Like everything else, Civilisation is in the throes of extreme societal upheaval. Of itself, this is not exactly an unknown condition. When we changed from hunter gathering to agriculture and urban living; when the Roman Empire fell; when the French Revolution signalled the beginning of the end of a settled order and the Industrial Revolution began, it must have caused each generation caught up in any one of these events to imagine that rational order was dead and gone. In each case the settled status quo was being torn up. The difference for us is that as our own status quo, the Industrial Age, is collapsing, everything is happening at a bewildering speed, beyond any previous experience, and this haste is combined with a complexity of issues that are demanding ever more urgent solutions. To add to those societal tremors, we must deal with a monstrous pandemic and the twin existential threats of climate change and loss of biodiversity, both caused by our intemperate, polluting selves. What we fondly imagine to be our continuing status quo, is already history.

Light and hope have only begun to seep through, largely because of President Biden’s wholehearted reversal of America’s policies and its effect of re-energising all of the likeminded states. In addition, our burgeoning youth, who luckily have such little respect for the certitudes and self-serving platitudes of the Industrial Age, are becoming very active. Perhaps we are beginning our move to safety.

The existential threats we must fix urgently. Although we really have no remaining need to defend the reality of those threats to our planet – the evidence is completely overwhelming – we must be prepared to suffer the arguments anyway, much as we have to tolerate flat earthers and evolution deniers. However, when the full import of the essential actions that must be taken to protect ourselves become apparent, the opposition to the necessary changes will turn feral.

That opposition will be driven mostly by those who are beneficiaries of the recent status quo, almost exclusively the wealthy. The most vociferous will include the fossil fuel companies and their shareholders, the mining and logging corporations, the financial houses. The corporations who put short term gain before public danger. The manufacturers who build in planned obsolescence. The fishing fleets. The list of such groups is legion. They will use their money and power to deny necessary action and try to obfuscate the reasons for such changes. The oil companies already boast that they will be carbon neutral in the near future but their calculations are so devious that they can achieve that target whilst increasing their levels of fossil fuel supplies. At the same time, they are vastly increasing their production of plastics. Their irrational, misleading, justifications have become a template for many others. More opposition will come from those wealthy individuals who need to own homes around the world and believe that their super yachts, private jets and Lamborghinis are essential for a decent life. After them are those of us who insist on fresh fruit and vegetables out of season. Who embrace a throwaway culture, think that doors and windows need to be made of teak and that new mahogany furniture is a sign of sophistication. It is this very large group that industry will try to persuade that the solution lies in our own hands and can be achieved by putting certain plastics in one bin, other kinds in another, (washed of course) and everything else in its proper place amongst a plethora of trash choices. Lobbyists and P.R. companies will be exhausted persuading us that our science is wrong and can be disregarded. Then there are other groups whom we might have supposed would be on the side of reason. Farmers, whose intrinsic love of the land and the animals they breed seems to become invisible when looked at through the prism of balance sheets. We cannot even depend on our major religions. Although their leaders often launch strongly worded, pious messages about the crises, unfortunately, their male driven obsession with gender and sex allows them to persuade their congregations to support any chancer willing to pay hypocritical lip service to those particular shibboleths. Far too many of those same churches are drifting into fundamentalism: the kind that suggests that the search for knowledge, even science itself, is not important. Why? Because everything humans need to know is already included in whichever ‘good book’ one believes in. None of these books mention climate, ecosystems or pollution.

Politics will of course be the real battlefield. Regretfully, they too are in chaos. The pace of change is so frenetic that fear of the future and the stress of trying to survive a present that changes every day and does not conform to the assumed givens of the familiar, result in a level of insecurity that gives charlatans their opportunity. They have taken that opportunity to persuade a great number of frightened people that the problems are mostly imaginary and are, in reality, just fairy-tale conspiracies spread by knavish liberals. The charlatan panacea is a populist one. A promise to lead us back to a safe, glorified past. The election of President Biden signalled the slow demise of those aforesaid charlatans. However, in allowing them to take centre stage we have, unfortunately, successfully mislaid our conservatives.

Their loss is a serious matter, even if a lot of liberals thank the Gods for their disappearance. But we need them! Liberals usually have a very clear idea of what they want the future to be, but like everyone else, they are not immune to following stars that lead to dead ends. They need criticism to hone their visions and turn them into realities. A tennis player does not improve their skill if their opponent is wading through six feet of water with only half a racket. Regrettably, for the moment, most of our conservatives in our most iconic democracies seem to have contracted a populist form of mad cow disease. They stagger incoherently from lie to lie, unable even to bellow properly (fortunately Frau Merkel is not infected). They put far too much faith in men who are incapable of love. We desperately need our sane conservatives back – the ones with their own hopes, visions and ideals. The ones who believe in truth.

Civilisation is described in many different ways, based on a kaleidoscope of special interests. As a non-expert, just an interested onlooker, it seems to me that the definition of the root of this very complex phenomenon is deceptively simple. That it is, in reality, a form of evolution but one driven not by genetics or the need to survive in particular niches but by the wholly unique gift of human intelligence. That it is simply the intelligent evolution of human society. Although it leaps ahead on occasion through the extraordinary minds of specific geniuses, it is a process that involves all human contributions, however small and unnoticed. It is on these, often tiny, insights that the geniuses build.

If, in our climb toward the end result of Civilisation, we fail to overcome the twin existential overhangs that we have placed in our own path, global warming and biodiversity loss, it will mean that we are not intelligent enough to survive. That we blindly accepted the norms of a status quo that failed us. We will then fade into nothingness as yet another unfit and unremembered species. The moon will shine on, regardless.

If, on the other hand, we perceive the threat quickly enough and survive it, we will continue on our upward path and eventually, and it may be a long delay, we will get to a calmer period when we can again refer to a status quo. It will be a very different model. It will not include our tribal divides between races, nationalities, genders, creeds or sexual orientation. Our differences will be cultural only. We will have broken the supposed marriage between money and work and rid ourselves of poverty, capital punishment, even guns and a vast number of our silly, but dogmatic, beliefs. The generation that reaches that stage will be quicker than we have been to realise that the past was a painful time to live. The endless fear for jobs will fade as we realise our much greater need for carers, educationalists, and experts of all sorts, and the insatiable need for people to complete the mother of all infrastructure programs: the cleansing of our home, the planet, and the recovery of our ecosystem.

Letters to the Editor: Big Tech and Anonymity

In my lifetime (a long one), I have never known a key industry to be allowed such freedom in terms of self-regulation, than what is happening in the tech corporations. There are hopeful signs that we are starting to catch up, but self-regulation remains a central concept.

The Big Tech industry generates three myths to disguise their greed and which bring into sharp focus the need to regulate the industry. The first of these is the right to free speech, by pretending that this is an absolute right. It is no such thing. It has always been trammelled by the need to balance competing rights: the right not to be slandered, to be free of hate speech, to a private life, to know the identity of your accuser, and many other rights. The second myth relates to privacy. The right to privacy is fundamental but, again, it can be restricted when necessary in a democratic society to pursue a legitimate aim. We all have social security numbers, passports, telephone numbers, and on and on. Records of all of these identifiers grant relatively easy access to the police if a crime is suspected.

The third myth is that of anonymity and this, of itself, is an existential threat to democratic societies. The first two are just distractions to hide the industry’s need for this one. Anonymity adds enormously to online traffic and thereby to profit. The term “anonymous free speech” is an oxymoron. It has no identifiable source, tells us nothing of vested interests, bias or motive. It smears unjustifiable pain, uncertainty and lies throughout our societies. It is unconscionable that this should be accepted to bolster the profits and power of Silicon Valley. 

Anonymity itself is not intrinsic to the Internet functioning. Every web enabled machine has at least two identifiable registration numbers: an I.P. (Internet Protocol), which provides an address and a MAC number, which identifies the exact machine. The industry has decided that these numbers must be secret, identities readily available to themselves only, except when it suits them to release the data to analytic companies. The social media corporations want to publish endless anonymous opinions, but without the responsibility mainstream media must bear, when they use an anonymous source.

What exactly would our legislators do if the auto industries owned the roads, controlled and kept secret the allocation and ownership of car registration numbers and, to add insult to injury, allowed some owners to have blank plates and yet others whose numbers changed every time they started the engine. In reality, this is what the Big Tech industry is getting away with. Why is everyone faffing about and refusing to regulate them as we should? 

Very recently the execrable Porn Hub was forced to delete two thirds of their posts and to demand proof of identity for new ones. This action was forced on them, not by legislators or police; but by Visa and MasterCard. Is this to be the future of of legislation?

When Brexit is mentioned nowadays (every two minutes), it is very difficult not to suffer a Laurel and Hardy moment – “fine mess you got me into”. It was, and is, one of the world’s greatest displays of incoherent magical thinking. It is, and will continue to be, an unmitigated disaster.

How on earth did things come to this? Although the choice of culprits is almost embarrassingly rich, the English media would seem to be the most obvious place to start. The British fourth estate has always leaned towards rabid conservatism, but since Murdoch started to take it over around 1970, it has become more and more like a tea party media. His stable of newspapers now includes the biggest selling rag, The Sun, the centuries old doyen, The London Times, and even The Sunday Times. The E.U. saved us from us – from a European version of Fox News by preventing Murdoch’s takeover of BskyB – but in the process, made a virulent enemy of him. The other conservative news outlets always ranged from appalling to quite good, but always with heavily biased opinion columns. Twenty or so years ago I had to be rescued from a hilarity attack in the local shop when I spotted a Daily Mail banner headline. It proclaimed that “EUROPE DESTROYS 1000 YEARS OF BRITISH HISTORY.” The story was that the E.U. Bureaucracy insisted that market traders in Britain display the weight of their sales in kilos and grams, as well as in their own imperial measure of pounds and ounces. The Mail does not do irony, so it didn’t occur to them that the British system was named, for the entirety of that 1000 years, the avoirdupois system. The most influential broadsheet, The Daily Telegraph, is good at news but its opinion pieces are positively medieval. When we lived in London in the 1970s, they were annoyed that Irish judges insisted on following Irish law concerning extradition and the Irish government refused to allow hot pursuit of the I.R.A. by British forces across our border. In response to this supposedly outrageous behaviour, they managed two editorials in the same month that suggested, in the first one, that Ireland should remember that Great Britain had the option of total warfare, and in the second, that they had the option of repatriating all Irish people from Britain. Ireland at the time had a navy comprising two fisheries protection vessels, an Air Force of three tiny unarmed training jets and a couple of helicopters. We also had a small army, much of it on regular loan to the U.N. At the same time Britain was a world power with its own nuclear weapons. To repatriate us wholesale would have required the mother of all bureaucratic exercises to identify us – including some of the paper’s own staff.

Needless to say, the Murdoch stable of newspapers, plus The Mail, The Express and The Telegraph have been spitting vitriol about the E.U., most of it untrue, for the last fifty years. Interestingly, Scotland and the North of Ireland voted against Brexit and those same newspapers do not have much penetration in these markets.

This media turned large numbers of voters toward ultra-nationalism: they did not like immigrants, hated Europe and, despite the evidence, continued to believe in the genetic superiority of Britons – well English anyway. Exactly like the Republican Party in America, this nationalism began to tear the Conservative Party asunder. Under this pressure and under a long succession of incompetent leaders, they ran faster and faster toward the zany right. The result was to leave them entirely bereft of competent ministers, diplomats, negotiators and leaders. This was not the ideal way to begin negotiating Brexit. They kept repeating, ad nauseum, their red lines and how easy these exit negotiations were going to be. The result of these repetitious inanities led them to appoint a whole series of Brexit ministers and negotiators who were risibly incompetent. The only target appeared to be “get Brexit done at any cost”. Unfortunately, whilst all this was progressing, the main opposition, the Labour Party, were so indecisive that they ended up on neither side.

The most depressing element is what they have inflicted upon their own youth. In essence, they have turned these two islands into a narrow internment camp for youthful Britons. Even in a fast-globalising world it is difficult to see how they can work anywhere else. The exceptions to these rules will themselves be aggravating: the very highly qualified will continue to be able to travel for work and those who are second or third generation immigrants can avail of a European passport (if Ireland had to count all passport holders in its census, we would be overpopulated). However, young musicians will not be able to cut their teeth in English music hungry venues in The E.U. Even the Erasmus program to allow students to do part of their degree in Europe is being ended, to be replaced by a pie-in-the-sky globalised daydream. The end result will be either a very angry, or very dull, young population.

Surprisingly, the biggest worry for the Irish in all of this is not the economy. God alone knows whether it will be our ruination or to our advantage (we have no inside information because even the Irish do not yet have a direct line to God). No, the most painful aspect of it all is being deprived of the dubious but enjoyable pleasure of schadenfreude. The “we told you so” superiority. Why? Because we all have dearly beloved British friends and relatives that it affects, both here and there. We are also deeply enamoured of English Literature (even the bits that are really Scottish or Welsh), and their science, arts, sports and tolerance. Many of us also deeply love the physical place itself. To take pleasure from the absurdities of Brexit would be a denial of part of our own emotional nature and the pain of our fellow tribes.

Luckily, there is a deep vein of ridiculousness inherent in the whole event that is ideal for the British sense of humour. The outrage engendered by the idea that the British might have to join the slower queue at passport controls in Europe. “Aliens! That can’t be us”. Truckers having their beloved ham sandwiches confiscated on arrival in Europe. The realisation that regaining their sovereign fishing waters means they no longer have a market for most of their catch. Even the embarrassment of having abused Brussels’ red tape for half a century only to now find that they do not have the skill to write their own. The deselection of the most talented Tory politicians by the tiny remnant of old fogeys who remain as voting members of the party. Added to this is a complete inability amongst Brexiters to understand the difference between being a member and not – “I have to get my dog vaccinated for rabies just to go to France. This is silly and cruel; our status and regulations are exactly the same”.

Speaking as just one European, I have no wish for my Union to deploy an entire division of bureaucrats to continually monitor which of their major and minor rules the British change. Such changes have nothing to do with our regulations. Nor should we be expected to negotiate every time we or they change rules. The recently appointed Brexit Czar, Lord Frost is, unfortunately, a type of conservative English leader with which we in Ireland have centuries of experience. No diplomatic or negotiation skills, no manners, just an arrogance that insists that the British position is always the correct one. I do not want to be too hard on him but – because of the example he sets – I am eagerly awaiting the elevation of Nigel Farage to the peerage.

Perhaps the most symptomatic story to describe the nature of the current government in London, is that of their intention to pass a bill in Parliament changing unilaterally the North of Ireland Protocol, an international agreement they had signed just a few weeks previously. Then the dratted Americans ruined it by electing an Irish American in place of Trump. An Irish American moreover with strong emotional ties to his ancestors’ home place. All change – “withdraw the Bill”. This deprived us of the pleasure of watching them explain to a bench of very senior British judges that although they knew the Bill was illegal, it was narrowly so. A senior cabinet minister had already, unbelievably, stated this position in the House of Commons. Better perhaps than common or garden perfidy and more amusing. They continue to blame European intransigence for difficulties caused by the protocol that they themselves negotiated and signed.

They are like an elderly swimmer, who was an Olympic swimmer in their youth, having to take the plunge in impossible circumstances because they had boasted that they would. Unable to admit that the water has become frigid, that they can see the storm coming, that they have not got the expected company and the lifeguard, their Trump card, has gone missing. All that is left to the rest of us is to bear stoically with the endless accusations that it is our fault and pray for them.

What have they already achieved? They are losing the trust of their allies because of their arrogant approach to treaties and agreements. They are ridding themselves of immigrants as fast as they can, forgetting the value and rich diversity they bring, and that they need a great number of them. They are reduced to boasting of trade deals that are just carbon copies of the ones they already had within Europe and doubling down on their mythical position as an influential world power at the same time as they reduce their aid programmes and increase their military spending. Supply lines are in chaos and although the City of London will not collapse, its influence is dribbling away. Even the signature issue of regaining their sovereign waters has been a disaster, with fishing communities deserting those same waters because they no longer have a market for the bulk of their catch.

There is always hope. The Brexiters may realise eventually that they are no longer a serious player on the world stage and that sovereignty is an old-fashioned word with very little real benefit. They might settle into Brexit – develop a simpler and better life, and become an exemplar of how to live properly in times of climate crisis. They might even find time to improve their cricket.

Democratic societies are in trouble. Don’t just take my word for it, look at two of the world’s leading democracies; the U.S. and the U.K. In the U.S., seventy-four million voters chose to re-elect Donald Trump. This, notwithstanding the dire need of so many of those same millions to have a real champion to enter the fray on their behalf. Instead, they chose as their knight in shining armour a self-obsessed, humourless jester, mounted backwards on a gilded ass, gaze firmly fixed on a mythical past, with all of its hatred. Decency won the day, but barely.

In the U.K. they chose a slightly more affable and slightly less incompetent clown, but who came with his own Dark Lord, Dominic Cummings; a man so engrossed in persuading voters that their baser instincts were so all important, that his soul ended up in lost luggage somewhere. Together, they got Brexit done. An almost incomprehensible policy of searching for the supposed glories of the past, but the achievement of which required the abandonment of economic common sense and, far more importantly, discarding the future of culture and cooperation. Both of which are fundamental to the upward path of civilisation. As silly old fogeys, they deprived their youth of a large part of the adventure of life. The intent in both States seemed to be the annihilation of whichever of our Better Angels still persist.

Big Tech, whilst not the sole contributor to such democratic lunacy, plays a very large part in the current maelstrom of dysfunction. In my lifetime (a long one), I have never known a key industry to be allowed such freedom in terms of self-regulation, but that is what is happening in the tech corporations. There are hopeful signs that we are starting to catch up. In America, a number of State Prosecutors have resuscitated the antitrust laws, designed originally to break up the monolithic power of corporate cartels such as Standard Oil and AT&T. These laws have in effect been dormant since Reagan and Thatcher discovered that an eternally recognized vice could easily be changed into a virtue by the simple expedient of preaching that ‘Greed is Good’. Europe, on the other hand, is in the process of introducing very harsh penalties for allowing blatantly untrue, or damaging, information to be spread on social media sites.

This is progress, but still leaves self-regulation as a central concept. According to the Social Media purveyors, this regulation is driven by algorithms and moderators. Algorithms are currently being sold as artificial intelligence driven magic; they are no such thing. Just more programs, sometimes sophisticated, with the same rule as all programs — garbage in, garbage out. They are top secret, so we are not allowed to see what criteria they use in checking for disallowed content. We do not know what sort of worldview is applied to ideas of what is proper. In general, when we require judgement on ethics or morality, algorithms are as crude as a Stone Age axe and less fit for purpose. As for the moderators, they are staff members so it is like a professional football team insisting that one of their own employees must referee all of their matches. And in a sane world there should be no need to expose people to the trauma of such a job.

An example of how well this system works is to be found in the recent story of Pornhub, the largest porn site on the planet, who have, according to themselves, five hundred moderators, plus algorithms. Yet, at the behest of two finance houses, Visa and MasterCard, they have had to cut the bulk of their posts, all of which were probably illegal. Now new posts can only be submitted with clear photographic identification of the person posting. What exactly were their moderators doing before this happened? People who are deeply troubled by the posting of what they consider to be totally private photos or videos can request Pornhub to take down the offending material. Only for it to immediately pop up on the site again, posted by someone who had already downloaded the content. Their algorithms are so inept that they cannot prevent material being uploaded that they themselves had already agreed was unacceptable. Nor could they be bothered to fix the algorithms. If you were the victim of such trolling, no matter what actions you took, your torture would continue without end. The problem was largely solved by two credit card companies refusing to authorize payments to Pornhub. Why finance houses and not the police or legislators? In this case there was no outcry from the ‘free speech at any cost’ lobby. I wonder why?

The Big Tech industry fetishizes three things to disguise their greed. The first of these is the right to free speech, by constantly pretending that this is an unfettered right. It is no such thing. It has always been trammelled by the need to balance competing rights: the right not to be slandered, to be free of hate speech, to a private life, to know the identity of your accuser, the right to innocence before conviction and many, many other rights. Total, unrestricted free speech is just one more fairy-tale.

The second fetish they promote is privacy. The right to privacy is fundamental but, again, it can be restricted when necessary, in a democratic society to pursue a legitimate aim. None of us have the level of privacy that is being promoted. We all have social security and tax numbers of some sort, driving licenses, credit cards, passports, birth certificates, telephone numbers, and on and on. Records on all of these identifiers grant relatively easy access to the police if a crime is suspected. Most citizens in democracies have no concerns about the State having such ready access to the mundane aspects of their private lives. Very few are inflicted with the mental laziness necessary to think of the State as a giant conspiracy.

The third fetish is that of anonymity and this, of itself, is an existential threat to democratic societies. The first two fetishes are just distractions to hide the industry’s need for this one. Anonymity itself is not intrinsic to the Internet. Every web enabled machine has at least two identifiable registration numbers: an I.P. (Internet Protocol) which provides an address and a MAC number which identifies the exact machine. For their own greedy reasons, the industry has decided that these numbers must be secret, identities available to themselves only. Why? In general, they themselves know what you post and to whom. Why should they be the trusted archivists of all this private material? Why should the forces of law have to go cap in hand to internet service providers to ask for the identity of the source when investigating a seemingly valid complaint? Why should we trust social media sites to keep to themselves all of our private correspondence? By their own narrative, they have put their trust in little known companies like Cambridge Analytica and released to them, without any by your leave, enormous tranches of our private social media correspondence for supposed medical research, only for that trust to be betrayed. It was not unidentifiable content that they released – such content would not suffice for targeted political analytics. What they released was your sign-up information: email, postal address and contact lists. Unexpectedly and miraculously that betrayal of our privacy led to a typhoon-like increase in targeted political posts and an enormous increase in their own profits. The poor things suffered a very beneficial betrayal! Anonymity adds enormously to online traffic and thereby to profit.

Democratic societies are still too fragile to survive an anonymous assault from unknown players for whom evidence is just a nuisance – where facts have alternatives, sources and motives are unknown, and even the seeming purpose may not be the real one. If events like the storming of the congressional building in Washington continue to escalate, they will eventually be known as the anonymity disturbances, where the protagonists knew not who drove them to it, or why. We cannot survive too much more of the infantile and racist bile of Q-anon or the persistent propaganda of alien bots, nor trolling or abuse by unidentifiable sources.

We need to banish the belief that the industry itself is interested in any kind of regulation other than their own twisted form of self-regulation. What exactly would our legislators do if the auto industries owned the roads, controlled and kept secret the allocation and ownership of car registration numbers and, to add insult to injury, allowed some owners to have blank plates and yet others whose numbers changed every time they started the engine. Just because we have the intelligence to create such a system does not automatically mean we can use it. The postal service would never be allowed to introduce a service for delivering anonymous trolling letters or ransom letters for kidnap victims, nor gun makers to produce weapons where the rifling changed with each new magazine. In reality, this is what the Big Tech industry is getting away with.

Why should we be reading daily stories about what actions various Silicon Valley companies take about online groups like boogaloo (whose only motivation seems to be armed insurrection and killing police officers) or Q-anon (whose motives we do not know, but are evil) or even Trump himself (whose motives are deranged)? The actions they take are properly in the purview of legislators and the police and, most emphatically, not the responsibility of technology companies. It is their provision of anonymity to endless deranged zealots that allows them to purloin these responsibilities and, having done so, they will never take a decision to prevent improper usage unless the risk of no action is going to be detrimental to their profitability. It is egregiously wrong to allow them to have their own Department of Justice and their own judiciary.

Why is everyone faffing about and refusing to regulate society as we should? The social media corporations want to publish endless opinions, but without the responsibility other publishers must bear. They know the identity of those who post but keep those identities to themselves, except when it suits them to release the data to analytic companies. They keep their algorithms secret and they decide who to remove from their platforms without an official judge in sight. They alone know what everyone posts; a fact that of itself is not safe. We get a sense of the arrogance involved when Mr. Zuckerberg tells Congress that they do not understand how Silicon Valley works. Most legislators, and the rest of us, barely know our Ram from our Rom, but we also have a very scant understanding of electricity, aerodynamics, automobiles and a thousand other things that we use constantly. The detail of how these things work is of interest to the engineers and enthusiasts involved. All the rest of need to know is what such technologies do for us, not how. Mystique is just another human way of exaggerating one’s own importance.

The industry escapes proper legislation by raising endless misplaced concerns about free speech, privacy and, their nest egg, anonymity. To release ourselves from a great number of modern ills – alien interference in our elections, cyber criminality of many different sorts and mountains of very suspect, evidence free, source free conspiracy theories and endless other nonsense – all we need to do is legislate the industry in the same way as we do with all other industries. To wit, include I.P. and MAC numbers with all posts. Add a country code as an extra. This will have zero effect on the vast majority of users in the same way as your motor registration does not impinge on your privacy, at least until you do something wrong. Admittedly, it will reduce profits for the principal shareholders involved. Such legislation would grant us another benefit; it would bring about the demise of two abominations in a free society, TOR and VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) and greatly reduce the illicit use of the Dark Web.

Anonymity is at the very core of the social media purveyors’ business plans. It vastly increases profits and at the same time, grants them powers that rightly belong to the forces of law and order. The term “anonymous free speech” is an oxymoron. It has no identifiable source, tells us nothing of vested interests, bias or motive and diminishes our real heroes of free speech: Gandhi, King, Mandela, Navalny and many lesser-known brave hearted people who accepted the costs of free speech, often fatal, and still spoke out. It smears unjustifiable pain, uncertainty and lies throughout our societies. It is unconscionable that this should be accepted to bolster the profits and power of Silicon Valley.

Publishing opinion in a democracy denies any right to anonymity. When mainstream media print or broadcast material from an anonymous source, the legal responsibility for the validity of the story is automatically assumed by the journalist and the media organization involved. Woe betide them if they get it wrong. Social media companies accept no such responsibility. In fact, anonymity is an enormous part of their business plan. There must be a million academic papers published on the advantageous and negative effects of social media but most seem unaware of the unnecessary harm caused by anonymity. We refer glibly to our own time as the post truth era, disregarding entirely the unavoidable reality that without a constant search for truth, our species is reduced to a gang of oddballs howling meaninglessly in the wind. The very core of civilisation is our un-requiting search for truth and understanding.

Yes! Gone. Not gone into hiding for a while: just gone, not to reappear until sometime in the future, when politics invents a completely new, ridiculous, trauma for us. If it ever does. Millions of words are being wasted on fears of his own elderly self’s reappearance, or as a hologram or even in the guise of one of his children or enablers. No! Did I not tell you already that both he and his movement are already fading history?

The reasons for such an uncompromising opinion are really quite simple. In truth he, and his magic, are irreplaceable and if he tries his own comeback, the party will stymie him. They have already suffered one term of his pretend Republicanism and know that they will not survive another. To know what the majority of them really think of him all we have to do is look at what the individuals involved said about him before he won the 2016 nomination. They still pay homage, but only in the wishful thought of keeping his base on their side. But without his power, without his pulpit and without his bullying presence, most of them are capable of walking the fine line needed to betray him whilst imitating diehard loyalists.

There are some residual concerns but most of them are not serious:

1. His base will remain active. A goodly part of it consists of a zany collection of opposing insanities: anti-Semites versus Netanyahu supporters, rank conspiracy theorists versus greedy business people, anti-immigrant supporters versus anti-immigrant immigrants, Christians versus tolerance, vitriolic day dreams versus reality. Trump’s formula for holding such a disparate group together was simple but effective: two contradictory lies every five minutes, knowing that disciples would only hear the one they wanted to hear. That was his genius. Can you think of anyone else who would have the bloated, boastful persona to carry off such twisted theatre and cement such a contradictory base together?
2. He will stay around and regain power in 2024 and maybe even start his own television channel. My hat! He doesn’t have the necessary energy for the first and, if we forget his legal and financial problems, a television scheme would cost money and dedication. And where would he get philosophising liars of sufficient stature to anchor it for him? The only possible ones are already in safe, overpaid work and unlikely to risk that to take a job with a loser, not exactly well known for his business acumen, or his loyalty. Anyway, he will be too busy working on his presidential library!

The vexed question of whether the Biden Administration will, for the sake of healing divisions, grant a pardon to ex-President Trump is, for the moment, unanswerable. There is, however, one bone of certainty to gnaw on; that it would be wholly improper and destructive to grant a pardon to a politician who intended to have a continued participation, of any form, in politics.

The why of Trumpism raises some truly serious questions. Yes, we can blame part of it on the usual suspects: racism, super nationalism, genderism and the rest, but we are perhaps missing the one difficulty that is most likely to cause this chaos to reappear in the future: an unwillingness on everybody’s part to accept unvarnished truth — that the dignity of work is being purloined by commercial interests and no one is planning the absolutely necessary replacement.

The world laughed while he was busy getting elected. Why then did he succeed? Perhaps because the opposition, all of them, forgot that it is people who elect Presidents, not money. You have to wonder how many people belonging to the blue-collar section of society voted for him because they knew, yes knew, that the entire system had failed them. The hope being that he would destroy that failed system. He only managed half the destruction necessary. He really needed another four years. We didn’t, but he did.

The failure of the system is due to the inability of almost everybody, including politicians and economists, to recognise that we are right in the midst of the greatest upheaval in our history since the advent of democracy, and that today, change happens at lightning speed. We are losing the need for mundane, commercial labor and no pious words from leaders will bring it back, irrespective of tax cuts. Yes, the big plants may come back but filled with robotics, not people. Self-drive trucks and app responsive driverless automobiles will fill our highways and the ever more visible, existential threat of climate change will purge our need for grossly silly consumption. We are like blind sheep wandering into an abattoir but we cannot see what is going on.

We cannot keep pretending that the gig economy, zero-hour contracts, or having tens of millions of ordinary people involved in low paid, insecure labour – such as in fast food joints, supermarkets, or soul destroying, machine like drudgery, found in the warehouses of corporations like Amazon – can restore the necessary dignity. At best, all of this is a temporary leaf covering for a tree that produces sour fruit. The educated middle class have been brought into the twenty-first century, but unless we begin to explain to the wider population how we intend to include them in the benefits resulting from the earth-shattering changes taking place, they will continue, rightly, to challenge the system. Perhaps the solutions are not being mentioned because they seem too radical but there is no moderate option. The times, they are a-changing, and the wealthy have shown no inhibitions about using radical solutions to increase their own wealth.

The common fear at the moment, among liberal journalists anyway, is that the Democratic Party is divided. At odds with itself. Does that mean that the monolithic Republican Party is the ideal? Where all criticism of the leadership, however daft, is verboten. Such leader worship belongs in tyrannies, not democracies. The other assumption being made, perhaps true, is that Joe Biden, when he becomes President, will work as hard as President Obama did at cross aisle cooperation. But the Republican Party today, is not the one he was used to in his own senatorial days. Less than a handful are brave enough to openly accept reason, whatever they might think personally.

The Republican Party itself has far more serious problems. Since the Reagan years they have steadily become more mean spirited. Reagan, then Nixon, then Chaney and the neoconservatives followed by the Disneyland climax of King Trump (climax is perhaps the wrong word to use with regard to this particular President). Despite their open contempt for democracy shown by indecent shenanigans with gerrymandering, voter and vote suppression, their interference with the U.S. Mail, and the Electoral College advantages in their favour, they were unable to get a sitting President re-elected. Then they doubled down with a childish refusal to accept the result. They too are finished. Ordinary, decent conservatives will have to find another way to push their own beliefs. We should all hope that this will be possible.

We, the middle class, were responsible for all the chaos of the last four years. With our educational advantages we were able to adjust to the mind-bending changes taking place but did not pay attention to the obvious, to the dangers, to the ordinary Jack and Jill whom we pushed down the hill, into the rapacious jaws of financiers, tech moguls and libertarians. Our leaders, our regulators, even our economists, seem oblivious to the obvious; that for the last twenty years we have not just been tweaking the edges of twentieth century life. It is time to catch up and start to explain the hopes that can be realized in this new world. We need the pain eased and the light of the future to be more visible to all.

The near future is going to be storm ravaged; in reality and in politics. In politics anyway, the tempest heralds a brighter future. One that will help us greatly in our delayed battle against the real, existential tempests. We have made a good start. The ogre has gone. Yes! Gone!  Did I mention that before?