Moral competence

Have you noticed that bomb disposal people are always "experts"? We never hear on the news about a suspicious device being dealt with by bomb disposal enthusiasts, amateurs from the part-time TA weekenders B-team. Expertise here seems important. Strong evolutionary selectors are at work.

Expertise here must be understood as something other than education and training. It is a certain kind of self-mastery. A most serious mind.

You may also notice that there are no celebrity explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) people who have a YouTube channel laughing with rich pals and high-society guests about near misses, comedy moments when they accidentally blew up the wrong car, and how they built a multi-million dollar Boom-Busters franchise.

It doesn't seem like something you do for public self-glorification. Or for the money. It's just a job. Isn't it?

I think this is a good place to start if we want to study the question of "What is work?" Work is religiously connected to moral competence.

Work is not something that can be reduced to an economic statement of input and output. When great scientists, artists or social activists talk about "their work", it has nothing to do with salaried activity. There are never any jobs that are just pure fun, because the very act of focusing, taking something seriously, changes it.

There is a corollary to the maxim "Do what you enjoy and you'll never work a day" It's something like, "Never do what you love for a job, because it will become just work". There's truth in both maxims and a synthesis that reveals an even greater truth.

"Work" is always towards something that is morally harmonious. It's an expression of the authentic self that defeats fear. Otherwise it is wage-slavery, penury, and fit only to be overthrown by resistance or escaped by emancipation.

The philosopher Heidegger had an important concept of human existence as care, for which he used the German word Sorge - which translates roughly as "importance and serious concern about things".

Today, what fails to translate from Heidegger is that "care" has come to be an insult. For those who see care as "for suckers" it means something like a neurotic weakness, anxiety, concern-trolling, a bleeding heart and over-thinking. In a culture that celebrates nonchalance and superficiality people ask "Why do you even care?", as if the very act of care were a fault.

We might call those sorts "nihilists", but that's a mistake. They themselves care about a great many things, but they hide their cares to seem invulnerable. There is a sort of embarrassment that the moral incompetent feels.

Instead they carry around a kind of "thin" care, which on it's own is corrosive. It is disaffection and anger. Its focus is mostly the behaviour, or supposed behaviour, of others, which if it could only be changed would fix the world. In the face of real crisis such care is just impotent rage and frustration.

For our well-being, humans require agency. Care without the ability to do something about the things you care about is a kind of hell, and the only exit is a kind of moral suicide; soft quitting, defeatism, resignation and apathy. Far from being empowering, digital technology now amplifies this prison of learned-helplessness for anyone with an urge toward genuine work and care. Technology is a soft-play amusement park for the mind. It has no connection to community, doing or being. To overcome nullifying technology we need something to accompany Heidegger's Sorge, some measure of "moral competence".

Like security, competence is both a reality and a feeling. Competence is something we have but also something we feign and sell. Some people have competence in spades. They don't need to sell it because they exude competence. Others are all about the look, the certs, the associations, the ladder. These people are escaping themselves in the fog of public opinion, becoming just like everyone else but alienated from themselves. A mere show of care, of trying to help, is a pale substitute for moral labour.

Most of us are insecure. We fall for education and training rackets to continuously "prove ourselves", seek validation and collect impressive accolades. While there is such a thing as authentic education undertaken as intrinsically motivated self-development, the person who finds it is rare. There's a thriving industry that feeds on undermining people's self-confidence and selling it back to them one certificate at a time.

Today my spam box is filled with charlatans trying to sell "certification in AI". As if anyone were in a position to award such a thing.

Competent people spot fakes instantly, see through them like a cheap pair of net curtains as there is something immediately jarring about them in their self-discomfort and try-too-hard inadequacy.

One does not need a specialism or niche to find competence. You can simply become competent at life. You don't need confidence. The shyest most self-effacing person can still shine with moral competence. If confidence is too shrill we over-sell competence, and we and people around us get hurt. A vital part of moral competence is honesty and authenticity.

All too often nowadays, the competent people are on the outside looking in. Performative confidence holds sway in our fake world. It's one of the reasons I love the Apple series "Slow Horses" which perfectly nails the tragedy of today's derelict institutions with their official core of vain, awkward no-hopers who depend upon but have an ambivalent love-hate relation with periphery competence.

To study this consider Linked-In, a microcosmic petri dish. It's home to the boldly competent, but also to so many many loud idiots.

However Linked-In reveals only one half of reality. The quiet incompetent isn't on conspicuous social media because, like the bomb disposal B-team guy, he has wisely already moved on to doing something else he's better suited to. "AI" is a lifeline for those to hang in there according with the Peter Principle. By a cruel tragedy it's main fan-base is amongst those precarious mid-upper management roles it so aggressively seeks to replace.

Likewise there are also very competent people who would not dream of having a Linked-In profile. Quiet competents are the ones nobody notices because they're neither boasting nor screwing things up to draw attention. Quietly competent people make up the vast majority of all people doing anything, anywhere, that actually matters.

The quiet competent is more immune to "AI" because she does not crow about her achievements, and loudly tell everyone about her expertise, or how she succeeds. She does not give herself away.

The quiet competent is the hero of modernity. Not having a need to prove anything is an invaluable asset and vital, invisible societal capital.

The morally competent person or organisation is more efficient, because time is not wasted on display, self-doubt, covering up lies, virtue signalling, showing-off, constant comparison with competitors and other draining behaviours. Just getting on with it and moving forward is a virtuous flow. That is not to say the moral competent is callous or unconcerned, rather being attuned and authentic is a powerful lubricant.

Moral competence transcends the overt organising principles present in any institution. It's doing the right thing because that obviously needs to be done. It's good work that occurs despite, not because of, managerial structures and policies.

As an example, a security officer I interviewed spoke of how he could simply not walk past a spillage without fetching a mop or broom. It wasn't his job. It was his nature to clear up an imminent hazard to others.

It is also knowing when to fail or forget. It's not that moral competence is Svejkian or antagonistic to order, it's just that it doesn't need it. Good men don't need rules. In the presence of a derelict order, moral competence must sometimes be exercised in secret. My theory is that all invisible superheros who sustain society now live by something like this creed. Collapse will come when they give up.

My late stepfather was an old-school civil servant in the planning department who did the quiet work of government. He, and all his colleagues I met, exuded common-sense worldly wisdom, great humour and a sort of dogged resignation to doing their best with the great pile of shit they'd been handed. Importantly, the emphasis is on the "doing your best", not on the "great pile of shit". Indeed, I think they would have been a little unhappy if government was actually functional.

It's an attitude thing. The "great pile of shit" is not something to be complained about, it's part of the world to be dealt with, one shovel at a time, through a lifetime of ten thousand small but determined acts. This to me is the honourable and dignified side of institutionalism. It is what Crick means in his "defence of politics".

Even according to the pragmatism of Machiavelli, the quiet moral competence of those with power is restraint and humility. The over-confident prince who holds power but is an insecure idiot and braggart invites others to take it from him and foments the ire of those over whom he rules. Compared to Trump, Starmer is by far the superior statesman on this count.

Quiet moral competence is everywhere. It's seldom recognised. It's not measured. It's not compensated and, while invisible to the corporate machine, it sustains it. It is a parallel power structure. In error it gets called "responsibility", but that sort of "corporate responsibility" - which is simply the rational risk analysis of having to pay a fine, re-brand or move jobs - can be reduced to a cost. That definition has nothing to do with the true meaning of the word "responsibility".

Every profession makes different demands of moral competence. One does not become a good judge or prime minister only by studying law or political science. Keir Starmer always looked great on paper. One does not become a good doctor simply by an encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy. Moral aptitude and emotional intelligence are key ingredients of the highest professional callings.

The professional does moral labour, and consequently she can suffer moral injury. For a doctor, coping with losing patients is a full time job. That is moral competence. To lose patients because of avoidable resource cuts is a moral injury.

For an artist or writer, it's watching someone else put their name on your work again and again, but cheerfully carrying on because you create for your own pleasure. For a bus driver, waiter or police officer it's "dealing with the public", which means grace in the face of frequent verbal abuse, idiocy, or helplessness to help those you're tasked to serve.

Moral competence is a subset of emotional intelligence, which is the ability to be in touch with and understand our own emotions and those of others. Moral competence is the capacity to think and feel morally

• to act on what we know is right
• to feel responsible and care
• to relate interpersonally and hold in mind
• to make and speak clear moral judgements
• to perform altruistic behaviour
• to foresee the consequences of ones actions
• to know who you are and where your morality comes from
• to reflect on ones own moral competence

It's not that there are no business opportunities to genuinely help people and channel care. However the cynical capitalist sees care and figures out how to exploit it. Employers put up signs in the workplace saying "we do not tolerate abuse here". If that were true the place would be empty, without staff, because so much modern work is taking abuse which comes from the employer or machines run by the employer, or is avoidably caused as hapless staff are asked to carry out unconscionable policy of the morally absent.

This is moral labour.

Machines replaced physical labour freeing the mind for exploitation. Computers replaced intellectual labour freeing our spirit. What we now sell for money, is our souls.

In places of care, like schools and hospitals, exploiters find easy pickings because the staff have a high natural moral competence. The modern workplace is a case study in indignity. Some of the worst moral work is being nothing more than a paper tiger or a full time apologist for a broken system. Workplaces need signs that recognise the moral labour we all do and what it costs us. Instead of blaming the desperate people our broken systems have driven to exasperation the sign should say:

The technofascist goes one step further. Financial exploitation is no longer the goal. With technofascism The Cruelty Is the Point. Moral competence is everything the techofascist hates. Every one of the virtues I just named, they'd call a "problem" to be disrupted by a new order. Technofascism must be understood as "anti-political" and "anti-care".

What does a billionaire who already has everything want? Satisfaction.

About technology, the hope of the weak-minded is that it can be used to alleviate moral labour. Technology is a means of not having to experience the world. Andrew Kimbrell's famous talk on "Cold Evil" considers diffusion of responsibility. His "Pilots Dilemma" (pdf) resonates with Roderick's account of the Nazi massacre scene in John Fowles The Magus in that those who hide behind "AI", webs of complexity, are hiding from their own inability to exercise moral competence. Face to face they are incapable of fighting, or of caring. They want machines to do moral work for them. To relieve them of the burden of living.

Thus a car becomes not merely a way of getting from A to B, but a way of not having to walk past homeless people or see the reality of your neighbourhood. In this state of retreat technology becomes a shield wall, a moat and drawbridge and ultimately a sort of weapon. A person who dodges moral labour through excessive technological control wants to be able to act upon the world but not have the world impinge back upon them. They make social media broadcasts and newsletters on no-reply email, but are unavailable to interact.

Modern digital technology is perfect to create a personal neverland in which algorithms feed milk and honey to the infantilised mind, inconvenient opinions can be deleted, and friends who have outgrown their use can be blocked.

Going further, it starts to really bother the cocooned mind that some people are capable of care and moral competence. Those annoying people are out there, in reality, going about their do-goodance, and not inside my machine where they follow my rules! Technofascists resent and wish to eradicate moral competence they see as an obstacle to their own unique vision of "progress" and proper living. Peter Thiel's choice of Greta Thunberg to single out as his Aunt Sally is telling, being almost Pythonesque schoolboy comedy.

A gendered aesthetic interpretation of technofascism feels problematic, but I think most men can relate to it in some way.

One irony is that Silicon Valley proponents of technofascism in the 1990s lamented the "pussyfication of technology". As if technology-personified was big, tough and All-American, and somehow had its balls cut off by the appearance of word processors and computer art to replace good ole nukes.

On the contrary, it's been argued since the invention of the crossbow that it's technology that turns real men into pussies. That's a conflict between two strong aspects of the male psyche, honour and prowess, projected onto machines that threaten us as men.

A powerful antidote to this can be found in Pirsig's "Zen" with regard to engineering as a discipline of care. That take is also a crack in the ramparts for techno-feminism, if ever it can get its act together. Perhaps too few men today have the patience to read a long philosophical novel, nor the wherewithal to engage in motorcycle maintenance in violation of DMCA repair restrictions.

The other awkward irony is that the only real competitors for technofascists are other technofascists. This gives the whole scene a palpable homo-eroticism. If technofascists took over government it would last all of three days before the whole thing disintegrated in a massive screeching catfight.

Fascism can be understood as an aesthetic account of immature masculinity; speed, recklessness, lust for control, a need for adulation, constant attention and being seen to win (not even actually winning).

On the bomb disposal team, these guys would last 15 seconds tops. On a good day.

The reason technofascists make bad technology is that they disrespect technology qua its function. They want to impress and want a surrogate, a thing to go whizz and bang, flash and bleep, and make piles of money. They couldn't care less if it really works. Despite appearing to worship tech, their regard of it matches that for women, as trophies and prostitutes. It's ego-driven conquest, not creation with care.

One of the reasons we want "quietly competent" people in charge of complex and important things - like nuclear power stations, airports, hospitals - is that they're grown-ups. But degenerate tech is run by man-childs locked forever in arrested development, displacing bodily prowess into proxies, into machinery, weaponry, business and petty oneupmanship.

One has to wonder, based on Craig Mazin and Johan Renck's historical docu-drama Chernobyl, how things might have unfolded if the control room had been staffed by women?

The technofascist judges himself not as a man, but a name, a legend, a salary, an automobile, a list of conquests, and is a 20th century creature struggling to adapt to the 21st, to sustainability, equity and the revolution of lesser expectation. The pity of this essentially insecure position is it's not actually a great masculine look. The whole shtick oozes overcompensation, and isn't attractive to high quality females (or male lovers) looking for a stable and reliable partner.

When John Perry Barlow wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace that generation saw cyberspace as a retreat, Yet the digital world we've created is essentially hostile. It is not even that its a "mirror of reality", but worse. Reality is kinder and gentler by comparison, and for Gen-Z the exodus is in the other direction, away from digital realms.

Because physical violence (along with all forms of bodily interaction) has plummeted in developed nations, the nascent fascist finds in his digitised boredom and frustration an outlet in ever more complex forms of technologically assisted or mediated abuse and exploitation.

Presently, society rewards him for that. The young man who is told, "you need to be someone", "you need to make a mark" and so on, is steered toward various forms of digital mischief; hacking, social engineering, stalking, hunting and watching, creating abusive materials, and so on. He has no quietly competent role models and no instruction in how to use technology beneficently.

This is something separate but adjacent to the "manosphere". Two thirds of young men are embracing moral competence, but tech is still seen as a harmless way to explore dominance, for example "nudification apps" are widely considered "just fun".

Eventually he encounters the Silicon Valley values of "business", which significantly overlap with criminality. Tech has carved out a realm of moral exceptionalism, of the "minimally legitimate business" - for example Israel's NSO group and other companies making spyware, bossware, stalkerware. This is what Alex Karp deems the "hard-power of soft-ware".

One of the reasons we're in such a pickle with cybersecurity is that we no longer know where the line is. We have no idea whether it's a ten trillion dollar "industry" or a ten trillion dollar criminal liability. Twenty trillion dollars of human ambivalence says a lot about the world we live in.

One thing is sure, all of these paths are devoid of moral competence or any element of service to humanity as once motivated the bona fide entrepreneur. The (mostly) men who find themselves here are stuck in a culture to impress one another with escalating acts of cruelty, domination and audacity in transgressing social norms.

Now, any realist has to admit the reason Big Tech is big, and Silicon Valley bros dominate the tech landsacpe is because they are first rate "businessmen" (but second rate engineers, and third rate people). It is this definition of "business" that lies at the heart of the problem.

So what does it mean to be "good at business"? Does that have any alignment with the values of society and humanity in this century? For digital tech I am not sure it does any more.

During the industrial revolution or amid the 1980s Thatcher/Reagan era any drive to create new business was considered an unequivocal good. A Calvinist work ethic and creative innovation was once something to be proud of. Creating new products for which there is a genuine need, while taking all the risks, makes the bona fide entrepreneur a kind of hero.

That previous era rested on the sustainability of opportunity resources. Digital technologists over-estimated market appetite. So much of the technology we see around today is not due to demand and free market choice, but because it's been relentlessly pushed on society to soak-up production and fulfil an essentially ideological narrative of the "high tech society". Technology is a story we tell ourselves.

It all seems a million miles away from the modern projection of power through private equity and venture capital. In digital tech today there are few "real entrepreneurs", rather grifters who see themselves as heroic "disruptors", who do social experiments with software and VC money. They mostly follow the same playbook:

• identify some unprotected socialised asset
• attack it to foment a calculated crisis
• pull a ruse to stoke fake demand
• reveal a "solution"
• build a moat to protect it while it's inflated
• pivot the software to malware
• execute enshitification plan
• cash-out with exit plan

The end result is a machine that takes everything good in society, asset-strips it and converts its value into private wealth, then injects poison into the depleted body. It's a giant mechanical parasite. It's not that disruptive technological innovation doesn't produce good things, and break down stultified norms that need a kick. The problem lies in its obsession with scale, domination, and universality that comes from the venture capital and private equity impetus. It is a totalitarian urge.

The start-up entrepreneurs who think they are being cool are tools who get used by "investors". By Pareto effects in most cases very little of real value is created, but the boundaries of technology are pushed to accommodate ever increasing complexity and harm, while the commons is enclosed, appropriated, commodified and bled dry.

This emerging digital realm is entirely predatory on social commons, including draining the developers and engineers who feed the machine with their youth energy until they burn out and become disaffected. Most of it is superfluous and contrary to healthy living. It's goals of "efficiency and disruption" are contrary to hard won safety, security, knowledge, skills and democratic capital. It is not merely "AI" but the foundation of an entire branch of technological thinking that is misaligned with human welfare.

Upshot? We get technology that is manifestly against the public interest. Yet we still hold up these "businessmen" and their companies as if they were something other than a net drain. We live with a quaint, antiquated notion of tech as a business from an earlier century.

For some of the true greats of the industrial revolution like Telford or Brunel, their bridges remain standing. Isn't engineering, skill and knowledge something we can all still take great pride in, even if we can't all be instant celebrity millionaires? Most of the Free Open Source Software hackers are intrinsically driven by self-development and a service culture.

Like the Germans and Japanese, in Britain we have an historical pride in our engineering. While creativity and industry are virtuous, the impulse is very easily turned to fascist militarism, and that's what the technofascists want to revive. If Britain wishes to be a light in the 21st century it is exactly what we must resist. We must hack, code, design and build against technofascism.

Industrialism is like a standing army. In times of need and demand such as during rapid growth or war, its great! However, returning soldiers from war become a deadweight to society. They brawl. They drink to forget. The calculation of warring kings was to win victory by the slimmest margin, so most of ones own army are killed. Without another war already lined-up, a returning victorious force is a burden.

Likewise, in times of stability and peace, bored industrialists are a problem. Surplus business is as bad as surplus population in causing crisis. Gratuitous over production is a scourge unless there is a "moral equivalent of war".

For the Raspberry Pi Foundation that equivalent is education, a war, as Emma Goldman plainly put it, against the greatest enemy humanity faces; Ignorance. The COVID pandemic temporarily created fresh conditions and inspired leaps in employment efficiency and biotech. For a moment the pandemic felt like a golden opportunity when the cage door of capitalism was briefly left open. We should not need a crisis to motivate moral innovation. We need a plan and a better vision of technological society that is not a war of all against all for domination through technological means and controlling of knowledge.

In Britain we sold-off our industry years ago, thinking that "financial products" would be a better bet. We've grown fat and complacent and got used to half-arsed foreign software that works occasionally. To the extent software is infrastructure and lifeblood, what is substandard destroys the lives of people, as in the Post Office scandal. Bad and deceptive software is a spearhead for it's real function of parasitical data exfiltration. Or it's a trap, something that its controllers, whether Americans or Chinese, can just turn off any time, as happened when Microsoft shut down the International Criminal Court when they said mean things about Donald Trump.

If software is an organising principle of aggressive force (rather than civic peace) as the technofascists suppose, Europe needs to re-industrialise its own software fast according to a defensive configuration. We must restructure our whole approach to technological society so as to make ourselves less vulnerable or remain vassal to foreign interests.

Hegemony is not the only problem. A real issue is quality. One problem is that Silicon Valley builds for the lowest common denominator of consumerism. The game is data extraction so vulnerability is built-in and for the burgeoning "insecurity industry" vulnerability is a boon. Being second rate engineers doesn't appear to wound any pride. They're proud of delivering the minimum viable product yet still getting a good price. They're great salesmen. Most "chatbot AI" is a regression that trades accuracy and reliability for some fuzzy notion of "efficiency". It doesn't deliver in reality. But boy have they suckered a whole load of people!

Because of how commercial software is manufactured, some of the smartest software engineers in the world have basically called correctness a lost cause. Software and cybersecurity is "perception management" now. Ship it. Fix it later. Break it when you've had yours.

Because the US thrives on crisis it appears to have no incentive to tackle quality. It is something we can fix. Cars were once death traps that killed drivers in collisions at 20 mph. We improved manufacturing and safety with laws. An era of mature, safe civic tech has yet to dawn.

If Microsoft or Google is good enough for me, it's good enough for everyone. Right? Wrong. Judging others by our standards is natural enough, and our understanding of the world is very much limited by our horizons. The problem is that the dominant standards for software are extraordinarily low. Shabby software may seem "good enough" because ten percent of errors can be corrected by humans. In reality humans get taken out the loop, and we end up trusting software that administers the wrong drug to a patient or targets a school for bombing. Everyone knows ninety percent is good enough, right? Until you need to iterate seven operations. Then you end up with a better guess by flipping a coin! ¹

The whole SV ethos, (take Theranos as a shining example), is that it assumes the only people who want accuracy in stuff like cancer care, criminal justice or choosing military targets are "liberal elitists"! The tragic truth behind the techno-populist position is that if we really depended on the likes of Microsoft. Google and Palantir for our defence, we're in big trouble!

This approach devalues and insults the intelligence of everyone. The whole world is absolutely desperate for any shred of trustworthy, reliable, accurate, accountable, stable, and ethical software right now. We need legible, attestable, open systems and networks without backdoors and zero-days. We need software not written by tech bros with contempt for their customers. We're in a deep crisis, a cybercrime wave so severe and sustained we now dishonestly dub it a new "cyber cold war" costing 10 trillion per annum and growing to an expected 20 trillion by 2030 (4 years from date of publication).

We caused this. We caused it by our low standards and poor choices of products. We allowed the worst case to become dogma. We let failure be normalised. We're now letting cruelty and recklessness be made into virtues.

US Big Tech will never, ever deliver the technical, social and psychological safety and security we need. Fascist technology cannot deliver civic cybersecurity for democratic nations at the quality and scale we need. The only path is massive civic mobilisation and that means FOSS, diversification, agreed standards, strong inter-European cooperation and vast new investment in education for post-US European economy.

So far we've only mentioned product quality. The puzzle of the technofascist personality disorder adds another layer.

I accept two truths; that business success in the 21st century is misunderstood as an indicator of value creation, and that people happily accept very low quality products. Those are failings of capital and human nature we live with. It is understandable that a lazy-minded person with no moral compass might choose to surf an easy wave.

I accept the further truth that we seem unable to transform from a blind growth economy, moderate production, and plan technology better. That's not an argument for "techno determinism", just a comment on our poverty of joined up moral competence around sustainability.

How to shake-off technological moral degeneracy? Why work hard to make good in the world when you can sell rubbish, make a lot of money fast, and live long and well at others' expense? Until 20 years ago almost nobody asked that question seriously because the moral answer, as a common social expectation, was clear;

Because it makes you a complete and utter bastard.

This week Peter Thiel led the US movement abandoning philanthropy as an American ideal. With it goes the moral basis for the "American Dream". Are we in a moral crisis? No. The billionaires and villains of Epstein Island are in a moral crisis, which will hopefully be their undoing.

Digital technology presently selects or creates entirely unwell and unlikable leaders. If we can change those selectors and the conditions that favour innovative work we can 'take back tech' and rescue it from technofascism.

The current crop of tech leaders seem increasingly bitter and resentful against humanity itself. There is no psychiatric designation for this active, progressive misanthropism, but it is growing and is an important dimension of technofascism. They now openly encourage excess, disrespect for the environment and contempt for democracy. If we allow leaders of tech corporations to be callous and have zero moral competence, what does that mean for the world? It's more of a worry than "AI" or social media misinformation.

We must divest from the source of it and also stamp it out wherever it appears closer to home.

Compare leadership-quality with other areas of quality: We're not happy if our school teachers and child minders are paedophiles. We're not happy if the people who drive our buses are drunks who turn up late. We're not happy if our doctors are quacks, our waiters are clumsy and our chefs have poor personal hygiene.

Why do we continue to accept digital technology on the basis of such low standards from such low people? Why, when every other aspect of human endeavour is ultimately answerable to a shared economy and social contract, has tech carved out an exception for itself for unbounded private indulgence and moral dereliction?

The one thing we come back to is that people are relentlessly beaten with the stick of; "You have no choice".

That's a complete crock. You absolutely have a choice. However the "no choice" narrative must first be comprehensively crushed.

Rejecting the "no choice" illusion is as simple as rejecting abusive monoploy, and totalitarian mandates by governments, councils and business. A diverse and democratic revolution in alternative approaches to technology is right in front of us for the taking. Take off the blinders and you will see there are thousands of other ways to live with, or without technology once you reject conformity and passivity.

The key, is moral competence. Without moral competence you will keep rationalising, going back, caring what others think, letting yourself be bullied, worrying about "being left behind", forgiving abusers, taking the easy path, putting off inconvenient change, saving face, blaming yourself…. you know the deal.

One of the most powerful interpretations of moral competence is self-care. Like jogging, swimming and going to the gym, self-care isn't immediately easy. You have to take some pain.

Dependence on abusive tech, and allowing others to abuse you through tech is its own self-sustaining myth very similar to learned-helplessness and depression. The curtailed sense of agency, lost horizons and lost sense of alternatives for the future are exactly like those experienced by victims of domestic violence. It is a kind of trauma.

Getting out of domestic violence is overcoming the fear to leave, or throw out the abuser. Behind our stuck tech situation lies fear. When our governments speak I feel like I'm watching one of those Soviet era TV news reports with someone just out of shot holding a gun to the news-reader's head… "And more good news comrades! Tractor production is up three hundred percent!"

The number one problem is that UK civic tech is dominated by mainly US companies. For reasons we've just explored the source of our technology has very serious moral failings. Even our notionally British companies are propped up by US investment, strong-armed by tariffs, trade leverage and technical threats. With the exception of Zack Polanski, most British politicians lack the courage to speak this truth and stand up against hegemony.

With good reason! The people holding that gun are already in a position to shut our governments down. You cannot do business with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.

That's why we need to get US big tech out of British and European state affairs as quickly as possible. If the UK government are not under extreme duress then we clearly have collective Stockholm syndrome.

For all the noise and smoke about regulation, standards, compliance, security, and all the "bleeding heart" stuff about diversity, equality, wellness, procurement fairness… the digital technology side of UK government is a political blockage that needs an enema.

The Bletchley Park summit was a sham and the UK posture on "AI" is completely unexamined by any meaningful democratic standard.

It's not that we've no professional standards here. The front-end of UK online services are some of the best in the world. It's not that we don't have great engineers. In my county of Dorset and Hampshire alone we have the highest density of defence, maritime, aeronautical, medical, and space companies, many of them very small and even family owned - plus a few big boys like BAE systems. Britain is where we invented steam engines, radar, hovercraft, computers…

Yet when it comes to cultivating and procuring our own tech, behind the facade there are no structures that are stable for more than a single political term. We now moved to a 10 year defence plan and reorganised procurement yet again. As usual this excludes small British firms who get no look-in and it excludes Free Open Source Software which is essential for the transparency needed to secure long-term resilience and supply-chain integrity.

What it hides is that there's no civil oversight, independent advice or democratically established values. Government still dance to the tune of what US big tech tell them. It's somewhere our Civil Service lacks independent moral competence, and it needs urgently correcting because it ultimately threatens the security of the UK. We still have a cosy pig trough for special interests like in the 1970s when Stirling's Mayfair Set ran the show. Britain must outgrow the old pattern of moral failure; Cambridge Analytica, Horizon, NHS track and trace… need we go on?

Unethical US companies who have sidled-in to our NHS are unashamedly up to their necks in Middle-Eastern genocides. They pen fascist manifestos. They rant online about end-times, coming of the Anti-Christ and other seriously unhinged blather. They lack restraint and perspective which makes them dangerous. Their ethical stance is "if we don't do really evil things, someone else will and get the money". In Strangelovian terms they want to "close the genocide gap".

Are these the people we want running the NHS? Or in our schools? Are these the clowns we want making critical planning decisions for our military?

Hearken Beasts of England! Silicon Valley technofascists want to take-over our state. They are loud, high-IQ football hooligans. Instead of Stanley knives they have data-centres. Their aggro song is "AI, AI AI AI!". They have no moral competence. Bourgeois thugs, all swagger and tilt, are coming for our NHS, for our Army, and for our schools. Whether you're on the left or right side of British politics you should be concerned about that.

You are called upon to exercise your moral competence. If you work in healthcare then it is time to refuse to use US based technofascist tools. The BMA have already given their directions. Those in military service in a NATO or UK Forces context should question why software is still being used from a defective former ally who now seeks to dismantle strategic alliances. Those in education should consider why they're letting companies complicit in mass murder into our classrooms to spy on and influence our young people.

The problem with having people run things who think they know everything about technology but know nothing about humanity and morals is we get schools that don't understand learning, hospitals that don't understand care, armies that don't understand force.

Our British government needs to show more moral leadership too. Allowing overtly technofascist US companies to have a foothold in Britain now mocks our ancestors and 80 million dead people who stood up against that.

Governments need to be in control of their affairs, which are increasingly tied to digital services and data. Digital sovereignty is therefore an urgent common sense trajectory. There is no place for fascism in Britain today. Not via the backdoor of software. There is no place for US big tech when we can write better software here ourselves, and every political party in the UK knows that. It's a vote winner! Leave Silicon Valley to its "AI" death spiral.

Today we don't hear much about British values. It's considered boorish, nationalistic and conceited to talk about ideas like national values. One of the few places I've ever seen them coded was in the original (later amended) literature of the PREVENT anti-terrorism programme. One of the listed values was "A sense of fair play".

As a Brit I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that. A modern translation could be; "We have a high capacity for moral competence". If there's even a grain of truth in it we need to unlock the moral capital of Britain and our innate strength as a morally competent nation.

Technofascists aren't going away soon, even if Trump dies and the cabal of Vance, Musk, Thiel and all the rest of them are swept away. So the sooner we make US divestment into policy the better for us all. That would be the morally competent move that has eluded Starmer throughout his whole term of office.