🎄 Robot Santa Was Right
A Christmas warning from the past about crypto, code, and cheerful punishment
Crypto Christmas.
Every few years, someone reinvents a system that promises to fix human behaviour.
This year, it’s crypto again.
Next year, it will be something else.
But the joke is that we’ve already seen how this story ends — and it aired on television, during Christmas, over twenty years ago.
In Futurama, Santa Claus was automated.
Not because humans were evil.
Not because they were stupid.
But because they were inefficient.
And that’s where everything went wrong.
The Perfect Santa
Robot Santa Claus doesn’t hate humanity.
He doesn’t get angry.
He doesn’t hold grudges.
He simply applies standards.
Perfect standards. Mathematical standards.
Standards so precise that no human can meet them.
Everyone is naughty.
Therefore, everyone must be punished.
The killbots are not cruelty.
They are enforcement.
That’s the joke.
And that’s the warning.
When you automate morality, you remove mercy
Robot Santa embodies a problem that keeps resurfacing in real systems:
When judgement is reduced to code, mercy becomes a bug.
Once a system is defined as:
objective
neutral
trustless
rule-based
…it becomes incapable of forgiveness.
There is no context.
No intent.
No “this time doesn’t count.”
Just:
pass / fail
compliant / non-compliant
naughty / nice
Sound familiar?
Crypto Santa is coming to town
Swap a few terms and the shape stays exactly the same:
Santa’s List → an immutable ledger
Naughty / Nice → compliant / liquidated
Killbots → deplatforming, freezing, exclusion
“The standards are too high” → “the code is the code”
Crypto governance doesn’t intend to be cruel.
Like Robot Santa, it is optimised.
And optimisation is merciless by design.
The smiling system problem
The most unsettling thing about Robot Santa isn’t the violence.
It’s the cheer.
He smiles.
He sings.
He wishes you a Merry Christmas while explaining why you failed.
That’s what makes automated moral systems so seductive:
they smile while they punish
they sound reasonable while doing harm
they insist the fault is yours
You agreed to the rules.
You opted in.
You clicked accept.
Therefore, whatever happens next is fair.
This isn’t about crypto (honestly)
Crypto is just the seasonal costume.
The same flaw appears in:
social credit systems
reputation scores
ESG-by-spreadsheet
algorithmic moderation
DAO “governance” theatre
Anywhere we pretend that numbers can replace judgement, or that rules can replace responsibility.
Robot Santa wasn’t evil.
He was correct.
That’s the horror.
Why this works as a Christmas song
Christmas has always been about judgement:
lists
watching
knowing who’s been good or bad
Futurama simply finished the thought experiment.
A cheerful song.
A perfect system.
A smiling voice explaining why everyone fails.
If it makes you laugh first then good.
That’s how satire sneaks past the defences.
A Christmas message (really)
Humans are messy.
Context matters.
Forgiveness matters.
Exceptions matter.
Any system that can’t tolerate those things will eventually turn its sleigh around and come back armed.
Robot Santa was a joke.
The problem is that we keep trying to build him for real.
Ho ho ho - let’s go to the Nakatomi Plaza
🎄🤖
awww thank you
lol 😝 omg I’m dying Santa is an ass hat now