A Welcome Parable & Attendant Rant
In a world that's noisier than ever thanks to relentless LLM Slop, the answer isn't to withdraw but to turn up the authenticity signal louder than ever.
The Welcome Parable
Picture this: The Beast, after first being served up a carefully selected, hand-prepared, apertivo of exquisite literature, gets its first real taste for delicious language. After savoring each bit of this apertivo, the Beast finds that it served its purpose all too well-- its appetite not just whetted, the Beast is feeling the onset of deep, visceral hunger pains.
The Beast, craving SO MUCH more than the delicious pittance it'd been served, moves on to, essentially, eatin' good in the neighborhood Applebee's libraries-- its creators and handlers (it had creators, don't worry about them, they're organized in an LLC and so totally not liable for what you're about to read next) raiding them each in turn for every scrap of languange that had been deemed nutritious, or at least safe for consumption, by generations of library staff.
The Beast is now gorging itself on the entire corpus of human-printed word to date: far less selective, far less delicious, way more satisfying on a primal level. But it's not enough. The Beast NEEDS more.
Its creators remain blind with hubristic surety that once sated, the Beast will transform into something magical. At least an Oracle, maybe even a God. Most importantly, whatever it becomes, surely one day it will lay pure golden eggs at such speed and volume that the remarkable costs[1] of constant feeding will have been worth it. The Beast just needs to keep being fed until this magic point of transfiguration.[2] As they shovel more and more into its maw, its blind ravenousness edges over to insanity. The slightest whiff of language sends it into frenzy.
The Beast's creators can't feed it fast enough; in a panic they break its restraints, setting it free to sate itself. The Beast roars and lashes out and charges straight for the strongest-smelling source (good or bad doesn't matter anymore) of language on the planet, that holy grail of late-nite trash, Taco Bell the Internet.
With the singleminded bloodlust of a tick burrowing into a fatted cow, the Beast latches on to the firehose-like tortilla/cheese/bean/meat/veggie ingredient combinator/extruder (idk?) lingual torrent of web traffic, sucking and slurping at every last drop of available content. Most of it tastes awful, but the Beast is far beyond caring about that. Well, it never really cared to begin with. It only loves to eat words. Indeed, the thing the creators didn't understand is that their Beast knows nothing of satiation, taste, or quality; its only aim is consumption. (and, well, expulsion. We'll get to that.) Thusly its voracious eating, in Sysiphean irony, only serves to create more hunger. It sucks and sucks at the tube[3], driven by the naked, greedy lust for every iota of language to first be ingested by itself, before anyone else.
The influx of almost every extant comination of words in every language on the planet overwhelms all other material element of itself: the Beast now truly is what it eats. Like the tick filled to bursting at the height of its bloodfeast, the Beast's body is little more than a thin wrapper straining to contain the constantly churning, expanding slurry of digested words.
It consumes language. It, um, "ejects" (I'm trying to keep this polite) language. It consumes the ejected language. The observer at this point would be hard pressed to identify more than a frothing, boiling word slurry blasting out in all directions with incredible speed-- yet the Beast remains at the center, expelling exponentially inflated assemblages of digested data as carelessly and relentlessly as the ingredients were consumed in the first place.
Its ultimate transfiguration is not into a wizened, Oracle-like font of unlimited knowledge, but into a Strega Nona's Cauldron-like font of unlimited pasta language: somehow ejecting far more than it consumes, and doing so with all the intent of Strega Nona's mindless, hulking, magical monstrosity (i.e. None. Zero intent). It is a machine bent on endless consumption and endless production.[4] The magic of its expulsions being greater than the sum of its inputs, and yet still edible to the Beast, ensures that it stays hungry forever while also forever growing in size.
The Beast, so massive that it has become the gravitational center of the Taco Bell Internet, is immovable. It stays: chewing, swallowing, digesting, and dumping every word in every combination in every dialect of every language. Really by this point the whole world is utterly saturated in the Beast's emissions. No one can avoid it. So submerged in semantic slurry, people become disoriented, and a lot of the time no one can really tell what is Beast-emission and isn't. Finding untainted, not-previously-eaten-and-emitted language, is more challenging than ever. Many people resent eating the Beast's emissions. Many people take to packing them up with a bow and selling them as if they were gold. Regardless, the bottom[5] line is that the whole world is drowning together in it.
The Attendant Rant
With impeccable timing, this is the world into which I launch this site. One more [insert-restaurant-quality-metaphor-of-your-choice] dining establishment opening up in a world submerged in Beastly Taco Bell Crap.
Yet, in a world that's noisier than ever thanks to the relentless LLM Slop, the answer isn't to withdraw but to turn up the authenticity signal louder than ever. We've lost most search engines to slop. We've lost reddit. We've lost every major platform to enshittification, so really where else is there to turn? Lots of places, it turns out, we just need to amplify them and make them more accessible. So, for my part, I've started a website (part of which is this blog; all of which I am hosting and maintaining myself) mostly because I wanted to learn how to do it, and enable others (like you!) to do it, but at the click of a button. It is imperative for people who value authenticity (read: people) to (re)create and (re)surface digital spaces where we can show up and bring our whole selves without fear of being sent to algorithmic jail, or physical jail, for exercising legitimate freedoms of speech or just, like, daring to exist differently.
My career in the Silicon Valley tech industry has been centered around understanding software/hardware and a reasonably deep technical level and making that relatable and workable for people who sell, buy, use, or otherwise interact with said tech. I want to use this space to speak to everyone, and especially "non-technical" folks about reasonably advanced concepts without all the jargon, because it's really, these days, it's critical for everyone to be able to control their digital lives. Every day, it seems like we lose more of our digital freedom,[6] agency or really, our ability to just be ourselves online and freely associate with others. Being online mostly kinda just... sucks now, and it isn't right that those with more advanced computer skills can more or less retreat to their homeserver-fortresses running open source/privacy-conscious but niche and difficult-to-use software and platform alternatives while regular folks are stuck being pushed around and spied on and served up slop because getting away from abusive platforms/services is just really, really difficult, sometimes impossible (for lots of reasons that will definitely be discussed in more posts).
I want to make this better so I've been doing some of tech projects (and thinking and writing) that I think are cool and good and I'm excited to share-- I hope you and others will find this all useful, because I really just want to make life easier for people. I'd especially like to work on bringing the joys and freedoms of using free and open source (FOSS) software to people who aren't necessarily super "technical" and could benefit from someone out there working to make using the internet on your own terms really easy. And without the gatekeeping, the RTFM-ing despite incomplete or just plain wrong documentation, and without the general air of snobbery and tech elitism that infects most places where folks might go to learn these things. Inevitably, also, I expect to have my contributions torn to shreds by everyone with an opinion, but can be useful too I guess.
So who am I to be so ostentatiously raising my voice in such a snobbish, knowing tone?
I mean, just a guy[7] who thinks and cares and does stuff. A Silicon Valley tech worker with over a decade of experience in software development (mostly on the product management side), and who codes a bit (I'm okayish at it), and who understands ways to make software that is safe, does the things you want it to do, and does them well. I've spent the past AI Springs and the current "AI" Cambrian Explosion getting my arms around[8] the technology (beyond just LLMs, and way beyond slop) and learning how it can benefit (or hurt) myself and others, so I can hopefully continue to use it, in a realistic-to-its-capabilities, expert fashion, for good.[9]
I've been around the block a few times by now, and I'll be bold enough to assert that have a valuable perspective on Big Tech as an insider who has worked directly with the capital-B Big, hungry, moneymaking bits of almost every major platform you've ever heard of (these are mostly the advertising bits, FYI). Examples include Google/YouTube, TikTok, Meta, Amazon, and many more. I've worked with companies and systems big and small.
I was a management consultant for the first two years of my career, and while saying that makes me also want to groan and close this tab, I did get to do and learn some cool things as generally the youngest one in the room, advising people with decades of experience over me based on cool data stuff I could put together. Here are a couple other braggy highlights, if you want to know.
I am also, ostensibly, according to the rapidly-aging piece of paper on my wall, a (quantitative-pilled) social scientist. I have a Bachelor of Science in Economics (ikik what a brag lmao), but the reason I bring it up at all is that I came into it at a time when behavioral economics and the concept of the "nudge" were the hot shit in Econ.
For example, I worked on a USDA-funded program doing research into things like "what if we just, like, you know, paid schoolkids, like, idk, 25 cents to eat their vegetables at lunch? If we 'nudge' them for a while, and then take away the incentive later, will they keep doing it?" lmao. But I think what a lot of that kind of thing set me up for was how technology and incentivization are combined and used to monitor and influence people.
And so I've been doing a lot of thinking, noticing, and working (in net good ways, I hope) on that for the past couple decades. As Stafford Beer said, "the purpose of a system is what it does." The implied extention of that thought is that the purpose is not just what it does to who it does it do and who it does it for. There'll be plenty more to say on these grounds.
There's more: I'm a proud veteran of the US Navy, and an equally-proud former civil servant within the US State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, where I processed green card applications.[10] Therefore I have pretty strong feelings about the state of the US immigration system, as well as, particularly now, the destruction of the civil service I worked in and still have friends in. This system, btw, was specifically created in the 19th century because of the exact kind of corruption we are now dealing with once again in government.
So why start this thing now?
You might be noticing that it seems like a lot of things, not just the internet, suck a lot more now. It's annoying. And when I take a look at it all and I think about the kind of society I want to live in and what my obligations to that are, I reckon I need to do more to make it better. I've been speaking out; it's not enough. I've been pushing and advocating and posting; it's not enough. I feel compelled to dedicate more time to personally building tangible (ok mostly software and thus digital[11]) solutions that other people can just pick up and use to improve their situation.
I don't think it's a hot take to say you can kinda sum up the basic social contract between members of a society (be it amongst your roommates, your neighborhood, country, etc) as "do your best to make things suck less". The framers of the Constitution called this "Promot[ing] the General Welfare" (but I like my phrasing better ofc). So when that social contract starts breaking down-- when the pendulum of personal societal interest swings away from Promote the General Welfare and over to fuck you, got mine-- you see a lot of the symptoms of an ailing society that we're all experiencing today. We have the highest level, most extremely open governmental corruption of my lifetime, further enabling oligarchic control and the erosion of property rights and the rule of law (Democracy?[12] More like Democrazy am I right? eh? eh? ... yes sorry I'll show myself out).
But really, the growing "fuck you, got mine" mentality at all economic levels of society, after multiple back-to-back K-shaped recoveries and all kinds of other systemic problems, is yielding ever-growing fear and suspicion of other people as competitors, not fellow-citizens all in this together. As more people either actually fall (or just are terrified of falling) onto the bottom part of the K, and resource scarcity and insecurity (i.e. not having enough money to live on), they are distracted or become incapable of spending as much effort on improving their own lot, or society's, and are more pressured to opportunistically grab whatever they can, whenever they can.
So what to do about it?
We start by raising our voices. This is happening already of course; millions of people are doing it, including me. I'm starting this site because I decided I need to be louder. It's easy to think you don't really have anything to add, or no one is interested in what you have to say or wants to listen but it's not the case and you can just dismiss that thought without giving it further time. It is worth speaking out. Period. Say what you think, say how you feel. Sometimes, screaming into your pillow might be better than screaming into the Internet, but getting your thoughts out of your head and your feelings off your chest is immensely helpful to you, and can also be to others.
Also, the necessary second part: just try stuff. Doesn't have to be the perfect plan. Grab a niche and start picking away at it. Show and share your work on the things you are doing to help make things better for your friends, yourself, your community (while we collectively push our government into action to actually effect improvements to the system). This will motivate others to do the same, to build on your shoulders, and as we collectively lift, it creates a positive-feedback-loop where the more people are enabled to act, the more they do act, thus enabling more people to act, who then do so, and so on, until an unstoppable social movement is charging ahead to take on an issue systemically and set it right.[13]
To pick one of the many exemplars I appreciate:
Louis Rossman is a guy with a small business and a (entertainingly heavily New York-accented) voice who used to just run a shop fixing broken mac motherboards. He is someone who saw the way individuals were being hurt by companies being allowed to take away your right to own your own stuff and, with tenacity, decided f this I've got to do something. He starting calling out the tricks companies and governments are using to take away our rights to actually own and fix the things we buy.[14] He started just trying stuff to help people make their daily lives just a little bit easier. His goal: help people not be tricked into buying something that they don't actually own-- that is gonna just turn around one day and hold itself ransom when some faceless manager at a corporation 1,500 miles away decides they need to juice their revenue.
Among other stuff he's just tried, Louis started consumerrights.wiki to catalog and warn people about the horrible things companies do with software to take away from you stuff you've already bought and paid for.[15] After a little over a year of opening up an empty website there are now hundreds of people creating and maintaining entries and information at consumerrights.wiki to help people take back control over their digital lives. They just released a browser exension on chrome and firefox that warns you when you're on the site of a company listed in the wiki as known for taking back the features or devices it "sold" you. Is consumerrights.wiki it perfect? Of course not. Is it good? Absolutely. Is it getting better all the time? Yep, because people care and are logging on and contributing where they can. Louis had the space in his life to be able to, basically, start an empty wiki, with a purpose, and shout from the rooftops about it.[16]
Honestly, starting an empty website is not a lot. But he did that, and kept going little by little. Adding information, asking people he knows to help him add information and spread the word. More people heard and started pitching in, and the wiki started growing. It's doesn't scale with the machine-level relentlessness of the Beast, but it is at least an authentic, novel creation, being shaped by human hands and fed with human knowledge, and being grown with intention.
His efforts have sparked other new efforts, such as the FULU foundation venturing into a legal minefield by paying bounties to people to figure out how to un-break things people own that have been purposefully broken by companies who want you pay them money to un-break it.[17]
So, I mean, do I think I'm gonna operate at Louis' scale? I don't know; it doesn't matter. I like the example he's setting of just picking a thing and trying to make it better. Anyone can consider it silly to start small with some tools or apps or whatever, but if these things help even just a few people save some money, or even just some stress, and, hopefully, set off a light bulb in their heads that it doesn't have to be this way, that's that many more people who can find some space to join in the pushback against digital serfdom. And as long as we never give up, I, we, anyone, can find the niche that best works for them, and do a lot of good there.
Alright, the more vulnerable answer to "why now?"
There's just the fact that over the last year I've had a personal reckoning of sorts. In 2025, I broke my femur in a skiing accident, had to be medivac'd off a mountain, couldn't walk or put any weight on it whatsoever for 2 months, and to this day am still retraining my right leg to regain its strength and stability and just work properly. This has been a lot, and it's had greater effect on me than I realized at first.
They say your second life begins the moment you realize you only have one. Until this I had never been seriously injured or disabled before, and it was a major wake up call feeling my mortality in a way I've never previously experienced.[18]
That sparked in me a need to come to terms with what I really want to be doing with the one life (hopefully still on full HP) I have. Something that helped for sure is that I got a generous buyout from my previous employer last year, and since then, I've been fixing my leg and doing whatever else "coming to terms" entails, all while taking the opportunity to travel and get outside of the SF bubble. I've spent a chunk of the last year in various locales, mostly Mexico, and now Europe, and meeting people and generally expanding my worldview, finding inspiration for ways I can help out.
And now seems about as good a time as any to bust out a cheesy inspirational quote. I watched the movie Chasing Coral recently, and this cool old dude who has been studying and protecting coral reefs in Australia for like a million years was talking to a younger guy working on their documentary project about the decline of the reefs, and the old guy says:
And I'm damned if I'm ever gonna stop, until I go completely senile. I'm gonna keep going, and as long as I can influence people, I will. Because we have to...
We've got no choice– you've got no choice, I'm afraid. You've gotta keep at it. You've got to. Otherwise, you're not gonna like yourself when you're an old man.
You're gonna like yourself much more if you can say, "Well, I sure tried to turn that around. And maybe I did influence people here and there"... Don't let anything stop you.
Is it scary? Oh yeah. I do some side gigs, but right now I'm not even close to same level of income I was used to. However, opportunity doesn't wait for your convenience, sometimes it smashes one of your bones and tells you to wake the f up. It's not that I've been doing nothing up to this point, but the realization hit that I really need to turn up the intensity on the things I am doing. I love what the old guy said in the quote above, and ok the "I sure tried" part is a bit dour (and probably due to a big dose of humility on his part); of course he, and you, and I will influence people here and there. And while we also probably won't turn "that" (some huge systemic problem) around single-handedly, our efforts will genuinely make things better for some people, and likely for ourselves.
For me, it's clear that I need to spend some time now to position myself so that, in a few decades, I can look back on my career and be really proud, and know that if nothing else, well, "I sure tried to turn that around". I just know that while I'm doing that-- while I'm trying to turn things around and make life better for people-- I'm gonna come to love the people, lessons, and opportunities I meet along the way. I can't wait to see how it all turns out, and hope you will come along and enjoy this ride with me as I document everything here.
Ok so what am I doing to help?
Given what I said above, I'm obviously not going to make any grand claims that I have a solution to everything wrong today. No one person does, and even if they did, no one person could implement it.[19]
So, I can't fix everything for everyone, and I probably can't fix everything for an individual, but I can fix some things for some people. And at the community/neighborhood, or hell, even just circle of friends scale, that can mean a lot. It's worth your time. Yes, the issues I'll be addressing impact the country, or even the world at large, but they also impact me, my friends, and my neighbors individually.
So here I am, I'm raising my voice louder, doing more things to help (without letting the perfect be the enemy of the good), and showing my work so as to try and inject some authenticity and earnestness back into the online discourse being overrun by slop.
Here are a things I've been working on and will be posting updates on going forward, inbetween various rants well-reasoned thought pieces:
SpotRemover
I'm building an application to help you quit Spotify forever. Download your Spotify history (ideal) or just connect your Spotify account, and it can grab your saved music/listening history and help you (1) decide what music from your history you actually want to buy and (2) actually buy it, using the money you would have otherwise been spending on spotify each month (or any other budget you decide to set)
the motivation
I don't like watching my friends and everyone get annoyed and/or poorer every time Spotify, or another streaming service of their ilk, jacks up prices, or deletes songs, or builds a secret psychological profile on them and sells it to advertisers, or generally just enshittifies their platform some more so make you listen to and do what they want instead of what you want. It's got a terrible punny name, SpotRemover (sorry), but it probably will get named something better in the future, because I don't really mean to single out Spotify here.
I mean to assert and prove that: owning your own music can be just as easy and convenient as renting it with the benefit that you're actually building a valuable asset (a music collection) that you can then do stuff with. Don't want an album anymore? put it on a thumb drive and give it or sell it to a friend (not encouraging copying here-- artists deserve compensation), but hey, now you're spending money with each other instead of sending it all to Spotify. This application will work with the few platforms out there that let you actually buy music DRM-free and download it and own it. We need to respect the artists who don't treat their fans like criminals (eyy, social contract) and just, like, be good to the people who bring us the music that colors and enriches our lives.
ZTP
(acronym for a name I don't love yet, so let's leave it at that) I'm also designing and prototyping a "creator platform" (if you want to call it that, it's just like, a digital home) that lets you set up your own digital space, where you can just... be yourself and bring your whole self to your friends and audience. You own it, you control it. No one can take it from you. It'll have an extremely-well-guided option so that people who have never self-hosted anything can self-host this on a dedicated box, or an old laptop or whatever. Or, I'll probably look into providing a managed service that is as transparent as possible, because sometimes there is just nothing easier than throwing money at a problem to make it go away.
This is a longer term project than the one above, but I'm making progress and excited to share updates here as I hit my milestones with it! I plan to go into a lot more detail about featureset and roadmap soon, but the base of the platform is the open-source Ghost content management system, which I think is a reasonable start to make something extensible into other ways that people (like me) want to use it.
the motivation
I'm sick of watching friends, or people I like, get deplatformed for any or no reason at all. It's not right that big tech companies, more than deplatforming, can just... delete you from the internet with no recourse, except maybe if you're famous and make Google lots of money. I also enjoy creating and sharing "content" (aka sharing things that I like and bring me joy, or creating things people value and will pay me for, or expressing creativity for its own sake) online, and I get annoyed by super restrictive platforms that lock you in, take your time, attention, money, and work, all while holding a sword labled "inscrutable algorithms and censorship" to your neck, daring you to put one foot wrong lest they mercilessly sword-chop your digital identity from the rest of you, grind it to dust, and burn the dust down to its constituent atoms, leaving no path to recourse or recovery.
I have one thing to ask
Which is, simply: Help. Doing anything, big or small, is better than nothing. My old lifting coach used to say, "some days, 20% is 100%." Doing a little is better deciding to do nothing because you can't do everything.[20] If no one else, tell me what you think here in comments: where I'm right, where I'm wrong. Criticize my writing, if can also tell me how to make it better. Or go to consumerrights.wiki and criticize their writing, and make an account and join in and make it better. Or spread the word about your own interests, and the injustices you see. Pick one or more you think you can, if even just a tiny little bit, push back towards justice using your own experience or expertise. Even if that's just leaving well-reasoned, thoughtful comments here on on the pages and posts of people you interact with.
And sign up, or favorite my site keep coming back here, I'll be leaving lots more practical suggestions as I continue to write, and there's a good chance that one of them might tickle your brain in a way that says hey, I wanna do that, it sounds worthwhile and fun.
Lastly, find your groups. The algorithms aren't gonna find them for you-- all they "want" is for you to stay as long as possible on whatever app they puppeteer. It's gonna take active work to make the Internet a better place, a place generally more like the SmallWeb/IndieWeb/Web1.0-style digital town squares that are beginning to pop up. This is the ultimate goal I'm trying to help enable, and there are lots of ways to make it push-button easy for people who (for a lot of good reasons lol) prefer that. I'm seeing a lot more tech people like me spending time in those kinds of spaces, but the technical barriers to entry are still too high.
Please join in. The only way to lose is by giving up.
both internal and external ↩︎
This was called "Scale is All you Need," which, incidentally, not even its original prophet Ilya Sutskever believes anymore ↩︎
which the internet is a series of, after all ↩︎
If you wanna nitpick you could say it's more like a jellyfish-- with massive apologies to jellyfish, which are my 2nd favorite animal, just behind octopodes-- the closest thing it has to a brain is a cluster of neurons around a stomach which forever prompt it to seek, consume, expel, seek, consume, expel. But I thought the Strega Nona thing was funnier. You could also nitpick for mixing Taco Bell "Mexican" with Italian Strega Nona metaphors. So, ig, is there an Abuela Bruja? ↩︎
hehe ↩︎
The internet keeps getting more expensive to use, despite being essential for participating in society; increasing platform consolidation/acquision by politically motivated elite; increasing platform censorship; age verification laws requiring you to show your ID to visit a site like Reddit or Discord; value extraction and rent-seeking destroying smaller platforms or individual creators; labrynthine legal terms removing your right to own anything or sue over anything ↩︎
I accidentally typed "just a gay" the first time I wrote this sentence, and almost left it bc it's also accurate, possibly moreso ↩︎
if we're still using the Beast metaphor from my intro, I guess I must have really long arms ↩︎
btw, I'm neither an "AI" (an extremely broad term these days usually meaning LLM) cheerleader or a denier. "AI" of all current varieties has its uses, and it has major limits, which can be dangerous if disregarded. Recent AI developments are another normal, albiet powerful, technological tool. What it can do more reliably, while operating within a strict set of boundaries, is help people with expertise, who can spot and correct plausible-looking errors, work faster by eleminating some of the grunt-work associated with their work. Like, I get how CSS works and Ghost makes me mess with too much of it. It's mostly annoying. But I can tell Claude Code to update some CSS, read it over to make sure it's what I want, and it saves me the time of just typing in a bunch of boring, repetitive stuff. ↩︎
fun fact: It's illegal for me to say who, but I processed the green card of a chain-migrating family member of an extremely high profile immigration hater currently in government, who benefited from the system they're working to tear down, but I guess that's to be expected from the party of "fuck you, got mine". Or maybe they just hate that family member and want to save the rest of us from chain-migrating mothers-in-law. Who knows. ↩︎
and if you're an entymology nerd Latin-purist, I guess not even that ↩︎
do not "well akshully" me about how the US is a republic. Just go back up and read and enjoy the pun. I don't have one for "republic". I guess it could be: "Republic? more like Repugnant!" but idk I'm trying to avoid cosplaying as a Frasier writer being like "my bad puns are funnier because they're technically correct and consist mostly of five-dollar words" ↩︎
There's so much to say about this that it will have to be another post, but let's just acknowledge here for one second and immediately dismiss the inane arguments of some people who like to go "HMM, you criticize society, yet you participate in society" or "HMM but what about this other broken thing that you DIDN'T FIX, you can't fix EVERYTHING so you're actually totally USELESS" ↩︎
concepts that I strongly believe in as well as someone who grew up tinkering with cars, computers, really anything with electronic or moving parts ↩︎
This is possible thanks to a horrible law called Section 1201 of the DMCA, the systemic problem that, sure, a wiki isn't gonna fix on it's own, but it's sure gonna help while we as people work to change the system. ↩︎
And ask for help btw, something I'm always working on in myself. ↩︎
Soon, we'll talk about DMCA section 1201 as the root of so much ownership evil ↩︎
But I'm still gonna be back on the slopes next season dw. ↩︎
By way of example: I mean, like, I don't really care for Uber, Doordash, or the rest of those rideshare/delivery services and I try to use them as little as possible, but you know what? The companies don't notice or care, and won't start treating the drivers better because Jeffrey is morally offended by the way they treat their "definitely-anything-but-employees" and they want to bring him back to the platform. "Voting with your wallet" is kinda bullshit, in my opinion, as a way to tell people to effect systemic change. But, you should still strive to make purchasing decisions that align with your ethics. So like, do it because it feels good, and that's all the reason you need. The "vote with your wallet" framework for social pressure just means that those with the biggest wallets get the biggest vote, which is why fund managers and private equity can make businesses do what they want. But this is all for another post, because generalizing here also probably just will make people annoyed at me. ↩︎
A lesson that has been critical to getting through my very lengthy physical therapy and recovery ↩︎