The Nose Wrinkle Metric

So, what do we have for the intellectual framework that makes up Deshittification 2026 so far? Quite a lot, actually!

A general theory of shit
A meaningful audit of the shit
A shittification scale that tracks progress

I also have specific, detailed case studies on a bunch of important vectors of deshittification:

Moving to Linux
Moving from Spotify
Moving to a tiny phone

More of those to come with time – my progress is quite a bit further than the documentation of it. But at the end of May, heading close to the half-way 2026 mark, I feel good about all of this.

The next step is how to identify when you’ve caught the scent of shit, so you (and I) can audit our lives to see what needs to be dealt with. That’s the topic of this month’s progress report.

The Nose Wrinkle

Think hard. What are the ‘shit smells’ that assault you on a day by day basis? By this I mean, as per the general theory of shit, where do you notice it? And a lot of it comes down to how often you are metaphorically wrinkling your nose at an interaction. And you might wrinkle your nose when you identify a number of factors:

How often do you feel corporate eyes on you?
How often is your workflow changed without your consent?
How often are the wishes you have expressed in the past been overridden?
When are you seeing friction at the interfaces of interactions?
How often are you paying for things you ‘own’?
How easily could you move the things you ‘own’ to a different ecosystem?
How often does an interaction demand your attention when you haven’t explicitly summoned it?
How often are you being up-sold features as a result of your insufficient piety to a corporation?

And when I say wrinkling your nose here obviously I don’t mean it literally, It can be an eye-roll. It can be sighs, frowns, silent condemnations. It can be frustrated stabbing at a keyboard or wild angry shaking of a mouse. It can be powering a device on and off in the hope the old tech-support rubric helps and a reboot fixes whatever unfixable problem you have. It is almost always though a tangible expression of frustration – an embedded micro-reaction that carries angst out of proportion with its physicality. And bear in mind the nose that wrinkles may not just be yours. It might an impatient shopkeeper at a till, while a grumbling queue fidgets behind you. Tangible frustration is the key, even if it’s not yours.

All of these here are points where the smell of shit is noticeable. Maybe you can just wrinkle your nose and move on – but you know, once you let yourself smell it things get a bit trickier. You’ll notice the pungency more frequently and it’ll bother you more. Largely these indicators come together into some broader themes. The four toilet demons of the shitpocalypse:

Telemetry and Spyware
Consent and Autonomy
Rent-seeking and degradation of ownership
Lock-in and platform capture

The latter is perhaps the most insidious. So much of modern tech is sold on the idea that if you just invest a little more, it’ll give you the experience you want and the one it has been promising. You need email? Try Gmail. Say, wouldn’t it be great if you could integrate your email and your office suite? Give Google Docs a try. Sure, you use Google Docs but it’s be so much easier if you also used Google Drive. Using Google Drive? Guess how much you’ll benefit from a pro plan that also includes Gemini. Ah, using Gemini, eh? You should let it automate your Gmail. By the time you’ve been fully institutionalized by an ecosystem it’s too much hassle to escape because the sunk cost gets you. Amazon Prime, for example – I mean, you’ve already paid for the shipping, right? It’d be weird if you went shopping elsewhere…

The wrinkling of the nose is a qualitative. subjective, and vibe based diagnostic But it’s also real and grounded. It’s inherently authentic. You can’t gaslight your own micro-expressions the way you can your own conscious analysis.

The Pause for Thought

So, the nose-wrinkle metric – that’s not just for tech, but for life in general. How many steps does an interaction require, and how annoying is each step? This is why I got a Tapster fob, because the dance of using Google Wallet was awkward and annoying. Get the phone, unlock it, open google wallet, hold it against the payment machine, probably identify myself with biometrics, put the phone away. It’s the same, mostly, for a card – get the wallet, open it, tease the card out, put it against the machine, maybe enter a key code, put the card back in the wallet, close the wallet, put the wallet back in your pocket [1].

That’s the smell – it’s annoying and slow and cumbersome. But also – it doesn’t have to be that way for any interaction. You can strip down the authentications and fiddle with settings so it’s more seamless. You could change your wallet, or where you store your card.

The problem is that it’s a system of tradeoffs and you may solve one problem by introducing new problems. Why did my Google Wallet need the app open to use it? It doesn’t, technically, but I found every time I stood by a pole on a tram the machine there would just – whimsically and without permission – take the payment for a single ticket regardless of the fact I had a monthly pass. So, I could change my behaviour – avoid leaning against poles – or I can get the software to be more restrictive. There’s probably a kind of Lagrange point where changes in my behaviour and settings on the phone can come into perfect harmony and Wallet will behave flawlessly and seamlessly at all times. That is, as long as you’re willing to bend over for the telemetry.

But why the fuck should my phone be telling me where I’m allowed to stand? Why the fuck should Vasttraffik be allowed to take my money without my consent? Sure, neither of them are in collusion with the other but I’m covered in shit regardless.

So, having identified a nose-wrinkle situation I had to consider what the solution was. And the solution, for me, was to get rid of Google Wallet entirely because it became pretty obvious as I thought through what all the other associated smells were. I was giving my financial history to an American mega-corp. It would switch settings on and off again seemingly randomly with updates. It’d override my wishes for frictionful payment. A lot of frustrations went along with that simple tool. So, away it went.

Spotify tries to re-engineer my tastes so as to better suit a lean-back, royalty free, listening experience. It’s tracking my behaviour constantly. It overrides my wishes with music I didn’t explicitly select. It tries very hard to move me away from an artist or album-centric experience in the service of playlistification. It makes me pay monthly for access to music I would have owned maybe twenty times over if I had just bought the albums at the start. I can’t simply move my playlists and such to another service – there’s lock-in. Not in terms of the songs themselves but in terms of the massive effort needed to replicate my curated experience. Again, there’s a lot of smells.

Windows – filled with telemetry, constant changes to apps and workflows, regular incidences of the hideous ‘Do you want to do X? ‘Yes’ or ‘Not now” dialogs which hint so clearly at future harassment to come. An unwillingness to play with services I might like to use. Constant upselling and badgering. Fuck off, I don’t want Edge. Why the fuck is Teams installed when I have uninstalled it six times now? And why does everything launch at startup when I explicitly set them not to? Why does Windows decide when I install updates, and when I reboot? Why am I not allowed to choose where my files are stored without wrestling dark patterns of obfuscation? Why does it feel like I’m in service to the convenience of Microsoft rather than vice-versa? And don’t get me started on what happens when it’s a centrally managed work device – there has been more than one occasion where, through insufficient deference to the calendrical reboot observances of the university, that a laptop has forced a reboot and upgrade in the middle of a lecture. So many nose wrinkles, and so many of them can’t simply be wished away.

The nose wrinkle is a signal. It’s a symptom. It’s the point where you should stop and think ‘Wait, what am I doing here?’. And that’s when you need to think about what you’re going to do about it.

Capitulation, Configuration or Counter-Offensive

Not everything is going to be unbearable to everyone, and having wrinkled your nose and thought about what caused it, you need to think about how much you care about it. The thing about deshittification that I hinted at in the last update is that capitulation is easy and there’s so much else you’ve got to be doing. Many of the solutions are daunting. Not everyone is going to want to self-host a Navidrome instance full of personally curated MP3s that they sunk a small fortune into obtaining. They’re just going to want Spotify to be less irritating. Everyone has to find their own balance here.

For some people, and for some tasks, the solution is going to be to go limp. Just learn to live with it. I can’t fight globalisation of the financial system – at least for the moment – so I need to learn to let go. I can minimise how often I need to engage with it, but I can’t simply boycott Visa or Mastercard. They power my bank cards. I can’t just bypass Paypal, because it has become a functioning layer of infrastructure for the Internet. What I can do is make use of alternatives where they are available. Those might be inconvenient. They might be side-grades of autonomy. They might emit a pungency of their own. But functionally, not everything is fixable. Capitulation is a defensible strategy when the time, effort or infeasibility of alternatives is too much to bear.

For most problems, it’s going to be possible to configure your way to a better relationship with tech. Switch of all your fucking notifications, for example. Don’t let the pocket demon of your phone tell you when it’s time to look at it. That’s fucking crazy. No seriously, it is objectively fucking insane that you leap to the summons of a device you paid for. While you can’t configure away everything, you can definitely set most applications to be less needy and invasive. And when you can’t do it through the application’s own tools. you will probably find some brave soul on the Internet has done work for you. You can install ‘debloated’ Windows instances for example that are pared down to the bone. It’s still Microsoft, it’s still impossibly needy, it’s still offputtingly thirsty for you to use all its many and varied tools and services. But it’s notably better than what you’ll get from Microsoft themselves. You can use the tech and tools you’re currently using but minimise ‘reeks per interaction’. The problem here of course is that gradually over time you desensitize yourself to the smell. It’s a checkbox here, a registry change there. And eventually it’s being told, once you’ve followed the breadcrumb trail of appeasement, that you can’t look at your webmail until you upload your passport to Microsoft [2]. As long as you know that going in, you can probably carve a workable life somewhere in the shit.

Or you can do as I’ve done and mount what is essentially a tech insurgency, violently ripping out the plumbing of my life and replacing it with my own ad-hoc and not entirely sewage-tight pipework. That’s high cost and high disruption, but ultimately the only feasible ‘minimal reek per interaction’ outcome. It’s also one that is based, for me, on assessing the trajectory of appeasement and not being happy with where it goes in a few years time. I’ll spend the time fixing this when it’s convenient to me, not when it’s forced upon me by external actors.

Constant Vigilance

The key thing here is that you can’t sit down and retroactive audit your nostrils. I mean, you can but it’s not going to work. You need to train yourself to observe them in the wild and link them to the cause.

Nostril activity is context dependent and mood dependent. A bad smell doesn’t justify burning the building down. A slow elevator does not justify the hiring of a wrecking ball. But pay special attention to the nostril wrinkles that recur, because that’s when you’re smelling the shit. Make a note. Identify the cause. Then work out what you’re going to do about it. You should keep a log of some kind. You should name names. McCarthy the hell out of it – channel your inner House of Uncompetetive Activities committee. Get your infrastructure to squeal on its mates. Get your friends to squeal on their infrastructure. And keep doing it. This isn’t a one and done process. This is you for life, bro. The minute you let your guard down, the minute you agree to give your email to a desk clerk for an easier interaction – that’s when they get you.

Get them first.

Frustration is a sign of stress. Stress is a silent killer. Your tech is killing you. Treat it like a hostile attacker in a dark alleyway. Batter it tae fuck with anything you’ve got to hand. Importantly, capture the data live. You forget how miserable it is to be cold when you’re standing in front of a warm fire. You forget how bad the burst pipes smell when in your own comparatively fragrant household.

[1] By comparison for the fob – pull keys out of pocket, mash keys against machine, put keys back in pocket.
[2] Trust me, that is coming. That is not a hyperbolic exaggeration. It is a prediction for the next three years.