Guide to Deshittifying

I’ve been doing this long enough now that I feel I can put together a high level guide to how to deshittify. I don’t think there’s a lot new here but it’s a reshuffling of insights into the ‘highest bang for your buck’. Do this stuff and you’ll go a long way towards having a healthier tech ecosystem. You can fetishise it beyond that, as I have, but let’s assume you’re a normal person who wants a better relationship with technology but has not yet adopted that desire as a significant pillar of their personality [1]. You just want to feel like you’re more in control. So here is where you should direct your efforts:

Your computers

Put Linux on them. No, don’t look at me like that. Just go and put fucking Linux on them. This is non-negotiable from a sovereignty perspective. It doesn’t really matter the distribution – that’s the obsession of tiresome nerds. I like Fedora, but it doesn’t really matter one way or another. Not only Linux, but also try to pick open source alternatives for everything you use. You won’t be able to go all the way with this – none of us can truly escape the gravity well of Big Tech, but you can pretty far. At a minimum:

• Get rid of Microsoft Office or Google Docs. Use LibreOffice instead.
• No more Gmail or Microsoft Outlook. Use Thunderbird and a separate email provider.
• Use Librewolf instead of Chrome

You’re not going to be a zealot about this – you don’t need to believe OSS offers a path to a more moral life. You just need to have the option to have eyeballs on the source code, because you need to know what you’re agreeing to with each update. You fundamentally cannot get that with closed source software. If you must use closed source software – and you’ll need to for hardware drivers, media codecs and so forth – keep an eye out for when open source alternatives become feasible. Closed-source lock-in now is not necessarily closed-source lock-in forever.

Wait, but I use Adobe or some other fucking thing

Okay, look – there is an important corollary to all of this and it’s that there exist closed-source proprietary software packages that people need to use and don’t come with alternatives. Your options are much more limited, but they do exist:

• Find an open source alternative anyway. Force your colleagues to bend to your will.
  • This is, sadly, just not an option if your employer is deeply embedded in a proprietary ecosystem like Adobe.
• Buy/repurpose a device that is intended to be your sacrificial offering to the shitware gods.
  • A self-contained machine that runs the corporate shitware you have to use.
• Run the shitware in a virtual-machine – install a debloated Windows 10 or 11 ISO and use the software there.
  • There are important performance considerations of course.
• Dual boot your system.
  • I don’t advocate this – a lot of the friction people have with Linux comes from technological lag associated with dual booting. While Linux will cheerfully read data from a Windows drive, it will do it at a fraction of its possible speed.
  • Nonetheless, this is an option.
• Investigate the use of Linux containers like WINE or Bottles, which give you compatibility layers that let you run Windows software as if it was Linux software.
  • This works pretty well for individual applications. It does not work well with proprietary ecosystems or cloud services.

This is though the only real point of genuine tension – if you need something you literally cannot get on Linux, then you need what you need, right? But even so you can cut down and debloat. There are scripts online that will turn off all the optional shit from Windows 11. You’ll need to keep using them because Microsoft is So Thirsty, but you can get rid of Edge and Copilot and Teams at least as long as until the next forced install.

Your Phone

If your phone can take an alternative privacy focused ROM, then put that on it. Degoogle if you can – increasingly you are losing all sovereignty over a device you paid for because Google is making Google Play Services the ultimate arbitrator of what you can and cannot run on your device. And, I don’t know if you’ve looked at the Play store, but it’s full of shit-riddled spyware and ad-sponsored ‘free’ apps. Using something like F-Droid gets you the good stuff, but Google doesn’t want you using F-Droid. If you can put something like LineageOS or GrapheneOS on your phone, you should do that as a matter of priority.

If you can’t, then there are other options provided you actually own the device and can unlock the developer layer of the operating system. If you can set your phone to talk to your computer, you can force off services you don’t want, uninstall the uninstallable and a whole range of other things. Canta for android, working in conjunction with Shizuku, will let you give your shitware a violent enema it won’t expect.

Push and Pull

Switch off all your fucking notifications. You decide when it’s time to look at your phone. Get off of 95% of social media – it is not good for you. Abandon Reddit, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok – fuck all these parasitic platforms. If you must, engage with them on the most limited terms – restrict their ability to make money from your eyeballs. FB Purity does a good job of making Facebook usable, for example. Or come join the Haunted Playground (or if you’re on it, check it out more often) where your presence is what matters, not your monetizable attention.

Stop letting Big Tech decide when it’s time for you to engage. Don’t let them push their needs onto you. Pull them, when you have the motivation.

Being a Person

Get off Amazon. It is corroding your soul. Avoid corporate lock-in in general – even if it seems trivial or harmless. When you ‘login with Google’ you are handing them phenomenal control over your life. How do you feel about your facial data being used to train Palantir’s civil dismantlement efforts? That’s what happens when Google makes you verify your age with a selfie. Even if you don’t care about a site, logging into it with Google’s SSO surrenders your right to your own physiology. And if you really don’t care about the site, why are you making an account with it anyway? Start to get more intransigent with the expectations sites have for you. They won’t let you look at the content without an age check? Fuck them, and their content too.

Get yourself a sacrificial email account. Use that instead.

Find yourself a third space, away from work and your home, where you are allowed to exist alongside the rest of the world without anyone looking at you as a revenue target. A library. A local pub. A park. Whatever it is – find a place where you can Be without being of Service to the System. For me, this is still on my todo list I have to admit.

Stop looking to algorithms for suggestions for how to spend your time. They are in service of Capital, they are not in service to you. Spotify doesn’t give you a recommendation because it thinks it’s the best song you can hear right now. It gives you a recommendation because it’s cheap to serve while being compelling enough to keep you on the platform so it can serve you more inanity. Spotify’s competition is not Youtube or Netflix. Spotify’s competition is the existential dread of silence.

If you want recommendations for books, albums, TV shows – that’s what your friends are for. They know you, they want to talk to you about your shared passions. Their incentives align with yours. If your friends have shitty taste, then rebuild a critical engagement with online media – not social networks or recommender sites, but long-form journalism. Learn how an outlet’s tastes align with yours. Accept that they’ll recommend things you don’t like, but accept that as part of the journey. The risk of experimentation within your time is disappointment. The reward is discovering something joyful that you never expected to find [1].

Take time to learn how to enjoy your own company.

Learn to differentiate between what is legal and what is ethical and what is pragmatic. Why is it important to support the artists you admire? Because you want them to make more things in the future. Does that mean supporting their distributor, or publisher, or whatever? If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing – maybe you download that album you like but you buy a t-shirt from the band because you know that gives them more revenue than the sale. Do they have a Patreon? Maybe support them there.

You should absolutely support your favourite creators, but you don’t need to endorse the systems in which they are forced to be embedded. Sure, ad-blocking might deprive a Youtube personality of a fraction of a penny from your view of their video. You know what makes up for that a million times fold? Sending them a Kofi. Or even just sharing their content – eventually someone else that may not have stumbled upon the video otherwise is going to give them the ad revenue.

Media

Buy (?) your media. Don’t stream it. Self-host it. Make curation of what you like as important as having access to it. Sometimes we are defined more by what we reject than what we accept. I don’t care if this is an old MP3 player loaded up with MP3s or a bunch of physical DVDs you still play instead of browsing aimlessly through Netflix. Ownership matters, because all digital purchases are mere temporary contracts with unreliable third parties. Sony recently removed hundreds of movies from the accounts of people who bought them online because their distribution agreement ended. Note, they weren’t paying to stream the movies – they paid ownership prices for a rental agreement and then didn’t get a penny refunded. The only thing that should be of risk to your media library is a house-fire. And even then, back your shit up.

Why do it at all?

The rewards for this may seem intangible, and I don’t want to overpromise, but…

• You’ll be amazed at how less stressful it is to work with technology once the shittification is removed.
• You’ll never find yourself unexpectedly dealing with a changed workflow unless you opt-in to it
• You’ll never find yourself dealing with an unexpected version of media you didn’t actively select
• You’ll develop a ‘person first’ appreciation of the world when it’s no longer being forced on you via an algorithm
• You don’t need to care, really, about what’s happening in the world of technology. If what you’re doing works,. who gives a shit what Google just did to its free Drive accounts?
  • That in turn clears your mind to focus on what actually matters to you.
• You decouple yourself from the cycle of manufactured urgency. Even ‘the news’ is a vehicle for selling you something. It may be a mindset, obdedience, or your consent… but they’re pushing a product.
  • Often that product is anxiety.
• Technology becomes transactional, applications become appliances.

Never forget that you’re supposed to be in charge here! Every time a ‘waiting’ cursor appears on your screen when you issue a device an instruction, it’s show you for the techno-beta cuck you have become. Don’t wait for your computer to decide if it’s going to obey you. Demand obedience and get it.

But what of the costs, financial and otherwise?

This isn’t an unhinged pro-sovereignty manifesto. I’m well aware of the fact that this is something that is going to cost you, but nothing worth having in life is free. So be aware:

• Nobody is coming to save you. You need to maintain all of this yourself.
  • Back. Your. Shit. Up.
• The timing probably isn’t great unless you have some spare tech at home already, or a bank account that needs aggressive siphoning. The cost of new devices and storage is currently eye watering. You may have to temper your ambitions to match your bankbook.
  • But see below!
• You will have to learn to live with boredom again. Over-stimulation will be gone.
  • When the algorithms stop constantly servicing you, you’ll forget what time is supposed to be used for. You’ll have to learn how to spend it instead of having it killed for you.
  • You don’t get serenity from avoiding the algorithms. You get silence, which can be serenity but you better be prepared to work for that because it’s not a free side-effect.
• Your country matters. Some countries will resist this.
  • A lot of the biggest frustrations I have at the moment are with Sweden and BankID. Other countries will be a problem if you want to use a VPN. Age verification may end up being operating system level for some areas. You’ll need to work out your solutions to this.
  • Digital sovereignty after all involves you relocating autonomy from the powerful back to yourself, and they don’t want that.
• There’s a lot of social shit when people don’t understand what you’re doing or why. You will sound like a weird zealot today. Tomorrow you’ll be an inspirational visionary.
  • I assume.
• There’s a lot of logistical shit when you need to work at the interfaces of people (sharing files, playlists, etc)
  • You’ll need to find the sweet point between ‘being that guy/gal’ and working with the people you care about.
• You will need to bend over for some tasks – not everything has a pure or feasible alternative (Steam, Discord, etc).
  • You cannot be ‘all in’ on this. There are some fundamental limits that come to play when you want to do things that offer you no alternatives.
• Some of this requires professional privilege too – not everyone can do everything. You have to do what you can. It’s better to take 2d6 psychic damage a day than 20d6.
• You need vigilance against reshittification. This is why open source and avoiding venture capital and private equity is such a big theme of this work.
  • Constant vigilance is required.

The Minimum Viable Product of Deshittification

All of that said, This is all you actually need:

• A spare computer that you can throw Linux onto. It doesn’t need to be ultra-high spec. It can even I guess be your main computer, it’s just better if you can tinker without worry. It needs to:
  • Run some lightweight web services
  • Run a couple of media servers
  • Save as a basic NAS
• A willingness to learn to do some stuff that may be a little intimidating. There is a lot of snagging
  • And I’ll help!
    • Seriously, I will share my backup scripts, my RSS playlist scrapers, my YAML configurations.
    • I’ll take you through SSH authentications and wireguard networks.
    • I will help you work through the workarounds.
• A willingness to do things you already do with slightly different interfaces.
  • LibreOffice for example is a 100% replacement for Microsoft Office in functionality, not in ‘vibes’.
• To be willing to put up with the occasional rolled-eye response from someone who asks you to collaborate on their Google Sheets file or whatever.
  • You are going to become, in your own life, an intentional point of friction that others must navigate. Fuck them, they can’t reasonably expect you shittify your life for their convenience.
  • And who knows – maybe you’ll inspire them to deshittify their own lives.
• An acceptance that the cost of sovereignty is occasional frustration.
  • Don’t backslide. Things will get better with experience.

That’s it. Everything else is optimisation. I bought three mini-PCs, but I could have done everything I did with the spare Raspberry Pis I have lying around. I have hefty online expenses, but you could just repurpose an old external drive. I backup 20TB of data and media every night through automated scripts. You can maybe get away with a much cheaper option if you have less to protect than I do. You can use DuckDuckGo instead of Kagi. It doesn’t cost you anything to move to Linux on your own computer. You can dial down on the telemetry even on a standard Android phone if you’re willing to use an ADB bridge and some debloating software. And again – if buying isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing [2]. That’s an ethical call you need to make.
If I got to, say, 90% deshittified by going all in on it, I’d bet you can get to 75% deshittified without spending a penny.

[1] The other major pillar of my personality is the album Imaginal Disk from Magdalena Bay.
[2] It actually, literally and legally, never was. Stealing is ‘taking something without authorization with the intention of permanently depriving the owner of possession’. That was never true of making a copy of things.