Cybershow Christmas Message: Give up!

Christmas is a weird time in the media infosphere. Suddenly everyone wants to spread love and goodwill to all humankind. Dictators and tyrants trim their moustaches, iron their epaulettes, and after a year spent murdering opponents go all soft and gooey, bathing in the light of Christ. Television and media companies - who faithfully served their advertisers and patrons by working tirelessly for eleven months erecting every possible obstacle to true and just speech - suddenly trip over themselves raising bleeding hearts to the pedestal.

A pie for tiny Tim and gawd bless ye merry gentlemen, one and all!

Channel 4's alternative Christmas message traditionally ups the moral ante so far as to make some of the worst bastards genuinely uncomfortable. In past years it's featured Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. This year 'cancelled' comic Jimmy Kimmel got to use the F-word. The USA is officially a fascist nation, dontchyaknow! Our lovely King Charles spoke of spiritual unity, stillness, digital detox, kindness, and - in a world gearing up for war - mentioned peace at least ten times!

And Rutger Bregman gave this year's very good Reith Lectures, agitating for a "moral revolution"…

Bregman wants to tell us about "the current age of immorality". No shit. He is absolutely spot on in my opinion. We are living, as Bill Hicks put it best, amongst "Demons run amok". Europe is way behind the US in its self-examination.

But Bregman's televised moral revolution grates. The exuberant screed sticks in the craw of those of us who have been quietly practising it all our lives and for whom morality is a daily act of lived resistance. Channel 4 giving Kimmel permission to state the bleedin' obvious feels insulting to those who called out Trump as a fascist decades ago and have been living accordingly ever since.

This year's Christmas messages felt like they were written for listeners on the catch-up channel.

Does Bregman, like myself, question who these "messages" are for? What is the expected effect? Are they aimed solely at an audience of morally lost souls so totally wrapped up in the work of enshitification and corporate demon-worship for eleven and a half months only to come up for one breath of clean, blessed air? Or is it temporary relief from what everybody knows, but we are made utterly powerless to confront?

Of all the messages this year, the King's speech was the only one to mention sacrifice - what people have given up so that we can still claim to be free. In talking about looking back as well as forward HRH matched well the message from Bregman in attempting historical perspective.

For most of us with the best of intentions, the spiritual equivalent of a seasonal fad diet, sobriety and fitness regime collapses mid-January. We revert to our shiny i-Things made in a Chinese child-labour camp, we buy more rubbish we don't need with money we don't have, and we dance merrily around in a jazz-handed squee, praising our "AI", social control media, mass surveillance and planet-wrecking junk tech.

I liked Bregman's lectures, don't get me wrong. And much as I adore the Motorcycle Diaries, one doesn't really need to know the unpleasant truth about Che Guevara to feel unnerved around the word "revolution". Why did he choose that word, as opposed to evolution? Or why not "resistance"? Resistance to immorality and amorality seems the core calling.

To even attempt to act ethically in today's world is to already be a revolutionary and resistance fighter. Does Bregman actually know many "revolutionaries"? For all the legendary thumos and good-heartedness of Ernesto Guevara I'd say Bregman would better heed something like the Cassian Andor lecture…

Revolutionaries are losers. We are not nice people. We don't have friends and you won't find us on Facebook. There is no glory for us. Moral life, standing up for what is right, instead of what is easy, is hard and thankless. It is sometimes about fighting and speaking-up, but mostly about losing-out, accepting less, through non-participation, abstinence and exclusion. In our effort to stay one step ahead of tyranny, we sacrifice much. We do not have "careers". If we have any sense we keep our heads down. We don't get access to the same social security or care that "good citizens" do. Most of us end up in unmarked graves.

The danger with a popular revolutionary message is that it's bourgeois. What deflated and neutralised Che Guevara was reducing him to an acceptable T-shirt icon, literally rendering him two dimensional. This way we rewrite workable resistance as mere symbolic opposition.

Otherwise we risk zeal, which today tends to end up as speaking hatefully of other hateful people on social media, a shallow kind of virtue signalling. It's mud-wrestling with pigs. If we participate in this modern currency of social acceptability, and paint "morality as fashionable again", that feeds the very platforms and technologies that undermine us.

As it stands the project of "AI" envisioned by Silicon Valley is toward Thanatos, the state of death and forgetfulness for humankind. That's evidenced in some comments Bregman received claiming "AI" can "take the friction out of… very difficult life." Living is friction and most of us choose difficulty in one or more ways. Great quotes from Aristotle, Freud and Alexis de Tocqueville come to mind, but in a nutshell the avoidance of life itself is what so many of us suffer, and what most of the shallow "pro AI" arguments seem to amount to.

The real challenge is to navigate discomfort, social unacceptability, social rejection, awkwardness, difference…. not actually something nerds and geeks are entirely unfamiliar with. Revolutionaries have few friends because in an occupied territory (our society is technologically occupied) there's so much fear. Fear of being different and standing out is what keeps docile people in line. Nobody wants to be mates with a whack-job. It's not good for your "career", so your "sensible" corporate friends will keep you in line with their "concern" about you hanging out with the wrong influences. They wouldn't want to see you "left behind" (especially if the train is headed for the camps).

Later, once quiet revolutionaries are vindicated, if they are still alive, those old friends come out of the woodwork to say, "I always knew you were right".

Consider Martin Heidegger, an interesting philosopher for many reasons. He has a lesson for us all, especially academics. A paradigmatic example of a brilliant mind, a deeply thoughtful and insightful man, who for social expedience chose to become a Nazi. Joining the party was "survival". Heidegger lacked the backbone to be the authentic moral agent his own philosophy prescribed, and flee. Christopher R. Browning's "Ordinary Men" is another sobering account of how we might all fare in such circumstances.

Bregman correctly names our society as celebrating and rewarding immorality, but other than his censored Trump-bashing, offers few meaningful examples. Evil does not advertise or present itself in horned biblical forms, but works invisibly by network effect, drawing people into it, out of "necessity". We join corrosive digital networks or buy treacherous digital devices to feel a part of things, to go along and get along, to be 'functioning' in society. The harms we cause and experience are invisible.

Pointing out those forms is rarely helpful. By "revolutionary" I presume Bregman does not condone evangelism. One can never successfully preach morals. That is a counterproductive activity which only alienates everyone. Instead one must lead by example. Therefore if you want to make a difference you must actively be different as part of a resistance against a general tide of moral decline.

Consider then, the "moral" act of abstaining from smartphones and social media. In Digital Vegan I deliberately avoided framing critical thinking around always-on mobile technology as primarily moral, but rather as an individual lifestyle choice. Today it's getting hard to avoid clear scientific evidence that smartphones and Facebook-like distractions are corrosive to our social fabric and individual mental health. Nonetheless, self-righteous declension warnings are as pointless and irritating as they ever were.

Being right does not excuse the greater sin of moralising.

Has ten years of prescience and head-start benefited me? Maybe. But only at some cost to other areas of life. Has it changed other people? Maybe, but hardly. A few people have told me I inspired them to get off social media, or to ditch their always-on lifestyle in favour of a home desktop computer and flip-phone that they carry occasionally. Some of those people say they are better for it. But still over 90 percent of Brits are fully enslaved and addicted to their phones.

So why are people, each of whom individually see the harms, unable to muster a rejection en mass of toxic technology? It is more than a coordination problem.

Australians have "Tall Poppy Syndrome", a subtle cultural code for marking out and punishing those who are too meritorious or virtuous. It's how the Aussie working classes keep themselves down while allowing their "betters" to mock their attempts at virtue. The Nordic version is Jante Law. In Britain we have our own vestiges of a class system. Nothing weakens our military and politics so much as its unshakeable class influence that keeps the "right sort of people" in charge. The expression - though people who use it are much more guarded nowadays - is "playing the white man".

Another defence against morality is populist celebration of ignorance. The occupied society implores you "not to think about things too much". It is afraid of anyone "rocking the boat". This is why academia is neutered. Universities become hotbeds of resistance unless "intellectual sorts who think too much" are forced to be preoccupied with daily survival. Recently academia has become more openly anti-intellectual, with a strange flavour of dismissive STEM populism that bizarrely undermines the scientific project in the clothes of the technological progressive.

Indeed Western society has invented a thousand ways of casually dismissing, minimising, ignoring, moving-on, and making fun of eggheads, dissident experts, shrill discontents, bleeding hearts and do-gooders - particularly "uppity women" or anyone over-concerned with "the planet" or toxic masculinity. At issue is not correctness, rigour, or even left-right politics, but adherence to dehumanising industrial dogma.

Yet at the same time the phenomenon of "wokeness" did an unfortunate disservice to actual revolutionary resistance, by fragmenting and alienating from each other those with the courage and stomach for change. Divisive identity politics is a huge win for the status quo. If all those "activists" who spent the past 10 years posting angry missives on social media had simply thrown their smartphones into the rubbish bin and acted according to their beliefs we'd be in a very different world already.

The Hollywood movie that nails the sense of screaming frustration is "Don't look up". The terror of the interior of that film is shared by my father-in-law, a climate scientist who worked on the original Kyoto Agreement, and then spent thirty years watching everyone ignore it. It's how most honest computer scientists feel when they look at the course of digital consumer tech today.

Perhaps Bregman would better have positioned his "moral revolution" lecture for Lent, Yom Kippur or Ramadan, rather than on a winter feast. The greatest weapon any resistance fighter has against a technofascist society is to carefully choose what not to do. Being a moral revolutionary means saying no. But that does not mean confronting tyrants face to face, banging our fists on a table and "standing up to domination". Instead the struggle requires quietly saying no to a lot of the "good things" in life as an ascetic calling. Taking a moral stand means setting tough standards for yourself and living by them. It is taking the road less travelled. The hard path usually feels like "giving something up";

• Giving up dating apps and porn as a way to pursue truly meaningful relations instead of easy sex.
• Giving up easy Big Tech for more demanding Freedom Software and community run systems.
• Giving up contactless cards and payment apps in favour of cash as a way to manage your spending and be more connected with your local economy.
• Giving up social media as a way to regain focus and purpose.

Each of these choices can be seen both as a selfish health/lifestyle decision, but also as a moral act, because it makes society better too. Once made, the trick is to stick with those choices. That's the really, really hard work of being a modern revolutionary - no beret, no AK47, no aviator sunglasses, no red flags needed.

This is what Bregmen fails to mention in his sales pitch, that modern revolutionary morality is invariably an act of self denial. For example, the authoritarian British Labour government want to install a technofascist regime of "Digital ID". That is absolutely unacceptable to me coming from a family three generations of whom fought in wars against fascism. Since public protest is basically illegal in the UK there is rather little I can do - other than writing. My scope of resistance therefore boils down to never having a job again, being excluded from large public gatherings and other "papers-please" checkpoints. At the moment that is probably my future since I cannot bring myself to vote for Reform - the only democratic party that claims to oppose Herr Starmer's madness.

But that's not entirely my loss. As a well educated and motivated computer scientist and engineer there are probably useful social problems someone like myself could contribute to solving. Right now fighting technofascism, even if only by fervent non-cooperation, is the most pressing of these. Indeed one of the movements that most terrifies the Chinese Communist Party is Tang Ping, which is similar in some ways to Gandhi's non-cooperation. In self-sacrifice lies the only realistic prospect of moral action. This is a total blindside to capitalist tyranny that assumes rational self-interest uber alles.

My problem with Bregman's tone is that if impatient and vain people are encouraged to be "revolutionary", they should beware of acting rashly, seeking attention, glory, and fast results. That is not the way. To be effective, as things stand today, each and every truly moral decision feels painful, a terrible loss and defeat. It requires a degree of honour that is essentially Klingon!

The point here is that you'll need to have the stomach for deferred satisfaction if "doing the right thing". We all want gratification and advancement now! For long-term revolutionary change there is always a loss to reckon with. In order to elegantly miss out (Adam Phillips) we must get better at putting aside fantasy versions of our lives in favour of ultimately more satisfactory realities.

My friend, a defence contractor, once became a "whistle-blower", raising the alarm about defective explosive initiation hardware that would have certainly lead to serving personnel losing their lives. The company did everything possible to shut him up and make it go away. Doing the right thing almost ended his career. Twenty years later as a respected chartered defence engineer he looks back with immense professional pride on that choice.

In my early academic career I stood up against misconduct and fraudulent research, for which I was fired. Later, the immorality of training foreign potential enemies as cybercriminals led me to resign on ethical principle. I quit another institution in protest at the domination and corruption by Big Tech which made teaching untenable. I regret none of those choices. Quite the contrary, they feel more and more the basis for pride in a well-lived life. But they cost me what would doubtless be a very comfortable and prestigious tenure in some fancy university by now.

Finally, I think that Bregman underestimates the quiet moral majority even within the "elites". So much of the immorality and corruption of which Bregman speaks is woven into the technocracy and digital governance structures of organisations. It has a flywheel effect, and in truth that is why dark forces want to impose more "AI" and automation, not because it is more economically 'efficient', but because it works regardless of whether it has human assent or not. It bypasses democracy and is a "mediation weapon" which "man-in-the-middle-attacks" our very possibility of making moral choices. It is, in Ursula Franklin's terms, "prescriptive technology". Moral choice requires freedom which comes from "holistic technology". That is why we have Software Freedom and that's why taking back tech through Software Freedom is itself an urgent first moral choice before any others can even be seen.

For the already privileged, making "moral revolution fashionable", as some philanthropist put it, is as easy as funding GPL based Free Software projects like GNU/Linux. The best way to stand up to Silicon Valley, Big Tech and all its grotesque immorality is not to directly confront it, or try to constrain, influence, regulate or rehabilitate it, but to directly fund its opponents at the grass roots level. Supplant Big Tech with alternatives the people control.

To be fair to Rutger Bregman his later lectures deal with "small dedicated groups who make a difference", community and temperance, all of which are powerful weapons against the current catastrophic trajectory. All describe the software freedom movement, of which he makes no mention despite it being a 40 year-long chapter within the most influential period and circles of modern computing history.

Those of us fighting in the digital resistance, against technofascism, for software freedom and for civic cybersecurity, know that in the end we will win. We will win not by spectacles of confrontation but quiet acts of sacrifice, to choose 'lesser', better, different and safer technology, to reject imposed but unconscionable social norms that enslave us. We will defeat fascist politics cloaked in technical garments, because we are smarter and know more about technology than the enemy.

What we know is that the enemy believes he is building a lever for his will, whereas in reality he is ceding control and weakening himself by atrophy. As with Kerkhoff's principle it may be plainly and publicly stated since the enemy is unable to help himself, hiding behind a "story" of technology like the Wizard of Oz. As acts of temperance and non-cooperation we forgo "convenience" and reject "efficiency". We eschew "competitive advantage", because we do not need to compete, only to cooperate.