Project Deshittification 2026: End of March Update!
Now that I have a General Theory of Shit, I’ve been building technical architecture to limit the amount of it I need to deal with. Financial Shit has been – significant, given how all of this is to get me back to a baseline of functionality just without the ability of Big Tech and my employer to control / enshittify my life. Some of this expenditure I’ve hinted at, some of it as a consequence of experiments or an intentional tradeoff to pay for my extraction from the surveillance economy.
So, let’s begin with the only thing I haven’t done from my original plan. I haven’t stopped paying for Spotify or Google. There’s a kind of Shit I didn’t talk about last month, and that’s ‘family bundling shit’. I pay for Spotify Duo, and Pauline is on my Google plan. That means in order to extricate myself I need to also extricate her, and she’s not as obsessed with this as I am. I guess this is a flavour of social shit – a network effect. Anyway, until I have a genuinely drop in replacement for the services I pay for, I’m stuck with them. I guess the alternative is to get rid of Pauline but in the frame of the General Theory of Shit that’s probably going to generate more Shit than it redirects.
What I have done that you already know:
1) Got rid of Windows on my home computer, and it’s been – good, actually. Linux is irritating in many ways, but so was Windows. I’ve lost a lot of my linux literacy over the years and I find myself no longer as au fait with the command line as I was when running two MUDs across multiple servers. But it’s fine and getting better with time. The muscle memory is starting to kick in again. I’l post more abut that later.
2) I actually Got rid of Windows on – well, everything. Two macbooks (an air and a pro) are now running Fodora. My home computer – Fedora (via Nobara). My work laptop – Fedora (via Nobara). My ASUS Rog Ally? Bazzite (which is a flavour of Fedora). There are no windows machines left with which I regularly must interact. Again, I will post more about this at a later date.
3) Got rid of Google Wallet, and moved to Tapster. It’s real good. Everything I can replace with a fob from now on, I do. Pauline and I had lunch with one of our graduated students over Christmas, and she asked ‘why not just use a card’? And I get that – the fob is basically a replacement for the same interaction that goes with my bank-card – just bop it against the reader. But with a card I have to get my wallet, open it, extract the card (which can be awkward depending on what else I’m doing at the time), hold the card to the reader, slip it back into the wallet, close the wallet, put it back into my pocket. Every step of that is a trivial, but non-zero cost. With the fob I pull out my keys and press the fob to the device. It’s just smoother, and also means I don’t need to carry a wallet with me.
4) Blew the dust off all my old MP3s and started curating them. Man I had a lot of stuff that did not survive the decade-long ice-age of my affections. Creedence Clearwater Revival? Did I really need a box-set for a band with a catalogue that contains maybe three songs I really like? Did I really need every album from Don McClean when only one of them is any good? No!
5) Designated an old tablet as the ‘Toilet Tablet’ which currently holds my enforced MFA shitware, gmail, and all the other things I don’t want on my main computer and don’t have to. There is some corporate shitware I need to have – I can’t access much of my employer’s network without using their VPN for example, but I can’t do anything about this just yet. I did think about situationally using a mobile hotspot with the VPN enabled but that doesn’t work. I will live with it. For now.
6) No notifications. Ever. Not a one. I don’t care if it’s a medical alert that I’m having a heart-attack. That’s a Rubicon no app should be allowed to cross.
7) I got rid of my work phone. By which I mean it’s in a drawer and I don’t use it. Instead I have a Bluefox NX1 which I am trying out. And it’s great!
Curating my music lead to me copying it across to a Hetzner storage bucket that I can access anywhere. I’m vaguely considering whether I want to run something like Jellyfin or whether the features it offers (synced ratings for example) matter all that much. I bought Symfonium which will play from a WEBDAV directory and it’s pretty good! Like – smooth as butter when when playing across a network on 4G to a storage device intended for capacity over speed. Do I really need to run a server to play some music? That is, after all, Logistical Shit in service of something I don’t care that much about. I could just make MP3 playlists like in the old days.
On a vaguely related aside…
I was talking to my Eldest Daughter [1] some time ago about gifts. Christmas was coming up and she was talking about her boyfriend at the time, and what to get. At one point, when circling the topic of something appropriately meaningful and personal, I suggested whatever the modern equivalent of a mix-tape is.
Reader – there is no modern equivalent of a mix-tape, and that makes me quite sad. The idea landed with the dull thud I would have expected if I had suggested getting him some oats for his horse.
An MP3 playlist or Spotify playlist isn’t the equivalent, but at least the effort required for the former makes it feel a bit more like it. The younger generations are impoverished by not having the romantic shibboleth of ‘here’s some music that makes me think of you, carefully curated and crafted by mine own two hands’.
Anyway.
Symfonium is pretty good and hand-rolling playlists gets me 80% of what I want without needing any more technology to manage it. Friction is good sometimes, and the mindfulness of doing this intentionally rather than reflexively is probably worth it. To be revisited though.
The next thing I did was buy a new router. This has had two main benefits. The first is that the C2 Wifi router provided by my broadband provider fucking sucks. It’s constantly cutting out, and in researching the solutions I found out it’s often because it’s designed around the median expectations (a couple of devices, limited use, minimal configurability) so when you run a home network of any complexity it often overheats and shits its pants. But that was something I discovered in relation to a much simpler task, which was ‘Setting it to use a DNS of my own choice’. I wanted to use AdGuard or NextDNS – things that allow for telemetry blocking at the level of the router, and found out I was hard-locked to the one of my provider. And I couldn’t just replace the modem because it requires a coax connection. So I bought a new router, put the router in as close to bridge mode as Tele2 would allow me to (bridge mode basically turns it into a mindless pipe for data), and then configured this new, expensive router to be a fortress against shitware. Defensive spending here.
And that’s been real nice – at the very least I no longer lose the network when the internet goes down. And I have enjoyed the feeling of safety that comes from having a router I control as opposed to one that begrudgingly lets me set some values in it.
This wasn’t an idle thing though. Our old TV (An LG something, bought in late 2014) began to fail and we needed a new TV. And, predictably, every TV you can buy is riddled with ‘smart’ shitware. And here’s where the network effect of social shit comes in again – you can’t be hardline, you need to conform to the minimal inconvenience of the household. Pauline wanted to be able to play SVT (a Swedish TV channel) through the TV rather than through her computer, and she also wanted to be able to stream YouTube through it. I, on the other hand, wanted to rip out its network card and salt the circuits where it had once been connected. Samsung TVs (and all TVs these days) are notorious for the telemetry they send, and of course it’s full of ‘helpful’ AI. Setting my network DNS to something that would block the telemetry was important, but so was some fine-grained firewall access. The TV often ignores router DNS settings and calls home via Google regardless what you want. You’re not its real dad, so it’s constantly bypassing your restrictions to call home. A decent router allows you to firewall specific ports, and specific IPs, on specific devices. So I have a secured ‘IoT’ network now that is a lot more locked down than the real one.
The TV is quite clever in that it doesn’t ask for your consent for connectivity. You have to set it up with an app, and that app requires the Internet, and the app feeds your wifi information to the TV so it can get on the Internet. Your wishes don’t even come into it. It’s ‘convenient’ in the same way a governmental theocracy is convenient. So thus a heavy-handed solution to a heavy-handed coercion. There are ways to get around that, of course, but I knew I’d have to do lock it down eventually anyway so I didn’t worry too much about it.
The router also lets me incorporate a hardware level VPN, which is good. While this project began as deshittification it has also become, over time, an obsessive focus on digital sovereignty. You want my data? Fuck you, pay me. But also don’t pay me because I don’t want your fucking money. I just want to know when I’m relaxing at night with a cold drink and an extended session with hot-nun-feet.com, there isn’t some pervert on the other end of my connection getting off on it. I just go there for the articles [2].
It doesn’t feel like a lot for a month of progress, but some of this is just allowing the new technologies and philosophies to bed in. You need to live with these things long enough to iron out the wrinkles – to deal with the snagging. But I think the direction of travel is good, and importantly I’m not finding my life meaningfully diminished by doing any of this.
I think the next big things will be:
1) Uninstall Spotify completely. I’ll still be paying for it for a while at least, but I need to live with Symfonium without having the Spotify safety net. That’s going to be particularly tough when it comes to listening to new music, but I think what I’ll also do is exactly what I did when I was younger. I’ll just, you know, buy albums – Bandcamp or Qobuz or whatever. Many of them will suck. But that was true back when I’d spend a signifcant portion of my paycheck in Fopp [4] in the 90s.
2) Completely degoogle. As with Spotify I’ll need to keep paying for it short term, but that doesn’t mean I need to keep using it. I already used gmail as a toilet account – the one I used for the services I didn’t care about – but cutting it off completely may have consequences. Not least of which will be YouTube, which is often the background noise of my life.
3) Continue to burn and rave at all indignities forced upon my clean new computing situation. Living with something temporarily is not permanent capitulation. I’ll scour you from my system yet, EduVPN.
4) Decouple from Amazon. This one is going to be tough, and it’s never going to be total. But I should accept some degree of ‘higher costs’ [6] and ‘lower choice’ as necessary deshittification from a sociopathic superpower. I’ll continue to be a Vine reviewer, but I need to stop treating Amazon as my first choice of retail. I’ve done some of that already, but sadly many Swedish companies just fucking suck. The fact IKEA robbed me of 550kr for a delivery they didn’t carry out AND WON’T ANSWER THEIR EMAILS isn’t related to much of this, but it is why I’m uneasy about going native. I have never once had a positive customer service experience with a Swedish company. I barely have positive customer experiences.
5) Continue the audit of where my money, attention and infrastructure goes.
The move to a BlueFox has significantly cut down on the size of the gadgets I need to lug around [5] and their capability. I’m probably down to my genuine ‘minimal daily carry’ that still lets me function in the ways I need to. I think I’ve probably secured my computer as much as I reasonably can without this becoming its own flavour of fetishism.
And I still want to accomplish what Project Unplug was supposed to do – develop a mindset where technology is an appliance not an activity in itself. I think I’m getting to the stage where I’m no longer feeling like I am ensorcelled by the compromises of Big Tech. I’m even wary about Mid Tech, which is the tier where many of the proposed Big Tech replacements live. Mid Tech can become Big Tech and the enshittification cycle will begin again.
I still feel like technology has an outsized influence on me, even moderating that observation within the frame of my job. I think even for a games lecturer in a computer science department, I am too tech-dependant and too absorbed in machines. Life is the sum of the things to which we choose to pay attention, and I feel like too much of my life is focused on a pair of 27″ monitors.
As another aside, I bought us a mini chest freezer at the same time I bought a router. I just plugged it in and it works. It’s almost retro in how little it cares about my preferences, and that’s fine by me. It’s what I want from everything these days. No configuration beyond a dial. No need to set up a cloud account. No app. Even the Miele vacuum cleaner I bought last year has an app. It’s a fucking vacuum cleaner.
So, that’s where we are at the start of April.
[1] By which I mean an ex-student of mine who adopted me as her dad – she is my eldest by virtue of being the first (and thus far only) one to have done that. I have become an opt-in dad for those that wish to subscribe for the low monthly payment of having me annoyingly invested in their lives.
[2] That’s another thing the younger generations have lost – the context of a magazine that published some excellent interviews along with the pornography. Although this generation is also shameless in a way that mine never was so I suspect they don’t care so much [3].
[3] Mental note for project 2027 – bring shame back into modern life. Y’all need Jesus.
[4] God I miss Fopp. An indie version of HMV that had personality on its shelves as opposed to soulless brand merch. It was swallowed up by HMV when it went bankrupt, and then consumed in turn by the unfeeling megacorp that bought HMV when it in turn went bankrupt.
[5] One indignity I cannot fight is the need to live in a digital-fetish culture like Sweden. I’m stuck with that.
[6] Amazon runs a ‘most favoured nation’ policy which means people selling on Amazon can’t charge more there than anywhere else. That means prices everywhere else have to increase to absorb Amazon’s cut even when you’re not shopping on Amazon. That’s bad, but in Sweden everything has a markup in local stores because it’s not a cheap country in which to do business. Maybe I do need to reconcile myself to paying twice as much for a paperback.