On Bulgakov, KPop Demon Hunters, supernatural familiars, and the remarkable persistence of the ridiculous feline. A short comparative piece to amuse my children, who won’t read this for years, if at all.
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The Cyber Veterans Alliance began with Ryan Jones’s idea for an enduring veteran-led cyber community. I subsequently helped develop that concept into a structured, independent operating model. The later West Midlands Cyber & Tech Veterans CIC proposition contains recognisable elements of that earlier work, along with substantial subsequent development. This article celebrates that evolution, examines the documented contributions along the way, and makes a simple case for collaboration and fair attribution.
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Opening an app should not require knowing who I am. Age assurance is becoming less like a gate and more like infrastructure. Prompted by Jerry Fishenden’s latest thinking on citizen-held credentials, this article asks what comes after age verification: how identity, authentication, authorisation, and attributes should relate; why civil identity is so often introduced unnecessarily; and whether the internet can establish what it needs to know without knowing who we are.
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Add compact readership statistics to WordPress articles using WordPress Popular Posts. This tutorial combines comments, linked publication dates, rolling 12-month views, and total recorded reads into a clean metadata line, with responsive wrapping and copy-ready PHP that adapts to Twenty Twelve and other classic WordPress themes.
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The problem is not that endurance failed. The problem is that it worked. I can teach students how to be successful. I cannot, apparently, teach them how to be happy. The same system produced a career, a large house, freedom, and children strong enough to leave. What it cannot manufacture is home, because home requires another free person, and another free person cannot be built. This is an essay about what comes after survival, when getting up was supposed to be the beginning of something, and turned out to be the thing I knew how to do.
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Endings have a habit of travelling backwards. If someone does not want me now, perhaps they never did; if something lasted a week, perhaps it was nothing. I don’t think the final chapter has that authority. People change, futures collapse, witnesses die, and memory edits without asking. None of that can make Wednesday cease to have occurred. Permanence is not the test of reality. Small is not the same word as false. A thing can disappear completely and still have happened.
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Call Me Womble said I am the baker, and my life is the bread. Then Ian pointed out the obvious problem: there are other people in the bakery. This is an essay about my friend Dave, who stole my stories, helped produce them, blamed me when he died, and kept editing afterwards. Personality happens between people. Being seen is not a passive event. Usefulness asks what I can do for you; witness asks whether I am here. We make one another. We do not own one another.
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There is no archaeological Wayne waiting under the sediment. I make the work, the work makes me, and I have never seen a good reason to keep those jobs in separate rooms. This is an essay about selfhood as a practice rather than a possession: life as material, the individual as artist, and why “find yourself” is looking in the wrong direction. Identity is not recovered. It is made through thought, action, contradiction, failure, and a kind of individuality that does not ask the category what to do next.
The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid are not a trilogy, but together they form an extraordinary narrative arc from the Trojan War to the legendary origins of Rome. Achilles embodies the tragedy of war, Odysseus the struggle to return home, and Aeneas the search for a new one. Following their stories reveals how Virgil inherited, reworked, and ultimately Romanised Homer’s world.
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A provocation about what cleverness really means in an age of AI-mediated manipulation. From Earl Aubec carving reality from Chaos to the Asymmetric Integration Model, the article argues that exploiting human behaviour is not creation. As social media, AI and post-truth systems converge, WARP Labs aims to restore agency to the human side of the interface by making influence legible, controllable and defensible. And it wouldn’t be a Horkan blog article without a callout to Michael Moorcock and a tiny bit of an expletive.
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Writing about Charles Jordan MBE, preparing for his funeral, and just after taking stock of everything we have built around the West Midlands Cyber Hub, made me think about founders and stewardship. The Hub and Cluster are entering a new phase. Andrew Horkan will take the lead, and I am going to concentrate more of my time on Cyber Tzar, Psyber Inc. and WARP Labs, and the exciting future that awaits.
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Charles Jordan MBE, founder of Servol, has passed away. I had hoped to say these few words at his Requiem Mass. Instead, I publish them here in gratitude for a man whose life’s work gave vulnerable young people security, dignity and somewhere from which to begin.
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Success, autistic burnout, the West Midlands Cyber Hub, and what comes next. I have been unusually quiet online while the Hub has expanded, secured its long-term home and begun evolving into the West Midlands Cyber Cluster. More importantly, we are discovering that the community around it represents a substantial indigenous cyber economy hiding in plain sight: established, revenue-generating SMEs with far more collective commercial weight than the region has historically recognised.
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Institutional Convergence, Memetic Evolution and the New Architecture of Digital Governance. Building on my earlier Age-Gated Internet articles, this essay examines the evidence presented by Mike Benz and Michael Shellenberger and then proposes a broader systems model. Rather than framing online governance as either coincidence or conspiracy, it argues that institutional convergence, memetic evolution, technological change and AI-driven legitimacy pressures are collectively reshaping the internet into an increasingly governed, identity-centric infrastructure.
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Liquid modernity did not begin with the internet, but the post-LLM web is turning social fluidity into computational infrastructure. This essay argues that the fragmentation of identity, work, relationships and institutions is no longer simply a social phenomenon. Through the Asymmetric Integration Model (AIM), it proposes that these forms of human fluidity are increasingly being instrumented, optimised and integrated into computational systems, signalling the emergence of a new phase in the evolution of the web and its relationship with society.
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This article introduces a practical operational extension to the UK FS SCD2 Bronze/Silver architecture. Rather than forcing operational applications to interact directly with the lakehouse, governed Silver current-state views are projected into a low-latency SQL database for operational consumption. Business decisions are made and stored locally, captured through SQL Change Data Capture (CDC), landed append-only into Bronze, and subsequently reconciled into governed Silver. The pattern preserves temporal correctness, auditability, replayability, and regulatory defensibility while providing the transactional performance and simplicity required by operational systems. It separates operational authority from institutional memory, allowing each layer to optimise for its intended purpose without compromising governance.
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Charlie Munger’s resilience was not built on optimism, confidence, or emotional detachment. It was built on a set of mental operating principles that allowed him to remain rational when outcomes were uncertain. By accepting reality, avoiding predictable mistakes, focusing on controllable factors, and applying multiple mental models, Munger developed a framework for thinking clearly under pressure. These principles extend far beyond investing and offer practical lessons for leadership, engineering, business, relationships, and any situation where important decisions must be made without complete information.
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The West Midlands is increasingly positioning itself as a technologically advanced industrial economy shaped by AI, digitisation and interconnected operational systems. However, much of the regional technology narrative still underestimates the importance of cyber resilience as a foundational element of economic infrastructure. As manufacturing, logistics and supply chains become more digitally dependent, cyber resilience is rapidly becoming inseparable from industrial continuity, competitiveness and long-term regional economic capability. Welcome to my review of TechWM’s “West Midlands Tech Review 2026 (WMTR26)”
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The 2026 DSIT Cyber Security Sectoral Analysis reveals more than continued growth in the UK cyber sector. Beneath the headline statistics sits a deeper structural transition: cyber is increasingly becoming a distributed economic infrastructure tied to industrial resilience, operational continuity and supply-chain assurance. This article examines the implications of regionalisation, slowing employment growth, rising productivity pressure and AI-driven dependency complexity, particularly for industrial regions such as the West Midlands.
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A short overview of some of the strongest articles currently on Psyber Inc, exploring cyberpsychology, organisational resilience, recoverability, human factors, and post-breach adaptation. The article also connects Psyber Inc’s operational cyber resilience work to broader themes explored on Horkan.com around systems thinking, digital environments, online harm, cognition, and cybernetic approaches to behaviour and recovery.
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