A General Theory of Shit
I realised early on in this project that I needed a theory behind it. It’s not enough to go on vibes here – ‘enshittification’ is a sticky term (urgh) but its very vagueness ensures that it’s going to blend into a generic slop that means ‘a bad thing’. So, I present here Michael’s General Theory of Shit.
The First Law of Shit is that Shit increases over time. It’s inevitable. No matter what technological convenience or time-saving hack you’ve found, it’s at best a transmutation. It changes shit from one form to another form. At best it redirects shit.
The Second Law of Shit is that the only way to destroy Shit is to avoid Shit. But that leads to an uncomfortable truth – Shit is like energy, it can’t be destroyed. Shit avoided locally is shit redistributed globally.
The Third Law of Shit is that your own Shit is infinitely preferable to the shit of other people. It’s about agency – the Shit you choose to accept in your life says something about you as a person, as does the Shit you refuse to wade through. Deshittification is really a form of repackaged mindfulness.
Okay, fine so far – but what is Shit?
It’s a lot of things.
Shit can be cognitive – how much does it require my attention, my memory? How much does it demand of me in terms of decision making, and when do I have to make those decisions? Do they get forced upon me at a time of stress, or can I defer them until I have time to deal with it. How much do I need to mentally shift gears to engage with it?
Shit can be temporal. It can manifest as delays or interruptions. Or as latency. To what degree am I in charge of the timing of what I’m doing in life? When Android forces me to wait for an update to be installed before I can access my travel pass, that’s temporal shit.
Shit can be social. How much do I need to explain what I’m doing, or justify my decisions? How much do I need to manage expectations – my own and others? When I say at work ‘Teams is workplace cancer, I won’t use it’ to what extent does that become a battle? When I opt out of the workplace Slack, what do I lose? How often do I need to have the ‘Have you considered this workaround’ conversation, or reinforce my already pretty solid reputation as a stubborn asshole who persists in making life difficult for himself?
Maybe the shit is logistical – how much do I need to charge devices, or consciously go out of my way to sync them? How often do I need to negotiate with my own rickety bespoke architecture of servers and storage boxes? How much am I dependent on a network? How much am I carrying? How often do I need to update things? And when they screw up, how difficult is it for me to fix things?
Shit can also be affective. The anxiety of a notification, the dread of an email you don’t want to deal with. It can be irritation at being interrupted, or finding small barriers put in the way of simple tasks. It can be impotent rage – my own special brand – when things just don’t work without a fucking negotiation. It can be helplessness (the unhelpful ‘something went wrong’ error message when you absolutely can’t afford for something to go wrong). Affective Shit is frustration, and powerlessness, and the general sense that the locus of your life is inverted – that you serve your technology, rather than the other way around.
And of course, Shit can be moral shit. How complicit does using something make you in the wider context of the society in which we live? Does the money I pay for Google Drive implicitly fund Murderbot AI on the battlefield? Does the Samsung TV I just bought leak telemetry to its corporate overlords that they have no right to have? To what extent is deshittifying a personal quixotic crusade and to what extent is it a moment of solidarity? I’m increasingly invested in the idea of ‘De-Americanising’ my life too, although less invested in the ‘Buy from the EU’ movement. I don’t really see swapping one over-reaching bureaucracy for another is a net positive. Am I happy with Paypal, Visa and Mastercard acting as the moral architecture of my life? What are my options? Klarna? God, no – that’s another Shithole company run by Shitholes. And yet, it’s not like I can go back to all cash in a digital economy like Sweden. Trying to use paper money in a Swedish shop is like trying to barter for bitcoins with apples.
And as a side note note to the Moral Shit category – how much of all of this is really just me being performatively resistant for the sake of it? If you can’t destroy Shit, what’s the point?
And I think this brings in the third pillar of the General Theory of Shit. The first are the three laws, the second are the Shit Categories, and the third is the Smell of Shit.
Not all of these categories are equivalent, and their relative pungency is based on contextual elements. In some circumstances, I might live with the Moral Shit (the way Spotify fucks over artists, for example) because the logistical Shit is just so much more tiresome to deal with. In others, it may be the other way around – degoogling might justify logistical Shit in favour of wiping away some of that moral Shit.
I think the volume of Shit doesn’t really change. You’re always having to take a great big bite of the Shit sandwich. That’s life in the modern era. What you do have control over though is the texture, smell and flavour of the sandwich. And again, your own Shit is preferable to Shit you’re forced to swallow.
I guess the general note here is that this project isn’t philosophy. It’s plumbing. It’s about changing the vectors of shittification – redirecting shit where I can and where it’s appropriate to do so. If one of our senior managers demands we use Teams at work or we won’t see whatever tiresome memo is being passed off as corporate strategy – well, that sounds like a management problem rather than a me problem. Email has been fine for decades, it’s fine now. Fuck you and your Teams fetish. Organizational shitware is a perfect example actually – I don’t care if the organization gets the backed up shit that it tried to send downstream.
Everything else is more nuanced. Moving from Google Drive to Hetzner – an ongoing task – is a multi-factor transformation. It reduces moral shit (Google as a bad actor, my data as training for AI, surveillance through the ad economy) in exchange for logistical shit (I needed to write my own backup scripts, it costs more to do this than to host on Google, I don’t have a Google Drive app I can deploy everywhere). The amount of shit is probably roughly the same but the malevolence (the smell) of the shit is different.
Everything is Connected to Everything Else
A good framework will eventually pose uncomfortable questions, because local comfort is global discomfort relocated. Comfort is anti-shit. And there are going to be some troublesome considerations here. What about when stepping aside redirects shit somewhere I don’t want it to go? What about when moral shit is overwhelming but the logistical shit is too much to cognitively bear? What about when performative shit is genuinely a form of solidarity shit that helps people?
I don’t post anything about Palestine or Ukraine or ICE or or or. Not because I don’t have an opinion, but because I feel structurally, intellectually, morally and logistically powerless. These situations are horrifying in an incredibly holistic way – a full body activism paralysis. Some people find activity a way to deal with that – to deal with the cognitive lock-up by moving. ‘We need to do something. This is something, so let’s do that’. I understand it. But solidarity here has to mean more than ‘it makes me feel better by showing solidarity with other helpless souls’, right?
Why should I be allowed to feel better when I’m not actually the one suffering? Isn’t the minimum I owe, as a human being, a fully articulated and intentional emotional acceptance of my impotence in the face of global injustice?
It’s not nothing to make your local community feel better through performative activism. I try to avoid the performative shit, which is in itself a new form of social shit, but that’s also affective shit. I feel so bad about so many situations, and it would be easier (less shit) to be performative, and that performative element might even help people I care about. It just wouldn’t change anything at the root. It would make me feel better, maybe, but perhaps bearing the affective cost is shit I need to accept?
Every time I think about Hind Rajab, the five-year old girl murdered by an Israeli tank crew, I feel myself free-floating on a wave of horror. I think allowing myself to feel those feelings is the only authentic thing I can do. I can wave a ‘justice for Hind’ sign at as many rallies as I like – nothing changes except how I and the people at the rally feel about ourselves. What gives us the right to feel better about it?
But that said, at the core of my own workplace code is a statement, ‘We fight not to make it easier to live with the grind. We fight to make it easier to live with ourselves’ [1]. But I guess here I find it easier to live with myself if I don’t find it easier to live within the world.
That’s not a slam on those that have made a different decision. It’s just not one I feel I can make. Everyone has their own Shit to deal with – the General Theory of Shit is explanatory. It’s not a model by which one can live a life.
‘You know what happens when a government can’t leak? Dark shit builds up’, is a line from The Thick of It and I think it’s pertinent here. Sometimes dark shit should build up, and redirecting it is itself a form of moral shit. It’s the inevitable consequence of Zizek’s philosophy of ‘Bartlebyism’. Participation in the accepted forms of social unrest is a way for the system as a whole to reduce pressure, but sometimes pressure needs to build up so the pipes burst where they are most vulnerable.
Displacement of shit, in other words, is not the same thing as moral justice. I’m not ‘sticking it to the man’, or trying to be a better person. I guess in the end I’m just trying to live my life in a way that still lets me live with myself.
I know this whole project started off as ‘lol what if I didn’t use Spotify so much’, but as Lenin once said ‘Everything is connected to everything else’. The shit analogy turns out to be prescient. No matter which way I look at this, I’m going to come away stained in some way.
I’m glad I got Tapster though.
[1]