Being a man who knows more than a little of guns, policing, and common sense, had I been reporting the arrest of Graham Linehan, I would have been accused of missing the point. But that is the point.

The fact that he was arrested by a number of armed officers would have passed me by, dismissed as irrelevant, why, because at an airport, armed officers are the norm, and the response level, well, that was normal too.

What any responsible, fair-minded journalist should have done was this: compare that arrest to similar arrests at the site; consider that the benchmark for such procedures, and compare it thus. And deviations noted.

The real story would have been both the nature of the offence, whether it was a joke or not, and whether he had been arrested by officers who were not armed, since this would have been abnormal. Outside of normal procedure and protocols.

Instead, parts of the media chose to take parts of the incident out of context. Considering the arrest over the offence. Why? To drive an agenda. And that’s the thing with free speech absolutists, they keep doing that. For words do not exist in a vacuum.

Our world is driven by context; what you say, how you say it and where you say it have for years had consequences. It was the same for Graham Linehan. Yet it was taken out of context by those whose default setting is to proclaim that free speech is under attack. In their world, it always is.

The reality is that it was a false flag operation. It was all an illusion. Far right smoke and mirrors. Bread and circuses. We have never had free speech; we have never explicitly been able to say what we want, where we want. If you did, you had to accept the consequences.

The laws of common sense and self-preservation prevailed. So what we had was a degree of freedom of speech. Yet still the far right bang on about a fantasy, a magical time in the past when we could say what we wanted. It’s a unicorn, not even a Brigadoon. It never existed.

It’s one of those misnomers, like the nursery rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me,” real-life events have overtaken it and it is no longer relevant.

It had its day; it was intended to provide resistance against verbal attacks, and as a shield, it worked valiantly for a while. Nevertheless, in the technological arms race that saw words weaponised and amplified, it was no longer fit for purpose.

There is no such thing as free chemistry or free physics; you are not free to do exactly as you will, there are rules. Ignore them at your peril, and you run the risk of blowing yourself or the world to bits.

Free time sounds nice, but since you don’t live in a bubble, you are not free to suddenly say that an hour is now composed of forty-two seconds and that the week starts on a Tuesday. The rules exist so that your little world can interact with the rest of humanity with as little friction as possible.

Yet we have turned that simple fact upon its head. Nowadays, it seems that the goal of far too many is that all their contact points should cause as much friction as possible in our new planet with amplified and “applified” words; friction causes heat, hot air, and steam.

In this new industrial revolution, likes, retweets, posts, and truths have replaced coal as the energy that powers these new dark satanic lands, and the dark clouds hang heavy over our lives just as they did over the mills. Data is the new oil, and its emissions are just as toxic as fossil fuels.

Instead of mill owners and oil barons, we now have Tech bros, top hats and canes replaced by leather jackets, t-shirts and eye-wateringly expensive timepieces (some things have stayed the same), and while the outfits may have changed, the sentiments most definitely have not.

Thankfully, I’m not Elon Musk, or my brain would have leapt out of my head and strangled me, so I have no idea what his agenda is. All I know is that he has one. It’s the same with Trump and his band of tame Tech bros.

Yet they all either speak in code or drive an agenda that is heavily codified. Yet when it comes to racism, it’s fairly easy to spot and decode. Talk of preserving and protecting our heritage and history is just code for racism.

The chants of saving and protecting our young girls and women from immigrants it is just code for more racism.

Social media exploits our own baked-in prejudices. I agree that not all those on the right are racists, but they do hold views that are compatible with racism. Then again, not all those on the left are for open borders, but they mostly hold views that are incompatible with racism. They are all open to manipulation.

When it comes to the very idea that free speech has been hijacked, that’s nonsense. Why, if that were true, Elon Musk would be working at Walmart, Jensen Huang would be repairing PCs at Best Buy, Jeff Bezos would be flipping burgers at McDonald’s, and Mark Zuckerberg would be selling sneakers in Foot Locker. Instead of being fabulously wealthy.

Paradoxically, the real attacks on the freedom of speech in the USA and the events leading up to the sacking of Jimmy Kimmel are not really about the wider issue, but rather through the fear that large corporations have of Donald Trump’s desire to shoot the messenger and are driven by commercial interests.

Such reasons and a desire to smooth the way in M&A deals that would require FCC approval are at the heart of that dish. The fact that Trump is trying to construct his own totalitarian state is a whole different kettle of fish.

Currently, the Tech bros and Trump are aligned; however, should his desire to control the narrative have a concrete effect that impinges on freedom of speech, which negatively affects any platform’s ability to monetise social media, then it might be a case of too many cooks, and that would really test Trump’s power.

For as we know, in a world driven mad by the optimism of Keynesian economics, the market knows best, with infinite growth as the main goal, so anything that affects the Tech bros’ bottom line would be seen as an own goal.

Now, in their attitude to wealth, the Tech bros seem to be like City Traders in that enough is never enough, yet traders do not make money, they trade and facilitate the transfer of wealth and in the process siphon off a percentage for themselves.

However, Tech bros not only have their cake and the luxury to eat it, but they baked the darn thing, not only do they own the platforms that effectively trade words, but they also own the systems that create the content in the first place.

They are the cotton traders, mill owners, and textile merchants, all wrapped together.

No wonder they are stoking the fires and building a head of steam to power this new industrial revolution, and bigging up the age of AI. So. Let’s cut to the chase, there is no altruistic vision, it’s not for the good of the people. It’s all driven by greed. The free speech versus freedom of speech is just a distraction. A laser toy for curious kittens.

New traffic needs new data centres, as the pointless developer-driven “Added Benefit’ AI features being needlessly embedded in all systems all need more computing power. You know the ones. The ones that nobody asked for, but require massive computational resources and serve mainly to justify development teams and create new revenue streams.

The kind of feature creep that makes your phone slower, your software more bloated and complex, and makes the data centres work harder, all while being marketed as “improvements.” But for data centres, read dark satanic mills. No small wonder the Tech bros push for more. But it will never be enough.

Let’s be brutally honest, AI will not make you rich. Even so, far too many imagine that one day soon they will be one of the richest taxpayers, but they are deluded. Wage slaves and white collar never see themselves as part of the exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

So they fall for the bullshit, all AI will do is make most of the rich richer. Some of the rich much richer. Some of the poor richer. And most of the poor poorer. All this bullshit about the tech investment creating jobs is nonsense; it’s just about building another portal for them to make money, and what a time to be rich.

Tech prosperity deal my ass, deal with that. This time next year we’ll all be millionaires. Yeah, and next doors cat will start quoting Milton Friedman.

For those lucky enough to find themselves at the top of the pile, AI will get faster and more efficient, and their lives will get easier. AI will create wealth not jobs, well, aside from a relatively few temporary ones in the construction of data centres and then the tail of employment, either guarding the sites or making sure the “battery’s of servers” don’t go all “Animal Farm”.

For the rest of us, the fact that it will steal our jobs could be the least of our worries. Now that data centres are classified as critical infrastructure, a near-future version of London could see such sites consuming swimming pools’ worth of fresh water. At the same time, you are barred from watering your allotment.

So sadly, in the process of writing this, I have had an epiphany. The world seems gripped by a growing madness, which I felt was the fault of social media, yet it has little to do with that. I was mistaken; it’s all to do with man and all to do with the fact that he cannot tame either the beast or the brave new world he has created.

The Tech bros have not just built mills; they have unknowingly (or perhaps in the case of some, knowingly) engineered a system that preys on the very essence of humanity. That exploits our tribalism, our vanity, and most importantly, our fear.

They didn’t create these flaws, but they have built the most efficient apparatus in history for mining them. A model powered by a technology with which mankind is fundamentally, tragically incompatible.

For a long time now, I have held firm on the opinion that social media is a curse on mankind. Nothing yet has changed that view.