Okay, we’re staring down the final stretch of this project now and I’ve covered a lot of things. Done a lot of things. I’ve seen some shit, man. But also, I’ve now been doing it long enough that I can see the ‘Reshittification’ start to set in. August’s monthly report then is on the CONSTANT VIGILANCE you need to do to keep yourself serene and clean while allowing the raging sewers of Internet Shitware to discharge all around you.

Fetishizing

Shittification comes in a few flavours, but one of the most pertinent ones here is in terms of ‘creep’. Too much deshittification is reshittification from the other direction. The goal of all of this after all is to have a better relationship with modern society, not to fetishise your isolation. This isn’t a purity test. It’s an actionable framework for reclaiming sanity.

So, optimisation creep is very much a thing – it’s when you find a nice balance between convenience and sovereignty but you talk yourself believing it’s still a concession rather than a mindful compromise. The point at which that happens will vary from person to person, but this is where we see people overshooting. A common example:

• I hate that corporations can control what I can listen to online.
• I hate Spotify because it’s one of those corporations.
• I’m going to cancel Spotify and replace Spotify with media I own.
  • Well done, you’ve hit the balance point. Now, you need to…
• MP3s are too ephemeral. They don’t really exist. I don’t really own them.
  • Woah, hang on a bit buddy – sure, they’re digital but if you have control over them then you…
• What I really need is to return to the old days of a physical media player.
  • Yeah, that does sound pretty neat but what did you…
• An iPod only lets me access digital media, I want to listen to all these physical CDs I bought
  • Wait, you bought all your old albums again on CD? What were you…
• The real solution here is an old-school portable CD player that I picked up for 2,000kr online
  • This is the solution to a problem you don’t actually have. This is actually a different solution to a new problem.

I definitely see the appeal of moving to CDs and physical media in general. In fact, I have jury-rigged a system at home that uses CD-sized acrylic panels with NFC stickers, tapped onto an NFC reader, that plays an album from the media centre like it was a CD. I get it. But at a certain point here you’ve forgotten your original goal in search of the aesthetics as opposed to the benefits of deshittification. Ironically you move from consumerism, to anti-consumerism, to a higher level form of ultra-niche consumerism.

You need to give each significant step you take time to settle. Get used to it. See how easily you live with it, how it beds itself into the rest of your life. How often it makes your nose wrinkle. Many people get into homelabbing and then they install fifty containers because they think ‘Oh, that’s cool – yeah, I really do need an industry grade certificate authority, because then my self-hosted single-sign on architecture will properly resolve with crypographic robustness’.

You don’t need that buddy.

You don’t need your own GPS time server, or military-grade randomiser, or your own self-hosted numbers station. Your hobby is now maintaining your home lab, it’s not using your home lab to maintain your hobbies. Fine, if that’s what you want to do – the homelab movement will give you a thousand ways to cosplay a sysadmin. But presumably that’s not why you started down the path.

Pick a few things you want to focus on. Let them settle. Identify unwelcome friction, direct expansions to deal with that. Otherwise you’ve just got new shit all up in your deshittification.

Reshittification

Here’s the real risk – we lean towards the effortless in what we do in online society, and as such we tend to adopt a ‘defaults are okay’ attitude. Whenever you accept automatic updates, what you’re basically saying is ‘I’m okay with this breaking at any time, even when I’m not ready to fix it’. I had that recently with Bitwarden – an automated update of the browser plugin broke my self-hosted vault.

All of this work is so fragile that a single update can violently reshittify your system. If Linux begins to introduce kernel level AI support, for example, it doesn’t matter if you don’t use it yourself. You’ve opened the door to some open-source Copilot bullshit messing up your day. That’s fine if you’re okay with that, but you should know before it lands on your desktop.

Everything here is susceptible to changes:

• Change in EULAs
• Change in protocols
• Change in rate limits
• Change in monetization strategies

It’s not enough that something isn’t currently shittified, you need to look at how easily it can become shittified and how much that becomes your problem. If Google Search starts charging a penny per search result, it doesn’t matter to me because I’m not using it any more. If they start allowing people to search directly in my gmails, that’s fine – my profile is essentially now just lorem ipsum and spam. But if YouTube starts restricting channel RSS feeds, that’s going to affect me. That’s a structural vulnerability that I need to have a plan for if (when) it happens [1].

So, what’s the business model underpinning your external dependencies and how does it align with what you want as a customer? To what extent does the external dependency have a business need to provide an excellent product at a good price, and how much of it is ‘free features’ that are eventually going to be sold on to venture capital? I’d say ‘where are you the customer and where are you the product’ but that’s an analysis no longer really holds. For the most shittified services you’re paying to be the product. It’s like if we charged rent to the milking cows. But yeah – are people providing your infrastructure because of ideological adherence to a wider goal (like open source software), or because they’re scaling up wildly to fatten the pitch for VC to come in and monetize?

What happens when you need to swap part of your stack out?

The wider question here is – what relies on trust and goodwill, and what relies on enforceable constraints? Software that only updates when you tell it to update is an enforceable constraint. Media that exists on your hard-drives is subject to enforceable constraints. Computers you physically own – enforceable constraints. Local first dependencies – enforceable constraints. You want to build a stack like this:

• Software you control
• On computers you own
• On a network you can physically separate from the world
• Operating on files that belong to you

If any part of that isn’t true, that’s a vulnerability. It doesn’t mean it’s actually a problem, or that it ever will become a problem. But it does mean that you need to rely on trust and goodwill, and the modern economy has given us few reasons to do that. This is why I never went down the ‘Use Proton instead of Google’ or ‘Tuta instead of Gmail’ path. Degoogling is a shorthand term that misleads as to the goal. It doesn’t mean ‘temporarily move to a platform that wants to be the next Google but maybe a bit better if you’re lucky’. These are ecosystems that are operated by less psychopathic players, sure – but if they’re not psychopaths now it doesn’t mean they won’t be in five years time.

You might have to do a bit of this anyway. You might want to accept a bit of risk to alleviate the corporate IT cosplay that comes with being your own tech support for every part of your life. But then the question becomes, again, ‘What happens if this part of my stack goes away?’. What do you own, what do you control, and how open are the protocols you’re using? If Zettlr shittifies it’s fine – all my files are in markdown, it’s just an inconvenience. My email accounts, hosted at Hetzner, are just a pain in the arse to migrate but I’ve done that a dozen times over the years. You need to be aware of the exit friction associated with unilateral shittification. In fact – rule for life – judge services not by their price to buy in but their price to escape.

Un-deshittifiability

Some parts of your life will be impossible to deshittify. Your choices are either to completely opt-out, to minimise as much as you can, or to knuckle under. Visa and Mastercard are not just payment processors – they are also arbiters of global morality. I however cannot invent a version of the monetary model that operates independently. Paypal is another layer on top of that. I can probably not use Paypal, but if I use my bank card it’s still going through American payment processors. That is – at least currently – undeshittifiable. I could investigate solutions like cryptocurrencies but that would turn me into another kind of unbearable tech bro. Currency is a tool, not a lifestyle. Or it should be. As the Bible says, the love of money is the root of all evil. Terry Pratchett has a similar take – ‘at the root of all evil is treating people like things’. I don’t want to fetishize my finances.

I could use Klarna, but Klarna is just Paypal in a slightly different outfit. Swish similar – it’s still all tied into fintech. Even my Tapster fob is a fintech abomination. Cash is about as good as it gets but it’s not accepted very widely in Sweden (even with recent legislation making some shops accept it as a matter of law [2]) and it’s not like you can use it on the Internet.

What I’m saying is – you can’t deshittify some things and the trick here is making your peace with it. You should experiment a bit to see what the options are, pay attention to what’s coming down the pipe, but you’ll drive yourself mad if you try to achieve the functionally un-achievable. You can shittify your whole mindset by thinking this is an all or nothing proposition. Federation gives social networks a veneer of acceptability but they’re still full of the same assholes as the closed ones. Sometimes the problem isn’t so much the technology as it is the people who use it. Civility does not survive Internet scale.

Compromise

You’ll find going through this process that a lot of people just don’t want you to. Shittification is a kind of consensus – we’re all suffering together. Sure, Spotify is rewriting our musical taste so we prefer the calming sounds of ambient algorithms versus anything as challenging as an actual song. But people know Spotify, and if you’re using your own self-hosted stack they’ll get confused and irritated. You won’t be able to share your playlists with them without them opting in to your weird kink. I have a colleague who I was sharing ‘sad emo girls being sad’ song suggestions with – I showed her an album on my phone, and she then tried to search for her suggestion only to be baffled it wasn’t there. No – my front-end just looks like Spotify. It’s my own self-hosted stack. Yeah, I get that’s irritating that you can’t just seamlessly let me hear the thing you want me to. But I’m still not installing Spotify.

People expect uniformity. When your Linux system behaves a little bit differently, or your document opens weird on their computer, or you aren’t checking the Teams channels you have been unwillingly added to, it’ll be a friction you need to deal with.

The wrong solution is to say ‘Ah, I’ll use this just for this one situation’. Again, Terry Pratchett has a tremendously wise take on this – if you break a promise for a good reason, it won’t be long before you break it for a bad reason. If you are genuinely deshittifying, you can’t stick your face in the toilet whenever someone else has shit they want you to smell. Social conformity is reshittification.

You have chosen, intentionally, to live a life outside of the defaults. it’s not your job to adapt to those that don’t.

[1] The plan currently when that happens is to just get rid of YouTube from my day.
[2] As someone who has often tried to spend Scottish notes in England, the fact it is ‘legal tender’ doesn’t actually necessarily translate into anyone taking it.