You can't say that! Until suddenly you can.

“Fuck you people.” wrote Rob Pike, "Raping the planet, spending trillions on toxic, unrecyclable equipment while blowing up society, yet taking the time to have your vile machines thank me for striving for simpler software".

Pike, a mild mannered engineer and computer scientist, is the very picture of the patient, thoughtful, rational man. He invented windows on computers - not the hopelessly insecure Microsoft operating system - rather the very idea of computer displays having movable and resizable windows, an idea from which Microsoft made a fortune.

Now of course that's not quite true. Everyone knowledgeable on the history of computer interfaces considers Douglas Engelbart and Bill English did that. In fact both views are true. In reality, only later did a confluence of ideas come together at Xerox-PARC to create WIMP - an interface comprising windows, icons, menus, and a pointer.

I highlight this to make a point. Ideas are latent. They "float in the air" like charged particles in a storm, waiting for the lightning flash. Proof of this lies in the observation that so many inventions happen simultaneously around the globe. Innovators often just say what is on everybody's tongue. They are a conductor for potential already building in the atmosphere. Unlike Dawkins idea of memetics, latent ideas are not discrete and measurable units of culture. They are powerful Jungian forces, unmanifested dark-memes in the spaces between memes.

Rob Pike was simply saying what everybody in tech wanted to say, but hadn't yet the guts; Fuck "AI".

Often the truth comes in an outburst. People can no longer hold it in or "play the game". Long ago people at the BBC would say to me, quietly at the pub after several drinks… "Of course you know about Jimmy Savile, right?…" and then conclude their whispers with "But you can't say that!!". Many years passed (and no doubt many further abuses occurred) between it being common knowledge and Operation Yewtree in 2012. Savile was a master of presentation, a "national treasure" whose charity work was praised right up to his funeral at Leeds Cathedral in 2011.

It's the "but you can't say that" bit that's interesting.

Why do people pretend? Why do we conspire feigning belief in the safe, popularly held opinions of those around us - but which everybody knows are lies? The social forces that stop people from "rocking the boat" are actually well understood by psychologists. If you're interested in this area of macroeconomics, ideas I strongly recommend studying are; Jante law, tall poppies, percepticide, spirals of silence, Stockholm syndrome and repression.

Of course we did say it. To each other, in quiet moments. Just not out loud in front of power.

Savile was protected by the establishment. He maintained a menacing old-school cigar-smoking gangster air. Speak out and you might find yourself in a concrete overcoat, propping up a motorway bridge… that was the vague insinuation. People knew that unless they all moved together, decisively and backed by power, they'd be crushed individually.

The gangster swagger of SV tech is more subtle. They've no stomach for violence. They don't need it. They openly state their power-position; "Play along with our new world order or you'll be pushed to the margins of society. And we'll make sure of that." Being "left behind" is not a concern about social progress, it's a threat. Exclusion is the soft power that technofascists hold over people. You'll be "cancelled", "deleted", "debanked", "erased" They intend to take over everything, and when they do… you better watch out!

However, resistance is also latent. It's not that people are ignoring all the evidence right in front of their own eyes. They are making calculated choices about when to defect from the persona or 'front' they maintain for the sake of social acceptance or 'career'. Desmond Morris noted how primates feign subservience to the alpha right up until the moment they smash-in his skull with a rock in a surprise coordinated attack.

We make a huge mistake about human rationality if we think that it is legible, linear, proportionate and measured. We are not rational actors who make transparent, moment by moment informed choices so that markets operate smoothly. In reality people play brinkmanship with pretending to be 'acceptable'. We build up huge potentials of conflicting thought, frustration, sore resentment, ambition, restiveness, and then suddenly; Bam! Out of the blue we smash to pieces the things that yesterday we claimed to love; loyalties, attachments, habits, beliefs. We're happy to feign approval of the surveillance capitalist order only so long as we believe we can get something more than others from it. Only so long as we fear it withholding something from us. Only so long as we believe that enough other people believe in it.

What I see lately is more people realising that "AI" and other technologies of domination are the common enemy of liberal democracy and peace whichever way you cut it. They're jumping-in with startlingly negative opinions. Successful "AI" either results in revolutionary levels of inequality in which the only constant is violence, or in communism where the only constant is complacent apathy. Failed "AI" is likely to wipe ten to twenty trillion off the world economy.

It's a lose-lose game. The only rational move is not to play.

Though the Economist named the "Techlash" back in 2018, some think that was prescient but premature. The real reactionary wave is yet to come and it's got little to do with Luddism so much as profound disenchantment with automation and the looming reality of what a Marxian "end of capitalism" might really mean. People hate the pallid non-experience and emptiness that Silicon Valley values have produced from once promising digital technology. As one friend put it recently, "I'm not tired of the idea of capitalism, I'm tired of the state of it. What the world's become. The awful people. The moral vacuum. It's a blockage that needs dissolving with drain cleaner. We need to tear it all down not to end opportunity and innovation, but so that it might continue." Judging by the recent outspoken attacks on "AI" by top "AI" company CEOs, the system has had enough of itself. Devils sick of sin. We won't need a revolution. Capital is doing the self-disassembly of its own accord. What is shaky, push it.

Expect first that some big totems will fall. IBM? Microsoft? OpenAI?

Take Microsoft. Everyone in computing knows about Microsoft products. Especially their Windows series of operating systems. No serious computer security person would ever willingly deploy Microsoft. But they do. If you're an IT professional in the UK you know… "But you can't say that!!". For laughs, you can say Bill Gates should have used Kaspersky instead of Windows antivirus before inserting his USB stick in a Russian model. But make any serious, rational, evidenced criticism of Microsoft and the room falls silent.

That's been going on for decades. Everybody knows. Not just Leonard Cohen. Yet Microsoft are also masters of presentation and press management. Like all US Big Tech that run rings around CEOs and politicians, they have the ability to prop-up confidence using almost limitless money to throw at influence (including bribery and threats). In the UK, Microsoft are anointed as "preferred suppliers" and take government contracts hands-down. The AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park was a sham where the UK government got into bed with the likes of OpenAI, Google and Palantir, a company whose co-founder thinks Greta Thurnberg is literally the Anti-Christ ¹!

But you can't say that?

Well now you can.

While institutions around Britain are still sleeping, still insisting on using Microsoft because it's entrenched into civic infrastructure, last week cyber experts at the US federal government's digital security team broke rank and openly described Microsoft as "pile of shit". Never have truer words been spoken.

Does that mean we're ready to have the Jimmy Savile conversation about Microsoft Cloud yet? About BigTech in general? Or will it continue to be buried like the Newsnight Report was? Not if UK Green Party leader Zack Polanski has anything to say about it.

The punchline is that those same US cyber experts then went on to say they were "signing-off on Microsoft Cloud anyway! They know it's shit, but their "hands are tied" even though it's their job to evaluate fitness and security!

That's a different level of insult, protest and a very loud signal. They're saying they know they're paper tigers, but they're no longer hiding their contempt. We should interpret that as a clear signal BigTech are on thin, creaking ice.

Of course all this is high optimism. The only pessimistic view would be that "nothing changes" and the Jimmy Savile's of the world keep on getting away with it.

It's good news for people in the software freedom movement, those working on alternative kinds of technology, new paradigms for social networks, local-first computing, community cloud, FOSS operating systems and applications, right to repair, intellectual property reform… Those helping the people to take back tech and restore some democracy to the digital world have cause to be bullish.

It may yet turn out that Rob Pike's greatest contribution to computing is not Unix, movable windows or Plan 9, but a moment of clear, lucid honesty.