It feels kinda funny, looking at this thing as she hops along in her virtual world.

As far as I can reasonably tell, she’s not aware that she isn’t biological. I didn’t want to say “not real”, because she’s probably about as real as she could be: it’s just that her body lives in a world unlike our own.

She lives inside my laptop, within its humming circuits, and she does not know it.

I’ve simulated the brain and body of a fruit fly on my laptop.

As many of you would probably know, some time ago I wrote about my adventures in downloading the brain of a fruit fly and rendering a visualisation of it on my little ol’ laptop.

For those that don’t remember:

That was fun and all, but I was hoping to take it further and simulate parts of the fruit fly brain itself, to see if I could mimic any known real-life firing patterns in the neural circuitry.

Turns out, that’s a real challenge, because no one has been able to obtain high-resolution recordings of the activity of all the individual neurons in a real living fruit-fly brain. The reason is actually quite simple: it’s really freakin hard to record the activity of just one neuron in a biological brain, let alone all the neurons individually across the whole thing at the same time. So, with nothing to compare it to, I’d have no idea if my simulations were a reasonable simulacrum, or total nonsense.

However, one alternative approach I was pursuing was using a kind of virtual body, perhaps with a rendered 3D “world”. The different virtual body parts might receive signals from a simulated central nervous system connected to motor neurons and allow the fly to move around, while sending data in to its sensory neurons where it can “see”, “smell”, “taste” and “touch” the rendered 3D world we have created for it.

I kinda got stuck at that point, because the idea of building such a virtual environment to provide my little virtual fly brain with all of its sensory inputs, and then figuring out the correct mappings for the correct neurons, felt kind of overwhelming; so I put it aside for a while.

I’m a little annoyed that I did, because just the other day, someone sort-of beat me to the punch, and got a whoooole lot of press about it. Oddly, though, they didn’t release their code, so no one can really verify what they did.

I got even more annoyed by that fact. Why do something like this without releasing the code?!

So, as one does, I decided to replicate it by mah damn self, or at least part of it, based on the descriptions given in their company blog post, which wasn’t all that helpful if I’m honest.

It took me about 3 days. I found a pre-released version of their connectome code - just the brain, no integration, no body - and hooked it up with the virtual body powered by NeuroMechFly. I was then able to render a 5-second (in-world time) clip of the fly sort of hop-shuffling forwards, and then turning slightly to the left.

I was quite proud of myself for this little feat. I’m not a neuroscientist, and I have very limited knowledge of the connectome itself. I also hate python, like, viscerally. The company also hasn’t shared much technical information on exactly how they did this, either, so I had to make use of what they did provide, combine that with various publications and annotated datasets on the neurons themselves to identify the correct inputs and outputs, and sort-of vibe-code the rest.

At first, I was under the impression that merely stimulating the sugar-sensing neurons - ones which tell the fly that there is a source of sweet, sweet sugary goodness very nearby - was the thing giving impetus to forward locomotion. That was an incredibly exciting idea: the fly was choosing to move toward a sugar source! “Wow”, I thought, “this is real, autonomous behaviour!”

Sadly, I was to be disappointed.

In the connectome used by the Eon team in their simulation, it seems they are force-stimulating a special neuron called P9. This neuron seems to force a signal out through the descending neuron structure that would normally connect to the Ventral Nerve Cord (like a spinal cord for flies) and tell it to walk in the forward direction. Although we don’t have a full VNC simulated here, the signal is used to instruct NeuroMechFly to proceed forwards.

In my quest to replicate their results, I of course included stimulation of P9. In their post, they did make it pretty obvious what they were doing, but I just wasn’t really paying attention.

Curiously, that slight left-turn the fly makes at the end of the clip above was unexpected. Is it possible the fly is adjusting its direction of motion by choice? I don’t honestly know.

So I had another go. This time, using some of the Jupyter Notebook experiments in the original codebase, I tried to connect all the relevant bits for those behaviours to the actuators of NMF so we could observe the expected physical behaviour.

First, I tried activating grooming, by stimulating the sensory nerves of its antennae.

We all know what fly grooming looks like, of course, and it does not resemble this:

Nor this:

One theory is the way I’m calculating the new front-leg positions, and overlaps/collisions, is causing all kinds of mayhem.

said I was just activating the well-known Drosophila Break-dance Neuron.

We’re now 5 days in to this run of experimentation. I am pushing ahead, but it is ridiculously slow to run these on a laptop. When you’re having to make a lot of tweaks and adjustments and retrying over and over, the iteration loop is painfully slow with the hardware I’m using. It takes at least 10 minutes to render 5 seconds worth of simulation.

I will keep this going for a while and see how far I can get. Ideally, I’d like to be able to simulate the entire VNC as well - for which I already have some working code, but the hooking up of the two connectomes is going to be a trick, and might require much more powerful hardware than I have currently available to simulate.

If anyone wants to donate some compute resources to help me make this go faster, I’d be very appreciative. Leave me a comment, or reply to this email (if you received this in your inbox).

Meanwhile, you can observe and/or participate in my tomfoolery over on the forked codebase: https://github.com/MiracleBlue/fly-brain

Watch this space, more to come. In the near future, I will do a more detailed technical write-up of exactly how this works.

Note: This is a short rant that is fairly off-topic for my usual fare, so apologies if it’s not the kind of content you were expecting. I promise we’ll return to regular programming as soon as I finish one of the 20+ drafts I’m working on.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you might have heard that my country of Australia recently introduced age verification laws for preventing under-16s from accessing social media, and today, they began a new requirement to verify you’re 18 to visit porn.

I don’t normally like to criticise from the sidelines (ok, maybe I do), but today is an exception, because I feel like I need to scream from the rooftops about this bizarre near-universal blind-spot that affects politicians of all kinds, in all countries, but especially in my own.

The idea is that by forcing websites and web services to perform “age verification”, they will somehow prevent young people from accessing online pornography.

Here’s a summary of what seems to drive their thinking:

On Friday, the eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, welcomed the introduction of the codes.

“We don’t allow children to walk into bars or bottle shops, adult stores or casinos, but when it comes to online spaces where they are spending a lot of their time, there are no such safeguards,” Inman Grant said.

“But that changes for Australian kids with these codes, which simply bring those same, commonsense protections we all grew up with to the online world of today to ensure children are having age-appropriate experiences and not being exposed to potentially harmful content too early.”

The Guardian

Notice the bold in that line: “Bars or bottle shops”.

She said the same thing again today, too, in an interview with the ABC:

“A child today can’t walk into a bar and order a drink, they can’t stroll into a strip club or browse an adult shop or sit down at a blackjack table in a casino,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

“This just really brings ... those protections that we put for kids in place to the digital realm.”

Clearly, the PR firm sending her to do this round of interviews has given her this line as though it’s somehow going to connect with “the average Australian” (see: talking to people like they are stupid because that’s a great idea), and due to what I assume is fundamental - yes, absolutely fundamental - lack of knowledge on the subject for which she is serving as Australia’s highest regulator, she didn’t see a problem with it.

Not in a long time have I seen anything which so poignantly demonstrates how utterly out-of-touch someone can be with how the internet works. In fact, it’s a perfect example of where politicians the world over keep going wrong with their attempts to implement “child safety laws.”

“But she studied Computer Science and worked for Microsoft, she totally knows all this stuff!”

Yes, she dropped out of Computer Science and went into International Relations instead. Nick Clegg worked for Facebook, but I doubt he’d pass an interview for any entry-level IT role.

Regardless, these statements demonstrate something called a “Category error.”

Specifically, the right honourable commissioner seems to equate websites on the internet with bars, bottle shops, adult stores and casinos in the brick-and-mortar world.

Let me take a moment to explain, in detail, not only why this kind of thinking is absurd to apply to the internet, it also increases the danger to children.

First, consider this “front door” fallacy.

In the physical world, a bottle shop has a single point of entry. To enter, you must be physically present in a specific geographic location. This allows for high-friction, low-risk verification. You show a licence, the bouncer looks at it, and you walk in.

Crucially, the bouncer does not keep a photocopy of your identity.

On the internet, there is no such thing as a front door. The internet is a decentralised network, with servers from all over the world, hosting all kinds of content by all kinds of entities.

When a platform implements a verification requirement in Australia, the content is still there; it simply puts up a verification challenge for users that are purportedly located in Australia according to their IP address.

An IP address can be changed to one of a different country so easily, some people do it as a matter of course, as their default manner of accessing the internet. A teenager with a basic understanding of a VPN can effectively teleport to a location where these verification laws do not apply.

Locking the front door does not automatically lock the back door, nor any of the other 200+ doors that exist on every house on the internet (that’s only if we only count the ways to bypass with a VPN; in fact, there are many thousands more doors)

Then, there’s the “honeypot” problem.

When you show your ID to a bouncer, the transaction is ephemeral. Once you walk past, the bouncer forgets your details (unless they have an unusually good memory). Digital age verification requires either direct ID uploads or full facial scans, which are stored and processed by third-party brokers. This creates a massive database of sensitive data.

Images of government-issued IDs are a whole other level of sensitivity, because they can often be treated as equivalent to the physical ID itself. I’ve used this myself a few times when I left home without my wallet, but had my phone on me with a picture of my license.

What’s more, we are asking people to link their legal identity to their most private browsing habits, and placing the trust for handling that identity in the hands of arbitrary 3rd parties. As far as I know, there isn’t even any certification process for determining who in the world of age verification providers is actually implementing a minimum necessary data security and privacy standard.

Allegedly to protect children, these measures are actually forcing people to hand over their biometrics or government documents to databases that will inevitably be targeted by hackers, and in fact, already are. It’s not just the adults that submit to age verification at risk here (because who cares about adults, anyway?); it’s also children, who are just as likely to attempt age verification if they are presented with it.

We are trading one manageable risk for something that is far less manageable: identity theft and digital stalking. I don’t know if you’ve done adequate risk analysis on this, but I’m guessing not.

If senior executives at a massive global brand like eBay could run a campaign of targeted harassment, abuse and stalking against innocent people, what makes you think the employees of a company like Persona (one of many age verification providers) are just automatically immune?

If the company 23andme can sell all the genetic data collected from their customers, despite what is stated in their privacy policy, in what universe do you think any other company might consider themselves bound to such agreements?

Hell, did you not see what happened to Discord recently?

How about Equifax?

Must I go on? I can keep going.

Then there is the issue of migration. (No, I don’t mean immigration)

If you block access to a website hosting certain content that is in demand, the demand for that content does not disappear. From a neurobiological perspective, curiosity is a fundamental driver of the developing brain, and technical hurdles often act as a gamified challenge rather than a deterrent (no seriously, ask me how I know: I was a kid once, too)

Instead of accessing sites that have at least some level of moderation with trust and safety teams, minors will migrate to the unmoderated corners of the web. I’m surprised politicians aren’t more aware of this shit.

The fact is, such websites do not care about Australian law. They are often hubs for malware and far more extreme material. By “cleaning up” the already-regulated web, these laws push children into the most dangerous parts of the digital ecosystem via the path of least resistance.

“So we’ll just put up more walls, then! Age verification just to google anything!” I can already hear them saying to themselves. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Google is not the only search engine in the world, and you should go back and re-read the part about VPNs.

“We’ll just ban those evil websites!”

Like you’ve been trying to do since the year 2000 with pirate sites? Good luck with that. Hilariously, piracy is easier than ever.

Finally, we have to address the gap between legislative nostalgia and technical reality.

In the physical world, friction is enforced by the laws of physics. Local jurisdiction is easily enforced by the nature of physical locality. In the digital world, there is so much less friction as a baseline, and only the location of the server hosting a particular piece of content matters in terms of enforcing the law.

A user in Australia, when visiting any given website, could be receiving content coming from 20 different servers in 20 different global jurisdictions for each page, and attempts to fence a user in to a single region can be bypassed by any fourteen-year-old in seconds.

Not even the Chinese do this perfectly, and they created essentially their own walled garden, with a huge infrastructure and active surveillance. Yet we think we can pull it off just by making a new law?

It’s nothing but safety theatre.

The only measures which can be called “commonsense” boil down to educating young and old people in technical literacy - something our own eSafety Commissioner would do well to obtain for themselves - and pushing Operating System developers to provide better device-level parental controls.

Not perfect?

Well bloody oath, tell us something we don’t know, but so far it’s better, it’s safer, and infinitely more sensible than any of your attempts at picket-fencing the online world have been.

You’re never going to get anywhere if you keep treating a global communication network like your local Dan Murphys.

Look, I get being eSafety commissioner is a tough job. If the government of the day demands you support their pet “child safety” project of the moment, you might not feel like it’s your place to push back. However, I’d argue that is exactly your place. In fact, that’s really your job: bring a dose of reality to Canberra’s distortion field.

I don’t know whether it was the commissioner, or some other entity that came up with this stupid scheme with easily foreseeable consequences, but whoever it was needs to understand that laws aren’t an end in themselves: they are supposed to be the means to an ends.

So far, the data is telling us they do not achieve the ends they were meant for.

Not only that, but if you look at the recent ban on under-16s from social media, how’s that going so far?

Not great, mate.

Like everyone predicted, it’s worse than useless, (thought you’d get away with burying the failure rates that easily, did you?) and easily bypassed anyway: kids just move to other, unregulated platforms, look up VPN tools (many of which are great, but some of which are dodgy), or use alternative systems which are not designated “social media” to get around the ban. (Did you know that Pinterest is like the new Tiktok? Whoda thunk it.)

Oh would you look at that, it’s not even been 24 hours and just as predicted, it’s happening again.

Stop making the same mistake over and over again ya dingoes. Instead, work on giving parents better control over devices, because that’s an area that is presently severely lacking: the controls built-in to Apple’s operating systems, for example, are simultaneously over-complicated and under-powered (how they managed to achieve such a feat I will never know.)

Also, as a special bonus, here’s a video from when I was teaching my kids How To Hack The Planet™

Gotta start ‘em early.

/end rant

Note: This is a true story, taken from one of the many fascinating case reports of medical literature. This is a fairly famous example in the annals of addiction neuroscience, and it reveals in stark colours the counter-intuitive nature of addiction.

She couldn’t stop herself. She had to push the button.

She kept it on all day, dialling the power knob between 75% and 100% in rapid bursts.

All she could do was blast the electrodes buried deep in her brain, triggering an experience she called “pleasant discomfort,” a kind of “erotic sensation” as though her genitals were sending signals to her brain at kilowatts of intensity.

By all objective measures, though, she was disintegrating completely.

She would exhibit the physical symptoms of stroke. She would become extremely thirsty. Her verbal IQ would drop by a whopping 25 points. She even developed an ulcer on her index finger, the one she used to tune the power dial rapidly. This was not a particularly pleasant experience. Indeed, it was painful.

And yet, she stopped going outside.

She stopped talking to other people.

She even stopped bathing, and eventually, eating.

She could not pull herself away from the button.

There were times when she’d beg for her family to take it away, and they would; only for them to give in when she went through inevitable withdrawal symptoms, and demanded its return.

It was an addiction like any other; except this was not chemical. It was electrical.

In 1954, James Olds and Peter Milner released a remarkable study that would go on to shape our understanding of addiction. They implanted electrodes at various locations into the brains of rats, and gave them a series of levers they could press to stimulate the different electrodes.

The behaviour of the rats demonstrated the existence of specific locations in the brain which, when stimulated, could produce profound addiction: the rats would go to stimulate them again and again and again, until collapsing from exhaustion.

Such experiments would have been completely unethical if done in humans, and would never be approved by a review board. So, how had this woman, in the 1980s, ended up in the position of one of Olds’ and Milner’s rats?

Years earlier, the 48-year-old New Yorker had suffered a herniated disc right at the base of her spine, between L5 and S1; an excruciating experience, leaving her with severe sciatica. Pain would surge through her legs like a bolt of lightning. Her lower back was in constant agony. The pain and suffering was constant and intractable.

Eventually it became too much; she obsessed about finding a way to halt the pain.

Although of limited effect, so far, opiates - specifically, methadone - was the only thing keeping her functional at a basic level. That wasn’t ideal. She had a history of alcohol abuse, and knew the dangers of addiction all too well.

So she had turned her body into a veritable pin-cushion, subjecting herself to any and all ideas, in search of an alternative.

She had seen so many specialists. They tried pharmacological treatments of all kinds, including antidepressants, atypical analgesics, and more.

Every drug wore off quickly.

Massages and exercises had no effect. Acupuncture was useless. Cognitive Behavioural Therapies made no difference.

The TENS units - skin-conductance electrical stimulators of nerves - achieved nothing.

They tried surgically removing the back plates of 4 of her vertebrae to relieve pressure on her spinal cord. They denervated the area at the base of her spine, and even severed specific nerve fibres in her spinal cord they believed were transmitting pain signals to the brain.

All of it failed.

All this medical science, all these doctors and specialists, all this money, and they were at a loss. Here they were - in the 1980s - and they had no idea what was wrong or how to fix it.

One well-meaning specialist had an idea: if we can’t seem to solve it from the nerve side, perhaps we can find another way through the brain itself.

Electricity for pain management is, remarkably, far from a new idea. There really is nothing new under the sun.

The first written description we have found of using electricity to manage pain was by the ancient Greeks, where both Plato and Aristotle described the use of the “Torpedo Fish” - a kind of electric ray, after which the submarine weapon is named - as an aid in curing ailments; but it was the Romans who wrote specifically about its use in treating headaches and gout.

Some 2000 years later, in the 1950s, we began to seriously experiment with delivering electricity directly to the brain. The implanting of electrodes directly into neural structures could bypass faulty central nervous system wiring, not to mention all the chemical filtering which made pharmacokinetics such a challenge.

Early experiments with this method as a treatment for chronic pain seemed to yield some positive results.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) was, indeed, originally meant to treat pain. Later, people like José Delgado would begin experimenting with the technique to treat movement disorders, epilepsy, and paralysis.

DBS has a storied and controversial history. José Delgado, among others, would become the targets of crazy conspiracy theorists like Peter Breggin, who for their own political purposes ran a campaign of lies designed to paint Delgado in particular as an evil mind-control villain, eventually chasing him out of the United States.

Despite this, by the 1970s, DBS for pain was quickly gaining traction, with companies like Medtronic setting up its neurological division for manufacturing devices to control electrode stimulation. Case reports started to come out showing positive results for pain with electrodes implanted into the thalamus.

So, although still quite a new treatment, it wasn’t as hare-brained an idea as it might seem to us today, though it still sounds utterly counter-intuitive: stimulating a brain region that is signalling pain in order to suppress that pain. However, it was based on a historical precedent, or perhaps, neurological dogma: that stimulation mimics ablation (destruction).

The thinking was that with electrical stimulation, based on this precedent, they could use it as a reversible alternative to destroying those neurons entirely. If it worked, we might never need to surgically damage or destroy anything in the brain, whether in cases of severe intractable epilepsy or chronic pain. It could eliminate the use of lobotomies, which were still popular in the United States at the time.

So in ~1979, specialists handling the case of this woman’s intractable pain decided to give it a try.

They made 2 attempts.

First, they implanted an electrode in the right Posterior Medial Thalamus, the region of the brain mostly concerned with your emotional response to a sensory input, e.g being startled by sudden sharp pain. When they turned on the electric current, she felt a warm flush spread across the left side of her body, and the pain dissipated.

For 6 months, this seemed to work remarkably well.

However, like everything else, it was only temporary, and soon the device gave her no relief from pain at all. They left the electrode in place, dormant, and continued to pursue other treatment options.

Four years later, they made another attempt.

The target this time was the left Ventral Posteriolateral Nucleus, the region which helps to determine what a sensation is (touch, pressure, temperature, pain) and where it’s coming from; it then relays the information to other regions of the brain relevant to that specific sensation.

Again, it seemed to have a reasonable impact on the pain. She initially reported a tingling “paraesthesia” down her left side, but that was it. For a few months, the pain became manageable again.

Then, there was something else.

She had begun to experiment with the settings on the stimulator. She found that by manipulating the controls in a certain way, she could induce these peculiar “erotic sensations,” and reported this to the clinicians shortly following the procedure.

Unfortunately, this did not ring any alarm bells.

When the pain inevitably returned a few months later, her need for stimulation didn’t end. Indeed, it was only beginning.

She found herself continuing to need more and more stimulation. She would keep the device on, set to 75% power, and every few minutes rapidly turn the dial between 75% and 100% power. It brought her to the edge of climax, but never over the precipice. She was always just out of reach of satisfaction.

During these intense stimulations, her body would writhe in severe discomfort. The left side of her face would droop as though she were in the throes of a massive stroke. She would experience paroxysmal atrial tachycardia, and the most extreme thirst leading to psychogenic polydipsia (compulsive water drinking to the point of toxicity.)

There’s simply no way this could have been pleasure she was experiencing, and even if there was, it would have paled in comparison to the devastation and pain being inflicted upon her body and brain.

Somehow, she managed to continue like this for 2 years. Her addiction was so total, she spent most of that time in complete inactivity, save for occasions when her obsession with stimulation drove her to tamper with the device in an effort to further increase its amplitude.

IQ tests she performed shortly before and shortly after implantation of the electrode, and again by the authors of the case study 3 years later, reveal the utter devastation wrought on her brain.

Initially scoring 99 both before and after implantation on full-scale IQ - a reasonable score - by the time of the case study, she had lost a whopping 11 points.

Her memory quotient - initially around 96-97 - had plummeted to 64 (though interestingly, when stimulating, it rose slightly to 73).

They had her do a PET scan before and during stimulation to see how much energy her brain was using (by measuring glucose) and the results were striking.

When the device was off, the scan showed a startling lack of activity. Specifically, the researchers found right-sided hypometabolism and significant asymmetries between the two hemispheres. In this state, her metabolic rates were so low they were comparable to patients with advanced dementia.

With the device on, this reversed completely, with both hemispheres lighting up with thalamic noise, essentially jamming much of the cross-region communication required for normal brain function.

She had become completely enslaved to the button, and it was eating her alive.

My friend Prof Kent C. Berridge - inventor of Incentive Salience theory of motivation, along with the Incentive Sensitisation theory of addiction - knows this study well, so I emailed him to get his thoughts on the idea of someone being trapped so tightly inside a “wanting” loop that even aversive stimuli, such as pain and discomfort, are not enough to break the cycle. He replied:

“No one would sign up for such an electrode if advertised by her description, so there’s a massive explanatory gap between the not-very-pleasant experience and the intense desire to repeat and continue it.”

Rather propitiously, just last year he and a colleague David Nguyen published a paper in Nature’s Communications on Biology about “Wanting What Hurts” (the title I also borrowed for this article, because it’s too good.)

Imagine you are a rat. You’re in a little box with soft tray bedding at your feet. You look around and find a shiny rod-like object that you’ve never seen before.

You wander over and give it a poke with your nose, and a sudden, painful electric jolt hits you!

What do you do?

Well, typically, rats will do something called “defensive burying”, where they will kick bedding litter over the top of some object that they see as harmful. They will bury it, to get it out of their environment.

That’s what a rat would normally do to such an electrified rod.

However, using specially optogenetically-modified rats hooked up to a device which stimulates the anticipatory reward centres of the brain using a light beam whenever the rat comes within 2cm of the rod, following their first shock, they seem to do something unusual.

They give it another poke.

Obviously, another shock ensures, making them flinch back, but this does not deter them.

They give it yet another poke.

Despite the total absence of pleasant sensation - indeed, in spite of the particularly unpleasant and painful sensation from electric shock - they develop an overwhelming addiction to poking the electrified rod with their nose. Some of them would even nibble and chew it with their mouths, all while receiving continuous electrical shock.

The rats were even given the option to self-stimulate their own brain using a lever, which delivered no harmful or aversive stimuli; yet they would ignore the lever and consistently favour a zap from the rod. Something about the salience of that shock was like an answer to the question posed by the anticipatory reward circuits: “I predict this is going to be good for us, now let’s see…”

Zap.

As soon as the artificial stimulation of the brain ceases, the “addiction” disappears entirely, and the rats proceed to bury the rod. However, the point is still proved: the ability for an organism to become addicted to something can be independent of whether the experience is pleasant or unpleasant.

Since her case report in 1986, there has been no further information on the New York woman. Her story remains a singular, frozen snapshot in the annals of neuroscience. We don’t know whether she managed to recover from the addiction, nor even do we know whether the electrodes were removed, though we should probably assume they were at least deactivated.

Her case stands as a remarkable demonstration of the physical anatomy of what we might call “the will,” encoded within our biochemistry.

Although we like to believe our choices are guided by a pursuit of happiness, as both the New York patient and Berridge’s rats prove, something like addiction isn’t just some base hedonist’s failure of self-control.

It’s a physiological malfunction, and one we are all susceptible to at some level.

If you are suffering with addiction, beating yourself up over your inability to break free, remember this:

It is not a character flaw.
It is not a weakness of will.
It is not a free choice.

No amount of character or willpower alone can beat an addiction whose claws are embedded deeply enough. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be done, just that we need to look at the problem through a different lens, and approach it collaboratively, leaning on others for help.

I know that getting away from the feelings of shame and guilt is easier said than done, but I hope that understanding the physiological factors that cause it helps.

If you or someone you care about is struggling, please make contact with addiction support services in your region. For help figuring out where to start, I’ve put together this list:

Thank you for joining me on this episode of A Chemical Mind. A big welcome to all the new paid subscribers, and those that have been added from the Ko-Fi list. I’m still figuring out the plan for paid content, but I will get to it, I promise. Please let me know your thoughts for what you want to see!

These posts take a ton of research and time to put together. It’s been a rough year financially, so if my work has been useful or interesting to you in any way, please consider a paid subscription, or a donation to the coffee fund. It would go a long way to helping keep body and soul together.

What if our entire understanding of the purpose of the brain is wrong?

By default, we have come to believe the main task of a brain is to think, to wield intelligence, to learn and remember and feel. Is this not what our own brains do the most?

It turns out it’s not nearly so simple, and by focussing on just our own perceptions - our conscious mind - we have completely ignored perhaps its most fundamental role: regulation of bodily systems to keep us alive.

I’m talking about the system of allostasis, or predictive regulation.

Unlike homoeostasis, where the body reacts to problems when they arise, allostasis is all about predicting the bodies needs ahead of time and adequately preparing for them, regulating internal systems to manage energy and resource-use. It’s tasked with efficient logistics planning, ensuring the supply is available at times when demand is predicted to rise.

This makes for a very obvious evolutionary purpose to the brain: it likely evolved as a means of managing the complex biochemistry of large multi-cellular organisms, and consciousness arose from the eventual complexity of its allostatic functions.

Although not a new idea, allostasis seems to be going through a bit of a revival.

According to an article recently published in Neuron Volume 113 (Issue 24), Jordan Theriault et al. argue that thought and consciousness might be a case of exaptation, a kind of happy accident of evolution which turned out to be useful in its own right.

If we adopt this "allostasis-first" lens, the very things we traditionally call "the mind" - our emotions, awareness, even sensations - appear to be low-resolution readouts of our metabolic state. Your mood, for instance, may function as a low-dimensional "allostatic barometer," a summary of how efficiently your brain is managing your body’s internal energy budget.

Even "stress" loses its purely psychological weight. In this biological framework, stress is simply the brain predictively issuing commands to deliver glucose and oxygen to your tissues in anticipation of a metabolic outlay. It is a value-neutral preparation for action should action be necessary.

This is not to suggest that these barometers and predictions are always correct. Like any sensor, they can be fed faulty data or be improperly calibrated. Like some safety systems installed on aircraft, a bad sensor can kick off a distinctly inappropriate response (see: Boeing 737 Max)

Still, this regulatory priority is etched into the very architecture of the human cortex. The brain is organised along a structural gradient that stretches from a "limbic core" to our primary senses. At this limbic core, signals are abstract and low-dimensional compressed summaries of the body’s collective needs. As these signals flow outward toward the motor and sensory systems, they "decompress" into the specific particulars required to move a muscle or adjust a heart rate.

Simultaneously, the firehose of raw sensory data coming from the world is compressed as it travels inward. It is stripped of its noise and categorised into meanings, with the most salience being placed on its allostatic value, i.e “what does this sight or sound mean for my survival?”

Ultimately, this shift in perspective dissolves the artificial wall we have built between the mental and the physical: we are not merely a mind inhabiting a body. The mind and body are a unified system.

What happens if we look at cognitive decline using this allostatic lens? Take Alzheimer’s, one of the main examples cited in the paper: the perspective shifts from a system breaking down, to a series of desperate, yet calculated, sacrifices.

Higher-order cognition uses up a fair bit of energy, but is non-essential for staying alive. It also produces a lot of waste products, due to the rather-inefficient method of anaerobic metabolism of glucose products into ATP (up to 15 times more inefficient than the aerobic alternative.). These waste products need to be removed regularly, mostly via the bloodstream, otherwise they can build up and cause havoc.

However, as we age, our vascular health naturally declines and becomes less efficient at this waste-removal task.

So when a system is faced with a situation where the waste produced by this high-energy, higher-order cognition begins to out-pace the brains ability to remove that waste, the authors suggest we might be forced into an “allostatic trade-off”, with the allostasis mechanism automatically rationing the amount of glucose supplied to the brain to reduce the overall demand on the vascular system.

If brain waste clearance is compromised, then it may be allostatically beneficial for the brain to downregulate glucose metabolism by restricting the transport of glucose into neurons and across the blood-brain barrier. Consistent with this, in older adults, glucose uptake and glucose transporter density (GLUT1 and GLUT3) decline following amyloid accumulation but before the appearance of cognitive decline.

That trade-off might allow the body to physically live longer than it otherwise would, but at what cost?

Alzheimer’s results in the gradual destruction of the inner self; cognitive ability, memories, beliefs, even volition, eventually slip away.

However, the allostasis model does suggest that approaching Alzheimer’s as an energy-management syndrome centred around glucose and the function of the vascular system in general might lead to better treatments. Perhaps, if we work on improving vascular system health, as well as finding ways to clear up debris as we presently do, this combined, systems-driven approach might give us a fighting chance.

Everything psychological that a brain accomplishes—sensing, perceiving, thinking, feeling, deciding, acting—can be considered a means to the end of its core ongoing task: coordinating and regulating internal bodily systems, as an organism navigates a constantly changing but only partly predictable world.

The mind is a prediction machine. That’s its purpose: to predict what happens next, what’s coming down the pipeline, where and when we need energy levels to be at their highest readiness and when we will need to rest. The mind is all about forward-projection, and from birth it is continuously training against the incoming data to identify sequences and patterns in time.

As a fellow Substacker mentioned recently, it’s possible that consciousness arises only when the subconscious mind is inadequate to the task of managing one particular system in a particular context.

Take breathing.

You breathe autonomically, and are entirely unconscious of it most of the time. However, now that I’ve mentioned it and brought it to your attention, it will have entered your conscious awareness. You’re now aware of the action of your diaphragm, as it works to expand and contract the lungs. You can now choose to alter its action, slow it down, speed it up, or hold your breath for a period of time.

This also happens at times of physical exertion, or when your head is underwater, or your conscious mind perceives the air around you to be unsafe to breathe: your conscious mind takes over to analyse the situation and decide when and how to take your next breath.

Soon, likely in the next few minutes, it will return to subconscious autonomic action, and your conscious mind will focus on other things.

If allostasis is the brain’s primary job, then it must prioritise the body’s internal state over external data. This leads to a phenomenon called sensory gating.

Emerging evidence suggests that our distance senses - vision, hearing, and touch - are synchronised to our internal rhythms.

We’re not perceiving the world at a constant, steady rate; the brain “samples” the environment in time with the cardiac cycle. In fact, so much about our perception is aligned with such cycles.

For instance, during systole (when the heart contracts and pumps blood), we are statistically slower and less accurate at detecting visual or auditory stimuli. The brain actually suppresses external input during these moments of high internal pressure, effectively “blinking” our sensory awareness. We saccade - rapidly move our eyes - more frequently during systole, but we fixate and actually process the world during diastole, when the heart is at rest.

Breathing acts in a similar way, functioning as a global “oscillatory pacemaker”. It synchronises neural signalling across the brain, impacting everything from memory consolidation in the hippocampus to how we process emotion and make decisions.

Self-regulation isn’t a silo, either. Humans are social animals, we have evolved to “outsource“ some of our allostatic regulation to others.

This is known as Social Allostasis, and resembles the concept of co-regulation.

When we are in close, trusting relationships, our companions help regulate our heart rates, breathing, and even our core temperature, effectively reducing the metabolic “tax” on our own systems. The sense of safety these relationships provide allows us to operate at a reduced level of vigilance.

This explains why loneliness is so physically toxic; without a social network to help distribute the load, our brains can remain stuck in a highly costly state of vigilance, which eventually wears down the system. In the context of Alzheimer’s, it’s one way to explain why strong social support shows a slower rate of cognitive decline; the social environment can help regulate a struggling internal energy budget.

In short: we see and hear with our hearts, think with our lungs, and heal with our friends.

Thank you for joining me on today’s short dive into some new research that I’ve been looking into. What do you think about the Allostasis model? I’d love to get your insights, let me know in the comments!

This is also the first post of 2026! If you’ve been here a while, please consider a paid subscription; it comes with some perks, and will give me the ability to deliver so much more value to all of you chemically minded folks out there.

Thank you so much to everyone that has donated, subscribed, liked, shared, restacked, and commented. Please share this around with your friends as well! The more the merrier.

Take care, until next time!

Note from Author: Yes, the title is slightly click-bait; but only slightly. Welcome to another deep dive.

The voice-over comes with its own soundtrack composed and produced by yours truly. Give it a listen!

Morality (from Latin moralitas ‘manner, character, proper behavior‘) is the categorization of intentions, decisions and actions into those that are proper, or right, and those that are improper, or wrong.

Let me ask you a simple question: would you ever commit murder?

We need to dig deeper. Let’s clarify a bit: would you ever commit murder if you knew there would be no negative consequences?

What if the proposed victim had brutally abused and murdered your children, and would not face justice in any other way?

If you answered either “Yes” or “No” to any or all of these, you’d actually be wrong. The only possible answer to these is “maybe”. There is no way to know what you will or will not do in any future situation.

However, if I were to ask: “is it ever morally acceptable to commit murder?” the answer is quite simple: No.

Morally, it is never OK to commit murder, despite some backward parts of the world remaining committed to capital punishment (which is, indeed, a type of murder.)

The distance between what we know as being morally right or wrong and our commitment to that moral judgement in our actions can be vast and incredibly dynamic. One easy example is this: is it ever morally OK to lie? Technically, the answer here is more of a “maybe,” but even so, you negatively judge those that you believe to have lied for personal gain, while simultaneously fudging the information on your résumé.

Don’chya?

The presence of a moral sense is consistent with a focus of human evolution on mechanisms of individual behavior that maximize survival in social groups. Evolution has promoted social cooperation through emotions against harming others, a need for fairness and the enforcement of moral rules.

Mario F. Mendez, The Neurobiology of Moral Behavior: Review and Neuropsychiatric Implications (2009)

Our moral values feel universal and immutable. We struggle to talk about them or think about them in any other way. We disdain others who don’t share our moral values, and often dehumanise them entirely.

The Imperial Japanese in WWII believed dying for the emperor was the single highest moral good a human being could achieve on earth.

Compared to the Yankee boys in the Pacific who, although ready and willing to fight and avenge the attack on Pearl Harbour, would have preferred to be home and warm and safe and at peace.

They could not comprehend each other at all, and saw each other as less than fully human.

When starting and waging war it is not right that matters, but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Act brutally. Eighty million people must obtain what is their right. Their existence must be made secure. The stronger man is right. The greatest harshness.

A troglodyte with a toothbrush moustache.

Interestingly, that brutality Hitler spoke of to his Generals shortly before the war, was never intended for to the soldiers of the nations at war with him (except for the Russians, of course.)

No, that brutality he spoke of was meant only for a specific subset of people: those considered “racially impure” or “defective”, such as Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, the disabled, and many more men, women and children. The Germans would go on to murder millions of them with industrial efficiency.

Considering the fairly frequent self-justifications made by officials, they knew it was wrong. Hitler knew they would know, and demanded they operate with black hearts regardless.

Despite having some of the most potent chemical weapons ever made (even to this day) and having mass stockpiles of them ready to be used, Hitler refused to deploy them on the battlefield, not out of fear of retaliation, but as a moral judgement.

Imagine that.

The Japanese saw it as quite acceptable to decapitate captive enemy soldiers with a samurai sword, and did so frequently. They saw this as building up their own “Sei-shin”, or “Fighting Spirit”.

The Allies saw this as barbaric; they preferred to do their slaughter from a great distance and with superior technology, such as the fire-bombing attacks on Japanese cities which burned alive around half a million men, women and children.

Indeed, it was perhaps this idea that the Japanese had deliberately crossed some kind of universal red line into immorality in their waging of war which may have helped to loosen the Allies own inhibitions on morality, allowing them to adopt one of the most barbaric war-fighting tactics: terror-bombing.

More recently, there have been debates about how pharmacology may one day provide “moral enhancement”, in which certain drugs could re-enforce a specific set of moral ideals and behaviours. The problem is: whose moral ideals and behaviours, exactly?

It’s hard for many people to imagine that simply changing the balance of certain chemicals in the brain and body could change how we make moral decisions, but in fact, they already do.

Research in 2014 found that we already have such drugs, and they’re already impacting our morality so much more than we could imagine; beta-blockers for example were found to significantly reduce racial bias in tests with only a single dose.

So, if certain drugs can strengthen our moral inhibitions, there must be others which can weaken them, right?

Weakening the Will

In the late-2000s, a teacher from the UK was caught downloading sexually explicit images of minors. During the investigation and trial, it was found that the medications he was on - to treat his worsening Parkinson’s Disease - had been a direct cause of this paraphilia which had not been present before treatment.

The medications in question - primarily dopamine agonist levodopa, but also the many others which contribute to overall dopamine agonist effect - have long been linked to the development of various psycho-social/sexual disorders, but this was a fairly landmark case which essentially found that a psychoactive medication was the causative agent of a persons offending.

This leads one to wonder: how exactly does this occur, and in what circumstances?

As far as I am aware (IANAL), individuals that go on drug-fuelled binges and commit crimes are considered responsible for their actions under the law. The reason is fairly straight forward: despite the mass of information put out about the impact on decision making by various drugs - alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine, PCP, and more - choosing to take them anyway means you assume full moral and legal responsibility for your actions while under their influence.

However, in a case like this, the substance was medically necessary (quite literally life-saving), properly prescribed, and the potential influence on decision-making was not widely known.

All medications which have an effect can influence us in one way or another; even placebos which have no biological or chemical effect can change our perceptions and decision-making. Paracetamol reducing pain can result in a better mood, with decision making patterns that would be different to those made while in pain. Beta-blockers like Propanolol inhibit instant amygdala-driven fear responses, significantly reducing things like racial bias.

Then, there’s dopamine.

I’ve long been fascinated with the Nucleus Accumbens (NAcc). It’s a tiny little blob of brain cells (two of them actually, on both sides of the brain). It’s essentially the seat of motivation and goal-directed valuation.

My friend Kent C Berridge developed the Incentive Salience theory of motivation, in which the NAcc plays its part by calculating how much value something has. This calculation is done using dopaminergic neural circuits running along the mesolimbic pathway.

When we think of an action that might have some value - regardless of morality, consequences, effort, or any other cost - a signal is sent out along that pathway. The stronger the signal, the greater the potential value.

Inhibition then acts to counter that signal. It is essentially subtractive, performing the other part of the Volition Equation, which is to subtract cost - in effort, risk, social standing - from the original value, thus weakening the signal.

In order for an action to be taken, this signal must run the gauntlet of our inhibitions, and remain strong enough to clear a minimum threshold. Anything below that threshold is dropped.

Morality can play a part on both sides of the Volition Equation; either adding or subtracting, so on the one hand, doing the “morally right thing” can boost the motivating signal. On the other, it can slam the brakes on behaviours and actions which might be detrimental to those social measures.

Morality evolved to help us maintain conformity with a group, and as a core part of our own sense of self. So, while moral behaviour is an obvious benefit when in a group context, we still often exhibit moral behaviour when alone.

Sometimes, this need for conformity can work against us, and lead to horrible and dramatic consequences.

Drugs of Brute Force

A teenager is hanging out with his friends one day, when one of them - a leader in the group - brings out a crack pipe. The teenager has never seen one before, but he’s able to make an inference on what it’s likely to be. He’s been told, by his parents, teachers, the government, and others, never to try it, because one hit is all it takes to cement a permanent addiction and lead him into a life of ruin, destitution, and early death.

His friends, however, are all jovial about it.

“Nah that’s all bullshit, I can stop whenever I want to. I just like having fun, it feels fucking awesome. C’mon don’t be a pussy.”

The attitude of his in-group - the group with whom he identifies - significantly reduces the inhibitory effect of anxiety about the potential dangers, and his need to prove himself a bona-fide member of his in-group - a core part of moral decision making - proves stronger than the inhibitions of broader social norms regarding drug use.

So he takes the hit, and the addiction is indeed cemented permanently. It is a grievous mistake, the consequences of which will last his entire lifetime. Severe neurochemical changes have already taken place in his brain, not just to cement the addiction, but also to break many more of his existing inhibitions.

This straw-man example demonstrates the result of an explosion of dopamine in the NAcc occurring nearly immediately following the act of consuming the drug. Normal incentive-based re-enforcement learning in the human brain is hijacked, and the drug causes a reward signal so large that nothing else in normal life can ever compare.

Even if all µ-opioid signals - the neurotransmitters that cause pleasurable sensations, including endorphins - in the brain are blocked entirely, resulting in no pleasurable sensations whatsoever, the addiction would still be just as strong, because pleasure - or a “high” - isn’t what’s driving this; it’s pure chemical computation.

What happens when you take any action in which there is potential for reward - so basically any and all actions - is two-fold: first, a prediction signal is fired, indicating the expected reward for the course of action being contemplated. When the action is a novel one, the expected reward is a guess, synthesised from past experiences which might be similar, and from any observations of others taking the same action in the past. If - after various inhibitory processes have subtracted from the signal - it remains above the activation threshold, then you will take the action.

Second, upon completing the action, the brain awaits a signal to indicate the actual reward obtained. When this signal is received, the predicted signal is subtracted from the actual signal, and you get something called a Reward Prediction Error (RPE).

If the RPE is positive, then the actual reward was more than what was predicted, and structural changes occur in the brain, making you more likely to pursue the same reward in the future. If the RPE is negative, this has the opposite effect. The difference between positive and negative values is indicated by a phase change. This is part of Associative Learning. The greater the value - in either positive or negative directions - the more significant the structural changes.

What a drug of addiction does, however, is amplify the actual reward signal so much, that the most extraordinary changes in the brain occur. Typically, these are supposed to be small, and developed through repetition. Instead, a drug of addiction can, from a single solitary action, re-wire the brain to a similar degree as a concert pianist from decades of daily and intensive practice.

To be clear, this method is simple brute force: the moral compass is not necessarily re-oriented. Instead, it’s simply rendered ineffective at inhibition. It can’t subtract enough from the action signal to play any meaningful role, so long as cues related to the drug are triggered.

Drugs are not the only way to achieve this. For a small subset of the human population, there is a built-in dysfunction to their dopaminergic circuitry, one they were likely born with.

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Parkinson’s Paradox

Brain damage or dysfunction induced by neurological diseases can profoundly alter different higher-order human functions including moral, religious, and criminal behavior.

Ponsi et al. Human moral decision-making through the lens of Parkinson’s disease (2021)

I’ve tried gambling on a few occasions; playing roulette a few times at a casino, playing around on the stock market a little. Each time, the novelty for me is very brief, and as soon as I start losing money - an inevitability - I lose interest.

I’m not particularly motivated by money in general anyway.

For some folks, though, even the smallest chance for a big win is enough to power them on like a perpetual motion machine. Every throw of the dice - or in most cases, press of the button, such as in those awful pokies machines - is like a novel experience. Even when they know that the odds of winning are so small to be practically insignificant, it doesn’t faze them.

In patients suffering from Parkinson’s Disease, the vast majority exhibit “hyper-honest” behaviours and are extremely risk-avoidant compared to the general population. In fact, it’s such a common observation that it is sometimes referred to as a “Parkinson’s trait”. They are significantly more inhibited and reward-desensitised in general, meaning any given stimuli to the brain is less likely to reach the threshold needed for activating “motivational salience” (the property that drives us to take action in pursuit of something.)

In a study of moral decision-making among Parkinson’s patients, a small subset was found to exhibit the exact opposite behaviour. This subset is called the “hypo-honest” group; people who become much more prone to immoral tactics for personal gain as the disease takes hold. The factor most common among them is a history of gambling addiction.

This doesn’t make sense. How can people suffering from the same disease exhibit two completely opposite behaviours?

Their early symptoms before diagnosis don’t seem to differ much from the norm. Only once treatment begins do these new “hypo-honest” behaviours emerge.

In Parkinson’s disease, not all dopaminergic neurons in the brain are destroyed; the damage occurs primarily to those which help to control motor movement. Other pathways, such as the motivating Mesolimbic pathway, are much less affected.

So it turns out, the answer lies not in the disease, but in its treatment.

Pathways

There are several locations in the brain that produce dopamine, but the majority originates from just two areas. First is the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA), which fuels the “Value/Motivation Pathway” (the Mesocortical and Mesolimbic routes). Second is the Substantia Nigra, the engine of the “Motor Pathway.” Nestled within the Basal Ganglia, the Substantia Nigra exerts a “right of veto” over the motor cortex, and modulates movement like a sculptor shaping clay.

Parkinson’s disease strikes the Motor Pathway with surgical precision by destroying its main dopamine supplier: the Substantia Nigra. However, the characteristic motor symptoms only become recognisable after a staggering 70–80% of these neurons are gone. By the time of diagnosis, the Motor Pathway is already operating on a nearly-empty tank.

While medications like levodopa are life-changing - a miracle on par with penicillin - they suffer from a fundamental lack of selectivity. Chemistry is a blunt instrument, while biology is a masterpiece of organic “urban sprawl” without a tidy master plan. There is currently no practical way to ensure a drug reaches the Motor Pathway alone.

Instead, we are forced to flood the entire brain with newly minted dopamine. This excess is up-cycled by transporters across all circuits, including the Value/Motivation Pathway. This “brute-force” method is the central difficulty of all pharmacotherapy ( back me up here)

Adjusting neurochemistry isn’t as simple as adding fibre to your diet. Because the disease is progressive, symptoms begin while some natural production remains, yet we have no way to measure that remaining capacity in a living patient. Short of a post-mortem slicing of the Substantia Nigra into a kind of usu-zukuri sashimi to examine under a microscope, we are flying blind.

Consequently, treatment is a game of trial and error. We start with small doses and gradually increase them, trying to strike a balance before the “overflow” of dopamine into healthy systems triggers debilitating side effects, ranging from physical nausea to complex cognitive shifts.

We remain limited by this lack of targeting.

For now.

What comes next?

Research continues into delivery systems which might have improved tropism (selectivity). Since we know that compounds like MPTP and Manganese can selectively target and destroy the Substantia Nigra, there is hope; if those compounds can be so selective, there might be a way to achieve something similar and deliver dopamine to that area.

Levodopa alone can’t do this. Although it can cross the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB), finding its way to the right places would require something more.

During the last 2 years, research has been focussed on 2 main approaches to this problem:

1. Gene Therapy: The use of viral vectors (Adenovirus and Lentivirus) to biologically implant dopamine synthesis enzymes directly into the putamen, effectively turning other neurons in the Basal Ganglia into dopamine factories;

2. Nanotechnology and Molecular Transport: Utilising specially-engineered liposomes, exosomes and polymers which can cross the BBB, decorated with special homing beacon chemical compounds which can locate damaged areas to deliver their cargo of dopamine;

Although much of this research relates specifically to treating Parkinson’s, the mechanisms could pave the way for developing highly selective treatments for a whole range of neurological diseases and disorders.

ADHD patients, for example, often suffer from side-effects such as dyskinesia, dry mouth, elevated heart-rate and anxiety when taking their medications. If we could target just the areas of dysfunction mainly related to the motivation pathway, we could avoid many of those side-effects.

The better we get at highly selective treatment of the brain, the better are patient outcomes. This would also unlock doors to much more interesting experiments which could identify how specific parts of the brain respond to specific compounds.

However one thing is already quite clear: we are what our neurochemistry makes us.

Where’s your free will now?

Thank you so much for joining me on the last edition of A Chemical Mind for 2025. I’ve been running this little series for over 3 years now! How time flies. If I ever reach 1,000 subscribers, we’ll have to do a special edition.

In 2026, A Chemical Mind is moving away from being a purely personal-interest blog. Instead, I’m hoping we can be a focussed look at the very latest research and breakthrough findings, along with analysis on their potential applications, and deep-dives into the technology. Yes, that means a portion will be paid-only. Sadly, I haven’t been able to stay free of pay-walls.

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Thanks for reading. Until next year!

JUST TRY AND STOP ME!

Today we’re going into code land and talking about a pretty crazy technique for hiding stuff. It’s called Steganography.

It’s weird.

It’s cool.

It’s tricky.

…and it can be used for pure evil!

Take this picture:

If you save that picture to your computer right now, there is a message hidden within it. No, not visually. You couldn’t see it no matter how hard you tried.

The hidden message is encoded within the binary representations of the image pixels. Each pixel has 3 channels, for Red, Green and Blue (or 4 if it’s an image with transparency), each stored as a single number representing the “strength” of that colour channel in the overall colour mix.

When I was a kid, I learned that mixing all the colours gets you “brown”, but in the digital world, it actually makes white! (The more you know)

The image above is encoded in PNG format, which is a type of image compression that preserves a lot of image detail, making it “lossless,” unlike JPEG, whose compression degrades the image, making it “lossy”. So that means PNG is particularly well suited to our needs here.

The number for a single colour channel of a single pixel is encoded in binary and looks like this:

0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

That’s the binary number for 170.

An entire pixel made of 3 channels looks something like this

0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

That’s 3 “bytes” worth.

As a refresher, a “bit” can either be 1 or 0. The importance is in the grouped sequences of “bytes”, which in base-8 binary (the form most computers use) means 8 bits. So for every 8 bits, the computer does arithmetic to calculate the number that byte represents.

So, to a computer, this is what it sees:

R | G | B

0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 | 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 | 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

170 | 255 | 0

Each “bit” in binary basically means “should we add this number to the total?”, with 1 meaning “yes” and 0 meaning “no”; in electronics, it’s usually referred to as “on” and “off”.

Each position has a specific number assigned to it which will be added to the total if the position is marked as “on” (1).

128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1

This is how the number 6 is represented in binary:

0 0 0 0 0 1 1 0

Why? Think of it like this:

128 | 64 | 32 | 16 | 8 | 4 | 2 | 1

0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 1 | 0

We get 6, because 4 + 2 = 6, and the only two positions marked as “on” are the positions for 4 and 2. This technique can be used to represent any number between 0 and 255, which is why digital RGB colour channels range from 0 to 255.

You can also represent human language in binary, because most alphabets have less than 255 letters. For example, in ASCII, every character is assigned a number, which can be encoded in a single binary byte.

So an upper-case A is 65, which in binary is:

0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1

Anything differentiable into 2 can be “bits” in binary. Quite literally, binary means “two of”.

You could encode binary into a sequence of fruit, where apples are 1 and oranges are 0.

You could encode it into sound, where above a certain volume is 1, and below is 0.

You could even encode it into the distance between bumps on the side of a coin (this has been used as a method of recruiting young talent into intelligence agencies, just FYI)

In order to encode information into an existing image in a hidden manner, we need to be careful. If we take one RGB channel of one pixel, and change the byte completely, we could significantly change the visual representation of that pixel. Simply replacing the Red channels of the first 50 pixels could make it very obvious that something was wrong.

We need to be sneakier.

What if we only changed the last bit of every Red channel byte?

That way, it would guarantee that any change would be imperceptible to the human eye.

In order to be useful to us, when reading it, we’d have to treat every 8 pixels as a “byte”, and reading only the Least Significant Bit (LSB, i.e the last bit) of one byte out of every 3.

Why this technique is so cool, though, is that it doesn’t have to change every pixel. The data is already in binary, and there are only 2 possible values. That means we can re-use bits that are already in the position we want, making it even less obvious.

However, it does mean our secret data takes up more space. So if we wanted to encode the letter A into an image, we would need at least 8 pixels to work with.

Ok cool, so what?

It’s all well and good to have yet another way to send secret messages to your friends, that’s very cute. What else can you do with it?

I’m so glad I asked.

Recently, some very malicious individuals used a similar method to sneak hidden executable code past the human and machine reviewers of code submitted to the Mozilla Firefox browser extension repository.

It’s basically like an “app store”, where each submission has to be reviewed to look for code that could bypass security mechanisms and violate the terms of service (by secretly spying on users data and form submissions, for example).

Typically, reviewers look for code that is designed to load and then execute other code from somewhere, like a web server controlled by the malicious agent.

This is called “Command & Control” (or C2), where an attacker can send commands remotely to the computers with the malicious extension installed.

As long as no such mechanism is found, and all existing code in the submission is self-contained and abides by the terms of service, it’s given the green light.

Historical tidbit: I wrote probably the very first web-browser worm that utilised this kind of Command & Control in the wild, in 2006. Yep, I was a wild kid, great at parties.

But here’s a trick: every app store has a method for submitting an “icon” image. Take this one from my very popular BlockedStack extension:

These are (almost) always PNG, so that they can have transparent backgrounds. These icons are also frequently loaded directly by the apps or browser extensions themselves. That means one can write code that reads the icon, extracts any hidden data from it, and convert it to executable code.

That’s what the malicious actors behind a recently-discovered malware called GhostPoster did.

The code for loading the C2 system was hidden in the PNG data of the icon, but using a method far less sophisticated than the one I described here: they simply append the code directly to the end of the file itself.

Image decoding algorithms are very forgiving. They will often treat excess data as junk and ignore it, thereby not affecting the displayed image at all. This allowed the malware to fly under-the-radar for a long time.

So think about it: with so many different ways to hide binary data, where else could malicious code be hiding?

Almost literally anywhere.

That’s all for now, thank you for taking this diversion into a side-quest with me. My hacker background means I have a lot of this stuff floating around in my brain, and it’s fun to share.

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On Sunday afternoon, one of Australia’s most-iconic locations and a place I know extremely well, became the site of a massacre, carried out with legally-owned firearms, against innocent people - including children - engaged in Jewish religious traditions. It is alleged that the perpetrators had pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State terror group.

Australia is a safe place, by and large. The old cliché of “it’s such a safe town, nothing like this ever happens here” is basically true of the entire country. However, this hasn’t always been the case.

One of Australia’s modern defining events was the Port Arthur massacre in 1996. 35 people were killed, another 24 injured, in what is still Australia’s worst-ever mass shooting. It was also the last mass-murder shooting spree we would have until 2019, a full 23 years later, where 4 people were killed in Darwin by a lone gunman.

Following that event, our conservative Prime Minster at the time - John Howard - made it his personal mission to introduce strict gun laws. He did so at great personal and political risk, as Australia was a fairly gun-friendly place at that time. It was an act of singular political courage, and despite the mass of propaganda and misinformation that comes from American gun-nuts and local Firearms lobbyists, our laws worked to stop a record of carnage and death that was made all too easy by access to firearms.

From the Wikipedia page on Mass Shootings in Australia, from 1996 - 1982:

In total, that’s 25 instances in just 14 years. That’s a shocking amount for a country like ours, with a population of only 20 million.

Here’s what I found even more shocking, however: many of these were exclusively cases of familicide:

8 of the 25 total instances were murder-suicides, where a man shot and killed a wife/ex-wife, and themselves. In 6 of these cases, they also massacred all their own children. That is a heartbreaking statistic.

Although massacres (defined as killing sprees with 4 or more fatalities not including the perpetrator) with guns dropped off radically following the introduction of Australia’s strict gun reform in the aftermath of 1996, looking at the data in the 25 years since then is still fairly harrowing:

If we look again at how many of these were cases of familicide, thankfully the number drops:

However it seems all massacres (where 4 or more people are killed, not including the perpetrator) involving firearms since Port Arthur (and before Bondi) have been Familicide except for two: Darwin 2019, and the 2022 Wieambilla shooting in which a couple under the influence of extreme psychotic delusions driven by conspiracy theories ambushed police officers who were simply checking to make sure they were OK, as they hadn’t contacted anyone for months.

Instances of shooting sprees have seemingly been on the rise again since 2016, and the other unfortunate fact is that despite how strict our gun laws are, we still permit people to own firearms - typically long-barrel rifles which might be used for pest control on rural properties, or for sport-shooting. The fact that a single person can own 6 of these deadly weapons is frankly outrageous. To own one is often too many, and quite frankly, I don’t see a place in Australia for firearms outside of very strict rural pest control settings.

We mourn the lives lost, including that of a 10-year-old child, at the awful events on Bondi Beach. As our Prime Minister has said, hate must be eradicated from our shores.

I hope that, as we consider the coming major overhaul of Australia’s gun laws in the aftermath, let us also keep in mind those children who have been lost over the years after a parent used a legally-owned firearm to snuff out their lives in murder-suicide.

On the 30th of November 2022, the technological landscape tilted on its axis. OpenAI released ChatGPT, and suddenly Generative AI was the only thing anyone could talk about. We became obsessed with Large Language Models, transformers, and the eerie ability of a machine to predict the next token in a sentence.

Just two months earlier, in September 2022, a show called Pantheon aired on AMC. While the rest of the world was about to lose its mind over a chat bot, Pantheon was quietly laying out a roadmap for something far more profound: Computer-Simulated Human Consciousness, or “Uploaded Intelligence” (UI).

It contained some of the most realistic depictions of mind uploads, and the potential effects on society, that I have ever seen. It grapples with the hardest philosophical questions head-on, such as the true meaning of consciousness, personality cults, the consequences of immortality and digital death, self-copying, and the universe-as-simulation theory.

I don’t think many people saw it when it came out. (I didn’t)

Yet there are so many fantastic, mind-bending, life-changing things about AMC’s Pantheon not just in its philosophy, but also the way it depicts cyber-security, software engineering and big data concepts; not to mention the cut-throat world of big tech both within and beyond Silicon Valley. It’s not perfect, but it’s easily the most accurate I’ve ever seen from a show of this kind.

Watching it today makes it feel somewhat prophetic, but likely was the result of extremely good footwork by the producers and their team, getting the most up-to-date picture of the inner world of big tech at the time, between 2021 and 2022. Facebook became Meta at the end of 2021 as a result of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse strategy, and you see a lot of those ideas were depicted in Pantheon.

We also see clear depictions of things Generative AI are doing today: chat interfaces with digital intelligence, for instance.

The digital intelligences in Pantheon weren’t artificial neural networks, but fully scanned and emulated human brains. They call these “Uploaded Intelligence”, or UI (which is confusing in tech, since UI stands for User Interface, but we’ll roll with it.)

In the show, a UI is created by laser-scanning a biological brain, layer by layer, down to the stem. The brain is destroyed in the process - vaporised - but stored apparently in its entirety in digital form. This is a human mind, stripped of its biological substratum which is replaced by silicon.

The entire connectome is then reconstructed digitally, presumably with simulated sensory receptors; the rest of the central nervous system is not included in the actual scan.

Somewhere in between all that, there is some magic fairy dust that allows the full emulation to happen, but since that is still one of the great millennium-type problems of our time, I don’t expect them to have that bit of detail.

At one point in the show, a UI produces an 80-page patent in seconds. Although GenAI today would likely screw that up with hallucinations, you can see the resemblance. It feels eerily prescient.

However, we’re not here to talk about GenAI, and neither does the show: the real focus is on the Uploaded Intelligence and the ability to fully simulate a human being computationally. This requires a few major assumptions:

1. The brain - that is, the cortex and brain stem - constitutes the entirety of who we are as individuated conscious beings

2. An individual’s behaviours, emotions, and cognition, can be simulated in their entirety from a scan of the cortical network using classical and quantum computing platforms

Before we can even begin to tackle these assumptions, we need to understand what it is to compute, to be intelligent, and to be conscious.

I Am, Therefore I Compute

When we perform a mental task, sometimes we are conscious of the effort expended to perform it. Other times, we are unconscious of that effort, and an input gets processed and turned into an output which is re-integrated with our conscious awareness sometime later.

To us, these results arrive as flashes of inspiration or insight; that is the moment of reintegration. In truth, the brain was likely working on that problem for a period of time without you consciously being aware of it.

These unconscious computations are presently done in our biological circuitry. Technically, the physical medium of computation doesn’t matter, and could be electronic. However, there is an inherent problem in viewing the brain as equivalent to electronic circuits.

Classical computing and electronics are based on gates. Gates allow you to perform simple, but exact, operations on incoming electrical signals. For example, an OR gate takes 2 inputs, and so long as at least one of those inputs is receiving a signal, the OR gate outputs a signal. A simple way to model this would be like:

0 OR 0 = 0

1 OR 0 = 1

0 OR 1 = 1

1 OR 1 = 1

The number 1 denotes an electrical signal, while 0 is no signal.

Meanwhile, an AND gate takes 2 inputs, and only outputs a signal if both inputs have a signal:

0 AND 0 = 0

1 AND 0 = 0

0 AND 1 = 0

1 AND 1 = 1

Gates like these feel intuitive to us. They follow a simple logic. They’re also exact and about as deterministic as it gets. They have no hidden influences outside the two expected inputs which can affect the result; so 0 AND 1 should never result in 1, just as 2 + 2 should never equal 5.

Brains, and biology in general, are nothing like that.

The thing about biological computation is that it is fuzzy. For most of us, doing novel arithmetic in our head is a combination of heuristics learned from repetition in similar tasks, which we use to get a sense of approximating a value; then more heuristics refine it down until we have a value in mind that we feel confident enough about.

Let’s do a quick experiment. Solve the following 2 problems:

1. What is half of 10,000,000?

2. What is half of 8,626,400?

Which one required more time/mental energy, the bigger number or the smaller one?

If we followed a purely computational way of thinking about things, our expectation should be that the bigger number would be more computationally expensive to calculate than the smaller one. However for the human brain, it’s not dependent on the size of the numbers we’re working with, but on their composition.

In the first problem, although the number was larger, its composition was vastly simpler, made almost entirely of zeroes. To solve it, we could reduce it by 6 decimal places, and then the problem becomes “What is half of 10?”

The second smaller number had many more non-zero digits, meaning we could not reduce it in the same way. Instead, our natural inclination is to solve for each non-zero digit separately: “What is half of 8? What is half of 6? What is half of 2?” and so on.

1 problem instantly turns into 5.

“Therefore, our brains are not computers, therefore, our brains cannot be simulated by computers.”

Woah hold up there cowboy, not so fast. Plenty of things which are not computers are simulated on computers literally all the time in every field ever; we just haven’t simulated literally everything in the universe that exists.

This argument, that the brain is not a computer and therefore could never be modelled by one, always drives me a little insane: just because it doesn’t follow gate-based logic does not mean it is not performing computation, and does not mean that it cannot be simulated computationally. It is, and it can. The problem here is one of dimensionality.

To simulate the human brain, you need way more than merely its connectome. We know this from simulations of C. Elegans, the Nematode Worm whose species all have exactly the same number of neurons: 302, no more, no less. We have been working to simulate its entire set of known behaviours for decades computationally, and we have made progress; but consider how incredibly simple C. Elegans is, and yet we still haven’t figured it out? How complicated can a near-microscopic worm possibly be?

Some have reached the conclusion that the complexity is not in simulating the worm, but rather, simulating chemistry itself.

Chemistry is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated and most powerful phenomenon in the physical universe. Chemistry is like the operating system, the essential firmware, upon which the software of human minds can run. Even firmware requires something firmer: hardware. That’s quantum mechanics. That’s effectively the architecture upon which the Firmware must execute.

Indeed, if the answer is that we need to simulate chemistry itself, then think of our predicament this way:

Imagine you were trying to simulate a classical gate-based Turing machine on some highly exotic computer, and you only managed to implement AND and OR gates; then you proceed to try running DOOM on it (as is tradition.)

You wouldn’t get very far, would you?

Technically, we can build a complete computing machine using any combination of “NOT” operator with “AND” or “OR” gates, but we don’t even know the NOT operator exists, let alone what a universal Turing machine even is.

That’s more or less where we are in the grand scheme of things when it comes to simulating all of chemistry.

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I Am, Therefore I Intellect

Another very common assumption made by just about everyone is that the ability to think implies intelligence. It’s also extremely common to conflate intelligence with emotion, with motivation, with the survival instinct. This is part of the problem which has often taken debates on simulated cognition in circles: we assume a full suite of human cognitive abilities as the baseline for any model of cognition.

Although you likely cannot have intelligence without the ability to think in some sense, it is not necessarily a given that thought brings with it intelligence. It is also essential to be aware of the fact that emotion is not included by default; in fact, emotion is a wholly separate concept. A machine that can think is not, by default, emotional. To be emotional, it would need to be given emotions explicitly; emotions evolved much earlier than intelligent cognition, and were a useful tool for boosting our instinctual motivations which promoted survival.

We tend to assume that a super-intelligence will naturally develop super-ambition, or super-benevolence, or super-hatred. But this is a fallacy.

This is best explained by the Orthogonality Thesis, proposed by philosopher Nick Bostrom. It states, effectively, that intelligence and final goals are independent variables. You can have a clumsy intelligence that wants to conquer the world, and you can have a god-like super-intelligence whose only motivation is to count every paperclip in the universe.

In a “pure” AI, there is no inherent reason for it to care about its own survival unless we program it to. It has no fear of death, no pride, no resentment.

This is where Pantheon (and the concept of Uploaded Intelligence) gets interesting. The UIs in the show are not “Pure AI” sitting on an abstract graph. They are brute-force scans of biological architecture. They inherit the “spaghetti code” of human evolution. They maintain their human wants and human needs. They carry the baggage of the limbic system simulated alongside the cortex.

If we are to achieve full emulation of a human mind, we must be prepared to emulate biological drives, emotions, hormones, the lot.

A Means Without An End

Finally, we arrive at the most challenging hurdle of all. Let’s assume we solve the chemistry problem. Let’s assume we achieve full emulation. We boot up the simulation. The digital eyes open.

The entity speaks.

It says, “I am.”

How do we know it is really aware?

This is part of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. If we wanted to simulate a human mind, we must assume consciousness is part of the success criteria. Whatever else it might be, it must be conscious.

Yet here we are, at the end of 2025, and guess what? We still have no idea how to tell for sure. We can’t even be sure that a rock is not conscious. I’m serious.

Think of it like this; what, exactly, is conscious, when it comes to a human being? Is it the brain alone? Or the body? Do the proteins that make up the neuron cell count as being conscious? Is it the whole system?

In our daily lives, we assume other humans are conscious because they act like us and are made of the same wet biological stuff as us. We assume a rock is not conscious because… it just sits there.

This is an assumption based purely on external observation. We have no “consciousness detector”, yet. We cannot measure the internal subjective experience (qualia) of another being.

Philosophers talk about the P-Zombie (Philosophical Zombie); a being that is physically identical to a human, acts exactly like a human, screams when you pinch it, and laughs when you tell a joke, but has absolutely zero inner experience. The lights are on, but supposedly, nobody is home.

If we simulate a mind on a silicon chip (or a quantum substrate), and it screams in pain, is it actually feeling pain? Or is it just executing a code function, equivalent to:

if (pain_intensity > 3) play_audio(”ouch.mp3”)

I don’t personally believe P-Zombies can exist. If I simulate the universe, and within that simulated universe I also simulate a human being, and the simulation behaves exactly the way a human would in every case, to the degree that they are entirely indistinguishable from any “real” human being when observed from the outside, on what grounds can one deny its consciousness?

If we can’t even prove a rock isn’t silently judging us, we certainly won’t be able to prove a digital mind isn’t experiencing qualia.

The Integrated Future

Simulating the human mind in its entirety, including chemistry, is something which we will not see happen for a very long time; some have estimated a timeline of 100 years from where we are now.

However, I believe there is a kind of part-way point which we are fast approaching, and when it hits, could herald another exponential growth curve in technology.

For at least the past 10 years, I have thought about a future where the integration between the biological and digital is real and deep.

It’s something I call “Neuro-Integration.”

It’s the idea that we can extend on the human brain’s existing biological modules of cognition, adding digital ones. Not only could we add additional sensors - infra-red video, say - we could add vastly more powerful computational abilities, such as floating-point arithmetic, physics simulations, statistics, and more, all accessible directly to the conscious mind at a thought.

Simply being able to control your laptop’s cursor with your mind isn’t what I’m talking about; we already can do some of this sort of stuff, but it’s fairly pedestrian. I’m talking about an input-output loop, two-way communication between mind and digital computers, via Brain Control Interfaces (BCI) and Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) devices, without invasive techniques such as surgical implants.

The technologies as they exist today are far from perfect; challenges remain to be solved around the level of accurate targeting, focal area, inter-individual variability and sensitivities, information encoding, and much more. Regardless, I truly believe these are solvable challenges.

It could reduce to zero the friction and effort required to make use of terrifically accurate and high-speed computation. Similar to how LLMs can access tools, these tools could one day be accessible directly from the human mind, and the result could arrive the same way as a flash of insight or inspiration does now.

If we combine this with various multi-modal ML technologies, and solve the problem of encoding various information modes so the brain can understand it, we could expand upon our own ability to visualise in our minds eye. We would never have to search our memory for the meaning of an uncommon word again; it could invoke an instant dictionary look-up. Semantic memory could be extended in ways which we can’t imagine, becoming a near-instant vector graph query for extended contextual information.

Hell, just imagine if you could add to your mental workspace with custom scripts, like you can with a shell environment.

What’s more, there are still questions of basic user experience, privacy and security to be answered before we can turn it into a platform for extending cognition: how does the human mind send input to the device, and in what manner does it perceive output? How do we minimise the risk of malicious passive scanning of brain activity? How do we address the risks of misuse and data security? How do we avoid amplifying inequality?

Perhaps the biggest challenge to the general availability of this technology - for very good reason - is the slow pace of regulatory approval.

Regardless, there is no doubt in my mind that this technology is coming, and probably faster than we think. The real question is: will we allow a small gaggle of tech bros to dominate the space like they have in Generative AI and Cloud Computing? Or will we take our destiny into our own hands for once?

I am, as you would know, not a fan of “big tech”; we can already see the insanity going on with the narcissists at the top of most of these companies, whose greed is now amplified to 11, desperate to replace human workforces with anything they can.

I am also much more cynical about the recent GenAI boom than most. However, I also know that some of that cynicism is a pure emotional response to the fact that this amazing technology humanity has developed has made that small gaggle of greedy narcissists at the top of Big Tech so much richer and more powerful than anyone ever thought possible, and it disgusts me.

The technology itself, however, when stripped of all the amphetamine-like hype and euphoria - though knowing CEOs as I do, it’s not amphetamine, it’s cocaine - is really quite remarkable.

The track we are currently on is one where corporations are desperately trying to scrape away the human “chattel”, whom they have long relied upon for their intellectual capabilities, in a race to replace almost all of their operations with machines, keeping on a skeleton crew of human meat sacks to monitor them, upgrade their hardware, keep the AC running; until they eventually get replaced by robotics. Meanwhile, the CEOs, board members and shareholders continue to rake in money until the mathematically inevitable collapse of aggregate demand.

I believe there is a future where human intelligence and machine intelligence are not in conflict. That may not be the future we are currently hurtling towards at trillion-dollar speeds; but it is reachable from where we are.

All that is required is for people who believe in the future of human kind and our continued relevance, who believe in fundamental ethics and open technology, to come together and start a conversation about how we can really create a future for all humanity, together.

Not for profit, not for domination, not for any one nation; for everyone.

Where we go from here should be up to us all.

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of A Chemical Mind; what do you think of the possibilities of neuro-integration technology? What did you think of Pantheon? Would you ever upload yourself to the cloud? Please let me know in the comments on the Substack article!

If you’re interested in further discussion on neuro-integration from all aspects and angles, I’ve set up a discord server here. Come join the fun!

Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.

“So far, there is no convincing evidence for Abdominal Migraines. Migraines just don’t work like that.”

These were the words spoken to me by a Head of Neurology; a very accomplished man at the top of his career, running one of the most prestigious Neurology centres in the country.

He was smiling paternally at me from across the desk, his arms leaning against it and his hands interlocked in front of him, his suit and tie practically glistening with the importance and prestige that oozed from every fibre of his being.

I, the distinctly unimportant, uneducated, scruffy-haired kid in torn jeans and t-shirt that I was, glistened mostly with nervous sweat as I shifted uneasily in my seat, adjusting my direction of lean from left to right.

I never sit straight up in any chair ever; I’m always tilted somehow. Just more comfortable that way.

“Ok, well, what do you think it could be?” I asked. I knew he would have no good answer. Nothing I hadn’t already tried.

I was right.

“Sounds like an allergy, you should see a dietician.”

It’s hard to tell someone whose expertise rightfully deserves respect that they are wrong, especially when you don’t have the benefit of all those many years of medical school, real-world experience and countless citations, awards, and grants to your name. I can’t help but cringe to the depths of my soul when I read stories of folks who are into homoeopathy proudly proclaiming victory over medical science, because “it worked for me!” and so I have developed a habit of deferring to the experts, even when I doubt them. However, not all experts are made equal, and not all illness is necessarily found in a diagnostic manual either.

The reason I was even here, in this room, speaking to this highly accomplished medical professional, had nothing to do with abdominal migraines, or migraines at all for that matter.

Several months earlier, I’d had a tonic-clonic (grand mal) seizure. They were trying to find out if I had epilepsy (thankfully it was my first and so far only seizure, and no epilepsy was found). While I was there, I decided to ask them about something my doctor had mentioned to me. These were experts in the field of brain-things, surely they’d know something about migraines.

Right?

The fact is, I had gastrointestinal problems literally my entire life, and they go through periods of variation, kind of like “phases”. Y’know, like one day you discover them dressed up all in black, smelling of cigarette smoke and listening to My Chemical Romance. “It’s just a phase.”

Sometimes, a phase would manifest as episodes of excruciating abdominal pain. Sometimes, it would be bloating and general discomfort. Most of the time, it included nausea. Nausea was the worst, particularly because I had a fear of vomiting (something called “emetophobia”). It would often send me into a spiralling panic attack, forcing me to pace the floor, back and forth sometimes for hours, controlling my breathing and repeating little “safety” behaviours to myself.

Though certainly unwelcome, it was never a huge concern. That is, until I began working full time. There were days when I would be scared to get on the train in the morning when nauseous. A couple of times, I had to get off at a stop part-way to work and call someone to pick me up and take me home again.

Fear and tunnel-focus can make us do weird stuff. Since I was young, it had been drilled in to me that if I ever felt like I was in trouble or having a crisis at a train station or some other public place, that I should just ask for help. I don’t know if you have ever tried asking for help when your stomach is turning itself in knots and you are in a full-blown panic, possibly on the verge of ejecting its contents: I did, at a central train station, and I got nothing but confused, bemused and mildly annoyed apathy. In all fairness, what are they supposed to do?

Then again, what was I supposed to do??

My mind returned to the Neurologist’s office, and his suggestion of a dietician.

“I already tried that.”

A single eyebrow on the Neurologist’s face migrated north, followed eventually by the other eyebrow, before the whole face gave in to that expression people use when they no longer want to bother. That, or he didn’t believe me. I mean, I was so skinny and pale and young, I bet he thought I just needed some protein, grit, and a tan.

“Well, if it’s not dietary, then it’s almost certainly psychological. There is, medically speaking, nothing wrong with you.”

I realised this conversation wasn’t getting anywhere, and ultimately it didn’t really matter. I had suffered this for so long, I had come to assume it was going to be my life now. I was just being naive, thinking that there might be hope for me. That maybe there might be a legitimate explanation for my infuriatingly inexplicable malady.

My relationship with food had never been what one might call “normal”. I’d always been skinny, mostly because I was incredibly active and athletic, but also because I just wasn’t interested in food as a thing. I ate because I was hungry, and only to satiate that hunger.

For the past few years leading up to this conversation, my stomach issues had escalated significantly; that nausea which used to stop by just to visit before leaving again, turned into something called cyclic vomiting, with cold sweats and excruciating abdominal pain. It would turn up seemingly out of nowhere, though it was more likely during some anxiety-inducing event; it wasn’t consistent in that regard.

I went to hospital one time, thinking I was dying. I will never forget the looks of complete disdain from the hospital staff on that particular day. I was in total crisis, and I was made to feel like a fool for seeking medical attention. Thankfully that was the only time I had such an experience with a hospital (though perhaps that’s due to my avoiding them.)

Much of my medical history was psychiatric: ADHD, ASD, Panic Disorder and general Anxiety. Autism Spectrum Disorder has a lot of overlap with gastric discomfort and upsets, so for a while we thought maybe it was just more of that manifesting. My father had died of Crohns disease when I was 20, so we were also on the look-out for any signs that I might also develop the disease, but no sign of that was present.

Doctors had looked everywhere, poked and prodded, taken nearly my body weight in blood to be run through every test, had scopes of my gastrointestinal tract both up and down.

They looked for cancer, diabetes, thyroid issues, drugs, various types of flu, they even wondered whether I still had dormant malaria from the times I had contracted P. Falciparum during my time in the Solomon Islands. They looked for Hepatitis, Gastroenteritis, Meningitis, Strep, they even checked me for ticks. I was checked for Toxoplasmosis, considering my lifelong history with cats. They looked for gastric ulcers, appendicitis, liver function, kidneys. They did an MRI on me. Actually, they did 3 of them.

Nothing.

Not. One. Thing. Was. Found.

And yet, I was still losing weight, despite already being the skinniest guy I knew. It horrified me. I was struggling to keep food down. I was gaunt, pale, a bag of bones.

I chanced to bump into someone I hadn’t seen for a very long time in the street one day, and they were shocked when they recognised me. “Are you ok?” I remember them asking. “Are you... like, sick?”

I looked like a cancer patient.

I didn’t know how to explain. I couldn’t really say “Ok, sit down, this is gonna take a while”. So I shrugged. “It’s fine.”

The evening before my neurology appointment was when I had seen my GP. I had turned up to the clinic covered in sweat, trembling like mad, gaunt, and emaciated. It felt like an attack of the flu, but there was no virus. I was nearing a point of no return. If I couldn’t escape this cycle, I was seriously considering ending it all.

After listening to my entire medical history, I remember him sitting back in his chair, hands folded across his chest, staring at the wall. The look on his face was utterly perplexed. It was a look I hadn’t actually seen before in any medical professional. It was strangely reassuring. Perplexity meant consideration. It meant he was seriously thinking about my situation. He was running it through in his mind, peering into his experience and education, searching for a glimmer of light somewhere in the darkness.

He was taking me seriously.

“Hmm...”, he broke the silence after a minute or two.

“It’s a long shot, but from what you’ve told me, there’s only one thing you might not have tried yet.”

My ears perked up. “Have you heard of abdominal migraines?”

I hadn’t.

“This is unlikely to work, but I think we should try you on a simple beta blocker. The good thing is that it has almost no side-effects, and we can stop it any time without harm. But there is a tiny chance that it might help, we can just see. How does that sound?”

I jumped at it. A tiny chance that I hadn’t yet taken was a chance worth taking. I was booked in to see him again the next week.

When I came back to see him, I nearly cried. It was the first time in years that I had gone a whole week without nausea. No nausea whatsoever. No vomiting. I could keep food down. I hadn’t had a crisis on a train while commuting. No crises while at the office. I could even eat yoghurt and I felt absolutely bloody fine.

“You really don’t know what you’ve done for me”, I told him.

My voice was breaking. I didn’t want to come across as melodramatic, but it was difficult to avoid: this man had saved my life. Somehow, a simple idea, and a simple remedy, had cured me from an illness that had been utterly intractable, an illness which had eluded so many more highly-paid and highly-respected experts, many of whom preferred to think I must be making it all up rather than admitting to their failure.

It’s been over 10 years since then. I got back to a healthy weight (maybe a tiny bit over-healthy), I re-discovered food (it helps that my wife was once a chef), and after a few years, I didn’t even need the beta-blockers anymore. The migraines are gone, and they’ve never returned.

Research on abdominal migraines is still severely lacking.

Most cases are found in children and adolescents, and mainly in women and girls. It’s startlingly rare, but that’s more likely a factor of its vague diagnostic criteria. It’s one of these “functional gastrointestinal disorders” which can only be diagnosed by eliminating literally everything else which could conceivably cause that particular set of symptoms.

Wanna know what else causes these sorts of symptoms?

Frikkin everything, ever.

So that doesn’t help. I don’t envy those tasked with diagnosing people like myself, let alone curing. It’s not easy. Regardless, there are several clear hints about where to look for the problem.

It seems there are two possible biological mechanisms:

1. Arbitrary electrical discharge from the hypothalamus into the cortex, brain stem, and out through the spinal cord

2. Variable blood flow through the cerebral artery

It’s highly likely that they’re not mutually exclusive mechanisms, and could explain some variability in the effectiveness of simple treatment with beta-blockers. However, the study numbers are so small, there simply is not enough evidence to clearly show efficacy of any treatment.

People aren’t known to die of this condition.

It’s not heart disease, cancer, or stroke. It’s not a deadly parasite. It’s not flesh-eating. Not only that, but it’s so damn vague, and super rare in adults.

So who cares?

I care.

Those suffering it care.

Sometimes, you just happen to get something that isn’t in the textbook. In that case, fuck the textbook.

Find a way anyway.

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Most of you know me by now, I think. I’m a socialist, with radical leftist pacifist leanings. I have all the leftist badges, although I don’t wear them on my sleeve. I won’t bore you with them here.

I also frikkin love babies.

Noisy? Yes.

Smelly? Yes.

Utterly incoherent?? Yes.

Cute as hell? So much yes.

Despite this, something has always made me feel uncomfortable about identifying myself with “pro-natalism”. The reason is fairly simple: it tends to be conflated with the pro-life, anti-contraception crowd, not to mention the “your body, my choice” types who like to troll Xitter.

Quite frankly, contraception is one of the greatest public health boons in human history, and has saved an incalculable number of lives and livelihoods. Yet somehow, there have always been those among the super-religious of many kinds (and commonly right-wing though not exclusively) who have a thing for banning contraceptives; today you’ll typically find them wrapping it in the guise of “trying to stop a population crash”.

So I started to ask myself: is it possible to be pro-natalist and pro-contraceptive/pro-choice? Is it possible to have a pro-natalist policy which doesn’t infringe on the rights of women?

I think the answer is “Yes”.

But then I realised I hadn’t even asked myself the very first and most obvious question:

Question #1: What Is The Problem To Be Solved?

Already, I’m struggling. I’m not entirely sure there is a real problem (yet).

For many decades particularly following the baby-boom, there was widespread worry and panic about the possibility of over-population. For most of that time, there was good reason to be worried: it did look like we were in for unchecked exponential growth. In fact, we were in exponential growth for a while following World War 2.

See the following charts, from Our World In Data:

Y’know the term “baby boomer”? Yeah, that’s the sharp mountain bit. That was a thing that happened, and it was indeed exponential.

In close-up, it looks like the population boom only started to emerge around 1925 at the earliest. There was, without doubt, an absolute explosion in population growth from 1945, peaking in 1963 and has been falling ever since. However, if we zoom waaaaaay the fuck out:

Population growth has had a foot on the accelerator since the 1700s, and once we discovered how to treat disease - and, more importantly, avoid much of it - population hopped on a rocket sled and rode that sucker until the fuel ran out.

Right now, and since about 1974, we’re in linear growth with roughly 1 billion people added to the pile every 12-14 years. Based on projections by the UN, world population is expected to peak in 2068 at 10.43 billion, and dip slightly.

It seems to me that we might now be extrapolating that little dip the same way that people extrapolated the exponential growth phase - by simply assuming the immediate trendline to continue indefinitely - thus beginning a new panic about the coming “end of humanity.”

Whereas to me, what seems more likely is a kind of population plateau, rather than a crash (let alone one so apocalyptic).

As Hans Rosling once illustrated in a lecture on the subject (he did it with physical blocks, so I made a digital version):

Even without a crash, we are presented with several economic problems. The first is that any country which is losing population is going to have a hell of a time. The East Germans built the Berlin Wall not to keep out spies or prevent sabotage: they simply could not afford the loss of population to the west, and their primary financial backer - the Soviet Union - would not pay the bill indefinitely.

It’s often said that economics is not a zero-sum thing, but at a population plateau, it would certainly resemble one in important ways. There would only be a certain number of possible consumers world-wide, and population shift through migration is far less likely to be offset in any meaningful way by birth rates. That means there will most definitely be some losers.

So, is there a problem?

Well, maybe. It’s all very speculative at this point. If we remain at a plateau as I expect we probably will, things will be interesting for a little while, but very manageable.

It only becomes a real problem in the event of an actual crash, and in the interests of hedging ones bets, it’s probably a good idea to at least start working on the problem now, so that we’re not caught out if such a time ever comes.

So really, you could say pro-natalism is a bit of a “break glass” stance for me. If the future of the human population is ever at stake due to a crashing birth rate, then consider me a pro-natalist. Until then, babies are cute, and sex is awesome.

As I see it, there are two main directions pro-natalist policy can take:

• Subtractive policy: subtract the right to control how many children you have by making it difficult to have sex for fun or terminate a pregnancy (whether simply accidental, or due to a sex crime)

• Additive policy: add support and assistance to people who want to have kids (or more kids) to ease the burden on the family

Some people even suggest - as in one of the many really dumb-ass viral Xitter posts from a few months ago - that we should literally stop educating women, which is yet another wonderful example of subtractive policy.

All these policies cost money, but only one has a hope in hell of actually working and not leading to a mass proletarian revolt. Can you guess which one it is? Hint: it’s the one that isn’t a buzz-kill.

No, I’m not getting into an abortion debate in the comments. Don’t do it.

Yeah but what if?

Ok ok, lets talk about Japan. I know you really wanted to. Let’s do it.

Japan is a fascinating case study for all sorts of things, but population dynamics has been a big concern for them since the “lost decade” of the 1990s. From October 2021 to October 2022, Japan’s population shrank by more than half a million people. According to the Financial Times, they lose 100 people every single hour.

You might be surprised to know, however, that Japan isn’t actually the most relevant example for our purposes here. By far, that honour belongs to South Korea.

South Korea has, for many years, had the worst birth rate in the entire world, and it gets worse year after year. In fact, it’s so bad right now, that within 50 years, their work-age population will have fallen by half.

HALF.

That’s mind-boggling. In fact, I dare say that’s catastrophic.

This is all despite the vast amounts of money they have been throwing at the problem for the last 20 years, and despite politicians having declared it a legitimate national emergency. Honestly, for once, I don’t think that’s hyperbolic in any way shape or form.

At the same time, South Korean women are saying that government simply is not listening to them.

Whaaaaat?!

How can this be? Surely, incentives would be the most preferred way of going about finding a solution to the problem?

Clearly, spending to incentivise having children has not worked, neither for South Korea, nor Japan which has been taking many of the same approaches to a problem that has haunted them since the 90s.

Actually, no, that’s not really true. We can’t just say that it “has not worked”, we need to be more specific: it has not worked in the very unique cultural, social and political circumstances of these two Asian economies.

Much of Asia is a world that places incredible pressure on young people to have an all-consuming career, and where their malignant corporate culture and rampant sexism means that maternity leave is out of the question if you have any hope of remaining in work for the future.

South Korea has the highest rates of women’s education in the world, but much of this push for education is in service of their economy’s insane demands on workers. First you slave away at that degree, with your parents demanding that you be top of the class; then you slave away at a job run by (mostly) men that demand all your time and energy be committed to work, and the moment you’re burned out, you’re discarded like empty packaging.

This is when the great dragon that is Asia’s unique circumstances rears its head and stares us in the face: for the average South Korean woman, the near-impossibility of having both a work-life and home-life, let alone a balance between the two, is the determinant factor which drives them away from the prospect of raising a family. When actually asked, women will repeat this point consistently, though it seems their politicians prioritise the appearance of working the problem more than the substance.

[One South-Korean woman] also shares the same fear of every woman I spoke to - that if she were to take time off to have a child, she might not be able to return to work.

"There is an implicit pressure from companies that when we have children, we must leave our jobs," she says. She has watched it happen to her sister and her two favourite news presenters.

One 28-year-old woman, who worked in HR, said she'd seen people who were forced to leave their jobs or who were passed over for promotions after taking maternity leave, which had been enough to convince her never to have a baby.

Jean Mackenzie, BBC

Japan and South Korea are both in dire straits here. The only hope they have left is to radically overturn their entire social and corporate culture, one that is perhaps rooted in centuries of national development, and replace it with something that grants more individual liberty from their relentless “culture to succeed”, and at the same time, to punish businesses that directly or indirectly violate a persons right to return to work following maternity leave.

Or, to phrase it in the language of additive and subtractive policy: they must subtract power from corporations to add sanity and a minimal “work-life balance” for individuals.

Should they fail, they will become entirely dependent on immigration to cushion the fall. That’s going to be a very bitter pill to swallow for countries that are already fairly xenophobic at baseline. Given their socio-political and cultural problems, they’re unlikely to improve rates of migration without a systemic overhaul, either.

So what about The West? If we were one day faced with a calamity like that of South Korea, could we spend our way out of it? The answer is probably yes.

Firstly, we actually have a sane idea of work-life balance, when compared with our Asian counterparts. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s true. We also place way less pressure on young people, prioritising holistic well-being and personal fulfilment more than corporate hustle.

Second, we also have some more progressive views on what constitutes a “family unit”:

Same-sex marriage is illegal in South Korea, and unmarried women are not generally permitted to use sperm donors to conceive.

"I'd love to have children. I'd have 10 if I could," [says Minsung, a 27-year-old Korean bi-sexual woman.]

"Hopefully one day this will change, and I'll be able to marry and have children with the person I love," she says.

The friends point out the irony, given Korea's precarious demographic situation, that some women who want to be mothers are not allowed to be.

Minsung’s idea of a family is considered perfectly reasonable in most Western countries, and as far as I know, there’d be little stopping her and her partner having as many babies as they like.

Right now, people like Minsung are a shining beacon, screaming “WE CAN SOLVE THIS! LET US HELP!”

Yet, South Korea’s political class refuse to acknowledge them, and then lament in front of the cameras: “We’ve tried nothing, and we’re all out of ideas!”

Here’s an idea which we could all use: try listening to women for once. After all, women are the solution.

The moral of this story? Leftist ideals can fit just fine into pro-natalism, and although I’m not ready to panic over world population levels yet, I’m not ready to write it off either. We can hedge our bets without picking a side.

With the world turning more and more to solar power and other renewables, we’re finally starting to see some light at the end of the tunnel on climate change (we’re not out of danger by any means yet).

It kinda says something about the human condition that we’re already looking around for a new existential crisis.

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“All the cruel and brutal things, even genocide, starts with the humiliation of one individual.”

Kofi Annan

Red.

That was all I could see. Red.

The colour. The smell. The sound.

It saturated my very being. Every sinew, every muscle, every nerve. I was filled with a rage, a hatred, so large, so unimaginably monstrous, that I felt myself capable of anything in response.

What was the cause of all this boiling emotion?

A series of comments, made by an anonymous person, on Reddit, directed at me, another anonymous person.

A laughing bombardment of insults and jeering which were invulnerable to my attempted de-escalations; by someone that followed me around, into threads on other communities; pursued me. Taunted me. Humiliated me. Called me “pathetic.”

All this by someone I have never known, never met, and never will. Still, it felt personal. Deeply personal.

Although it occurred many years ago, I can remember every detail.

I’ve always practised a kind of “strategic patience”. I assume everyone is just having a bad day, that they’re truly good people underneath, and that I just need to show them that I pose no threat to them, and they’ll calm down. Then we can talk like grown ups.

Very few people have actually broken my will to be patient when I’m actively putting it into practice. Those few that managed to do it live in my head rent-free.

The reason?

They made me feel utterly humiliated in front of others.

If you want to destroy me, find a way to humiliate me in a public way. Works every time. Use at your own risk, can backfire severely.

This feeling isn’t just an online phenomenon; it’s a force that has directly shaped history, and continues to do so. In her book “Making Enemies: Humiliation and International Conflict”, scholar Evelin Lindner gave this force a name: “The Nuclear Bomb of Emotion”.

Since its release in 2006, the book has given international relations and violence a whole new clarity: underneath the surface, the radioactivity of feelings of humiliation poison everything, and can last for generations. The humiliating act itself may be entirely forgotten by all but the individual who felt aggrieved. It might even be seen as humiliation only by the aggrieved.

World War 2, and the rise of Hitler, was made possible by the very deliberate humiliation of Germany by the Entente powers after the end of the Great War. Hitler himself made use of these feelings, embedded in the German psyche, and his rhetoric of vengeance and reclamation of dignity and might were nearly irresistible. This is why most international correspondents who covered his rallies and speeches could not understand the reaction of the masses.

William Shirer described seeing the “distorted faces” and “extended arms” of the audience in attendance at one of Hitler’s speeches, all engaged in a kind of primal scream as they saluted “der Führer”. The general excitement and enthusiasm shown by even those Germans who he believed were the least likely to fall for völkisch propaganda seemed to defy explanation.

Shirer, being an American, did not share the feeling of humiliation. He wasn’t primed to receive Hitler’s message the way most Germans were. He was not equipped to understand the phenomenon he was witnessing.

The message Hitler was sending - the one of reclaimed dignity - was utterly non-partisan. Left or right, socialist or nationalist, democrat or fascist, all were vulnerable. People were ready to do anything to overcome that sense of humiliation; from there, killing comes easily.

Not the sanitised, abstracted kind of killing practised by the modern-day drone operator, separated as they are by thousands of kilometres, centring fuzzy blobs between virtual cross-hairs.

The genocidal kind, the up-close-and-personal kind, the kind that defines the word “bloodlust”.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, even some of the fiercest critics of Fidel Castro within Cuba declared themselves ready and willing to enlist in the brigades, to defend with their lives the sovereignty and “Dignidad” - dignity, pride - of Cuba from the Yankee aggressor, should they ever attempt to invade the island. America had made Cubans feel humiliated for a very long time, and the Bay of Pigs was yet more salt poured into an open wound.

So, when Khrushchev offered to send Castro his own weapons of mass destruction, it should have been obvious - had anyone in the Kremlin, or anywhere else, been paying attention - that the Cubans would seize on the opportunity to square up, chest against chest, with their belligerent superpower neighbour. Small bands of Cuban exiles notwithstanding, the determination to re-assert their sovereign existence was universal among Cubans, powered by those feelings of humiliation, and through this, they were unified.

This is what made the crisis so dangerous. Castro and the Cubans were deadly serious. Not even Khrushchev understood that, and by the time he figured this out, he was standing “eyeball to eyeball” with Kennedy.

The Genocide in Rwanda was fomented by a sense of humiliation, too. Hutus had long felt like second-class citizens, and saw the Tutsi as elite oppressors. Despite a Hutu “Power” dictatorship having been in control of the country for more than 30 years by the time of the genocide, those feelings were easily hijacked, and people could be turned instantly from friends and neighbours into brutal killers.

Japan in World War 2? They had felt humiliated by the United States over sanctions following Japan’s invasion of China. They believed this action to be an overtly racist double-standard: they were “merely” following the same play-book the Western powers had been following for centuries, and now the Western powers were punishing Japan for it. They felt aggrieved and deliberately excluded from the World Power club, despite having proven themselves just as militarily capable as any European country after they smacked the Russians around at Port Arthur.

School shooters, a phenomenon seen primarily in the United States, are often considered to be victims of bullying or acts of humiliation who have snapped. Although there are a few notable exceptions: Columbine, for example, was a classic case of charismatic psychopathy from the mind of Eric Harris, who swept Dylan Klebold up in a cycle of rage and hatred, which further amplified each other.

These events can vary wildly in scale, yet they are all powered by similar psychological mechanisms. To understand why it’s so potent, we have to distinguish humiliation from simple embarrassment; because humiliation is so much more than that.

Humiliation is external and relational. It can even feel existential.

Its core ingredients are powerlessness, public exposure, and a sense of injustice.

It’s an attack on the social self which, more even than the physical self, is essential not only to our own survival as part of the herd, but also to our own sense of identity. It introduces us to a whole new dimension of vulnerability, one we could never have imagined, one which we have not had time to make peace with.

“…one of the defining characteristics of humiliation as a process is that the victim is forced into passivity, acted upon, and made helpless.”

Evelin Lindner: The Anatomy of Humiliation

The perpetrator, the victim, the witness: this is called the “humiliation triangle”. Indeed, this is a defining characteristic of humiliation: it requires a minimum of 3 actors.

The psychological and the physical are deeply intertwined when it comes to perceptions of pain. The same regions of the brain are lit up when experiencing either physical or emotional pain. Yet, these mechanisms are incredibly complex, and there is no single shared pathway which begins with the experience of emotional pain and ends in extreme violence.

Moreover, “Perpetrator” is not always a strictly accurate description of one of the actors in the triangle; nor is “victim”.

“…a perpetrator may want to commit humiliation but not succeed, some people may wish to be humiliated rather than wish to avoid it, a ‘do-gooder’ may cause humiliation while trying to do good, and a third party may identify ‘victims’ who do not see themselves as such, or fail to see victims in those cases where they do exist.”

As with all human social interactions, there is a highly complex interplay of individual intent, perceived intent, intended perception, the act itself, the interpretation of free will behind the act, the view of 3rd parties, the reputations of those involved, their social caste, the dynamics of culture, politics, power and sexuality, and much else besides.

What matters in the end is that someone has perceived a deliberate, malicious act on the part of another actor, identifying that actor as a perpetrator and themselves as a victim, and believes the act to have reduced their own social standing in the eyes of the witnessing parties.

Regardless of the accuracy of this perception, it is the perception itself which creates the emotion and embeds it deeply into the psyche of the aggrieved.

Thankfully, it is not always thus.

Lindner found that, on rare occasion, leaders who deny themselves the kind of vengeance and retribution which might otherwise seem their right have emerged.

Nelson Mandela did not unleash genocide on the white elite in South Africa. After 27 years of humiliation in prison, he emerged as a wise peacemaker, not as a humiliation entrepreneur like Hitler.

Although today it is a bit of a cliché to cite Mandela as inspiration, no doubt Mandela’s example is particularly powerful, no less for the catastrophe that he had the power to unleash had he wanted to. He could have had all of white South Africa eradicated in an instant, along with anyone considered “collaborators”. After the treatment he experienced at their hands, we might have expected as much.

Instead, he welcomed his perpetrators with open arms, without waiting for an apology, or a show of remorse. He told them they were welcome by his side, and indeed, he even kept the white men of the security service in place to protect him when he ascended to head the government. He was determined that one way or another, they would learn to make a new world together, as comrades. The Truth and Reconciliation process made it possible to forgive without forgetting.

There are other examples where a deep sense of awareness of the perspectives of others may have prevented catastrophe: Ronald Regan eventually came to realise the cycle of humiliation, outrage and fear which pushed the two Cold War super-powers towards the precipice - one which he had continued to perpetuate when he first entered office - and took radical steps to change his behaviour, to recognise the Soviet perspective as real, and to do everything he could to make it clear that the United States legitimately wanted to live together in peace, not in fear.

It went a very long way toward ending the Cold War.

Imagine if the Germans had found a leader with the wisdom and humanity of a Mandela following the Great War.

Imagine if the leaders of Hutu Power had taken a few pages from his book.

Imagine if Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu had even the smallest scintilla of a Mandela, or even a Ronald Regan, in them.

Imagine being such a positive influence on the world that mentioning your name actually becomes cliché.

This finally brings us to the morals of this story, and they are important ones.

The same dynamics of psychology play out both in a twitter pile-on, and during the drawing-up of the Treaty of Versailles; while the ultimate consequences may be distant in both time and space for most, the unfortunate fact is that someone will be saddled with the pain. Now and again, that pain can lead people down the darkest paths.

That doesn’t mean a perpetrator isn’t responsible for their actions; but while we don’t bear any blame for their final choices, we can’t be blind to the climate our own words and attitudes help create.

Commit to the dignified treatment of others. If there is no need to twist the knife, don’t do it. Be mindful of the fact that words do hurt. We can tell ourselves all day long how we shouldn’t care what others think of us, but the reality is that we do.

When delivering any message, the only thing more important than its content is its delivery. How you deliver a message is critical to ensuring it is received. It’s possible to deliver hard truths without the extra salt. We can’t guarantee that a message, no matter how well packaged, will be received the way we intended, but the very least we can do is to give it the best chance we can.

After all, we humans are a beautiful mess of sophisticated applied chemistry.

In this constant process of mutual reactivity, dignity is one of the most powerful catalysts there is.

Note: All private beta slots for Scribbles are now filled! Thank you to everyone that volunteered! Assuming no major bugs are uncovered, we’ll hopefully open up to public access in the next couple of weeks.

Hi everyone! It’s been a minute. I’m sure you’re all wondering why I’ve been so quiet over the last few months.

As part of the work we’re doing for CommaDash - our unified research platform - we’ve been building out standalone pieces of technology which can exist as products of their own.

Our very first product about to go live is called Scribbles.

Transcribing handwriting is tough computationally, but modern technology makes it way easier and way more accurate than ever before. So we’ve built a tool which can take hundreds, or even thousands of pages at once, and transcribe it into formatted text which can be exported straight to a .docx, PDF, or markdown file.

The speed at which we can do this is difficult to comprehend without some context:

The Darwin Correspondence Project transcribed 15,000 of Darwins known letters and correspondence into text by hand; it took them 20 years to complete.

Meanwhile, we recently transcribed the entirety of Dr Frank Fenner’s travel diaries - 3,500 pages of near-illegible scrawl with very challenging scientific text - and it took a little over 1 hour. With further optimisation, we could bring the time down to approximately 20 minutes.

Right now, we’re looking for more people to join a private beta program, who can test it out and give us feedback before we go public. Are you someone who likes to write articles or substack posts by hand? Do you have a large archive of text which needs transcribing? Whether it’s notebooks, old letters, or anything really.

Those who join the private beta program will receive a considerable amount of free credits to make use of. All we ask in return is that you send us your feedback on the experience, as well as any ideas, thoughts, and bugs you encounter.

If this sounds like you, or you’re just curious, please reach out to us either here on Substack (you can just message me direct), or email me: nicholas@commadash.app and let me know you’re interested.

At some point in the future, we’ll have more information to share on Frank Fenner’s travel diaries as well, so keep an eye out for that.

Places are limited, so get in quick before it’s all gone!

Finding nut cases on the Internet is easier than finding NASCAR bumper stickers in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Mike Hartwell, Maine Campus News
September 24th, 2004

(Note from Author: “nut cases” is not at all an appropriate term, but the above quote captures the early internet so well. Trust me, you had to be there to know. Times have changed somewhat.)

I remember when blogging took off in a big way.

Yeeeeeeah, I’m an old man.

Blogging was once a cultural phenomenon. The kind that people loved to hate - as is true with most such things (ahem BlockedStack ahem). By roughly around 2005-2006, it was hitting peak-mainstream.

Seen as an industrial revolution in self-publishing, it was a more automated version of the old hand-crank-driven “personal websites” which had been a growing fad since the 90s.

You know, those old relics, consisting of no more than a few hand-written HTML files (sometimes exported from Microsoft Word documents), dumped on a free webhost like Angelfire or Geocities, peppered (perhaps flooded) with animated gifs indicating the perpetually “under construction” nature of their creation, and all for the vitally important purpose of…

…

Sharing a few family vacation pictures.

Oh, but also sometimes thoughts. Lots, and lots, of thoughts. Disordered thoughts. Chaotic thoughts. Intense thoughts.

I’m talking about the wonderful online worlds of the paranoid, the psychic, and the possessed! (Sadly, we’re actually talking about mental illness. There are no real psychics or possessed people. Bummer.)

This post is a kind of random nostalgic walk down memory lane, where we explore how the early internet gave us a window into some fascinating, disordered minds, some of whom are still around to this day.

Time Cube

One of the most well-known oddball personal websites, perhaps of all time - get it? - went by the name of “Time Cube”.

Time Cube achieved a kind of internet “Hall of Fame” status in 2003 when its author, a profoundly schizophrenic man by the name of Gene Ray - who often referred to himself as the “Wisest Human” - was invited to come on a nerdy “late-night” talk show, Unscrewed with Martin Sergeant.

Sargent: Gene, how do you feel about being an Internet celebrity? I mean, you're huge on the web.

Ray: Well, it's not a position I wanted, it's something I had to do. I'm not a writer or speaker, but no writer or speaker understands the Time Cube

Time Cube’s creator died in 2015 at a ripe old age, although someone else seems to be keeping the original website going (calling themselves the “second wisest human”, behind Gene)

Most people with a passing interest in this stuff already knew of Time Cube long ago. It’s actually one of the best examples of the disordered and intense thinking in schizophrenia I’ve come across. Page after page after page of what looks like nonsense at a surface level, but when studied closer, is most certainly not random, and reveals something like structural consistency. It’s also intense.

Really. Fuckin’. Intense.

I’ve always had a soft spot for people like Gene. He could be rabidly racist and homophobic in his tirades, but schizophrenia takes no prisoners. I don’t know if Gene would have had bigoted views without the schizophrenia, all I know is, every thought is churned through its powerful teeth, often infused with paranoia and bizarre rage. Their very systems for making conscious choices are hijacked by this disease.

Temple in the Machine

There is a similar example from more recent times, which was mostly known to software engineers, particularly those of us who spent a lot of time on tech forums and Reddit in the early-2010s.

Terry A. Davis was a fairly well-adjusted and well-educated electrical engineer and computer scientist who referred to himself as a “scientific materialist” and an atheist; then, in 1996, at the age of 27, he experienced a “revelation from God”.

From there began a sharp descent into severe schizophrenia, with long periods of unemployment, during which he embarked on one of the most ambitious personal projects you can imagine: he built an entire operating system from scratch.

At first he called it simply “J”, then a few further names, before settling on “LoseThos”.

He made a website for LoseThos on which he outlined his clear intentions for the project: it was an exercise in “programming as entertainment”, and to remain so. Anything which wasn’t fun, or blocked the user from doing whatever they wanted with the system, was unacceptable.

No logins, no authentication, no security, no encryption, but also, no networking (a system so insecure by design could not safely connect to a network, after all).

He made various technical decisions defining the limits of what he was prepared to support or make work: 640x480 screen resolution and 16 colours was the only supported graphics mode available, for practical reasons. It would have no sound mixer, limiting it to monophonic audio: mainly because building sound mixers wasn’t fun.

Some of the solutions he devised for various technical problems were quite remarkable, and programming communities would often discuss his work, usually in a positive light. For example, he developed his own programming language, on which LoseThos was built: he called it “C+”, to signify it being a middle point between C and C++.

Terry was, without doubt, exceptionally intelligent - unlike the aforementioned Gene Ray. He was also a regular nuisance to many online communities, where he could descend into bizarre homophobic and racist rants.

Most tried very hard to be understanding and were sympathetic toward his mental health issues, but eventually, each of his regular haunts in turn had to ban him when it became too much.

Over time, his mental illness drove his personal obsession with religion to extremes. He began to change his recollections regarding the limitations of his OS design: instead of furthering the practicality and fun, they were now “commandments from God”.

God said 640x480 16 color graphics is a covenant like circumcision.

He changed the name of the programming language, to “HolyC” (holy-see, get it?). LoseThos also had another name change, becoming “TempleOS”.

Terry now saw his mission not as programming for entertainment, but something very different: his Operating System was akin to building the 3rd Temple, and fulfilling an ancient biblical prophecy (the first having been Solomon’s Temple; never mind that the 3rd temple was supposed to be in Jerusalem).

He built a number of strange programs into TempleOS, such as a random word generator he named "Oracle”, through which he believed God would speak to him.

He updated the website to reflect its new name, and added a “Charter” document for it, filled with religious and biblical references:

It’s possible that his initial efforts were during a period of relative lucidity, only later becoming so viscerally charged with this extreme religious fervour as the jaws of the disease went to work. However, he is known to have stopped taking his medication at some point, and perhaps this was the result.

Terry’s story came to a sad end. He became homeless, but was brought supplies by his many fans and supporters; very generous people. Yet he refused all offers of housing. He seemed to prefer living in his own world of biblical hallucinations, on his own terms. He reportedly told one person that he did it to “escape the dog catchers”, in order to avoid being hospitalised. Unfortunately, one night while walking along some train tracks, he was hit at speed by a freight train.

This man built a skyscraper single-handedly; only to fall from the top floor. He was only 48.

Rest in Peace, Terry.

Matthew & The Spaceships

This one is less of an intense mental illness, and more of a fairly common delusion: the ability to make contact with the dead.

On the night of April 17th, 1980, a 17-year-old boy was killed when he fell asleep at the wheel of the Jeep he was driving, being thrown from the vehicle after it veered off the road. His injuries were catastrophic. His mother was left with a broken heart and soul. Losing a child can be enough to send anyone into depths of despair.

Some 14 years later, in 1994, Suzy Ward, the mother of Matthew Ward - the boy who had been killed on that April night so many years before - found her mind unravelling.

She had begun receiving “messages” from her dead son. Telepathic messages.

It took her some time to believe what was happening to her, but eventually, she start writing these communications down. She asked questions: Why me? Why now? What happened to you? Where are you now?

Matthew was infinitely reassuring and encouraging.

He told her that he was in a place called “Nirvana”:

From there, she began to record these conversations with him by writing them down every morning as they occurred in her mind. To her, the messages coming from Matthew “felt” parallel to her own thinking and consciousness.

…the most significant proof that I wasn’t somehow fabricating the transmissions came when information totally alien even to my imagination, let alone my comprehension, started coming.

Eventually, “Matthew” instructed her to turn their conversations into a book, which went on to become one of the most well-known texts of the entire New Age movement: “Matthew, Tell Me About Heaven”

One book turned into 4 books, and at some point around 2003, she began posting a monthly newsletter to her website, where she shares messages from Matthew and many other “channelled beings” with her online audience. These “soulful” beings speak about life with the extra terrestrials, deliver messages for humanity (mainly conspiracy theories), and - especially during the first 10 years - made a lot of predictions. Like, a LOT. They seemed especially interested in predicting the political goings on of some earth-bound place called the United States of America.

Also crop circles.

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I remember coming across the book, “Tell Me About Heaven”, in the early-00s, along with her website. At the time, I was also steeped in many of the same conspiratorial ideologies shared by Matthew and his ET friends, and didn’t have a whole lot of critical thinking skills.

I mean, not that much has changed, but…

I, being what I am, simply had to do some analysis of my own on these predictions, now that a fair amount of time has passed. Turns out, not even space aliens can predict the outcome of a US Presidential Election. Maybe we should cut the merely mortal human pollsters some slack, eh?

The only accurate predictions over the first 10 years - 3 out of the 45 I counted - were predicting non-events, as in, “such and such a thing will not happen”. Failed predictions were later changed to be unfalsifiable, or simply forgotten about entirely. Not that I blame them; my record for predictions is likely worse than this. Don’t analyse pls.

Suzy is still going strong to this day, posting at least once a month, year after year. Her most recent conversation with Matthew came out at the start of this month - August 2025 - and we’ll likely see another for September, too. Although the New Age movement is a mere shadow of what it once was, her influence in what’s left seems as strong as ever.

She also seems like a perfectly lovely person; despite being saturated in conspiracy theories and spiritualism (an unsurprisingly common combination), her message is all about love and light being the emotions we should focus on, not hate or negativity. Honestly, that’s a message I can get behind.

Yet there is something else strangely consistent in her messaging, as is the case in most of the world of conspiracy theorists: a reflexive distrust of all public institutions, rule of law, government, information, and democracy, continually repeating the idea of an all-controlling Illuminati, “dark reptilians”, and dark extra-terrestrial forces controlling the world, using it as the lens through which she interprets all world events.

Why extra terrestrials with such power would care at all about us measly ape-men is beyond me, though.

This also makes me wonder about the statistical overlap between the new-age movement and conspiracy theories, but that’s for another day.

Suzy, and most people like her, are almost certainly not schizophrenic. Instead, it sounds like she’s experienced something which could happen to any of us: a delusion brought on by profound grief. That she has managed to find some peace through it is a good thing, I think. Just as long as you don’t start making serious life decisions based on advice from online ghosts.

There are far worse sources of advice out there on the internet, if we’re honest.

Meanwhile, on Substack:

Until next time!

Overnight, something interesting happened. Some code I wrote in January suddenly took off, and has been making its way around substack like a bushfire. I wrote a little browser extension called BlockedStack, which will let you know how many people have you blocked on Substack.

It’s neat, and kinda fun.

When I first built it, the majority of reactions to it were: “Why would I want to know how many people have blocked me?! This is awful!” as though I had just showed up to their house with a bucket of dead rats and demanded they eat.

But a few curious folks tried it, and occasionally I’d see a post from someone with their surprise that anyone blocked them at all, let alone the 51-odd they had picked up. Not bad. I’m the least-controversial person on all of substack, and even I’ve managed to collect a full 93.

Still, it made me feel all warm and fuzzy when someone would post their number.

Otherwise been quiet on that front. I built a Note Exporter which only seems to work sometimes, and added it in. I’ve been meaning to make that work better, but there were so few users that it didn’t seem all that urgent.

That is… until yesterday. My friend shared their high score. Then this morning I woke up to do my ritualistic sacrifice of a can of V and several goats, and checked my Substack notifications.

That certainly escalated very quickly.

Since Lirpa’s post, I’ve picked up several dozen new subscribers (Hi! I’m glad you’re here! I hope you enjoy my weird eclectic interests because I’m gonna tell you all of them!!) and it’s been a TON of fun watching the high score, which used to be held by , get suddenly eclipsed by (and also a little sad, Ninja has long been the tools biggest fan, but he took it very well)

I hope you’re all having as much fun as I am!

I will keep making updates and new tools - I’ve been building something that will extend the capabilities of the Substack editor with custom templates and snippets, to make it way easier to just instantly add stuff like a Ko-Fi button, or a custom header. Watch out for that one at some point.

If you’re a handwriting enthusiast, I’ve been working on just the thing for you, and hope to have the first public release next week (it was supposed to be this week, but it needs a bit more time). I’ll post more about that very soon.

Meanwhile, lets try a poll:

Until next time, friends!!

P.S: if you like this stuff and want to see more, a donation to the ritualistic goat sacrifice fund Coffee Fund goes a long way!

This is a very quick post I wanted to make about a paper that came out in the journal Science this month. It contains some tantalising evidence that SARS-CoV-2 not only enters and propagates throughout the central nervous system, including the brain, but that it results in the production of amyloid-β (“amyloid-beta”) plaques, which are like tangled knots of protein which can form within neurons.

You know what else these plaques are implicated with?

Alzheimers Disease, followed by Dementia.

Firstly, it must be alarming that a virus can potentially wreak such havoc upon the brain as to effectively result in dementia, though it turns out it this might be due to a kind of neuron defence mechanism, according to emerging theories.

Moreover, it might offer us a key to understanding what happens to the brain of those suffering long-term COVID symptoms, sometimes called “Long-Covid” or “Post-Covid Syndrome”.

Here, we demonstrate that SARS-CoV-2 induces CNS amyloid-β deposition in electrophysiologically active ex vivo human retinas from short-interval autopsies and in an accelerated aging human retinal organoid model. Retinas from patients with COVID-19 revealed amyloid-β pathology that colocalized with SARS-CoV-2 Spike 1 protein.

Miller et al., SARS-CoV-2 Induces Alzheimer’s Disease–Related Amyloid-β Pathology in Ex Vivo Human Retinal Explants and Retinal Organoids.

Science Advances, Volume: 11-27 (2025) [doi: 10.1126/sciadv.ads5006].

This is one of the most intriguing things I’ve ever read in the context of Post-Covid Syndrome.

Human retinas were treated with SARS-CoV-2 Spike 1 protein or control, followed by the application of the amyloid stain thioflavin T to visualize the amyloid burden (Fig. 6A) (53). We noted a significant increase in the thioflavin T fluorescence signal, demonstrating increased amyloid deposition in human retinas following SARS-CoV-2 Spike 1 protein exposure (Fig. 6B).

These data show that the SARS-CoV-2 Spike 1 protein can induce amyloid deposition in ex vivo human retinas.

Although it’s not a novel hypothesis that the Spike Protein can interact with various amyloid proteins, there has also been ever-growing evidence not only of the neurotropic nature of SARS-CoV-2, but of the dysregulation it causes to Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) levels, reducing the brains capacity to form new connections.

There have also been previous studies done where quantities of amyloid proteins were measured from the cerebro-spinal fluid of Covid-19 patients.

Normally, these proteins are “washed out” of the brain by the CSF and expelled from the body, so you should see a normal quantity of them in the fluid drawn from a healthy person’s spine.

When there’s a problem however, that’s when they stop being cleaned out, and over a long period of time, they begin to form “plaques”, which are twisted amalgamations of the stuff that end up strangling neurons.

In those studies, the Covid-19 patients had significantly lower levels of amyloid protein in their CSF compared to healthy controls, meaning it’s not being cleaned out. No definite conclusions could be drawn from it, but it certainly begs the question: where is all the amyloid actually going?

This months paper is the first I’ve seen with direct observation of the resulting plaques after introducing the Spike protein to neural cells. Not only that, but they co-localise with the areas the Spike protein was introduced, more so than the rest of the tissue.

There has been some speculation before about whether the formation of plaques in the CNS is, in fact, an immune system response to the presence of microbes. The theory goes that these plaques form in order to trap microbes and destroy them, preventing the further progress of an infection. This is called the “amyloid-β antimicrobial hypothesis”.

Some might be confused as to why the retina is involved at all in such a study, but the answer is straight forward: there are a lot of central nervous system cells there, like the optic nerve, which emerges directly from the brain. The retina itself also contains a handful of neural cell types, and as such, is a whole lot simpler to understand and study in a lab than brain-originating neural tissue cultures.

Infections in that area can also be an indication of an infected brain.

The pathogenic agent most commonly linked with Alzheimers and Dementia is HSV1 (Herpes Simplex Virus), another neurotropic, like SARS-CoV-2. Interestingly enough, all known human coronavirus species - including variants of the common cold - are also neurotropic. Could these infections also result in plaques?

Perhaps the headline of this post really should have been “COMMON COLD MIGHT CAUSE DEMENTIA”, but I’ll leave it for someone else to fall down that particular cliff ;)

Anyway, it’s late, and that’s always a risky time to post anything for me (the later I post it, the greater the chances of being wrong in every respect), but if you like this kind of rapid analysis of brainy things, do let me know and I will endeavour to provide.

Otherwise, hang around; there are several more long-form deep-dives still in the works on a host of topics, and will land in your inboxes in the sometime future.

Warning: This post includes references to acts of Genocide

Certainement qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste.

Voltaire
Questions sur les Miracles (1765)

Commonly summarised as: Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.

I have this on-going back and forth debate in my head about free speech. This debate has only become more complex since I joined the Substack community, a place which certainly wants to think of itself as a safe harbour open to all. It hosts views from all corners, even the darkest ones.

Earlier this year, I got into an interesting (and very cordial) discussion in the comments on another article talking about how this openness is an inherently good thing. I agreed for the most part, but drew a red line:

I was adamant that there is indeed a difference between free speech and hate speech, and I don’t believe there should be anywhere on earth that is safe for actual Nazi ideology, ever.

Colour me naive, but I was surprised by the amount of people who disagree with both of those positions.

Of all the things we could have differing opinions on, I never imagined my position on Nazis would be one of them; save, of course, for people that are Nazis, who I’m sure would disagree with me. However it turns out that even this, one of my own “sacred cows”, is not taken to be so sacred, even by people who do not identify in any way shape or form with Nazis or their ideas.

The point being made by my interlocutors seems to be that actually defining a Nazi can become inherently slippery. How do we identify them? How does one differentiate them from people that are not Nazis? Those who sport a Swastika arm band, or wave the Nazi flag, or voluntarily identify themselves as Nazis are almost certainly identifiable as such, but what about actors playing a role in a film, or a re-enactment?

Ok, how about people who share all the same abhorrent views and opinions as, say, Adolf Hitler, but who vehemently deny having any association with or admiration for Nazis?

Is everyone who has ever murdered a Jew a Nazi? Or only those who murdered them because they were Jews? How do we even identify what their real intent was?

What about Kanye West? Is he now, officially, a Nazi? (This one is even more complicated, because mental illness is very much involved)

If you think that’s a challenge, let’s try explicitly defining “Hate Speech”.

Hate speech is an act that expresses or incites hatred toward people on the basis of some aspect of their identity.

Hate speech is speech, writing, behaviour, text or commentary, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language towards a person or a group on the basis of identity. It can be based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, culture, colour, descent, class, sexuality, gender or other identity factors.

Racism No Way, Australia
https://racismnoway.com.au/about-racism/hate-speech/

I quite like this definition, because it’s probably the most clear I’ve seen. However it presents two problems: the first is that it’s likely very Australia-specific. Second, since Nazi is a kind of identity, does that mean those speaking out against Nazis are engaging in hate speech?

There are some possible solutions to this: we can define identity as something which is not formed by choice. For example, sexuality, gender, skin colour, ancestry, ethnicity are things that we don’t get to choose for ourselves. However, religion is certainly a chosen identity, and yet much of the prejudice we seek to deter is between those of different faiths.

Nationality can be chosen, since (some of us) can choose to immigrate and take on the citizenship of another nation, yet so much prejudice is directed at such individuals, as though it’s a sacred right to choose which brand of milk you want to drink, but some kind of unnatural transgression to choose what country you want to live in.

Some places have defined a special subset called “protected groups”, containing a kind of grab-bag of the most commonly targeted identity groups, but this of course has its own problems.

The Wikipedia page on Hate Speech notes that “There is no single definition of what constitutes "hate" or "disparagement". Legal definitions of hate speech vary from country to country.”

Ok, so I think you will agree that my interlocutors from that comment thread do indeed have a point: it’s complicated. Perhaps we should take a step back and ask the obvious question:

Why is hate speech a problem?

Voltaire - that most influential Enlightenment figure I quoted earlier in the original French - is spot-on: he was talking about how "absurd” - i.e unenlightened - ideas, once believed, effectively forfeit ones self-control to those who have convinced one of such ideas. You become nothing but a tool in the hands of others, whose intentions can be malicious.

“Si vous n’opposez point aux ordres de croire l’impossible l’intelligence que Dieu a mise dans votre esprit, vous ne devez point opposer aux ordres de malfaire la justice que Dieu a mise dans votre coeur.” - If your God-given intellect cannot resist a demand to believe something impossible, then your God-given sense of justice cannot resist a demand to commit malicious acts.

I frikkin love being able to translate that. Voltaire was no stranger to his own absurd ideas: he was quite the anti-semite even for his day, and believed that different races were, essentially, entirely different species with completely different genetic origins (polygenism), but this is not a post about Voltaire.

Unpronounceable philosophising aside (redundant?), history does indeed demonstrate that the pre-requisite to just about any mass atrocity committed against any group is the determined spreading of absurd ideas about that group. They are absurd because they cannot make sense: a generalisation of a diverse group taken as literal and universal fact, applicable in the same way to all members.

The ideas that drive hate speech are not benign, either. You might say that such and such an ethnic group have a universal love for unicorns; it’s still absurd, but generally harmless. Hate-speech, however, is about explicitly dehumanising whole groups of people - ascribing to them an absence of qualities that are seen as positive and uniquely human - and charging them as an imminent if not active threat.

For example, lets take the utterly absurd idea that Jews - all of them - conspire together to control the world, or to bring about some specific catastrophe or disaster upon other peoples.

There are, and have been pretty much throughout history, people who believe this literally. That literally all Jews, no matter where they live, where they were born, where they grew up, their age, sex, whether they even know that they have Jewish ancestry at all, are conspiring together to do all kinds of dastardly deeds which threaten you and your loved ones.

It’s nuts. It’s almost perfectly absurd. You might as well believe the entire universe is contained inside the anus of a Dolphin.

Nevertheless, people who might seem otherwise completely rational have been made to believe such madness, one way or another. In fact, most people involved in pogroms in 20th century Europe for example likely didn’t have to believe the full scope of all anti-semitic ideas circulating in their societies at the time.

When being offered a banquet of such absurdities, most people treat it like a buffet: they might take a bit of this one and a bit of that one, sampling only those which resonated with their own sensibilities and tastes.

For example, some believed that Jews were over-represented in Politics, while others believe them dominant in Entertainment, or Finance, with the implication being that they deliberately bar the way to other non-Jews; or that they were under-represented in the Armed Forces, the implication being that they are not as loyal to the nation.

These ideas also created the sense of the Jews as “pest”, at first only implicitly, but then later quite explicitly, such as in Nazi propaganda which referred to Jews as various kinds of insect.

However, the ideas themselves aren’t as important as the underlying association between the group and the threat which the ideas create in the mind of the believer. Even more powerfully, if one can create the association between a group and something already salient in the community - such as a war, or a drought, or a famine, or an economic downturn, or some other crisis - then all that is needed is but a single spark to set this particular Hindenburg aflame.

Whatever sense of right and wrong the average “sensible” individual might have can be bypassed entirely, and when ordered to exterminate millions of innocent human beings they might at first hesitate, until informed they were all “Jews”.

“Ja wohl,” and so the killings begin.

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“Do Your Work”: The Rwandan Genocide

By my estimate, nearly two-thirds of Rwanda’s Tutsi population were eliminated; one in five Hutu men participated in their deaths; the carnage was accomplished in just over 100 days; and it took place in almost every community in Rwanda where Tutsi lived.

Omar McDoom, The Path to Genocide in Rwanda (2022).

On 6th April 1994, Juvénal Habyarimana, President of Rwanda and an ethnic Hutu, alongside the President of Burundi, also an ethnic Hutu, were killed when their aircraft was shot down while coming in to land in the Rwandan capital of Kigali.

In less than 48 hours, one of the most brutal episodes of genocide and ethnic cleansing in modern history, conducted at the community and village level, had begun, with machete-wielding civilian Hutus incited by racist extremists broadcasting over popular radio networks, against those whom they considered responsible for shooting down the Hutu presidents: an ethnic minority group called the Tutsi, as well as anyone else considered “sympathisers”.

I’ve owned machetes. In the Solomon Islands where I spent some of my most formative years, they were an essential tool for tasks such as cutting grass, clearing a path through thick jungle, and opening coconuts. Everyone had one, or several. These were not well-made instruments: consisting of a shaped sliver of metal, with two pieces of polished wood sandwiched around one end for a handle. Such household machetes are rarely kept sharp, and spend most of the time in humid open air. It’s even rarer to see one not covered in rust end to end.

Yet this was by far the most commonly used weapon during the slaughter. Victims occasionally begged for a bullet instead. Very few were granted that wish.

Neighbours. Friends. Colleagues. Random people on the street. Men. Women. Children. Even family members. If they were Tutsi, they were slaughtered. If they were protecting Tutsis, they were slaughtered. It was the most efficient mass killing since the Atomic Bomb, and people were massacred faster than in the industrialised mass-murder of Jews during the Holocaust.

Overall, it lasted 100 days and resulted in 800,000 dead.

That’s 333 people killed every single hour, hour after hour; almost 8,000 people every single day, day after day.

The sheer effort involved to carry out this task was immense. They didn’t have German-style camps or gas chambers. They weren’t rounding up their victims beforehand. Instead, people were literally chopped down wherever they were found, mainly with machetes, but sometimes, even with backhoes, or whatever they had lying around. Not designed for cutting through flesh and bone, these yard work tools made it a gruesome and back-breaking slog. Some survivors endured innumerable strikes and the loss of some limbs, only to miraculously make it out alive.

That means not only did it require a massive number of perpetrators to carry it out, most of them worked at it like a full time job. A common refrain on Radio RTLM during the 100 days was "Do Your Work”, a call to continue the killings until there was no one left to kill.

It was the culmination of a process which had been underway for nearly 100 years by that point. Between independence in 1962 and the outbreak of civil war in 1990, there had already been a few smaller and more localised massacres of Tutsis; and yet, no one predicted the sheer ferocity, vastness and overwhelming scale of the Rwandan Genocide.

“The ethnicization of society and politics is the first indicator of civilian radicalization.” writes Omar McDoom of the London School of Economics, in his book The Path to Genocide in Rwanda (2022).

In the context of inter-ethnic relations, threat then activates latent ethnic boundaries and raises the salience of ethnic identities. As the threat intensifies, ethnic distance increases and ingroup hostility toward the ethnic outgroup escalates.

This distance and hostility can be amplified when the threat is framed as having historical and contemporary parallels. The threat then resonates against the collective memory and shared perceptions – the myths and narratives – that the threatened ingroup has of the threatening outgroup.

This is the simplified pathway to Genocide. It never happens in a vacuum: the near-universal pre-requisite to all genocides is a process of perception-shifting, by which the in-group and out-group become increasingly stratified, through the spreading of certain cultural and collective myths, memories and beliefs.

We collect our perceptions from the things we hear around us. We humans are voracious consumers of information, whether right or wrong, good or bad. We are especially receptive to it when it’s information coming from trusted and authoritative sources, or those with whom we feel a shared identity. Information salience further increases the more emotional its content, particularly fear and outrage. We tend to remember emotional negatives far more readily than emotional positives or neutrals.

Such perceptions alone are rarely ever enough to spark a genocide: instead, they contribute significant flammable material to the socio-political environment.

The Invention of Identity Politics

Rwanda was said to have originally been inhabited by members of the Twa ethnic group since the ice age, with Hutus supposedly migrating around the year 1000AD, followed supposedly by Tutsi in the 15th or 16th century. Prior to colonial domination by European powers, it had been an independent Kingdom for an unknown period of time, ruled by a supposedly Tutsi royal bloodline. When the Germans sent an expedition in the late 1800s, it was the first time a Rwandan Mwami - King - had encountered Europeans. Although they had a strong administrative state and defended their borders with a strong unified army, the situation became volatile and unstable following the King’s death due to a succession struggle. The Germans took their opportunity and established a protectorate called German East Africa, with a figurehead Mwami on the throne.

When the First World War broke out, the neighbouring Belgian Congo invaded the German East African territories, including the Rwandan lands, establishing an occupation which continued until the war’s end, when Belgium was granted the territories under something like a United Nations mandate. They continued the setup the Germans had established: choosing indirect control via a puppet Mwami. At the same time, they sought to divide and rule by creating a heightened awareness of ethnic identity, despite the fact that Rwandans had been a highly integrated people long before the Europeans turned up. Government-issued identity cards came clearly marked with a determined ethnicity, making possible a racist administrative caste system.

The Belgian colonials had brought with them the Hamitic hypothesis: the utterly absurd myth which determined Tutsis to be Rwanda’s “Master Race”, supposedly of Semitic origin, and therefore “superior” to the common African Hutus. Therefore, the Belgians ensured Tutsi were always placed in positions of power. This naturally created a kind of “Tutsi Elite”, and by design, the result was that Hutus felt unjustly subjugated, and the target of their animosity was the Tutsi, rather than the Belgian colonial masters. This remained a core part of Rwandan historical memory long after the shackles of colonialism finally fell away following independence in 1962.

In the Rwandan context, the brutal history of this deliberate stratification of ethnic groups out of what was once a highly integrated mix of peoples, served as a historical anchor by which the emotional sense of outrage and injustice felt by Hutus at what was seen as Tutsi’s historic (and contemporary) criminality was legitimated.

This was coupled with the colonial myth that Tutsi peoples were essentially foreigners: that somehow they must have come from Ethiopia, turning up some time after the Hutus. This would become another important factor during the genocide, and was used as propaganda to denounce Tutsis as foreigners with no right to live in Rwanda, let alone to rule it.

…the Belgians propagated the idea the Tutsi were racially distinct and, in origin, alien to Rwanda. They drew on both racial science and religious scripture to justify these beliefs.

…

The idea that the Tutsi were allochthonous – they did not belong in Rwanda - would become an important theme during the genocide.

In 1962, Rwanda became a republic and saw its first-ever attempt at democratic elections, which propelled the radical and racist Mouvement Démocratique Républicain “Parmehutu” (MDR) party to an overwhelming majority. The MDR was the embodiment of radical identity politics, which believed staunchly in not only overthrowing the old Tutsi elite as they saw it, but establishing Hutu supremacy over all Rwanda. They wanted to flip the old order upside down, and then scale it even further in their direction.

By 1965, the MDR was deemed the only legal political party in Rwanda.

Furthermore, the ongoing civil war which had begun in 1990 between primarily Tutsi exiles - who had been trying to return home since being forced to flee during the revolution - and the Rwandan Government, made for an emotionally salient threat, and propaganda easily turned the civil war into an ethnic war in the minds of many Hutus.

Extremist Hutu ideologues had been referring to Tutsi peoples as Inyenzi - cockroaches - since the 1960s. As far as they were concerned, this was a problem of pest control; everyone well knew that cockroaches are pests to be eradicated.

Then, in 1992, Government leaders actively began calling for their extermination.

Why don’t we seize all those who bring them and exterminate them all? Are we really waiting now for them to come and exterminate us?

Leon Mugesera, Government Official in 1992, speaking to party members

Smaller-scale massacres of Tutsi peoples had been occurring since the Civil War’s onset, sometimes in the form of “counter-insurgency” operations by the Rwandan militia, but other times, purely as a reaction by Hutu civilians to something heard on the Radio.

The Radio was the most important source of media and information to Rwandans, as only 56% of the population had basic literacy.

Also in 1992, “the radio falsely broadcast that Tutsi planned to kill important Hutu leaders, especially in Bugesera,” which kicked off a massacre of Tutsi peoples in that region.

It was a harbinger of things to come.

2 years later, during the Genocide, Hutu men were seen walking around carrying their machete in one hand, and a portable radio in the other. Through the hate speech and incitement to violence propagated via radio - and often through one particular extremist radio station, RTLM - those Hutus who had been convinced of absurdities for much of their lives about the Tutsi being foreigners, inhuman pests, and an active threat, were given their marching orders, and proceeded to follow them without mercy or hesitation.

Long time friends, neighbours, family in law, teachers and students, these interpersonal bonds suddenly lost all importance and meaning for the perpetrators.

Rwanda became a land of mutilated and rotting corpses. They were everywhere. It was difficult to walk the land without eventually hearing the crunching of bone and feeling the unnatural squash of dead flesh underfoot. Many were simply left in piles, along the sides of roads, in ditches, stuffed into drains and wells, poisoning the only sources of fresh water for many, resulting in deadly cholera outbreaks. Some were left in shallow mass graves. Some merely had a mound of dirt poured over the top.

Those who had managed to survive often didn’t fare much better: many a victim was left with limbs missing when the perpetrators who hacked at them with the machetes failed to complete the job, leaving them to bleed out.

Occasionally, like with many Genocides before it, people were saved from death when a perpetrator or person of authority recognised them as a good friend. Indeed, while the vast majority of those killed were murdered by people they knew, including their own friends and family, there are harrowing stories from survivors saved at the very last moment when an interpersonal bond with a perpetrator somehow managed to rise above that homicidal drive, and they would be quickly hidden away somewhere out of sight, where they could remain for months waiting for the killings to stop.

Ethnicity had been part of Rwandan politics since independence, and over time, it became seen as a replacement for having individual political views in the minds of many. If you were Hutu, you were for the Government. If you were Tutsi, you were for armed rebel groups. This was the tenor of Rwandan identity politics, completely distorting the reality of the situation.

Ultimately, all this stratification and segmentation was built on nothing but words. Words which were wielded as a means to political ends, whether by the European Colonials who sought to keep the native people divided and subjugated, or later, by native Hutu politicians who were effectively pursuing the same ends.

Simply being exposed to hateful messaging is unlikely to drive someone to kill. Humans are an overwhelmingly pro-social species. We are genetically pre-disposed toward helping others over harming them, even those that we may not necessarily like, or identify with. However, we are also prone to tribalism. We can be suspicious and wary of out-groups. We are also sensitive to threats, or perceptions of threats; emotions, especially fear, can overwhelm our rationality, simplify our thinking, and make every action we take seem justified at the time.

Of all the factors which have been studied about Genocide and its precursors, there is one near-universal pre-requisite for all: the deliberate and purposeful spreading of hate speech.

Without the kind of messaging that dehumanises and isolates the target group, whether in the moment of greatest tension or throughout the years preceding the critical events, the likelihood of genocide becomes practically negligible.

Aftermath: Theory vs Practice

The 100 days of slaughter came to an end when the rebel RPF effectively defeated the government militias, and seized power. The drafting of a new constitution began shortly thereafter, in which the new government introduced articles allegedly intended to depoliticise factors like race and religion, clan or gender, and make the political hegemony of any one ethnic group impossible. The stated goal was to prevent extremist identity parties such as the old MDR - the Hutu Supremacist and formerly governing party - from being formed to begin with.

Most would have agreed, in the context of the aftermath of a genocide, such a measure made sense.

So the new constitution included Article 54, which states: “political organizations are prohibited from basing themselves on race, ethnic group, tribe, clan, region, sex, religion or any other division which may give rise to discrimination".

Furthermore, laws were introduced which made it a crime punishable by decade-long prison terms to simply “belittle” the genocide, laws so vague they could be used to justify the imprisonment of just about anyone. More laws were added which meant anyone who had spent more than 6 months in prison, for any reason, was permanently barred from public office.

Almost immediately, Paul Kagame, leader of the RPF and installed as Vice President of Rwanda, as well as Defence Minister, began using Article 54 to turn Rwanda into effectively a one-party state: this time, instead of outright banning all other parties, he would simply ban those which he deemed a potential threat to RPF dominance. During the transition years, he kept himself in the Vice Presidents position officially in order to create a false sense of humility and shared power. Whenever asked about his political ambitions, he would tell about his desire to leave politics and become a farmer. Western aid organisations and governments fawned over his show of democratic principles.

Yet that was all it was to be: a show.

When the time came for Rwanda’s next attempt at presidential elections in 2003, Paul Kagame stood for the RPF. Although a handful of newly minted parties contested, the results had been pre-determined: Kagame has won over 90% of the vote in every single election he has now stood for. Every single result was overwhelmingly fixed, through violence, intimidation, ballot-stuffing, and if that wasn’t enough, he used the vague hate-speech laws meant to prevent genocide to instead imprison anyone seen as a potential rival for the presidency, thereby making them legally ineligible to run.

His rule closely resembles the personal dictatorship of the tiny and cowardly Vladimir Putin, yet somehow he manages to get away with it more successfully. A combination of international shame over having done nothing to intervene during the 100 day genocide, and a historic sense of guilt (entirely justified) over the crimes of colonialism, the international community is desperate to please, continuing to send aid and offer loans, while praising the “clean streets” of the capital Kigali, and turning a blind eye to the massive rigging of elections, which delivered over 98% of the “vote” to Kagame in the 2024 edition of this charade.

It is a complete police state, on par with the old East German regime, yet more violent. People are still being disappeared for not showing complete obeisance and grovelling at the feet of Kagame: whether they be old RPF fighters who had fought all their lives for the cause, the closest old school friends of Kagame who had for one reason or another become suspect in his eyes, or innocent civilians who were supposedly overheard saying something potentially critical of the state of the country, the RPF, or Kagame himself.

Revenge killings en masse at unknown scale were carried out after the RPF’s seizure of power, and kept mostly quiet. Some have called these reprisal killings genocidal: some estimates are that around 30,000 additional people, mostly Hutus, were slaughtered by the triumphant RPF.

Many former insiders of the RPF over the years, frozen out by Kagame’s psychotic paranoid rage, have admitted to the RPF’s role in shooting down the presidential airplane in 1994 which immediately precipitated the genocide. Paul Kagame himself, it seems, planned the operation, and gave the shoot-down order.

Such whistle-blowers continue to be hunted down relentlessly worldwide by the Rwandan security services to this day, alongside the extra-judicial killings and assassinations of Rwandan expatriates all over the world who dare to voice even minor criticisms of Kagame, the RPF, or the situation in Rwanda.

So the dilemma is a real one. How does a country effectively prevent the necessary pre-requisite to all genocide - violent hate-speech - without risking the creation of a police state?

Ultimately, I believe the answer comes down to the strength of institutions to stand up to the executive. Rwanda makes a big show of democratic principles, yet keeps everyone in fear for their lives, and uses hate-speech laws to silence dissent. Notice, however, how no one ever criticises Paul Kagame (and lives), and moreover, anyone that ruled against him in the very early days of Rwanda’s post-genocide government from the judiciary were silenced. Despite being against Rwanda’s constitution, all their Supreme Court justices were replaced by Kagame himself with those who were ready to kowtow to him personally.

So the story of free speech continues to play out in the west. Yet Rwanda serves as the cautionary tale of all cautionary tales.

On the one hand, how genocide is made possible by certain forms of speech, and on the other, how trading freedom for safety can leave you with neither in the end.

Thank you so much for reading and listening. This has been my most intensely-researched article, and although I only quoted from a few sources, two books in particular helped me to understand the Rwandan context immensely, and made this work possible:

• We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch, (1998)

• Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong (2021)

Thank you to my paid subscribers, who make all of this possible, and everyone who has donated to the coffee fund.

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We had a ton of fun, and I hope you will too :)

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Now, on to today’s article. Enjoy!

In late 2018, one Mark Zuckerberg got a haircut, something which made a lot of people on the internet very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

What’s wrong with haircuts?

Well first of all, it didn’t seem like a particularly good haircut (and profoundly rich people only get the best haircuts), and second - according to internet historians - it looked strikingly similar to the haircut on some ancient statues of Augustus.

You know, the Roman Princeps, adopted son of Julius Caesar, the kid that overthrew the Roman Republic and replaced its peaceful, all sunshine-and-rainbows democracy with a dastardly evil Empire? That interminably blood-thirsty psychopath who once appointed a horse as head of government? (That last part wasn’t Augustus, actually, that was Caligula, but the way journalists were talking about him, it might as well have been!)

Well, apparently, our boy Zuck here has a certain fondness for Augustus, and he and his wife spent their honeymoon checking out relevant historical sites around Italy. So, naturally, given the fact that the Romans were also fond of cutting their hair every now and again, the implication was clear: Mark Zuckerberg believes he IS Augustus, Supreme Roman Dictator, Princeps Metamaximus!

Once this connection was made - between a haircut and a Roman emperor - the news media ran with it so hard.

It was one of those occasions when one can only assume it was a slow news day, or perhaps week. Suddenly, a whole lot of nonsense non-stories started spewing forth from respectable publications (and otherwise), all at once, all casting shade on my boy Augustus.

I have no fondness for Mark Zuckerberg, let’s just be clear on that.

I have even less fondness for autocrats and dictators. (If you’ve been following me for any appreciable length of time, you would know this.)

However, I do have a certain fondness for Augustus in particular, and it’s not for any of the reasons you might think.

Trust me. In order to explain, we’re going to need a fair bit of context.

What was the Roman Republic?

The idea that any state could go from a “republic” to an “empire” makes it seem like it must necessarily have been a democracy overthrown by some evil regressive autocrat, but this was unlike any democracy we would recognise in today’s world.

The fact is, the Roman Republic was an Oligarchy, albeit a kind of elective one.

Rome was neither a direct nor an indirect democracy, and had no such pretensions. It had no elected legislative assembly composed of the people’s representatives, and no ideological political parties that competed for power.

The voters did not choose between a failed leader and a successful one, or between one political platform and another, but between candidates who were all drawn from a select group within the citizenry which held the exclusive right to compete for the various positions (ius honorum) in line with a set of rules established over the years by both tradition and legislation.

Roman Elections in the Age of Cicero, by Rachel Feig Vishnia (2012)

Although the system was better at self-correcting than the Empire would be later, and was still more representative at the end of the day, it was not by much. It was also viciously aggressive, expansionist, and imperialist beyond anything the Roman Empire itself would ever be.

For its entire 482-year existence, it had spent 466 of those years at war; as such, the famous doors of the Temple of Janus - which were kept open during war, and closed during peace - spent a measly 16 years closed prior to Augustus. Most of Rome’s wars were of conquest; though this is quite possibly one of the reasons the Republic managed to survive for so long.

So this idea that Augustus replaced sunshine-and-rainbows democracy with aggressive imperialism is outright nonsense.

At the same time, there really is no answer to the question “Was the Roman Empire a good thing?”

It was just a thing. It existed. It had a profound influence on the world, both in positive and negative directions. The weight of each of these influences will differ from person to person. They are necessarily subjective, and our assessment of it is not only limited by the historical records which have survived and what archaeology manages to reveal, but it is also tainted by the context of our own times.

Up until relatively recently, Empires in general were commonly seen as civilising forces for good in the world. Today, however, we know all too well the harm they are capable of.

Okay, great, so how does Augustus fit in to this story?

I’m getting to that!

Gaius Octavianus (a.k.a Octavian), later known by his adopted name Gaius Julius Caesar, and then later by the name Augustus (but we will call him Octavian for now), was just 19 when he first set out from the military camp in Illyria - where he had been training - over to Italy in order to learn the contents of his great uncle’s will. His great uncle, of course, was the one and only Julius Caesar, who had been assassinated on the Ides of March.

Since Julius had no legitimate children, he had adopted his nephew Octavian as his own son - as was common practice in Rome - posthumously, bestowing to him via his will (kept safe by the Vestal Virgins) all his wealth and property, but most importantly: the name of Caesar.

That name was the equivalent of a super weapon in the Roman world by this point. It gave Octavian instant legitimacy among the Roman army, plus the instantaneous and total personal loyalty of Julius’ legendary veteran legions, those that had been with him throughout the conquest of Gaul: the “Caesarians”.

All of a sudden, this province-kid’s life went from normal Roman province-kid stuff, to being the inheritor of all that was Julius Caesar, at the very moment when the Republic itself was imploding.

In Roman politics, military glory was everything.

No, really. I don’t think you fully understand, so allow me to emphasise: EVERYTHING.

If you wanted to have a political career in Rome, to leave your mark on society and on history, you had to get out there and lead some troops into battle. It didn’t matter who you fought or why you were fighting them, you simply had to fight and win, and be seen to win - or, at the very least, have someone write that they saw you winning.

Julius had managed to pull off a fairly spectacular political career for the time, before making a real name for himself on the battlefield, and this was a feat of its own; he made very smart, very timely alliances with all the right people, riding up with them in power and prestige. After a stint as Consul, however, and some serious political defeats (he became very unpopular among Senators for having several of them beat up by street thugs for opposing him), he was effectively exiled away from Rome’s centre of political power, and made Governor over the border province of Transalpine Gaul.

Being governor of a border province was the traditional way that men could build power, status and personal wealth. They were typically assigned a certain number of legions - the standard unit of the Roman army, like a division - who were supposed to assist in “maintaining order” in the province.

Instead, what they usually did with these legions was to expand the borders of Rome, by invading and conquering neighbouring territories. This could be a brutal process, to varying degrees. Most of the time, after defeating whatever resistance there might have been, instead of simply slaughtering all the people that had been living on those lands, they would be assimilated as Romans; although much land would also be confiscated and redistributed to the families of the troops.

The tricky thing is: this was technically illegal under Roman law. You could be charged with very serious crimes. Nevertheless, as long as you were outright victorious - successfully expanding the borders of Rome and subjugating any and all peoples in the way - everyone would simply forget about trifling details like the illegality of the act; furthermore, you were likely to be granted a Triumph: a massive parade through the streets of Rome herself, where you would be painted up to represent Jupiter Optimus Maximus, King of the Roman Gods, and driven around in a grand chariot with all the slaves and booty captured in your conquest marched along behind.

If you were not outright victorious; even worse, if you lost territory; and even worse than that, if you actually survived: your name would be tarnished, whatever fortune you may have had would be decimated, and in the political climate in which Caesar was living, you might even lose your life.

In Rome, the ends justified the means.

Existential Dread

For a long time, Romans had an unusually visceral, even primal, fear of barbarians. Not just any barbarians, but one very specific group of them: they were called the Gauls.

Roman mothers were said to use that fear as a way to straighten out naughty children: “You better behave, or else the Gauls will get you!”

This fear stemmed from the one time that Rome herself was ever completely overcome by an outside force: the 390BC Sack of Rome by a Gallic warband. Rome’s great Legions appeared utterly impotent against them. The Romans never forgot, and never forgave.

So, in this context, becoming governor of a province up alongside the borders of Gaul - more commonly known today as France - with a mere handful of legions was probably not an ideal scenario for those seeking easy victories.

Julius Caesar, as noted earlier, was not exactly known for any special military prowess at this point, either, and the Gallic tribes were thought to have some of the best warriors in the known world. It turns out, however, that Julius understood tribal armies the way most Roman commanders did not: he realised they are easily divided, and thereby more easily conquered piecemeal.

Divide and conquer.

So that’s what he did: he marched into Gaul, and arranged things in such a way that he could fight one tribe at a time. It was a strategy he employed with ruthless efficiency, and within 4 - 6 years, he had conquered the whole of Gaul - a territory spanning today’s Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxemberg - and had even made initial excursions into the British isles.

Yet it was not simply the conquest itself which made Caesar the most powerful name in the history of Rome; it was the fact that he himself wrote the history of it, in letters he sent back to Rome, regularly chronicling his exploits in heroic and vivid imagery. Caesar was a propagandist of genius, and his “Commentaries on the Gallic Wars” was then and is still today considered a master work of written Latin.

The Roman people were enthralled by Caesar. Ultimately, his name would become immortal in ways that even he could never have imagined.

Rubicon

Julius Caesar did eventually return to Rome under threat of arrest and prosecution for his conquest of Gaul - something which had almost never happened before to a victorious General - and in order to protect his name and legacy from ignominy and exile for political ends, brought one of his legions with him, which by definition was an outright act of treason and declaration of war on the Roman state.

This lead to the civil war, which Julius won with great skill, and great tact; he made a point to show clemency to many of his enemies, especially those he defeated on the battlefield. He would offer them amnesty, and try to recruit many of them to join his administration. He let most captives go free, even when he knew they intended to fight him again.

He refused to emulate victors from previous civil wars in Rome, who had famously drawn up lists of their opponents and people they disliked in order to have them rounded up and executed in an orgy of violence and bloodletting.

Nevertheless, although Caesar stood victorious at the end of the civil war, and had gone out of his way to prove himself virtuous, compassionate and trustworthy, he did not turn down the copious honours, rights and extraordinary powers the Senate showered upon him.

Yeah, rookie move. When you’re trying to be an emperor, you’re not supposed to look like you’re trying to be an emperor.

His face began appearing on new coins, something which had never been done before. He sat atop a throne in all but name. He wore Royal colours. The only thing he turned down was a literal crown.

It naturally freaked out a bunch of people, including several young ideologically-charged senators, who decided it was time for a bit of good ol-fashioned Tyrannicide.

It was carried out on the Ides of March, and the great Julius Caesar, Conqueror of Gaul, Dictator of Rome, “tyrant”, was dead.

Et tu, Bruté?

Now we return to Octavian, our future Augustus (he wasn’t yet known as Augustus); he was also not known for any special military prowess, and in fact was too young to have commanded troops into battle; yet with the name Caesar, he was warmly welcomed by the old Caesarian veterans when he arrived at a garrison in Brindisium. That was the power of the name alone.

At the time, it was assumed that Mark Antony - Julius’ right-hand man who had been by his side throughout the conquests and the civil war - would take the mantle of Caesar and assume power. This is, in fact, what Mark Antony had believed as well, and upon finding the body of his leader on the floor of the senate, carried it out to the public square and proclaimed his iron determination to bring the murderers to swift justice.

When the young Octavian shows up, bearing Caesars last written will and testament, which stated clearly who the true heir to Caesar was, things became… complicated.

Mark Antony was a capable military man, who had been steeped in blood and victory for most of his life. He had also spent time in charge of Rome when Caesar left Rome to chase down the last remaining resistance (and then got “distracted” by a young Queen Cleopatra of Egypt).

His time in charge of the city, however, was nothing short of catastrophic and scandalous. He was drunk throughout most of it, mis-managed everything, screamed at everyone, and letters were sent by people of Rome to Caesar in Egypt begging for his return, to save them from Antony.

Octavian, on the other hand, would turn out to be an intelligent and diligent administrator, a brilliant and subtle politician, and a very, very good friend.

Friends Forever

Something you learn from reading a lot of Roman history is that powerful people don’t really have good friends, because those that do are all too often either usurped by them, or will become so paranoid about such an eventuality that they will end up destroying everyone. See: Justinian and Caligula, for starters. There are few examples of total and unmitigated loyalty and devotion between someone of supreme power and any other human being, especially when unrelated by blood or marriage.

However, Octavian (Augustus) had a most loyal and most capable best friend in a man named Marcus Vipsaneus Agrippa.

The friendship between Octavian and Agrippa was something so special, that it is difficult for me to recall an example like it in history, though I know there must be some.

They first met as boys, and bonded quickly. The teenaged Agrippa followed Octavian to his first and only meeting with his famous uncle Julius Caesar, and trained alongside Octavian at the camp in Illirya. When word was received about the events of the Ides of March, Agrippa was steadfast in his support for Octavian, agreeing to assist him in whatever way he could.

Octavian needed the support: he was chronically ill throughout his life, afflicted constantly with severe gastrointestinal problems, migraines, a skin condition, and much else besides including several close brushes with death. This often prevented him from being able to command his own legions in battle; a story is retold by Suetonius in his “Lives of the 12 Caesars” that, on the moment of engagement during one battle against Antony at Actium, Octavian was hit by severe abdominal cramps which forced him to the ground, and he had to hand over command to someone else.

He had miraculously managed to escape death in camp another time, after leaving his sickbed shortly before it was unexpectedly overrun, his tent being stabbed through by enemy soldiers believing he was still there.

As such, he often had to hand over military control to others in moments of crisis, when even his own body rebelled against him.

This would normally be a very dangerous thing to do for anyone seeking supreme power: victorious generals often gained the loyalty of the legions they lead, no matter who was supposed to be in charge.

However, Octavian was not the typical political power player, and he had an incredibly competent and capable man whose loyalty was without question on whom he could rely.

It was during the Civil Wars that broke out between Antony and Octavian that Agrippa’s genius for military tactics first came to the fore, both on land and at sea. Octavian, lying in his sick bed, doubled over with cramps, handed command to his friend, and charged him with dealing a decisive defeat to Mark Antony once and for all, at Actium.

It was quite possibly the best decision of his life.

Agrippa had already smashed the Naval forces of Sextus Pompey at Naulochus, in 36 BCE. This time, he was up against the combined navies of Cleopatra and Antony himself, with forces that were roughly equally matched on both sides.

Yet, he was unstoppable: Agrippa routed the enemy decisively, causing Antony and Cleopatra to flee for their lives. Antony later killed himself (thinking that Cleopatra had already done so, but she was captured alive.)

Every victory that Agrippa stacked up was a victory for Augustus, and every attempt at honouring Agrippa was politely turned away and redirected toward his friend. As the Principate became established, with Octavian - now Augustus - in supreme power, he showered Agrippa with titles, positions of honour, tasks of the greatest importance to the state. Agrippa became the one he turned to in every crisis, knowing there was no better man for the job, no matter what it was.

When Augustus famously said “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble,” most of this enmarblification was carried out by the indomitable Agrippa. He consistently ensured things got done. One of his many, many infrastructure projects was the repair and maintenance of Rome’s main sewer system, the Cloaca Maxima - it’s still in use to this day.

Agrippa applied his talent for assessing a problem, determining the solution, bringing together the required resources and then getting the work done.

Marcus Agrippa: Right-hand Man of Caesar Augustus, by Lindsay Powell

Augustus had been so sickly for his entire life, that it was assumed he could not possibly out-live most of his friends. Only 12 years following the smashing of Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s combined fleets at Actium in 31 BCE, Augustus became convinced of the need to ensure the succession of the Principate - the word used for his position of great power in the state, chosen deliberately to avoid anything resembling monarchy - and that there was only one man on Earth he could entrust such a responsibility to: his best friend.

Thus, he elevated Agrippa once more, this time placing him - politically at least - on equal footing to Augustus himself. Should Augustus die, Agrippa would carry on.

Yet, in an unexpected twist of fate, it was Agrippa who would die long before his friend took his last breath. Few things in Augustus life devastated him so much as this loss. Cities and towns all across the vast Roman lands raised monuments to the memory of Agrippa. The people had loved him for all the work he had done to build and repair public amenities, roads and infrastructure, all across the land. Augustus minted so many coins bearing the profile of Agrippa, that they circulated throughout the Roman world for a very long time, and are today a common collectors item. Augustus wanted to ensure the continued memory of his best friend.

Agrippa was not forgotten.

It can honestly be said that this duo was one of the most significant friendships in all of human history. Between the two of them, they defeated their enemies in the civil war, and proceeded to conquer the hearts and minds of the Roman people.

Together, they created a legacy so enormous, so overwhelming, and so enduring, it has stood tall like a beacon of achievement for over 2,000 years.

I’ve not heard great things about Mark Zuckerberg’s ability to form close relationships with others. Like most men of power and wealth, he seems to enjoy standing alone. His creations might also one day be regarded as a net-negative to society in general, having helped to foster much polarisation and division, rather than unity and shared values.

In these and many other ways, he is nothing like an Augustus, not even with a bad haircut.

This is Part 1 of a 2-part series, profiling two very different people in supreme power whose illnesses and disabilities had profound impacts on world history. Next, we’ll be taking a look at one Kaiser Wilhelm II, and how the black sheep of the family with insecurities beaten into him, and only one properly functioning arm, was forever branded by the world as a warmonger, when he was nothing of the sort.

See you then!

I don’t remember the exact day when he died, or when we heard the news.

Memory, for me, has always been a very fuzzy thing. Ill-defined. Blurred. Time gets away from me, and I am rarely able to estimate the time distance between memories.

I do remember what I did: I went out with my buddies to skate the day and night away, to flush the initial emotional turmoil out of my system, and then drink heavily. That was usually how I handled heart break: physical activity, followed by alcohol. The emotions had this strange effect of boosting my skill and confidence level on the skateboard. Most likely, it was due to becoming less inhibited, less afraid of pain.

I didn’t cry. Not at first.

It wasn’t until I was standing at the rostrum of the tiny little funeral chapel near his home in Queensland several days later, fumbling with the papers on which I’d printed out what I intended to say, that it all came pouring out.

The tears made it impossible to read from my notes, so I set them aside and just spoke.

Of the 5 people who attended, only 3 of them knew anything about my Dad, and I was one of them.

My dad was born in Germany, and emigrated with his family here to Australia when he was 10. Coincidentally, he travelled here on the very same boat at the very same time as my Mum, but it would be another 20 years before they’d meet each other for the first time. My mother and her family were coming from France.

My dad had 3 brothers, one of whom had severe cognitive disabilities. Being the eldest, he protected them from their brutally violent stepmother, who used to beat them with all her strength, at every chance she got, for no reason. Dad would physically place himself in the way, and take the blows meant for his disabled brother.

As he grew up, he took numerous different jobs, all generally within his areas of interest: he once drove freight trains across the nullabor, and later became a hospital pathology technician. Sadly, he didn’t get far into his independent adult years, free from his sociopathic stepmother’s beatings, before he became stricken with a chronic, incurable, and awfully painful illness.

Crohns Disease is auto-immune. The body’s immune cells detect a foreign invader, and set to work to destroy the invader and cleanse the body of all traces. The only problem: the supposed invader is not an invader at all. It’s your own intestines.

For whatever reason, the immune system no longer recognises those cells as your own. Gradually, over time, more and more of the intestinal wall is wiped out.

The disease is rarely fatal on its own. You can live a long time with it, especially with modern treatments that have come about during the past 10-20 years.

In my dad’s lifetime, though, it was yet more pain and suffering; the kind that you can’t even defend yourself against. He required regular surgical interventions to cut away destroyed tissue. He wore a colostemy bag. His food intake was necessarily restricted. He required strong opiates and sometimes morphine to ease the pain. This would be how he’d have to live his life, for as long as it lasted.

I am his only child. None of his brothers had children of their own. Although their relationship didn’t last long, my mum and dad remained friends. She would try to have dad spend more time with me, but it was sadly rare for me to actually see him. At the time, I couldn’t understand why. I don’t think mum could, either.

A lifetime of pain surely must effect the human psyche in profound ways. Long after his death, I came to realise that he hadn’t really been living: he’d mostly just been existing.

Life in his case was simply a matter of the next go round through surgery. If you lived, then you had a bit of time until the next one.

When people say “live your life as though today could be your last”, they usually mean something very different, but this was his life: each day, you were never quite sure if he’d survive it, but somehow, he did. Day after day. Waiting.

Breathing because his body made him do so.

Eating for the same reason.

Allowing the heart to beat merely as so he would need not be bothered fighting it.

He thought. He sometimes continued doing mathematics, concocting formulas in theoretical physics, studying electrolysis and astronomy. He loved his car, a classic and very rare Mercedes, which, like him, was always in the shop.

His wife kept him company. He followed along.

His accent still had a faint hint of his German boyhood.

If there was more going on underneath, it was utterly concealed.

He was almost never visibly angry. The one time I can remember, his anger was like a snapping spring: very briefly in rapid motion, but then gone just as quickly. That was it.

He didn’t have any strong friendships. He rarely engaged socially with people. He was quiet, nerdy, somewhat unkempt.

For reasons I simply cannot figure out, women found him irresistable.

He left very few markings on the world in general. It has made me feel a kind of responsibility, a duty, not to let him be forgotten, because I suspect if it weren’t for me, he almost certainly would be.

But those times when I did get to be with him, just Dad and me, formed some of the strongest memories I have.

The times we went camping out in the bush near railway tracks, recording the numbered engines of the massive freight trains that criss-cross the state of New South Wales. The times we visited some of Australias most famous telescopes and observatories. The days he taught me chess on an old German electronic chessboard. Reading to me from his highly technical astronomy and physics textbooks, which I never understood a word of, but I loved it because they were things that he loved.

When I was in my mid-teens, he and his wife moved a long way away, far up north, almost on the opposite end of the continent. From that time on, my only contact with him would be by phone, or the internet.

I resented it. I resented the woman he married, choosing to believe that she was the one taking my dad away from me. I still carry some of that resentment to this day.

By the time I gave his eulogy at the rostrum in the tiny little chapel, in front of the only 4 other people in attendance, I hadn't seen him in person in over a decade. It had been planned for me to visit him that year. Some things just don't go to plan.

Yet, my dad was never bitter about his circumstances. I never heard him complain. Unlike most people, I don’t see that as a virtue, but it is an indicator of his character. Through all that pain and trauma, he became effectively numb to the world. He dismissed it with nonchalance. He owed it absolutely nothing, and that’s how he lived.

We are tempted to believe in the idea “that which does not kill you makes you stronger”. Based on my experience, I don’t know if that really holds water anymore. What is clear to me, is those tempered in fire can be made brittle, despite the appearance of great solidity.

Others have already been shattered, and there is nothing left to break.

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Some families debate politics.

Other families debate religion.

In our house, we debate the physics of coffee.

For months now, there has been a small coffee stain on the kitchen ceiling. We know where it came from: a cat knocked a cup of coffee off the kitchen bench, which crashed to the floor and sent coffee flying everywhere.

What we’ve been trying to figure out is how the coffee reached the ceiling after only falling from hip-height.

If you drop a ball, no matter how bouncy, with no added force, onto a flat and stationary surface, it cannot bounce higher than the point from where it was dropped. To do otherwise would be a violation of physical laws (and Newton himself would come to arrest you for such a crime.)

So every now and then, one of us looks at the ceiling, and comes out with a theory.

“Maybe the cat added extra force to the coffee cup with its paw?” - unlikely.

“Perhaps coffee is resistant to gravity?” - highly implausible.

After discussing this conundrum further with CommaDash’s resident scientist, , we came upon the most likely answer: Fluid Dynamics and Worthington Jets.

As illustrated in the embedded video, a Worthington Jet is an effect created in water (or suitably inviscid liquid, like coffee) whereby a smaller portion of water mass is ejected from the larger body at significantly higher velocity than whatever impacted it in the first place.

The coffee stain is rather small, suggesting only a small amount reached the ceiling (the cover image of this post shows the extent of it). Due to the fact that such a liquid can change its shape with minimal force, and split into smaller parts, presumably a large amount of the overall energy of the system was transferred into relatively small droplets from the original body of liquid; or, in other words, it likely underwent “energy focussing”.

Caffeine-Powered Jetstream

First, lets assume the cup makes contact with the ground bottom-first.

The bulk of the coffee is instantly redirected outwards, hits the edge of the cup, and redirects again upwards. The momentum moving away from the centre has created a low-pressure partial-vacuum called a “cavity”. This is similar to the voids created by rotating propellers in water.

There is suddenly an immense amount of force attracting all the surrounding matter back in to fill that void, which nature abhors. That, combined with the momentum of the liquid returning toward the centre after being redirected by the sides of the cup - assuming a perfectly spherical cavity - will cause it all to meet at one central point, where the only remaining direction is up.

However, instead of all the liquid in the vertical column meeting at the same time, you get a “zipper” effect. Think of it like a tube of toothpaste: there’s a tiny amount still in the bottom of the tube, and to extract it, you need to squeeze the tube starting from the bottom, and going all the way up.

Similarly, at the bottom of the cavity, there is a portion of liquid that will be squeezed through the middle by the force of the inward-rushing liquid body, driven both by the rebound against the edges of the cup *and* the pressure difference in the centre cavity.

This small liquid packet ends up with all of the kinetic energy of the rest of the system, giving it way more velocity than it had when the cup hit the ground.

Voila: coffee hits the ceiling.

Great, now that we’ve settled the debate, we can finally get on with more important things: like making more coffee.

Gotta have priorities.

Update: Things are heating up over at CommaDash HQ! We’ve been having a lot of fun learning all the ins and outs of hardcore academic statistics, and building out our vision for doing explorative and hypothesis-driven analysis. Our prototype continues to advance in leaps and bounds. If you’re a scientist (or non-scientist even) interested in helping us shape the future of statistics, we’d love to hear from you!

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