“Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure”. Agent Smith’s words to Morpheus echo in the Matrix-inspired, Danny Boyle-directed play, Free Your Mind, which claims to depict a world where humans are enslaved by algorithms. Yet, the play refrains from accusing those behind these technological systems as the perpetrators of the consumerist nightmare.
On the 10th September 2009, the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, issued an apology to Alan Turing, culminating with the words “we’re sorry, you deserved so much better”. This apology came over 60 years after Turing’s ingenious cracking of the German Enigma code, which explicitly led to many British victories in WW2, such as the Battle of the Atlantic. During the war, Turing worked at Bletchley Park – more specifically, Hut 8, which was a section of the Government Code and Cypher School, tasked with deciphering German naval messages. It is here that his most notable achievement, the Bombe machine, was created.
A glimpse at the tragic, heroic but often forgotten life of one of Britain’s wartime heroes.
