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2026-07-28

You don’t just have to give in

I didn’t have to spend five days cycling across the country to and from a festival. I could just have taken the train. There wouldn’t even have been any moral failing in doing so. Instead, I did it the hard way. In exchange I saw a slice across England in great detail – birds, animals, plants, architecture – and felt the satisfaction of having achieved something.

When I performed at a festival in Athens earlier in the year, I could just have taken a plane to get there – everyone else did – but I try to avoid unnecessary flying. Instead, we made a holiday of it, and spent a fortnight on trains, buses, and ferries, travelling through four different countries. In the process, I had the chance to visit Rome for the first time, as well as Turin, Bologna, and Basel. I saw the whole length of the Italian countryside from train windows. I came back relaxed and refreshed, and I never had to worry about whether my instrument would be allowed as carry-on baggage.

When I walk into a restaurant, I could just order anything off the menu. My life would be a lot simpler. Going vegan has profoundly changed my relationship with food. In exchange, I cook and eat much more interesting and varied food, and I feel much happier with the consequences of doing so.

I’ve been running Linux on a variety of computers, mostly second-hand laptops, for decades. My life would undoubtedly have been simpler if I had just thrown money at the problem and bought a lot of proprietary hardware and software. In work situations, I have long been the only person not using a MacBook. “Just buy a Mac!” they exhort me from the keyboards of their £3,000 machines. I’d be afraid to carry something so expensive and fragile around every day, and the inflexibility of Mac OS bugs the hell out of me. Meanwhile, I’m using a corporate surplus ThinkPad that cost me £170. I saved a computer from landfill instead of buying a new one. I don’t have to give my personal details to US Big Tech just to sign in or install some software. If I don’t like the way something works I can change it, and that makes me happy.

So when people tell me that so-called “AI” is here to stay, and there’s no point resisting, and I’ll be left behind if I don’t embrace it, I don’t care. I don’t just have to do anything. I don’t want to argue in English with a graven image of a human mind, to cajole a gaslighting automaton into writing some software for me, when I already have an unamiguous means of instructing the computer to do exactly what I want. Besides, my human brain is right here, it costs me nothing to use it, it doesn’t create any additional environmental damage to do so, and continuing to exercise it keeps it working.

You only have to spend time in a country with high income inequality to see the negative moral and intellectual consequences of “having staff”. “AI” chatbots and agents bring the same decerebrating idleness to many more people who, like plutocrats of old, think they’re somehow doing actual work while they really become less capable.

I don’t just have to give in, and you don’t either.