Professional juggler, alias international development consultant and mother of two young 'chimps'. Seeking just, sustainable solutions. All views are my own
"use ai or you'll get left behind" oh no that's okay you guys go on ahead i'll be back here with my reading comprehension & critical thinking skills
My latest Substack article examines the latest shocking developments in Labour's nationwide rollout of Data centres.
Across Wales, Scotland, and England, the largest peacetime infrastructure seizure of community land and energy in modern British history is accelerating.
It did not begin with Keir Starmer’s January 2025 announcement that Britain would become an “AI superpower.”
It began with Brexit, and a deliberate choice by the Conservative government to exploit the removal of EU state aid rules, rules that previously prevented governments from funnelling public money into private corporate pockets inside deregulated zones, to create what this writer has been documenting for nearly a decade: a network of Special Economic Zones, Freeports, and now AI Growth Zones, functioning as sovereignty-lite enclaves where normal planning rules, environmental standards, and democratic accountability are stripped back.
Please subscribe to my Substack, I'm a volunteer who has uncovered the biggest corporate political heist of the commons in UK history. I call it Zone Fever.
https://t.co/HgefpLqKfu
This line 😭— “For an algorithm, an error is a flaw to be corrected; for a person, however, an error can be a catalyst for profound change.” — Pope Leo, #Magnificahumanitas
Bloke is literally describing an employment model for educated & skilled talent. We’re being asked to pay a machine to do a job a human could & should do. F*** OFF!!!! 😡
First, the outbreak is spreading faster than the response.
Second, conflict and displacement are accelerating the risk of regional spread.
And third, severe global aid cuts have weakened frontline health systems and outbreak preparedness across eastern DRC.
A message to all retired people
It’s late afternoon on a sunny bank holiday
Put your fucking hedge trimmers, lawnmowers & any other fucking noisy engine, electric machines back in the shed until tomorrow 😡
And stay out the Post Office on Saturdays 🫤
“In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise it, finance it, regulate it and use it.”
THANK YOU POPE LEO FOR SAYING THIS.
Time for the “technology is a tool with no inherent moral position” idea to die!
Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5,000 years.
Funny. I thought it was morally wrong for Elon Musk, the wealthiest man alive worth more than $800 billion, to eliminate humanitarian aid that will cause 4.5 million of the poorest kids on the planet to die in the next 4 years.
The most dystopian part of AI isn’t the technology itself.
It’s the sheer amount of electricity and water being burned so corporations can automate things nobody asked to automate.
Entire rivers diverted so an app can generate “funny medieval Breaking Bad images.”
So LinkedIn users can produce motivational posts written in the tone of a traumatized flight attendant.
We are constructing cathedrals of computation to eliminate the burden of having an original thought.
And they keep selling this as progress.
Meanwhile the actual physical world decays.
Bridges collapse.
Cities rot.
Public transit looks post-apocalyptic.
Young people can’t afford houses.
But thank God the machine can generate 9,000 fake podcast clips per second.
Civilizations used to build aqueducts and railways.
Now we build data centers.
If the subject of the £5m donation scandal was a member of the Cabinet, a senior SNP, Plaid or Green politician, he or she would be getting doorstepped an monstered everywhere they went. The double standards are sickening
The new Reform Administration in St Helens just admitted they were too politically inexperienced to run the council and have created a post, paid for by the council, to help them.
At a cost of 200k over 4 years.
You actually cant make this up!
@OrevaZSN It also exposes a bigger question we haven’t properly answered yet: should technological efficiency always outrun environmental cost just because we can’t feel the impact directly in our daily lives?
We're in a weird era where a guy gets publicly shamed for running his sprinklers on a Tuesday, while a data center the size of a Costco quietly drains a reservoir so AI can generate a picture of your cat as a medieval knight. And the data center gets a tax incentive for it.
2017: Nigel Farage in the European Parliament complaining about perceived foreign interference in Brexit
2026: Nigel Farage saying that foreign based crypto billionaire gave him £5,000,000 as a reward for campaigning for Brexit