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I remember travelling with my parents on the newly opened M6 motorway in 1959. My father’s Austin Ten motor car hurtled along this magnificent new road at a breath-taking forty miles an hour. To me in the back seat it seemed very fast, but still enabled me to spot something I’d never seen before. It was an old articulated lorry trailer parked in a farmer’s field adjacent to the new motorway, and on its side was a huge advertising hoarding.

I’d seen advertising signs before, of course, in towns and cities on the sides of buildings, but this was different. This farmer had seen the potential to make money by selling advertising space along what was to become one of the busiest roads in Britain.

I have no memory of what that hoarding was advertising, nor did I realise that what I was seeing that day was the beginning of a new era in the lives of the people, an age of mass advertising that would take over our lives and change them forever.

It was thirty-five years before the internet, and another few years after that before almost every home had its own computer connected to the WorldWideWeb. It was the wonder of the age. New providers and websites began to spring up and it was mostly all free to use. I met my American wife on Yahoo’s “Find a Friend”, the first dating site on the net. It was totally free,  both of advertising and for use. There was even a box that could be ticked, marked, “Pen Pals Only.”

The internet was like a child in those days, innocent, uncorrupted, virginal, a community like none ever before.

Then came the corrupters: Google, Microsoft, Apple and others. Small start-up internet providers were rapidly bought out by the bigger fish, until they in turn were swallowed up by the giant corporations who saw the dollar mounds of profit from large scale advertising revenues.

There’s a name for this degradation of the internet, “enshittification.” Coined by the tech critic, Cory Doctorow, the term is most apt for what has been allowed to happen to the internet over the twenty-odd years since its inception and corporatisation.

The child has grown up to be a monster.

John Naughton, a professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University and frequent Guardian columnist, wrote this week:

“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that…”

He then goes on to give examples of such degradation, of which there are legion.

You are probably reading this on my blog site, Sparrow Chat. You can continue to read unhindered by any form of advertising whatever. I’m not here to make money. It’s a platform for my thoughts and feelings about the world and any comments that readers might like to share.

There are still a few of us left on the net. Most blog writers came from that yesteryear when the net was about community and fellowship, and global friendship. There’s not many around these days who can remember what it was like back then. Many of my old blogging friends are no longer with us today.

The net has been kidnapped by a relatively small group of huge corporates that now control it. Their sole purpose is to make money, and their customers are not you or I, but other giant corporations that pay them for vast advertising space.

They have changed our world and they have been totally free to do so, with little or no effective regulatory curbs.* They have become so powerful they control governments.

Yahoo’s “Find a Friend,” died a death many moons ago. Replacing it are a myriad of so-called dating sites, corporate owned, or by the mafia-style gangs who operate on them. Photos and descriptions of cute women or good-looking men, hide the real criminals who work these sites.  They coin vast sums by stealth and false pretences from lonely folk just seeking love and companionship. This, besides the grotesque fees charged for membership of these places, and the inevitable advertising revenues that accompany them.

“Enshittification” is an apt description for what has become of the internet today. Capitalism has gone berserk within it. There is no longer any sense of community. One has only to see what Facebook and Twitter, among other social media platforms, have become in the last two decades to comprehend the sheer enshittification that corporate greed has imposed on us via the ‘net’.

If you drive up the M6 motorway today, you’ll not see many old articulated trailers in farmer’s fields. Back in 1959, one farmer thought he had himself a winner. He was, perhaps, short-sighted. He never realised that in a few years time he would be superseded by one mammoth global advertising hoarding, known as the internet.

^{*Reading this link shows just how ineffective most government internet regulations are today.}

On the 8th March 2014 a Malaysian Boeing 777 airliner code-named MH370 took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing, China. The aircraft carried twelve crew members and two hundred and twenty-seven passengers. It has not been seen since.

The aircraft apparently disappeared into thin air. The first forty minutes of the flight were routine. The Malaysian air traffic control passed the flight to the Vietnamese ATC via the aircraft’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, one of Malaysia’s most senior pilots. Zaharie never contacted the Ho Chi Min ATC and nothing more was heard from the aircraft. It literally disappeared into thin air.

Nine years later, we are no further forward in discovering what happed to that hapless plane and the 239 people on board.  There have been a multitude of theories, some viable and others downright ridiculous. Even this writer put forth one viewpoint in a story entitled, “MH370-Flight To Armageddon.“

The truth is that no-one knows where the aircraft is, though scientific analysis indicates it eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in the Indian Ocean. Some twenty pieces of aircraft wreckage have washed ashore on Réunion, Madagascar and Mozambique. It is purported to have come from the stricken aircraft.

There is hope that a new search may commence within the next year or so.  The original search team has stated they have new evidence come to light. As yet no-one, apart from the company involved, knows what that evidence might be.

Nine years on and still the relatives and loved ones of those on board have no more idea of what may have happened to them, than they did on the 9th March 2014.

It’s a sad indictment of humanity that we can allow such long and arduous suffering because governments don’t want to spend the money on continued searches.

Let’s ensure we don’t forget those unfortunates on board that doomed aircraft, and those left behind who are still grieving.

Last week the UK Special Immigration Appeals Commission ruled that the government was right to strip a British citizen of their citizenship. This despite it not proven that she held citizenship in any other country, and despite Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that states:

“Everyone has the right to a nationality. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.”

The Special Immigration Appeals Commission is the most secretive judicial body in the UK. Nobody is allowed to know who sits on it, other than they are high court judges.

Almost all teenagers rebel in some form during those years. There are a few who were mollycoddled, given everything they wanted, could borrow daddy’s sports car to court the local debutante, and ended up as politicians or bankers. Most of us rebelled, and often it was the likes of them we were rebelling against.

I wasn’t the worst teenager, but I got in a few scrapes. I was caught drinking underage in a pub when I was sixteen. It peeved me no end as I’d been a regular there for two years and it had a full-size snooker table. A sergeant from the local force wandered in one night and caught me with a full pint glass. I did offer to buy him one but he didn’t seem very thirsty.

My mates and I loved driving cars. None of us were old enough for a licence  as we were still schoolboys. No way could we afford a car , so we used to borrow them on the occasional evening for joyrides.

It was fun till we got caught, and for a time I held the dubious honour of losing my licence before I was even old enough to hold one.

It was a simpler life then with no internet and social media to brainwash us.  We were much less likely to be lured away to fight for dubious causes in foreign lands. In 2015, one young teenager and British citizen, Shamima Begum from Lambeth,  South London, along with two other teenage girls, was lured into the murderous pseudo-religious group, Islamic State, by bad people on social media.

We all think we know what we’re doing when we’re fourteen or fifteen. Of course, we don’t. We’re simply trying to wander our way along the murky path to so-called adulthood. Some never make it. Many get stuck in the teenage years until the day they die. They end up with positions of power in government, or, “The City,” but still drink themselves silly with wild parties while the rest of us stay locked down and isolated against Covid-19. These elderly teenageers make laws which suit them rather than the rest of the country, and break laws and degrade moralities because they believe they were never anything but wise adults, even while driving daddy’s sports car, at age fifteen.

Sajid David is a fifty-four year old teenager.

He happened to be the Home Secretary in December 2019 who cancelled Shamima Begum’s British citizenship, after that young woman was found in a refugee camp in northern Syria. She was nursing a fourth child. The other three had died shortly after birth. It’s understood the fourth child has now died from pneumonia.

Shamima Begum is twenty-three now. She’s no teenager. After the life she’s been leading I would think she’d make a better Home Secretary than Sajid David ever did, which let’s be honest, would not be difficult.

She doesn’t have Bangladeshi citizenship, despite the UK government affirming that she does. The Bangladeshi government has denied the assertion and says if she returns there she will be executed as a terrorist. That, at least, makes her a refugee seeking asylum.

The British Establishment, from the government and Parliament up to the highest courts in the land are staffed by teenagers aged between thirty and ninety. They were all born with a silver spoon in their mouths. They all courted debutantes and borrowed daddy’s sports car.

Shamima Begum was a child when she and two friends were brainwashed into believing a load of pseudo-religious and highly dangerous rubbish, by a woman in Glasgow at the time, by the name of Aqsa Mahmood. One of her friends paid with her life in a Russian air strike while planning to escape from Syria. The whereabouts of the other is unknown, possibly also dead.

There’s a lot of people in the West, particularly in the UK, who will say, “Let Begum rot in Syria. She deserves no better.”

I got away lightly when I was sixteen. A £2 fine for the drinking, and about thirty quid and a six month licence suspension for “taking and driving away a motor vehicle without the owner’s consent.” Maybe in another country I would have fared worse. After all, you can get fifteen years jail in Russia today just for mentioning the word, “war.” I think my crimes were far worse than that!

We don’t know what Shemima Begum did while she was with ISIS. There’s a lot of rumour and third-rate media speculation, often offered up as fact. It’s not hard to imagine what she saw. One thing is certain, you don’t see the things that ISIS did at first-hand and stay a teenager very long.

It’s time she was allowed to go home. It’s time the British people remembered their humanity, and perhaps also their own teenage years.