Slog he say, do not give slavery toy to megalomanic control nerd
Bill Gates made his fortune by creating an operating system for computers. He then used a near monopoly to force-factory-fit it onto the vast majority of pcs. When Microsoft tells you to do something on your computer, you disobey orders at your peril: disobedience is rewarded with your pc being abruptly taken over and force-fed updates.
And woe betide anyone (however limited their readership) who questions the ambitions of the Gates Motel; for if, having created one OS that behaves like a virus, the Billy Goat decides to take on a virus with a vaccine, then do not question the wisdom of this idea. Otherwise, your laptop will have its hard disk vapourised.
Bill Gates is a uniquely controlling human being who displays almost zero awareness of the inevitable consequences of his blinkered neo-Nazi Weltanschauung. He comes across as affable enough on video, but Mr Microsoft the Monopolist has always been a chap who thinks there’s the Wrong Way, and His Way.
He was, both his teachers and friends agree, argumentative and intolerant as a schoolboy. The residence he inhabits has an underwater sound system in the pool and computerised points the house can read to customise music, temperature and lighting. It has 24 bathrooms, and a garage that holds 23 cars. His need for anal control of any debate and all distribution systems in business is thus reflected in his domestic systems now, and revealed itself from the age of eight in his educational behaviour.
Fundamentally, William Henry Gates III thinks he knows better. I use his full name there not as a baseless jibe, but as the recognition of his upper middle class background. Bill Gates is very much a champagne Democrat. Whether he is a genuinely liberal democrat is considerably more doubtful.
Gates had primary responsibility for Microsoft’s product strategy from the company’s founding in 1975 until 2006, and he brooked no argument: although he met regularly with Microsoft’s senior managers and program section heads, there was never any sense of consensus: the ‘combatitive dictator’ remained the control-freak he had always been, and preferred working with clones of himself.
Gates didn’t turn to “philanthropy” after 2006 out of some warm-hearted desire to better humanity: he did so because Congress had decided it was time for his power-lust to be reined in. After 1995, complaints against his commercial bullying grew exponentially, and in 1998 he was subpoenaed to appear before a Congressional committee.
The ubiquity of Microsoft’s operating system (90% penetration) had raised initial fears, but Internet Explorer – Microsoft’s web-browser – had raised further concerns. Government was worried that the company would use its position to charge fees or otherwise control access to the internet.
Gates opposed the move against him ferociously. Three years ago, the Atlantic magazine observed of those events:
‘the role of computing has changed since Gates’s testimony. The computer ceased to be a servant of human life and began to be the purpose for which that life is conducted. That’s the heart of the problem with the technology industry today, and it’s a problem that data-privacy regulation alone has no hope of fixing.’
This is an opinion with which I wholeheartedly agree. And on 5th November 1999, there were fireworks at last as Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson declared that the Gatesenstein creation was a monopoly…..not just any monopoly, but the nastiest kind: one not afraid to use its power to strangle competition at birth.
Time magazine suggested that “the total dismemberment of the Gates empire” was at hand. Alarmed – but as determined as ever – Bill Gates decided that the Total Control he craved wasn’t available via the Microsoft route alone.
Hugely notable is that, once the decision had been taken to withdraw from day-to-day management, between 2006 and 2014 Gates’ wealth grew from $18 billion to $75.8 billion. In those eight years, he made conclusively strategic gains via his company Cascade Investment. Thus by 2013, some 58% of his wealth came from things that had nothing to do with Microsoft.
During that time, Bill and Melinda Gates completely PR’d (as in, re-engineered) their image from that of controlling do-gooders to Third World philanthropists.
Some Bill quotes from that interregnum are, I would suggest, highly pertinent here.
2010: “First we’ve got population. Now, the world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that forecast by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent”
2015: “Now’s the time to put all our good ideas into practice, from scenario planning to vaccine research”
2015: “The world is simply not prepared to deal with a disease—an especially virulent flu, for example—that infects large numbers of people very quickly. Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic.”
2017: “Whether it occurs by a quirk of nature or at the hand of a terrorist, epidemiologists say a fast-moving airborne pathogen could kill more than 30 million people in less than a year. And they say there is a reasonable probability the world will experience such an outbreak in the next 10 to 15 years.”
By 2019, Bill and Melinda Gates had made a staggering 238 investments in companies directly or indirectly involved in track & trace, low altitude satellite observation and vaccine development. Bill himself badgered Davos chums about the need for a New York based webinar specifically to study ways to combat The Coming Plague in summer 2019.
Within five months of his final utterance, Covid19 was out there and happening.
C19’s arrival has been, shall we say, incredibly convenient for Bill and Melinda. But take note: he is supporting every which way kind of inflationary panic about an outbreak – and pushing like mad for global vaccination alongside documented travel controls – despite the obvious fact that it is one thirtieth the virility of the pandemic he predicted.
Gates is an extreme megalo A typology heavily invested in global tracking surveillance and pharmaceutical vaccine solutions.
He is no philanthropist in the current context: he is a control freak billionaire with aspirations to unparalleled power.
Of course he doesn’t care about the eonomic damage that’s being sown by his epidemiology loons….in his $121 million megahouse (called, believe it or not, Xanadu2) he’s going to reap more billions of dollars from it.
He’s not even going to need a licence for his wonderdrug…..and if it kills thousands of unlucky people who didn’t need it in the first place, well – he should worry: he’s one of those immune from prosecution.
You may think I exaggerate the sheer hopelessness of Citizen Gates’s OS software. So let me put you right via some startling facts. There are 35 million-plus separate web pages, blogs and forums devoted entirely to explaining why Microsoft is an inflexible, unreliable, counter-intuitive, nerdy and eccentrically arranged system of getting around a pc. More people complain every day about awful Microsoft product quality and practices than the entire population of Saudi Arabia.
I’ve ploughed through a lot of them over the last five days since I had the idea of quantifying just how dangerous a man Billy Gates Gruff is. And while the multivariate nature of complaints is both very familiar and at times hilariously funny, the biggest single grouping I put together was called ‘CONTROL’.
For like its creator, Microsoftware is totalitarian. It dictates, it thinks like a fascist geek, it will do anything to block criticism – and above all, it lacks any emotional intelligence whatsoever. It arranges stuff as would any mind more comfortable with columns of numbers, it offers option headings similar in kind to the most obscure crossword clue, and it thinks nothing – with the user of a brand new pc device – of playing Hal the 2001 computer to ensure you sign in with Microsoft, your pc password is approved by Microsoft and thus a piece of hardware costing up to $2,500 can be off limits to you if Powergates thinks it should be.
This process of asking Big M to f**k off can waste up to 50 minutes of your time, and usually requires you to access another computer in order to go through all the steps to get rid of the sign-in mania. Because of course, your Microsoft edge browser bans anything that badmouths or stops Bill from controlling the show.
It was for many years, would you believe, impossible to get rid of the Microsoft Explorer system once it was on your device. You could delete it, disable it, infect it and for all I know give it a morning dose of napalm every day, but the little mother popped up like a bad and bent penny whatever you did.
We are in control. Do not adjust your set. You will obey. I have opined over and over that one day, there’ll be an Orwellian screen in your kitchen displaying all the items you must consume that day. When that day comes, Bill Gates will be leading the charge and giving CNN interviews about all the reasons why it’s a good idea.
Yet by raping both the hardware suppliers and retailers, Microsoft has done what JVC did way back in the days of videocassettes – kill off far better competitors through stuffing the supply lines.
It’s an old trick, and it works: last year, 88% of pc owners around the world were fitted up (in every sense of the term) with Microsoft systems.
The bottom line is this: Bill Gates is a man with no social sensors, and 880 million censors.
This is not a suitable person to be in charge of systemic global tracking and vaccination. To be more specific, this is not a man who should be allowed out in the Brave New World on his own.
John Ward reads a lot, and blogs about what he finds out.
The Slog 