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!

 

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.

Among the things that make me a very dull man is that I'm very risk averse. I'm a safety guy, in fact some who know me might say ‘excessively so’. (Some of the other things that make me dull, which are legion, include a fondness for prog-rock, an obsession with vintage television shows like “The Prisoner” and a self-belief in my potential as a musician that after five decades that has yet to be realised)
 

Anyway, back to risk. I've never ridden a motorcycle. Well I went on the back a few times, but the feeling of exhilaration and freedom that I'm told makes the experience desirable never manifested in me strongly enough to overcome the warning my brain signals to me of the dangers. I saw a dead guy covered in newspapers lying in the road after a bike crash when I was single-digit old and I remember thinking – 'note-to-self, do not end up like that'.
 

There were many things that led to me quitting the UK and moving to Spain in 2003, but one was certainly 9/11. The old risk-calculator in the noggin kicked in and I decided that the increase in terrorism renders cities as targets. However slight it may be, if you live in London, New York or Paris, you do so under the possibility that you may at some point be attacked. The larger the population, the greater the risk. Moving to an ‘out of the way’ country like Spain and to a small village rather than a big city seemed to me to be a logical move.
 

Even when choosing a property, my risk aversion kicked in. I was looking for a house with an elevated aspect that would be resistant to flooding (and couldn't be overlooked by snipers - OK I'm teasing about that one, I'm not completely paranoid!)

Given my lifelong focus on minimizing risks, Trump’s election marked a turning point where, in my mind, the threat of World War III escalated to DEFCON 1. This isn't because I see Trump as some maniacal tyrant with a wargasm fetish. The problem with Trump as I see it is his hair-trigger. He's easily upset and his responses unpredictable. He could take the actions or words of another world leader the wrong way and press the big red button out of spite before anyone sane has the opportunity to talk him out of it.
 

The flag-shagging right-wing press in the UK, which I monitor to see what lies they're trying to brainwash folk with each day, seems equally expectant, having carried numerous WW3 scenario stories, some so painstakingly researched and presented that I strongly suspect military involvement behind the scenes. Some of these helpfully point towards websites where the likelihood of nuclear attack and the possible damage inflicted can be accessed for any geographical location, simply by entering one's address.
 

With this as my starting point I decided to assess my own risk, should 'the reds decide to push the button down' (apologies to Donald Fagan). It turns out moving to Spain was a very smart move on my part. Spain managed to stay largely neutral in two world wars, so is more than likely to keep its distance from any bust-ups once again. There are possible targets near me - the US military bases at Moron and Rota, though to destroy runways and ports there are better conventional weapons to do this rather than use nukes. So far, so good - I'm not a direct or indirect target.
 

The problem though is fallout. Nuclear conflict in Europe would inevitably lead to clouds of Strontium 90 and other dangerous sources of radioactive material that could blow my way causing all sorts of problems. Google is my friend, and I consulted so you don't have to.
 

The scenario for me in my little village is that following an incident, the best thing to do is to stay inside for at least two to four weeks, while the fallout settles. Ideally during this time I'd have the house completely sealed off with a separate air supply, but this is obviously impractical. Instead I found advice that in a house like mine on three floors, the best thing is to stay downstairs, taping up the doors and windows with duct tape. Then tape up some sheets on the doors in the upper levels. Air would still circulate through the upper levels of the house, with some of the dirtier air captured in the sheets.
 

I would not be able to leave the house for a month at least, so I have to ensure there is enough food and bottled water to last that time. Since November I've been over-shopping, buying a few items for the cupboard each time I go shopping for myself. I consulted with ChatGTP to get advice about the best foods to get to provide a reasonably balanced diet which would not subject me to nutritional shortfalls, so lots of tinned fish, tinned fruit and so on. The water supply can no longer be relied upon during this time, so not only have I stocked up on ‘potable’ bottled water but I have saved hundreds of litres of grey water for flushing the toilet etc.
 

Electricity cannot be guaranteed either so in order to make sure I can cook the food in the store cupboard, I've invested in a small portable alcohol stove. These are supposed to be used outside, but I've done some tests in the stairwell and for short usage there is not enough carbon monoxide to be problematic as the heat carries it up the stairs. Yes, I also bought a carbon monoxide detector! For light I've also bulk-bought some candles and I have a wind-up radio/mp3 player for news and entertainment!
 

Finally, in order to know when it is safe to venture out again I need to be able to know the level of residual radiation in the outside world, so I've bought a cheap and nasty Geiger counter - twenty euros from Ali-Express, but hopefully this will give me a rough idea of what is happening to the current ambient levels. I've also stocked up on facemasks and disposable gloves, to be worn when first going outside to minimise my personal exposure. Like I said, I'm a safety guy!
 

It may sound like a lot, but apart from the food for the store-cupboard, the hardware spend has only been about 70 euros – hardly breaking the bank for a little peace of mind.
 

So how about you, are you worried about a conflict? Do you think ahead? Are you a ‘prepper’? Do you have any tips, or have you spotted any flaws in my own preparations? Let me know!