5th of January 2016

...The first member to arrive on that rainly Thursday evening was a guy called Steve.  Steve was an artist in his late twenties who had recently discovered screen printing and political street art.  In 2008 street art was still a fairly new concept.  Banky, for example, was still the mysterious figure who peppered the streets of London and Bristol with subversive artworks and then disappeared into the night. 

(N.B. A key player in the cultural 'awakening' Banksy was soon absorbed by the establishment by making him 'a famous artist' and throwing a ton of money at him. 
The system has certain immune responses to renegade souls - it either demonises, ridicules, or - as in Banksy's case - absorbs the renegade and makes them a part of the spectacle. Warren Ellis puts it best in his phenomenal - and slightly prophetical - graphic novel 'Transmetropolitan'.  In Transmetropolitan the protagonist, Spider Jerusalem - a rouge columnist reporting on the fucked up and twisted society where children watch the 'sex muppets', people are half human, half implant and sleezy robotic politicians coerce a population hooked up on synthetic drugs and pornography - is the sole voice of the people.  In volume 6 of Transmetropolitian the system does to Spidey what it did to Banksy - it turns him into a celebrity; a cartoon character; it makes him safe.) (See image).

Steve sat down and proceeded to show me his large collection of artwork that he'd brought along in his large black artwork case. I wasn't quite expecting this, although I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting. You see, instead of organising this revolutionary group of bandits on some secret forum hidden in the backstreets of the internet, I'd used a fairly mainstream website called 'Meetup.com' and very openly presented the group to the general public.

The person to arrive next was a older man called Nigel.  I can't actually remember his real name but Nigel will do, he certainly looked like a Nigel.  Nigel was a white middle aged man in his early to mid fifties, a bit weedy and who turned out to be a computer programmer - for The Government.

Now, as you can imagine - after watching countless you tube videos about sinister forces controlling the world - I was already expecting some kind of infiltration, some kind of secret agent spy who would be taking down all my details and planning my own convenient disappearance at a later date, so when Nigel turned up my paranoia sprang into action.  In Hindsight however, it is very unlikely that The Government would send an uncover agent to my little unknown group, let alone give him a cover story that told me that he actually worked for the government.  (The Met Police would have been a more likely suspect as they have not been adverse to infiltrating groups so thoroughly in the past that they'd have long term romantic 'relationships' with activists.) 

Either way, my 25 year old self was extremely suspicious of this little speckled old man who always made a special effort to be at every meeting and thought that there was nothing wrong with CCTV...