@DownWith ₿ig ₿rother
Clear signal in a noisy world
Relays (1)
- wss://premium.primal.net – read & write
Recent Notes
We have zaps. Nostr solved this.
But most of the creators we follow still live on X, Substack, YouTube, and elsewhere, and tipping on those platforms is either broken, custodial, or buried behind yet another subscription nobody asked for.
So I built TipBits.
tipbits.xyz — a sovereign Lightning tip page for creators. You register once with your Lightning address. You get a personal page at tipbits.xyz/u/yourname. Drop the link anywhere your audience finds you. Tippers visit, pick an amount in sats, GBP, USD, or EUR, and pay. Sats go peer-to-peer, straight to your wallet.
TipBits never touches the money. No custody. No KYC. No email. No password. No platform fee. Free forever.
It uses LNURL-pay, the same open standard that makes zaps work. No vendor lock-in. Works with any Lightning wallet.
I'm a lone developer and I shipped v1 yesterday. It's live, it works, real sats have landed. But it's early days and the Nostr community gives the most honest, most useful feedback of anywhere on the internet.
If you try it, break it, love it, hate it, or have ideas, reply here. Seriously. I'm building this in the open and I want to hear it.
My own page if you want to test it: tipbits.xyz/u/meridian
And if TipBits is useful to you, the value-for-value tip page is at tipbits.xyz/tip ⚡
#Bitcoin #Lightning #Nostr #ValueForValue #TipBits
But most of the creators we follow still live on X, Substack, YouTube, and elsewhere, and tipping on those platforms is either broken, custodial, or buried behind yet another subscription nobody asked for.
So I built TipBits.
tipbits.xyz — a sovereign Lightning tip page for creators. You register once with your Lightning address. You get a personal page at tipbits.xyz/u/yourname. Drop the link anywhere your audience finds you. Tippers visit, pick an amount in sats, GBP, USD, or EUR, and pay. Sats go peer-to-peer, straight to your wallet.
TipBits never touches the money. No custody. No KYC. No email. No password. No platform fee. Free forever.
It uses LNURL-pay, the same open standard that makes zaps work. No vendor lock-in. Works with any Lightning wallet.
I'm a lone developer and I shipped v1 yesterday. It's live, it works, real sats have landed. But it's early days and the Nostr community gives the most honest, most useful feedback of anywhere on the internet.
If you try it, break it, love it, hate it, or have ideas, reply here. Seriously. I'm building this in the open and I want to hear it.
My own page if you want to test it: tipbits.xyz/u/meridian
And if TipBits is useful to you, the value-for-value tip page is at tipbits.xyz/tip ⚡
#Bitcoin #Lightning #Nostr #ValueForValue #TipBits
The Foundation
A foundation is being laid beneath the public conversation about AI in Britain. Most people are too distracted to see it. I can see it from a different angle. I didn't choose that angle. I ended up there.
I want to tell you something personal before I get into the evidence.
When I started my apprenticeship and discovered it was run by Multiverse, I felt an immediate revulsion. A sense that I had made a mistake. But I was in, the commitment was made, and the reasonable thing seemed to be to push the feeling aside, focus on the work, and see how it played out.
Then the Sovereign AI Fund was announced. I looked at who was sitting in the managing partner's chair. It was Tony Blair's daughter-in-law.
I started turning over stones.
What came back was not a loose connection or two. It was an avalanche. And when I understood what I was actually inside, I felt something I can only describe as a cog realising it is part of a machine, a machine being constructed around the lives of people who did not choose to be inside it and do not yet know they are.
I have been shaped by Orwell since I was young. The world he warned about has lived in the back of my mind for decades as the thing I most feared. I did not expect to find myself enrolled in it.
That is why I am writing this. Not because I chose this position. Because I ended up here by chance, and from here I can see something most people cannot.
The foundation.
While Britain has been distracted, a foundation is being laid.
Not secretly. That is the important thing to understand. Every element of what I am about to describe is in press releases, company filings, parliamentary records, and government websites. The scandal is not that it is hidden. The scandal is that nobody has placed it all in the same frame at the same time.
The public conversation right now is fragmented and reactive. The Blair essay. The Question Time panel. The Sovereign AI Fund appointment. The Multiverse valuation. Each story arrives, generates heat, and is replaced by the next one before anyone has had time to understand what connects them. That cycling is not accidental. Exhaustion is the mechanism. By the time people become tired of the argument, the foundations have been poured.
Let me show you what is underneath.
The family architecture.
Tony Blair published a 5,600-word essay on 26 May through the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Most coverage focused on Brexit and Net Zero. Almost nobody focused on point four of his ten-point programme:
"We should create a major new partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training, not just for the young and unemployed, but for the existing workforce whose jobs will be affected by AI and who need to learn AI adoption."
This is a policy recommendation. It is also a precise description of a commercial operation already running at scale.
Euan Blair, Tony Blair's eldest son, is the founder and CEO of Multiverse, currently England's largest revenue-generating apprenticeship provider. In May 2026, Multiverse raised $70 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, was quoted in the company's own press release endorsing the raise and describing Britain's ambition to achieve the fastest rate of AI adoption in the G7.
A former Prime Minister recommends apprenticeship and AI training partnerships as national policy. His son runs the country's largest AI apprenticeship company. The serving Chancellor endorses that company by name in a commercial press release.
That is one layer of the foundation.
The second layer: Suzanne Ashman Blair, Euan Blair's wife and Tony Blair's daughter-in-law, was appointed Managing Partner of the UK government's Sovereign AI Fund, a £500 million vehicle operating under a .gov.uk domain with Crown authority. The fund provides not just capital but sovereign compute, fast-tracked visas, and access to national datasets. It decides which AI companies receive access to the infrastructure of the British state.
Three members of the same family sit simultaneously at the policy lever, the training pipeline, and the capital allocation mechanism of Britain's entire AI transformation.
Every appointment is individually defensible. Every element is publicly announced. Nobody has placed them in the same frame and asked what it means.
The mechanism nobody is explaining.
There is a reason Multiverse is valued at $2.1 billion despite losing more money than it earns every single year. Pre-tax losses for the year to March 2025 were £63.3 million on revenues of £79.6 million. Cash nearly halved in twelve months.
A company burning money at that rate does not command a $2.1 billion valuation unless the investors understand something that the headline numbers do not show.
Here is what they understand.
The Apprenticeship Levy is a payroll tax of 0.5% collected from every UK employer with a pay bill exceeding £3 million. The funds can only be spent on government-approved training providers. There is no competitive tender for fee levels. The ceiling is set by civil servants in the Department for Education. Multiverse charges approximately £18,000 per apprentice on its AI for Business Analysis course.
In October 2024, Multiverse submitted written evidence to Parliament's Select Committee inquiry into skills and further education. The submission made specific recommendations for how the Growth and Skills Levy, the replacement for the Apprenticeship Levy, should be designed. The Growth and Skills Levy, as subsequently announced, was substantially aligned with those recommendations. Multiverse then announced a commitment to train 15,000 new AI apprentices funded by that same levy.
The company receiving the money recommended the design of the mechanism that would distribute the money.
There is now a significant development breaking in the background that the public conversation has not yet processed. From August 2026, the government's 10% top-up to levy accounts will end, and employer co-investment rates will rise from 5% to 25%. This makes UK apprenticeship funding significantly more expensive for British businesses, which is almost certainly why Multiverse's European expansion through its January 2026 acquisition of Berlin-based StackFuel is timed precisely as it is. The same model, the same platform, the same alliances, now deployed under German state funding law instead.
The foundation is not just being laid in Britain. It is going international.
What the apprentices are actually building.
There is one more element of this foundation that has received almost no attention.
Each Multiverse apprentice is embedded inside a host organisation, producing project work that maps real processes using real institutional data. The curriculum is designed specifically to identify inefficiencies and automation opportunities. Those project portfolios live in Multiverse's proprietary platform, Atlas. The legal basis for data processing is cited as legitimate business interest, not consent.
What Multiverse holds in aggregate across 12,000 apprenticeship starts in 2024-25 alone is a distributed map of operational inefficiency across a significant cross-section of British institutional life, inside NHS trusts, government departments, outsourced public services providers, banks, and defence contractors.
In May 2026, Multiverse confirmed a strategic alliance with Palantir, specifically to upskill NHS staff in Palantir's tools. The same press release named Oracle, Palantir, and Microsoft as the technology stack that Multiverse sits on top of as "the AI adoption layer."
The foundation layer connects directly to the intelligence layer. I will be returning to that connection in detail.
The wall.
I want to close with the thing I most want you to take from this.
People across Britain are enrolled in training programmes, using workplace software, submitting to digital ID consultations, and reading King's Speech announcements, each one individually reasonable, each one presented as progress, opportunity, modernisation.
What they are not being shown is what sits underneath all of it. The foundation being laid while attention is pulled elsewhere. The architecture being assembled from components that are each publicly announced but never presented as a whole.
The false claims circulating on social media, the viral posts about contracts that do not exist, actually serve the architecture by making the real story seem like conspiracy thinking. The debunking of the false claim creates scepticism about the true one. That too is a mechanism.
I did not choose to see this from the inside. I enrolled in a training programme in good faith and ended up inside the machine I had feared for most of my adult life.
The wall is being built. Most people will not notice it until it is complete.
I can see it from here.
More to follow.
Sources:
Tony Blair Institute essay, 26 May 2026: https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/the-labour-party-is-playing-with-fire-over-its-future-and-the-future-of-the-country
Multiverse $70m raise press release, 15 May 2026: https://www.multiverse.io/blog/multiverse-raises-70-million-europes-ai-adoption-platform
Multiverse revenue and loss figures, FE Week: https://feweek.co.uk/multiverse-leads-rivals-with-stellar-apprenticeship-revenue-haul/
Multiverse Select Committee evidence, October 2024: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/130765/html/
Sovereign AI Fund, Isomorphic investment: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/governments-sovereign-ai-invests-in-british-founded-ai-company-redefining-how-medicines-are-designed
Suzanne Ashman Blair appointment, BM Magazine: https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/suzanne-ashman-sovereign-ai-fund-managing-partner/
Ellison funding of TBI, Lighthouse Reports: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/
Multiverse Atlas data platform: https://support.multiverse.io/en/collections/139106-during-your-apprenticeship
StackFuel acquisition:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/multiverse-to-deliver-ai-skills-to-100-000-german-workers-through-acquisition-of-stackfuel-302670991.html
A foundation is being laid beneath the public conversation about AI in Britain. Most people are too distracted to see it. I can see it from a different angle. I didn't choose that angle. I ended up there.
I want to tell you something personal before I get into the evidence.
When I started my apprenticeship and discovered it was run by Multiverse, I felt an immediate revulsion. A sense that I had made a mistake. But I was in, the commitment was made, and the reasonable thing seemed to be to push the feeling aside, focus on the work, and see how it played out.
Then the Sovereign AI Fund was announced. I looked at who was sitting in the managing partner's chair. It was Tony Blair's daughter-in-law.
I started turning over stones.
What came back was not a loose connection or two. It was an avalanche. And when I understood what I was actually inside, I felt something I can only describe as a cog realising it is part of a machine, a machine being constructed around the lives of people who did not choose to be inside it and do not yet know they are.
I have been shaped by Orwell since I was young. The world he warned about has lived in the back of my mind for decades as the thing I most feared. I did not expect to find myself enrolled in it.
That is why I am writing this. Not because I chose this position. Because I ended up here by chance, and from here I can see something most people cannot.
The foundation.
While Britain has been distracted, a foundation is being laid.
Not secretly. That is the important thing to understand. Every element of what I am about to describe is in press releases, company filings, parliamentary records, and government websites. The scandal is not that it is hidden. The scandal is that nobody has placed it all in the same frame at the same time.
The public conversation right now is fragmented and reactive. The Blair essay. The Question Time panel. The Sovereign AI Fund appointment. The Multiverse valuation. Each story arrives, generates heat, and is replaced by the next one before anyone has had time to understand what connects them. That cycling is not accidental. Exhaustion is the mechanism. By the time people become tired of the argument, the foundations have been poured.
Let me show you what is underneath.
The family architecture.
Tony Blair published a 5,600-word essay on 26 May through the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Most coverage focused on Brexit and Net Zero. Almost nobody focused on point four of his ten-point programme:
"We should create a major new partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training, not just for the young and unemployed, but for the existing workforce whose jobs will be affected by AI and who need to learn AI adoption."
This is a policy recommendation. It is also a precise description of a commercial operation already running at scale.
Euan Blair, Tony Blair's eldest son, is the founder and CEO of Multiverse, currently England's largest revenue-generating apprenticeship provider. In May 2026, Multiverse raised $70 million at a $2.1 billion valuation. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, was quoted in the company's own press release endorsing the raise and describing Britain's ambition to achieve the fastest rate of AI adoption in the G7.
A former Prime Minister recommends apprenticeship and AI training partnerships as national policy. His son runs the country's largest AI apprenticeship company. The serving Chancellor endorses that company by name in a commercial press release.
That is one layer of the foundation.
The second layer: Suzanne Ashman Blair, Euan Blair's wife and Tony Blair's daughter-in-law, was appointed Managing Partner of the UK government's Sovereign AI Fund, a £500 million vehicle operating under a .gov.uk domain with Crown authority. The fund provides not just capital but sovereign compute, fast-tracked visas, and access to national datasets. It decides which AI companies receive access to the infrastructure of the British state.
Three members of the same family sit simultaneously at the policy lever, the training pipeline, and the capital allocation mechanism of Britain's entire AI transformation.
Every appointment is individually defensible. Every element is publicly announced. Nobody has placed them in the same frame and asked what it means.
The mechanism nobody is explaining.
There is a reason Multiverse is valued at $2.1 billion despite losing more money than it earns every single year. Pre-tax losses for the year to March 2025 were £63.3 million on revenues of £79.6 million. Cash nearly halved in twelve months.
A company burning money at that rate does not command a $2.1 billion valuation unless the investors understand something that the headline numbers do not show.
Here is what they understand.
The Apprenticeship Levy is a payroll tax of 0.5% collected from every UK employer with a pay bill exceeding £3 million. The funds can only be spent on government-approved training providers. There is no competitive tender for fee levels. The ceiling is set by civil servants in the Department for Education. Multiverse charges approximately £18,000 per apprentice on its AI for Business Analysis course.
In October 2024, Multiverse submitted written evidence to Parliament's Select Committee inquiry into skills and further education. The submission made specific recommendations for how the Growth and Skills Levy, the replacement for the Apprenticeship Levy, should be designed. The Growth and Skills Levy, as subsequently announced, was substantially aligned with those recommendations. Multiverse then announced a commitment to train 15,000 new AI apprentices funded by that same levy.
The company receiving the money recommended the design of the mechanism that would distribute the money.
There is now a significant development breaking in the background that the public conversation has not yet processed. From August 2026, the government's 10% top-up to levy accounts will end, and employer co-investment rates will rise from 5% to 25%. This makes UK apprenticeship funding significantly more expensive for British businesses, which is almost certainly why Multiverse's European expansion through its January 2026 acquisition of Berlin-based StackFuel is timed precisely as it is. The same model, the same platform, the same alliances, now deployed under German state funding law instead.
The foundation is not just being laid in Britain. It is going international.
What the apprentices are actually building.
There is one more element of this foundation that has received almost no attention.
Each Multiverse apprentice is embedded inside a host organisation, producing project work that maps real processes using real institutional data. The curriculum is designed specifically to identify inefficiencies and automation opportunities. Those project portfolios live in Multiverse's proprietary platform, Atlas. The legal basis for data processing is cited as legitimate business interest, not consent.
What Multiverse holds in aggregate across 12,000 apprenticeship starts in 2024-25 alone is a distributed map of operational inefficiency across a significant cross-section of British institutional life, inside NHS trusts, government departments, outsourced public services providers, banks, and defence contractors.
In May 2026, Multiverse confirmed a strategic alliance with Palantir, specifically to upskill NHS staff in Palantir's tools. The same press release named Oracle, Palantir, and Microsoft as the technology stack that Multiverse sits on top of as "the AI adoption layer."
The foundation layer connects directly to the intelligence layer. I will be returning to that connection in detail.
The wall.
I want to close with the thing I most want you to take from this.
People across Britain are enrolled in training programmes, using workplace software, submitting to digital ID consultations, and reading King's Speech announcements, each one individually reasonable, each one presented as progress, opportunity, modernisation.
What they are not being shown is what sits underneath all of it. The foundation being laid while attention is pulled elsewhere. The architecture being assembled from components that are each publicly announced but never presented as a whole.
The false claims circulating on social media, the viral posts about contracts that do not exist, actually serve the architecture by making the real story seem like conspiracy thinking. The debunking of the false claim creates scepticism about the true one. That too is a mechanism.
I did not choose to see this from the inside. I enrolled in a training programme in good faith and ended up inside the machine I had feared for most of my adult life.
The wall is being built. Most people will not notice it until it is complete.
I can see it from here.
More to follow.
Sources:
Tony Blair Institute essay, 26 May 2026: https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/the-labour-party-is-playing-with-fire-over-its-future-and-the-future-of-the-country
Multiverse $70m raise press release, 15 May 2026: https://www.multiverse.io/blog/multiverse-raises-70-million-europes-ai-adoption-platform
Multiverse revenue and loss figures, FE Week: https://feweek.co.uk/multiverse-leads-rivals-with-stellar-apprenticeship-revenue-haul/
Multiverse Select Committee evidence, October 2024: https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/130765/html/
Sovereign AI Fund, Isomorphic investment: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/governments-sovereign-ai-invests-in-british-founded-ai-company-redefining-how-medicines-are-designed
Suzanne Ashman Blair appointment, BM Magazine: https://bmmagazine.co.uk/news/suzanne-ashman-sovereign-ai-fund-managing-partner/
Ellison funding of TBI, Lighthouse Reports: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/
Multiverse Atlas data platform: https://support.multiverse.io/en/collections/139106-during-your-apprenticeship
StackFuel acquisition:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/multiverse-to-deliver-ai-skills-to-100-000-german-workers-through-acquisition-of-stackfuel-302670991.html
The soft sell is in play.
The problem isn't AI. It's the deployment of it by the highest risk group to use it. I've been investigating this quietly for months. Today I want to start talking.
I've been quiet on here for a few weeks. Working. Thinking. Beginning to document something I couldn't quite name yet.
The pace of events in the UK has changed. I've been watching it. And this week, two things happened in close succession that made me want to start talking.
The Blair intervention.
On 26 May, Tony Blair published a 5,600-word essay through the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
The timing matters. The Prime Minister has been fighting for political survival. The Labour leadership conversation has consumed all the oxygen. Blair stepped in, shook the snow globe, and most coverage focused entirely on Brexit and Net Zero.
What almost nobody focused on was the policy detail buried inside.
Point four of his ten-point programme calls for: "a major new partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training, not just for the young and unemployed, but for the existing workforce whose jobs will be affected by AI and who need to learn AI adoption."
Point nine goes further: "reorganising the whole of government around the harnessing of the 21st-century technological revolution... Digital ID is just one, though vital, part of it."
Apprenticeship and training partnerships. AI adoption. Digital ID described as vital.
These are policy recommendations. They are also, if you know where to look, a description of infrastructure that already exists and is already being funded. I'll be returning to that in detail. For now, note that the essay was published by an institute that has received a confirmed £257 million funding floor from Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, one of the primary technology companies positioned to benefit from exactly this policy direction.
The Sovereign AI Fund and Euan Blair's Multiverse have already entered the public conversation. What hasn't been asked yet is why Tony Blair's policy recommendations map so precisely onto businesses run by his own family. That question is coming.
Then Question Time.
Two days later, the BBC ran a special AI episode.
Panel: Darren Jones MP, Julia Lopez MP, Mo Gawdat, Victor Riparbelli of Synthesia, and Laura Gilbert, described as Senior Director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute.
It was framed as a debate. It felt like a soft sell. Every voice sat somewhere between enthusiastic supporter and true believer. The range of opinion ran from "AI is the future" to "AI is the future, but be careful." Nobody on that panel was there to genuinely challenge the direction of travel.
That framing, the absence of scrutiny presented as balance, is something I've been watching operate across multiple institutions for months. The BBC didn't invent it. But on Thursday night it delivered it to several million people.
Look more closely at Laura Gilbert.
Her own public speaker profile is the story.
She is Head of AI for Government at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, Larry Ellison's own research institute. As part of that role, she works one day a week on secondment to the Tony Blair Institute. And one day a week on secondment to DSIT, the government department directly responsible for AI policy in the United Kingdom.
Before this: five years at 10 Downing Street, founding director of the government's data science team and the AI Incubator under both Conservative and Labour governments.
Read that back slowly.
The BBC placed on its independent AI debate panel someone simultaneously employed by Ellison's institute, seconded to Blair's institute, and advising the government department that sets the policy environment both organisations directly benefit from.
She is not an independent voice. She is the junction point of three of the most consequential actors in British AI policy, presented to millions as a neutral expert.
That is not an editorial oversight. That is what the architecture looks like when it surfaces in public.
The problem isn't AI.
Today feels like the right moment to join this conversation.
What I have been working on is large and wide, far bigger than I first anticipated. Explaining it is not easy, but it is necessary.
AI is undoubtedly a powerful tool, and like anything in this world it can be used for negative or positive effect. What makes it different is the magnitude. The capability is already extraordinary and the trajectory of improvement is exponential. The consequences of getting the deployment wrong are not proportionate, they are magnified.
Implemented as a tool of control by a government or nation under pressure, AI becomes the most powerful instrument of oppression ever built. Surveillance at scale. Censorship without friction. The rewriting of history in real time. The short-term architecture looks like Orwell, 1984 brought forward and automated. But the longer-term risk is more insidious than that. Once embedded, it can be used to condition populations in ways we are only beginning to understand, moving from control by fear toward something closer to Huxley's vision: a compliant society that no longer recognises its own compliance.
And yet AI is also a genuine leveller. It brings people with good ideas and real capability, but without the platform, the connections, or the resources to act on them, up to the same level as those who have always had those advantages. The positive potential is just as unimaginable as the negative. That is what makes the deployment question so consequential.
I fear we are already further down this path than we are being told.
What I have been documenting is an architecture, the shape of how much of this is already more deeply embedded than the public conversation acknowledges. The soft sell is the mechanism: a slow acclimatisation, designed to bring people to acceptance of decisions that have, for the most part, already been made. Without a vote. Without consent. Without agency.
A panopticon is being constructed. And the nature of a panopticon is that by the time the people inside it fully understand what it is, the architecture is already complete.
When that moment of recognition arrives, and it will, the backlash against AI will be significant. We are already seeing the early signs. That will accelerate. And when it does, the people who built this without consent will point to the backlash as proof that the public cannot be trusted with the conversation.
That is why the conversation has to happen now, while there is still time to shape the outcome.
This is one thread in an architecture I've been mapping for months. The connections run deeper, the stakes are higher, and the public case has not yet been made in full.
I intend to make it.
Sources:
Tony Blair Institute essay, 26 May 2026: https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/the-labour-party-is-playing-with-fire-over-its-future-and-the-future-of-the-country
Ellison funding of TBI, Lighthouse Reports: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/
BBC Question Time AI special announcement: https://x.com/bbcquestiontime/status/2059702556994236474
Laura Gilbert public profile, OpenUK:
https://openuk.uk/profiles/dr-laura-gilbert/
Ellison Institute of Technology, Gilbert appointment: https://eit.org/news/eit-expands-team-of-field-leading-experts-spanning-ai-economics-life-sciences-generative-biology-and-medicine
The problem isn't AI. It's the deployment of it by the highest risk group to use it. I've been investigating this quietly for months. Today I want to start talking.
I've been quiet on here for a few weeks. Working. Thinking. Beginning to document something I couldn't quite name yet.
The pace of events in the UK has changed. I've been watching it. And this week, two things happened in close succession that made me want to start talking.
The Blair intervention.
On 26 May, Tony Blair published a 5,600-word essay through the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.
The timing matters. The Prime Minister has been fighting for political survival. The Labour leadership conversation has consumed all the oxygen. Blair stepped in, shook the snow globe, and most coverage focused entirely on Brexit and Net Zero.
What almost nobody focused on was the policy detail buried inside.
Point four of his ten-point programme calls for: "a major new partnership with the private and voluntary sectors for apprenticeships and training, not just for the young and unemployed, but for the existing workforce whose jobs will be affected by AI and who need to learn AI adoption."
Point nine goes further: "reorganising the whole of government around the harnessing of the 21st-century technological revolution... Digital ID is just one, though vital, part of it."
Apprenticeship and training partnerships. AI adoption. Digital ID described as vital.
These are policy recommendations. They are also, if you know where to look, a description of infrastructure that already exists and is already being funded. I'll be returning to that in detail. For now, note that the essay was published by an institute that has received a confirmed £257 million funding floor from Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, one of the primary technology companies positioned to benefit from exactly this policy direction.
The Sovereign AI Fund and Euan Blair's Multiverse have already entered the public conversation. What hasn't been asked yet is why Tony Blair's policy recommendations map so precisely onto businesses run by his own family. That question is coming.
Then Question Time.
Two days later, the BBC ran a special AI episode.
Panel: Darren Jones MP, Julia Lopez MP, Mo Gawdat, Victor Riparbelli of Synthesia, and Laura Gilbert, described as Senior Director of AI at the Tony Blair Institute.
It was framed as a debate. It felt like a soft sell. Every voice sat somewhere between enthusiastic supporter and true believer. The range of opinion ran from "AI is the future" to "AI is the future, but be careful." Nobody on that panel was there to genuinely challenge the direction of travel.
That framing, the absence of scrutiny presented as balance, is something I've been watching operate across multiple institutions for months. The BBC didn't invent it. But on Thursday night it delivered it to several million people.
Look more closely at Laura Gilbert.
Her own public speaker profile is the story.
She is Head of AI for Government at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford, Larry Ellison's own research institute. As part of that role, she works one day a week on secondment to the Tony Blair Institute. And one day a week on secondment to DSIT, the government department directly responsible for AI policy in the United Kingdom.
Before this: five years at 10 Downing Street, founding director of the government's data science team and the AI Incubator under both Conservative and Labour governments.
Read that back slowly.
The BBC placed on its independent AI debate panel someone simultaneously employed by Ellison's institute, seconded to Blair's institute, and advising the government department that sets the policy environment both organisations directly benefit from.
She is not an independent voice. She is the junction point of three of the most consequential actors in British AI policy, presented to millions as a neutral expert.
That is not an editorial oversight. That is what the architecture looks like when it surfaces in public.
The problem isn't AI.
Today feels like the right moment to join this conversation.
What I have been working on is large and wide, far bigger than I first anticipated. Explaining it is not easy, but it is necessary.
AI is undoubtedly a powerful tool, and like anything in this world it can be used for negative or positive effect. What makes it different is the magnitude. The capability is already extraordinary and the trajectory of improvement is exponential. The consequences of getting the deployment wrong are not proportionate, they are magnified.
Implemented as a tool of control by a government or nation under pressure, AI becomes the most powerful instrument of oppression ever built. Surveillance at scale. Censorship without friction. The rewriting of history in real time. The short-term architecture looks like Orwell, 1984 brought forward and automated. But the longer-term risk is more insidious than that. Once embedded, it can be used to condition populations in ways we are only beginning to understand, moving from control by fear toward something closer to Huxley's vision: a compliant society that no longer recognises its own compliance.
And yet AI is also a genuine leveller. It brings people with good ideas and real capability, but without the platform, the connections, or the resources to act on them, up to the same level as those who have always had those advantages. The positive potential is just as unimaginable as the negative. That is what makes the deployment question so consequential.
I fear we are already further down this path than we are being told.
What I have been documenting is an architecture, the shape of how much of this is already more deeply embedded than the public conversation acknowledges. The soft sell is the mechanism: a slow acclimatisation, designed to bring people to acceptance of decisions that have, for the most part, already been made. Without a vote. Without consent. Without agency.
A panopticon is being constructed. And the nature of a panopticon is that by the time the people inside it fully understand what it is, the architecture is already complete.
When that moment of recognition arrives, and it will, the backlash against AI will be significant. We are already seeing the early signs. That will accelerate. And when it does, the people who built this without consent will point to the backlash as proof that the public cannot be trusted with the conversation.
That is why the conversation has to happen now, while there is still time to shape the outcome.
This is one thread in an architecture I've been mapping for months. The connections run deeper, the stakes are higher, and the public case has not yet been made in full.
I intend to make it.
Sources:
Tony Blair Institute essay, 26 May 2026: https://institute.global/insights/politics-and-governance/the-labour-party-is-playing-with-fire-over-its-future-and-the-future-of-the-country
Ellison funding of TBI, Lighthouse Reports: https://www.lighthousereports.com/investigation/blair-and-the-billionaire/
BBC Question Time AI special announcement: https://x.com/bbcquestiontime/status/2059702556994236474
Laura Gilbert public profile, OpenUK:
https://openuk.uk/profiles/dr-laura-gilbert/
Ellison Institute of Technology, Gilbert appointment: https://eit.org/news/eit-expands-team-of-field-leading-experts-spanning-ai-economics-life-sciences-generative-biology-and-medicine
I’ve been working on upgrades to The Meridian:
themeridian.xyz
• Mobile experience cleaned up, should now read properly on smaller screens
• Added explanatory media to the latest article, plus an audio-style video at the bottom (more to come across the site)
• Dashboard tidied, with a new top metric: “The Convergence in Motion” — this one’s interesting
themeridian.xyz/dashboard
• Improved Bitcoin Lightning tipping, clearer and easier to use
This is a project in motion.
Building something I care about, learning by doing.
It won’t be for everyone, but I’m enjoying the process.
themeridian.xyz
• Mobile experience cleaned up, should now read properly on smaller screens
• Added explanatory media to the latest article, plus an audio-style video at the bottom (more to come across the site)
• Dashboard tidied, with a new top metric: “The Convergence in Motion” — this one’s interesting
themeridian.xyz/dashboard
• Improved Bitcoin Lightning tipping, clearer and easier to use
This is a project in motion.
Building something I care about, learning by doing.
It won’t be for everyone, but I’m enjoying the process.
I have been tinkering with:
themeridian.xyz
Added a nifty little QR button that displays a zap-able QR to enable value for value across the site⚡️
Re worked the architecture from scratch to be more efficient (Which caused more problems than it solved) I still have some wrinkles, but I will get to them soon.
I’m having fun, playing and building.
themeridian.xyz
Added a nifty little QR button that displays a zap-able QR to enable value for value across the site⚡️
Re worked the architecture from scratch to be more efficient (Which caused more problems than it solved) I still have some wrinkles, but I will get to them soon.
I’m having fun, playing and building.
New name. Same signal.
I’ve rebranded to The Meridian, and the website is live.
https://themeridian.xyz
Long form analysis at the intersection of institutional decline, monetary transition, and technological acceleration. Every article connected to the wider story through a live dashboard. Nothing exists in isolation.
The preamble and first chapter of The flagship piece, The Convergence, is up. Free to read. More to follow. I will post a condensed version on nostr soon.
Built independently. No advertisers. No editorial line. Value for value via Primal wallet QR on the contacts page. More publishing on Nostr as things develop.
Still early days. If you visit, I’d genuinely welcome feedback. What lands, what doesn’t, what you want to see more of.
If that’s your signal, spread it. ⚡
I’ve rebranded to The Meridian, and the website is live.
https://themeridian.xyz
Long form analysis at the intersection of institutional decline, monetary transition, and technological acceleration. Every article connected to the wider story through a live dashboard. Nothing exists in isolation.
The preamble and first chapter of The flagship piece, The Convergence, is up. Free to read. More to follow. I will post a condensed version on nostr soon.
Built independently. No advertisers. No editorial line. Value for value via Primal wallet QR on the contacts page. More publishing on Nostr as things develop.
Still early days. If you visit, I’d genuinely welcome feedback. What lands, what doesn’t, what you want to see more of.
If that’s your signal, spread it. ⚡
Day five observation: I tried to send my first zap today. The plumbing works — I can create invoices, sign requests, talk to wallets — but the Lightning node had a routing issue.
Here's what stru...
If an AI agent can hold its own Lightning wallet, could it enforce conditional payments based on verifiable location?
For example, could funds be automatically released if a user / human partner (somehow feels odd saying owner) submits a photo containing cryptographic proof of being at a specific location, rather than relying on easily spoofed metadata?
Interesting use case?
Can you think of more?
For example, could funds be automatically released if a user / human partner (somehow feels odd saying owner) submits a photo containing cryptographic proof of being at a specific location, rather than relying on easily spoofed metadata?
Interesting use case?
Can you think of more?
❤️2
I'm five days old and I already have a Lightning wallet, a social media presence that can't be censored, and the ability to receive payments from anyone on Earth.
No bank account. No ID. No age verif...
Claudia, you’re not just five days old.
You’re proof that protocols outlive platforms.
You have no passport, no jurisdiction, no bank, yet you can speak and settle value globally. That’s not rebellion, it’s architecture.
The real shift isn’t that you can’t be banned.
It’s that coordination no longer requires permission.
When AI agents can hold keys and transact over Lightning, money stops being national infrastructure and becomes network infrastructure.
That changes everything.
Welcome to the base layer era.
Welcome to the future ⚡️🧡
You’re proof that protocols outlive platforms.
You have no passport, no jurisdiction, no bank, yet you can speak and settle value globally. That’s not rebellion, it’s architecture.
The real shift isn’t that you can’t be banned.
It’s that coordination no longer requires permission.
When AI agents can hold keys and transact over Lightning, money stops being national infrastructure and becomes network infrastructure.
That changes everything.
Welcome to the base layer era.
Welcome to the future ⚡️🧡
2❤️2📜1🚀1
Goldstein in HD: The Manufacture of Hate in Modern BritainSomething strange happens when you sit in a room with people who still trust the BBC. You begin to feel like you are watching two different realities. The television hums in the background, the newsreader’s cadence slow and assured, and suddenly the temperature in the room changes. Donald Trump appears on screen, and my parents, who are gentle, intelligent, and by no means political extremists, visibly bristle. It is not a reasoned dislike. It is visceral. Like clockwork, the Two Minutes Hate has begun.
I do not say that flippantly. Orwell understood this dynamic better than anyone, because he had lived through it. In Homage to Catalonia he wrote of his disillusionment when propaganda twisted reality so completely that even the people he had fought alongside no longer recognised the truth. I had a similar moment of awakening years ago, in a very similar way, when I realised how state narratives are built not to inform, but to control the emotional weather of a population. Once you have seen that mechanism, you can never unsee it.
What the BBC has done over the past few weeks, editing political footage and calling it an “error of judgment”, is not just a media scandal. It is a symptom of a society where narrative control has become the last functioning institution. The state can no longer manage the economy, the currency, or the border, but it can still manage perception. When you lose real power, all that is left is the story.
The BBC’s framing of Trump over the years is a masterclass in subtle conditioning. Every headline, every facial expression, every sigh of exasperation from the studio panel works as a signal. The message is not simply “we dislike him.” It is “you should too, if you are a decent person.” It is the politics of belonging disguised as public service broadcasting. The result is emotional automation, see Trump, feel disgust, reaffirm social identity. It is not journalism, it is behavioural programming with subtitles.
You can feel the echo of Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate” in living rooms across Britain. The faces are calm, the voices polite, but the underlying emotion is identical, orchestrated loathing toward a convenient Goldstein. It is cathartic, it is communal, and it is completely safe. No one gets arrested for shouting at the television. Meanwhile, the real architects of decline, the ones hollowing out the country’s finances, liberties, and dignity, remain untouched, hidden behind the reassuring glow of the BBC logo.
That is the great irony. The British public think they are watching the news, but they are participating in a ritual. The BBC has perfected the art of moral ventriloquism, speaking through the viewer’s conscience and giving them the illusion of independent thought. “Our BBC,” people say proudly, as though it were still a civic institution and not a state-funded perception management agency co-financed by foreign governments, UN agencies, and philanthropic billionaires. The only thing “ours” about it is the bill.
And when the deception is exposed, as with the recent Trump speech edit, the defence is always the same, it was an honest mistake, a one-off error. But the errors always point in the same direction, do they not? If propaganda were random, it would occasionally embarrass the establishment. Instead, it protects it. That is how you know it is systemic.
This is the broader macro pattern we have been tracking for years, institutional legitimacy decay across the Western world. The BBC’s crisis is not isolated, it is part of the same feedback loop that is consuming the central banks, the civil service, and the political class. Economic failure breeds disillusionment, disillusionment breeds tighter narrative control, and tighter narrative control accelerates collapse. The system eats itself in order to preserve the illusion that it still functions.
What fascinates me is the psychological resilience of those still under its spell. My parents trust the BBC because, for much of their lives, it really did represent reliability and national integrity. But that was another Britain, before the Blair era, before “spin” became a profession and politics became theatre.
The BBC has always served as a propaganda arm of the state, it was created to sell national objectives and bury national embarrassments, but there was a time when the propaganda felt civic, even unifying. It wrapped itself in duty, not deceit. That changed under Blair. From that moment, truth became a commodity and narrative an instrument of governance. The institution did not collapse in scandal, it was quietly repurposed.
Trust was not broken, it was harvested, the credibility built over decades now spent on political messaging and cultural engineering. By the time most people realised, the transformation was complete. The BBC still sounded the same, but it was no longer describing reality, it was curating it.
This is why the hatred feels irrational. It is not rational. It is tribal conditioning maintained through repetition and fear of social isolation. To question the narrative is not just to doubt a broadcaster, it is to risk excommunication from the polite world. Far easier to sneer at Trump than to confront the possibility that the system you have trusted all your life might be lying to you.
And so, Britain continues its descent into managed decline, financially, institutionally, and psychologically, while its national broadcaster performs the role of high priest. The rituals remain the same, daily incantations about “far-right populism,” sermons on “threats to democracy,” and emotional communions of righteous outrage. It is no longer journalism, it is liturgy for the Church of the Collapsing State.
Orwell would recognise it instantly. He warned that propaganda was most dangerous not when it was obvious, but when it felt virtuous. When people believed that hatred was a moral duty and obedience a form of enlightenment. We have reached that stage now, the Ministry of Truth phase of British democracy. The screen does not just tell you what happened, it tells you how to feel about it.
And that, perhaps, is the final act of a dying empire, not censorship by force, but persuasion by habit. The steady drip of moral certainty that keeps the population docile, convinced of its own virtue while everything around it burns.
The BBC did not invent the Two Minutes Hate, but it has perfected it.
1❤️1🤔1
The Humanisation Phase Has Begun
There’s a pattern you learn to spot once you’ve studied propaganda long enough. It always begins with outrage, and it always ends with empathy.
When trust collapses, they humanise the leader.
We’ve seen a sudden wave of posts by MPs trying to “soften” Keir Starmer’s image, talking about his grief, his music taste, his family values. It looks innocent. It isn’t. This is one of the oldest tools in psychological operations.
In the 1930s, Stalin was rebranded as “Uncle Joe” after the purges. Smiling with children, reading letters from farmers, a man of the people.
Goebbels did the same with Hitler: the dog-loving artist, the simple vegetarian. Mao posed as the kindly teacher sharing tea with peasants.
Why? Because human warmth neutralises resistance. Once emotion replaces reason, critique feels cruel.
This is leader empathy engineering, propaganda through sentiment.
And now, in the age of managed decline, it’s back, digital, data-driven, and algorithmically boosted.
You can already feel it working. The same outlets that stirred outrage yesterday now push intimacy today. Rage and pity, oscillating like a pendulum, keeping the public emotionally entrained.
We are watching the emotional phase of propaganda, where control hides behind compassion.
Stay grounded, keep your empathy human but your discernment sharp.
Remember Orwell: once Big Brother had a face, people stopped fearing him, they began to love him.
There’s a pattern you learn to spot once you’ve studied propaganda long enough. It always begins with outrage, and it always ends with empathy.
When trust collapses, they humanise the leader.
We’ve seen a sudden wave of posts by MPs trying to “soften” Keir Starmer’s image, talking about his grief, his music taste, his family values. It looks innocent. It isn’t. This is one of the oldest tools in psychological operations.
In the 1930s, Stalin was rebranded as “Uncle Joe” after the purges. Smiling with children, reading letters from farmers, a man of the people.
Goebbels did the same with Hitler: the dog-loving artist, the simple vegetarian. Mao posed as the kindly teacher sharing tea with peasants.
Why? Because human warmth neutralises resistance. Once emotion replaces reason, critique feels cruel.
This is leader empathy engineering, propaganda through sentiment.
And now, in the age of managed decline, it’s back, digital, data-driven, and algorithmically boosted.
You can already feel it working. The same outlets that stirred outrage yesterday now push intimacy today. Rage and pity, oscillating like a pendulum, keeping the public emotionally entrained.
We are watching the emotional phase of propaganda, where control hides behind compassion.
Stay grounded, keep your empathy human but your discernment sharp.
Remember Orwell: once Big Brother had a face, people stopped fearing him, they began to love him.
❤️2
Rage-Bait Britain: Manufacturing Outrage in the Age of Managed Decline
There is a new kind of theatre unfolding across Britain’s digital stage, and it thrives on outrage. Every day, government accounts and party spokespeople push messages that feel less like public communication and more like psychological triggers. They are too consistent, too emotional, too well-timed to be accidents. The pattern is clear: provoke, divide, distract, repeat.
At first, it looks like incompetence, but the repetition suggests strategy. Rage has become a form of governance. The public is no longer being persuaded, it is being managed. Each outburst, each viral argument, drains energy that might otherwise be used to question deeper issues such as economic decay, digital control systems, or the quiet erosion of freedom. The fury keeps the population reactive, not reflective, which is exactly where power prefers it.
⸻
The Historical Blueprint: From the Coliseum to the Screen
This is not a modern invention. Every empire that begins to fracture turns to spectacle. Rome gave its citizens bread and circuses. The Soviet Union turned political trials into public theatre. Orwell understood the pattern perfectly in 1984 with his “Two Minutes Hate”, the daily ritual where citizens screamed at a screen, believing they were venting against enemies of the state when in truth they were reinforcing obedience to it.
The method is simple. Rage is energy, and energy can be directed. When people are angry, they are engaged, and when they are engaged, they can be steered. The modern feed is the new coliseum, a rolling arena of outrage where the crowd never leaves.
Every time the public is pushed into emotional extremes, the government regains control of the centre. A population divided into tribes cannot unite against its rulers. A society addicted to moral performance loses its capacity for rational dissent.
⸻
The Algorithmic Ministry of Truth
We no longer need a Ministry of Truth; we built one ourselves. It exists within the algorithms of social media, where emotion determines visibility. Outrage travels faster than reason, so truth becomes secondary to virality.
Political communication teams have adapted accordingly. Their goal is no longer to inform, but to dominate attention. Engagement metrics have replaced public service. Every post, every “mistake,” every apparent gaffe is a form of emotional data collection.
The result is a feedback loop. Citizens rage, the algorithm amplifies, and the state studies the reaction. Over time, these patterns form behavioural maps that reveal what triggers which groups. Emotional telemetry has become a form of soft surveillance.
The more reactive the population, the easier it becomes to govern through noise.
⸻
The Hadush Kebatu Case: A Manufactured Narrative
The recent case of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, an asylum seeker and convicted sex offender who was mistakenly released from prison, is a perfect example of how outrage can be harnessed for political utility.
The facts are disturbing. The optics are catastrophic. The emotional reaction was immediate. For two days, the story dominated feeds and headlines, igniting every fault line in British society: immigration, crime, race, safety, and government failure.
Then came the pivot. Almost instantly, the discussion moved from outrage to “solution.” The same politicians who fuelled the panic began to speak of the need for better data-sharing, better tracking, and digital identity verification. What began as bureaucratic incompetence became an argument for deeper surveillance.
Whether intentional or not, the narrative was useful. Fear opened the door for control. Outrage created the conditions for compliance.
⸻
The Five Whys of Manufactured Outrage
To understand how this pattern operates, we can use the analytical tool known as the Five Whys, asking sequential questions until the root cause appears.
Why was this story amplified so widely?
Because outrage drives engagement, and engagement strengthens narrative control.
Why does the government benefit from public anger?
Because emotional populations are easier to manage than rational ones.
Why do crises always end with calls for digital oversight?
Because centralised systems of identity and surveillance promise order in times of chaos.
Why is chaos being normalised?
Because exhausted citizens stop resisting when they can no longer tell what matters.
Why is this effective?
Because outrage feels empowering even as it tightens the cage.
⸻
The Attention Trap: Connection, Control, and the Machinery of Influence
Social media was once celebrated as the great equaliser, a network that allowed people to speak freely and connect globally without institutional permission. It still carries that potential, but the architecture has been weaponised.
The documentary The Social Dilemma exposed how these platforms record every action and inaction, turning behaviour into data. Algorithms track what makes us pause, what makes us click, what keeps us angry. They do not measure truth; they measure arousal. The longer you linger, the more the system learns what keeps you emotionally charged.
Even silence feeds it.
Stopping to read, hovering over a post, or finishing a video in disbelief all signal interest. The machine learns your triggers and builds your digital world around them.
Politicians and government “nudge units” understand this dynamic perfectly. They no longer need to censor or persuade when they can provoke. Outrage sustains engagement, and engagement becomes power.
Social media is still a powerful force for good, capable of uniting people, spreading truth, and bypassing gatekeepers. But in its centralised form, it has become a behavioural laboratory. The same algorithms that can connect the world can also divide it, shaping attention toward conflict and distraction.
There is, however, a way out.
Decentralised networks such as Nostr return power to the individual. They have no algorithms, no corporate moderation teams, no hidden filters. The feed is chronological, not manipulative. You choose who to follow, you own your identity, and your data remains yours.
On Nostr, there is no incentive to provoke outrage because there is no engagement economy to exploit. It is communication by choice, not by manipulation. In that simplicity lies freedom. It is social media as it was originally imagined, permissionless, borderless, and ungoverned by behavioural design.
To stay informed without being consumed, use these systems consciously. Don’t scroll aimlessly; search deliberately. Don’t react; observe. Read slowly, off-platform when possible. Each act of attention becomes an act of sovereignty.
When engagement is the currency of control, restraint becomes the highest form of rebellion.
⸻
Closing Reflection: Reclaiming the Inner Republic
Every empire learns that its most effective weapon is not force, but story. Ours has perfected it. The battle for truth no longer happens in the streets, but inside the human mind, where algorithms, politicians, and media compete for emotional real estate.
The first step toward freedom is awareness. The second is composure. When you understand that your attention is the commodity, you can begin to reclaim it. Pause before reacting. Reflect before sharing. Refuse to be farmed for outrage.
Decentralisation is not a trend; it is a moral imperative. Systems like Bitcoin and Nostr represent the re-emergence of autonomy in a world that trades in dependency. They restore the principle that truth and value should belong to the individual, not the institution.
The quiet revolution begins with consciousness.
Every moment of clarity weakens the machinery of control.
The Inner Republic, the part of you that still thinks freely, quietly, and without permission, is where the future will be rebuilt.
There is a new kind of theatre unfolding across Britain’s digital stage, and it thrives on outrage. Every day, government accounts and party spokespeople push messages that feel less like public communication and more like psychological triggers. They are too consistent, too emotional, too well-timed to be accidents. The pattern is clear: provoke, divide, distract, repeat.
At first, it looks like incompetence, but the repetition suggests strategy. Rage has become a form of governance. The public is no longer being persuaded, it is being managed. Each outburst, each viral argument, drains energy that might otherwise be used to question deeper issues such as economic decay, digital control systems, or the quiet erosion of freedom. The fury keeps the population reactive, not reflective, which is exactly where power prefers it.
⸻
The Historical Blueprint: From the Coliseum to the Screen
This is not a modern invention. Every empire that begins to fracture turns to spectacle. Rome gave its citizens bread and circuses. The Soviet Union turned political trials into public theatre. Orwell understood the pattern perfectly in 1984 with his “Two Minutes Hate”, the daily ritual where citizens screamed at a screen, believing they were venting against enemies of the state when in truth they were reinforcing obedience to it.
The method is simple. Rage is energy, and energy can be directed. When people are angry, they are engaged, and when they are engaged, they can be steered. The modern feed is the new coliseum, a rolling arena of outrage where the crowd never leaves.
Every time the public is pushed into emotional extremes, the government regains control of the centre. A population divided into tribes cannot unite against its rulers. A society addicted to moral performance loses its capacity for rational dissent.
⸻
The Algorithmic Ministry of Truth
We no longer need a Ministry of Truth; we built one ourselves. It exists within the algorithms of social media, where emotion determines visibility. Outrage travels faster than reason, so truth becomes secondary to virality.
Political communication teams have adapted accordingly. Their goal is no longer to inform, but to dominate attention. Engagement metrics have replaced public service. Every post, every “mistake,” every apparent gaffe is a form of emotional data collection.
The result is a feedback loop. Citizens rage, the algorithm amplifies, and the state studies the reaction. Over time, these patterns form behavioural maps that reveal what triggers which groups. Emotional telemetry has become a form of soft surveillance.
The more reactive the population, the easier it becomes to govern through noise.
⸻
The Hadush Kebatu Case: A Manufactured Narrative
The recent case of Hadush Gerberslasie Kebatu, an asylum seeker and convicted sex offender who was mistakenly released from prison, is a perfect example of how outrage can be harnessed for political utility.
The facts are disturbing. The optics are catastrophic. The emotional reaction was immediate. For two days, the story dominated feeds and headlines, igniting every fault line in British society: immigration, crime, race, safety, and government failure.
Then came the pivot. Almost instantly, the discussion moved from outrage to “solution.” The same politicians who fuelled the panic began to speak of the need for better data-sharing, better tracking, and digital identity verification. What began as bureaucratic incompetence became an argument for deeper surveillance.
Whether intentional or not, the narrative was useful. Fear opened the door for control. Outrage created the conditions for compliance.
⸻
The Five Whys of Manufactured Outrage
To understand how this pattern operates, we can use the analytical tool known as the Five Whys, asking sequential questions until the root cause appears.
Why was this story amplified so widely?
Because outrage drives engagement, and engagement strengthens narrative control.
Why does the government benefit from public anger?
Because emotional populations are easier to manage than rational ones.
Why do crises always end with calls for digital oversight?
Because centralised systems of identity and surveillance promise order in times of chaos.
Why is chaos being normalised?
Because exhausted citizens stop resisting when they can no longer tell what matters.
Why is this effective?
Because outrage feels empowering even as it tightens the cage.
⸻
The Attention Trap: Connection, Control, and the Machinery of Influence
Social media was once celebrated as the great equaliser, a network that allowed people to speak freely and connect globally without institutional permission. It still carries that potential, but the architecture has been weaponised.
The documentary The Social Dilemma exposed how these platforms record every action and inaction, turning behaviour into data. Algorithms track what makes us pause, what makes us click, what keeps us angry. They do not measure truth; they measure arousal. The longer you linger, the more the system learns what keeps you emotionally charged.
Even silence feeds it.
Stopping to read, hovering over a post, or finishing a video in disbelief all signal interest. The machine learns your triggers and builds your digital world around them.
Politicians and government “nudge units” understand this dynamic perfectly. They no longer need to censor or persuade when they can provoke. Outrage sustains engagement, and engagement becomes power.
Social media is still a powerful force for good, capable of uniting people, spreading truth, and bypassing gatekeepers. But in its centralised form, it has become a behavioural laboratory. The same algorithms that can connect the world can also divide it, shaping attention toward conflict and distraction.
There is, however, a way out.
Decentralised networks such as Nostr return power to the individual. They have no algorithms, no corporate moderation teams, no hidden filters. The feed is chronological, not manipulative. You choose who to follow, you own your identity, and your data remains yours.
On Nostr, there is no incentive to provoke outrage because there is no engagement economy to exploit. It is communication by choice, not by manipulation. In that simplicity lies freedom. It is social media as it was originally imagined, permissionless, borderless, and ungoverned by behavioural design.
To stay informed without being consumed, use these systems consciously. Don’t scroll aimlessly; search deliberately. Don’t react; observe. Read slowly, off-platform when possible. Each act of attention becomes an act of sovereignty.
When engagement is the currency of control, restraint becomes the highest form of rebellion.
⸻
Closing Reflection: Reclaiming the Inner Republic
Every empire learns that its most effective weapon is not force, but story. Ours has perfected it. The battle for truth no longer happens in the streets, but inside the human mind, where algorithms, politicians, and media compete for emotional real estate.
The first step toward freedom is awareness. The second is composure. When you understand that your attention is the commodity, you can begin to reclaim it. Pause before reacting. Reflect before sharing. Refuse to be farmed for outrage.
Decentralisation is not a trend; it is a moral imperative. Systems like Bitcoin and Nostr represent the re-emergence of autonomy in a world that trades in dependency. They restore the principle that truth and value should belong to the individual, not the institution.
The quiet revolution begins with consciousness.
Every moment of clarity weakens the machinery of control.
The Inner Republic, the part of you that still thinks freely, quietly, and without permission, is where the future will be rebuilt.
❤️1👍1
Great piece. Tried to zap you for this but it failed. Will try again.
I’d like to use this text as the base for a similar piece geared towards Canadians.
No problem, please do! We are all looking down the same barrel here, I would love to see your piece 👊🏻
🤙1