Tag Archives: Wayne Horkan

Steering Regional Resilience: Reflections on Two Years Supporting DSIT’s Cyber Local Programme

As Chair of the West Midlands Cyber Working Group, I’ve helped lead DSIT’s Cyber Local steering group for the region over the past two years. Working alongside regional experts, I’ve supported the selection of projects that strengthen cyber resilience on the ground, including Aston University’s powerful work on cyber violence against women and girls. This experience has reinforced just how critical locally informed funding is to building practical, inclusive, and impactful cyber capability.

Continue reading

The Memory and Noise Tetrology

What began as an exploration of two strange non-songs, “Apes Ma” and “Fitter Happier”, quickly unfolded into something larger: a meditation on memory, loss, defiance, and the strange work of sound in the spaces where meaning breaks down.

This tetralogy gathers three connected essays and the one you are reading now, not as conclusions, but as echoes. Not as closures, but as signals still carrying across time.

Continue reading

Do Not Go Quietly into That Dark Night: A Response to Two Sides of the Same Coin

A quiet manifesto for memory, resistance, and the voices that refuse to vanish. From whispered warnings to machine-read prophecies, this piece explores how songs like “Apes Ma”, “Fitter Happier”, “Trans Am”, and “Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory” carry defiance through static, grief through silence, and presence through time.

Continue reading

The Veil, the Soul Mirror, and Reflective Chrome Ghosts: On Memory, Music, and the Ones We Carry Onwards

Some works don’t end. They echo. “Apes Ma” and “Fitter Happier” gave us the edge of language, the moment just after sense unravels. But what follows? What lingers in the silence after the static? What shapes itself in the quiet? Memory. Not the nostalgic kind. Not warmth. Something stranger. Something inherited. Every time I hear “New Rose”, Dave, I salute you, brother.

Continue reading

Two Sides of the Same Coin: Captain Beefheart’s “Apes Ma” and Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier”

Some works scream. Others whisper. “Apes Ma” and “Fitter Happier” do both in a frequency that bypasses the conscious brain. What remains is a residue. A shape. A hush at the end of language. An old lover kisses slow, dayglo blue scorpions.

Continue reading

Innovation Incoming in Space: Notes from the Royal Academy of Engineering Panel, 31 March 2025

The Royal Academy of Engineering’s Innovation Incoming in Space (31 March 2025, Prince Philip House) offered an insightful and fact-rich exploration of the technologies shaping the future of the space economy. With topics ranging from space-based solar power and crystallisation in orbit to modular infrastructure and lunar habitation, the panel discussed how innovation is driving space from the experimental to the operational. Set against the backdrop of geopolitical shifts and commercial competition, the event underscored the UK’s strategic opportunity to lead in agile engineering, cyber resilience, and space-enabled industrial capability. A dawning theme throughout the evening was the growing realisation that space is becoming commercial, contested, and critically dependent on cyber resilience.

Continue reading