Written by: Mil Williams, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
My name is Mil Williams. I used to be called Miljenko. I changed my name so as not to have to explain it all the time. Now I have to explain why Mil. Actually, I'm now comfortable with the story. For example, it’s cool when you meet someone from the armed forces to be able to say you’re called Mil.
I have a Film & Literature BA Hons from the UK University of Warwick; a Spanish University Master in Publishing from the Spanish University of Salamanca; and a more recent (2017) International Criminal Justice MA from Liverpool John Moores University, UK.
My dissertation, delivered for the latter, focussed on the reality of secular Original Sin as imposed, understandably at first, on Western liberal democracies because of the strategies of total surveillance. That is, we used to be innocent until proven guilty. Now, we are all guilty and surveilled as a result, and no one cares to prove our innocence at all.
I’ve been many things in my life: language trainer and enabler, both face-to-face and remote before it mostly became a thing; corporate employee in the banking sector; self-employed in a number of aspects; and an inveterate technology proofreader, privileged enough to see over more than a decade of deep engagement with quirky and deliverable tech the proposed near and far-futures of many of the most substantive IT corporations on the planet.
What have I primarily been interested in during most of my life?
Empowering others describes it best: I was a language trainer, then enabler, in Spain for sixteen years or so. I learned to speak and write castellano well. Whilst there, I studied Russian for three years and graduated with a University Master in Publishing via the University of Salamanca. I studied under some of the best editors and publishers Spain ever produced. Which means some of the best the world has ever seen.
I believe in people. That is, I believe in you: all of you. I also sustain that we are sometimes our own worst enemies: in the world of big consumerism, we are determined to swing wildly between savage acceptance and dependence on big tech’s directives and software constitutions and a probably idiotic rejection: something we could call Luddite-like independence.
Really what we need to engineer, for the benefit, pleasures, and well-being of Western liberal democratic citizens, is a systemic interdependence, where each to their capacity helps each in respect of their needs.
Why have I had these interests?
Because interdependence was never allowed me. It wasn’t a thing in my generation, back in the city I lived in and the early decades I grew up via. You were made to be dependent on everything around you. No one was centered on the individual, the person, in those days. Grandiloquent strategies from powerful politicians and leaders; monolithic battles with class-based movements; and none of Peter Levine’s generously capable Good Democracy: that exquisite tension and equilibrium between inclusiveness and efficiency, both.
How have people helped me to deepen them?
I once heard the UK politician Gordon Brown reject Scottish independence in the most profoundly intelligent way. He didn’t argue that the United Kingdom and its nations required the alternative of a lesser of two evils: a forced union imposed by naked power, on the situation as it has stood for centuries. Rather, he suggested we work toward a brand-new and purposefully voluntary federation of interdependent societies and individuals. Everything, indeed, coincidentally, which Brexit has kicked deliberately into touch.
This idea struck me most forcefully. I had been a nationalistic kind of guy during the Balkan Conflict back in the 1990s: my upbringing and personal foolishness put me on a Western security watchlist; my intellect did struggle, it is true, with the violence thus generated; but still I argued in favor of defensive aggression informed by being on the side of “right”.
With what he said above, Gordon Brown saved my life. Really. I retreated from even civic nationalism; retreated, also, from veering between the reductionism of extreme political dependences as the only alternative to what was becoming increasingly ragged independence.
Yes. Mr. Brown saved my life. Peter Levine, too. And finally, Lawrence Lessig. The man who made it patently clear cogently and literally that we were living in a world where democratically elected legislatures counted for far less than the strategy meetings and operational decisions of the Founder/CEOs who scoped our big technology and IT companies; who, by so doing, ensured that the software constitutions written and coded by their workforces served to structure our online permissions and “voting rights” the way they preferred; and who marshaled what we could and couldn’t do online and off, in a way that benefitted their pockets most of all.
My history of intuition validation
I’ve got some online whitepapers that may help us all come up to speed. If you need the links and prefer to lead your own understanding of unfamiliar topics, do get in touch:
How did it all start for me?
It all reverts back to proofreading for me, though. There is no better way to understand the value of something than to have to enable a complicated text into a better state of readability. If you’ve never proofread anything, you should. You get inside the head and think of the writer. So deep inside. Seeing things they never were able to see of themselves.
It then continued with experiments in AR, back in 2017, via a Google Pixel XL first-gen mobile. I realized this was something completely different from anything I had experienced before; I realized here we could enhance, expand, and upskill the individual, and it was worth doing. I wasn’t a film director as I shaped the narratives that arose in front of me: everything was shot in real-time it is true, and the only post-processing involved editing the footage achieved to better tell a story. But the story had arisen mainly from the interactions of what appeared to be autonomous software code. In this sense, I was more an anthropologist, observing a strange new tribe of gently interdependent beings.
It still didn’t go as far down the route of a democracy-based tech as I wanted. The operating systems were still male IT: hierarchies where admins saw everything and users saw nothing. Essentially, kingdoms of kings & queens versus serfs & peasants. But even so, a different interdependence began at least for me to come upon the horizon: the tech remained a serious conceptual and inhibiting series of hurdles for rigorously nonconformist thinking, but hope existed.
And so this, unconsciously in hindsight, became my goal – a goal so profoundly nonconforming that only now, four years or so later, am I able to understand myself what I’ve been aiming at all this time: ever since my Film & Literature degree back in the 1980s bubbled under the surface for the following four decades, as a prime example of how to use technologies of all kinds to industrialize human beings back into workplace relevance, instead of continuing to violently automate us out of any sense of intelligible future-present.
What do I mean by intuition validation?
After my MA in International Criminal Justice in 2017, I began to consider the role of arts-based thinking in criminological and law-enforcement contexts. I had a phone stolen from me in Dublin a year or so after, and I made an AR film that I felt showed how easily we might use such technologies to expand, as both professionals and victims, our understanding of what we might be witnessing during and after a criminal event.
I soon began to refine my desire to capture and evidence i.e., store and retrieve what we could variously term:
Intuition
Arationality
High-level domain expertise
Thinking without thinking
I also realized, pretty quickly, that there was no point in capturing more data in a world where data overflows quite unremittingly already. Often to little purpose.
The key was validation. In the context of law enforcement and criminology, make crime hunches as admissible in court as video became some decades ago:
Or as Elon Musk did with the internal-combustion engine (ICE), when he turned vested interest upside down. In this analogy, traditional datasets (the ICE) have had huge resources dedicated exclusively to their validation, whilst intuition (Tesla here) has for many reasons been totally underfunded. Partly because what we call male IT and its supporters, who may be of any gender, dictate that intuitive ways of thinking are inevitably less effective and useful for society than the ones whose validation they’ve funded over the years. Partly, maybe, because intuition is gendered: and only 30 percent of IT workers are women.
Why don’t we validate intuition very well in traditional IT already?
We had an insight, a year or so ago, in respect of how most of Western culture has seen intuition since the Age of Reason: not only gendered disrespectfully, as it is, but tinged with the baggage of an emotion seen to be unreliable.
We realized that intuitive thinkers do act emotionally on occasions, but it wasn’t the intuitive thinking process that led them to behave like this, as supporters of exclusively rational thinking like to maintain. Rather, it was a persistent denial of a rationally perceived reality, in the absence of robust validation systems being duly invested in, that frustrated them into escalating emotional outbursts, as they strove in challenging circumstances to get their points across.
Rational thinking is more reliable than arationality, as the internal-combustion engine has similarly outplayed electric for so long: because the industry has already invested in its success, and so inevitably it’s more successful. It’s not bad that it’s successful, either: historically, it’s taken us out of many Dark Ages. But it is bad, in a world full of digital malleability, that no one has yet proposed we should spend as many of our societal resources on validating other ways of thinking, apart from the purely logical: other ways such as intuition, arationality, high-level domain expertise, and a properly supported and regularly validated thinking without thinking.
What does it need to become effective and real?
1. Wide recognition, acceptance if you like, that intuitive thinkers use non-emotional thinking processes to reach profound and deep insights, often without themselves realizing how to unpick what they’re doing: emotion only sets in when what they believe firmly to be true is consistently ignored and/or denied. It’s not the thinker who is to blame here: it’s the validation systems our societies have chosen not to spend our money on.
2. IT spaces and environments that support such deep thinking from the inside-out, what we have termed secrecy positive, female IT, that begin to foment and focus again on our nonconformist capabilities to think hyper-creatively. Much, in fact, like the children we once were born to be:
3. A set of basic open-sourced intuition-validation libraries that support a wider societal effort into becoming a reality.
4. An acceptance that where sophisticated domain knowledge, such as law-enforcement, national security, startup creation, medicine, education, and management consulting (we could say any human endeavor on the planet!), becomes the key to effective made-to-measure digital services and products, the delivery of bespoke intuition validation into such industries will require close collaborations and shared interests in the projects that arise, in order that they are sustainable in the long term:
5. And where such acceptance is forthcoming around how to resolve the challenges of complexity so they do not become complicatedness, then also accept that the best business model for everything that may happen in intuition validation is an open-sourced one that combines the best of all worlds:
a. The WordPress way, not the otherwise fabulous IBM approach. So white labels, often, which don’t mean quality control or recognizable origin need to go out of the window.
b. Open and closed-source code and services/products, depending on whether we are discussing projects that directly benefit society as utility industries do or the more cloaked support required by national-security and law-enforcement agencies, where the requirement to be covertly ahead of the bad guys’ intuition games will always remain primordial.
Summary
What next
In my second article for Brainz Magazine, which will be published in June 2022, I will begin to suggest what you, the readership of the magazine, might via the tech strategies I’m sketching out be able to do for a subject as big as Western liberal democratic structures.
This doesn’t preclude the participation of people and citizens from other ways of seeing and doing the world. I only seem to be restricting it to this region and way of thinking because:
1. It’s the one I know best: I was born into it.
2. As I was born into it, I’ve seen exactly how it appears to have been dismantled:
3. As I have seen this happen, and read different explanations of why, I feel I might know better, and at least have some right to express authority on, how the situation might one day be improved.
How might we achieve this? Via political activity? No. I don’t think so, not anymore. Or at least, not party-political activity. A politicized activity, yes. But not political, as we once assumed.
Lawrence Lessig taught us politics is broken because of money. Brexit taught us that intolerance and the desire to deliver self-destructive independence is winning out over a sensibly long-term capacity to value interdependence. Ukraine now teaches us, as the Balkan Conflict did during other times, with nonconformist individualists, the Putins of this world, who drive, long-term, a creatively criminal transglobal activity with astonishing patience, and still cannot be stopped with our machines-only total-surveillance approaches, that there are huge technology-driven forces which no longer limit themselves to their sovereign borders.
Now, we are either all Ukraine or none of us are.
What’s the answer then?
I’d like to find out from you.
And here’s an online intuition-validation whitepaper, for Brainz Magazine’s readership to really get its teeth into — if, that is, you decide you are collective of a mind:
This paper needs to expand over the next 12 months. I’d like to do it myself, of course. But I’d like to do it with you, absolutely too.
For next time, then
I suggest a structure of five strands and/or topics be discussed in my next Brainz Magazine article:
StartUp Hunch
What it is
What it proposes to change
What we can do together to achieve these goals
What our desired outcome in 12 months could be
Where it could lead us over the next decade
What do you think?
Jobs to be done?
Mil Williams, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Mil Williams is a founder working in the field of repurposed IT tech. He wants to industrialize people back into workplace relevance, instead of continuing to automate them out of it. He's also an inveterate coder, whose coding language is English. He has at times been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but actually suffers a bad case of nonconformism. He's been working on intuition-validation projects since 2016, with applications in practically all areas of human activity. Yes, the magic bullet you never believed you'd see. He's now designed a special intuition-validation project for the readership of Brainz Magazine to collaborate on: https://startuphunch.com
