My Spiritual Journey (MSJ) is an open, class series for getting people know more about the basics and values of Christianity, entirely based on Biblical principles. It has also become the foundation of discipleship and leadership in Gereja Mawar Sharon (GMS) and Rose of Sharon Church (ROSC). In mid-2022 I secretly joined the Education department of GMS Jakarta to help them manage all the students, especially MSJ 1, 2, and 3. I quickly realized that these great classes are still managed by a small number of people (40-ish), but well, we can serve tens of thousands of students in a year! Who said working in a department that just schedule Zoom meetings and take notes of attending participants? Having some expertise back then in digitalizing HIMTI BINUS' events back then, I decided to create another Telegram bot to automatically generate contact cards from a single spreadsheet! This year, as we decided to hold more classes, we expect the numbers to double, or even triple. Of course, this is all made possible by everyone, the church who actively find for missing souls and guide everyone to receive, walk, and lead in Christ. As our Jakarta region expanded to Jakarta-Tangerang-Kelapa Gading, our church administration region was even more entrusted and merged with GMS Jawa Barat to form a large region, GMS Jakarta Jawa Barat Banten (JJB). Our Education team has expanded, too, that we have to adapt with the planting of new churches, which means a whole new location that we should serve as well. But unfortunately, that Telegram bot had to be shut down as we move to a new administration and attendance system by the church. And that could be a good thing as I will leave Indonesia over the upcoming weeks. That said, thank you to God and the greater ministry team to make our great efforts possible ❤️

Exactly one year ago, I made the decision to withdraw myself from those surveillance capitalism narrative where corporations and governments are ambitioning for extracting your data in exchange for all the fun and convenient things of the cyberspace. And you have to take action. As a person who have ever worked with real FLOSS organizations before real technological startups and real government, I too can connect such one narrative to another. To justify my reasons on dropping the surveillance narrative altogether, I need to say that we live in a society where technological ambitions—including Surveillance Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence—often come and go and leave a huge loss of money and effort. Learning from the fall of Big Data Let's say about the old tale of Big Data, which was perceived as "revolutionary towards the rapid globalization and digitalization" as many people including me believed 5 years ago. And today, we can no longer deny that the role models of Big Data—Google and companies alike—are being beaten by the legal forces of European Union, and surprise, the United States' Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice. "Data is the new oil" suddenly posed business threats that are barely different than those dealing with real oil. Huge legal battles about monopoly in the energy sector, workplace practices and ethics, cases of environmental and sustainability are keep coming towards the industry. It is also recently known that ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) initiative, which PwC pitched three years ago to be highly significant for investors, suddenly became nothing but a massive virtue signalling campaign to psychologically stimulate humans to buy and consume their products. It is clearer each day the industries honestly no longer want to establish such goals. Some of you may already relate those "real oil" company issues with those dealing with "digital oil". The people behind such "digital liberation" movements, including the EFF and FSF, writing their own personal book of corporate sins for email companies, your operating system (including Apple and even Linux), your well-known search engine, your smartphone brand, your "smart" printer, and at the end of the day, towards governments with their law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Here's a page taken out from one of their books of corporate sins: The new version of MacOS — and therefore the new generation of Macs — informs Apple of every time the machine launches a program. The Guardian press seems blissfully unaware of this spying. It even repeats Apple's claims to help users protect their privacy — but only some aspects of their privacy. Just as software developers have redefined "security" to mean "security against everyone but us", Apple is redefining "privacy" to mean "privacy from everyone but us." Reasons not to use Apple by Richard Stallman Not to mention the latest incidents in the tech ambition world: the Apple fallacy of privacy, Google finally get convicted for monopoly with DoJ proposing to sell off Chrome. The Big Data and ESG-like "blockchain-first" corporate pledges are going away, and as we know before, those influencers who were hyped with Blockchain jumped ship to AI. To whom it may concern, double the red pill, please. The Cyberspace is never meant for freedom. Some who support the anti-surveillance liberation movement may be proud for being "red-pilled" (as in The Matrix) over this situation. But it's also an irony that they forgot to take another red pill. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace believes that the Cyberspace itself is independent from the forces of the industrial governments, which they accuse for not being wholeheartedly involved in their conversation, and instead enforces laws by raising issues which the people claiming to be part of the Cyberspace claimed never existed. But is it? It is clear that the early origins of the Internet significantly came from ARPANET, an United States government project. ARPANET was not a regular, political or democratic effort of establishing the computer networks for the public, but it is a military project in the first place. Now what did the military project bring into the design of the modern-world Internet? Yes, the basic TCP/IP network that we still even use as of today. By using the present-day Internet, knowingly and unknowingly, we are using the designs and the arts of the military government to our personal benefits. Like a peanut forgetting their skin. Okay, long story, but some of you cypherpunks wanted to stay away from the government by using a technique named encryption. But think again what made encryption freely available to you, and especially for United States citizens, to people outside of your country. Did you know that the US government has provided a set of encryption algorithm that we blindly use it for day-to-day encryption!? Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) is everywhere, and even it is used for HTTPS and validating your Linux software packages with a checksum. And as the goodness of SHA itself came from the militant nature of the United States government agencies, so are they protected by the cryptographic exports laws. Thanks to such laws, almost everyone can enjoy the benefits of encryption, including your ambitions to lock yourself out from the governments. I would recommend you to thank to your (government) enemy to give the kindness and permission to you, which the government may identify you as an enemy of theirs, to use such algorithms for use inside and outside the countries where such algorithms are developed and respectfully belong to. So, is freedom synonymous to stealing? Reflecting my actions over the past 12 months of not engaging with such ideological narratives, I wonder if I keep supporting defeating surveillance capitalism, either the enterprise or the government side of things, could eventually benefit me in the long term. If I believe that my personal life and data are stolen as part of a social experimentation from those parties, then I and others decided to take them back by stealing their opportunities, then what makes us different from our own enemies if we altogether love to steal? I know that the Holy Bible has all the answers that we are tasked to pray, give ourselves away, and even bless our own enemies. Applying the basic principles from Mark 12:17, and as the Internet partly bears the image of the government ambitions to organize their (military) missions to protect their own country, I am giving back what belong to the Caesar to Caesar, those who are God's to God, and those belong to the governments, to the governments. I will apply the same principles to the other parts of the Internet, too. The images of academic research efforts for academia, the images of enterprise ambitions to enterprises, and organizations for organizations, and my own intentions for myself. And in addition to that, while accounting to the same Bible, I am a product even in your own terms, as I did not pay anything to be born as a boy on this world (I would rather stay happily in the heavens in exchange for that). Being light—wholeheartedly transparent of our identity, existence, and actions—is indeed a great consequence of following Christ. But I would doubt you shall believe the Bible if you stay true to your ethical beliefs, because all the stories I referenced from the Bible, are all the personal information gathered from real people who were recorded before your establishment of modern human rights and digital rights. Remembering that blessings come from privacy invasions. If I truly follow the current modern world definition of digital privacy as a human right, then I would proudly present the Holy Bible as a great written historical record of people that we even read everyday without each of these people’s consent. The process of recording and distributing the events in the Holy Bible should be considered a privacy invasion, as I and we did not even ask for the consent of the descendants of Abraham, Samuel, or so, just to be able to read, modify, and/or reproduce their stories and quotes either for commercial or non-commercial purposes. We did not ask for the legal consent of the parents of Joseph, Jacob, and David in order to do the same with their stories. Unlike the former ones, these people and their guilty sins were recorded since their childhood days, making the Holy Bible a product of the biggest children’s privacy invasion conducted over more than 1,000 years. If you uphold the values of purity and digital privacy against preying companies and governments, but at the same time love the stories of the Bible, it may be an indication of a double standard. Just as I said last year, God did not ask us to be a light of the world except for Facebook, or even having our shine end-to-end encrypted to peers that you can only trust in such a rigorous process. This Bible is why I left my beliefs on surveillance capitalism.