I wrote the below paragraph in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s recent wilful and totally thought-through attack on Israel and — in the event — Palestinian people both:

“First 9/11 … then Russia’s ongoing invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territories. Now Hamas disregards both the life of Israeli people and what it would nominally judge to be its “own”: but who so carefully uses their “own” as human shields against those who are placed in a position where they must, inevitably, respond?”

It produced the slide-deck you can download by clicking the button that follows. It attempts to understand how one might be able to react in any way coherent with traditional national security philosophies and necessarily, rightfully, humanely citizen safety needs, when war chooses one: that is, when the enemy offers no alternative.

This piece of work, sometimes visceral in its standpoint, and coloured by my own mother’s experiences — and therefore my upbringing in some small way — in a Yugoslavia the West never cared to see as it really was, shows how when push comes to shove, you can only rely on yourself.

It’s interesting, at least to my mind, to compare the above essay with the one that follows below, and which the time spent most of this year of 2023 in Stockholm Sweden led to. Here, instead of placing the onus of direct action on the state in terrifying circumstances, I focused on taking a longer view of how we might socially engineer authoritarianism out of existence through the creation of specific tech tools and platforms, using brand-new architectures designed to promote such outcomes more easily, by deliberately aiming to create citizens who feared less.

You can download this example of how we could encourage a grassroots fightback over as longitudinal periods as a specific nation-state’s circumstances might demand, simply by making democratic citizens’ most secretive data less and not more accessible to their tormentors.