I Don’t Want to Say I Told You So…

Mainly because saying “I told you so” is one of the least attractive things a man can say, ranking somewhere between “have you heard my prog-rock demo?” and “The Big Bang Theory is much funnier than Friends.”

Nonetheless...

A year ago I wrote a blog post about preparing for a world that seemed to be inching, blindly yet belligerently, towards a really nasty cliff edge. When I posted it, I half expected people to read it and conclude I was one step away from lining the skirting boards with tinfoil and muttering about fallout patterns. Yet here we are, twelve months later, and the world has done very little to reward complacency. If anything, it has promoted my cranky rantings from the realm of the absurd to something more like prudent contingency planning. As I write this, America is actually at war with Iran... for no apparent reason!

On a positive note, what I’ve learned in the year since is that preparing for disruption has an interesting side effect: even if the worst never happens, you still end up improving your life by acquiring a whole new bunch of skills and knowledge.

Though my starting point was “I should probably have enough food, water and basic kit to sit tight for a while if the world goes belly-up”, this soon morphed into a broader fascination with resilience in the everyday sense. I haven’t bought a leather trench coat, a crossbow, or anything that would look good on the cover of Prepper Monthly, but I have started to look at the practical systems that matter to my day-to-day existence and gradually sought to improve them to make life smoother for those times when it decides to be a nuisance.

I’ve developed the habit of asking a certain type of question and then coming up with a solution. For example, how would I turn on the air-conditioning if the remote control broke? Answer: either use a universal remote or rig up an IR interface that can be wired up and triggered by an app on my phone.

Soon I found that the search for these sorts of answers pulled me into a rabbit hole that led to home networking, local servers, Home Assistant, IoT gadgets, backup power, battery banks, smarter lighting, better monitoring, and the general art of making a house behave less like a random collection of temperamental appliances and more like a military command centre.

I’ve rediscovered skills that I’d forgotten I had, like soldering and decoding resistor colour codes. While normal people are recycling jam jars, I’m stripping components out of old electronic equipment and mumbling things like, “That bit of wire might come in useful.”

There is, it turns out, a lot of overlap between “mildly anxious middle-aged prepper” and “bloke who gets excited about network topology.” Once you start asking sensible questions like “What happens if the power goes?” or “What happens if the internet dies?” or “What happens if some essential service I’ve lazily assumed will always exist suddenly doesn’t?”, you find yourself building useful things. Not bunkers, maybe, but infrastructure.

So now I find a lot of reassurance not merely from the tins in the store-cupboard, but in knowing how my own home works. I like knowing which devices matter, which ones are fluff, what can run locally, what depends on the cloud, what can be automated, what can be monitored, and what can be made robust for relatively little money. There is something deeply satisfying about replacing vague dependence with practical understanding. It scratches the same itch as stockpiling, but in a more technical and, dare I say it, more interesting way.

And the lovely thing is that none of this only applies to war, or civil breakdown, or whatever flavour of geopolitical idiocy happens to be trending this week. It applies to everyday disruption too.

Case in point: the power outages we had during the storm season just after Christmas.

A year ago, that sort of thing would have irritated me. This time round, I largely breezed through it. Not because I had built some apocalypse compound on the South Island of New Zealand, but because I had quietly, bit by bit, made life more resilient. I had backup options. I had lighting sorted. I had ways of keeping key kit going. I had thought in advance about communications, charging, local control, and the boring but vital question of “what stops working first?”

That is the real dividend of all this stuff. You don’t need World War Three for it to pay off. A storm will do. A router outage. A brief blackout. A flaky service provider. A burst of bad weather. The future always arrives dressed as an inconvenience before it turns up in uniform.

And maybe that is the point.

Preparedness is often mocked because people imagine extremes. They picture conspiracy cranks, underground bunkers, and fifty kilos of dried lentils. What they miss is that resilience is simply competence with a torch in its hand. It is understanding systems. It is reducing single points of failure. It is making sure that when something goes wrong, your first reaction is not blind panic but mild annoyance.

If I have become more interested in technology over the last year, this is why. Not because I’ve fallen in love with gadgets for their own sake, though I admit I’m not entirely immune to a blinking dashboard. I actually spent the best part of a morning figuring out how to get my servers, of which there are now four, to power down gracefully and come back online automatically when there is a power outage. The answer involved a magic packet and the status of a smart socket attached to the fridge. (Long story). It’s because technology, used properly, can make a home less fragile. Home Assistant, local networking, IoT sensors, backup power arrangements, all of it is really just practical anti-chaos engineering. It’s a way of pushing back, however modestly, against the modern habit of building everything on assumptions of permanent stability, which where I live feels like a somewhat fragile position.

And that brings me back to Spain.

Looking back, one of my better life decisions has been moving here in the first place. Spain stayed neutral in the First World War and remained nominally neutral in the Second, even if Franco’s sympathies were hardly mysterious. More recently, Pedro Sánchez has made a habit of resisting pressure to follow the most excitable military drumbeats, including pushing back on NATO’s 5% spending target and, this month, refusing to let U.S. forces use Spanish bases for Iran-linked strikes.

That, for once, is exactly the sort of national character trait I’m happy to lean into.

So no, I don’t want to say I told you so.

But I will say this: thinking ahead has served me rather well. It hasn’t made me richer, cooler, or more relaxed, but it has made me more resilient. And in an age where fragility is built into almost everything, that feels less like eccentricity and more like common sense.

Maybe the biggest lesson of the last year is that preparing for catastrophe is not really about catastrophe at all.

It’s about building a life that copes better with wobble.

And, in the 21st century, we seem to have wobble in abundance!

 

I loved robots when I was a kid. They seemed to be everywhere in popular culture. From the Amazing Magical Robot Game, an educational toy that appeared in my Christmas stocking, to the weekly dose of “Danger, Will Robinson” while watching the cult American classic series Lost in Space, I was hooked. So when I was seven or eight years old and "Tricky’s" the local toy shop, put one in their shop window, I had to have it. Beyond the reach of my pocket money, I devised “The Robot Club” with school friends John London and Ian Collie, whose club subscriptions coincidentally covered the price of the robot, though I don’t recall John and Ian getting much time to play with it. (Sorry guys!)

Fast forward fifty-five years and the robots are here for real. However, the reality lacks the magic conjured by my childhood imagination. In fact, to me, the whole robot business seems just a little bit scary.

For starters, why aren’t there any purple robots? Or blue, pink, green, etc.? Even robots in black-and-white movies, like Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, were clearly not monochrome. I don’t know what colour Gort was, but he had a metallic shimmer that suggested silver or grey, as did Robot Maria in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Today, though, I bet you a Buffalo nickel that all the humanoid robots you’ve ever seen have been white, or worse, white with black faces. I don’t think this is an accident. I think the way in which robots are presented to us is a representation of the intention of the people behind them. The robots of yore were the product of the creative minds of science fiction writers, who cast robots as angels or demons as their narratives demanded. The folk behind the robots being sold to us today are the products of billionaire tech futurists. Their intended narrative appears to be somewhat different.

In the old stories, the robot was always a character. It could be comic or tragic, loyal or murderous, but it was always a someone. Even when it was a menace, it had personality. It had colour. It had a face you could read, even if it was only a blank mask of rivets. The robots coming to an online distribution outlet via your billionaire-controlled tech device of choice are blank, faceless soldiers of servitude.

These are not characters; they’re appliances with limbs. That they’re white is no accident. White is a cultural signal: clean, clinical, neutral, safe. White is the colour of hospitals and laboratories and the myth of objectivity. A white humanoid says: don’t worry, there’s no ideology here. This is just engineering.

There is more going on here, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. In a recent interview, Subhadra Das, historian of science and author of Uncivilized: Ten Lies That Made the West, revealed a hidden dark agenda. Speaking to Myriam François on The Tea YouTube channel, she outlined some of the motives behind the forthcoming robot revolution.

She says that it’s a myth that science and technology are automatically neutral, “truth with a capital T,” floating above politics. As was the case with eugenics, this aura of neutrality has historically been used to give harmful social ideas a clean bill of health, because if something is labelled “science”, it becomes harder to argue with and easier to obey.

That matters, because the robot revolution is going to force society to answer a very old, very ugly question: what is a person for?

When machines can do more and more of what people currently do for wages, there will be more and more humans who are “unnecessary” to the labour market. In a sane world, that would be the start of leisure. In a less sane world, it becomes the start of sorting.

She talks about how eugenic thinking worked, not as cartoon villainy but as something disturbingly mainstream: decide that society has a “problem”, identify a group you can blame for it, then present control over that group as rational, scientific, and even compassionate. What gave me a chill was the way she described how this thinking can return in softer packaging: not “inferior race”, but “burden”, “low productivity”, “won’t contribute”, “won’t pay taxes”. Those aren’t just insults. They’re the vocabulary of a future in which citizenship is conditional on usefulness.

If that sounds dramatic, consider the mood music coming from the billionaire futurists themselves. The same people who sell “abundance” also flirt with demographic panic: talk of “Western civilisation” in peril, fear of replacement, the sense that the wrong people are multiplying. My earlier point about robot colour isn’t separate from that. If you’re anxious about who counts as the rightful inheritors of the future, then a white, “neutral”, “default” robot starts to look less like a product and more like a flag.

There’s another strand in her reasoning that helps explain why this ideology arrives with such confidence: the belief that the future is inevitable. In the transhumanist/AI-accelerationist framing she describes, AI isn’t treated as one possible path. It’s treated as destiny, almost a secular end-times story: history has a direction, the merger with machines is coming, and anyone who slows it down is cast as ignorant or even immoral.

Once you accept that framing, debate becomes blasphemy. Regulation becomes “standing in the way of progress”. And political questions, like “who owns the robots?” or “what happens to the displaced?” get pushed aside by a louder question: “how fast can we build?”

Which brings us back to those white bodies and black faceplates.

I’m not saying a designer sat down and said: “Make it look colonial.” I’m saying something more mundane and therefore more plausible: the industry is building the visual language of a future in which robots are framed as neutral, rightful, unquestionable. The whiteness is laundered as safety. The black “face” is blankness: no ethnicity, no history, no individuality, nothing that might prompt you to empathise or to ask who is being served. A humanoid, stripped of the human.

In the fiction of my childhood, robots were angels or demons depending on what the story needed. In the marketing of today, robots are neither angel nor demon. They are presented as inevitable infrastructure. And when infrastructure is inevitable, the people who control it quietly become inevitable too.

So the question I want to ask, before the robot revolution is declared “AMAZING” and the press releases start writing the future in permanent ink, is this:

When the billionaire futurists say “abundance for all”… who exactly is included in “all”? My fear is that it will be “all who remain” after the dust has settled on what may turn out to be the most turbulent period in human history.

 

I bought a new piece of kit this week, that really made me reflect on how far things have come. Long story short, I blogged about prepping for Armageddon earlier in the year, and one thing I realised needed a major overhaul was my 'home network' - the ever-growing collection of tablets, phones desktops and the ways they connect to the Internet. I've been looking for ways to make the whole thing more robust yet less power hungry.

When 'El apagón' - the big blackout happened here in Spain earlier in the year, I found out a lot about what would happen during an extended period without electricity. During those 17 hours, one of the things I noticed was that my local ISP failed before the Internet on my mobile phone. Not 100% sure why that is but my guess is the local ISP has less emergency power backup. So in the following months I mulled this over in my mind, and the more I thought about it, the more I came to see that I had underestimated my local Internet connection as a single point of failure. I live in quite an isolated little village in the 'Sierra de Cádiz'. I've long suspected much of the Internet coming into and out of the town comes through line-of-sight microwaves as the connectivity often gets worse in adverse weather, particularly storms and low lying cloud. The town's electricity supply is on a knife-edge at the best of times - I personally use two uninterruptible power supplies to keep the network up as I'm used to the electric tripping out mid-poker game. The chances of losing Internet due to an electricity outage is therefore always on the cards. Then there is flooding, terrorism, meteorites - OK and straw-clutching with that one, but you get my point, it became apparent that having a backup to connect my local network to the Internet made a lot of sense.

So I began to research solutions. I could have figured out away to make my smartphone a hotspot, but the phone assumes a higher level of importance during an emergency so I didn't want it occupied on network duty. After lots of research with my friends, Claude, Grok, and ChatGTP I arrived on a solution which was to buy a second Wifi router with a 'fallback' option. It works like this. My ISP router connects to the second router, so all my network traffic passes through it. I use the new router for both Wifi and wired connections. Should the ISP connection go offline, the new router makes a 4G connection through the phone network. Within 60 seconds, I'm back online. It's like magic. I had to get a new SIM card for the router, but I shopped around and found a pre-paid card with no contract. All I have to do is put 10 euros on it every six months to keep it 'alive'. During normal operation the SIM is inactive and only makes a connection during an emergency.

After I set this up, feeling very smug and pleased with myself, I noticed on the box that the router is capable of 300Mbps - over 4G? I thought this was a mistake, but apparently due to a thing called 'carrier aggregation', under ideal conditions the thing can weave together different mobile bands making 'one big one' (given there aren't too many other folk online). This is what triggered my reflection on my path as a user of the Internet in Spain.

Back in the late 1990's when I first considered moving to Europe, Spain was one of a number of countries I was considering. Internet connectivity was a key factor, since I would be working remotely for my company in England. During my research I stumbled across an article that wrote in glowing terms about the broadband rollout in the Iberian peninsula, and how the country was 'forging ahead' as a European leader in high speed Internet connectivity. This must have been a puff-piece for Movistar or something because when I finally arrived, the truth was rather different.

The house I bought in Murcia was less than three kilometers from town. The house had mains electricity and potable water, so getting an Internet connection would be just a question of running a phone line, no? Oh how wrong I was! I made overtures to the phone company who said they would be quite happy to help if I paid several thousand pounds to install telegraph poles! There was another problem in the form of a big hill at the back of my house that made line-of-sight connectivity impossible. I was so screwed. Caveat emptor. (Some years later, I met a smarter guy than me, who had his lawyer insert a clause in the compra-venta - the presales contract that determines the conditions of sale - that broadband internet connection would be available in the property before the sale would go ahead)

I was anxious to get connected because of work, so I had a word with the owner of a local Internet cafe and negotiated a preferential rate, given that I was spending five mornings a week in there with my laptop! There was a lady who did shifts looking after the place who was a chain-smoker. I used to go home reeking of tobacco smoke and coughing like a laboratory beagle, so I was keen to find a practical alternative.

There was a Vodafone shop in the town and, although mobile phones at the time were more geared towards calls, they were offering a new card with a data tariff. It was expensive so I'd have to ration my connectivity - a bit like the early days of Compuserve where we would use an off-line-reader program to login, download a bunch of messages and log off again to minimise connection fees! So I signed up for one of these cards and a condition was I had to have an ordinary phone SIM as well. This is where something happened to my disadvantage. The lady gave me the SIM card for my phone and said the data card would arrive in the following week. While muddling through with my schoolboy Spanish, I got the impression that I could use the SIM card she gave me to connect to the Internet until the proper data card arrived. So that weekend, I made a few sojourns in to Hotmail and Google, nothing too lengthy, then swapped over to the data card in the following week. At the end of the month I got a bill for 400 euros! I remonstrated with the girl in the shop arguing that she told me I could use the other card, but she just said 'you did - it worked'. I spent hours complaining writing to regional and national offices, sending faxes at their request etc, but never did manage to get a refund.

After about a year of struggling with the SIM solution - it did work when I had the right card, a Spanish neighbour helped me wade through the bureaucratic minefield of Telefonica's Sales Order Process to get a 'fixed line' telephone. Due to the poles issue, this was provided over radio, which capped the Internet connection to a ridiculously low speed, but at least I was on all the time without the same level of metering that I suffered with the SIM card. That did me for another year or two, until an enterprising couple of English chaps in the village put their heads together and, realise there were a lot of folk in the 'campo' like me with a need for broadband, started a wireless network company.

I'm a software guy rather than a hardware guy, so a lot of what they did remains a mystery, but it seems they figured out how to bundle together a bunch of consumer internet connections from the local cable company, then bounce these around the village and then on into the houses in the country side. If like me, line of sight was unavailable, they would angle dishes on other client sites to share the signal around. However they managed it, the system worked great and at last, after about four years I finally had a fast Internet connection in Spain.

When I moved to another little village in Andalucia, most folk were using a similar wireless systems because it was cheap - subsidised either by the townhall or the regional government or both. It was pretty terrible with speeds slowing to a crawl at that time of day when the kids came home from school. The support closed on Friday afternoon and if the line went down, which was often, there was nobody to help get it back until Monday morning. In time however a couple of new entrants to the market emerged offering fibre to the home. Considering we are fairly remote I'm very impressed by this.  A friend in Portland, Oregon with a holiday home here was telling me the Internet we get here is faster and cheaper than he has back home. I pay 20 euros per month and on a good day my fibre will test at 600Mbps. My ISP has a higher tariff - for a fiver a month extra I can get double that!

All of which makes me think, why on earth isn't everybody grabbing a digital nomad visa and coming to Spain to work. I often see posts on social media, especially TikTok from Americans who have moved, or are thinking of moving to Barcelona and are moaning about the price of property there. Well here's the thing, there are plenty of other places, many of which have amazing property deals. Whole villages are for sale for peanuts in some regions due to the phenomenon of rural depopulation, yet now, with Starlink in the mix providing broadband coverage through the whole of the country, there isn't a place where you can go in Spain where you would have to endure the same painful journey I did to get a good online connection.

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There's a war going on right now for the control of money. Its significance cannot be overstated. It will shape the future of everything to such an immense degree that I believe its impact will dwarf all the wars of the 20th century combined. Billions will die - untold billions will cease to exist, all because of a handful of laws that are being passed today, with hardly anyone batting an eyelid. I'm woefully inadequate as a writer to convey the magnitude of this change, especially in a short form such as this blog post. I just hope I can bring you a flavour of what is going on so that you can start thinking about it and doing your own research.

Back in 2022, I penned a somewhat gloomy blog about the future of freedom, power and money (Bitcoin Is Doomed And So Are We). It now turns out that not only was I on the right track, but the rate at which our freedom is coming to an end is massively accelerating. I'm late publishing this blog because every day since writing the initial draft, new relevant stories kept coming to light which I've had to research and include.

Anyway, getting back to the main story, the nature of freedom, power and money is intertwined. If you've acquainted yourself with the history of money, perhaps by reading The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson or Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber, you can't help but see the analogy to a game of Monopoly. Every game ends the same way. One player buys all the houses and hotels, wins all the cash, then the other players get frustrated and throw the board up in the air. Then a new game starts with the wealth redistributed evenly again. The pendulum swing, where wealth moves from rich to poor and then back to rich, is essentially the history of economics, money, credit and debt, and ultimately power. This may be why the same redistribution myth appears across cultures, from Prometheus giving man the fire of the Gods, to Robin Hood stealing from the rich to give to the poor. [Others include Zorro, Koschei the Russian folk hero, Song Jiang from the Chinese 'Water Margin' and to some extent Jesse James!]

There isn't room to fully summarise the story here, but I've always been impressed by the theme tune to the Big Bang Theory which somehow manages to compress the entire history of the universe into a song lyric. With the help of AI, I've had a go at doing a similar thing for economics:

A History of Debt (karaoke cut, Mont Pelerin edition to the tune of the Big Bang Theory theme)

Ten thousand years ago we started farming land,
And temples used their scribes to track the IOU demand.
The pharaohs taxed the people, while kings declared a slate,
Religions banned the usurers - they tore apart the state.
The Medici got clever, winked at God and made it pay,
The Brits built banks and empires, flags and debts along the way.
The French cut heads, the markets bled
Wars, New Deal, Bretton Woods, the dollar ruled instead.
The anti-red Chicago boys said freedom is the key
Thatcher, Reagan hatched a plan, cried "Markets wild and free!"
Math, cash, history, unravelling the mystery,
It all comes down to big debt (Debt)!

And so here we are today, with the Neoliberalism of the Chicago School economists, embraced by left and right wing governments in the US, UK and EU - collectively known as the West. In universities it is taught as political orthodoxy - as though there is no rational alternative, yet it's only working out well for the 1% of people. The widening gap between rich and poor at the heart of this theory is there for all to see.

At this point, given our Monopoly analogy, we would reasonably expect the millions of people who are saddled with debt, living from pay packet to pay packet, may soon reach that point again where they have had enough and the board gets thrown up in the air.

Here's the thing though: the 1% know this, and are making subtle yet fundamental changes to the law to make sure that doesn't happen again.

So pay close attention to the next bit because it really matters. Cash - the simple handing of value from one person to another, without permission, without oversight, has been the bedrock of human liberty. Take that away, and everything else, every right, privilege, every choice falls with it. If money ceases to be ours, our life ceases to be ours. Total financial control is not just tyranny - it is an apocalypse. It is the weapon that makes famine deliberate, war automated, pestilence engineered and death selective. Billions will never live because they will be smothered before birth by resource control systems that decide who may eat, who may travel and ultimately who may exist. The end of our personal financial sovereignty is worse than the Four Horsemen - it is the master that rides them all. Once it comes, there will be no going back.

The war of which I speak then - the laws being changed are designed to move us away from cash towards a future of digital money. There is nothing wrong with digital money itself. We could have a form of digital money that can be exchanged between individuals with no other parties involved - in fact it exists already - it's called Bitcoin. However, that's not the form of digital money that we will be forced to use. They want us to use digital money that is centrally controlled - the CBDC or Central Bank Digital Currencies. The difference between these is huge. With money that transacts from person to person, we retain personal financial sovereignty - we are the masters of our own funds. It's this very Personal Financial Sovereignty that 'they' are planning to take away from us.

Of course, they're saying they're not. The US, UK and the most recent EU digital currency announcements don't claim to be doing away with cash altogether. In fact, the EU said they're considering a system of 'peer to peer' digital transactions with the digital Euro which won't require third party banking intervention, but I'm old enough and ugly enough not to believe a word of that nonsense. The stakes are too high, the power too great for them to allow that to happen.

When I speak to people about this they often fail to see the danger, and are seduced by the ease of use of apparently frictionless card purchases. I get it - it's easy. They want you to be comfortable with it. That's why the UK's Financial Conduct Authority announced on 10 September 2025 their intention to raise the limit on cashless card transactions. But this is to ignore what is going on behind the scenes. For all its flaws, Bitcoin has demonstrated that no banking intermediary is needed for value to be exchanged from one person to another. Despite what you may have read, Bitcoin has never been 'hacked'. The horror stories the press love to dwell on all refer to Bitcoin exchanges - essentially the interface between Bitcoin, which is perfect money, and the banking system, which is bent as the proverbial nine bob note. That 'they' are trying to ban anonymous crypto wallets and force everyone to use crypto via recognised exchanges says all you need to know about 'them', the folk who bought you the Wall Street and 2008 financial crashes - what could possibly go wrong?

Who, you may ask, is 'them', or the 'powers that be' as I referred to them in the previous blog? This question was eloquently answered by Critical Theory lecturer Louisa Toxværd Munch on TikTok recently. Conspiracy theorists love to apportion blame, even naming people like George Soros, Charles Schwab or Bill Gates as the arch villains in charge of it all. In reality the system is protecting itself. Rich people work to protect their own interests in all sorts of ways, and this leads to the creation of organisations that serve to protect those interests. There is no Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. There are just structures, many of which are unconnected and uncoordinated that appear to conspire against the interests of the less well off. 

There is no single figure to point at, just a blob, as I discovered myself a few years ago while trying to play low-stakes poker.

One day, the online gambling site 'Pokerstars' decided I wasn't allowed to play €1 sit-and-go tournaments unless I sent them shots of my passport, my face from multiple angles, my tax ID and my inside leg measurement. I failed the test (Spanish bureaucracy - enough said), so I tried other poker sites. Malta, Gibraltar, the other side of the world - didn't matter. They all demanded the same. Why? Because the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), an unelected global body, had decided it should be so. They forced every online poker site in the world to introduce 'KYC' - know your customer. The G7 created the FATF back in 1989, and now, if FATF says jump, every government on Earth asks "how high?" No elections. No accountability. It seems on the face of it to be a one world government in all but name, but it's actually less well coordinated than that.

The reason I felt compelled to write this blog now is that 2025 is the year in which the 'powers that be' want to beef up online security, in the name of children's safety, by forcing people to provide KYC to access certain types of content (The Poker experiment clearly went well). While the UK government is most vocal about access to pornography, access to other sites such as Reddit and Wikipedia are similarly affected. Australia and Canada are following suit with similar legislation in the pipeline. Even America has The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), a bill with bipartisan support which is currently grinding its way through congress.

The important point here is the direction of travel. We've had web access for 30 years, but all of a sudden we're supposed to believe it's right now we're taking action to protect children from porn? The UK government has seen that people are circumventing the identification process by using a VPN, so now they're talking about banning them too.

The relevance to child protection of these sorts of digital legislation has been shown elsewhere to be spurious at best. The real reason is to increase the control that governments have over the Internet. As I explained in the previous blog, I believe there to be a movement to restrict the software we are allowed to run on our devices. As if to confirm my suspicions, Google announced last week that from 2026 it will restrict the sideloading of apps to those of 'authorised' developers. (Sideloading basically means loading an app that comes from outside the Android appstore). I predict that moving forward, terrorism will increasingly be used as an excuse to introduce further restrictions on the software we're allowed to run. To ban software that could be useful to fight our subjugation: encrypted messaging, peer to peer file exchange, off-grid messaging apps like bitchat and many other tools will all have to become 'authorised'. Most of the open source software repositories for these sorts of apps are hosted on a source control website called Github. Github was bought by Microsoft in 2018, to gasps of horror in the open source community. Years later, Microsoft has been lauded for largely maintaining the site's independence and encouraging its continued growth. However, the cynical voice in my head says they would do that if there was a long term plan to capture and control the world's open source software.

My belief is that none of this is really about poker sites or porn filters. The endgame is cash. Cash, or as I explained earlier, Personal Financial Sovereignty, is the overarching goal.

When 'we the people' have our money fully digitally controlled, there are many upsides for the winner of the Monopoly game, but many downsides for us.

Once cash disappears, governments can literally program what you're allowed to spend money on. The classic example is "Fancy a sausage roll? Sorry citizen, your cholesterol's too high. Try a lettuce leaf." However, it goes much deeper than that. "Government deficit? We'll introduce negative interest rates - there won't be a bank run because you can't get cash out at the bank!" We're already seeing in America how Trump is using the threat of litigation to silence news media. Imagine how much easier that would be if the same man had the ability to control every penny everybody has to spend. The stranglehold an unscrupulous leader would have over our lives doesn't bear thinking about.

We tend to think of the end of civilisation as nuclear war, asteroid impact or a global pandemic, but this is far worse. I can see it happening in my head like a slow motion car crash. I feel like Nuñez in that H.G. Wells short story "The Country of The Blind". If I talk to people about what I think is going on they treat me like I'm mad.

And maybe I am mad - mad because I can see what most refuse to see. Once our money itself is captured, resistance dies with it. You can't organise, you can't fund a movement, you can't even buy bread without permission. Rebellions require resources, but all the resources will be controlled by them, so the fight will be over before it starts. That's why to me, this feels so apocalyptic: not because it ends in fire, but because it ends in absolute submission, forever.