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How I lost my mind (and won an AI war) for a depressed octopus office worker: a tale of shrimp, sharks, and prompt-engineering madness. Chapter 1: The vision I had heard about these AI image creators and decided to try it. And then it began, as all terrible ideas do, with a whisper: “What if under water, but capitalism?” Armed with nothing but a keyboard and a dream of a silly image, I set out to create the ultimate underwater dystopian office scene—a place where octopuses ring up kelp groceries, clownfish drown in paperwork, and shrimp riot against the 1% (plankton). ...

Neoliberalism crept into Europe wearing a sharp suit and talking about efficiency. It promised a leaner, meaner state, less red tape, more growth, and a brighter future. What it delivered was stagnant wages, crumbling services, and Jeff Bezos in a rocket. For Europe, the cost has been clear: growing inequality, weakened public institutions, and a sense that someone, somewhere, has sold the family silver—and is now renting it back to us with interest. ...

European democracy, once sold to us as government for the people, increasingly resembles government for the shareholders. The slogans haven’t changed—“freedom”, “fairness”, “choice”—but behind the scenes, the boardroom has quietly replaced the ballot box as the place where real decisions are made. It’s not that politicians have stopped caring what the public thinks. It’s just that donors, lobbyists, and corporate advisors tend to shout louder—and arrive with champagne. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a business model. ...

When European leaders speak of “security”, it’s worth asking: security for whom, exactly? Not for the millions navigating crumbling health systems or housing crises. Not for those struggling to afford heating or fresh food. No, the current drive to rearm Europe has little to do with public safety and far more to do with shareholder satisfaction. As Grace Blakeley has sharply noted, the sudden rediscovery of defence budgets has less to do with strategic necessity and more with economic opportunity—for the right kind of people, of course. Not your neighbour. Not your nurse. But certainly your nearest weapons manufacturer. ...

For decades, European politics has resembled a Punch and Judy show, only with fewer laughs and more austerity. On one side, the market-worshipping neo-liberals clutching their spreadsheets and “fiscal responsibility.” On the other, vaguely embarrassed centrists who occasionally tut at inequality but still vote for trade deals written by Exxon lawyers. The stage is well-lit. The audience, increasingly, is not impressed. But while corporate power has captured institutions from Westminster to Brussels, it hasn’t silenced resistance. Across the continent, citizens, thinkers, activists and even the odd rogue economist are challenging the capture—not just with slogans, but with blueprints for change. This isn’t about utopia. It’s about damage control, dignity, and doing better than a system that currently functions like a vending machine for billionaires. ...

As Israel’s slaughter in Gaza grinds on—now in its twentieth month, with over 45,000 dead, most of them women and children, and nearly every hospital, school, and home reduced to rubble—one might expect Europe, that self-proclaimed bastion of human rights, to muster more than a few limp statements of concern. Instead, the European Union has perfected the art of hand-wringing paralysis, offering little more than performative sympathy while continuing to arm, fund, and politically shield Israel. It is a masterclass in moral evasion, dressed up as diplomacy. ...

David Clark remembers the moment the Internet’s Pandora’s box creaked open and said, “Hello, world.” It was 2 November 1988, and the Morris Worm was slithering its way through cyberspace like a python on speed. Designed with the innocence of a curious grad student and the destruction of a cyber sledgehammer, it crashed some 6,000 machines—roughly one-tenth of the Internet at the time. Not bad for an opening act. Back then, the network engineers in the room weren’t pondering threats to democracy or ransomware gangs knocking on NHS servers. No, they were earnestly wrestling with TCP packet loss and the excitement of latency reduction. Making things go faster, scale bigger, and connect better. The digital equivalent of building a racetrack and forgetting brakes might be useful. ...

The Weimar Republic—that plucky little democratic experiment that popped up in Germany after the Kaiser buggered off and everyone else was too busy starving to argue. It’s become the go-do historical analogy for every hand-wringer who thinks the rise of the far-right in Europe or the occasional American political tantrum means we’re all doomed to replay the 1930s. But let’s be real: history doesn’t repeat itself. At best, it drunkenly stumbles into the same pub, orders the same drink, and then vomits on the carpet in a slightly different pattern. ...

Scenario Planning, 2013. Observable Misery, 2022. Obliviousness and congruence Let’s start with the obvious: all scenario planning is fantasy. Dressed up, data-driven fantasy, but fantasy nonetheless. No crystal balls involved—just a lot of graphs, jargon, and people nodding solemnly in conference rooms. And what most digital scenarios consistently overlook is the actual state of the world. You know—finite planet, finite resources, that sort of inconvenient reality. Likely effects Economic development might slow down, unless you’re a transnational behemoth with a flair for tax evasion and a fondness for shareholder value. Employees are already being told to “make do with less”—which in practice means being set up to fail and then blamed for it. Burnout, frustration, and plunging performance are the inevitable side effects of pretending scarcity isn’t a thing. ...

Sometimes, you’re trundling along through the digital forest, trying to navigate terms of service longer than Dostoevsky’s back catalogue, when suddenly… there’s a Larch. Unexpected. Tall. Mildly majestic. And utterly irrelevant to the rest of what’s about to happen. The Google fonts fiasco: Helvetica, but make it litigious In a plot twist worthy of Kafka, a German court (Landgericht München, civil chamber number three, for those playing Regulation Bingo at home) ruled that simply including a Google-hosted font on your website amounts to illegally handing over users’ IP addresses to Google. No consent. No justification. No shady disclaimer hidden in 6pt grey-on-grey legalese. ...