Not one of us

Elon Musk has brought embarassment to nerds and technologists everywhere. We must turn our backs on him, his ilk, and their childish technofascist ideas.

In the 1980s it was not easy to be a geek. Western schools implemented some variation of Jante Law or a Tall Poppy code, making kids with non-standard interests marginal. We gorged on optimistic sci-fi film and novels. We had big ideas about how tech would free humankind, bring unlimited free education, free energy and limitless growth amongst the stars. Computers would be a leveller, a saviour, bringing wealth and good living to all. And if all that failed, we could build virtual cyberspace worlds and hide in them.

Hmm, all a pretty immature set of ideas looking back at it, no? Optimistically wanting to "just make the world a better place" can be a dangerous mindset under conditions, like:

• believing one has a unique power and destiny to change things
• thinking you are "smarter" than others
• seeing everyone else as stupid and in need of guidance
• knowing nothing about history, geography and the present global context
• not relating to other humans socially or understanding human psychology

At school, to believe such stuff made us ridiculous amongst peers, if not unpopular and out of the reproductive race. Besides, when I was a geeky kid, at the time the world seemed perched on brink of nuclear annihilation. Only old people talked about things like privacy, democracy, freedom, agency, and human dignity, with six years of world war and sixty million deaths still in clear living memory.

When the Internet arrived for regular folk in the '90s the nerds rejoiced. We all woke one day to find the world talking about our stuff. We had made it to the news. Other people, particularly business people, had also realised "it's more fun to compute". We felt validated, a sure sign of impending dramatic irony.

For the mostpart the geeks were meek, and had no ambitions to inherit the earth. For years, decades, and for reasons nobody can explain, we just helped other people with their computers. For free. The rest is history, as they say. The Internet was a 'culture-shock' and 'meta-crisis', a chapter of the "Information Age" that changed what everyone does and how everybody thinks.

The ninety nine point nine, nine, nine percent of regular computer people who didn't become multi-billionaire celebrities got jobs making apps, websites, games, music and gadgets, or teaching others how to create technology. It was all immense fun. Of those who made companies, all but a handful were swallowed-up or destroyed by emerging mega-monopolies.

Since the '90s we've found living in Britain and US America a technological backwater. Successive governments invested in nothing but war, oil and curruption. They fed public money to incompetent cronies in spectacular IT failures. They pandered to the appearance of innovation while merely turning tech into suffocating bureaucracy. Social control media lowered everyone's IQ significantly. Even the cream of pioneering software and semiconductor design in Britain got bought-up. Our technical 'elite' became the poor and unemployed, laid-off by 2023. We got a slightly less unpleasant deal than Stalin gave the Bourgeois Engineers in the USSR. The usurpers believe they have built their 1000-year Reich and no longer need us.

Naturally, a new kind of identity emerged and once again made us marginal and unpopular. After 2001, technically literate people who felt increasingly uncomfortable with the direction of digital began to diverge. We said people were "doing the Internet wrong". Some of us refused smartphones and social media, driven as much by an instinct as anything. We weren't wrong. Again society is catching up.

A schism emerged. On an increasingly reckless path went a cadre of "tech-optimists" seeking money and fame. A more cautious and thoughtful group established a sceptical position and began a slower, measured enquiry into how humans might best use our silicon riches.

Regardless, the masses of consumers were hooked, enchanted, addicted and within the clutches of men with dark intentions. Clearly the potential for political abuse of technology was growing, and with a drift toward techno-fascism we started to talk about those topics that preoccupied our grandparents.

The "optimists" mock conservatives as "Luddites" - despite most tech-sceptics being by far the most accomplished and previously fervent advocates who have simply matured. Many such "tech pessimists" have ended up working in cyber security, a refuge for those who still care about privacy, democracy, freedom, agency, and dignity in the digital domain.

Last week we had another meta-crisis. I woke up to a palpable change in the culture around me. Apparently Elon Musk was doing Nazi salutes!

Was it really a Nazi salute? If you go through some videos of people excited and celebrating you can catch almost anyone in a "Nazi salute", so I was sceptical. Was it just a single frame taken out of context?

Elon Musk is known to be an immature personality, a self-confessed troll. Whatever, it puts cybersecurity centre stage with a spotlight on us again - though exactly why may not be clear to people yet.

Things are moving fast now. Within days of Trump taking office a slew of attacks against online freedom began - in predictable Fascist style - all in the name of freedom and free speech. Censorship of topics which technologically empower people began almost immediately. Anti-intellectualism and attacks on rational discourse, social and psychological sciences are growing. A howling insanity overtook Facebook this week as they "banned discussion of Linux", the very operating system on which their whole operation runs.

The censorship engine is ramping up as Facebook, Google and Amazon toady-up to Trump. The US tech oligarchy is on course to suppress all talk of Software Freedom and alternatives. Censorship of cybersecurity - in other words security from them - will be next.

Decent, rational technologists feel appalled by the all-in rush to dependency and vulnerability, and the madness of being beholden to a few foreign corporations hell-bent on domination. Whether Elon Musk is a genuine Nazi or not we must face the reality that US social media has become a suppressive technofascist order. To continue using Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter (X) or any other company run by megalomaniacs is to throw your tacit support behind that new order of blackshirts.

Must we stand helplessly-by as leaders very deliberately put ever-more unreliable and untrustworthy tech right at the heart of modern existence? Kier Starmer seems utterly lost and without a backbone. Will we remain silent as they kow-tow to the kind of insanity we fought wars to eradicate only 80 years ago? It's a course that seems suicidal.

No we will not! There's a whole world of alternative technology and radically different ways of modern living out there. There are better devices. There is better software. There are better algorithms and online services.

You're just being stopped from seeing or hearing of them.

Other than his money, Musk himself is a relatively unimportant figure in computing. An ambitious and appetitive businessman who played with cars and rockets until he bought a pop communication tool. He is only one of a bunch of tech "broligarchs" whose massive companies have become too powerful and slipped democratic restraint.

Though some geeks are prone to identify with Musks's 'awkwardness', the thing worth saying is "He's not one of us". A serious mind embraces complexity. A populist seeks refuge in childish things and attention-seeking. The broligarchs are loafers in the garden of technology, still seeking validation and approval from long dead accusing fathers.

Although Musk's skittish tech aura may have a few genuine engineers fooled, he doesn't represent the vast majority of developers and scientists out there in any way. Real technologists have respect for what we make and the people who are affected.

Musk is undisciplined and has too much to prove. In many ways he is a "useful idiot" for the cause of freedom because he is unable to conceal himself. His immaturity is not unique. All the heads of US American BigTech companies seem to struggle with complex social and political interaction, and anything resembling morality. Altman, Bezos, Zuckerberg, each fail the authenticity sniff-test. They are stuck in a toddler stage of self-importance and foot-stomping tantrums.

This is a "Dr. Strangelove" moment. We've allowed very important technology that the world depends on to fall into the hands of unfit guardians, pretenders, perhaps traitors to tech who are unable to handle the responsibility.

They see their companies as "too big to fail". They feel unstoppable and are now drunk on power. Under the second Trump regime they've knelt before their new master and embraced an extreme creed. This is a dangerous time for technology as an enabler of peace and prosperity.

Cybershow regulars will know that we interviewed respected European cybsersecurity actors during the Trump election, and a key fear was what would happen after a trans-Atlantic split and weak global-values. What will happen to NATO and "eyes" intelligence-sharing? We've heard similar from almost everywhere in Europe.

• For the sake of national cybersecurity we must ask what are we going to do to gracefully disengage with US tech as it turns bad?
• For civic cybersecurity what is our plan to protect citizens from having data relations with authoritarian regimes hostile to values of liberal democracy? What does it mean to ban TikTok when it's equally Facebook and Google that need banning?
• How are we going to rebuild European knowledge, capability, cloud and services, rapidly and securely from other forces on the world stage?
• How can we build a firewall for democracy if the USA falls?
• How, if at all, can we help our American friends, the majority of whom still believe in freedom and democracy?

Maybe we should also prepare ourselves for the worst. If a technofascist order rises in the US we will face an unrecognisable cyber-security situation. Entities like Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook may quickly change from being just behemoth corporations with awful, insecure products, to being actively hostile actors within our digital perimeter.

Musk's gesture will probably be airbrushed out by the media. We may accept Elon Musk as just an awkward prankster, a schoolboy troll and attention seeker. But a crucial question has now been asked, and it is not going away. The mask has slipped, and in many ways this is a good thing. We're on alert now. Everyone in European governance and business must start thinking of US technology alternatives on a new and much accelerated timeline now.