Biography

I think there’s only one thing I really struggle writing about, and that’s myself.  It’s always so awkward — a constant battle to avoid cliché, while bouncing between narcissism and self-deprecation.  This is, so far, my best attempt.

I do a bunch of different things.  Right now I’m working on a new business serving mission-style burritos to the streets of Leeds.  We’ll be implementing an ethical supply chain and a totally flat, equal pay system.  The hope is that once we have some regular staff, we’ll transfer the business to a worker cooperative foundation.  This is partly just me wanting to work in food rather than tech, and also a chance to test my own theories on cooperative systems.

I also write.  I write quite a lot, actually.  I don’t get paid for it and I release most of my work for free use.  I’m more interested in changing society than in getting rich.  I’ve also started speaking publically at a few local events in Leeds.  I suspect that I would be popular and probably semi-famous if I used the same skills to spout populist conservative viewpoints, but I prefer to alienate people with the uncomfortable truth.  I’m a rationalist, sceptic, feminist (& masculinst), socialist; so I disagree with most people on most things.

I grew up in the town of Boston, in Lincolnshire.  That’s the original Boston, outgrown somewhat by its newer American namesake.  It’s a town divided, with a large population of migrant workers from Portugal and Eastern Europe, along with a local population that is typical of rural England: conservative, xenophobic and generally backwards.  Most of the economy is agricultural and that was even more true twenty-odd years ago.  The attitude of the locals was understandably fed by concern of losing their jobs to migrants, along with the general struggle of the British farming industry in the face of cheaper imports.  For most of the migrants, there was more work here than at home, so the choice was simple.  They weren’t there to cause trouble, just to work hard and get paid.  Obviously, as a child, I didn’t understand any of this; all I knew was that the people who looked like me and spoke the same language as me were angry at the other people about something.

My parents elected to send me to a Christian primary school, something that I don’t blame them for, but would never have done myself.  Still, it proves interesting to look back on now, because it raises the question of why I was able to escape from indoctrination on that front so early.  It could not have been long after I rejected Santa Cluas that I also rejected “God” or the very idea of a “supreme being”.  Yet, the same was not true for many of my peers.  I quickly noticed that the issue wasn’t clear cut; there were those who believed, those who believed that they should believe, and those that believed that they believed.  I found the paradox of those who identified as “Christian” when asked, yet said they did not believe in a god.  Somehow, they considered themselves a part of a religion, even if they did not actually believe anything of its teachings.  In many ways, it was frustration with these people that drove me so strongly towards scepticism and rationalism.  I still wonder however, why I became the way I am, instead of what I might have become.

I don’t believe I’ve ever been truly moderate, politically.  In my experience, people like me rarely are.  There’s something about my psychology that demands an answer one way or another, that will find what is right and go all the way to that.  I’ve considered myself apathetic, but only through feeling disenfranchised by the present political system.  I realise now that any time I did not consider myself to have an opinion politically, I simply had not realised, that the things I had opinions on were political.  Unfortunately, the microcosm in which my teenage mind evolved gave me a distorted view of the world.  I found a set of answers that satisfied my questions about the world, but I stopped short of fully questioning those answers.  Between the anecdotes of bitter old men and the propoganda of the Daily Express, I found myself wrapped up in a world I now know as the far right.

I dropped out of sixth form after the end of lower sixth, taking my first job in IT.  The next few years were a learning curve.  I learned a lot about programming, about business and about people.  I went through a small company, freelancing, a corporation and a national museum.  At some point along that road, I learned that most of the things I had previously learned were wrong.  I also learned that I was wrong about what I wanted to be.  I learned that my personality, while making me a good programmer, also made the corporate world intolerable to me.  I came to understand the exploitative nature of Capitalism and came to hate the corporate world that I had once aspired to be a part of.  In just a few short years, my entire perspective on the world had been inverted.  Although looking back, I know how wrong I was before, I don’t regret the journey or where it started.  The reason for that is it has equipped me with a first-hand knowledge of how people in every corner of the political spectrum think.  I know first hand that the people I now oppose in every way are simply products of their environment.  Given the right opportunity, I believe that everyone can have such a change of perspective.

My mission now is to use the skills I have to learn and to educate.  I don’t know how much I can do, but it is my intent to try.  I write about democracy, economics, social issues, rationalism and humanism in the hope that my contribution to the analysis of life will be worth something to somebody.