, I wanted another Will Stetson song here. This is essentially a dub of the AMV of the original song, which was pitched to me as (checks notes) Judas betraying Jesus but it's tragic yuri with a witch and maid. Let me put on my best ProZD impression, ahem. Okay.

Plastic Love It should not have taken a nice member of the Beige Party, Jessica, to remind me that Caitlin Myers covered Mariya Takeuchi's awesome city pop track Plastic Lover— especially since this is the song where (as one commentator notes) I keep expecting the singing to start a bar and a half earlier!

Mimukauwa Nice Try (English) The anthem of all those who are totally going to win at Uno— DAMN IT THAT'S THE THIRD WILD DRAW FOUR FROGGIESINGER!

Sanctuary (Opening) Jessica put this to mind too. I have never played Kingdom Hearts because I fear it will consume me. But Utada's vocal work for it in Japanese and English... it is a siren song...

Overlord III – “Voracity” (Opening) Amalee gets another feature, and gad this is note perfect, down to the “two three fours”. A true ode to the glorious, all consuming sublime existence of Nazarick.

For the first time in my life I stopped going to church. After about a month of not attending, a couple things I remember.

1. The last day I went, a girl in my cell group was engaged, nearing marriage, and she was almost in tears as she described the feeling she had, that “she really felt in her heart that God wanted her to be happy,” as she described the newfound good things that happened to her. Maybe she meant that she had simply found joy in God alone, but from the context of describing all the ups of life coming her way, I lightly interpreted it as “Good things are happening – God must want me to be happy.” But after mulling over it for a couple weeks, I disagree with that sentiment. God makes you happy despite the circumstances. Actually, he may give you miserable circumstances, and He will still command you to joy. I say this from the perspective of someone that is chronically unhappy. I was afraid to say this before because I was afraid people would not believe God because of me or turn away from Christianity, but I am chronically unhappy. I don’t know if I’ve ever been happy in my entire life. In the few moments I have felt genuinely content, I’ve felt a deep sense of fear, longing, like something was off and everything would implode the next hour.

2. During my last cell group, I described how two months ago, I just gave up on the whole thing I was doing with faith, everything, because I couldn’t do it anymore. I was just miserable, and faith was making me more miserable. They looked concerned and offered me kind words, and said I should take some time off if I was struggling. I’m certain they actually cared. I was grateful for that.

New things:

1. My mind feels much more receptive to the vast possibilities of the world and life. My relationship with theology, the Church, was that there was a right answer, and that I was bound under tight moral quandraries. There were places my mind was allowed to go, and places where it was not. Things I wanted to say but did not let myself, now I speak freely. I feel the chains falling away. Maybe this is what other people just normally feel like all the time? It’s rather nice. I feel more human. I feel less trapped. I’m letting myself be a little delusional, chase ambition, the rather inconsequential things of this life that other people chase, and whatnot. Things I was already chasing before, now I chase more eagerly, openly, and guilt-free.

2. I realize how much of a time and energy sink going to church on Sundays was. Now I feel like I can actually relax on the weekend.

3. I’m trying more to do things I wouldn’t do because “a good Christian wouldn’t.” In some ways, I kind of hope I hit some kind of rock bottom. Maybe I just need to hit it hard enough to bounce back.

4. How did I come to associate the whole thing of Christianity with only the negative, so much that I detest even the idea of talking with other Christians, and going to church at all? Was there really so little happiness in that entire ordeal that I remember nothing positive and only the negative? To me right now, it seems even the positive was always tinged with the negative, the underlying feeling that I was not enough. Guilt. Punishment. Wanting to kill myself. Self-denial. Forcing myself to do things I did not want to. Emotional repression. Common themes.

Consider the moment the engineer sees the dialogue box. It is late April 2026, in a Menlo Park office that has been emptier than it used to be, and she has just opened her work laptop after a four-day stretch on an overdue project. A grey panel informs her that a piece of software named the Model Capability Initiative is now installed on her device. It will capture mouse movements. It will log keystrokes. It will record clicks. It will take periodic snapshots of whatever she has on screen. It will run across hundreds of applications she uses without thinking, from her IDE to her Slack channels to her browser tabs on GitHub, Google, LinkedIn and Wikipedia. The data will train AI agents. There is no opt-out on a company device. She can sign the acknowledgement, or she can not. The reading time is ninety seconds.

What the panel does not say is that her professional judgement, the decisions she will make about how to frame a problem, which library to reach for, when to step away from a function that is not working, are now an input to a system whose stated purpose is to perform those decisions without her. The accumulated craft of her career is being read out of her keystrokes and into a model. There is no extra pay. There is no additional consent beyond the employment contract she signed when she joined. There is no realistic refusal that does not amount to a resignation, three weeks before the company begins the largest round of redundancies in its history.

This is the scene Reuters reported in an exclusive on 21 April 2026, in a story picked up by Fortune, TechCrunch, the BBC, CNBC, TechSpot, Fast Company and the Financial Times. It has since become a reference point in a debate the law has not yet caught up with. An employer is collecting data on workers without giving them a meaningful choice, and the lawyers consulted say the practice is probably legal. The story has a different shape, too. The data is no longer the by-product of work. The data is the work. What Meta is collecting is the cognitive substrate of professional judgement, harvested at scale, to train systems whose explicit purpose is to make the careers themselves redundant.

The question that follows is whether the employment contract as currently constructed is the right instrument for that exchange. If the expertise a worker has spent two decades cultivating can be extracted as a training corpus under the boilerplate provisions of a standard at-will agreement, what does employment mean? What does ownership mean? And what does consent mean when the practical alternative to consenting is to be unemployed?

What the Memo Said

The factual record is straightforward. In mid-April 2026, Meta circulated an internal communication on its Workplace platform announcing that the Model Capability Initiative would be installed on the work computers of its US-based employees. The tool would log mouse movements, clicks and keystrokes, take periodic on-screen snapshots, and run across hundreds of approved applications. The list, as reported by CNBC and TechSpot, included Google, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, GitHub, Slack, the Atlassian suite, and Meta's own properties including Threads and Manus. The data would be used solely for AI model training. Managers would not have access. There would be, the memo said, safeguards to protect sensitive content.

Reuters added two details that subsequent reporting has confirmed. European employees are entirely exempt. The General Data Protection Regulation requires explicit, freely given consent for the kind of monitoring MCI involves, and the working consensus among European employment lawyers is that consent obtained under threat of dismissal is not, in any meaningful sense, freely given. Rather than litigate the point, Meta drew a line at the Atlantic. The second detail is that there is no opt-out on a US-issued company device. When an engineering manager asked on the internal Workplace platform how to decline, Meta's chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth answered in writing that no opt-out existed. The choice presented to US staff was not a choice between participating and abstaining. It was a choice between participating and leaving.

Andy Stone, Meta's vice-president for communications, defended the programme in language quoted across the coverage. “If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them,” Stone told reporters, citing “things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus.” The framing presents MCI as a research necessity. The agents Meta intends to build cannot be trained on synthetic data, the argument runs, because synthetic data does not capture how a competent professional actually navigates an interface under deadline pressure.

What Stone did not address is the obvious follow-on. If the goal of the agents is to perform tasks Meta employees currently perform, and if the way to train them is to record how those employees perform those tasks, then the employee is being asked to teach the system that will replace them, using the company's hardware, on the company's time, under the terms of the company's employment contract. The contract was not drafted with this exchange in mind. Whether it can carry the weight of it is the question the legal scholarship, and the workers themselves, are now turning to.

The American Statutory Floor

The first thing to note about the law that governs MCI is that, in the United States, there is not very much of it. Workplace electronic monitoring is governed federally by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, a statute drafted to address the wire-tapping of telephone calls. The ECPA prohibits the interception of electronic communications without consent. It carves out a broad business-use exception for monitoring on employer-owned equipment. The consent provision can be satisfied by an acknowledgement clause buried in an onboarding packet, signed once at the beginning of an employment relationship that may go on for a decade. The notion that an employee who signed such a clause in 2017 has thereby consented, in any morally substantive sense, to having their keystrokes mined for AI training in 2026 is one the statute, on a plain reading, accommodates.

There is no federal employee-monitoring statute that addresses behavioural data collected as training material for a generative model. The state-level patchwork is uneven. Connecticut, Delaware and New York require written notice before electronic monitoring is deployed. California's Consumer Privacy Act extends some employee-data rights but does not give workers a substantive veto on monitoring of company devices. Illinois's Biometric Information Privacy Act is narrow in scope and does not reach keystroke data. None of these regimes resembles the consent and proportionality framework the GDPR imposes on European employers.

The legal experts consulted by Fast Company described MCI as probably legal under current US employment law, while describing the consent frameworks the legality relies upon as substantively empty. Kayne McGladrey, a senior member of the IEEE, observed in coverage by TechTarget that the level of surveillance MCI implements “is something that can be done because we don't have a federal privacy act in the United States.” The position is consistent with that of Ifeoma Ajunwa, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at Emory Law School. Her 2023 book The Quantified Worker traces the doctrinal evolution of workplace monitoring from the Pinkerton agents of the late nineteenth century to the algorithmic management of the 2020s. American employment law, in her account, was built on assumptions about what an employer could reasonably know about a worker that recent technology has rendered obsolete. The statutes never contemplated continuous behavioural capture, because the technology to do it at scale did not exist. The result is a regime in which almost any form of monitoring on employer-owned equipment is permissible, because no rule was ever written to prohibit it.

Brishen Rogers, a professor at Georgetown Law and the author of the 2023 MIT Press book Data and Democracy at Work, makes a parallel argument. Labour law does more than fail to constrain data collection. It actively grants employers the right to gather workplace data and to develop new technologies on the basis of it, in a way that encourages firms to use those technologies as instruments of cost reduction. The legal silence is a structural choice. Data flowing out of the labour process is treated as the employer's property by default, with no corresponding obligation to share value, governance or access with the workers whose activity produced it.

In Europe, the same data would not be treated the same way. Article 6 of the GDPR requires a lawful basis for processing, and the European Data Protection Board's guidance, updated in 2023, holds that employee consent is generally not a valid basis in an employment context, because the power asymmetry renders consent insufficiently free. Continuous keystroke monitoring of the kind MCI implements would require a separate lawful basis, a proportionality assessment, a data-protection impact assessment, and meaningful worker consultation through the works councils that German, French, Dutch and Italian law variously mandate. The reason MCI does not run on European Meta machines is that European law would have required a different conversation, with a different set of actors, before it could lawfully have been implemented.

The Petition and the Posters

The American legal floor is low, but it is not infinitely low, and the response from inside Meta has been instructive. Within days of the memo's circulation, an internal petition opposing MCI had attracted more than 1,000 employee signatures, a figure reported by TechCrunch and Cybernews. Flyers appeared on walls of Meta's offices in Menlo Park and New York City reading “Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?” and directing colleagues to the petition. The flyers cited the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 statute protecting workers' right to engage in concerted activity, whose protections extend to collective action against surveillance technologies affecting terms of employment. In the United Kingdom, a formal union organising drive began in early May 2026 among the company's London-based engineering and product staff.

What the petition does not contain is the harder claim made by labour scholars outside the company: that the data Meta is collecting is not Meta's to take. The employment contract governs what work the worker performs in exchange for what compensation. It does not, and on a defensible reading cannot, govern the transfer of the worker's cognitive patterns, the trace of their professional judgement, the substance of their accumulated craft, to a different category of asset. The keystrokes are not a by-product of the work like the lunch wrappers in the office bin. They are the work, in the sense that the work consists of choosing where to put attention, which sequence of inputs to make, and when to revise.

This is the argument Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson developed in their 2023 book Power and Progress and in Acemoglu's The Simple Macroeconomics of AI, a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper from May 2024. Their position is that the deployment of AI as a substitute for human labour, rather than as a complement to it, is a choice shaped by an institutional environment that systematically privileges employers' rights to extract value from workers' tacit knowledge over workers' rights to retain control over it. Acemoglu has called explicitly for legal frameworks that discourage “expertise theft” by establishing workers' ownership of their capabilities and creative output. The MCI rollout is the fully predictable consequence of a labour-law regime that has placed no such ownership claim in the worker's hands, in an industry with the technical capacity to extract whatever the law does not actively protect.

The Tacit and the Codified

There is a deeper conceptual problem with what MCI is trying to do, and the literature on it is older than the programme. Michael Polanyi's 1966 book The Tacit Dimension introduced the proposition that we know more than we can tell. The skills of an experienced professional are constituted by an enormous mass of implicit, embodied, contextual judgement that cannot be fully articulated even by the person who possesses it. Polanyi's claim, generalised by the MIT economist David Autor in his 2014 paper Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth, was that this tacit knowledge constitutes a hard ceiling on automation, because computers can only be programmed to do what we can articulate.

The argument that has driven the past decade of AI development is that the ceiling can be lowered not by articulating the tacit knowledge but by capturing enough behavioural traces of it that a sufficiently large statistical model can recover the pattern without anyone having to write it down. This is the bet on which the large language model industry is built. It is the bet on which MCI is built. If you cannot extract a senior engineer's intuition by interviewing them, perhaps you can extract it by recording their keystrokes over a year. The bet is, on Polanyi's terms, a wager that the tacit dimension of professional knowledge can be reduced to a behavioural surface without remainder. There are good reasons to doubt it. There are also good commercial reasons to make it, because if it pays out, the resulting model can perform work currently performed by human professionals at a cost asymptotically close to zero.

Antonio Aloisi of IE University in Madrid and Valerio De Stefano of Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto have spent five years working on the legal implications of what they call algorithmic bosses. Their 2022 book Your Boss Is an Algorithm argues that AI in workplace decision-making does not simply automate tasks. It restructures the relations of authority and accountability that have historically constrained managerial discretion. An algorithmic manager is a different kind of authority, one whose decisions cannot be contested in the ways human decisions can be contested, because the reasoning is not legible to the worker and the responsibility is diffused across a chain of developers, deployers and vendors none of whom carries the full weight. MCI is one step removed from algorithmic management, because the model being trained is not, at the time of training, supervising the worker. But the substantive logic is the same. The data flows from the worker to a system that will perform the worker's job, with no flow back: no governance, no compensation, no audit right, no ability to inspect what the model has learned.

Veena Dubal, professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, has been making a related argument from the gig-economy side. Her 2023 Columbia Law Review article On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination documents how ride-hailing platforms use granular behavioural data to produce what she calls personalised pay, in which the wage varies in real time according to dozens of signals invisible to the worker. “Platform companies have been at the cutting edge,” she has said, “of trying to experiment with ways to control workers without it being obvious. When these experiments work, they leach into other industries and can affect people in formal employment.” MCI is a pure instance of the leach Dubal predicted: the mechanism by which platform companies turned gig workers into involuntary contributors to their own algorithmic management is now applied within the conventional employment relationship at a salaried tech firm. That Meta engineers earn six-figure salaries does not change the structural logic of the exchange.

A Brief History of Knowing Things About Workers

The story of employer attempts to capture worker knowledge is older than the computer industry by more than a century. Frederick Winslow Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911 and drawing on work he had begun at Bethlehem Steel in the 1890s, is the canonical instance. Taylor's project was to extract from the heads of skilled workers the knowledge they used to do their jobs and to redistribute it to managers, who could then redesign the work in standardised forms that did not require the knowledge to be held by any individual worker. The point was to convert the workers' tacit competence into the firm's explicit property.

Taylor's method produced famous resistance, including the 1911 strikes at the Watertown Arsenal and the 1915 prohibition of stopwatch studies in federal workshops. The historian Harry Braverman, in his 1974 book Labor and Monopoly Capital, framed Taylorism as the systematic separation of conception from execution: the transfer of the planning of work, and the knowledge required to plan it, from the worker to the manager. The de-skilling of the labour process, on Braverman's account, was not an accidental side-effect but its central purpose, the mechanism by which capital secured itself against the bargaining power of skilled labour.

The MCI programme is, in important respects, a Taylorist project at a higher level of abstraction. It is not trying to extract the manual motions of a steel worker. It is trying to extract the cognitive motions of a knowledge worker. The instrument is no longer a stopwatch but a behavioural-capture pipeline feeding a large neural network. The intellectual purpose is the same: to convert what is held tacitly inside the heads of workers, who can quit and take it with them, into an asset held explicitly by the firm. Taylor's workers struck against the stopwatch, and the strike was about money but also about something more fundamental. They understood that what was being extracted was not just their time but their craft, and that the firm intended to use the extraction to render the craft itself obsolete. The flyers in the Menlo Park hallways in May 2026 are saying, in updated language, something Taylor's workers said in 1911.

The mid-twentieth-century history of knowledge work was in significant part a history of negotiated arrangements between firms and workers whose value could not be extracted by Taylorist means. The bargain, imperfectly and unevenly, was that the knowledge worker retained ownership of their professional identity, their portable skill, the relationships they built, in exchange for the firm getting the output of their labour and the right to direct it. The recognition that the knowledge worker's expertise was something the firm could rent rather than own was the structural backbone of the post-war professional economy. What MCI proposes is the rescission of that bargain. The keystrokes are not the output of their labour in the conventional sense. They are the trace of how they think while they work. To claim those traces as a corporate asset is to assert ownership over precisely the thing the post-war bargain had reserved to the worker.

The Macroeconomic Question

The gains from AI automation, Acemoglu argues, accrue principally to the owners of the AI systems, and the costs accrue principally to the workers whose tasks the systems displace. If the workers whose tasks are being displaced are also the workers whose behavioural data trained the systems, the asymmetry compounds. The workers contribute the input, do not share in the output, and are the bearers of the displacement risk the output creates.

Aiha Nguyen, who leads the Labor Futures programme at the Data and Society Research Institute, framed the wider pattern in her 2021 report The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance. The datafication of work produces a sequence of effects in which speedups, employment insecurity, the shifting of risk from employers to workers, and the exacerbation of racial profiling all accompany the technological roll-out. MCI brings the same pattern into the white-collar economy. The Meta engineer in Menlo Park is, in structural terms, in the same position as the warehouse picker whose every movement is logged: producing data the firm will use to reorganise or eliminate the work she is doing now.

The point is not that MCI is uniquely bad. The point is that MCI is uniquely visible. The same logic operates, in less explicit form, across the technology industry. Microsoft's Recall feature, the AI-coding assistants from GitHub Copilot to Cognition's Devin, the productivity-analytics tools sold by Microsoft Viva, Workday and Veriato: each is, in some measure, a system that captures fine-grained behavioural data from knowledge workers and uses it to train or refine models. Most are presented as productivity enhancements rather than training pipelines. MCI's contribution is that it stripped away the click-through fiction. Bosworth told the engineers there was no opt-out, and the consequence was a petition. According to 2025 studies reported by The Register and Computerworld, between 74 and 80 per cent of US employers now use some form of online tracking on remote or hybrid staff. The employee-monitoring software market is projected to reach $7.61 billion by 2029. Nearly half of monitored workers said in 2025 they would consider leaving if surveillance increased; 45 per cent reported monitoring had harmed their mental health.

What Consent Would Have to Look Like

The legal experts who told Fast Company that MCI was probably legal were not endorsing the programme. They were diagnosing the gap between what the law permits and what the moment requires. A consent regime that meets the substantive standard implied by the European tradition would have to look quite different from the regime that currently obtains.

The first requirement is informational. The employee must be told, in language they can understand, what data will be collected, for what purpose, for how long, how it will be used in training, what models will be trained on it, and whether the resulting models will be sold or deployed in ways that affect the employee's own employment prospects. A notification box that runs for ninety seconds before the worker has to start their day does not approach this.

The second requirement is structural. The consent must be obtained in conditions that allow it to be refused without consequence. A consent obtained from an employee who can be dismissed at will for any non-protected reason is not, on any reasonable reading, freely given. Meta did not extend the programme to the EU not because EU keystrokes are technically distinguishable from US keystrokes, but because the EU's structural consent regime would not accept the at-will American template.

The third requirement is governance. The data has to be subject to oversight regimes that include the workers whose behaviour generated it. Trade-union consultation, works-council representation, designated worker-data trustees: each has been proposed in the relevant literature and each has analogues elsewhere in the OECD. The current US regime offers none. The data Meta collects flows to Meta's Superintelligence Labs, led by Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI chief executive who joined as part of Meta's $14.3 billion investment in Scale in 2024. The workers whose data it is have no representation in Wang's governance, no access to the models, no audit right, no portability claim.

The fourth requirement is compensation. The value of the data Meta is collecting is, by the company's own logic, substantial. If it were not, the company would not have rolled out MCI in the face of a thousand-signature petition, a union drive, internal posters and the worst week of press its AI division has had since the Cambridge Analytica era. Mark Zuckerberg has committed up to $135 billion in capital expenditure for 2026, the bulk on AI infrastructure, and the agents MCI data is intended to train are central to that spend. A worker whose keystrokes are an input to a $135 billion bet has, in any account of value that takes labour seriously, a claim on a portion of the upside. The standard employment contract does not acknowledge the claim exists.

The Difficulty That Will Not Resolve

There is a temptation, in writing about cases like MCI, to end with a list of policy prescriptions and a confident assertion that the prescriptions, if adopted, would resolve the difficulty. The temptation should be resisted. The difficulty is real, and not all of it is resolvable by legislation.

Part of the difficulty is that there are versions of MCI that are clearly fine and versions that are clearly not, and the legal vocabulary needed to distinguish them has not been developed. If Meta were collecting code review discussions to fine-tune a model that helped its own engineers spot bugs faster, with no plan to deploy elsewhere and no plan to eliminate engineering roles, the case would look different. If a hospital were capturing the conversations of senior consultants with junior doctors to train an AI assistant that helped juniors learn from seniors' reasoning, the case would look different again. The features that make MCI feel like an extraction, the asymmetry of value flow, the absence of meaningful refusal, the displacement risk for the workers whose data is being used, are not present in every instance of workplace AI training.

Part of the difficulty is that the workers themselves do not have a simple position. The Meta engineers signing the petition are not, in most cases, anti-AI. They work in an organisation whose strategic direction is AI development and whose stock options pay for their mortgages. Many have personally built features of the models being trained. Their objection is not that AI training data should not exist. It is that they did not consent, in any substantive sense, to being the source of it, and that the institution refused to give them a meaningful way to decline. The objection is, in the proper sense of the word, procedural. A regime that addressed it would still leave the underlying question, about whether AI training on worker behavioural data is a legitimate corporate activity at all, unresolved.

Part of the difficulty, finally, is that the underlying question is genuinely hard. The case for treating worker expertise as inalienable is the case for a stronger property regime in human capital than any developed economy currently maintains. The case for treating it as fully alienable, already sold by signing the employment contract, is the case for a regime that treats human cognition as factor input on the same terms as raw material. Both positions are coherent. Both have intellectual defenders. The settlement between them, in any actually existing economy, is some negotiated middle position that depends on the relative bargaining power of the workers and the firms, on the cultural understandings the parties bring to the negotiation, and on the legal and political environment in which the negotiation takes place.

The MCI memo was a moment in which that settlement was renegotiated unilaterally, in the firm's favour, in a jurisdiction whose legal regime had no mechanism for the workers to push back through institutional channels. The petition, the posters, the union drive and the press coverage are the workers pushing back through the channels that were available, which are not the channels through which durable renegotiation usually takes place. What is visible is that the old settlement, the post-war professional bargain in which the knowledge worker rented their output to the firm while retaining their expertise as their own, is no longer the operative assumption inside at least one of the largest technology companies in the world. What assumption will replace it, and at whose initiative, is the question the next decade of labour law and labour economics is going to have to answer. The engineer who clicked through the acknowledgement on her work laptop in April was not the first person to be asked it, and she will not be the last. What she was the first to do, along with the thousand colleagues who signed the petition behind her, is to make it impossible to pretend the question had not been asked.

References

1. Reuters. “Exclusive: Meta to start capturing employee mouse movements, keystrokes for AI training data.” 21 April 2026. https://tech.yahoo.com/ai/meta-ai/articles/exclusive-meta-start-capturing-employee-162745587.html
2. Jessica Mathews. “Meta will start tracking employees' screens and keystrokes to train AI tools.” Fortune. 21 April 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/04/21/meta-will-start-tracking-employees-screens-and-keystrokes-to-train-ai/
3. TechSpot. “Meta will record employee screens, clicks, and keystrokes to train AI that may replace them.” 22 April 2026. https://www.techspot.com/news/112143-meta-record-employee-screens-clicks-keystrokes-train-ai.html
4. CNBC. “Meta is tracking employee keystrokes on Google, LinkedIn, Wikipedia as part of AI training initiative.” 22 April 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/22/meta-tracks-employee-usage-on-google-linkedin-ai-training-project.html
5. TechCrunch. “Meta will record employees' keystrokes and use it to train its AI models.” 21 April 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/21/meta-will-record-employees-keystrokes-and-use-it-to-train-its-ai-models/
6. Cybernews. “Meta staff revolt over AI tracking software.” May 2026. https://cybernews.com/ai-news/meta-employees-revolt-ai-mouse-keystroke-tracking/
7. Fast Company. “Meta tracking employees for AI: Legal but maybe not ethical.” April 2026. https://www.fastcompany.com/91530650/meta-tracking-employees-ai-training-legal-not-ethical
8. TechTarget. Julie Hanson. “Meta's AI training with keystrokes: Progress or privacy issue?” May 2026. https://www.techtarget.com/searchcio/feature/Metas-AI-training-with-keystrokes-Progress-or-privacy-issue
9. Al Jazeera. “Meta cuts 8,000 jobs in sweeping global layoffs.” 20 May 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2026/5/20/meta-cuts-8000-jobs-in-sweeping-global-layoffs
10. Ifeoma Ajunwa. The Quantified Worker. Cambridge University Press. 2023. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/quantified-worker/CDA274EFF118E3AB6E583424D95DF40D
11. Ifeoma Ajunwa, Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz. “Limitless Worker Surveillance.” California Law Review 105, 2017.
12. Brishen Rogers. Data and Democracy at Work. MIT Press. 2023. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545136/data-and-democracy-at-work/
13. Daron Acemoglu. “The Simple Macroeconomics of AI.” NBER Working Paper 32487. May 2024. https://www.nber.org/papers/w32487
14. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. Power and Progress. PublicAffairs. 2023.
15. Antonio Aloisi and Valerio De Stefano. Your Boss Is an Algorithm. Hart Publishing. 2022.
16. Veena Dubal. “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination.” Columbia Law Review 123(7), 2023. https://columbialawreview.org/content/on-algorithmic-wage-discrimination/
17. Aiha Nguyen. The Constant Boss: Work Under Digital Surveillance. Data and Society. May 2021. https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/The_Constant_Boss.pdf
18. Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension. University of Chicago Press. 1966.
19. David H. Autor. “Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” NBER Working Paper 20485. September 2014. https://www.nber.org/papers/w20485
20. Frederick Winslow Taylor. The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper and Brothers. 1911.
21. Harry Braverman. Labor and Monopoly Capital. Monthly Review Press. 1974.
22. Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Public Law 99-508. 18 USC 2510-2523. https://bja.ojp.gov/program/it/privacy-civil-liberties/authorities/statutes/1285
23. European Data Protection Board. “Guidelines on data processing at work.” Updated 2023.
24. The Register. “Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff.” 23 November 2025. https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/23/bossware_monitor_remote_employees/
25. Computerworld. “Electronic employee monitoring reaches an all-time high.” 2025. https://www.computerworld.com/article/3836836/electronic-employee-monitoring-reaches-an-all-time-high.html

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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In Summary: * Waiting patiently for coverage of tonight's Indiana Fever Game to begin. The wife just came inside grumbling about how hot it is outdoors. Yeah. Really. It may not be Summer officially yet, but we're getting a serious dose of South Texas heat and humidity now and for at least the week ahead. Triple digit heat indexes daily. Thank God for air-conditioning, I say.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 235.9 lbs. * bp= 165/97 (67)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises

Diet: * 05:45 – 1 banana * 06:30 – 1 pb&j sandwich * 09:20 – garden salad with seafood salad * 13:00 – ground beef patties, mashed potatoes, mushroom gravy * 14:30 – big bowl of lugau

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:00 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:15 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 12:00 to 12:45 – go to the bank, take care of business * 13:00 to 15:15 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 16:00 – listen to the Jack Riccardi Show

Chess: * 15:35 – moved in all pending CC games

At the bus terminal there was a guy in one of the shelters. His face was red, and all around his mouth was purple with wine stain. He had a thin plastic bag that had three or four bottles of wine in it. I could hear the bottles clanging together. I was waiting for the bag to split and for the bottles to fall and smash. He was incredibly drunk. Wine drunk. He was trying to sit on the shelter bench and it looked like he was going to fall off of it. I felt dizzy just looking at him. I'm not sure how things all turned out for him. My bus arrived. I got on it and left.

At the bus terminal I was walking on the platform. There was a woman in front of me, and in front of her there was a guy. The three of us were about ten feet apart walking at the same pace. Suddenly the guy laid down on the platform. Didn't fall or anything. Just gently laid down on his side like a person would at home on the carpet. Like to play with the cat or something. When the woman got near him she stopped, and sort of leaned over him. Right when I got near both of them she said, “are you okay?” He looked up at her, and said, “no,” and then very suddenly he changed his response to, “uh, yes!” Then he got up and continued walking. It was very odd. He might have been high. I do not know. We all continued on.

At the bus terminal I was standing on the platform waiting for my bus to arrive. It was a hot and sunny summer day with a nice breeze. A woman with a light dress was walking towards me. The wind caught her dress and it blew up. Not just a flash of upper leg or anything. Like right up. If she had raised her arms at that exact moment the dress might have blown right off, and away like a balloon. She was not wearing anything under it. She was right in my line of sight. Suddenly right in front of me, naked woman for a second or two. I was standing there, and then I continued to just stand there when she walked by me. Neither of us reacted at all to the occurrence. What could we say or do though really? Any reaction I could have had would have been inappropriate. Laugh? Nope. Nod? Nope. Thanks? Nope. OMG? Nope. Yes! High five! Nope. No response was the only option. And what reaction could she have had really? There is just nothing. She couldn't blame me for the wind and scratch my eyes out. She didn't have to apologize.

It was like, oh,

that just happened.

---

Uma bibliografia comentada do caderno

Este caderno não escolheu as suas referências por acaso. Cada texto aqui mobilizado representa uma filiação intelectual e política — uma escolha sobre quem merece ser lido, citado e colocado em diálogo. A teoria das masculinidades de Connell, o realismo agencial de Barad, a intersecionalidade de Crenshaw, os conhecimentos situados de Haraway, o testemunho de Vincent — são vozes que vêm de tradições diferentes, de posições diferentes, de corpos diferentes. O que as une é a recusa da neutralidade: todas partem de algum lugar, todas têm uma posição, todas produzem conhecimento a partir de uma aposta política sobre o que importa pensar e por quê.

Esta bibliografia é também uma cuirografia — uma escrita situada das leituras que tornaram este caderno possível. Não é exaustiva. É honesta.

Teoria das masculinidades

Raewyn Connell, Masculinities (1995, 2.ª edição 2005). A obra fundadora da teoria das masculinidades. Connell introduziu os conceitos de masculinidade hegemónica, subordinada, cúmplice e marginalizada, mostrando que a masculinidade é uma estrutura relacional de poder e não um atributo individual. Indispensável — e incontornável para qualquer análise que recuse essencialismos.

Richard Howson e Jeff Hearn, Hegemony, Hegemonic Masculinity, and Beyond, in Routledge International Handbook of Masculinity Studies (2020). Uma revisão crítica do conceito de masculinidade hegemónica que sublinha a sua natureza relacional e a centralidade do exterior constitutivo. Útil para compreender a hegemonia como estrutura dinâmica e não como categoria estática.

C.J. Pascoe, Dude, You're a Fag: Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse (2005). Um estudo etnográfico decisivo que mostra como o insulto homofóbico funciona como prática regulatória de género que disciplina todos os homens — e não apenas os gays. A análise interseccional de Pascoe revela que o fag discourse articula simultaneamente género, sexualidade e raça.

C.J. Pascoe e Tristan Bridges, Fag Discourse in a Post-Homophobic Era (2018). Atualização do conceito que analisa como a regulação da masculinidade persiste e se reconfigura mesmo em contextos aparentemente mais tolerantes. A tolerância liberal não elimina a vigilância — transforma-a.

Tim Barrett, Multiple Forms of Masculinity in Gay Male Subcultures (2020). Barrett analisa a pluralidade de masculinidades dentro das subculturas gays, mostrando que a subordinação não é homogénea e que as hierarquias internas às comunidades cuir articulam raça, classe e estética corporal.

Stephen Lawton, Bi+ Men and Their Intimate Partners: Sexual Identities, Intimate Relationships and Binegativity (2023). Um dos poucos trabalhos que leva a sério a especificidade da experiência bissexual masculina, mostrando como a binegatividade opera tanto nos espaços heteronormativos como nos espaços cuir. A invisibilidade não é ausência — é produção ativa.

Henry Rubin, The Logic of Treatment: Transsexuality, Medicine, and the Medical Model (2006). Rubin demonstra como o sistema médico-psiquiátrico não se limita a responder às identidades trans — participa ativamente na sua produção. Uma leitura essencial para compreender a transmasculinidade como fenómeno materialmente produzido por aparelhos institucionais.

Jamison Green, Look! No, Don't! The Visibility Dilemma for Transsexual Men (2006). Green aborda o dilema da visibilidade trans masculina e mostra como a passabilidade é um campo minado de classe, raça e acesso desigual a tecnologias corporais. A visibilidade expõe; a invisibilidade apaga. Não há saída fácil.

Miriam Abelson e Tristan Kade, Trans Masculinities (2020). Uma síntese contemporânea que articula experiências trans com teoria feminista e estudos críticos de masculinidade, sublinhando que os corpos são lugares cruciais onde a masculinidade se materializa — e onde a exclusão se inscreve.

Onto-epistemologia e teoria feminista

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007). O texto central do realismo agencial — uma onto-epistemologia que recusa a separação entre matéria e discurso e defende que a realidade é produzida por práticas material-discursivas. Difícil, exigente, transformador. Nenhuma leitura sobre género, corpo e poder fica igual depois de Barad.

Karen Barad, TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings (2015). Um texto mais acessível onde Barad articula o realismo agencial com questões trans e cuir. Uma entrada mais curta no pensamento baradiano para quem quer começar por aqui antes de enfrentar Meeting the Universe Halfway.

Judith Butler, Problemas de Género: Feminismo e Subversão da Identidade (1990, tradução portuguesa Orfeu Negro, 2023). Butler argumenta que o género é um efeito performativo — produzido pela repetição de normas e não pela expressão de uma essência interior. O texto que fundou a teoria cuir. A tradução portuguesa permite finalmente ler este clássico na nossa língua.

Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (1988). O ensaio fundador dos conhecimentos situados. Haraway mostra que não existe olhar de lugar nenhum — que a pretensão de objetividade universal é sempre o privilégio de quem pode esconder a sua posição. Uma das leituras mais politicamente necessárias deste caderno.

Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others (1992). Um texto complementar que desenvolve a ideia de figuras parciais e conexões inesperadas como estratégia política e epistemológica. Lido em conjunto com Situated Knowledges, aprofunda a proposta de uma objetividade encarnada e responsável.

Pierre Bourdieu, La domination masculine (1998). Bourdieu analisa como a dominação masculina se naturaliza por meio de esquemas de perceção incorporados e reproduzidos por instituições e práticas quotidianas. A violência simbólica — central nesta obra — atua precisamente por não se apresentar como violência, mas como evidência, consenso ou normalidade.

Intersecionalidade e direito

Kimberlé Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989) e Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color (1991). Os textos fundadores da intersecionalidade. Crenshaw mostrou que os sistemas de opressão articulam-se produzindo experiências específicas de discriminação que as categorias jurídicas e políticas dominantes não conseguem captar. Escreveu a partir das mulheres negras — e criou uma ferramenta para pensar qualquer experiência que recuse tratar as opressões como compartimentos estanques.

Elisabeth Holzleithner, Law and Social Justice: Intersectional Dimensions (2024). Uma análise rigorosa dos limites do direito anti discriminatório face a experiências interseccionais. Holzleithner mostra que o sistema jurídico tende a proteger categorias estáveis e a deixar de fora quem vive na intersecção — não por omissão, mas por desenho estrutural.

Vanessa E. Thompson, Entangled Genealogies?! Intersections and Abolition (2024). Thompson articula interseccionalidade e abolicionismo, mostrando como as modalidades institucionais de violência se inter-relacionam. Uma leitura que empurra a análise interseccional para além da denúncia e em direção à transformação estrutural.

Contexto português

Sandra Saleiro, Nelson Ramalho, Mafalda de Menezes e Jorge Gato, Estudo Nacional sobre Necessidades das Pessoas LGBTI e sobre a Discriminação em Razão da Orientação Sexual, Identidade e Expressão de Género e Características Sexuais (2022). O estudo mais abrangente sobre discriminação LGBT+ em Portugal. Os dados mostram de forma inequívoca a dimensão interseccional das desigualdades — e a distância entre a igualdade formal que a lei promete e a exclusão material que as instituições continuam a produzir. Leitura indispensável, e mais pertinente do que nunca num momento em que essa igualdade formal está ela própria sob ataque.

Testemunho e experiência vivida

Anthony Vincent, Peau noire, masque arc-en-ciel, in Florent Manelli (org.), Pédés (2023). O testemunho que atravessa os dois últimos textos deste caderno e que serve de âncora para o argumento onto-epistemológico do texto 5. Uma obra que toma a sério a experiência vivida como matéria política e teórica — e que recusa a separação entre o pessoal e o estrutural. Vincent não é um caso de estudo. É um sujeito epistémico.

Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). O texto fundador da análise da colonialidade como inscrição na pele e como produção de um sujeito que aprende a ver-se através do olhar do colonizador. Vincent dialoga deliberadamente com Fanon ao substituir a máscara branca pela máscara arco-íris — atualizando a genealogia fanoniana para o campo da sexualidade e da vigilância policial contemporânea.

#cuir #kuir #bibliografia #leituras #masculinidades #intersecionalidade #ontoepistemologia #teoria #desdeasmargens #caderno2

Tonight my WNBA Indiana Fever are scheduled to play the Washington Mystics at 6:00 PM CDT, and I plan to follow this game. I've not yet decided whether to watch the game on Peacock TV or follow the radio call on WIBC. But whichever I choose, I do intend to follow this game.

And the adventure continues.

On a couple of previous, now deleted blogs, I wrote a fair number of pieces looking at so called Liveable Neighbourhoods, the concept of 15 minute cities and last but by no means least, the frustrations of trying to get around the Avon region. That’s getting around by driving, using public transport, cycling and walking. I include all modes of transport because I don’t want to pander to the divide and rule merchants who are doing their level best to pit users of different modes of transportation against each other. Which when you think about it is plain daft because regardless of whether we drive, use public transport or cycle, at some point we’ll all be walking along a pavement. In other words, being a pedestrian is a great leveller.

The aim of this piece is to revisit what I’ve written in the past and fuse them together to try and provide some kind of overview. Something that will hopefully form the basis for a rational discussion around the issues and problems relating to getting around the Avon region. This isn’t a comprehensive piece and there are issues raised that I’d like to examine in greater depth at some point in the future.

It’s disclosure time. The two of us behind this blog don’t drive. We use public transport, mainly rail, we occasionally use taxis and a lot of the time, we walk. Our experience of these modes of transport gives us some degree of authority when we talk about the parlous state of train travel in the region and also, the degraded state of the pedestrian infrastructure.

The discussion around the various modes of transport people choose to use to get around the Avon region all too often descends into what can best be described as a culture war. One that manifests itself in a variety of ways from the bitter rows between supporters and opponents of Liveable Neighbourhoods, through the tensions between cyclists and pedestrians and onto the element of die hard motorists who resent the subsidies given to public transportation, both rail and bus. That’s a lot of division that’s being fostered. Division that ignores the fact that we all have to be able to get around and that a holistic transport strategy that balances everyone’s needs fairly is what we really need. Well, we can all dream can’t we because with the calibre of politicians running the various authorities across the region we cover, we’re more likely to end up getting kidult style name calling and virtue signalling than anything coherent.

Liveable Neighbourhoods

On the surface, Liveable Neighbourhoods seem like a lovely idea – in theory that is. Imagine the bliss of living in an urban neighbourhood where measures have been put in to minimise the amount of traffic coming down your road, making it a much pleasanter place to live. Less, pollution, less noise and being outside on your street becomes a much pleasanter experience. Who could possibly object to streets in urban neighbourhoods having the amount of traffic using them substantially reduced? Let us try and explain why people do object...

Unless there are measures that actually reduce the overall volume of vehicles using the roads in a town or city, all Liveable Neighbourhoods achieve are shifting the traffic burden onto someone else. We're talking about measures such as vastly improved public transport networks that will persuade people to leave the car at home because the bus and/or train offering is a faster and more comfortable way to move around. We live in a region where bus services leave a lot to be desired and what remains of the local rail network after the Beeching cuts of the 1960s is widely seen as a joke. Also, it's a hilly region, so cycling is only a serious option for the younger, fitter and braver members of the populace. So sadly, many people are forced to rely on their cars to get around because there are no viable alternatives.

So what happens when there aren't anywhere near enough viable alternatives to having to use a car, yet Liveable Neighbourhoods are still being imposed? What happens is that the same volume of traffic is forced to use a smaller network of roads. The inevitable result is...more congestion! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work that one out... As it tends to be the more affluent streets who can leverage the system to make sure they become a Liveable Neighbourhood, inevitably the displaced traffic is forced upon lower income areas. It could be argued that they’re a form of class war.

What they certainly are is a piecemeal, so called 'solution' to the problem of traffic. They're little more than a gesture that appeal to those with sharp elbows and a knowledge of how to work the system to get traffic in their neighbourhood reduced at the expense of others suffering more traffic. If they're not accompanied by sustainable, long term plans to offer a viable alternative to car use, they're essentially a waste of time at best and at worst, socially divisive.

15 minute neighbourhoods

‘15 minute neighbourhoods’ sound like a lovely idea – in theory. However, after decades of planning policy assuming near universal car ownership with our towns and cities developing accordingly, it's understandable that a fair few people will be bemused by the concept of a '15 minute neighbourhood'. Tract housing has been allowed to sprawl in such as way that when people need to do the weekly shop, all too often they have no alternative but to jump into the car to the nearest supermarket which may be miles away. We're talking about forty minute round trips just to pick up the groceries for the week. This is the reality of how our towns and cities have been allowed to sprawl for decades without any thought as to the long term when the resources needed to sustain a car based economy start to run out.

To ensure that as many of the amenities of life are within a fifteen minute walk would involve the reconfiguration of many suburbs and overspill towns that were built on the assumption of near universal car ownership. While it's perfectly possible for a lot of the amenities of life to be reasonably close to hand in the older suburbs such as Bedminster or Redland in Bristol, once you get out to places like Hartcliffe to the south or Bradley Stoke to the north, it's a very different story. Re-configuring the outer suburbs and the overspill towns to ensure that as many of life's amenities are within a fifteen minute walk is a gargantuan task because it involves correcting decades of flawed and ultimately, short sighted planning policies. That's before having the really serious conversation needed about how we adapt to a future when the resources needed to sustain a car based economy start to run out.

Liveable Neighbourhoods and so called '15 minute neighbourhoods' are essentially performative rather than achieving anything substantial in terms of reducing the overall volume of traffic on the roads. All each of these actually achieve is to add more to our lives in the way of digitised monitoring, tracking and sending out punitive fines in moves that suck us all further into what feels like a high tech, digital control matrix. You can forgive people for thinking that this may be the actual motivation for the imposition of these schemes rather than any substantial reduction in overall traffic volumes.

The rail ‘option’

What of the so called alternative modes of transport that would allegedly reduce the volume of traffic using the road network across the Avon region? There's the train 'service', most of which is still currently operated by Great Western Railway (GWR). The thing is, there's nothing 'Great' about it, nothing at all. That's unless you're a fan of buses on rails where the offering outside the mainline stations of Bristol and Bath is two or three coaches of these trundling through your station roughly once or twice an hour. That's until a creaking signalling system fails yet again, throwing what passes for a network into meltdown and you end up with, no trains and an expensive cab ride home, if you have the money that is. Whatever I may have said about the c2c rail service that operated in the south of Essex where I used to live, I wholeheartedly take it back!

When you look at the rail 'service' on offer in the Avon region, it offers little to no incentive for anyone to leave their car at home and take the train. An option that's denied to many people as a result of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s that left many areas of Bristol and Bath bereft of a train service. Also, should a significant number of those within easy reach of a train service actually decide to leave the car at home and take the train, the rail network as it currently stands doesn't have the capacity to accommodate a surge in passenger numbers.

As for the buses, we rarely use them so we aren’t really in a position to comment. Suffice to say that with what we’ve heard from various sources about the dire state of services across the Avon region, we have little incentive to use them.

Cycling and walking

The cycling infrastructure… At best, the cycling infrastructure across Bristol is patchy with a few scattered examples of how it can be done well standing in stark contrast to the shoddy state of much of what cyclists have to put up with. Bristol with its hills is not an obvious cycling city. Given the dire state of public transport across the city, cycling and walking are seen as more reliable options, despite the hazards faced by both cyclists and pedestrians. For many, it's a case of needs must rather than a positive lifestyle choice. Given the sclerotic pace that discussions about the future of public transport across Bristol are moving at, it's going to be a case of needs must for some time to come.

One thing we notice every time we go into Bristol is that the way the cycling infrastructure has been set up with poor delineation between cycle lanes and pedestrian footpaths, conflict between cyclists and pedestrians is inevitable. Cyclists and pedestrians should be natural allies, not at each others throats. Such is the lack of joined up thinking from the 'planners' that is responsible for this conflict.

As for Bath, while there’s some cycling along the Avon and also, the Kennet and Avon Canal, because of the hills, it’s not exactly a city for riding a bicycle around. Which makes walking around Bath as a pedestrian less stressful than walking around Bristol.

Then there’s the pedestrian infrastructure. The reality of being a pedestrian in both Bristol and Bath stands in stark contrast to the bullshit we're being fed about how wonderful it is to walk and how we should feel great about reducing our carbon emissions. The reality are pavements that are not fit for purpose. You should be able to walk around without having to constantly cast your eyes to the ground to avoid the numerous trip hazards caused by broken and uneven pavements. The reality is having to watch out for the selfish minority of cyclists who seem to think the rules don't apply to them and that they have no responsibility to look out for pedestrians while they're cycling around at speed. The reality is having to watch out for pillocks on e-bikes who, like the aforementioned cyclists, seem to think the rules don't apply to them. The reality is waiting ages at pedestrian crossings over busy roads before finally being able to cross.

Every time we're out and about walking where we live in Keynsham, it's a life lesson in how the needs of the motorist seem to take priority over those of us mere pedestrians. The main roads in and around Keynsham are busy and an absolute pain to cross in too many instances. Where the main roads go through the older residential areas of the town, the pavements are incredibly narrow making walking along them a pretty unpleasant experience. To get from where we live to the pub by the Avon that's our adopted local, even though it's only a ten minute walk away, because there isn't a continuous pavement along both sides of the main road that runs past it, we're obliged to cross the road three times!

The same applies to a fair few other towns in our region. Older town centres and residential areas that were not laid out with 21st century traffic levels in mind. One such town that sticks in my mind is Bradford-on-Avon, just over the border in Wiltshire. A lovely old town but blighted by a massive volume of through traffic which makes walking round the streets in the centre not just unpleasant but also, pretty risky.

A brief conclusion

On the one hand, people are being lectured on the need to leave the car at home and use 'alternative means' of travel. On the other hand, as outlined above, those 'alternative means' of travel simply don't hack it. We're being set up to fail aren't they? As for us non-drivers, we're being absolutely shafted. As already mentioned, the pedestrian and cycling infrastructure leaves a lot to be desired and as for public transport, it's dire. Look, I'm not asking for public transport to whisk me to every corner of the Avon region because I know that's impracticable. All I'm asking for is a reliable public transport system with solid plans for expansion that will help to reduce the volume of vehicles clogging up the roads. With my pedestrian hat on, all I'm asking for is for a safe walking environment. That's not much to ask for is it?

When we don't even get the basics we should expect in a so called civilised society, we can be forgiven for thinking that there is in fact, a silent war against non-drivers as well as drivers. In fact, it could be argued that there’s a war against movement regardless of the mode of transport that’s chosen. One that’s a significant part of the control matrix that will be a feature of the ‘great reset’ if we don’t start resisting it. Which is why the bastards who presume to rule over us will go to some lengths to pit the users of various modes of transport against each other. Anyone falling for these divide and rule tactics and engaging in the culture wars surrounding transport really needs to take a look at themselves in the mirror, because they are part of the problem.