For those of you who read my writings or listen to my podcasts on The New Era, you’ll know that my main focus of attention, of late, has been on technocracy - and particularly the technocratic agenda being peddled - not just by governments but by the Tech Bros. My new book, South of Market, has been a work in process for the last 9 months or so. The book is now published in both paperback and Kindle editions.

Governments are increasingly in thrall to the companies providing the means of controlling the masses: the surveillance companies, machine-based intelligence organisations (that call themselves AI companies) and digital money peddlers. Oh and digital ID snooping outfits like Palantir.

But as the main subject of a novel, I knew that it would have to be relevant for readers - conveyed via characters that I’d have to create, and to which the readers would have to relate. As Tim O’Brien has said, “fiction is for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.”

There’s a maxim that we can only write about what we know. So the characters I created are essentially amalgams of people with whom I’ve worked, or got to know, in a long career in tech - much of which was conducted in the world’s main tech and media centres in the UK and the United States. My job, throughout most of my career, was to peddle the messages I needed amplified, through the media. So I know the process. I know just how slick, and sharp, the personalities can be.

What I tried to do in South of Market, was to populate the book with people - the main heroes of the piece - who reacted, broadly, in the same way as I did when the Covid event was manipulated into being by the media and the Tech Bros who control it.

So I created Anna, an LSE Alumnus who becomes hot property in Tech Comms because she’s beautiful, intelligent, and went to the right type of school. Then there’s Rahul, the coder turned business developer, who is just too well educated to accept irrational nonsense from people peddling certainty. There’s Mark, the self-made businessman and crypto-speculator, who knows that the only route to attention-grabbing is to be very, very rich. And Jenny, Mark’s enigmatic Comms Head, who has something of a dark past.

For my own part, I was only able to cling-on to a paid role, post-Covid, for a few months. I was just unable to button my lip when London went into another lockdown in December 2020. My characters also face similar dilemmas, so I provide them with apparent routes out. Although some of the routes turn out to be dead-ends or blind alleys. But what they all realise is that they need to find out the truth and communicate it far and wide. The media - upon which they have depended in various ways - has become a processor of lies and a promulgator of manufactured fears.

The central theme of the book is the reactions that people have when they’re robbed of agency - the ability to make their own decisions, to live their lives like they want to live them. We see the consequences when government coerces and the effects when rules, regulations and surveillance are applied to people that just want to get on with running businesses or creating wealth or having a drink in a bar.

In short, the four main characters in the book know that the world is at a turning point - with the rubicon ‘event’ an invented virus, and an invented public health crisis that allows governments and media to peddle lies as though they were universal truths. Lurking behind the scenes, though, are dark actors and corporations that define the agenda, land-grabbing and thieving of assets to suit their own purposes and line their own pockets.

In writing South of Market, I’ve tried to create modern day libertarian heroes that have chosen to fight battles for the right to think, the right to hold counter views and the ability to hold truth to power. If you read the book please let me know what you think. And please review it. And spread the word if you think it works and makes some valid points. I enjoyed writing it.

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