Letters to My Manager

What Free Market?

Hi Adam,
I went into my local store yesterday to get a drink. I wanted something natural. I don’t want to put artificial chemicals into my body. Some of my friends don’t read the labels on the food and drinks they buy, and they mock me for doing it, but I don’t think it’s a laughing matter. Cancer, diabetes, obesity … where do people think this is all coming from? Food has to be a part of it right? I even read some professor the other day writing that eating the wrong kind of food can cause depression. Basically, your gut health is linked to your mental health. Anyway, back to the store. There was a large fridge with about thirty products in it. I couldn’t find what I wanted. The labels you see, they were all saying the same thing … preservatives, synthetic flavours, artificial sweeteners, artificial colours, some or all of. Then I realised something. All those drinks were from the same manufacturer. One single company. I looked at the chocolate section. Almost the same again. At a rough guess, 80% of the shelf stock was from one company. We don’t live in a free market Adam. We are sheep being farmed by massive monopolies who stuff our food full of the cheapest shit so they can make the biggest possible profit. And then we get ill. And then another massive monopoly comes and sells us the medicine to make us better. Except that the medicine isn’t so good for us either. Oh boy. Can’t name names of course … I’d get trolled to death.
Regards, Debuchelon
12 March 2024

Where to Begin?

Hey Adam,
I was on the train home last night when some girls sat down on the seats opposite. They’d just been to a concert and boy didn’t they want everyone to know it. This particular singer talks a lot but doesn’t have much to say. Terrible clichés that would make most people over the age of thirty groan, but for these girls they’re the words of a sage. How is it that some airhead who knows relatively little about the world and its workings can be so influential, while knowledgeable people with a lifetime of study and experience are ignored? I was faced with a choice of moving seat and looking rude, staying put and suffering a silent meltdown, or saying something. And this is my question. Where do you begin with people like this? If you give the slightest hint that you’re not as addicted to their goddess as they are, they’ll diss you. In the end I decided to stay quiet. My thinking is that in order to influence people, you first have to win their trust, which can take years, and these girls had never met me before. It’s only when someone trusts you, when they have a conviction that you’re a sincere person without an agenda, that they’ll begin to listen to you. But of course to some extent I do have an agenda. I want to limit the damage being done by the airhead. I suppose I’ll just have to hope they grow out of it. Can’t name names of course … I’d get trolled to death.
Best, Debuchelon
21 April 2024

Crapitalism

Dear Adam,
Have you noticed how ugly England is becoming? I was on the road up north last week and two things stood out. One is the decay. Potholes, houses with the windows rotting or the roof slates falling off, open spaces overgrown with weeds, that kind of thing. And then there’s the newly built stuff. It’s so characterless. The same concrete, the same plastic facades, the same cheap look and feel, cloned in every town. This new stuff pays no homage whatsoever to the English architectural tradition … it says “Birmingham” about as much as it says “Bangkok”.
I reckon the peak of English civilisation (in economic not technical terms) was about 100 years ago. The properties that were built then used higher quality materials, bricks instead of wood for example, they had larger rooms, higher ceilings. Even the factories that were built were beautiful, so much so that these days developers convert them into expensive loft apartments. Look at the windowless grey sheds we build these days for the likes of Amazon. No one in their right mind would convert one of those into loft apartments. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?
Here’s another way of looking at things … who wants to go to a modern town centre when they’re on holiday? It’s the historic towns that everyone wants to go and see, right? And why? Because that’s where the beauty is, where the humanity is. Leon Krier, the architect, makes a point in his book “Choice or Fate”. He says that the amount of built space produced by humanity from the beginning of time until the Second World War, very roughly, is about the same as what has been built since then. He supposes that, if we demolished everything that has been built since 1945, most people wouldn’t be that bothered from an architectural point of view. But if we demolished everything that was built before 1945 there would be a complete outcry. Why? He’s making the same point that I am. Our modern economic system produces crap and we just can’t stop doing it.
How do we explain all this? I think part of the answer is that when one has an empire, resources flow into the economy, and the results show. When the empire declines, the results also show. Look at the buildings of imperial Rome, of Athens … beautiful once, nowadays crumbling. A second theme is that because the purpose of modern capitalism is to make profit, there’s an insatiable drive to reduce costs and therefore, in many cases, product quality. I’ve bought six kettles in the last ten years, all broken one after the other. My mum and dad’s kettle lasted fifty years. Once upon a time, the object of business was not just to make a profit but also to create something of lasting value for the community. In the nineteenth century, the Quaker businessmen in England built whole towns of superb accommodation for their workers which today are among the most desirable areas in the country. They wanted to put wealth in, not suck it out.
But there’s a third point I’d like to make, which Krier doesn’t. A lot of the blame for this descent into Crapitalism rests with our financial system. I sung about it in the Oh Money song. The bit about “money growing on trees, if you have the keys”. Like the Austrian economists once said, if you debase the money system, you debase the whole society. Stay tuned for more.
Regards, Debuchelon
20 May 2024

What Democracy?

Hello Adam,
Have you woken up yet? I know it’s only 8am but I just found out something very important. We don’t live in a democracy. Shocking huh? All that preaching from our politicians telling us that “we” decide who rules over us, and that we live in a “free” country. Well consider this. Whoever we elect as our leader, the same unelected central bankers decide what the interest rate is, and the same media moguls control what news we see. The same corporate bosses decide which rivers to pollute and the same lobbyists use their muscle to sway our elected representatives. Did you know, for example, that the pharmaceutical lobby spent almost $700 million lobbying against Obama’s healthcare reform? Where’s the democracy there? Many people voted for Obama precisely to get healthcare reform. Second, whether a politician is from the right or the left, they all support a system which keeps 1% of people owning more than 50% of the wealth. How can it be right that millions go without proper food or accommodation while tax cuts are handed out to people who are multi-millionaires? If no politician offers an alternative vision on basic issues like these, there really isn’t much of a choice is there? And if there isn’t a choice, there can’t be a democracy right? In some countries there’s only one leader on the ballot paper. In ours, there’s only one system. You can go back to sleep now.
Best, Debuchelon

19 June 2024

The National Health Service Black Hole

Dear Adam,
The UK’s National Health Service is in the news today. The Prime Minister is making a speech about the crisis in the service as portrayed by the government’s own appointed inspector Lord Darzi. None of Darzi’s seven recommended “themes” for “how to repair” the NHS mention the most important part of the explanation as to how things got this bad in the first place.
A surgeon friend of mine working in London told me a while back that a small office room in his hospital was badly in need of a repaint. He volunteered to come in one weekend to do it himself with a colleague but the office manager said no. It would have been a breach of contract with the hospital’s maintenance provider which had secured the right to bid on all hospital maintenance work for a period of twenty years. The maintenance company duly sent a man for half an hour to look at the room and decide how much it would cost to paint. A few days later the quote came back along with the bill of £5,000 (for the cost of quoting, not for the cost of actually doing the work).
This is only a small example of the kind of legalised extortion in which the UK’s health service is entrapped. In November 2010 the columnist George Monbiot wrote in the Guardian newspaper about the redevelopment of two hospital buildings in Coventry. A plan for the refurbishment of this old hospital complex was costed by a group of health service managers and contractors at £30 million. Then the usual corporate interests got wind of things and used government regulations under the so-called Private Finance Initiative (“PFI”) to force a halt to proceedings so that they could bid for the project. The PFI rules were so skewed in favour of these big contractors and their bankers that they eventually won the contract. Total cost including interest? £410 million. And all this for a hospital with fewer beds than the first group would have provided at less than one tenth of the price. Incredibly, rules implemented by the then Labour government made most of these PFI contracts confidential so that no outside party could read them. No wonder. When some contract details were eventually leaked, it turned out that payments to the corporations involved were typically guaranteed for the life of the contract so that, even if their services were no longer needed, they still had to be paid for them.
You might think that this money wasting extravaganza couldn’t reach beyond the hundreds of millions in any single episode, but you’d be wrong. Transparency International says that during COVID, over £4 billion of public money was handed out to companies which were politically connected with the government. 51 contracts were awarded to companies recommended by sitting politicians, many of which had no trading history or experience in the health sector. Of the £48 billion of public money spent on private contracts during COVID, £15 billion was written off by the government.
It is a hobby in the UK to say that the National Health Service needs more government funding but the truth, probably, is that it needs less. What we really need to do is 1) stop throwing money into the black hole of corporate corruption, and 2) abolish the collective of politicians, contractors, bankers and managers that has shown itself so incapable of delivering healthcare in the public interest. Maybe the best way of doing this is to relieve hospital managers of the spiders’ web of rules that presently tie them to their corporate and political overmasters. Why not let doctors run their own hospitals? Construction contracts, service delivery, budgets, hiring, the lot basically? Doctors are good people (usually). They give their lives to help others. Corporations and banks don’t have souls, they don’t lose sleep at night, they just want the money. Can’t name names of course, I’d get trolled to death.
12 September 2024

Religious or Not?

Hi Adam,
I walked past a preacher near Oxford Circus the other day. She had a mike, a big speaker and she was certain of what she was saying. If you don’t believe that Jesus died for your sins, then you’re going to hellfire for ever. Someone stopped to argue with her. Big risk in my view. She’s got the mike! This is how it went (roughly, I wasn’t taking notes).
Passer-by: Jesus died for my sins?
Preacher: Yes he did
Passer-by: And if I don’t believe in Jesus, I go to hell?
Preacher: Yes
Passer-by: So what happens to the people who died before Jesus was born?
Preacher: What do you mean?
Passer-by: Well, if I died before Jesus was born, then I would never have had the chance to believe in him
Preacher: And so?
Passer-by: And so would I go to hellfire?
Preacher: (short pause) Yes
Passer-by: So everyone who died before Jesus was born goes to hell?
Preacher: Yes
Passer-by: Including Prophets Like Moses?
Preacher: (longer pause) No
Passer-by: Why do the Prophets not also go to hell?
Preacher: You have to believe in Jesus in order to be saved
Passer-by: That’s not an answer to the question I asked
Preacher: What question did you ask?
Passer-by: You have a very short memory
Preacher: I won’t talk with you if you’re just going to insult me
Passer-by: The followers of the Prophet Moses go to hellfire for not believing in someone who hasn’t yet been born, but Moses himself doesn’t. Why?
Preacher: Moses believed in Jesus
Passer-by: But Jesus wasn’t born until after Moses died
Preacher: Moses knew the future, he was a Prophet, so he knew of Jesus
Passer-by: And that’s what saves him from hellfire?
Preacher: Yes
Passer-by: So why didn’t he tell his followers about Jesus? If he truly cared about his followers, he would have told them the one thing that could have saved them surely?
Preacher: (no answer)
Passer-by: What message did Moses give to his followers?
Preacher: What do you mean “message”?
Passer-by: Well, for example, did he say to them, “Follow me, put up with all that hardship from Pharaoh, cross the Red Sea, wander in the wilderness for forty years, be patient, and then go to hellfire”. Was that his message?
Preacher: (no answer)
Passer-by: Why did God wait thousands of years to tell humanity that he has a son and that if they don’t believe in him then they go to hellfire?
By this stage it was five-nil to the passer-by and I was actually feeling sorry for the preacher. All she could do by way of response was to offer debating tactics (pretend not to understand the question, accuse the other person of being insulting, everything except answer the question). Eventually she explained that Jesus would go down into hellfire, preach to its inhabitants, and those who accepted his message would be taken out of hellfire and put in paradise. I thought to myself, “who wouldn’t accept Jesus under those circumstances?”. And anyway, under what fair logic should these people have gone to hell in the first place?
In a way I admired the preacher for being certain about her religion, but she either doesn’t know her stuff, or if she does, then the stuff itself isn’t quite right. But in this case the certainty was also her undoing, because when someone knowledgeable came along, she froze. Suddenly her pre-prepared arguments were no longer up to the job. Now, I grant you, this was a particularly bad case. A seasoned preacher will freeze only momentarily, because part of their art is to look like they’re in control, like they haven’t been surprised by the other person’s ideas.
There are of course people out there who despise all religions and those who promote them, and yet, if one sees religion as a set of values and beliefs by which a person lives, then all of us have a religion. One could for example say that communism and atheism are religions just as much as Christianity is. Communism regards private ownership as a bad thing (this is a value) and many communists argue that by the application of their values society will eventually enter a condition of utopia (this is a belief). Atheists believe that God does not exist and, for them, this is such a central idea that it is little different to a religious pillar. In short, one can be as religious about “God existing” as one can be about “God not existing”.
The question today isn’t whether to be religious or not, because whichever way of life you decide to follow, THAT is your religion. And if “not being religious” isn’t an option, then the only remaining issue is which religion to choose. Christianity? Communism? Capitalism? Jedi? There’s a sea of choices out there, so maybe the following navigation aid will come in useful. You can weed out the false religions from the true ones by looking at the answers they give to the most important questions in life. There are only three of these. Where did I come from? Why am I here? And where am I going?
27 September 2024

Education or Brainwashing?

Dear Adam,
This is my first letter to you in over a year. The reason for my lack of productivity is that I’ve been watching what’s going on in the world and thinking to myself what good is writing anything? Bombs and money talk, words don’t anymore, it seems. I’m hoping this is only a temporary phenomenon and that eventually “the truth will out” as they say. But then if we don’t use words, how will the truth out? And so here I am writing to you again.
You probably know that I was educated in an entirely white English middle-class environment. I was taught that what counted most in life was to be truthful, virtuous and well-mannered. And the boys I grew up with (there were very few girls at my school) were largely that. Amongst one another at least. It wasn’t until much later that I began to realise that the education I received at the hands of my teachers was a highly selective one. It wasn’t untrue, for sure, but it missed out on so many important facts of history that it couldn’t possibly impart to us schoolboys an objective understanding of why the world is the way it is today. And in that sense it was an enormously misleading education.
We were not taught, for example, that between the fall of Rome and the arrival of Columbus in America, an entire civilisation blossomed in Arabia, one that practically dominated the world from Spain to China for seven centuries. There was just this thing called the “Dark Ages” when nothing much happened in the world. Neither were we told that the most complete genocide of an indigenous people in recorded history was carried out by the British (in Tasmania, in the early 19th century) or that Churchill and his cabinet caused the deaths of up to 3 million Bengalis (by carting off their harvest to feed British troops in 1943). When episodes of awfulness were at a level that could not be ignored (the slave trade for example) these were of course taught in our history lessons, but never in a way that caused us to question the supremacy of white European culture over other “barbaric” ways of life. Brown and black people needed civilising, and without us white folks they would still be living in mud huts. That was the general idea.
I realise today of course that, without us white folks, perhaps 100 million or so young African black men would have lived to contribute to the development of their continent, and that as a result much of Africa wouldn’t be in the hopeless position it is now. I also came to understand just how hypocritical we in the West were being when we applauded our own humanity and denigrated the lack of it in others. When the Taliban fired their artillery at the huge Bamyan statues in the mountains of Afghanistan, the British tabloid press was outraged at their fanaticism. These people were obsessed by hatred of the West, they were cultural vandals. No one chose to remind us of the countless acts of vandalism carried out by Westerners over the centuries, the burning down of the Peking Summer Palace (courtesy of Lord Elgin), the nuking of Hiroshima, the napalming of Vietnam, the dozens of coups against democratically elected governments financed by us freedom-loving Westerners (Chile, Iran, Guatemala, etc.), the fascists and puppets that were installed in their places (Pinochet, the Shah, Colonel Armas). Where would one stop?
As the years passed, world events conspired to keep Samuel Huntingdon’s “Clash of Civilisations” at the top of the agenda and I widened my search through the archives of colonialism. I began to despise what the political classes in some countries had done (and then hidden) from their own people. Imagine for example that the Algerians had invaded France, forced its people to learn Arabic, took the best resources of the French for themselves (wine probably), and then let off nuclear bombs in the middle of the country. Absolutely barbaric right? Yet this is exactly what the French did in Algeria. You wouldn’t guess it from a reading of the French press though, because they, still, seventy years later, continue to deploy racist language against French residents of north African descent as if French colonialism never happened. Want all those brown people to go back to Algeria? Don’t eff up their country then! The point is summarised very well by Huntingdon himself. He writes, “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion … but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do”.
And to bring things right up to date, here’s another example to think about. Imagine that Russia was to send missiles to northern Mexico and have them positioned near America’s border. Imagine at the same time that they enticed as many south American nations as possible to enter into trade and military cooperation agreements. Would the Americans tolerate any of this in their “back yard”? Well they didn’t in the Cuban missile crisis of course, and on that occasion the Russians didn’t even manage to get their missiles into position. But lo and behold, when American missiles are stationed next door to Russia (in Turkey), when NATO signs partnership agreements with Russia’s neighbours (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan), and when the European Union does likewise (Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia), the Russians are just meant to put up with it. Not that I’m a fan of the Russian (or Chinese) way of doing things, it’s just the double standards in the Western narrative that I don’t like. So maybe Trump is right to concede a little bit to Putin. Trump knows full well that if he was Putin, he wouldn’t put up with the encroachment either.
I am guessing that many of the boys from my school, now fully grown up, have not come to the same realisations as me. They have carried the glossed over half-truths of their early educations into the world of bombs and money which cares very little for truth. To them I say, wake up. Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution. Look upon yourselves as members of the human race, not as members of some nation, or some corporation, or some tribe. Humanity is in this together, and the problems that are heading our way need solving together. Spread the word Adam, it’s one of the few things we can still do.
17 December 2025

Addicted to Hype

Dear Adam,
Are you fed up of hype? I am. Wherever I go, at work or play, virtual world or physical world, there’s no end to it. Everyone has got something “ground-breaking” to sell you, something “amazing” or “best-in-class” to tell you about. And most of the time, when I get to see or use whatever thing it is that I’m being offered, it falls short in some way. But people just can’t stop hyping themselves and their creations. It’s as if making extravagant claims has become an accepted part of our culture. So I’m going the other way. From now on, I’m claiming less for myself than I think I am, not more. Then, if people like what I do, they’ll be pleasantly surprised. And if they don’t, well I never claimed much in the first place did I?
Most of us learn quite early in life that there is often a difference between what people are and what they appear to be. And they also learn that what really counts in life is the reality of things, not their appearance. For example, if something appears to be a bread roll but is actually a plastic imitation, then you really do care about the difference between appearance and reality because you can’t eat plastic. In relationships, it’s critical to be aware of this fact. Many people enter into a relationship on the basis of what the other person appears to be and it’s only when they start living together that they find out what they’ve actually entered into. To some extent, especially if you’re experienced in the game of life, you can read another person’s face and maybe save yourself from this kind of disaster. The way a person lives life tends to show on the face, eventually, but you have to know what you’re looking for of course.
Alas, in this modern world, the age-old practice of distinguishing between appearance and reality seems to be on the decline. It’s no longer what’s inside that counts, it’s what’s outside. Your clothes, your make-up, your looks, the car you drive, the number of followers you have on YouTube. Honesty, kindness, commitment, that kind of thing just doesn’t get you noticed any more. Our society has fallen into a malaise of materialism and we’re all suffering because of it. People are going to extraordinary lengths, and much expense, in order to increase their subscriber count, in order to look like they are more popular, more successful, and more talented than they actually are. If you’re sick of wading through fake reviews when looking for a good electrician, or of falling for clickbait and endless celebrity newsflashes, then you too are suffering from this massive win for appearance over reality.
It would be nice if one could wave a magic wand and restore reality to its rightful place at the heart of our society, but things have gone so far that we can barely define what reality is anymore. Part of the reason for this is that personal opinion has been elevated above informed opinion in so many areas of life. It has become almost routine for populist politicians to make claims that contradict the experts on matters from medicine to climate change. In the world of art the problem is even more complex because the worth of a book, a play, or a piece of music is arguably to be judged by those who encounter it, not by “experts”. If a painting appears to you to be good, but an art expert tells you that it’s actually quite bad, why should you care? As far as you are concerned, in this particular case, the appearance is the reality. If you think the appearance is good, then it is, for you at least. And in matters of personal taste, is the difference between appearance and reality actually very critical anyway? It’s not as if we’re dealing with a serial conman who passes himself off as being honest, or a school drop-out who passes herself off as a qualified doctor. In those cases the damage that can be done is clearly immense, but in the world of art?
However, in general, it really does matter what the reality of a thing is, because it’s the reality of a thing that defines it. If you are a “boy” and you call yourself a “girl” on social media, then someone else who is looking to have a relationship with a girl might make a seriously wrong decision based on your mislabelling of yourself. And in a different sense, if you unkowingly buy unhealthy food, then knowing the reality of things will be of immense benefit to you. Our most important decisions should be based on reality, not on appearance. That way, the world gets by, kind of.
So consider this. If I’m an expert in matters of nutrition, isn’t it my duty to tell you that the food you’re eating is bad for you, even though you like it? Or if the music you’re listening to is bad for you, if it causes stress, or incites you to violence or some other negative lifestyle, shouldn’t the expert psychologist warn you of that? Doesn’t society appoint experts precisely in order to safeguard itself from such derailments?
The problem here, as you probably know, is that people generally don’t want to be told that the food they eat is unhealthy (“I like those burgers, they’re tasty”), or that the politician they admire is actually quite ignorant (“he can’t be, he says all things which I believe in”), or that the music they love is actually a hoax from a very cynical industry. I once heard a well known record producer explaining that he was “taking the piss” by seeing just how talentless an artist could be and still get the British public to buy it. But try telling that to a Sex Pistols fan. The one who’s been taken in is usually in no position to accept advice to the contrary, as many parents and teachers know.
But while parents and teachers shy away from telling harsh truths to their kids or students, sometimes for good reason, society as a whole cannot afford to. Being afraid to confront others with clear points of principle has led to a world in which a few plastic bags glued together on a pedestal can constitute a “work of art” (go to the Tate Modern gallery in London) and where the grunts of two talentless cnuts can be lauded alongside Beethoven and The Beatles.
I worry that once the dumbing-down is complete, there won’t be enough knowledgeable people left to rescue society from its ignorance. We may already have reached that stage. Billions of people spend their spare time swiping through TikTok and Instagram, seeking guidance from those who are themselves not guided. Neo-colonial wars and grand schemes of corporate theft run rampant while the people titillate themselves with lipstick tutorials and cat videos. And at the top of this pyramid sits a relatively small number of people who sift through our data, knowing everything about us, while we know next to nothing about them.
God help us.
1 January 2026

Information Inequality

Dear Adam,
In England, during late 2025, Lloyds Bank was in negotiations with union representatives over the amount it pays to its staff. It emerges that in an effort to support its case for a lower pay rise than the unions were asking for, Lloyds accessed the bank account data of some 30,000 of its staff to find out how much they spend every month on bills, and therefore how much pay they actually needed. Lloyds has since issued a half-apology for this enormous intrusion on the privacy of its employees. The lesson to be learnt from this is that when someone else has your data in their hands, it’s at risk of being exploited for purposes that are not in your interest.
In the world of investment, people have known for a long time that when someone else holds your money it is similarly at risk of being exploited in ways that can harm you. From the savings of British pensioners stolen by Robert Maxwell (total theft in excess of £400 million) to the Ponzi scheme that Bernie Madoff ran (total fraud exceeding US$60 billion) to the gigantic lending binges that funded the sub-prime boom (cost to the US taxpayer upwards of USD$3 trillion), other peoples’ money is much easier to abuse than your own.
The difference between the mismanagement of money and the mismanagement of data, however, is that the latter is more difficult to pinpoint. With money, if your investment account or pension statement suddenly drops to zero, or if your bank can’t repay your deposit, then you know for sure that your money has been abused. Or stolen maybe. But with data, there is no immediately obvious sign. Your private information is on databases which you didn’t even realise existed, location unknown, and run by people you don’t know. What these peoples’ intentions are is anyone’s guess and, when they abuse you, no statement comes through the post alerting you to the fact.
Today, the abuse of data by governments and big tech giants is one of the greatest dangers facing humanity. Here’s why.
The importance of good information received early has been clear since ancient times. Knowledge of where your enemy’s army is, or what profits a company is about to reveal to the stock market, is an immensely valuable asset. Hence, people, corporations and governments have invested heavily into the machinery of gaining knowledge early, both by fair means and foul. And even if one thinks it is wrong to spy on others, the strategic disadvantages of not doing so are often irresistible. What government would unilaterally stop spying on its own people if others didn’t? None, I think. It is far too great a security risk to allow the government of another country to know more about the activities of your own citizens than you do.
So it seems that governments must spy. What is not widely known is the extent to which they are doing it and how. There is a famous story that the British security services didn’t tell any outsiders that they had succeeded in decoding the German Enigma machine during World War 2, for the simple reason that many less advanced nations continued to use it for their sensitive communications well into the 1960s. A key element here is of course that the target of spying must not realise that his communications are being intercepted. In some places, the efforts to hide the spying apparatus became a virtual art form. The East German Stasi had at their disposal the talents of specialist craftsmen who could remove the wallpaper and flooring of a residential apartment, lay spying cables and microphones, and put everything back exactly as it was.
But then came the internet and mobile technology. Suddenly, it was no longer necessary for the craftsmen to surreptitiously enter the target’s apartment while he was out at work. Now, all one needed to do was intercept his emails or listen in on his phone conversations. No one needed to know of the devices that were tapping satellite and internet data, or of the government sanctioned malware that had turned every mobile phone into a personalised bugging device. Fortunately, not everyone on the inside was able to live with themselves, knowing what was going on. In 1999, Martin Brady, director of Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate, confirmed the existence of Echelon, the programme that managed all that juicy intel. Then in 2013, NSA employee Edward Snowden leaked the fact that even when your mobile phone appeared to be turned off, it was actually on, and listening to your conversations.
If the spying activities of our freedom-and-democracy-loving governments can somehow be justified on the basis of protecting national security, what excuse might exist for the spying activities of the private sector? Because it is entirely possible that the likes of Meta, Google, Oracle and Microsoft are harvesting, storing and analysing our communications in ways that have nothing to do with national security and much to do with enhancing their own wealth and power. The fact that many governments are now devolving their own information gathering and processing activities to the likes of Palantir (UK healthcare data) and Amazon (US federal government data) may be a national security risk in itself. For example, what if a company which processes data in the United States is run by people who have a secret allegiance to, say, Russia or China? Is this not exactly why the sale of Huawei’s products was restricted in the USA and why Larry Ellison ended up owning American TikTok? Trump and his allies didn’t want a Chinese firm seeing sensitive American data, or brainwashing American kids with video shorts of a political nature. It is indeed very obvious why we should want to know what the real allegiances of those big tech giant bosses really are, which countries they are in love with, and which ideologies they follow.
Naturally, the establishment has its defences ready and waiting for the above criticisms. Sometimes they point to the regulatory mechanisms which have been put in place to protect the public interest. At other times they plead that it’s only the violent and the perverted that they’re after (or to use Zuckerberg’s words, “… if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”).
Neither of these defences have much weight in my view. All of us have done things we want to hide, and whether we do or not is no excuse for someone else’s abuse of our data. As for the supposed regulatory protections, many of these are self-policed and, worse, many are authored by the very firms that are supposed to be applying them. The data policies recommended by the Information Commissioners Office in the UK and the policies and procedures applied to advertisers by the big search engines are a good example of these two conflicts of interest, respectively. It is largely for the regulated firm itself to decide what policies to put in place over the data it controls in the UK, and it is for Google to decide whether an advertisement is of a political nature in the US. Such policies of self-regulation famously didn’t work in banking in the 2000s, they won’t work for data either, but the big corporations love it and so they are unlikely to change any time soon.
Decades ago, the world became a place of massive wealth inequality. Now, it has become a place of massive informational inequality too, and together these two facts spell doom for the survival of truth, for freedom of thought, and for freedom of action. The journalist who exposes the abusive data-collector can immediately be undermined by the release of his private data by that very same data-collector. Alcoholism, sexual affairs and mental illness make for such juicy reading. A bank account application can be turned down by a computer with no right of appeal, no right to see underlying evidence, and no recourse to a human being. The politician who stands against a powerful lobby can suddenly find that his ranking on the major search engines has plummeted. Imperial wars can be justified by narratives which no one on the outside has the ability to falsify. All of these are examples of how information inequality can degrade humanity.
The issue of who controls our data, who sees it, and what rights they have to obtain it, may become the cause of the next revolution. But I fear that the ordinary person will have to become the worst of slaves first.
23 June 2026

Money Grows on Trees

Dear Adam,
People sometimes ask me what I mean by that line in the Oh Money song “money grows on trees if you have the keys”. Well, it’s a bit complicated but here’s a two minute summary.
When you go to a bank to borrow money, the bank isn’t actually lending you money that someone else put in the bank beforehand. The truth is that most of the money banks lend is created by them out of nothing. If you or me created $100 bills on a machine at home, we’d go to prison. It’s called counterfeiting. But banks have the full protection of the law in doing what amounts to the same thing.
Back in the 1600s, London goldsmiths were the original bankers. People would hand over their gold for safekeeping, and the goldsmith would give them a receipt, basically an IOU. Over time, people realised it was easier to pay for things using those receipts instead of going to the bank and getting the gold first. Why not just give the shopkeeper the receipt, and then he could go to the bank and get the gold? That was the basic idea.
Once the goldsmiths cottoned on to this, they had a lightbulb moment. If people thought that the receipts represented gold in the bank vault, why not just print more of them and lend them out? Since all the receipts looked identical, nobody could tell which ones were real (i.e. backed by gold) and which ones weren’t. Why would the bank do this you ask? To earn interest on the loans of new money of course! But the bankers had to be careful not to issue too much paper money. If they did, the risk increased that they wouldn’t have enough gold to redeem paper receipts on any one business day.
This dodgy trick is what we now call “fractional reserve banking” and the basic idea hasn’t changed in centuries. Banks create money out of thin air and lend it at interest. These days, it’s the central bank that issues official state money (cash, essentially), while commercial banks create money in the form of electronic database entries (the balances shown on your account statement). But like the banks of old, if everyone went to withdraw their bank account balance on the same day, the banks wouldn’t have enough cash to satisfy them.
Why does any of this matter? Well, firstly, why should banks have the right to manufacture money while everyone else has to work for it?
Secondly, whoever has the power to create money gains huge influence over society as a whole, perhaps even over the government itself. The banks decide which businesses get funded, which governments get supported, when to pull back on lending (triggering a recession), when to pump money in (triggering a boom), even whether to bankroll a war. That’s a lot of power to hand to a profit-driven private company. Thirdly, and this is a philosophical point, if our monetary system is built on this kind of injustice, then the effects of the system are likely to be unjust too. You can probably understand why wealth inequality and inflation would get worse under this kind of system, but it might even be true that the world’s pollution problem and its more or less constant wars are partly a consequence of it.
These days, money really does grow on trees if you have the keys, by which I mean a banking licence.
23 August 2026