Time for the End of January Deshittification update! This is long, and largely only for my benefit. This is me using Facebook as a project Rubber Duck.
Where Does The Shit Go?
The theme of a lot of Deshittification 2026 is one main question – ‘does this reduce shittification or does it just relocate it’? I think a lot of what is considered digital minimalism is preformative fetishism – a kind of signalling behaviour that certainly changes the flavour of shit but doesn’t meaningfully reduce how much you have to swallow. I’m not nostalgic for a past golden age of perfect technology. That age never existed. By and large technology has gotten much better even if digital sovereignty over that technology has eroded. That’s a philosophical argument though and what I want is just a better experience of life. The problem isn’t technology. It’s a question of agency.
Agency is I think the right framing, because I often see this discussed as an issue of consent. I think that’s too low a bar (for anything, pretty much). I consent to be digitally sodomized every time I agree to an EULA. And I consent because I am not in a position to deny that consent and still function in modern life. I can’t opt-out of BankID in Sweden, as an obvious example. So, deshittification is a reclamation of agency. A willpower enforced ‘no-entry’ zone around my technological arsehole.
The question I am constantly asking myself now is ‘where did the shit go?’. If it went somewhere else in my life, that’s no good. If I flushed it away, that’s a win. And for now, the answer is ‘I’m not sure’. Some of this needs time to bed in.
And the thing is – shit can go many places. Maybe it’s an increase in anxiety, or in cognitive load. Maybe it reappears as a logistic cost. Or even, as in the ‘every day carry’ of the typical preformative digital minimalist, in the backpack needed to carry ten devices, three chargers, and a bunch of physical media. Maybe it’s social shit, such as having to explain to everyone why I’m untangling wired headphones to plug into a decaying iPod nano. Some of it will even be career shit, such as how I’m not plugging into any of the tedious backchannel chatter on Microsoft Teams.
Project Unplug back in 2023 demonstrated clearly that it is not possible to exile yourself from the Internet and still live a functional life. Regardless, many of the patterns of behaviour I built then did meaningfully improve my day-to-day existance. No notifications – life changing. Minimising exposure to news (which is no longer an informative necessity but rather an amplification platform for helplessness). No social media except for that which is minimal investment. That kind of thing has been transformative, and while I do slip occasionally (I notice Reddit making its way into my life again, even if purely through an aggressively curated list of deshittification-adjacent subs) those slips are correctable.
So Deshittification 2026 isn’t a project of philosophical purity. It’s pragmatic. It’s about functioning through life more optimally – and often that’s resolved by working out how many things I need to negotiate with to live.
So, this I think is the checklist for changes moving forward:
1) Work out where the shit goes. The sum total of shit should be less after a change than it was before it. Changes in texture and flavour are not inherently changes in volume.
2) Work out how many negotiations any change adds or removes from my life. A new small phone – probably adds negotiations. Maybe? To be determined really. A yubikey probably just changes the texture. Perhaps? I don’t know.
3) Work out what is sacrificed, and whether that sacrifice is a bad thing. Switching off notifications in 2023 meant I needed to be less responsive to people. That was not a negative. I think much of what I hate about the modern technical ecosystem is the expectation of immediacy. Just calm the fuck down, everyone.
Financial cost isn’t a key factor here, but it is a flavour of shit that needs to be taken into account. I have radically increased my spending on servers at the cost of marginally decreasing my spending on services. I have 10 TB of storage at Hetzner now, which is more than I was paying for the perfectly adequate 2TB storage I had at Google Drive.
Hetzner though lets me do whatever I want with it – full server access, mountable wherever, no apps required. The extra financial cost is relocated (and increased) shit. However digital sovereignty flushes a lot of other shit away,
But again, it’s not that simple!
I could pay Facebook for an ad-free experience (allegedly, they keep offering) but that feels like agency through menace. ‘Nice personal information you’ve got there. Shame if anything happened to it’. That feels like paying protection money to the mob. Similarly I could get Youtube Premium but encouraging people to pay into a service because otherwise the experience is intentionally and manipulatively awful seems like behaviour I don’t want to encourage. If you want my money, offer me a service that is better because it’s better, not because you made the alternative worse. It’s not the money per se that’s the issue in both these options – it’s the sociopathy of the business models. I don’t want to be complicit in encouraging this kind of thing. That’s how they getcha.
The next big question I think I need to answer is ‘so, what do I really mean by shit?’. For now, this is vibe based. But if this is going to be a useful instrument for living a deshittified life, I think I need something more fleshed out to build it upon.
Everyday Carry Nonsense
Okay.look at the attached image. This is a sampling of what people in the digital minimalism movement call an EDC, or an ‘Every Day Carry’
See what I mean by how it’s indistinguishable from a fetish? Even back in the day this wouldn’t be an every day carry. When this tech was contemporary, you didn’t load yourself up like a masochistic pack-horse, you made compromises. ‘I’m not taking my Walkman because I have my Gameboy’. ‘Maybe today I don’t need a graphing calculator, because what the fuck would I need that for on an every day basis?’. And we rarely had to worry about power-banks because most tech wasn’t thirsty enough to demand them – a couple of AA batteries lasted a week or more. Or if the device was especially power hungry, we simply made our peace with it running out while on the move.
This is what I’m explicitly not trying to do. This is ridiculous. I want to be less dependant on devices, not spread my dependency across ten separate single purpose devices, each one of which is its own compromise. That’s not really minimalism to my mind – it’s maximalism through fragmentation.
This is the philosophical pivot that fractures this rough movement – do you want separate devices to ensure you’re not essentially pulled into in the inescapable gravity of your phone, or do you want a stripped down phone which has limited gravitational pull? Insofar as you can distil either side down into those reductive framings, I want the stripped down phone. I want it to be a digital swiss army knife, but I’ve never seen anyone spend eight hours a day looking at the snap-out corkscrew on their leatherman. That’s what I want from my phone – a tool I flick open with the specific intention of getting at a wine bottle My intentions should be sovereign, not those of the attention economy. I think that’s achievable.
As an aside – imagine if your corkscrew sprung out of your pocketknife every time you passed a Londis, or whenever your favourite wine manufacturer decided it was time for you to get sloshed. That’s your phone, all the time!
What I want to have always available is a relatively simple list:
- A camera / video camera
- Some means of payment
- Some means of public transport
- The ability to get in and out of locked places I need to get in and out of
- Some means of listening to music / audiobooks / podcasts
I don’t like that I have to carry a phone everywhere, but it is a remarkable multitool. It’s my camera and my video camera. It holds my Vasttrafik pass. It has a music player on it. And it’s also a general purpose emergency device. The fact it’s also a nightmare rectangle into which all the world’s horrors are crammed is its only downside. And that’s not nothing, of course – I understand the desires of the separate device crowd even if I don’t agree.
The problem with the shardification approach is the totality of the shift – I’d need to replace everything my phone does or the replacements are just an additional thing I need to carry around. Any unfilled utility requires me to ‘yes and’ to the phone. And I don’t want to carry around, ideally, more than three things. Currently – my keys, my phone, my headphones. Maybe I should lean into the general bell-endery of modern public life and listen to everything out loud on my phone speaker like a bell-end who is being a bell-end. I could get that minimal EDC (MEDC) down to two things.
Anyway, I don’t think this is a feasible solution (multiple devices), so I think what I need to do is deshittify the phone as much as possible. Perhaps through, as I said in another post, a tiny phone may be the answer. I’m not convinced yet that’s better. although I did buy a Bluefox NX1 to replace the S21 Supercomputer I have as a work phone[1]. So far, I love it The small phone would need to be completely disconnected from my employer’s ecosystem to be properly unobtrusive, and then I’m probably back to having two devices I need to alternate attention between. Again, the question is – where does the shit go?
Some experiments ahead I think.
[1] I know this isn’t a top-range phone now but every phone for like ten years has has processing capabilities far in excess of what people actually need. They sent people to the moon with less processing power than you’d find in a Casio wristwatch. Technological fetishism equates ‘new’ with ‘better’, but the gains are so marginal that they are practically irrelevant. The only need here is capitalism’s – we don’t need to buy better systems, but companies sure need to sell them [2].
[2] This is why I am pretty sanguine about the whole ‘AI has bought up all the tech!’ alarmism. Okay, sure, DDR5 RAM is pretty expensive now but if you think you’re going to enjoy a game better at 4K or at 180 FPS versus 175 FPS then you are so deep in the shit that your brain is starved of oxygen. Yeah, you’re paying a comical amount of money for a 5080 now but you never needed that in the first place. We passed the threshold of ‘enough’ a long time ago. Enjoyment is no longer a function of technological capability [3].
[3] In fact I think I’d go in the other direction – technological capability is a crutch that replaces innovation with spectacle. Look at Larian complaining how the OpenAI RAM buyout means they’ll need to spend more time optimising their next game. I mean… good? Bloatware is a byproduct of excess. None of the best games I have played in the past ten years depended on graphics. Even games that were (are) genuinely stunning are at best fractionally improved by ray-traced reflections in puddles.