May 2044: an evidence file and a voice memo are leaked from MI5, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, to the general public.
The file purports to contain item 7356B, a piece of evidence connected to an operation codenamed WIRECUTTER. The evidence in question is a water-damaged home-produced booklet, cheaply printed perhaps a decade previously. An introductory guide to “off-grid” living, the booklet out the main considerations for anyone looking to set up a homestead without any reliance on public infrastructure—and frames such a move as an escape from “the digital daemons” of algorithmic utilities management.
The file also contains what appears to be a briefing memo associated with the evidence, which explains its circumstances of discovery during a raid by armed police on Hillside Farm, Carmarthenshire. Details of the raid are absent or redacted, but seem to match with suppressed reports of a botched anti-terror operation in the late 2030s at the property in question; the memo’s contextual briefings suggest that the residents may have been mistaken for (or deliberately conflated with) member of the infamous cyberterror organisation known as the Butlerian Jihad.
Though leaked separately, the voice memo—an internal communication from MI5—is clearly connected to the evidence file, but of much more recent vintage. In the recording, a male voice gives a retrospective summary of the context around OPERATION WIRECUTTER, conceding in the process that at least some parts of the UK intelligence community were aware of the ideological chasm between the Butlerian Jihadis and the Neoluddite off-gridders of Hillside Farm.
There was some attention paid to the raids of OPERATION WIRECUTTER at the time, but in the absence of vital information, the topic soon disappeared amidst a maelstrom of journalistic content. Since then, much of the pertinent information has been declassified without fanfare, and largely ignored. As parliament prepares to begin debating the 2044 Grid Renationalisation Bill, therefore, these leaks will serve as an uncomfortable reminder of the UK’s troubled 2030s; the question of exactly whose advantage might be served by that reminder, however, remains obscure.
DISCLAIMER: the text above, plus the documents and audio files referred and linked to, are all works of fiction. The future events, locations and organisations described are entirely imaginary, with the exception of MI5 and various other parts of the UK intelligence system, whose names have been used purely for narrative verisimilitude.
This work of narrative prototyping (or design fiction) was commissioned was commissioned as part of the project Preppers’ Kit 2047 led by Dr Ola Michalec, and funded by RISCS, The Research Institute for Sociotechnical Cyber Security (University of Bristol), which in turn is funded by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
The Wirecutter Leaks seeks to address the futures of cybersecurity in the UK, and particularly the security of automated infrastructure management, in a way that more traditional futures methods, e.g. scenarios, cannot achieve. In a scenarios approach, two divergent responses to pervasive infrastructural automation—e.g. “off-grid” withdrawal, or a cyberterrorist campaign against the incursion of algorithms—would be treated as two separate futures or “worlds”. History suggests, however, that divergent responses frequently occur in parallel—and it is their interaction, and their impact in the spheres of politics and culture rather than merely the sphere of technology, that really needs to be considered in any serious strategic discussion. As such, The Wirecutter Leaks uses narrative triangulation and worldbuilding techniques to address not only the popular reaction to infrastructural automation, in the context of a more widespread intrusion of the algorithmic into people’s everyday lives, but also the political reaction to that reaction, and its manipulation for short-term advantage in turbulent times.
Project assets
Leaked MI5 voice memo:
Scanned reconstruction of the “Off-grid Primer” booklet from Hillside Farm:
Scanned reproduction of evidence memo: