This is a story about filtration...

Muscle damage causes the release of myoglobin. The kidneys try to filter out the myoglobin, but it causes damage to the renal tubular epithelium, causing acute kidney failure. Creatine kinase (CK) is an enzyme and a marker that allows muscle damage to be detected by a blood test. Creatinine is a waste product produced in your muscles, normally eliminated by your kidneys. High levels of Creatinine in your blood indicate kidney failure.

So, we know that a muscle of mine must have been damaged, because my CK reading went higher than the test was able to measure. We also know that my kidneys had failed, because my Creatinine levels were also off the charts.

Dialysis has cleared the backlog of all the toxic crap that was damaging my kidneys and had caused them to fail. My kidneys are now a bit better and I'm now making pee.

The question is, are my kidneys working efficiently enough to remove all the creatinine that my muscles are creating? Also, is the original muscle injury still chucking out a load of toxic myoglobin, which is injuring my kidneys?

So, I measure how much I drink, and I measure how much I pee, and hopefully there isn't much difference - at least my kidneys should be able to get rid of the fluids and stop my body from swelling up. Also, my blood gets regularly tested. The creatinine, which is currently at about 1,000ppm, needs to drop to around 100ppm. My CK should reduce slowly over time, and certainly not increase. Provided all those things are happening, I can stop dialysis and let my body heal itself.

If my creatinine is not going down, or starts going up, then my kidneys just aren't recovered enough to be able to cope on their own. If my CK starts going up, then I still have some kind of muscle injury that's going to cause my kidneys to fail again, unless I have regular dialysis to filter the toxins out of my blood.

So, every drop of pee counts. The more I drink and the more I pee, the more creatinine and CK gets carried out of my body, making life easier for my kidneys and increasing the likelihood that I can recover without any more medical intervention.

I'm currently trying to build up a data set of blood test results, drink consumption and volume of pee, so that I can demonstrate to the doctors tomorrow that I don't need weeks and weeks more dialysis, and I can go start my new job on Monday.

So, cross your urethras for me that I can do it, and get my pee up to impressive volumes and get that nasty creatinine and CK flushed out of my system naturally, so I can go home tomorrow or Saturday.

I also get to have a rubber tube that's been inserted 24 centimetres - over 9 inches - into my groin region, removed from my body. I'm hoping to avoid having to have a similar tube inserted into the jugular vein in my neck.

Lots at stake. Pray for pee!

Tags: #hospital

This is a story about affordable care...

I've been able to roll the dice a few times - following my dreams and chasing my ambitions - because of progressive liberal socialist policies put in place by the Labour government of 1945: most notably, the creation of the National Health Service.

I chose to leave an extremely well remunerated job with an American investment bank, with amazing private medical insurance and a brilliant team of occupational health doctors. That US-style of healthcare certainly gave me access to the very best treatment, whenever I needed it, but it was part of a "golden handcuffs" deal: a job that was so much better than anything I could get anywhere else, that I had to be insane to quit.

Life is a balancing act. You can have loads of money, but no time to spend it. You can have loads of time, but no money. You can have job security, but you'll be bored and constrained. You can have freedom and be your own boss, but you will carry all the risks and responsibilities. You have to choose what works for you.

While one friend has parked his tech startup dreams and has taken a salaried job, another couple of friends have just sold their tech startup. In the space of 6 years, I made myself sick with stress, trying to run my own tech startup; I went back to my old job at the American investment bank and stayed sick until I started rebuilding my life in London as an IT consultant. In the space of those 6 years, my friends had countless sleepless nights and worked relentlessly to build their startups to the point where they were worthy of investment or acquisition. In the space of those 6 years, my friend who originally introduced me to the tech startup ecosystem, built a bunch of cool tech and very gracefully pivoted into a job that really suits him, working for a company he really admires. In the space of those 6 years, my friends from the technology accelerator program we attended in Cambridge, raised millions of pounds of investment and sold their company to a tech giant.

Friends went to Silicon Valley to follow their tech dreams. One friend had to break up with his girlfriend. Another had to move his young children away from the family support network, and live with the risk that the USA would reject him and his family's request for residency. Imagine if I had moved to America. How would I ever afford the medical bills, when things have gone badly wrong? I would have been bankrupted many many times over!

Nobody's keeping a seat warm for me in a cushy job because I went to a posh school and a prestigious university. I have no trust fund or family money behind me. Running out of money has meant homelessness. Starting a business had to be profitable from day one.

There's just no way that I would have been able to pursue the opportunities that I have, without the National Health Service. In theory the UK and US are lands of opportunity, where anybody can start a business and become rich and successful. In practice, it's almost impossible unless you're already quite wealthy. The consequences of failure are just too much to bear, for most people.

My current business is consultancy. If I'm sick, I don't get paid. If I don't have a client, I don't get paid. However, I've calculated that I only need to work a few months of the year to earn the same as as the 'secure' job I gave up. It's a calculated risk. I might end up not being able to pay my tax bill. I might end up not being able to pay my rent. But, when things go well, they go really well. The odds are in my favour: if I can just get two or three contracts in a row, not get sick, maybe have some projects that run longer than expected, then I'll suddenly be way way way ahead of where I would be if I'd just plodded along with the golden handcuffs on.

I sat awkwardly on my leg and it went numb. My foot became swollen. My leg swelled up all the way above my knee. My kidneys shut down. I was admitted to hospital and put on dialysis. I haven't had any income since September. Surely this is why it's best to have a nice 'secure' job?

I've been stressed and depressed about losing a lucrative consultancy contract. I was literally about to start working again when I got sick. Contractually, I have no rights: the company could just award the contract to somebody else. I was going to have to start the search for a client all over again, meaning yet more loss of earnings.

Here I am in hospital. I've been here for a week.

I was seen by a doctor within an hour of arriving at Accident & Emergency. I've had two private rooms with amazing views over central London. I've been seen by top consultants, surgeons, registrars, nurses, phlebotomists, physiotherapists. I've been wheeled around by porters and served meals by catering staff. My bedding has been changed and I've been given clean gowns and towels. Numerous medications have been dispensed. I've had ultrasound scans and my blood has been scrubbed clean and drained of dangerous toxins by dialysis machines. My blood pressure, blood oxygen, pulse and body temperature has been monitored around the clock. Even the amount I drink and piss is meticulously recorded by the staff on the ward.

Nobody has ever asked me for my medical insurance details, credit card or discussed how I plan to pay for all this world-class treatment. Nobody is going to send me a bill when this is over.

As luck would have it, my client has decided they will wait for me to get better, so I can start my contract. Imagine if I wasn't able to take that contract in the first place, because of the risk of getting sick. Imagine if all the profit from my contract got wiped out by a humongous medical bill. How is anybody supposedly 'free' to become rich and successful, if they can't predict when they're going to get sick and how much it's going to cost?

This story is really a re-telling of three stories. The story of the friend who inspired me to follow my startup dreams and who inspired me to write about the importance of the National Health Service for social mobility; the story of the friend who succeeded, after 6 years of sacrifice, blood, sweat and tears, with countless sleepless nights and untold stress; and the story of me, who couldn't handle the chafing of the golden handcuffs, and got unwell because of the combined stress of running a tech startup with an unsupportive partner and unsupportive family.

I'm now lucky enough to have reconnected with old London friends, repaired friendships that were damaged or neglected when I got unwell, made new friends who are incredibly loyal and caring, and I have found an amazing lady who makes me feel loved to bits and completely accepted for who I am. Her family have welcomed me with open arms and most of the get well cards I've been getting have been from her family, along with offers of help to get me back on my feet.

While the welfare state is deeply flawed and it's an impossible task to get the social support that you need, as a single man whose life is imploding, the National Health Service has been the glue between the pooh, holding my shit together and just about keeping me alive. When you add in an amazing girlfriend, her family, loyal and caring friends and the rest of the social fabric that a person needs, you finally stand a chance of getting your life back.

I read with great dismay that the US Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) is being repealed. What the actual fuck, America?

If you wanted a case study for a society that's as close to perfect as you're going to get in an imperfect world, we should look to London. 300 different languages are spoken in London schools. The tower blocks of Canary Wharf sit in a London borough that's 46% Muslim. There are cycle superhighways, driverless trains, an underground railway that moves 5 million people every day. The Metropolitan Police are humble public servants, who protect the vulnerable and take people to hospital, involve social services and mental health crisis teams, rather than flashing their badges and drawing their weapons. The whole city exudes tolerance, inclusion and diversity: it's in London's DNA.

You might mistakenly believe that London is a city for the rich, but it's not: because of the National Health Service. The NHS employs 1.7 million people, and funded properly - like it is in London - it shows that socialism and multiculturalism can be made to work. The last piece of Britain's nationalised socialist infrastructure, not to be wrecked by the greed of capitalism; the NHS is a fly in the ointment for the Tories who want to sell everything off for private profits and damn the lives of British citizens.

I want the railways re-nationalised. I want the energy companies re-nationalised. Most of what comes out of Westminster is good for London but bad for the rest of the UK. What we're seeing is one rule for Londoners and another for everybody else. London gets state-owned public transport where 100% of the profits are re-invested in infrastructure. London has a remarkable set of public services that create jobs as well as keeping the residents well looked after. Socialism for London and capitalism for the rest of the UK... that sucks.

In my week in hospital, I've realised that London truly offers an enticing vision of a near-utopian society, so unlike the ugly one pictured in the dark minds of the populists. London is a European city, connected by train to Paris and Brussels. London is a mercantile centre, where East literally meets West at the Greenwich meridian line: the perfect time zone to deal with both Japan and San Francisco in the same business day. The peaceful co-existence of so many cultures in one crowded city is a modern miracle. I live here because of the immigrants, not in spite of the immigrants. London simply wouldn't function without its chaotic diversity.

Getting used to living in London is hard. The congestion is hard. The clash of cultures is hard. Seeing people who look and act differently is hard. Processing the humbling fact that the world is huge and complex is hard. Realising that you're in the racial minority is hard. Living a small, neat, efficient, considerate, reserved life, where you quietly observe and ask questions, as you discover your fellow Londoners have had incredible journeys, arriving here and building their lives, is hard. It's hard damn work, letting all this chaos and complexity assault your senses.

I don't want private hospitals, private health insurance, medical bills, policemen carrying guns, offensive foreign policy and an economy that offers no hope of escape from the socio-economic background you're born into, except for a tiny handful of sports stars, lottery winners, rappers and criminals. I don't want private prisons stuffed full of black people being used as slaves. I don't want a world of "us" and "them" with torture, pre-emptive strikes, invasion of sovereign nations, regime change and covert ops to destabilise other nations.

In a week in hospital, I've benefitted from everything that's great about Great Britain in the European Union and London's huge immigrant population. Only a tiny handful of the staff who've saved my life were born in Britain. Only a tiny fraction of the medical supplies and equipment were designed, tested and manufactured in the UK. I'm a stone's throw away from mosques where alleged firebrand hate preachers are supposedly plotting against the British people. Whitechapel Market is crowded with women wearing full-face veils, but I'm just another Londoner to them. If there's an exemplary organisation to demonstrate multicultural society working perfectly, doing life-saving work, it's the National Health Service.

Affordable care not only saved my life, but it's keeping my hopes and dreams alive, so I don't have to take a zero-hours contract McJob flipping burgers, just in case I get sick.

Tags: #NHS #hospital

This is a story about seeing the light...

Nobody preaches louder than the convert. I've been accused of speaking like a sanctimonious prick on several occasions, but let's just have a little think about a book I've never read, shall we? I had the good fortune of avoiding almost all religious indoctrination, despite attending Church of England schools, the occasional event at Easter, Christmas and observing a few other antiquated religious customs.

So, let's start with revenge.

I'm pretty sure that Jesus wasn't a "never forget" and "make those bastards pay for what they did to us" grudge holding kind of guy. In fact, despite my lack of bible study, I'm pretty sure there was something he said about turning the other cheek and forgiveness. Yes, now I think about it, all that "eye for an eye" stuff definitely wasn't attributable to Big J and his disciples. You could say that bloodthirsty acts of revenge and 'pre-emptive' strikes are definitely not Christian at all.

What kind of dude was Jesus anyway? Like I say, I never read the bible, went to Sunday school, went to church or got taught much about his life, but I know this: he didn't think being disgustingly wealthy was a great idea.

I probably can't name all 12 disciples, but if I had to guess I'd say: John, Paul, George, Ringo, Sleepy, Dopey, Dasher, Dancer, Thomas, Henry, Edward and Gordon. For some reason I think that Matthew and Luke should be on that list, but those names don't exactly sound like fishermen and farmers from the Middle East.

What I can tell you about Matthew and Luke, is that they both reckoned that Jesus used to say that we should stop building piles of treasure on Earth. Both those dudes said that Jesus was all about giving up your worldly possessions so you could donate to the poor. The upshot being, Jesus wasn't intent on being a billionaire, building big tower blocks with his name on and decorating everything with blinging gold.

The Bible - although I've never read it - comes in two parts and is translated from Aramaic. Basically, it's a Syrian book... you know, the place where Saint George the patron saint of England came from. The most popular English translation runs to some 750,000+ words. It's not all the disciples' account of Jesus' ramblings and crazy shit that happened to him. There are also some fairly simple commandments in there.

The first three of the famous ten commandments are all about God being a really jealous imaginary dude who demands your undivided attention. If the commandments were in order of importance, numero uno is that you're not allowed to so much as think about another God. In fact, it's not until commandment number 6 that we get onto trivial things like not killing other people. In fact, so many commandments are given over to not saying God is a stinky pooh-pooh head and other weird rules, that rape didn't even make the list. No to murder. No to adultery. No to theft. Rape... well, it's not as big of a deal as worshiping an idol is it?

In fact, most of The Bible is full of absolute garbage. Exodus 23:19 forbids us from eating cheeseburgers. Leviticus tells us we can't get tattoos, cut the hair on the side of our head, trim our beards and most bizarrely of all, you can't mix cotton and wool clothing.

"a garment mingled of linen and woollen [shall not] come upon thee"

So, basically, we know that to study The Bible is to study a laughably backwards culture and a book written by many authors, with many agendas, over several ancient periods of time. You simply can't use it as an instruction manual for modern life.

Now, back to the original question: what would Jesus do?

It's a fairly serious question. If the dude was alive today - walking around in his sandals and his dusty robes - what kind of shit would piss him off and how would he act?

I'm pretty sure he'd be straight into the temples of the money lenders, turning their tables over and kicking their arses for the sin of usury. We can be certain that Jesus was no fan of banks and financial services.

On the pro-life debate, Jesus seemed pretty sympathetic towards mothers and the choices they want to make with their own bodies. Basically, the bible's pretty clear that other people's unborn foetuses and fertilised eggs are none of your goddam business, as explained in this passage from the bible:

"As you do not know how the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything" -- Ecclesiastes 11:5

Most telling of all, the bible contains this passage:

"[an aborted foetus] does not enjoy life's good things, and also has no burial, I say that an [abortion] is better than [an unwanted child]... [that] has not seen the sun or known anything" -- Ecclesiastes 6:3-5

Jesus would have one thing to say to those pro-life people who harass poor women who are trying to get into abortion clinics: "he who is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her". In other words, who the fuck are you to judge? Who the fuck are you to intimidate a poor frightened woman who's faced with an incredibly difficult decision? Jesus would be pretty mad about supposedly Christian people, acting with so little compassion and forgiveness.

All this Islamophobia and anti-refugee sentiment would certainly piss Jesus right off. He would be angry as fuck about the way that the wealthy West is slamming the door in the face of refugees they created, through bombing and drone strikes. What part of "thou shalt not kill" didn't you understand? What part of "love your neighbour as you love yourself" got mangled into "look after your own"?

How dare Theresa May - an alleged Christian - and Donald Trump, leader of "God's own country" carry on in such an unchristian manner. There isn't an ounce of Christianity in these greedy megalomaniacs, who care nothing for the poor and needy.

I'm an atheist by default, because my scientific studies have answered questions and provided truth that makes all religious faith look like a mental illness, but the sentiment - the morality - of Jesus Christ is perfectly relevant, and a useful guide for us all when thinking about how we should treat one another.

I'm never going to become some born-again Christian, repent my sins and start banging on about The Bible, but when I weep at the cruel, callous, greedy, selfish and inhumane leadership demonstrated by British and US politicians and business leaders, I do sometimes think we need a decent human being as a moral beacon for us all. Aspiring to be like the fanny-grabbing billionaire bigot Donald Trump is going to be a rocket ride straight to a metaphorical hell.

Religion has been perverted by a clergy who've lined their own pockets and committed atrocious acts of paedophilia, as well as other abuses of power. We can reject religion, while also saying that Jesus Christ sounded like a pretty cool dude. The world would be a better place if we all tried to be a bit more like Jesus: a bit more Christian.

I really don't give a fuck what fictitious character we decide we love and want to emulate - perhaps Robin Hood? - but reality TV idols and wealth worship has taken us to a terrible, terrible place.

This is obviously written from my hospital bed, where I'm a bit loopy from kidney failure and painkillers, but I hope my writing is still reasonably cogent. All I can tell you is how I cry and cry and cry when I read the news right now, because the action of our leaders doesn't match their rhetoric about peace, compassion and care for the poor and vulnerable.

Tags: #religion #politics

This is a story about the wanker of the wharf...

London's financial services sector is the gift that keeps on giving. Through Y2K, the dot com bubble bursting, 9/11, 7/7 and the credit crunch, the good times never stopped rolling.

I'm now experiencing deja vu. My very first contract in Docklands was at Harbour Exchange, working for Lloyds TSB. I wore a shirt with cufflinks shaped like taps. I thought I epitomised the height of business fashion. In my defence, I was only 20 years old.

As I look around the glimmering tower blocks on the wharf, and look at their revolving doors leading into their fancy foyers, I realise that I've done at least two tours with so many of the companies: HSBC, JPMorgan, Barclays, Lloyds and others too.

It's good that these places will have me back. Why wouldn't they? I left on good terms, with great references and a bunch of people who'd remember me and some of the things I did when I was there.

But, I've started to burn bridges.

I know how to play the game and keep my mouth shut; not rock the boat. I know that the whole banking world keeps you hostage with golden handcuffs. You're ridiculously well paid, so you try to silence the voices in your head that say: what we're doing here is just not ethical.

You can immerse yourself in the propaganda, that says that the financial products that we offer are greasing the wheels of commerce, but you know that deep down, most of what you're doing is helping the rich to hide their wealth and shield it from taxation. When you ask your customer what their source of wealth is, they're not exactly going to say that it's sweatshops and drugs, are they? They're not exactly going to confess that their family is wealthy because they embezzled a load of money, leaving their fellow citizens starving.

Even a close friend, who seems reasonably ethical banker, has helped his father - a judge - to hide the family wealth in an offshore trust. They had some problems proving that they controlled the money, in order to get a mortgage, but the bank was eventually satisfied. The people who work in banks are outsmarting the ones who work for the regulators and the taxman, so that's why the rich pay very little tax, while the poor shoulder the burden of social programs. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

Am I a hypocrite? Am I ungrateful, when I bite the hand that feeds me? Well, the easy defence is just to say that if I didn't do my job, somebody else would. Isn't it better that I'm on the inside, trying to make things better, than on the outside where I would have very little power and influence. I could easily throw my clogs into the loom, if I thought that was the right thing to do.

Fintech is a conflation of financial and technology. Fintech tends to mean the challenger banks and ecosystem that exists outside of the long-standing institutions. Arguably, I've been working on Fintech - financial services technology - since 1998, but yet I might get mocked by my startup buddies as working for dinosaurs. Indeed, one well-respected friend from the venture capital world, even wrote a blog post which suggested that my return to Canary Wharf was an admission of defeat; a failure.

I do feel like a failure. Even though I just secured yet another contract for yet another massive bank, doing some cool stuff with AI and other bleeding-edge tech, and I'm going to be exceedingly well remunerated, I still feel like I sold out. I'm also really worried about my chequered past catching up with me. Instead of popping a champagne cork in celebration of my new role, last night, instead I have butterflies in my tummy and I'm incredibly anxious about getting everything signed, starting the job and making a good first impression, without any hiccups.

My self-assured manner and my self-confidence has all been destroyed, replaced instead with self-doubt. I started looking for a new contract on the 30th of November, and it took all this time to get one. I take that pretty personally, and I worry that I'm not a competitive candidate anymore: I'm not making the grade, amongst the other contractors in the market.

Obviously, when I actually start working these contracts, I realise that there's a real lack of tech pedigree and good leadership. I realise that there is a need for my skills and experience, and I can add value.

However, I struggle to play the game anymore. I struggle to keep my mouth shut for the benefit of my career and my bank balance. I struggle to let things go, for my own personal benefit. When I see wrongdoing and incompetence, I feel that I have a responsibility to the general public, to not just turn a blind eye. I feel like I have to act ethically... not because the regulators are watching, but because it's the right thing to do.

I struggle to do the work anymore. I don't enjoy tech for tech's sake. Often times I don't really believe that tech is improving anything. Most projects are doing the same kinds of things that have been done time and time again, for years. You'd have thought that if we were solving real problems, we'd have solved them already and moved on to something more useful, like finding a cure for cancer. The banking problem - debit account A and credit account B - is not a hard one to solve.

Who the hell am I, to sit idle for the whole month of November, writing a novel instead of trying to get a job. Who am I to arrogantly assume that I'll be able to win another lucrative contract, instead of getting a regular job like everybody else does? Who am I to only work 4 or 5 months of the year? Who the hell do I think I am?

Well, you're welcome to hate me if you like. I'm a banker; a capitalist pig; a lickspittle of the wealthy elites who cause so much human misery.

However, I'm an ideological misfit. I know that I'm well remunerated, but I don't confuse that with value. I don't feel valuable, I feel like I'm wasting my time building stuff that doesn't help; it hinders. I feel bribed into doing a job, because I need the money. Aren't we all? Yes, so why work a job that's just as pointless, but get paid a lot less? Do you think that by depriving that massive corporation of yourself, you're hurting them?

Arguably, if we were to all take an ethical stance with our employment, and refuse to work for weapons manufacturers and banks, we would starve them of the manpower they need to function. However, humanity responds to incentives: if you couldn't buy guns, somebody would start sharpening pointy sticks and selling them; if you couldn't get a bank loan, loan sharks would lend money.

The problem is when you follow a set of rules to their ultimate conclusion, you get some undesirable outcomes. Free-market capitalism might work when you're conquering the Wild West and building all the critical infrastructure to colonise the New World, but what about when it's all done, and populations start exploding? Is it right that being born into wealth or poverty is not a choice: inherited wealth and ownership determine everything.

If we pressed the 'reset' button and set all the bank balances to be the same, how many would lose and how many would gain? Yes, it's unfair that some who've worked very hard would lose out, but what about those who think it's unfair that their inherited wealth shouldn't be subjected to a Robin Hood tax? Surely it's more unfair that some people have a lifelong trust fund income, while others have to flip burgers and still can't afford to raise their families. Surely, there are more people who would benefit, than lose.

So, eventually I arrive at the conclusion that we need to have debt forgiveness, or else civilisation will be destroyed. I mean, what are the wealthy even doing with all their ill-gotten gains? It's dog in a manger behaviour that's the problem here, not jealousy.

In the rigged system we've built, success is not about hard work. The fable of the girl who swept the factory floor being promoted up the career ladder until she was eventually the CEO, is total horse-shit. We know that all the best jobs go to wealthy men from a handful of powerful families. You could bust your ass your whole life, and still have nothing to show for it except the little plastic stars on your McDonalds name badge.

To say "twas ever thus" and blame human nature, is disingenuous. You don't have to look very hard to see that civilisations rise and fall, based on the satisfaction of the hoi polloi. It doesn't matter how high you build the walls: when enough people want to smash down your defences, you'll find that even the most robust barriers are too flimsy to protect you.

What do we really believe in? What cause are we fighting for?

The top echelons of society are wealthy enough to have their every whim catered for, but what do they believe in? How many of our rulers are passionately engaged in the pursuit of something more meaningful than money?

I wanted to save up and buy a house. I wanted luxury holidays and fine dining. I had become totally bourgeois.

If we leave noble causes - like the search for scientific knowledge, world peace and hunger - to a handful of charity workers, while we ourselves fret about buying a bigger house or another boat, then our most educated and powerful portion of society is consumed by the consumer economy, which is intent only on separating fools from their money.

Western civilisation will fall, as if knocked over by a feather, because we believe in nothing.

Tags: #politics #capitalism #career #banking

This is a story about the precariat...

Here I am, in psychiatric hospital with underpants on my head and pencils up my nose. I think you will agree that this makes me perfectly qualified to run the country.

Having a manifesto is something that we associate with nutters who commit mass murder. The end justifies the means, in the minds of people consumed by their political ideologies.

Admitting to having political ambitions is laughable for an ordinary British citizen. The route into politics is through namedropping, brown-nosing and suffering the bullying & infighting of the dominant political parties, as you rise through the ranks. Going into politics is not about campaigning on a manifesto which comprises your deeply held political beliefs. Going into politics is not about a commoner being elected to the House of Commons. There's no room for the riff raff in politics and you're going to need wealthy donors to back you. You'd have to be stark raving mad to think you could get into politics as a representative of the constituents in your local area.

Politics is a career; it's not about improving the lives of your fellow citizens. There's no room for anybody who hasn't made politics their specialism. An interest in government is a fetish for three-line whips.

Political office is granted in recognition of a complete lack of empathy for the proles that a prospective MP has spent their whole life exploiting. Our ministers should be selected from a pool of wealthy elites, who have no concept of life without a trust fund and the advantages of nepotism. The benches of parliament should reflect the people who helped win those seats: the wealthy donors.

Pretending that political parties are given an equal campaigning platform, and that we don't have a two party system, is a hilarious prank that's being played on the electorate. Who could possibly compete with the big two parties, who hoover up so much political donation money? If you're looking to buy yourself a peerage, are you going to waste your hard-earned cash on a party that stands no chance of winning a majority? What a joke!

The top three manifesto promises of the Tories are: plutocracy, plutocracy and plutocracy. Crush the proles. Smash their unions. Keep them insecure and divided. Oh, what a glorious thing, to see the landed gentry literally lording it over the riff raff.

Posh little girls and posh little boys grow up dreaming about the day when they'll get to destroy the welfare state and lower the living standards of ordinary people. "On yer bike!" the jumped up little twits shouted when they were youngsters, and now they're ushering in the Britain they always wanted: where the only fucking job you can get is being a Deliveroo takeaway food bicycle delivery rider.

We don't want anybody getting into politics, who has any idea what life's like for the vast majority of British citizens. We need people who live and breathe the Westminster bubble, to think about real issues, like where they're going skiing this year with their barrister chums.

- ALTERNATIVELY -

I know what it's like to claim benefits, be homeless, suffer mental illness and have to navigate an under-funded National Health Service. I know how digital transformation will affect every aspect of the world around us, and I've worked in education, retail, defence, financial services, security, transport, housing & construction and a host of other sectors too. 

I've studied the dismal science - economics - as well as starting several profitable businesses. I have in-depth knowledge of almost every tax we have: from income tax to capital gains tax; from Value-Added Tax (VAT) to corporation tax; from import duties to stamp duty. I understand trade deficits, fractional reserve banking, financial instruments and the national debt.

With a background in science and technology, I have a big-picture view that broadly encompasses every aspect of modern life. This is not stuff I've read about and only understand theoretically: I'm a practitioner and I have real-world hands-on experience. I have a worldview that starts in the subatomic realm of particle physics and finishes in the intergalactic universe of cosmology, with a geopolitical overview of terrestrial matters somewhere in-between those two extremes.

I'm not a specialist. I have no desire to study the minutiae of anything, like a stamp collector or a train spotter would, but instead I've gathered knowledge of how all the different component parts fit together. It's no co-incidence that I've been able to write game of life type software simulations: computer models.

Anybody involved in politics would benefit from being a generalist not a specialist. When all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. It's impossible to reconcile the competing views of thousands of specialists, because they all have a very narrow worldview. It's all very well being an expert in your field, but where's the balance?

If I was going to pick a bunch of people to run the country, they would be the fiction writers and the computer game designers. Without an enticing vision of the future, reactionary forces will drag us back into the dark ages. Without a working virtual world, how are you ever going to test your ideas, without your mistakes inflicting untold misery on real people?

As a prerequisite for becoming a minister, you should be able to build a thriving happy metropolis in Sim City and complete a game of Civilization through cultural influence, not war. If you're a failure in those virtual worlds how can you think you're even remotely qualified to wreak havoc on the lives of the electorate? We wouldn't turn you loose on the roads without a driving license.

All minsters and their children should attend state school and be treated by the National Health Service: you've gotta eat your own dog food. There should be a means test, that excludes wealthy families, trust fund babies and any nepotism: only a single generation of any family may enter into politics.

In fact, some of those who govern should be selected randomly, like jury service. Wanting to exercise any kind of power over your peers should be an automatic disqualification. The House of Commons should be balanced out with ordinary people, who have no interest in politics per se: it's the civic duty of every British citizen to muzzle the dangerous megalomaniacs.

Housing, transport, education, healthcare and a host of other essential services, are public services and as such, they should never be profitable. The state should have a monopoly on the things our citizens need. To allow a private firm to profit from our population's needs is a crime. The private sector is welcome to compete in the world of wants, but not needs. Simple economic theory will tell you that prices have upwardly inflationary pressure on things that you have to have: are you going to skip getting cured of that deadly disease, because it's too expensive?

Do you want to live in a world of zero-hours contract McJobs, insane house prices, stress, long hours, insecurity and indentured servitude, for the benefit of big business? That's what you're getting when you allow the country to be run by commercial interests.

We need to smash the plutocracy. We need to have dignity in labour. We need to be united, not divided by those who tell us that we're easily replaced and make us crawl over broken glass for a few mouldy crumbs. Inequality and the arrogance of the elites has reached unsustainable levels. We can't afford the rich any more.

If you think these are just the immature words of a bleeding-heart liberal who never grew up, and I don't understand the complexities of the world, I think you're being a mouthpiece of the elites when you say that it's not as simple as just dividing the wealth. It's easy to be an intellectual snob, because you believe you're destined for greatness. Just because it's not you, going with your cap in your hand to the mill owner to ask for a bowl of gruel, you could easily fall from grace at any moment. Just because you can't imagine what it's like to be poor and struggling, doesn't mean that it couldn't happen to the likes of you. Your fancy education and your expertise won't save you, when the working classes rise in anger and strike down the bourgeois rentier parasite class.

The irony of me writing this, while sipping champagne and looking out over the River Thames and the London skyline, from the balcony of my luxurious home, is not lost on me. The working-class heroes and self-made millionaires can be some of the most awful people. There's absolutely nothing humbling about rising up through the ranks and being successful; quite the opposite in fact.

I write as somebody who's been incredibly fortunate - getting propelled into a life of privilege and wealth - only to lose it all and have to rebuild from scratch. I write as somebody who knows that there's a fast track, as well as how hard it is to overcome prejudice and adversity. I write as somebody who can have delusions of grandeur as much as a sense of worthlessness. I know I'm flawed and I know I can fail, as much as I know how to succeed.

Worshipping power and status has led to layers of sycophantic courtiers, each one existing only to polish the egos of old men. Do you really want your whole country run, just so some exploitative megalomaniacs can be called Sir or Lord? Do you really think anybody deserves your respect, when they preside over the destruction of living standards in an epidemic of mental health issues, caused by the stressful modern life they created?

A central tenet of my desire for political influence, is my first-hand experience of depression, misery, exhaustion, stress and anxiety, which is an intolerable situation, created unnecessarily by unrestricted free-market capitalism. Are these the pillars that you want our working world built on? Should British citizens suffer as much as they do, just to have a crust of bread, a roof over their head and the hope of one day being able to pass on the suffering to the next generation? My answer is: no.

I don't necessarily believe that the state should own the means of production, but the workers should benefit most from the fruits of their labour. Wealth needs to be distributed, not concentrated in a few idle hands. Trickle down economics is a terrible lie.

I think that without social reform, eventually people will put down their tools and violently protest at their exploitation.

Obviously, I'm just a maniac up on my soapbox, shouting absolute nonsense, but who do you believe more: the wealthy elitist who tells you that everything's fine, or the person who's suffering at the hands of those elites?

Tags: #politics

This is a story about 140-character soundbites...

Who has the time for the long read? Just read the title and guess the rest. If it can't be summed up in a tweet, it isn't worth reading. Jump straight to the comments section: that's where the real action is.

I bought a book that was based on a series of tweets. Worst book I ever read.

One of the best tweets I ever read was in 9 parts. Infographics are good, but they often have more text on them than would be permitted by the 140-character limit. If you put text on a graphic, it's not searchable.

Do you realise that everything you write on Facebook is completely unsearchable from anywhere except within the walled garden?

You're slowly being erased.

So much discussion has moved to Slack and most of that is just meme sharing anyway. In fact, most of what goes on anywhere on the Internet seems to be meme sharing. Are we being discouraged from in-depth online discussion? The rise of microblogging and the domination of the social media space by Facebook, is ridiculously successful at recirculating trivial distractions, which discourages us from creating original content.

When you think about all the words you've written into messenger apps, they're lost in the ether: it's not like those discussions are held in topic threads, indexed and searchable. All those words are throwaway. There's a cheapness to words. Imagine what happens when Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp cease to exist. All that text that was transmitted all over the planet will disappear into nothingness; gone forever.

What would a historian of the future make of your digital footprint? Could they infer who you were as a person from the animated GIFs that you chose to share? Could they gain any insight into your worldview; your politics; your philosophy; your personality?

Have we not been cheated out of owning our digital identities? We could all be famous bloggers and valued discussion forum contributors, with our online persona well known to fellow Netizens around the world, but instead we are confined to small groups of Facebook friends and Twitter followers: the people we knew before we entered the walled gardens.

Nobody is going to discover you and find out anything about who you are and what you believe via the mainstream platforms. Facebook wishes to keep you as a captive audience, to feed you adverts while you browse through baby photos. Twitter wants you to worship the cult of celebrity, or provide convenient soundbites for journalists, while you tweet in total obscurity.

Nothing you ever do online is going to go viral. Well orchestrated marketing campaigns have huge teams of people to sow the seeds. It's like a Mexican wave: you need to coordinate a critical mass of sufficient numbers if you don't want to look like an idiot, waving your arms on your own in a stadium grandstand.

You're not going to be the next online video sensation, because nobody's solved the problem of video discovery yet. If you broadcast a Facebook Live video, you're just going to be spamming your friends and family. If you put something up on Youtube, how are people going to find it in that sea of noise? Videos only have a title, description and a few tags. People are only going to watch things that are popular, and popularity is achieved through marketing, which is expensive and time-consuming.

The idea that the Internet is democratising opinion sharing is disingenuous. Most of the opinions I read online are either from the mainstream sources, or from my existing network.

I'm exceedingly unusual, because I bought into my friend Ben's vision of a social media platform that allows me to retain control of the original content I create. Instead of wasting effort on tweets and Facebook status updates, I put it all onto a website that's fully search indexed: anybody can find the fruits of my labour.

"But what about privacy?" I hear you ask.

I can email, private message and talk to people face to face, about things that I want to keep private. I really don't consider Facebook very private, when I have hundreds of Facebook friends and I have no idea who's reading what. I could waste loads of time sharing things with selective audiences on Facebook, but why would I go to all that effort?

Why do I write hundreds - if not thousands - of words every single day and make them publicly available? Well, the Internet is responsible for lifelong friendships, fruitful discussions and a network of people who help me feel connected to humanity, when I'm otherwise roundly ignored. Occasionally, some complete stranger will reach out to me and say that there was something I wrote that resonated with them, and that's the nicest feeling in the world.

Why does anybody write? Why write a fictional novel? Why tell people what you thought about that movie you just watched? Why do anything? You could just curl up in a dark hole and die, quietly.

In a world of urban solitude, loneliness and living lives of quiet desperation, don't you want to feel a little anchored to something; somebody? Don't you want to feel that you made your mark; left a legacy?

Writing this blog is like carving my name on a tree. Writing is like spraypainting my 'tag' on the Internet. It's "Nick woz 'ere" writ large.

Of course, you can sneer at that, but what's your mark on the world? Your children? That dissertation you wrote that never got published? Your job? What you consumed during your life? Should we chisel a list of all the books you read onto your headstone?

I came back to London, partly because I could be anonymous. I could fuck up and burn a few bridges, and nobody would care. I came back to London to be a nobody.

Now that I'm cleaned up and back in the land of the living, I no longer want to be a faceless nobody; I don't want to be alone; overlooked; forgotten. I'm trying to rediscover my value; my place in the world. At times of great stress, I've reached out to the Internet for validation: validation that I exist, that my opinions are well regarded and that I have a place in the community. It's given me great confidence, to have an online persona when the rest of the world largely overlooks and shuns me.

There is no short-form version of what I'm going through. It might be the same as every other person on the planet, but this is how I choose to express myself; this is how I vent and attempt to cope in a healthier way than drink and drugs; this is how I attempt to ward off the fear of being mischaracterised as some kind of evil na'er do well.

Perhaps, the more you read, the more my mask slips and you can see some underlying character flaws. Certainly, the more I write, the more narcissistic and self-absorbed I must be. The justification I have for this self indulgence, is that I feel suicidal every day. Do you begrudge me leaving this digital legacy, for anybody who cares to know who I was and what made me tick?

I can write 140-character retweetbait, but I choose not to. I choose to write with depth and meaning. I choose to offer more than just a fleeting distraction. I choose to offer the whole story, not just the headlines.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #suicide

This is a story about fragile male egos...

Insecurity. Wrenching away my self-confidence, my self-esteem, my sense of value. Insecurity is degrading and causes me to say things through fear and pain, further undermining my decaying self respect. Those sensitive subjects; the nerves; the over-reaction. What am I even arguing about? I can't admit it, because it's too shameful and it leaves me even more exposed. I feel so vulnerable. I can't tell anybody what my weaknesses are.

"Pervert!"

She never said it, but she could. It's not normal to like sex. I'm a freak; a weirdo. I'm a dirty old man for wanting sex. I'm too much of an easy target. It's too much fun, to knock somebody back when they're vulnerable. What power! What fun!

I haven't worked since September and I'm rapidly running out of runway. I feel pretty useless. I can't risk spending money on holidays and eating out. I don't feel like a provider. I don't feel very manly.

Without work or hobbies, I don't have any projects to feel proud of. I have this blog, but it's easily dismissed as a ranty diary, with no real substance behind anything I write. Anybody can voice their unqualified opinions on the Internet, can't they? Just another ignorant stupid voice. Nobody cares what I've got to say, because I'm not speaking in a professional or academic capacity.

The antidote to the fear that my chequered history might be discovered, is to write candidly about it. However, I'm no more than a couple of months away from being bankrupt and evicted onto the streets. I'm no more than a few clicks of the mouse away from relapsing into drug addiction. I'm months - if not years - away from financial security, luxury holidays, fine dining and the rest of the trimmings of wealthy urban lifestyle.

It's been so long since I had all the pieces of the puzzle: the job where I'm an expert, the income that exceeds my expenditure, the savings that give me a safety net, the comfortable and secure place to live, the friends who give me a social life, the hobby that I'm good at, and the girl to share the good times with. Who wants to share in my misery, depression and the unravelling of my life?

Every insecurity - am I fat, ugly, stupid, worthless? - becomes amplified the longer I languish in obscurity. I'm a hermit, writing in my bedroom and pushing my words out into the ether. Who even knows that I exist? Who am I? Why was I even born?

My entire existence is fixated on financial income. Without money, I'm nobody. Every failed interview is a disaster and depression threatens to consume me. I drink copiously to cope with the stress and anxiety, but it's a flawed solution. I know I could take a low-paid job that I could do with my eyes closed, but it would pain me to be so undervalued; under-appreciated; unchallenged.

On Saturday night we meet some people; I'm drunk. Making polite conversation, I'm asked what I do. Nervously, I say that I'm an IT consultant, but it feels like a lie. I work for less than half the year and it makes me unwell; I hate it. My debut novel is mentioned and a dam is broken; I'm gushing forth with rabid enthusiasm about my writing. I can sense that my eyes are wide open and there's an intensity to the way that I'm speaking. My speech is almost pressured; rushed. Then, I think that I've become horribly egocentric. I regret talking expansively about myself, in response to polite middle-class smalltalk. I'm embarrassed about how narcissistic I am.

She tries to reassure me, but I struggle to believe what she says. She's a famous bird off the telly and she even passed her O-levels without cheating or nuffink, so what does she see in me? Surely she's dumbing herself down, so that I don't feel as intimidated?

Gender roles are reversed. She takes me out for dinner. She says she'll protect me. I could easily become her cheerleader; idolise her; put her on a pedestal.

I dig into my archives, looking for things that I'm proud of. The problem is that most of it was years ago. What am I doing at the moment that I'm proud of? I haven't yet managed to find a publisher for my novel, let alone a new IT contract. What opportunity do I have to strut my stuff?

A game of Monopoly: now's my chance to demonstrate my entrepreneurial business talents!

But, there's too much pressure on this rare opportunity and it's a game of chance. Luck doesn't go my way and I'm losing, despite playing a winning strategy. The board gets flipped over and the pieces go everywhere. What a bad loser!

What can I do? I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't.

Tags: #sex #relationships

This is a story about the surprising thing that happened next...

The Internet is a massive dick. Part military network and part academic collaboration tool, our beloved 'net is now mostly pornography, pirate movies & music, clickbait bullshit and advertising. Also, photos of your dog, cat and/or baby.

Copy and paste this to your Facebook wall for the next hour. 99% of people won't do it because they're evil and stupid and they want kittens to die. You have to copy and paste. No sharing!

Why do we have to suffer the endless hoaxes?

If you were a deadly disease, what kind of deadly disease would you be? If you were a Game of Thrones character, which Game of Thrones character would you be? If you were an Internet quiz type thing, which Internet quiz type thing would you be?

Millions of people, bored at work, are momentarily entertained by vapid bullshit, designed to bring eyeballs to advertisers' content. Our entire culture is being reshaped, not by the little dopamine hit we get every time somebody 'likes' our selfie on Facebook or Instagram, but by advertising revenue.

Newspapers The Guardian and The Observer are held in trust, so that they are free from commercial and political interference, but they are facing commercial difficulties, attempting to adjust to a changing readership. If those newspapers fail, we will have almost no free press. Our beloved BBC is politically influenced, established under a Royal Charter, which effectively makes it a mouthpiece of Her Majesty The Queen.

In our world of clicks, high quality journalism is under threat. Can you imagine BuzzFeed breaking important news stories to the world? Are the editors interested in anything other than the number of readers? Can success only be measured in terms of website visitors?

Our best writers are turning their content creation talents into a psychological game of cat and mouse: who can come up with new viral bullshit to suck in the punters?

Facebook allows us to hone our skills, but Facebook hides most of the statistics from us. Only Facebook knows how many people looked at that photo of your cat, but decided not to give it a thumbs up. Facebook is a private proving ground, where you are microblogging, and you are also learning what kind of content is popular. You're being trained to be yet another BuzzFeed writer.

The rise of user-generated content, blogging, microblogging and social media, is a good thing, but what kind of cultural legacy are we leaving, if everything we consume and create is simply a momentary distraction from our boring jobs? The Internet canon is so heavily influenced by the commercial interests of the advertising industry, that vast swathes of content are locked up in walled gardens or drowned out by the deafening noise of clickbait articles.

Growth hacking is an ever-present temptation, but we can't all sit idle, earning money from the clicks on adverts. Somebody, somewhere, has to generate some real content, and I've really seen enough of other people's children.

Bullshit boring jobs, doing pointless work that's of no value to anybody, is a barrier to the age of leisure, but we're going to need a lot of books, films, computer games and music, to entertain ourselves when we're no longer typing made-up numbers into a spreadsheet, in order to get a mouldy crust of bread.

We're not ready for the age of leisure yet, because there aren't enough Netflix box sets to binge on.

We need to move from an economy that's based on persuading people to buy consumer goods that we don't need, to an economy that rewards people for creative contributions to society, that inform, educate and entertain. Art is a hobby for the rich and privileged. We should all have the opportunity to be a film director, actor, scriptwriter, poet, painter, potter, chef or whatever we want, as long as it adds value to the lives of others.

Measuring value in monetary terms is disingenuous, because money is a token that represents value created by somebody. Somebody had to shepherd the sheep. Somebody had to grow the corn. Somebody had to make the bricks. Money is simply more convenient than barter, because it's really hard to swap a fraction of your house for something you need.

Measuring value in terms of the number of people who viewed your content, is also disingenuous, because it creates an incentive to make something popular not valuable. Free pirate movies are always going to be popular, so the only people who can make art are those who can afford to have it stolen. Movies are made to sell merchandise. Movies are full of product placement. Is that what we want human society to be all about: packaging up the natural world and selling it back to us?

I might sound like a hippy tree-hugger, but it makes me really angry that I have to waste my creative talents, as well as polluting the planet, travelling to get to a pointless job in a pointless building, just so we can all buy more crap that we don't need.

Why can't my job be reading books, watching films and listening to music? In my leisure time I'll write, make movies and compose music. The value that is created is the fantastic stuff that keeps us interested, making life wonderful and enjoyable.

In my utopian society, we won't need more roads, railways and runways. In my utopian society we won't need to take pointless journeys to get to work and for business meetings. In my utopian society, we'll all have much more time to educate our children and get them interested in the world around us.

We already have the agricultural machinery and high-yield farming techniques to feed humanity. We already have the healthcare infrastructure to care for our sick and dying. We already have an adequate transport network to allow us to occasionally visit distant relatives. We already have enough laws, courts, policemen, jails and other mechanisms to protect ourselves from anybody who wants to take more than their fair share.

The idea that people wouldn't do any work if they didn't get paid to do it, is disingenuous. Nurses, teachers and fruit-pickers are paid appallingly, compared with middle managers who do nothing except waste precious resources. Do you suppose that doctors only save lives because they're well paid to do it? Do you imagine that a farmer begrudges the people who share the harvest?

There are roles that are useful and necessary and these are rewarding in their own right. Most 'work' is not necessary, useful or rewarding. Humanity and our planet of finite resources, would benefit a great deal by no longer mandating that we all do pointless make-work.

In my utopia, there would be jobs that you're allowed to do if you want to do them and you're good enough. I'm sure there would be no shortage of applicants, because those people would be respected and admired for their contribution to society. Our gratitude is a much more valuable currency, than useless rectangles of paper and circles of metal: money.

In my utopia, there would be plenty to watch, read and listen to, because creativity would rein supreme. Art would be democratised.

In my utopia, there would be people who smoked cannabis, played computer games and never left the house, but they wouldn't have to suffer the indignity of being told they're lazy useless bums. Simply being part of society is enough of a contribution. Better to be at home relaxing, than clogging up our transport network, going to a job that you hate that contributes nothing to humanity and wastes precious resources.

In my utopia, autobiographies wouldn't be about boring old men who achieved nothing in their lives apart from presiding over untold human misery.

In my utopia, a writer isn't somebody who writes BuzzFeed articles in order to scrape together enough of a pittance to survive.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #computing

This is a story about bias...

When you go hypomanic, you overestimate your capacity to work without sleep and food; you overestimate your ability to take on difficult tasks without negative consequences; you believe you can achieve superhuman feats. Often, hypomania can mean hypersexuality and the belief that you're irresistible to the opposite sex. Hypomania brings extreme risk taking, for me, and I'm a big risk taker anyway!

There must be an element of underestimation too. When hypomanic, you underestimate the difficulty of what you're trying to achieve. You underestimate the risks and the consequences of failure. "How hard can it be?" you find yourself thinking, as you get stuck into the quantum mechanics books. I rejected a highly paid career, in favour of building my own business, mostly because it seemed like it would be quick and easy at the time.

Depression has flipped all that on its head. I had an interview with a well known high-street bank earlier in the week. I thought it went dreadfully and I sank into an even deeper depression, because I gave such an appalling performance. I was beating myself about things I said and cringing about holes in my knowledge and experience that the interviewer had exposed. Then my agent phoned me:

"They loved you. They want to meet you again"

I spent the rest of the week dreading this second interview. I imagined all the things that they were going to ask, that would be difficult for me to answer. They were going to haul me over the coals and my incompetence would be laid bare for all to see. It would be embarrassing; shameful. I was losing sleep over it and waking up each day with a feeling of dread.

At the second interview, they cooed enthusiastically at everything I said, and laughed encouragingly at my anecdotes. It was almost as if we were friends and work colleagues, gossiping conspiratorially about the good and bad things that happen in the world of grey suits and office blocks. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

Afterwards, I thought "oh no!" What if my intuition is wrong again? What if there's an inverse correlation between how I feel like things went, and how impressed my interviewers were?

Depression is almost like a defence mechanism: a reaction to a hostile world where bad shit happens. When the UK voted to leave the EU, and when the USA voted for Donald Trump, I had placed bets correctly on both outcomes, at substantially long odds. I knew I was sad that those things had happened and I didn't make enough money to be happy, but I still didn't really feel anything even though they were awful events. I was prepared for the worst. In fact, I expected the worst.

There are psychological experiments that prove that depressed people are able to perceive the world more accurately, in certain circumstances. This depressive realism is the antidote to illusory superiority. This depressive realism is the antidote to the madness of crowds and a misplaced sense of optimism.

Humans are notoriously bad at perceiving the risk of very real and likely events: stock market crashes, earthquakes and hurricanes. If we were risk-averse according to probable catastrophes, we would steer clear of the Pacific Rim of Fire and the San Andreas Fault, but yet we see insane real estate prices and a concentration of our best technologists, in Silicon Valley and Japan.

London is currently rated by MI5 as at severe threat of international terrorism: an attack is highly likely. When I see huge crowds of people at Canary Wharf underground station, I see a swarm of sitting ducks. There are two vans full of armed police parked nearby, but it doesn't make me feel any safer... it just makes me glad that I don't have brown skin.

On a day-to-day basis, I generally assume I'm going to be blown up by a terrorist, fail to get a job, run out of money, be evicted, be declared bankrupt, never be able to work again, society is going to collapse, there will be riots and looting and the human race is going to retreat into the dark ages of barbarism, religious dogma, superstition and ignorance. It just seems likely, given the evidence.

I might be wrong, but I tend to put my money where my mouth is, and I've sadly been right more than I've been wrong.

I just placed a bet on Marine Le Pen. I hope I lose.

Tags: #depression #bipolar

This is a story about orotund pontification...

Please excuse my magniloquence, but I'm attempting to brow-beat you into submitting to my intellectual superiority. My ostentatious language is not intended to communicate, but to intimidate. The purpose of my education was not the pursuit of knowledge, but the ratification of my pre-eminence. The plebeians' obmutescence and the academic elites' hegemony is the natural order of things. The lower orders should be seen and not heard.

Our rulers and their mandarins are publicly schooled - Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester - before studying PPE at Oxford. Inherited wealth, the nepotism of political dynasties and the inside track - knowing how the corridors of power function - means that we are governed by the elite of the elite, not by our peers.

Education and publishing are dominated by sycophantic courtiers - the landed gentry - reflecting our aristocracy's vested interest in culture and society being fixed and unchanging. Dead languages and classical chamber music are fetishised.

In order to prevent the working class from getting ahead many professions have overtly defended themselves through the use of Latin instead of English. Studying the classics will set you in good stead for medicine and law, although the majority of your patients or clients will not speak Ancient Greek.

Like a virulent disease, the self-interest of those in power, causes every aspect of our society to be shaped to reflect the values of the ruling class. The 'correct' answers in an examination are the ones that parrot conventional wisdom, maintaining the status quo. The 'correct' use of language is the most formal, not the colloquial.

Little by little, the self confidence to freely express your thoughts and feelings, is eroded by a hierarchy that wishes to clip your wings. It's a free country, provided you've attained the prerequisite level of education and write only in a manner which pleases your superiors.

As a little game, sometimes I posh it up a bit. Sometimes I talk like a public schoolboy and do you know what happens? Genuine posh people ask "where did you go to school?" as if I was one of them.

"Your evidence is anecdotal" I hear you say.

What about the Castilian lisp?

"Insufficient evidence"

What about the fact that people watch the Queen's speech or stand for the national anthem? What about the fact that people follow the life of Kim Kardashian?

Wherever we turn, we see ordinary people obsessed with the private lives of the ruling elites - the aristocracy, plutocracy, oligarchy and vapid celebrities - imitating their affectations.

Didn't you fantasise about being prime minister, marrying a prince or living in a castle, when you were a child? You still have those dreams today, but you pretend that you don't. Your desire to be special - number one - has been corralled into some specialist area. Maybe you're the best fudge packer in the factory, or maybe you got a 2:1 degree from a former polytechnic, but your creativity and energy was channelled into something that makes you feel like a king or queen in your little fiefdom.

You read Harry fucking Potter, didn't you?

There's a certain joyful lightness when you read something that's well written and not just written to obfuscate any meaning and stupefy everybody except for your elitist Oxbridge chums.

Why must we struggle through the supposed great works of literature, which are a crime against the enjoyment of reading? Why must we be told at every juncture, that we just don't understand how complex the world is and that we should leave it to the experts, because they know best.

It's extremely easy to come up with exceptions to any rule. It's extremely easy to pick holes in any theory or model. It's extremely easy to find areas where a person's worldview is incomplete. It's extremely easy to be the smug critic. This is the role of academia: to undermine and discredit any challengers, who threaten our dogmatic rulers.

We funnel our children through a system where they learn to kiss the arses of their teachers, lecturers, professors, Ph.D. supervisors, viva voce examiners and those who award tenured professorships. For anything to be printed, it must pander and conform to the preconceived notions of an editor or publisher. Only the most obedient servants will rise to prominence, because they are most complicit and compliant with the will of the ruling elite.

Nothing ever changes - for the better - because of the inherent homogeny created by our education system, which feeds into a political system predisposed to select a public schoolboy - born with a silver spoon in his mouth - with an Oxbridge degree, instead of a normal person who actually knows what it's like to be an average UK citizen.

We aren't choosing our brightest minds to help with the challenge of building a better society for all its members. We're choosing the very worst kind of people: snobs who think that dead languages and chamber music are culturally important.

There's a big difference between being anti-intellectual and being pro-ignorance. Being a great thinker is about having a brilliant mind, not about being able to follow a well-trodden path with your fellow privileged brethren, steered by your sharp-elbowed mother.

We've built walled gardens where spoiled middle-class children can strut and swank, safe from criticism that they're far removed from the real world. We've built robust defences to insulate the intelligentsia from responding to valid critique: only the views of other academic elites will be dignified with a response, and out of courtesy and wilful ignorance, nobody dares to burst anybody else's bubble.

Commentary and satirical magazines - Private Eye and The Spectator, for example - as well as the 'free' press gives the impression that there are some checks and balances. In fact, to have the good fortune to come under the critical gaze of one of these newspapers, is to feel as though you have been given a seal of approval: further endorsement of the importance of your good work.

What - pray tell - does the person who makes your lunch think of your job? Who cares. I doubt they can even string a sentence together.

There's an automatic filter, that rejects anything that sounds a bit common, you know?

On the lead up to the EU referendum, I noticed that social media was awash with rather over-zealous use of punctuation marks, capital letters, as well as a great deal of confusion over common homophones.

"That's unreadable" I heard you say.

Really? Does the use of a greengrocer's apostrophe or mixing up your "you're" and your "their" with your "they're" and "there" really make something unreadable? Does it really alter the meaning if you write "less" when you should have written "fewer"? You must be very stupid if you can't read something and see past a couple of typos.

Writing accessibly doesn't mean dumbing down. It's perfectly possible to set aside your arrogance and write in a manner in which you know you are much more likely to be understood, without a scramble for the dictionary. Are you really so insecure that you need to turn your writing into a demonstration of your extensive vocabulary? Save it for The Times crossword.

The fetish for institutionally issued 'qualifications' has led us to the situation where the vast majority of people are turned off by politics, philosophy and literature. The condescending manner in which our intellectual elites talk, has led to their rejection by the masses. Our finest minds have unwittingly - and stupidly - played straight into the hands of the populists, who write and speak to impress their audience, not their fellow elitists.

Politicians canvas public opinion, so that they can win votes, but they turn to their advisors - Whitehall, think tanks and academia - when they come to rule. Political parties, media and the think tanks are all funded by commercial interests - influencing public opinion by sheer weight of noise. A rising crescendo of contradictory opinion on social media was drowned out by the views of a handful of academic elites, with their puppet strings pulled by those who control the purse.

It offended me the other day when the philosopher A C Grayling wrote that ordinary people are "narcissistic" when they publish their opinions. It was tantamount to writing "STFU, plebs".

We need to have another Gutenberg moment, where ordinary people can finally overcome the barriers that stop them from being heard. Blogging platforms like Wordpress go some of the way, but mainstream media, academia and politics are doing an excellent job of marginalising and discrediting the groundswell of public opinion on social media. The constant bombardment of "fake news" stories in the [non-fake] news seems like an attempt to get us to disregard the opinion of our peers, in favour of the approved opinions printed by newspaper tycoons.

We need to change our society - from boardrooms dominated by wealthy old men, government dominated by privileged elites and publishing dominated by academics - to a society that's representative. I'm not championing ignorance and lies. I'm not suggesting that brain surgery should be performed by amateurs. I'm saying that snobbery and elitism has reached the end of the road and everything that's good in the world will get torn apart by destructive forces, unless we listen to the proletariat: they outnumber the cruel and condescending ruling class.

"My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" -- Isaac Asimov

This quote seems to neatly encapsulate the battle between the stupid & ignorant and a class of people who know better than everybody else. Certainly, the letters after your name tell you that you're a cut above the rest don't they? You studied hard at university, so you must be more knowledgeable than those dimwitted fools who didn't attain the same standard of education as you, right?

As I wrote before, being anti-intellectual is not the same as being pro-ignorance.

Is it possible, that people are sick of being voiceless, unrepresented and talked down to by people who are so privileged that they have absolutely no idea what ordinary day-to-day life is like for most people? Is it possible that people are sick of being told that geopolitical complexities are beyond their comprehension and they should just leave things to the people who crashed the economy and started a bunch of wars, destabilising the world.

Is the desire to simplify problems and put things into terms and language that can be universally understood, the wrong approach? In my experience, jargon and impenetrable complexity exists only to justify pointless jobs and make talentless twits seem indispensable. If I was going to sack one person, would it be the front-line worker or the middle-manager? Is that a hard decision to make?

All this talk about facts and expert analysis: has it truly added any value?

Of course I want my bridges to be built by civil engineers, not amateurs, but I don't want career politicians, political commentators and intellectual masturbation.

The whole point about democracy is that the people govern themselves, through elected representatives. If our government and our media is not representative, because it's stuffed full of elitists, then we've completely failed to create a democratic society. It's not like a bunch of knuckle-dragging ignoramuses are saying they can do a better job of flying the plane than the pilot. It's literally that democracy has been perverted by the plutocracy.

Have a look at this list of autodidacts and ask yourself if they're ignorant fools who've contributed nothing to humanity.

Formal education, an obsession with conformity and the rejection of ordinary people's opinions, on the basis that they are stupid and ignorant, has led us to obscene wealth disparity and untold human misery. The reason why you don't believe it's true is because you're surrounded by people of the same socioeconomic class and you disregard the 'unreadable' comments of the great unwashed masses. The peasants are revolting.

Unless we give ordinary people a voice, they will never be able to develop their own philosophy for the 21st century, explore political ideas and challenge the plutocratic interests that seek to enslave them.

Until we end intellectual snobbery, we are on a collision-course with a popular uprising that will throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Tags: #politics #writing