The Establishment, Oxford, Google & Debian artificial intelligence conspiracies
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
22:30 Wed, 05 Aug 2026
On Tuesday, I reached out to other members of the free software community in the UK to join the discussion about the Clacton by-election. Most candidates and journalists are being quite pragmatic about how the people are likely to vote next week, nonetheless, the election process and my personal candidacy provides an opportunity to get some media attention on those aspects of the software freedom cause that are critical for society at large.
Before getting involved, some people have started looking at the history of the Debianism feuds and asked what made some of these people develop such an insane obsession with my family in the first place? Is it only about the death of Adrian von Bidder on our wedding day or are there other dark forces at work?
In 1999, during the third year of my undergraduate degree, students were asked to work in groups of five on a team project. Our group were perceived to be the top guns of the computer science department and we were asked to work on an artificial intelligence project. The supervisor was the head of the department at that time and a highly respected expert on the artificial intelligence of that era.
Peter Eckersley was one of our classmates of that era, he subsequently had a big role in artificial intelligence but he was not one of the five students in that particular project group.
Out of the five students working on the project, one of them never really left university. He was one of the early people to join DeepMind in the UK.
The Debianists are currently having one of their endless debates about the role of LLM in creating Debian packages. Looking at the profile of my former classmate:
From 2014 to 2021 I founded and lead the Natural Language research group at DeepMind London.
In other words, he joined DeepMind at the same time it was acquired by Google. The stuff that Debianists are arguing about was invented by more former classmate. Google and their misfits have banned the community from reading anything I might have to say about the subject.
Later in 2014, St Hugh's College published a lengthy statement about the extent of the Google money flooding the institution.
the University will receive a significant seven figure contribution from Google to be split between the two departments
In 2017, the Fellowship elected me as their representative to the FSFE misfits in Berlin.
In 2018, Peter Eckersley left his role at the EFF to join the Partnership on AI, which is funded by big business interests like Google.
In 2020, my former project team-mate was promoted from being an Associate Professor and given the title Google Professor of Computer Science at Oxford. Does that mean everybody who ever met him, including me, is now arguably part of the Establishment?
Given that Google pays so much money to have the name of their company affiliated with Oxford and these Oxford titles for their own staff, how could they possibly tolerate anybody else from the same peer group in Australia making alternative comments on the ethics of their business practices?
It looks like they may have also been unable to get Peter Eckersley to endorse their brazen wrongdoing. He left the Partnership on AI in 2020 without any public comment.
The same year, we saw Google turning their fangs on the co-chairs of their own ethics department. First they attacked Timnit Gebru and then they attacked Margaret Mitchell. At exactly the same time, my family and I were subject to increasingly hysterical character attacks from misfits and other underlings.
In hindsight, people see that none of us had done anything wrong whatsoever. Is it just coincidence that all the people making critical commentary about ethics were attacked at almost the same time?
This was all about some companies with extraordinary amounts of money and complicit underlings being able to throw their weight around and humiliate independent professionals who might have the stature to contradict the "official" experts endorsed by the company itself.
Looking at the archives of the Debian-project mailing list, we can see huge threads discussing the role of artificial intelligence and LLMs. What is the point of spending all that time on those discussions if the most interesting commentary is censored? People just waste their time going around in circles. Maybe it is Debian's death spiral.
Please watch my crowdfunding video to learn more about the lawsuit in US federal court.
Read more about my research into groups that evolve into cults. █