I am @geeksrulz

The Geek

The Geek

This is a big moment for me, saying who I am. I have personal, family and business reasons for being anonymous on Twitter.

The last piece like this one I wrote 10 years ago on Margo Kingston’s pioneering Webdiary.

Does it matter who The Geek is?  From the moment I set up a site with Margo Kingston called “Australians for Honest Politics”, I knew that to be a credible contributor I would have to be honest and transparent about the man behind The Geek.

The Geek’s time is over, and the time for the smart, sophisticated and insightful guy behind him has arrived. This is part of my 2013 resolution. My inner Gough was telling me: It’s time!

How I use Twitter

Don’t you love it when people follow through with their New Year resolutions? You have to admire my courage for doing this. Okay maybe not just yet, but please hear me out. To get to this point, I had to fight my way through the party political trench warfare on Twitter. How many people do you know who have done this? How many have retained their sense of humour? I had to fight orcs, goblins, wargs, stone giants and trolls.

I am making light of the infamous hash tag on twitter called auspol, where it seems a lot of nasty (mostly from the right) people gather. It was a deliberate decision of mine to go where the left meets the right at the coalface of political argument, to witness it in all its ugliness, pettiness, and hatred. Can you blame me for adopting a pseudonym?

In the distant past, a time before Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, these groups would never meet directly. Now they are directly exposed to each other in public.

It can be fun to go where the tectonic plates of Australian politics clash and observe the resulting fireworks. It certainly can be more entertaining than the reheated, predictable, jaded, cynical and repetitive groupthink narrative dished up every day by our professional media communicators.

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What I found in my travels through Twitter Mordor is that reason and logic will only get you so far. To discuss politics and to keep your sanity on Twitter you have to use humour, parody and satire, especially in an era of Post Truth Politics and Post Facts Media.

A thing is funny when it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution. – George Orwell

Thus George Orwell explains what destroying the joint means. I like to challenge basic assumptions and premises put on Twitter which invariably reflect the media-fed or party-fed narrative of the day. You can quickly establish with a few questions who is a shallow tweeter and who has substance and beliefs.

My first ever Tweet:

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My fourth Tweet – Finding my voice:

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My sixth and seventh Tweet – Finding my calling:

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There are many ways to engage politically. You can write a blog, you can write a letter, you can tweet a journo, and you can ring call-back radio. In the end it doesn’t matter as long as you engage with the issues that are important to you. I sometimes choose to engage with LNP staffers/members and Menzies House trolls on Twitter because I like to get my hands dirty. I prefer the salt of the earth kind of way rather than a high brow academic approach to politics, which in my view is ineffective in the Post Truth era.

Here is an illustration of the approach I prefer. Cut down a David Speers Sky News video interview from 13.30 minutes to 35 seconds to communicate at a visceral level with the viewer who gets the context of the Carbon Tax scare campaign.

Mr Abbott says: “If you want to put a price on carbon why not just do it with a simple tax.” June 3, 2011. You can argue the issues in a purist way and write an impressive blog post about it but as a comparison, this video attracted 60,000 views on YouTube and was featured in multiple news programs, Q & A, Lateline and commercial TV. When is the last time a well argued, well researched blog post achieved that?
If the Liberals did not exist, you would have to invent them. If Tony Abbott did not exist, the media would lose its stunt-a-day readymade vaudeville machine. Abbott fulfils a need the media has to provide content and visuals to fill their gaps with a readymade circus. The media has no need for quality. This in part explains the disconnect with their audience and the failing business model.

So there you have it. The key to twitter is to enjoy it and have fun. This is my guiding philosophy for life.

Early Life Europe

My journey began in a place far away,  not Mordor, but a little town called Ettelbruck in the tiny Grand Duchy of Luxembourg.

My parents are Spanish and migrated to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg in the 1960’s. I am incredibly proud of what they achieved in bringing up a family of 8 kids (5 sisters and 2 brothers) in a foreign land with the most rudimentary language skills except for a little French. I was child number 5 and the second to be born in Luxembourg.

My birth made the newspaper as I was born in a taxi on the way to the hospital. This is when my love for newspapers began and ended up with me running a digital services company to Newspaper Publishers.

By 7 I had learned four languages. I was speaking Spanish, struggling with Luxembourgish and German and at ease in French. At the time we had German, French and Luxembourgish TV and newspapers. I watched and read them all as I was growing up and going through my “Sturm und Drang” phase trying to find a meaning to life.

These were exciting and momentous times in the Europe of the 1970’s and 1980’s. It was the era of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan’s Pershing Missiles, Gorbachev, Margaret Thatcher, Giscard D’Estaing, Francois Mitterand, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, Erich Honecker and the DDR, Disco and Trabant. It was the era of Petra Kelly, and Die Grünen (German Green Party) who were one of the earlier elected Greens in a national Parliament.

In those days, the terrorists we had to deal with were the IRA, ETA, Baader-Meinhof Group and Brigate Rosse.

There was also a more serious version of Ashbygate, the 1982 coup d’état attempt in Spain. It was a conspiracy conceived to overthrow the government. I remember my family being glued to the television set, fearful that a Franco type Dictator would return and destroy a fledgling Spanish Democracy. King Juan Carlos saved the country with an address to the nation, calling for rebellious army units to return to their barracks. They did.

As an addendum to my piece in Margo’s Webdiary, when I met Bob Hawke, he said to me: “I’ve met your King”.

We had Gorby’s Glasnost and Perestroika, then we had one of those troublemaker union organisers, an electrician (later President and Nobel Prize) Lech Wałęsa in Poland, the head of Solidarność (Solidarity) who started the Eastern Block Revolutions of 1989. The communist regimes of Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and the Ceausescus in Romania all came tumbling down. We had Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Journalism

You get the idea. I followed all of this not through studying history but through quality multilingual media and journalism in Europe. My favourite publication was the German Der Spiegel (Global Mail Story), one of the world’s most successful magazines which, against all odds, is still making money. Have I mentioned quality yet?

If journalism is the first draft of history, we are in big trouble right now. Apparently we feel threatened in this country by a few women and children on a boat. We are unable to find out who leaked to Laurie Oakes in the 2010 Election campaign. We are unable to find out who continually leaks police operations to the media. We are unable to question Mal Brough, Tony Abbott, or Christopher Pyne on their knowledge of the Ashby conspiracy. We are unable to get answers from the Taxpayer funded ABC. We get pop psychology about Celebrity Big Pollies, zero policy analysis, zero fact checking and zero value. Welcome to Post Truth Media.

Early life Australia

If you have made it this far, please the read that story I wrote for Webdiary back in 2003. (Mate, where is my country?)

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Australian dream, by Martin Davies. www.daviesart.com

As much as I loved re-reading that piece again, there was a distinct change in tone from positive, warm and passionate about Australia, my adopted country, to distress at what I thought the Howard Government was doing to it.

One aspect I want to add to my experiences of Australia was the feeling of liberation in being able to call your boss by his or her first name. Breaking down the barriers between people in authority and staff adds a personal dimension to the relationship. This in turn may help in team building, loyalty and mutual respect.

Business

There are not many countries in the world, where it is easier to set up a business. I have been involved in a few startup companies and the ease with which you can get up and running in a new business is remarkable. It is a dream come true for serial entrepreneurs.

Back in 1994 to 2000, I was working as a Digital Producer for a Business Communications company dealing with high profile corporate clients with big budget projects. We worked on exhibitions, museums, first use of live web broadcasting of company AGMs all the way to internal Business TV for Big Banks. My main client was Fairfax Media, managing their Fairfax Newspapers on CD ROM project which were sold to schools, universities, businesses and libraries.

Together with the then Art Director Mark Sehler and best friend, I had worked on some smaller freelance web projects, and after we brought in a sales guy to sell our skills and services, our old jobs were made redundant. We formed a publishing company called Smedia,  and as technical director I helped it become an industry-recognised digital publishing house. My biggest coup was getting my previous client at the business communications company, big corporate Fairfax Media, to come across to Smedia.

During my time at Smedia, I successfully delivered major contracts for clients such as Woolworths, The West Australian Newspapers, Allied Press NZ, The Star Malaysia, Sing Tao Hong Kong, SMH, AGE, BRW, AFR, Property Press NZ and ACP.

Bringing in the now commonly used Digital Edition format was a major effort in terms of market education requirement. Interestingly, I was selling this still novel concept of online Digital Editions to Fairfax already in 2004. It took until 2006 for them to finally make a decision and adopt the online format. It just goes to show how slow the Fairfax Mother ship moves. Are we surprised they are in trouble?

During that time, I also co-founded the online business Findacarpark, a novel car parking portal for renting, buying and selling private car parking spaces.

I met interesting and genuinely inspiring people in business. I have also met a few sociopaths along the way. They seem to pop up more in business, because that’s where their anything goes and no scruples attitudes are highly sought after in the dog eat dog corporate world. I have worked and still work with Liberals as business associates, colleagues and clients. I get on really well with all of them. Politics is rarely discussed in any depth or seriousness.

Business is about solving problems, making money and building a life for yourself and your staff. Politics should not interfere when you do business and this is why I have always tried to keep the two separate. Why let politics interfere with making money from Liberals?

I have sold the two businesses mentioned above in 2010 and now run a few other online ventures in various back and foreground roles, again with a combination of Liberal and Labor partners.

No Fibs (Australians For Honest Politics) 

The project that I am most excited about is No Fibs. Being a news and politics junkie, it gives citizen journalists like me and others a platform with a highly credentialed former investigative journalist like Margo Kingston to pursue the stories that the mainstream media refuses to cover or follow up for whatever reason.

The gatekeepers have lost the key and are suffering a disconnect with their audience and the public, and there is a need and a huge gap that must be filled. Technology facilitates good quality journalism filling the gap. How about we start with: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How.

Australians for Honest Politics was started and based around Mr Abbott’s “Australians for Honest Politics Trust”. Margo, in a moment of inspiration, reclaimed the words “Australians for Honest Politics” from a covert, behind the scenes operation to an open and transparent citizen journalism project that covers the issues the mainstream media likes to forget.  The title perfectly captures what we set out to do and is also a constant reminder that the Hanson Slush Fund scandal really did happen. There are still serious questions that remain unanswered by the AEC and Mr Abbott.

Finally, can we also put to rest once and for all the childish and repetitive  attacks on me by  Liberal trolls and @prestontowers of me being a paid Labor staffer. Latika Bourke from the ABC has now added her jernalism efforts to re-ignite that silliness. For the record I am not an academic, a public servant, a Labor party staffer or a member of any political party. I do not get paid to tweet. I do not take or give instructions from anyone or to anyone. I am my own person using the poor man’s megaphone – The Twitter. Everything that’s not fit to print.

You have made it this far? Seriously?

OK, The Geek who tweets as @geeksrulz is Tony Yegles, a proud dad of 4 daughters and a serial entrepreneur who has been destroying the joint in Australia since 1987 and in Europe before that.

Disclaimer for completeness: I run a  digital media services company. My company is 100% owned by me, has never provided any services to any political party, and is not affiliated or linked in any way to any other third party entity.

This is the Geek, but you can call me Tony now.

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Copyright Tony Yegles. This image should not be used under any circumstance without the express written permission by Tony Yegles. Contact me via @geeksrulz or geeksrulz@gmail.com

We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors; we borrow it from our Children. We’re all in this together. Let’s fight the good fight.


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Comments

  1. Marian Rumens says

    Hi Tony. Nice to meet you. I do hope your ‘coming out’ doesn’t mean you wont tweet any more. I remember all those incidents in your early years. I remember seeing Lech Walesa bringing factory workers out on strike. I remember Gorbachev when he was in power with his little birth mark on his pate and I remember Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax that pretty well did her in. Until reading your ‘confession’ I had no idea how much history I’d lived through. Hope all goes well with your business and good luck. Only reason I’ve always used my real name is because I’m in my 81st year and got nothing to lose.

  2. Space Kidette says

    Pleasure to meet you! It has been a delight to fight in the trenches beside you!


  3. “If the Liberals did not exist, you would have to invent them. If Tony Abbott did not exist, the media would lose its stunt-a-day readymade vaudeville machine. Abbott fulfils a need the media has to provide content and visuals to fill their gaps with a readymade circus.”

    Wise words.

    Now give me back my gravatar! :)


  4. Hello Tony,
    “Finally, can we also put to rest once and for all the constant and boring Liberal attacks on me of being a paid Labor staffer. I am not an academic, a public servant, a staffer or a member of any political party. I do not get paid to “Comment”(sic). I do not take or give instructions from anyone or to anyone. I am my own person using the poor man’s megaphone”

    Jesus H. Christ I say that every day to the peanuts that are following the codicil as set down by Howard for Tony “No Show” Abbott and his so called “conservatives” to follow.

    The field of battle may change but the fight goes on.


  5. Congratulations Tony on a beautifully written article and a well-lived life. And much more yet to come!


  6. Hi Tony,
    We love you Geeks, thankyou for sharing your story with us. Interesting and enjoyable
    a Lovely story, 4 daughters did you say ,how wonderful .
    :):) from Lyn


  7. Hey Tony, Great article, well written :grin:
    I think Australians for Honest Politics is a great name for a site, and I read, and enjoy, a lot of Margo’s work on other sires, including her expose of the Abbotts slush fund, it’s just a shame that the MSM won’t take it up, as like you I believe there are many questions yet to be answered.
    I did write my own piece on that very subject by way of poetry that you may be interested in?

    http://truthseekersmusings.wordpress.com/2013/01/29/tony-abbotts-australians-for-honest-politics/

    Keep up the good work, and I have put a link to AFHP on my site :grin:

    Cheers :smile: :grin: :lol:


  8. Is awesome when you learn someone’s background, really gives you a sense of where they are coming from & why. Well done mate & all power to you!!! :)


  9. So nice to meet you Tony! Thank you for a beautifully written piece and all you do to help fill the holes that Media leaves/ignores/refuses to deal with. Your efforts are very much appreciated and please do not stop tweeting :)

  10. Harry de Wortel says

    Mate, I congratulate you. 2013 will be an epic battle between the forces of good and evil and it’s a delight to be on the same side as someone as eloquent and driven as you, someone whose values I share. Not sure about the soul kiss, though ;=)
    And seriously, if you need any help, give me a yell.

  11. Robert Bettinzoli says

    Thank you mate for being so open and honest,In my eyes people like yourself I consider gifted and inspirational,not many of us can express what we mean as you do and selfishly spin of folk as yourself to get what we try to say out there.Please continue your good work as you give people like me hope.Thank you again Tony,an avid follower.


  12. When you decide to uphold the values of integrity in politics, not just hiding behind power, and you can come to the conclusion that there is something wrong in the state of ALP politics, you can start talking to me. I have been an ALP supporter and member, a trade union member and supporter for more years than you have been on this earth and you have no conception of the notion that, without integrity, honesty and honour, you have nothing. Absent the admission that the AWU is rotten, the HSU is rotten, the ALP is rotten, you will come nowhere within cooee of governing this country again, Thank God. And your sycophantic supporters are bereft of any dignity also.


    • Who are you Mr Tough Guy? You seem like such a tough hero and yet strangely too scared to come out from behind your little anonymous profile hidy hole. :)


      • The “bushy” has been commenting on Fairfax and is a complete dipstick …. along with “hacka”, “SteveH.” and a few others who have been commenting there for at least 2 years.

        Always with the crap “I have been a Union member” and “I voted Labor but no more”.

        They are an extremely sad bunch worthy of a rise in their pensions payments so that they can spend more time in front of the pokies.

        Put their names to anything … not likely.

      • Robert Bettinzoli says

        J.Fraser you are an embarrassment as an idiot,I notice you are full of constructive advice and news worthy information,.


      • Many thanks R.Bettinzoli.

        I will take your constructive criticism on board and read more of your posts in an endeavour to lift myself above your embarrassment.


  13. Geek, you were one of the first people I followed when I joined Twitter. And are still one of my favourites for your pithy observations of politics. Living evidence that the progressive side of politics has both the ethics and the smarts.


  14. Many thanks R.Bettinzoli.

    I will take your constructive criticism on board and read more of your posts in an endeavour to lift myself above your embarrassment.


  15. Hi Geek, wondering if you could fix up the spelling of my name on the blog’s Blog List – Gwyther (no t at the end). Thanks :)
    I’m sending in a contribution soon if that’s okay.
    best wishes
    Sheryl

  16. mutatedwombat says

    Fascinating bio. I wish you well, and hope your side of politics finally figures out where it went wrong during its inevitable extended exile from power.


  17. Hi Tony, Great to meet the face behind the tweets. Already following you, but will of course have to unfollow at some point before you get fashionable et al your facebook style ;)


  18. Dear Tony

    Love your work :)

    Please fix the frame size on the Home page so the whole page doesn’t jump around when one of the slideshow image constructions fails the consistency test.

    Thank you
    Enthusiastic Reader with a headache

  19. Chris Brooks says

    Tony on my first day on twitter (some months ago) I followed about 20 of my favorite tweeters in about as many seconds and duly had my knuckles rapped by Twitter. You must have thought I was a spammer and blocked me. I would love to follow you without relying on re-tweets.Chris Brooks @CB_Nandad


  20. Thanks Chris. Apologies for blocking. It gets a bit hectic sometime on twitter and it can be hard to tell friend from foe when the person is not known.

  21. Chris Brooks says

    Thanks Tony.

  22. Stark Raving Duncan says

    Up until today I followed you via retweets, which appeared in my feed with alarming regularity. Sorry that the crazies took over on you. For some reason they think that once they see your name anywhere in the news that it’s time to attack..

  23. Rosie Elliott says

    Hi Tony: Nuthin like coming out! All good.

    But crits on sign off proposition 1: We DO inherit from the Ancestors. We carry them with us from all their great, lesser and mad wanderings/wonderings. But Proposition 2,3 & 4. Right on. Poor damned grand-children are getting a damned bare cupboard…

    We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors; we borrow it from our Children. We’re all in this together. Let’s fight the good fight.