I have two skills in my professional locker which are both very useful and which also cause me a lot of trouble.

One of those skills is a photographic memory, which I’ve had since primary school. If I am scratching away at a policy question, I can remember a verbatim passage from a book I read years ago, and I can also remember that it was on the top half of a left hand page. I don’t understand it. It just is.

The other skill is an uncanny inner radar for charlatans, chancers, shysters, grifters, hustlers, and (as per previous blog entries…) actual criminal predators. Even when it’s years before The Stories come out or The Revelations are revealed, I will find myself looking at the centre of attention, being the only person in the room who not is applauding them like a seal, because I’m thinking to myself what’s your story, morning glory. I don’t understand it. It just is.

What I do understand is why these skills are why I have spent my adult professional life being labelled “difficult”, often at the cost of the professional work itself. Over time you come to learn that “difficult” means “person who remembers everything and sees right through your bullshit”. Which is why I tend to wear “difficult” as a badge of pride.

Well.

In light of various dramatic news events this week, I must report that once again, without even trying or knowing The Stories, I spotted one from hundreds of miles away, and I remembered where I kept the receipts.

Thanks to that photographic memory, I remembered a tweet (!) that I wrote way back on the 13th of June 2019, at fuck-this-o-clock in the morning, en route to a meeting.

It said:

What, perchance, was I referring to? Well.

I had just read this.

You can read that full story here. It’s the DM, so the usual rules apply about making sure you have adblockers on and javascript off.

But you don’t want to do that, so I’ll share the relevant parts which managed to trigger me before normal people were out of bed:

A female entrepreneur who has developed software that parents can install on their children’s mobile phones to stop them ‘sexting’ has been praised by the Duke of York.

SafeToNet, designed by mother-of-four Sharon Pursey, 51, uses artificial intelligence to address growing concerns over ‘toxic’ material online.

It is the first company in the world to block harmful messages and content on social networks without breaching children’s need for privacy.

It does this by ‘learning’ the child’s normal pattern of use so it can alert parents if their online behaviour changes.

…

Princess Beatrice, who is expected to be there tonight, has followed him into the entrepreneurial arena, forming her own start-ups consultancy. Andrew also paid tribute to the Queen.

‘Being led by an inspirational woman, I have seen the positive effect of women in a team from an early age and have always made choices on the best person for a role regardless of their gender,’ he said. ‘I am probably a great deal more understanding of the issues facing women in the entrepreneurial world than some, but I am quite certain that, as I’ve said before, women are just as, if not more, capable than men in many areas of business and they shouldn’t feel inferior to their male counterparts in any way.’

Mrs Pursey, who has four children aged 16 to 29, worked in the tech industry before having a family.

‘My children were telling me how popular social media sites, such as Snapchat, were being used for sexting because children believed the images were not permanent,’ she said.

‘As a parent and as someone with a keen interest in the industry, this was deeply troubling.

‘We decided we wanted to create an environment to allow children to use their phones safely and realised the way to do this would be to put something on to the operating system that would work as a safety net to filter harmful content.’

The app does this by replacing the existing keyboard on a smartphone with one that removes ‘high risk’ words, relating to everything from sex to cyberbullying and online aggression, and issues a pop-up warning when something inappropriate is typed or an inappropriate website is accessed.

Parents download the app to their phone, link it to their child’s and receive notifications when online behaviour changes and risk levels increase.

The AI can weed out any potentially offensive photographs that are taken or sent.

The user can then opt to get their parent to reinstate the picture if it is an innocuous snap.

Sorry if you just vomited down your front there. You want that magic stain remover spray in the purple bottle.

Yeah so you’re probably thinking to yourself, my god, a nonce supporting an anti-sexting project, that’s sick!

To which I would say: what part of ‘that is how this works, that is always how this works’ didn’t you understand, honey.

Because now let’s bring this full circle.

Over the years, I have gotten pelters – and also actual hate mail (as have my bosses and employers) – for being highly suspicious of the sudden wave of affluent white saviours who appeared seemingly out of nowhere on the technology policy scene, around 2019-2020, bearing bottomless budgets and limitless egos.

Those figures proceeded to hijack the critical work of building a better internet and fighting big tech, whilst defiantly ignoring all the research and policy work which civil society had been putting into those issues for years, choosing instead to turn it into a righteous crusade with their impeccably media-trained personalities at the centre. It goes without saying that some of their policy proposals had very little to do with children and much to do with freedom of expression, privacy, and fundamental issues of human agency vs state and corporate control – issues which they were, defiantly, on the wrong side of.

Many of us working at or well below the poverty line (as I was, and still am) watched dumbfounded as years of carefully considered work were bulldozed over for the optics of their sanctimonious appearances on the sofas of network television, holding hands and wiping tears, sparing no effort to Save Our Precious Children. Policy stopped being driven by real people with skin in the game. It started being driven by PR agencies paid on retainer by the Telegraph, Times, and Tatler set.

It got so unhinged that one of these agencies tried to recruit me to become a full time paid crisis actor, spinning a sob story about being a victimised victim of big tech, for no reason other than the fact that I am white and articulate, which seems to be their preferred flavour of professional victim.

And all that time I’m thinking: Who funds this? Where is the money for this coming from? Who is backing illiberal, privacy-destroying, censorship-inducing proposals packaged as child safety?

And then.

This month happened.

Not the second thing. The first.

(That full story is here. You can read how the paedo and his female enabler were actively looking to recruit normal people – mothers, mothers!! – as the acceptable public faces of their lucrative transatlantic brand partnership.)

And you can bet your sweet backside that their project would have weighed in on children’s online safety, or even on policy ideas to protect young people from sexual predation online.

Because that is how these people work. 

You already read that, above.

That doesn’t change, even after death or dethronement.

If we are to learn anything from the past few days, it is that – as a certain French woman has said – shame must change sides.

For example. And this is just one example, completely unrelated to the above individuals:

When you have someone on your staff who is so bothered by the questions of “who is funding these people?” and “where are these authoritarian ideas coming from?” that someone who seems to have pockets full of that funding phones you up and demands that you fire that difficult harpy  –

and yes, this happened too, White Saviour Karen phoned my manager to complain about me –

perhaps you should consider the fact that your difficult employee may be on to something.

Something which, many years in the future, is going to prove far bigger than you were even capable of comprehending.

Because when it all comes out in public years later, and it will, people are going to look straight at you and ask one simple question:

what’s your story, morning glory?

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My thoughts are with the victims of those figures mentioned above, and with all of those who have been victimised during the years since, when their bodies have been treated as battlegrounds for the comms grids of public relations agencies on easy retainers.

See also the impeccable Marina Hyde – “Sex abusers creating fake philanthropy ventures that bring them closer to vulnerable victims? …if these files show us anything, it’s that there would have been so, so many mega-rich male donors.”