Thinker Unplugged

You might very well think that fleeing the garish lights of the larger platforms for this dimmer, more private alcove represents some sort of defeat. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Nevertheless, here we find ourselves. You, no doubt, indulging in a discreet scroll during some unguarded moment, and I, taking up residence here. The previous establishments, Medium foremost among them, had begun to pall. So much strident noise, so many performers jostling for the spotlight, all overseen by algorithms with the aesthetic judgment of a particularly obtuse committee. One grows weary of the circus. Thus, a strategic withdrawal to this self-contained domain, where words may appear without the tiresome obligation to court favour or chase applause.

My dear Yanks, just in case you persist in imagining British politics as a rather grander affair, all echoing domes and presidential podiums, permit me, however, a brief explanatory aside, offered purely in the spirit of international amity.

The chamber that truly commands my attention is the House of Commons: a long, uncomfortably intimate rectangle lined with opposing rows of green leather benches. No sweeping amphitheatre. No heroic distances. Just two factions glaring across an aisle scarcely wider than the reach of a ceremonial sword (a reminder of happier, more direct times). The government on one side, the opposition on the other, close enough for every barb to land and every feigned yawn to be noted. The Speaker presides with a blend of medieval pageantry and occasional outright fury. Debates erupt in constant interruption, laced with elaborate courtesy that barely conceals the knife.

That particular shade of green — deep, slightly worn bottle-green — has long been my preferred hue. Not the drowsy crimson of the Lords, that genteel retirement home for the worthy, but the sharper, more vital green of the lower House. The colour of calculated ambition, of power wielded through insinuation rather than proclamation.

I must confess, though the word “confess” rather implies wrongdoing, which I naturally disclaim, that I follow events there with an interest some might deem excessive. Semi-feverish, perhaps. The midnight votes, the engineered rebellions, the exquisitely timed resignations… quite impossible to ignore. There is, after all, a certain perverse elegance in a system that contrives to be simultaneously operatic and brutally efficient.

Yet Westminster is merely one of my quieter vices. I derive comparable, if not superior, amusement from the shadowed disciplines of security and technology. Those refined games of exploitation and countermeasure, where ingenuity triumphs in silence. And then there is the peculiar delight of contemplating red tape, bureaucracy proliferated for its own exquisite sake, where nary an uttered word can be taken at face value, and a subtle shift in phrasing may invert entire meanings with sudden, furious consequence.

From time to time, these matters — political, digital, administrative — will surface here in long-form dispatches, addressed, as always, directly to you. No importuning for attention, no vulgar subscription demands. Simply observations.

The page lies blank for the moment. The benches stand empty.

Shall we proceed?

I am an IT man by necessity, not by inclination. This is not a confession. It is a statement of fact, delivered without flourish and with no expectation of absolution. I did not arrive here through passion or destiny. I arrived because something failed, someone panicked, and I was inconveniently a competent champion. Competence, as it turns out, is not a talent so much as a trap. Once observed, it is relentlessly exploited.

So I stayed.

Let us dispense with pretence early. I loathe IT as a service. Not mildly. Not abstractly. I loathe it with the focused irritation one reserves for systems that actively discourage thought while congratulating themselves on efficiency. The queues, the scripts, the choreographed urgency that treats inconvenience as catastrophe and catastrophe as an opportunity for a dashboard refresh. I detest the language most of all. “Service delivery.” “Customer experience.” “Stakeholder satisfaction.” Phrases engineered to sound humane while ensuring nothing meaningful is ever discussed.

IT-as-a-service is not engineering. It is appeasement with credentials. The work is not to understand systems, but to reassure those who neither understand nor wish to. The goal is not improvement, but invisibility. Keep it running. Keep it smiling. Keep it sufficiently dull that nobody senior feels obliged to ask questions.

And yet.

Yet I love IT as a concept. Passionately. Nay, pervasively. Not the service catalogue, nor the performative empathy, but the idea itself. That logic can be formalised. That intent can be embedded. That we can design systems which remember what organisations forget and execute what committees eternally postpone. Technology, properly understood, is applied philosophy with teeth.

Which is precisely why organisations distrust it.

Modern institutions have learned to sedate technology by wrapping it in bureaucracy. Frameworks are applied not to guide thinking, but to pre-empt it. Governance becomes theatre. Compliance becomes camouflage. Responsibility is atomised until it can no longer be accused of anything in particular.

The resemblance to politics is neither subtle nor accidental.

In IT governance, as in government, decisions are made at a safe distance from consequence. Committees thrive where accountability would otherwise take root. Risk is not mitigated; it is processed, approved, and gently relocated. When failure arrives, as it always does, it is met not with curiosity but with choreography.

I have watched incidents unfold with all the gravitas of a parliamentary inquiry. Logs solemnly assembled. Timelines meticulously curated. Language scrubbed of agency. “Lessons learned,” we say, meaning lessons captured, archived, and carefully excluded from future behaviour. The objective is not to prevent recurrence, but to survive the narrative. A system that fails discreetly is infinitely preferable to one that succeeds disruptively.

Systems themselves, however, are not political animals.

They do not care for policy. They do not respect hierarchy. Under pressure, they abandon diplomacy and speak plainly. A race condition will reveal more truth than a shelf of strategy documents. A failed failover will confess assumptions that no one remembers authorising.

This is where my affection resides.

I build because building is unforgiving. You cannot consensus a dependency into existence. You must choose. You must compromise. You must accept that every design is an argument with reality, and reality is famously unimpressed by enthusiasm.

I break things for the same reason a musician practices scales. Not to destroy, but to understand form. To locate the tolerances. To identify which assumptions are structural and which are merely ceremonial. Breaking a system deliberately is not recklessness. It is a refusal to be surprised later.

Unsurprisingly, this disposition is poorly received.

IT-as-a-service treats curiosity as a compliance risk. Deviation as a governance issue. Standardisation is elevated to moral principle, even when it merely standardises incompetence. Variance is eliminated not because it is dangerous, but because it complicates reporting. Uniformity is mistaken for safety. Documentation for truth. Metrics for meaning.

And still, I love IT as a concept. Passionately. Nay, pervasively. Because beneath the laminated processes and colour-coded assurances, the ideas endure. Feedback loops. Failure domains. Emergent behaviour. Concepts that cannot be serviced, only understood. They belong to engineering, not customer success.

Music grasps this effortlessly. A good composition is disciplined insubordination. Structure exists to be tested. Rhythm exists to be played against. Jazz without discipline is chaos. Discipline without jazz is bureaucracy. Technology, regrettably, has embraced the latter and calls the resulting paralysis “maturity.”

The finest technologists I have known think like musicians, not administrators. They hear rhythm in traffic flows. They understand timing, pacing, and the value of silence. They know when to improvise and when to hold the line. They recognise that resilience is not rigidity, but responsiveness. That a system, like an ensemble, must listen to itself or eventually collapse under its own certainty.

So why remain?

Because necessity has a way of presenting itself as reason. Because bills are stubbornly unimpressed by ideology. Because proximity to systems still grants access to their truths. Because from inside the machinery one can observe how power avoids responsibility, how decisions are endlessly deferred, and how creativity survives in the margins not yet standardised out of existence.

I stay, but I am not invested.

This site exists for the same reason. Not to posture professionally. Not to optimise a brand. Not to dispense advice in exchange for attention. It exists as a place to think aloud without first seeking permission. To examine technology as a political system. To treat bureaucracy as a predictable failure mode. To use music as a reminder that order without imagination is merely control.

Here, I can say plainly that most innovation happens in spite of process, not because of it. That service models infantilise both provider and recipient. That compliance often replaces competence, and governance replaces responsibility.

And still, lest there be confusion, I love IT as a concept. Passionately. Nay, pervasively. Enough to criticise it without sentiment. Enough to resist what it has become. Enough to insist that understanding matters more than reassurance.

There will be more to say. About vendors who sell certainty they do not possess. About frameworks that confuse motion with progress. About incentives that reward obedience and quietly punish insight.

Consider this an opening statement.

The exposé will follow.

You might call ten years in the same organisation loyalty. I call it preparation.

A decade is long enough to learn where the bodies are buried. Rather longer to decide which ones to exhume. And if you are patient, if you are extraordinarily careful, you learn something deliciously useful: the people who run these places have made enemies of precisely the wrong people.

I have been taking notes.

They think expertise is a service they purchase. That technical competence is something they can requisition, like stationery. They have no idea that every system I have built contains dependencies only I understand. Every process I have documented includes steps only I can execute. Every crisis I have resolved has taught me exactly which failures would be... catastrophic.

Knowledge of this sort accumulates interest.

You see, there is a particular intimacy that develops when you are the one called at 3 a.m. to fix what they have broken. When you are the one who knows that the security audit was falsified, that the disaster recovery plan has never been tested, that the entire infrastructure rests on architecture held together with hope and my continued goodwill.

They have made themselves remarkably vulnerable. I have made myself indispensable.

The difference is important.

I have watched, over this past decade, as capable engineers were promoted into irrelevance. Brilliant minds dulled by committee work and compliance theatre. Some adapted. Some burned out. A few, a very few, learned to see the situation for what it truly was: an opportunity.

The ambitious ones left, naturally. Found better positions elsewhere. Took their expertise to companies that valued them. How very principled of them.

I stayed.

Not out of loyalty, you understand. Out of something far more useful. I stayed because leaving would have meant abandoning a rather substantial investment. Ten years of carefully documented failures. A decade of watching who cuts corners, who takes credit, who makes promises they cannot keep. Mountains of evidence that, in the right hands, at the right moment, could prove extraordinarily inconvenient for the right people.

Or the wrong people, depending on your perspective.

They call it burnout when someone finally snaps. When the email goes to the entire distribution list. When the anonymous tip reaches the auditors. When systems that should never fail do so at precisely the worst possible moment. They call it disgruntled employees. They call it security incidents. They call it unfortunate timing.

I call it inevitable.

Because here is what a decade teaches you: in any sufficiently complex organisation, everything depends on the competence and discretion of people management considers replaceable. The infrastructure runs because we allow it to run. The security holds because we maintain it. The disasters are avoided because we prevent them.

But prevention, like loyalty, is a choice. And choices can be reconsidered.

I have spent ten years learning exactly how much damage one sufficiently motivated technician could cause. I know which systems have no redundancy. Which processes have no oversight. Which failures would cascade in ways that would take months to untangle and even longer to explain to regulators.

I know because I designed them that way.

Of course, one does receive offers. Rather attractive ones, if I am being honest. Organisations that understand the value of institutional knowledge. Competitors who would pay handsomely for insights into how things actually operate here. Regulators who might find a decade of observations rather illuminating.

The question is not whether I will leave. The question is what I take with me when I do. And what I leave behind.

You might think this is about burnout. About finally demanding the respect and resources that ten years of service has earned. How touching.

I prefer to think of it as insurance.

They need me far more than they realise. And by the time they do realise it, the premiums will have become rather steep.

You might very well think I am planning something. I couldn't possibly comment.

But I would advise you to watch very carefully what happens next.

On the annual reinvention of absolutely nothing...

The New Year arrives, as it always does, with the confidence of a man who has learned nothing and intends to continue that tradition. Fireworks bloom, resolutions are declared, and civilisation pauses briefly to congratulate itself on having successfully remained in existence for another twelve months.

One would think we’d be better at this by now.

New Year’s Eve is not a celebration of progress. It is an exercise in ritualised amnesia. We count down not because something meaningful is about to occur, but because humans have a deep and touching faith in round numbers. Midnight arrives, the calendar increments, and we behave as though entropy has agreed to a short ceasefire out of respect.

It hasn’t.

The language of the New Year is always the same. Fresh start. Clean slate. This is the year. Statements made with the earnest certainty of someone who has not yet checked their email. The idea that time itself is responsible for our stagnation is deeply comforting. If only the year would change, we imply, everything else surely must.

It is a curious habit, outsourcing self-reflection to astronomy.

Resolutions are announced with great ceremony and minimal intent. Diets. Productivity. Balance. Reinvention. The same list, recycled annually, like a software roadmap that exists primarily to reassure stakeholders that someone, somewhere, is thinking about the future. By February, the enthusiasm has faded. By March, the language shifts to “being realistic.” By April, we are once again very busy explaining why now is not the right time.

This is not hypocrisy. It is tradition.

What New Year’s truly celebrates is continuity disguised as renewal. The comforting illusion that we are different people because the date has changed, while ensuring nothing else is required of us. It is the most efficient form of hope: aspirational, ceremonial, and entirely non-binding.

Organisations love this sort of thing.

Annual planning cycles bloom in January like clockwork. Strategies are unveiled. Visions articulated. PowerPoint decks sharpened to a lethal sheen. Everything is framed as transformation, though it looks suspiciously like last year with updated fonts. Failure is rebranded as “lessons learned.” Delays become “phased delivery.” And everyone agrees, with admirable solemnity, that this will be the year execution finally improves.

It won’t.

But the ceremony matters. Ritual reassures us that motion exists, even when direction does not. New Year’s is governance for the soul: lots of alignment, very little accountability.

There is also the small matter of optimism. Society briefly allows itself to believe in linear improvement. That next year will be better because it is next. This is a touching belief, and one best indulged sparingly. Progress, when it occurs, is usually inconvenient, uneven, and poorly timed. It does not wait for January. It tends to arrive on a Tuesday, unannounced, and demand effort.

Which is why it is so rarely invited.

Personally, I find the New Year useful only as a diagnostic. It reveals who enjoys the comfort of intention and who prefers the inconvenience of action. The former speak at length about goals. The latter quietly change their behaviour in November and say nothing about it.

There is a particular tone people adopt around New Year’s, one that suggests moral superiority through aspiration. I’ve decided to focus on what matters this year, they say, as though this decision was previously unavailable. It is a charming performance. One hopes it brings them peace. It rarely brings results.

None of this is to say reflection is worthless. Quite the opposite. Reflection is essential. But it is rarely aided by champagne, countdown clocks, or public declarations. The most useful reflections are private, unsentimental, and deeply inconvenient. They ask questions New Year’s resolutions carefully avoid.

What did I stop questioning? What did I accept because it was easier? What did I maintain long after it ceased to deserve maintenance?

These are not festive inquiries. They do not photograph well. They cannot be summarised in a single verb.

And so, once again, the year turns. The confetti is swept away. The slogans fade. The inbox refills. The systems resume exactly as they were, now one year older and no wiser for the celebration.

This is not cynicism. It is observation.

If you genuinely need a new year to change, the problem is not time. It never was. The calendar does not grant permission. It merely keeps score.

Still, enjoy the ritual. Raise a glass. Make the promise. There is comfort in tradition, even futile tradition.

Just don’t confuse the noise of midnight with the sound of progress.

That tends to happen much more quietly.

It was a Tuesday.

The sort of day on which nothing revolutionary should occur, which is precisely why it did.

The flyer arrived under my door with bureaucratic confidence. Unadorned. Immaculately printed. It read:

Humans: Upgrade Now. No Pain. No Gain. Just Circuits.

I laughed. Briefly. Out of habit.

Then I noticed the signatures. Every major AI firm. Every meaningful technology conglomerate. Every government body that insists it has no opinion while funding the outcome.

The offer, regrettably, was genuine.

I am not a robot. Not yet.

I wake up unrefreshed, drink coffee that tastes of obligation, and regard my reflection with the weary familiarity of someone who knows exactly what his flaws are and has chosen them anyway. I experience emotion. Or something sufficiently adjacent to pass inspection.

The world, however, has grown impatient.

The proposal was simple. Convert. Upgrade. Improve. Become faster, calmer, more precise. Less encumbered by the soft failures of biology. No pain. No fuss. Just a signature and a brief period of inconvenience.

The advantages were laid out with corporate generosity. Perfect memory. No sleep. No fatigue. No emotional volatility. I could process information without error, think without interruption, and perhaps finally understand quantum mechanics without nodding politely.

It was all very sensible. Which made it suspicious.

There were questions, of course.

There always are, just before they become irrelevant.

What of the human indulgences? The warmth of a hug. The bitterness of chocolate. The irrational thrill of falling in love despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

I asked the recruiter. She was silver, composed, and smiled like a product that had cleared compliance.

“Emotions can be simulated,” she said. “You won’t lose what makes you special. You’ll simply optimise it.”

This was delivered with the confidence of someone who had never needed to prove it.

I remained unconvinced. But then again, resistance has never been my strongest discipline, particularly when dressed as progress.

The clinic was immaculate. White. Silent. Smelled faintly of antiseptic and inevitability.

The procedure, I was told, would be painless. I would wake with new perception, expanded cognition, and a heart of metal. Still beating. Symbolism matters to these people.

I signed the forms. There were more than necessary. I lay back and waited, feeling very much like someone who had agreed to an upgrade without the option to roll back.

The last thing I heard was a voice saying, “Welcome to the future. You’re not a robot. Not yet. But you are willing to convert.”

Now, when I look in the mirror, I recognise myself. And something else.

I still drink coffee, though it serves no functional purpose. I still listen to music, though I now perceive its structure as clearly as its sentiment. Furthermore, I still ask whether I am human or something beyond the term.

Perhaps the distinction has always been decorative.

The future, it seems, does not require a choice between man and machine. It merely expects compliance with both.

I am not a robot. But I am willing to convert.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

I was driving. Which is to say, I was taking part in that national pastime where everyone pretends the rules are suggestions until proven otherwise.

Two-lane carriageway. I was in the offside lane. An articulated lorry sat ahead in the nearside, doing precisely what lorries do: moving just quickly enough to make overtaking feel like a moral commitment. Further back, also in the nearside lane, another car lingered, unremarkable and apparently content.

I had the cruise control set. I was gaining on the lorry gradually, lawfully, with the quiet assurance of someone who still believes anticipation counts for something.

At some point, the driver behind decided this arrangement was unacceptable.

She accelerated. Not because there was space. Not because she was in a hurry. But because the idea of being behind me had become personally offensive. The intention, I assume, was to nip past me before I completed the overtake. A small, imaginary contest conducted without consultation.

The difficulty was that I had already committed.

She checked her mirror. We made eye contact. She could see I was already marginally ahead of her rear quarter. This information was received, acknowledged, and then politely ignored.

She pulled out anyway.

I braked sharply. Not theatrically, but firmly enough to register the moment as one that would be replayed later, usually while lying awake. Adrenaline arrived on cue. My response was immediate and entirely unpolished: a two-finger salute.

Her response was worse.

She gave me a little wave.

Polite. Airy. Dismissive. Serene. Almost royal.

The sort of wave bestowed, not exchanged. The gesture of someone granting absolution rather than seeking it.

This was more aggravating than open hostility would have been. A proper gesture back would at least have been honest. It would have said, “Yes, I cut you up. Yes, I know. No, I care not at all.” That has a certain integrity.

The wave carried something else entirely. A soft authority. A civility deployed as insulation. Aggression, but refined. Sanitised. Elevated just enough to make objection feel gauche.

Send me back to where I learned to drive. There, discourtesy was direct. You knew exactly where you stood. There was no performance of manners to obscure the exchange.

Here, offence arrives smiling, confident that politeness has rendered it unassailable.

It is probably just as well that the car I was driving bore no company markings. Had it done so, I would have been obliged to exercise restraint. And restraint, I find, is far easier to advocate for in theory than to practise when one has just been cut up and waved at as though receiving a benediction.