If you don’t know the name Craig Williams, you don’t really need to. I’ll confess, I just had to ask the Duck to find it again. The offence is easy enough to find. He put a flutter on with Ladbroke’s betting shops, supposedly guessing at what in fact turned out to be a dead cert: the date of the UK’s next general parliamentary election. The flutter in question was one hundred pounds, and the cert was dead because Mr Williams didn’t guess. He knew what the date would be, from the Prime Minister himself, no less. Mr Williams regrets his wager, having not, in his own words, considered “how bad it would look.”
Here, Mr Williams is wrong, however: it doesn’t look bad at all. It looks nothing less than absolutely normal. Idiot is he who, with insider information in the modern world, does not make rank use of it. That, Mr Williams, would look bad. As it was, the dishonesty that was revealed to the world was not what looked bad. It was the fact that the dumbass got caught.
Image: If it looks like a dumbass, acts like a dumbass, it needn’t necessarily be …
If you don’t know the name Laura Saunders, you also don’t really need to. I’ll confess, I just had to look her name up on the Internet, as well. The act could be the same as Mr Williams’s, having been revealed by the BBC earlier this morning. Since good news always comes in threes, we also have one of the prime minister’s body guards, who also seems to have been caught placing bets on the date of the general election. Such officers are selected for their skill and their probity, and this one has now been referred to the Police Complaints people, with a view to a possible prosecution. Apparently, these guys also protect the King, who’s been known to take a used fiver or two for access during his time as a prince of the realm. How much, exactly, is unknown, because the British royal family might well be a firm but they do not publish their accounts.
Mr Williams, of whose misdemeanours we know the most, described his £100 bet as a flutter, and that has me wondering: at what point a wager ceases to be a flutter and starts to be a serious bet. The deregulation of the betting industry by the government he works for, back in the late 20-teens, certainly makes £100 look like a trifling sum. The targeting of addicted gamblers by the deregulated industry, in large measure online, has caused great financial distress and a good number of suicides. To that extent, £100 is indeed but a flutter. But to the many Britons who, despite never ever having placed a bet on an aleatory future event, daily have to line up at foodbanks, £100 is a small fortune, a sum that would keep them in victuals for a fortnight, perhaps pay a chunk of their fuel bill, allow them to warm some water for a bath.
What, of course, renders £100 as not a flutter is not the amount per se but the fact that Mr Williams knew that his wager was no shot in the dark. One recalls the story of Biff the bully in Back To The Future, whose fortune was made by knowing all the sports results to come. The film-maker in that case depicted for us the dystopia into which the world descends when we know for certain what the future will bring, and we know for certain the means by which we can twist it to our best advantage: how very dangerous insider knowledge can be.
Yet, in realms that entail precisely as much betting on future events, as much wagering and fluttering, but this time with hundreds of thousands of pounds, in the stock markets and in the supplies of personal protective equipment and AI-driven technology, insider information is no less at play. Yet those who wager a flutter in these realms rarely, if ever, get taken to task over their honesty, their rectitude, their professionalism.
When you hear MDs at TED Talks and on CNN waxing lyrical about the next big thing, like the rise of Dot-com, like Big Data, like the Internet of Things, like Crypto, like Artificial Intelligence, like a whole lot of stuff in tech that people out on the street know nothing about and which charismatic business leaders like Sam Bankman-Fried are able to persuade us (mostly from a position of ignorance) is the one big development that’s dead certain to reap dividends for our every last invested dime, then it is sobering to know that much of that bluster is also performed from a position of ignorance, too.
This is the exact opposite of insider knowledge. This is not someone who has the inside track on a future event, who’s planning to relieve some multinational numbers-game shyster of a couple of thousand of their ill-gotten gains. In fact anyone who cheats to relieve mega-betting companies of the millions they extract out of punters on whom they relentlessly prey gets my endorsement: just the dishonest robbing the dishonest.
What big tech does is act like some conjuring mountebank to ingather investment in something that really doesn’t work all that well. Big Data was supposed to be the answer to every corporation’s marketing dilemma: who to sell what to? AI is supposed to be the answer to vacuuming the carpet.
Seriously, there are AI-enabled vacuum cleaners, that probably work out exactly where I am most likely to drop a bread crumb, so that it will know to suck especially hard on that particular spot. No doubt the accumulation of Big Data from across the worldwide vacuum-cleaning spectrum will have been processed at some ginormous data centre in rural Ireland, consuming the power requirements of a small central-Asian republic, to inform my intelligent carpet cleaner where exactly it will find the muck. I, in my extensive experience of muck-cleaning, I can tell you, have already sussed out that the kitchen workbench and the dining room table are classic accumulation areas for crumbing, and I tend therefore, through hard-won experience, to dwell with my Dyson at those particular locations, and I must pause in wonder at the tech experts who are all collecting data on where the housewives (and -husbands) of the world drop their crummy crumbs, or whatever it is they are collecting data on, in order to direct their marketing at people who will buy their damned floor cleaners. Instead of just making a fantastic, value-for-money floor cleaner that anyone in their right mind who wanted to clean a floor would buy and direct at the spot where it’s needed: the dirt.
The investors who massage the market and divest and invest at remarkably propitious moments just before events happen, which they then vehemently deny having any influence on, remain remarkably immune to any investigation into probity and trustworthiness. Their gains are large, their flutters in sums beyond what a foodbank supplicant could earn in a lifetime, their probity intact, their normality secure. What’s more, these dumbasses do get caught, and nothing ever happens. It’s not getting caught that makes them dumbasses. It is their insouciant destruction of Man’s faith in his fellow Man.