“Does it work?” is all she can say.
“Huh?”
“The van. The engine? Does it work?”
Neal laughs, glances over his shoulder. “Oh yeah, she works. I mean, she’s a bit temperamental and—”
“We need to go. Now.”
“Oh, okay, well, I—”
“Now. We need to go now.” She gestures out toward the motorway. “There’s an LA jeep parked up there. Did you see it on your way in?”
“Yeah, I think so—”
“Well, if they see me, they’ll kill me. And then they’ll kill you.”
Neal sighs, the friendliness fading from his face. “Right. Okay. Shit. Dave said this would be fun.”
“Dave paid you already, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Then we go. Right fucking now.”
He closes the hood, wipes his oily hands on a rag, and opens the passenger door for her. Yellow foam spilling from split, fake leather seats. The faint smell of mold.
“After you,” he says.
A few minutes later, after Neal coaxes the van into life, they’re slipping out of the car park, onto the access road to the motorway. Right past where the LA jeep is parked.
“I’m sorry, no other way out,” Neal says through gritted teeth.
“It’s fine.” She sinks down into her seat, pulls her hoodie up as much as she can. “Just, y’know, let’s not hang around.”
As he pulls the van onto the motorway she glances out at the parked patrol. The guy back in the café was right, it’s a Land Rover, but it’s not army issue. It looks like a farmer’s old jeep that’s been badly sprayed forest camouflage colors. Land Army stencils on the side. Towheaded kids, no older than the one bleeding out in the toilets, smoking a joint, laughing, cradling assault rifles. It suddenly all looks like a joke to her, like apart from the guns it’s nothing more frightening than some out-of-their-depth kids. It reminds her of being told, back at the camp, that it’s all the Land Army is: bored farmers and starving country kids, trying to stay alive and playing army. Kids angry at the cities, blaming the cities for everything, for all that went wrong.
Maybe they’re right, she thinks.
But then all she can see is the labor camps, the starving children being dragged from their homes by LA troopers, the fields of crops being burned just to prove a point.
And then they’re away, past the patrol, out on the M4. Heading east.
She lets herself relax, just slightly. Neal chuckles next to her, shakes his head.
“I tell you what, girl, I hope it’s worth it.”
“What?”
“Whatever you’re going to Bristol for. I hope it’s worth all this shit.”
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah. So do I.”
4. BEFORE
7 July 2021
Neeta Singh
BBC News magazine
In a hip neighbourhood in Bristol, a controversial group of anarchists are rebelling against the smart city by blocking out the internet. Neeta Singh visits the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft to find out what life off-grid looks like in the centre of one of the UK’s most connected cities.
The whole world around me is cycling with colours—every building down this busy Bristol street is covered with animated patterns: flocks of birds scroll across their surfaces; intricate, alien-looking plants burst forth from the architecture; and stylised faces look down on me with cool disdain. And I can’t share or tell anyone about it: my timelines aren’t working. I can’t connect to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even my Gmail. In fact, I can’t connect to the internet at all. I can’t even send a text message or make a voice call. My spex have been completely hijacked by secret, almost mystical, technologies hidden in the buildings around me, and I’ve no choice but to try and enjoy the ride.
Welcome to the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft, a two-mile-long digital no-man’s-land right in the centre of Bristol, one of the UK’s leading smart cities. Part hippyster commune, part permanent art installation, and part political protest, the Croft (as the locals call it) claims to be a refuge from the physical and digital surveillance we associate with everyday life both in major cities and online.
“Your first reaction might be ‘oh god, I can’t connect to anything,’ but the reality is that you’ve actually disappeared,” explains Rushdi Manaan, anti-surveillance activist and the PRSC’s most infamous founder. “When you step into the Croft here you vanish not just from the internet, but also from the cameras and sensors that now watch us everywhere else we go in the city. Your spex and your phone might not be able to access the usual networks and services you use, but that means they can’t find you, either—they can’t track what you’re doing, can’t record your every movement—both in the real world and on the internet. Only here can you be truly sure of some privacy.”
If Manaan’s name sounds familiar, it’s because it’s been associated with controversy for years. The academic researcher turned activist has evaded being sent to prison on two occasions, when his name was allegedly tied to high-level hacks and email leaks at Apple and Uber. He’s been accused of being amongst the highest ranks of hacktivist groups such as Anonymous, Dronegod$, and BaeSec—which he strongly denies—and flirted with legal issues again a few years ago when he posted a series of tutorials online that explained how to create DIY tools for hacking and spoofing common smart-city monitoring systems. With the PRSC, though, he may have created his most controversial and rebellious project yet—an entire neighbourhood that rejects the digital status quo of surveillance, the internet, and big data.
“Everywhere you go, even in your own home, you’re not only being watched by cameras, but you’re generating data,” Manaan tells me. “We’ve reached a point, in cities like Bristol, where we’re in a state of total surveillance. Where every square inch of the built environment has been mapped, is being watched. And I don’t mean just by cameras, the city is also covered in sensors—from LIDAR through to embedded microphones and pressure pads under the pavements that can measure how many people have walked past.
“And all that’s before we start to even include what we do online, how big data companies like Google or Facebook track us across the internet, from site to site and service to service. Everything we do creates data that these companies monitor and collect, and use to track us and to try to predict what we do.”
This is nothing new, I suggest.
“No, of course not, it’s been this way for at least two decades. But in the last few years those two areas of surveillance—online and off—have merged in ways we couldn’t even have imagined ten years ago.” He points at my spex. “We’re all carrying—wearing, even—hugely powerful devices that create and gather data simultaneously about our physical and digital activities. It’s increasingly hard to separate the two. What we’re trying to do here is to create a space where people can escape from all that.”
I ask him whether he isn’t painting a rather dystopian picture—it’s not as though all this monitoring and data collection is being done by one Big Brother–style organization. And isn’t most of it done for our benefit and convenience, to improve the quality of our lives?
He laughs. “Well, that’s a moot point. Do you know who is tracking you online, when you are looking at your timelines, shopping, walking down the street? I mean, you can guess—it might be Google or Twitter or Amazon or whoever—but do you know what they do with that data? Who they sell it to? Who they let have access? What it’s used for? Also, we’ve known for over ten years now—since Snowden—that many of these companies are actually sharing that data with governments, and that organizations like GCHQ and the NSA have ways of compiling and mining it to create scarily comprehensive ways of watching every aspect of our lives.