Thomas 🇪🇺🇸🇪🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Astroturfing is when campaigns are designed to look like spontaneous grassroots movements, but are actually influence operations driven by powerful vested interests 👇

The Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee surveyed 7,358 homeowners on the draft Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill and the findings are stark. Our full report will be published tomorrow. Watch this space. 1/6 🧵

52% are struggling to afford service charges. 39% cannot sell or remortgage due to high service charges. The scale of the problem is clear. 5/6 🧵

Let me trace the timeline here because nobody's connecting it. Step 1: Scrape the entire internet. Every book, every article, every conversation, every piece of art, every forum post. Do it without asking. Do it without paying. Step 2: Train a model on all of it. Call it "artificial intelligence." Step 3: Go to BlackRock's Infrastructure Summit and announce: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter." Step 3 is where you sell people's own knowledge back to them. On a meter. They took the collective output of human thought, compressed it into a model, and now they want to charge you by the token to access a version of what you and everyone you know already created. One Reddit user put it perfectly: "They stole all this data from us, the people, our life's work, creativity, art, by devouring the internet and blowing through all copyright laws. Now they want to sell it back to us in the form of a utility." Imagine if someone photocopied every book in the public library, burned the library down, and then opened a subscription service for the copies. That's the metered intelligence business model. And they're pitching it to infrastructure investors as though they invented water.

More than a third of leaseholders can’t sell or remortgage due to high service charges. This is a miss-selling scandal the likes of which we have never seen before.