It's tax declaration season in Sweden, and I found out I owe an additional 15000kr of income tax for 2023. Ouch! As far as I can tell, it's a side effect of how quickly I found work after the redundancy last year. I managed to start a new job while still in the old one's notice period, which meant I got two salaries for a little while, and I think that screwed up the preliminary tax deductions.

It got me thinking about Sweden and the UK again. The experience of paying tax in Sweden is really different than back home. Back home it was always this annoying thing you didn't really want to do. The British mindset on this issue is best summarised as “You've got to pick a pocket or two”. And I dunno what the hell they're spending the money on over there, but it's sure as hell not on parental pay or the posh kind of school buildings that don't randomly collapse.

Here in Sweden there's this cool idea that you actually get something for the money. My childcare costs here are a fraction what they'd be back home. I'll notice a pothole in a road here and then a month later it might be fixed. On top of that, there's this very Swedish concept that paying taxes is an expression of patriotism. I think this is really bloody clever. It's the first time the concept of patriotism even made sense to me as a force for good.

There's no doubt in my mind that I could get rich a lot easier in the UK. But every single day in Sweden my kids travel from their rent-controlled apartment to their state-funded preschool on protected, separated cycle lanes, and there's no amount of individual wealth that can recreate that lifestyle in the UK. Individualism can work miracles for the lucky few, but it's terrible at building whole societies.

It took me a few months of instalments to pay in the full 15000kr to my tax account. By coincidence, once it was done, the bosses over at Spotify renewed their political campaign to cut taxes and deregulate the housing market in order to attract more software engineers like me to Sweden. They've been pushing this since the day before I moved to Sweden, and they've chosen this moment to revive the campaign.

This came as a surprise on multiple levels. Obviously, a company whose headcount has been shrinking globally since 2022 isn't really arguing from a position of strength whenever they talk about competition for talent in any country. But more than that, it's an argument that contradicts the lived experience of many of us who've made the move to Sweden in particular.

When I accepted my Spotify offer, back in 2016, I had options. One of them was a startup in Barcelona. So I could have picked a lower capital gains tax and a deregulated rental market if I wanted, but I didn’t. I knew about these differences between the two countries, and I chose Sweden. Barcelona’s introduced rent control legislation since then too, by the way.

It's tempting to try to rationalise this somehow. Like sure, they hired me, but maybe they wanted to hire even more people? Thing is, the 2016 hypergrowth phase that I joined during suggests otherwise. Every day, you'd try to ask someone for directions to a meeting room and then find out they were even newer and more lost than you were. And more recently, the rationale for the layoffs was that the company had overhired during the pandemic. Spotify's bosses have been doomsaying about Sweden's tax policy for the better part of a decade now, and the claims are simply not borne out by the results so far.

So what’s going on here? Personally, I think that once you get above a certain level of individual wealth and power, everything starts to look like business to you. It’s your golden hammer after all, and it’s given you everything you ever dreamed of, so why shouldn’t it be able to fix society and save the planet too? Spotify's repeated attempts to justify a night work ban exemption on the basis of being "socially important" further suggests how grandiose the self-image is in the upper echelons.

My perspective is very different. I like business plenty. I daydream often of starting a company of my own when the kids are a little older. But I don’t see that we need to elevate the practice of business above all other fields of human endeavor, as if Spotify’s ability to poach a handful of machine learning engineers from Google is worth cutting jobs in healthcare and teaching across Sweden. And I think we should be especially cautious about the motives behind these kinds of statements from people whose personal fortunes would benefit from that kind of social change.

But these are powerful people. They have powerful friends too. Martin Lorentzon was even invited to the prime minister's birthday party this year. So they can do a lot of damage in pursuit of their next big stock market payout. And as long as Microsoft Excel shows them a green number instead of a red one, they might not even notice the negative impact on society at large.

Personally, I'm done simply shaking my fist at all this. The day after the 2022 elections, I made a decision to put all that energy into action instead. And one of the most impactful types of action we can engage in as software engineers is in creating the organising tools with which to build a bigger mass movement. In Sweden, Zetkin Foundation builds just that kind of tooling for the international left.

In September, Zetkin's hosting an International Code Camp. If you can fund your own travel to Malmö, they'll provide your accommodation and food, and together we can put our skills to work implementing our own vision for the future of society. Zetkin's a special thing, and I'd love to share it with more of the people I know. So have a think about coming down here on September 27th.

It's coming up on the tenth anniversary of the release of my infamous global thermonuclear war game. It's been offline for longer than it was ever online now. I want to get the story of this thing and its general context in my life & career written down and posted in time for the ten year milestone, so here it is.

Origins

I don't really remember how I ended up making this. My best guess is that I was probably pissing around with the Google Maps API one day and noticed it was possible to animate the geodesic lines to look like live-updating nuclear warhead trajectories.

It was a challenging idea to turn into a game and I'd bought some whiteboards to help with things like that, so I did some sketches to help myself work through some of the concepts and vocabulary.

The Landlord Visit

The visit was a scheduled inspection. In the UK these are a common practice in the rental market. In Sweden they're not. Moving here changed my perspective on this aspect of the story very significantly. In the UK, people's reaction to this story was always “I can't believe they actually called the police”. In Sweden, it's “Wait, what do you mean ‘inspection’?”.

In one of my interviews last year I talked a lot of shit about Thatcher, and how eye-opening it was to move to Sweden and realise what a dump the UK was in so many ways. This was one of the many realisations on that journey.

There's a lot of bloodthirst about deregulating the Swedish housing market these days. Here's hoping we manage to hang on to this one small dignity at least. We have a right to enjoy our lives without the surveillance of our private homes by the landlord class. Let's keep that.

The Police Report

The whole point of publishing the blog posts about the incident was to try to pre-empt a police intervention. I don't know if the blog posts going viral made any difference, but the police never came.

In hindsight, my fear response to the police report makes a lot of sense. The vast majority of my police interactions back home were negative. One time, I was walking to my local supermarket in Liverpool, and I was stopped and searched by police for no reason, under section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994.

That's another thing we don't have here in Sweden. Or didn't have, more like. Starting Thursday, Swedish police will have comparable powers for suspicionless stop-and-search. In an Arbetsvärlden interview I did recently, I talked about Sweden becoming more like the UK. This would be a specific example of that.

The Media Attention

Someone on Twitter saw my blog posts and posted them on Hacker News. Someone at The Guardian saw the Hacker News post and contacted me for quotes for a story about it. Various publications picked up the story from there.

Gaming-related stories sometimes get reinterpreted with a particular agenda where it's about how the stupid “normies” don't understand the refined culture of the poor beleaguered gamer. I saw this happen a little bit with my story. Simultaneously, I saw it happen with Anita Sarkeesian.

The idea of benefiting from the same destructive social forces that I could see destroying other people's lives made me a little bit sick. I think I wrote Gaming's Persecution Complex more or less just to ease my own conscience about that.

The Big Launch

The guy at The Guardian told me what day the story would go up, and that became my deadline. It was fun to have an externally imposed deadline. It helped me to cut my crap and ship the thing. The whole project had been stuck in a boring dead zone of aimless pissing about before that.

Once the story was up and the game was online it was really exciting. I kept having to do all these seat-of-my-pants optimisations to keep everything running. The back end leaked memory and crashed from time to time. The front end slowed to a crawl with all the missiles and I had to do things like limit how many would even render.

When I shipped this game, the Google Maps API was free. Today, serving the amount of traffic I did back then would have cost me hundreds of dollars in Maps API fees. I don't know if I could have afforded it.

The Long Tail

The publicity lasted about a day, and the social media buzz about a week. The game itself retained users way better than it had any right to though. People kept coming back, and the thing stayed decently busy for a long while after the launch.

The traffic did eventually flatline. But then, something surprising happened: every so often the server would light up again with a surge of activity for a short while. Individual online communities would rediscover it and have a few days of fun playing it together before moving on.

After a while, it narrowed down to one community in particular who came back repeatedly. And unfortunately, that community was creeps from 4chan. I managed to track down the thread about it once based on the top referers list in Google Analytics, and they were all in there hooting and hollering about role playing their violent racist fantasies. I stopped renewing the domain name after that, and the game's been offline ever since.

Career Impact

It seemed like everyone in the Bristol tech scene in the mid 2010s had heard of the nuclear landlord police report story. It was a pretty good ice breaker at events for a while.

Attributing career progression to any individual piece of work is tricky. But I did move jobs not long after all this. And I think having such a well-known JavaScript side project helped a lot, because the new gig was my first ever JavaScript job, after a very PHP-centric career up to that point.

That job also happened to be MixRadio, which led me directly to Spotify when it later closed down. So I do reckon Global Thermonuclear War helped me escape the UK. Maybe not directly. But I doubt I'd be sat here in Malmö today writing this otherwise.

The WebGL Demo Thing

It never sat well with me having such an important career milestone project just be this offline app from the past. I wanted there to at least be something online to show people. Eventually the idea came to me that I could probably make some kind of watchable demo out of some of the old missile launch log data.

So now there's that.

It'll do! It gives a nice sense of the scale of the popularity the game reached at its peak, and it preserves the sense of endlessness and pointlessness to the conflict. It was fun as hell to build, too. And it means there's something, not just an old readme.

Krisen Eller Kriget

Being in the news as a suspected nuclear terrorist leaves you with a lingering interest in the general topic. In 2018, the Swedish government sent everyone these little booklets about what to do if there's a war. I was a little bit obsessed with these. In them, they mention public fallout shelters.

Sweden has 65000 of these fallout shelters. Within a one block radius of my home, there are four. Within a one kilometre radius, there are about 100. Remember what I said about life in Sweden making me realise what a dump the UK was? Yeah, they don't have anything like this back home. What kind of dickhead country builds one of the world's largest nuclear arsenals but nowhere to shelter from its effects?

Anyway, I read a really captivating alternate history timeline last year called Protect & Survive. It's about the UK in the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war in 1984, and it's fucking horrible. Towards the end, the few survivors establish radio contact with Sweden, who are doing comparatively well, I guess partly due to the neutrality making us less of a target, and partly due to all these public fallout shelters.

Been reflecting on that aspect of the story a fair bit recently. Sweden's NATO membership got approved two weeks ago, and I found myself living in an EU & NATO member state again, just like back in 2014. And I guess the fallout shelters here are more directly valuable to me personally than the UK's nuclear warheads ever were, so that's a solid upgrade. But wasn't the only winning move not to play? Definitely was in my version of the game at least.