fidzbit

So you take some photos - just ordinary things, like a trip to the park with the kids, a night out with friends, a snapshot at the beach which happened to come out as a perfect windswept portrait. You share them on facebook so your family can see. They gradually filter down into the archive of your account where you forget about them completely. Several years pass. A phone call from a friend. “Do you realise that...?” “What?! You can’t be serious?” You check out the webpage. Sure enough. That’s your face. But it’s not your body. And you have never even seen the other people on the film - never mind engaged in a sexual orgy. It’s called deepfake porn. Someone took those old pictures of you and used a computer algorithm to generate a 3D model of your face to cut and paste into a sexually explicit film. Discovering that you have been the unconscious subject of a deepfake porn film would no doubt come as a shock. Just reading about it may well provoke a sense of disgust. Perhaps more ...

When the Covid restrictions were first announced last Spring there was a tide of good will, community spirit and shared resolve. There was a new enemy but it was an enemy that we could beat if we all pulled together. The summer sun certainly helped keep the mood positive. It didn’t seem that long before things started to return, gradually, back to some kind of normality. We didn’t have to dig so deep anymore. We could relax a little. Perhaps, like me, you hoped that this was the end. It was a serious threat but by taking action together we had avoided the worst. It was not as bad as it could have been. Alas, we were wrong! We couldn’t see how bad the second wave would be. We didn’t know how many new variants would arise and that they would prove more contagious to different subsections of society. Medical friends who have been following the studies closely inform me that they always feared this. The progression models differed on the details but they all predicted that a ‘second wave’...

This is a very different blog than most that I write so please don’t feel any pressure to read on if it is not what you signed up for! Many people are juggling the balls of lockdown schooling with other responsibilities; in my case I would describe it more as dropping the balls. I hope to return to easier writing eventually but it will continue to be sporadic for a while! I started writing this as a mental exercise, in order to explore whether some of my own recent theological reading and reflection could offer any helpful insights in relation to recent political events. It addresses a topic which some colleagues and friends are discussing and this is the best platform I have with which to share my ideas. Trump, Trans, and Treason It seems bizarre to write these three words in the same sentence. Less than two weeks ago we were celebrating the end of 2020, the Year of ‘what could possibly happen next’. Alas it took only a few days to prove wrong any forecast of a return to normality....