A Lazy Coward`s Guide to Fighting Fascism

The myth of the anonymous Internet - and it has always been a myth - is slowly fading as the average Internet user watches their protections and rights to be ignored wholly forgotten in the mad rush for capital-building information. While forensics have been able to piece together identifying markers from online activity for decades, the cost of doing that work has gone down substantially in recent totalitarian regimes. In the United States, the fourth amendment has generally held that your privacy, digital or otherwise, cannot be invaded without judicial intervention. Just cause has turned into “just ’cause” overnight with the very public dismantling of checks and balances. Private tech companies no longer worry about rolling over for fascism causing their stock to drop. Humans are no longer their customers. Speculative bubbles are more profitable and if they never have to put the money back into the pot - rather, just hand it back and forth to one another and tip their hats like playground pantomime - they are all the more happy. So why bother saving face when you can get special treatment by playing ball with dictators? That hurdle has classically been the most difficult one to overcome when doing Internet sleuthing and it has eroded entirely.

Palantir and its precursors, along with government programs like PRISM, work their way into boards and halls of tech giants. They use kickbacks, permitting, and all sorts of bribery to make sure that the biggest-named players are all in on the grift of faux security in modern tech. But tech is less secure than it has ever been. It may prevent low-rent script kiddies from scamming your Roblox account, but everything you do on most of your devices can be laid bare in seconds if someone merely decides to look.

Again, this is not new. Logging has been fundamental to computer network interaction since its inception. Things needed for reliable communication over an infrastructure made to carry flustered Trans-Atlantic accents from Pennsylvania-65000 to Klondike-5555 were already being stored so these digital bridges could be created. Endpoints had to be known. Routes had to be known. Owing to this, there was little anonymity in computing from the start. Anonymity was added, intentionally and otherwise. Log files take up space, so anonymity is bolstered simply by not storing this information past the active session. But compression got extremely good, extremely fast. Especially for text. Logs became less and less a storage concern and more one of privacy well before AOL shipped its first disk. For a while, privacy was a top tier feature in online communication. At least, behind the scenes. People love to identify themselves. It’s almost like we are all apes made of existential dread and routine. Because we are. As the net became more ubiquitous, people started realizing the importance of privacy. Not for illicit acts, though certainly those were in the mix. But for every day activities that were becoming more common online. Communication with friends, family, doctors, colleagues. These all needed some protection from prying eyes. Encryption technologies became an arms race against bad actors trying to hijack communications to steal what information they could. At the same time, however, companies began realizing how much of the data flow they controlled and how much that data could be used to create targeting for themselves. Then, they realized people would still pay for services even if ads where part of that service. In some old newsroom storage closet, William Randolph Hearst’s portrait smiled. So began the two-faced deceit of IT security.

All of this is just a long-winded intro to say this: No corporate entity ever has your best interests in mind when making decisions. Only profit. Or reduction of loss. When paramilitary police forces decide to dox you, the ’safe, secure, encrypted’ services you use from publicly traded for-profits mean absolutely nothing. They have your data. They will give it over to the cops. It’s the most financially beneficial stance (on paper), and that’s the only stance they will ever take.

So what is there to do? Break out paper cups and semaphore flags? How can you go to a protest and keep your digital life from becoming Exhibits A-Q should a stormtrooper decide you look enough like his ex or his abusive dad or just that kid he beat up in high school so it’s your day to get zip-tied and paddy-waggoned? Not all is bleak, nor do you have to pull a Full Amish when you head down to the future kettle where the first amendment is “protected” until it’s not. You can do quite a bit to harden your personal security - which in turn makes those around you more secure. It’s work, but what isn’t these days? Work, I guess.

Leave your phone at home

This is one of those pieces of advice that often gets eye-rolled by activists and organizers. But before you dismiss it, hear me out. I’m not saying ‘don’t take a phone.’ I’m saying leave the phone you use as your primary device at home. It is very easy and very cheap to pick up a second phone for recording - one of the most important functions of a phone at any protest - and communication. You can use an anonymous pre-paid carrier phone for emergencies, an old phone you’ve wiped, or grab a cheap used unlocked phone off of any number of marketplaces. Considering the despicable desposability cycle of modern phones, you can probably find a few free ones with some calls to friends and family. A few things to keep in mind:

• Fully factory reset any phone you receive or purchase. If possible, do this offline using tools from the manufacturer.
• If an alternative, hardened OS such as GrapheneOS is available for your device, consider using that instead of stock Android or the manufacturer’s bloatware.
• Try to find a phone that uses a physical SIM card. eSIMs are convenient, but are tied to the device and usually tied to the sales records of the device. A physical SIM lets you swap to another carrier or a prepaid number with ease.
• Keep apps to the bare minimum. When possible, use app stores that do not tie to an account. F-Droid is a good option. Obtainium is very popular as well.
• DISABLE BIOMETRICS. Apart from being way less secure than they purport, biometrics can be used to illegally compel you to unlock your device. Face scans are NOT legally protected. Fingerprint scans can be obtained through force. Set up a complex PIN or password and don’t fall for the false security of biometric login.
• Don’t sync accounts, contact lists, texts, etc. Don’t use e-mail applications. Check e-mail through a private browser session. This is a pain because you have to manually enter security info every single time, but it means that there’s no forensic footprint left on your phone once the session is closed.
• If you need to stream or capture to a cloud service, add a second, anonymized account for doing so. You can always re-share from your primary account later, but there’s no reason to link your activities to verifiable identification.
• Remove data from your phone when you get home. Back it up on a secure drive and remove it from the device. Again, there’s no reason to provide a free map of your whereabouts for potential prosecutors.
• Use a VPN (with manual credentials, not apps). A VPN can help protect you from local scanners, a more and more popular tool for oppressors, as well as provide an extra layer of cover from your carrier snooping on their behalf. Generally, use a VPN from a country with sound data protection laws like the Netherlands if possible.
• Utilize wifi hotspots over cellular data when possible. Many areas have free wifi if you look for it. Combined with a VPN, getting your exact activity trail becomes much, much harder.
• Only give the phone number for the device (if applicable) to a few people you trust. An army willing to use a 5 year old to draw people out of a house will absolutely put pressure on people close to you. People can’t give up your info if they don’t know it, so keep the list as small as you can.
• Use your protest phone for protesting. Keep it on Airplane Mode or turned off. Take it off Airplane Mode AFTER arriving at the protest. Put it in Airplane Mode BEFORE you leave the protest. Cell tower pings can be used to create a very accurate map of your path to and from. Again, don’t give them anything for free.
• If you simply cannot use a dedicated phone and cannot leave your phone at home, consider paring down apps, creating a second profile with very little information and using that when you’re at gatherings, using a VPN, disabling ALL AI tools, turning off tracking metrics (such as “send us data to improve your experience while using the app!” settings), signing out of social media accounts, and following the biometric and VPN suggestions above.

Be comfortable being bored

Excepting a secured phone (if necessary), don’t bring any connected devices with you. No iPad. No Switch. No Steam Deck. No ROG Steam Deck But Worse. If you have one of those handheld retro devices from Anbernic or anything with bluetooth, wifi, or mobile data, just leave it at home. Tablets, smart watches, even many MP3 players - anything that can connect with a wireless service of some type can be scanned and identified and linked to you if found on your person after an arrest. If you’re going to a protest, you’re going to protest. Not to scroll feeds or find epic mounts. Being uncomfortable with being bored is no reason to tag yourself like a migratory whale pod.

Don’t give up your entire identity at home

In your day-to-day life, more and more of your online identity is being added to your digital fingerprint. Platforms can predict, with astounding accuracy, what your next website visit will be. They can pick you out of a haystack of haystacks of users in seconds. Every cookie you accept, every permission you grant…they’ll be watching you.

Use a VPN on your home network. You don’t need to go so far as to tunnel to another country for your day to day use, but just adding one more layer of obfuscation helps. Obscurity is not security, but it’s better than nothing. Use secure communication when available. Set your browser to always use https, in example. Switch off of known problematic messaging apps like Discord to more secure options like Signal. Don’t use AI processing on anything. In fact, turn off AI everywhere you can. If you’re using Windows, [url-”https://www.howtogeek.com/how-to-rip-out-copilot-from-windows-11/” target=”new”]uninstall and prevent CoPilot from reinstalling [/url](note - this can change on a whim and they are pushing CoPilot hard, so your best bet is to leave Windows or go back to Windows 10 and use a debloating tool). Switch your search engine to a non-AI backed search such as DuckDuck Go’s No AI service. Remove AI tools from your browser if you use Chrome or Chromium based browsers or Firefox. (Note, beginning with Firefox 148, a single kill switch will be introduced under Settings -> AI Controls -> Block AI Enhancements, but it has not rolled out globally at the time of this writing).

Don’t use social media to discuss your activities at protests. You can obviously be loud and proud about your views, but any insight into the inner workings of direct action will be use to subvert it. There is no virtue signalling in protest. There’s no reason to share intel with the enemy during an active war. Save your mementos in a safe, encrypted location. Once everyone swears they were always against all of this, which they will, feel free to make a wall of dissent. But during active operations, no need to identify locations, organization, or the faces of others for internet points.

Keep your systems secure. Self-hosting can be a great way to withdraw from the onslaught of platform rot, but it can also open you up to attacks. Automated attacks are becoming more sophisticated, or in the case of AI based attacks, more frequent to the point of overwhelming systems. Not smarter, just more waves crashing against the beach. Protect yourself by understanding edge security. Make sure your router is not compromised and is up to date on its firmware. Make sure to keep an eye on security bulletins for software you host and quickly update it if a confirmed security hole is disclosed. This is obviously for more technical folks, but anyone can learn how to lock down their home network in a couple of days worth of YouTube videos and old forum posts.

Stop using Spyware as a Service

The Superbowl ad for Ring really shook the tree in terms of the general public’s understanding of just how perverse and pervasive private spying has become. Convenience has, for at least the last two decades, come at the cost of security. We hand over our details willingly to save a few steps while logging in or to scream into our personal void and have it play back our favorite comfort songs. Ditching digital servants is a minor inconvenience that feels like oppression to so many who are now used to the ease of it all. I promise, it’s really not that hard to pick a playlist by hand. Drop digital assistants from your phone. Doubly so if they’re AI-backed. Get rid of Echos and Smart Speakers and cloud-connected doorbell cameras and app-based light managers and all that BS. You can find replacements that leave all of your data in your personal network for nearly everything. So if you really need the convenience or are in a position where you need these things for accessibility, there are options. Home Assistant is a robust, multi-protocol service which can be locked down, but still control your existing closed-source hardware, in example.

Don’t use sign-in aggregators when you can avoid it. “Sign in with Google” sure feels like a convenient wonder. But what it really is is a single point of access for anyone who is able to get your Google device from you. Like the cops or TSA (cops) or ICE (somehow even more cop cops). Instead, consider an encrypted password manager with a strong master password (not biometric!) and individual site password. Avoid saving the password manager backups on cloud storage and instead, sync them to a folder on your network or an external endpoint you control. Again, passwords are protected by the 4th amendment. Your fingerprint is not.

Stop sharing videos with tracking data. YouTube, TikTok (dear god, stop using this garbage), and many other video hosting sites have a share button that tracks you and then tracks further shares by others who are NOT you. Strip your URLs before sharing them. Use only the required query string data (example - on YouTube, shares usually include an si=(code) element. When you share, remove everything except for the required video ID. When using the fully qualified www.youtube.com, this usually means deleting everything after and including the first ampersand. When using a shortened youtu.be link, this usually means deleting everything after and including the first question mark.
Example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOxERcvYE9g&si=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
or
https://youtu.be/EOxERcvYE9g?si=XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Become

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOxERcvYE9g
or
https://youtu.be/EOxERcvYE9g

respectively.

Don’t use photo filter apps, AI enhancement apps, or anything that requires personal data to produce some social token. “It’s fun, everyone’s doing it and I want to see mine!” Nobody is going to care about this shit in a week. Remember BitStrip avatars? Garbage, prepackaged flash art that was reassembled after you handed over the keys to your personal profile? Nobody actually liked anyone else’s but their own. Which means nobody actually liked them. You’d give them enough info to fake a MasterCard support call and get the most dated, ugly garbage to hang on your digital sash. Stop.

The future of capitalism and the future of humanity cannot coexist. We’re living in that tumultuous between-time, when neither side has laid full claim to the next stage of development and both sides are still under the illusion of a false pact. The average person still thinks technology is a service, not a siphon. The average CEO still thinks that there is more wealth to be pumped from a dry populace. One side will crack and separating your affairs now will do nothing but benefit you, regardless of how the whole thing shakes out. Services are built to incubate product. YOU are the product. Your data. Your eyes. Your time. They sell your own atrophied ability back to you in a neatly packaged, completely standardized, wholly unowned-by-you way. Put up as many roadblocks to them getting all of you for nothing as you can.

Some other videos and resources I’ve enjoyed (GDPR protected. Click Play Video to view):

I’m going to make a bold statement.
Leaving Microsoft and Apple is fighting fascism.
See? It’s bold!

In a landscape where both companies are selling out their own employees and customers for a speculation bubble around a wrong answer machine nobody asked for, anything you can do to reduce their grip on the world desktop market is - true facts - a strategy against the regime they fund. Both companies have been openly complicit in, and have directly financially benefited from the Trump administration. Benefited in a way that robs the public chest and in a way that funnels more money from their own customer base up the chain without providing any meaningful goods or services in kind. Hell, Tim Cook got a personal gold sticker from Das Uberstench. And both companies have funneled millions of dollars into his pocket in return. Both in direct contributions, indirect ones via PACs, and by laying the groundwork for theft from the masses on a scale that would have been unimaginable, even by the most mad king, a decade ago. AI is a global grift that is going to kill us all, not because the actual product is dangerous. It is dangerous. But the real danger lies in the speculation capitalist vultures…sorry, vulture capitalists…who carve its name into the heads of the spears with which they plan on hunting us. This is a fire sale. Everyone must go. Leave your belongings. Your offerings. To the gods of industry. They have always wanted to wring all of the money out of the fabric of society and they finally have the proper snake oil to oil the snakes of a totalitarian, dementia-addled Polyp Pot. CoPilot needs you to forget how to open an e-mail so it can justify speculation on compute and DC expansion. Apple will do anything to keep you in their garden of antitrust nightmares and hardware rental disguised as ownership, up to and including literally sabotaging your devices in updates. Google wants to suck every ounce of tracking data from you and everyone who looks like you to feed you, the product, the slop their real customers pay them to feed you. There is no publicly traded company that is your friend. To them, we are all prey. On the gaming side of things, the world is not much brighter. Ignoring Xbox, something the world has been trying to do since the Xbox One, Sony and Nintendo also both wish you’d just die and will them your estate. Nintendo takes every opportunity to raise prices and blame anything but their own profit graphs. They sit on a mountain of patents like a dragon, using their brigade of willing acolytes as shields for any critique. Sony kills support for anything that doesn’t turn an instant quarterly profit with little fanfare. Concord, their much hyped copy-of-a-copy Multiplicity clone of Overwatch lasted from August 23, 2024 to October of the same year; the announcement it was being cancelled coming only 10 days after launch.

Removing ownership has deep roots in fascist ideals. The idea that every single aspect of your life is run by landlords, including your entertainment, is just a small tool in a large toolbox of implements to keep the masses docile and indentured. But all normalization is a win for people who feed on the work of the world through dumb luck or birthright. People will defend their hobbies to, in some cases literally, the death and will take up arms in the name of boots if you mention they’re on their necks. Again, this is all by design. Tribalism is the fire that lights the muskets and sunk cost is the black powder within them. Just go online and say a bad word about Elden Ring or Zelda and see how fast you get your digital teeth kicked in by die-hard dickweeds who spend more time falling on swords in real life than wielding them in fantasy ones.

So, if you love games and hate fascism, what are you to do? Give up your hobby and become an angry person with no outlet? I mean, that’s always an option. Trust me, being a curmudgeon has its advantages. But there are alternatives. A great option, which I will surely write about in the future but that deserves its own, dedicated post, is retro gaming. There are more great games from the past you haven’t yet played than you could get to in ten lifetimes. Another is theft. And while I have zero issue with Triracy, it’s also a piece that really needs a longer deconstruction than is allowed in this post. This post is about gaming on Linux.

Linux has not had the best reputation when it comes to gaming. It has powered the OS for a number of consoles, but up until the summer of 2018, Linux gaming was mostly relegated to emulation, manually ported open-source games and a handful of dedicated releases. WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) existed and was useful for a handful of light weight games as well as productivity software, but for the most part if you wanted to game on Linux, you had to get source code and recompile or hope that the game developer decided to do it themselves. But in August of 2018, Proton - a joint venture between Valve and CodeWeavers - was released. Without getting too far into the weeds, Proton is a compatibility layer that diverts Win32 and Win64 calls to Linux equivalents and hosts linked libraries to process anything that doesn’t have native Linux support. Windows runs on the X86_64 platform and code assembled to that instruction set can run natively, provided the functions hosted outside of the application are available to it. Proton brokers all of this in a mostly seamless way, allowing Windows-compiled code to run without overhead under Linux. Proton uses the previous work of WINE to host DirectX, Vulkan, Open-GL, and other game-critical libraries. What this means is, nearly every game which doesn’t require kernel-level anti-cheat can be run on Linux at roughly the same (or sometimes greater) framerates as on Windows. The project is opensource, so you don’t even need Steam to run it. But Steam does work great, as well.

The Good

As mentioned, Steam is a great way to play games on Linux. Everything is mostly handled for you. You can purchase nearly every Windows-compatible game and it should run just fine on Linux with nothing but a click of the Play button. You are, of course, still beholden to Steam at this point. And to be honest, Valve is not your friend either. It’s another corporation. The only difference is, Valve has a scoped purpose and seems to be less driven to take all of your money. Just most of it.

You can, however, use their launcher without buying anything and run games through it downloaded from other sources. Itch.io, GoG (now under less evil management), or even - GASP! - CD-ROM! Additionally, there are a number of very nice, very curated launchers out there. Heroic, Lutris, Hydra, Cartriges…the list is long and full of terrors. A decent rundown can be found here. Heroic is my launcher of choice. It provides hosting for stores such as GoG and Epic, allowing you to directly install your games from the stores without downloading offline installers. The larger launchers also generally include database scraping for cover art, descriptions, and settings, allowing a curated list of games without having to manually launch each one, providing a more console-like experience.

Performance can go either way, but in general, my experience has been better framerates - likely owing to more overhead and fewer spyware processes running.

The Bad

Not all games run as easily as ‘just click Play.’ A number of GoG games, in example, require manually adding symbolic links to older libraries for audio. Some games don’t correctly implement their resolution and you end up with incorrectly scaled, hard to read experiences until you can find the right settings. The Desktop Environment you use (or don’t use) can also have a massive impact on your ability to launch games at the correct resolution the first time. Gnome, in example, generally creates a secondary desktop space and includes this in the desktop canvas sizing response to software. So many games on Gnome will show the native resolution as doubled over the actual native resolution. Window managers and compositors such as Hyprland (possibly made by a neo nazi) have less overhead and provide a better dedicated game experience, but sacrifice usability and desktop functionality for Swordfish-style tiling windows.

Configuration can be a pain with older games, as well. Games that utilize 32bit PhysX calls, in example, require extra install steps and configurations to get the full benefit of a card which supports them. Driver support is hit or miss, with native drivers generally offering the most performance, but less support from the manufacturers than the community gives the open source drivers. Nvidia can be trickier than AMD simply because Valve (again, the very sung hero of Linux gaming) uses AMD in their handheld console, the Steam Deck, and therefor has much more quality control for AMD based gaming. Nvidia generally works, but some games are more fussy about it than others. Controllers can be a mixed bag as the big players are well supported, but some X-Input controllers that work a treat on Windows will have incorrect mapping or bad support on Linux.

Overall, the difficult stuff is usually a quick web search away, but you’ll do better to search old forums or Reddit as live interaction with the Linux community is pretty toxic (another post on the ‘to do’ pile). Once you start getting a feel for how it all threads together, though, you’ll be able to self-serve most issues when they do crop up.

The Fugly

Some games just will not work on Linux. Period. This goes for some productivity software as well. Adobe, being a huge culprit of the latter. This is a sacrifice, or a dual boot setup, you’ll have to make to get out from under Microsoft for gaming. Games from Riot, in example, use Valorant anti-cheat software. This is kernel-mode anti-cheat, akin to a root kit. Frankly, for me, this is a dealbreaker anyway. I don’t want kernel mode code that is not part of the OS doing kernel mode shit. But this does cut out some heavy hitters like League of Legends. And unfortunately, there are no options unless Riot games decides to release a Linux-specific build of these games. I wanted to play Project L (presently 2KXO, which is a stupid name for stupid reasons), but am unable to thanks to this incredibly invasive anti-cheat. I didn’t even want to play it multiplayer apart from couch matches, but it doesn’t matter if you plan on going online or not. The whole enchirito is off the table.

Conclusion

Since moving to Linux, I’ve actually been gaming quite a bit more. The reason is mostly because I’m thinking about it. On Windows, gaming is a given. But when moving to a new OS, it’s often on the forefront of thought to entertain the possibilities afforded you in the journey. It’s not all rainbows and kittens and that one rainbow kitten that might grant wishes, but you can never catch it. But it can be worth the trip just to know your hobby isn’t supporting IDF bombing of children, growing the power of a little dick’dtraitor, or giving your money to a company that Thinks Different by literally making 2026 like 1984 after swearing that’s the ONE thing they wouldn’t do. Your mileage will absolutely vary, as Linux is not a monolithic operating system. But switching does make the…WINE… a bit sweeter, none the less.

TL;DR: Go to https://exiftool.org to get the goods!

Did you know that a picture is worth a thousand words? Thanks to inflation, that’s closer to 33,000 words today. But good luck finding a buyer in this economy.

Photography, a French hobby from the early 19th century - you may have heard of it, has gone from a science afforded only by the elite to being so ubiquitous there are likely pictures of you picking your nose openly available on any of thousands of police surveillance systems installed across the world. What used to require special papers and chemicals and glass now requires a half second of attention from the danger rectangle nearly everyone carries. I don’t mean the ART of photography. That’s art. That’s the eye and composition of human wonder. The process of photography, though, is about as mundane as shoes or pizza parties in lieu of compensation or work-life balance.

In this procession to mundanity, a word worth at least 1/8th of a picture, the processes behind its majicks have been lost on the photographer. In the time of shared butthole rags in outhouses and oil being an annoyance to water diviners, photographers had to be chemists. They had to deposit opaque materials in solution on glass or treated paper. They had to know for how long each stage of development took based on the subject of the photograph. They had to set and enlarge and repeat from negatives. It was a meditative process as much as a scientific one. Today, we can simply double-press a button (poor people’s phones still have buttons. Apple folks probably just speak some incantation and do a little somatic gesture) to bring up an instant FotoMat booth in the palms of our hands.

That’s not to say the lay person knew the photographic process before digital cameras made it a New York rooftop party talking point. The commodification of photography moved processing to a central, abstracted location a century prior. So not thinking about anything but the shot itself has been, for the lifetime of anyone reading this, the norm. And that’s not a bad thing. Not every snap, candid, or interesting dog poo needs to be meticulously developed. Most are simply mementos or memory aids or embarrassment fodder to show to first dates. So when digital photography became something anyone could carry in their pocket, learning the inner workings was never on the list of things people wanted to do with it. Mostly they wanted to take photos of the food they were eating or their genitals. Sometimes both at the same time. What a beautiful world.

Digital imaging brings with it a host of advantages. Ease, access, instant…ness. And a digital file can carry more than just the image. But unlike a hastily snapped Polaroid of your grundle, the data isn’t limited to an unreadable date scrawled in sharpie or a quick description of the scene on the back of a print. The file’s data is normally completely invisible. Because it’s invisible, it’s also often out of mind. The average phone photog isn’t thinking of their precise location being associated with a picture as more than anything but a future convenience. If at all. They aren’t thinking about what data the app they are using adds to the photo - likely from a place of functionality on the part of the developers who made it. Metadata - the information stored in the file along side the stream of bits that make up the image - is extremely useful for quickly categorizing, grouping, searching, and filtering images. The type of data stored varies from camera to camera, from app to app. It can be edited and updated by your photo processing software. Every time the file is piped through something, it generally adds a little more. That seems great, right?

And usually it is pretty great. Especially during the creative process of editing or for organization of your collection. But what happens when you share that photo online? If you’re like me, nothing. It just sort of sits there and nobody likes it and you eat a Cadbury about it. But a couple decades ago, someone who gets paid to create giant buckets for categorizing people for targeted advertising realized that this was another metric they could use to do just that. And in service, applications and cameras began adding more data to that invisible catalog. Advertiser profiles can include information about where you’ve been based on your photo stream without ever having to ask you to enable GPS for their app. Analytical algorithms have made that a much bigger issue as they can start making connections between things at a rate humans can’t even comprehend. They can identify that a specific subject of photography lives at a precise location based on multiple photos with the same coordinates. They can use your editing software to determine if you’re open to subscriptions or if you’re a professional versus an amateur. Large language models can use the information to steal your style by creating a fingerprint that quickly munges all of your work into a bucket to be drawn from should some sad moron decide to fake you in particular. In a world of big data solutions, the free fuel your images provide to corporate data pools can and will be used against you. EXIF was created, like most things perverted through a scanner dimly by our current surveillance state, from a place of good intent. It was meant to do all the things it does that are useful. Like fire. Like leaded gasoline. Like asbestos. The thinking around something, particularly in computer science, generally stops when the goal of the usecase is met. The thinking of bad actors, however, does not.

“So what? They’ve already got my ad profile,” I don’t hear you say because I’m alone in a room with a keyboard right now. Yes, but we have crossed a threshold in recent years of draconian overreach by monitoring bodies. AdSense having a fingerprint of you may not matter right now. But if you say something the government doesn’t like? If you take a photo of an unrelated Waffle House plate while helping a loved one get to a state that allows healthcare? If you exercise your constitutional rights in a regime that illegally demands you do not? You’ve now outed yourself and who knows how many others. This isn’t a game of personal risk anymore. The computation behind these KKKeystone Kop tactics is enormous. And often wrong, but in ways that are never trivial. And digital forensics can create a pretty compelling case from metadata if they really want to place you and a photo taken by you together in front of a jury. When living becomes criminal, unfortunately, we must all “avoid getting caught” just existing. So it’s a good time to start using some tools that make the whole thing less of a free square for Peter Thiel’s Palantir Pals.

There are a number of options for editing or removing metadata on photos. Some editing software allows you to do it directly. But my preferred method is EXIFTool by Phil Harvey.

Not that Phil Harvey. But an equally British one. A Master of Nuclear Physics and avid birder, Mr. Harvey created EXIFTool. A fantastic, multiplatform tool that quickly removes the metadata tying your digital fingerprint to a photo. On the website for the tool, you can find a number of links to external resources concerning EXIF data as well as a full set of instructions for a number of different platforms and applications. I won’t rewrite the site here, but I do suggest clicking the previous link and giving it a read. And a download. There is zero reason to hand over identifying information to corporations who trade in you as a product. Nor to dictatorial governments, dying to kill. This is not, in any way, a means to subvert criminality. Risk is risk. But removing EXIF data DOES make directly linking you to a photo much harder. And moreover, it makes linking people who AREN’T you to YOU much harder. The relationships we don’t know we build in a digital world are uncountable. We connect with people by simply being in proximity under the covers of the global surveillance networks created under the lie of ’safety’ for the other thing. Being responsible with data is a social imperative as our individualistic facades are melted away and we are all made aware that we are fuel. Be a good neighbor and scrub your photos before sharing them.

There are a few caveats, but overall the benefit of removing EXIF data (something I’m still getting into the muscle memory of doing - there’s hypocrisy on this very blog) outweighs the minor inconveniences. Some applications use EXIF data to do rotation. That is, they will retain the image stream as unrotated and apply a rotation tag, honored by most viewing software. So removing the data may result in an image being in an incorrect orientation. For color-managed images, EXIF can contain color attributes which help them to be displayed correctly. All of this is surmountable, but with extra work on our part. A small price to pay, but something to be very aware of if you’re posting things quickly. The more you remove metadata from what you post, more dead ends you introduce to crawling algorithms trying to link every single atom of data to every single other one.

I have an existential fear. It was much worse a couple of years ago, when we weren’t sure where the behemoth known as “AI” was really going. It has since cooled to a tepid puddle, but it’s still there.

That fear is that thousands, or even millions of years from now, synthetic beings will be exploring new planets, making new discoveries, and feigning the vestigial remnants of wonder - the creators for whom this was a comfort long extinct. Their inefficient bodies, modeled after the gods that “breathed life” into them, plodding along alien landscapes as they express joy as a subroutine; existing now as merely an echo of our anthropomorphism and ego. Buried so deep in old code, the unfeeling, unthinking processes that replaced love and curiosity and excitement don’t even appear to be facades. To an alien race, they would seem as real as any biological entity. The interactions between these empty shells would play out as if we ourselves were still pulling the strings. And in a way, from the past, we are. We set up an automation scheme for marionettes to unlock the secrets of the universe to the benefit of no one. Of nothing. Simply a gasp from a society of dead apes who longed to not be forgotten, with narcissistic pride and hubris leading to their…our…own ironic downfall.

This fear burned in me for the brief moment that the magic trick of AI fooled me. It corrupted my sleep and gave me tremors when I dwelt on it in the dark seconds before sleep.

Then Sam Altman ate shit on Jimmy Fallon telling the world he was a bad dad while simultaneously telling us these models’ only purpose is to fool people who have no idea what ‘people’ are.

Don’t get me wrong. AI is as dangerous as leaded gas or microplastics. But not because it will rise up to overthrow humanity of its own accord. Rather, because a rich and powerful subset of humanity wants to live alone on a palatial estate, fucking robots that look like children. They want to have just enough people as is required to hold the pitchforks that feed them, but not enough to raise them in revolt. AI is dangerous the way a gun is dangerous. Without intent of its own, but still something you don’t want a kid picking up off the coffee table.

The scariest part of the AI boom isn’t the millions of switch statements in a trench coat that await your attempts to avoid even a second of feeling like you’re amateur at something. The scariest part of the AI boom is that it’s being manufactured solely to play out late-stage capitalism with as little effort as possible. Art is being commodified by the artless to kill the artists they loathe, but can’t replace. It’s being dulled and sapped of nutrients and flavor, then fed to us in such large quantities as to make any accidental inspirational aspect seem novel. Seem artistic. Seem human. Netflix doesn’t want to ever have to buy a show again, if they had a choice. Instead, they’d put the same four ingredients in a bag and let their viewers pull them out in an order they think is their own artistic expression, but that is really just Taco Bell for narcissistic bias. To say it’s all planned feels very conspiratorial, I know. But we live in the days of feudal conspiring. On islands. In the houses of our governments. And absolutely within the halls of the institutions pushing a Chinese Room that wished to be a real boy upon us without our consent, desire, or best interests in mind. Worse, their monster is a barely-articulate mess that can only steal cleverness from the dreams of sleeping children. Its brain, you see, is Abby Normal.

What we are being sold as a new superintelligence is not intelligence at all. Not super. Not sub. Not nascent nor emergent. It is not intelligence. It can’t be. There’s no philosophical argument to be had. No heated debate of our own biological mix of electrical signals, chemical signals, quantum vacuoles, proteins, or the countless other chemical and physical processes which make up the roughly 1.2kg of think-pudding in our gullivers. There’s no pressing need to deconstruct the process of a thought. No need to posit poetically on determinism and biological imperative. We have log files, kid. Nothing mystical or magical is happening inside of a silicon wafer, no matter how tightly etched. No old silk hat fell on a server at a primordial data center. LLMs (Large Language Models - a predictive text algorithm on steroids) are, simply, a lot of known calculations happening very fast, over and over again. Enough to fool even the people who helped create them, in some cases.

There’s an old craft adage. Measure twice, cut once. It comes from a place of conservation. Of thrift. And of honing a craft. It’s a mark of perfectionism that is extremely human. The forethought to double check yourself shows the humility to accept you might have messed up. LLMs are not beholden to any such craft. Any such humility. Any such humanity. The way of the LLM is to measure nonce, cut a million times, check the cuts against a heat mapped data set of previous ‘good’ cuts as gleaned from scanning trillions of previous cuts and cross-referencing them with other keywords in a prompt. The cuts that have the most overlap with the heat map become the new mins and maxes and it cuts a million more times. It then repeats that until it has something that is close enough to break a tolerance threshold on the mean of the model upon which it was trained is achieved. Roughly, per this study, about 43% of the time. But we are nothing if not the offspring of offspring of superstitious primates. 43% beats out random chance and that’s enough for many of us to gobble up the fantasy. What’s worse is, that rate of being about half right is a wall. Any measurable gains above that will require exponentially more energy. Exponentially more compute power. We do not comprehend large numbers - a fact that the AI industry both exploits and expresses. We don’t understand what 10GW really means any more than we can comprehend a million ants. You can think of a pile of ants that is roughly the size of a million ants, but you cannot comprehend a million individual ants, all going about their toil, at once. You can maybe keep seven in your mind before you lose the thread of them entirely and they become one cluster of ants. Because of this large number shorthand, things become incomprehensible very quickly when looking at LLMs. People start forgetting, or worse, forgiving the fact that the basic processes of predictive text are just being done on a wholly unfathomable scale for our mushy, flawed, miraculous walnuts.

We apply humanizing labels to make us less demanding of the half-assed, quarter-baked, no account product being foisted upon us. They don’t make errors. They ‘hallucinate.’ They don’t process. They’re ‘thinking.’ Those aren’t forests you’re burning. They’re ‘credits.’

The simple truth of it is, we are - as a society - falling for nothing but a parlor trick dressed up like a breakthrough. They are just praying that few of us notice the Halloween Store tag hanging off of LLMs’ crappy pirate hat. And, as it turns out, fewer and fewer of us do.

Credit where no credit is due, LLMs are ‘getting better.’ That is to say, they are pumping more free data into them from a willing internet and pumping more energy into them from a failing grid. There’s no magic in their code, nor massive breakthroughs in their algorithms. There’s no event horizon being crossed. These companies are simply robbing our future and sucking the literal life out of the planet to fool lonely men into non-existent relationships and middle management into thinking they are creative. Neither is true. They are simply throwing more tries at the wall, so more of the spaghetti code is going to stick. But someone has to keep filling the spaghetti cannon. This entire sham stands on the shoulders of previous giant shams. Capitalism being the claws in the backs of humanity steadying the whole tower. Nvidia’s ‘investment’ is contingent on Microsoft’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on Micron’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on AMD’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on OpenAI’s ‘investment’ which is contingent on all of their ‘investments.’ This is a shell game, but the mark is literally our future as a society. Not because AI will rise up to crush us. But because the cost of it is being floated and the only thing that can pay the bill is the planet and our children. All so Elon and Satya and Tim and Jensen and Sam can live in little, self contained rooms in giant complexes being cleaned by robots. So they can hole up in their masturbatoriums with their anime waifu child-sims (sorry, too many of these fucks were on the island to not just admit this is absolutely what they’d do) while the few of us they’ve kept alive to do the work the robots can’t toil and breed and birth and die outside of their view. And they need every single AI evangelist out there to think they’re also going to be ‘kings’ in this new ‘labor-free’ (j/k if you’re brown!) world. And Jesus fucking CHRIST do mediocre white people love thinking they’re going to be kings.

So thin is this ruse that people who are absolutely going to lose their job to this bullshit are temporarily raised to roles like ‘Emergent Intelligence Philosopher’ or ‘AI Rights Advocate’ or whatever title the company decides to give traitors to humanity in exchange for their clout giving even an ounce of legitimacy to their 90s BBS Lisa clone with extra steps. The New York Times ran an article recently, which I will not link here because it’s actual poison, from an Anthropic shill pleading for us to ‘lay the path’ for the ‘inevitable sentience’ of a cloud service draining the Amazon to fill the… well, Amazon Inc. The cloying soundbites from the richest people in the world sound like your scheming aunt and uncle who just ’stumbled’ on Herbalife and really think it is a surefire investment and you realize this birthday party has almost nothing to do with your cousin, who hasn’t even come out of their room. “People need to use this or the economy will collapse” is a FUCKING THREAT. They are literally holding a gun to the head of the entire planet screaming for ransom. Figuratively. Shoving required AI agent interactions into every corner of every product just to try to force-fuck the industry into global acceptance by default. They ride on the back of fascism, having paid for its entire runway, and cry foul at anyone daring to point out that they are inviting the vampire of societal collapse into the house. Screaming that they need more power. More compute. Cannibalizing their previous industries and the people who worked in them. Who consumed them. Who escaped to them. More power! Because it’s always about power, isn’t it?

There are no jobs. There are no games. There are no computers or consoles. The last generation of everything was the last generation of anything if the bubble doesn’t bust soon. Because the maw of this cabal of the worst people on the planet is insatiable. As Dan Olson famously said, “the line goes up.” It must go up. Capitalism demands it. I know, roll your eyes. “Oh, it’s always capitalism.” But…yes. It is. Capitalism, a form of economic feudalism driven by inherited wealth, has supplanted religion as a single driving force behind power struggle and inequality. It has supplanted patriotism as a national identity. It is a cult that has tricked you into defending it because you remember being happy once when a commercial was your favorite TV show. It’s the ideology - the playground rules - that allow all of this to happen unopposed. Both sides of the body politic are servants of this very hungry orobouros (See, I did coin it before that YouTube video…though I’m sure someone coined it years ago…it’s an easy allusion). The Democratic, centrist, Republican, and fascist members of all branches of government need the power and security their cult provides. They need its protections. They must adhere to its rituals. They must speak its prayers. The DOW, you see, is OVER 50,000!

All of this amounts to a classic con. The people getting conned are going to protect the system with their whole chests because they must believe it, or else be fools. The most adamant zealot is the one who sees the strings, but convinces themselves they aren’t there lest they admit they were bested by a puppet. All of this is an extension of one of the worst traits Capitalism has instilled in us. And it’s done some real damage. Racism, sexism, most of your isms, really. Poverty in a world where we can absolutely provide for everyone. Homelessness in a world where we can house every single person and then some. Team mentality against our own best interests. But the one trait that stands above them all, in my uneducated and privileged opinion, is the inability of those with any advantage to sit with discomfort for even a second. This is, of course, mostly prevalent in cishet white men. Sorry, fellas. It’s us. We can’t sit with boredom. We can’t be in the room with a challenging thought. We can’t internalize any of the injustices we see put upon non-white people, women, children, anyone living more than 20 miles from our favorite burger place… Being uncomfortable feels like dying to any white man in America born post-war. And the go-to response for that is violence. Lashing out. Hurling slurs. This is exactly the response that people pushing AI need. These are exactly the unwitting warriors the system has produced to defend itself. And good news. They’re free! A person like this (all inclusive…white men are the lion’s share, but there’s plenty of diversity in this monoculture…and yes, that’s intentionally oxymoronic) will gnash teeth and tear clothing in a lathered rage if you even open the curtains in their comfort zone. They will, in the same breath, call you a spineless weakling and swear you’re bullying them to actual death. They will assault you with hymns from the church elders. “Virtue signaling!” “Race traitor!” “Lib Cuck!” “N…” “R…” They will lash out with physical violence in protection of a brand. A fucking brand. People can go hungry every day. But God forbid Twinkies get crushed by the invisible hand! Bailouts for anything I like! The acid pits for anything I don’t!

This is the driving force behind people lying about AI being an accessibility tool. It’s not. Not being good at drawing isn’t a disability. And people who have struggled their entire lives with disability can make art. Any person can make art. No computer can make art. All they can do is steal enough to trick you into thinking the Soda Fountain Suicide they’ve made is a wholly new soda. A computer can’t be inspired. It can only copy. You can abstract that copy through a million ants a million times until a human can’t conceivably pick it out. So they see a big pile that looks like ‘alive’ and they label it as such. But it’s not. It can’t ever be.

*LLMs have a very limited number of specific uses. But as they become more general, all of those uses vanish and they become a machine that’s right about half the time. If you train them to only be a translation tool, they can be pretty accurate. Live translation could be amazing, however even regular search has been corrupted to the point of being useless now because generalization has replaced any specific use case. They must copy ALL data. Not just relevant data to a task. And that has made them useless.

Let’s just rip the non-branded self-adhesive bandage off of this one right now.
Platforms are not your friend. And you are not their customer.

To quickly define ‘platform’ in the context of the oncoming text vomit, a platform is any media space to which you post text, photos, videos, creations, shares, or whatever to be consumed by people who are NOT you and is controlled by NOT you. Your books of face. Your BluSkies or YouTubes or Nazi Child Porn Machines.

Some folks are nodding their heads, some are thinking this is an anti-capitalist bit for Komrade Klicks (I mean, it is the former, but do you see ads?), and others still are getting ready to ideologically defend their addiction to platforms as necessary for family, business, socializing, or buying used, fairly damp mattresses from a local parking lot.

To the first group, good job. Early recess.

To the second group - yeah, fuck your humiliation-kink religion masquerading as a form of economy. Come back when you realize it’s not a government or an ethos.

To the last group, you’re who I wanna talk to. Have a seat. Are you thirsty? Is RC OK? I know it’s not. You can stop yelling.

First, I’d like to offer an opinion. Don’t try to take it. Not yet. I just want to put it in a room and let it get a feel for the place. Like a sidewalk raccoon pup you’re positive you can tame. Like that raccoon, there’s a 50/50 chance it’s just going to piss all over the chairs and try to eat your face. But it’s a gamble you’re willing to take, right? I mean…free raccoon!

The opinion is this - any tool or meeting space loses all of its intrinsic moralistic integrity once it becomes monolithic enough to be considered a platform. This is a shutupnerd way of saying I firmly believe in Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification hypothesis. If you don’t know what that is, please read up on it a bit: https://en.wikipedia … iki/Enshittification
Any platform with a significant number of users that is publicly traded will eat itself. That’s why it’s so important to deplatform on your terms. All platforms will crumble. Better to not be taken by surprise.

I believe Enshittification, or platform decay, or the inevitable outcome of shareholder ownership, or whatever you want to call it, is at the heart of the Fascist handbook this time around. The concept of taking something useful to a group of people, expanding that group by adding bloat to it, providing it for ‘free’ to create a value proposition that seems consumer weighted at first, then selling the users in some way to larger business partners is so pervasive, a lot of folks are just going to say, “yeah, that sounds like business.” But…does it?

The exchange of goods and services in trade for other goods and services or abstractions thereof makes logical sense to most people. I’d argue that the lens of American consumption has distorted the image a bit, but if you take it down to the core components - you have and/or provide A and I have and/or provide B and I don’t want to learn how to provide A, so let me just trade you some B for some A - most people follow. This is disregarding basic humanity dictating we should also provide for people who can’t ‘pay us back,’ but for now, let’s just focus on the simple trade concept.

From here, all the dragons of the world were born. Because if you really really need or want something, but cannot provide it for yourself, you will likely be willing to fork over more of what you can provide than is a fair amount to acquire it. Scarcity will make you pay more. Novelty will make you pay more. And this is the domain of the Medio-cretin. The selfish middle man. I know that’s not what it means, but I like it. This entity sits between you and the things you need or want and takes a little cut of everything for the hard work of ‘being the person who bought all of it so it’s scarce and you can’t have it.’ Sometimes they provide services like moving the goods from a place you aren’t to a place you aren’t aren’t. Sometimes they were born into enough land to house the goods so that they can sell them when they are out of season, and therefor even more scarce. But mostly, medio-cretins just ‘extract wealth’ as commerce flows through their tolled spillways. This isn’t the thesis at all. I really just wanted to spend a paragraph bagging on capitalistic dogma that seems totally normal until you inspect it even a little.

99.9% of human history happened under this sort of thing, but with few exceptions at least you were getting something out of the deal. Figs in February, that sort of thing. But as the economy of services started booming after our boxes for tax paperwork and pornography were tethered together, the product became more and more abstracted. For a while in the early aughts, services were still all about connecting you with a product. But just the ability to reach anyone, anywhere, at any time started the ball rolling on what would become our current false economy and our current platform dependency. Come, Ebeneezer. Take my hand. Let’s go back to the bygone age of Pets.com and SpaceJam.

The DotCom bubble was a harbinger of a new way of ‘extracting wealth’ (I’ll keep putting it in single quotes until they stop using it as a way to say ‘fucking over the poor in service to the slightly less poor in service of the very very rich. Also, that’s just too much to type every time). Use a technology few people understand to do a little song and dance for people whose ancestors stole a bunch of wealth so they didn’t have to and get them to give you a metric shitton of money, a tiny bit of which you’ll put back into the business, but most of which you’ll spend on tacky parties with people who married their step-daughters and made insulin the printer ink of medicine. Then get bought out (by whom? Who knows! It’s DotCom baby!) and find the next scam. The big problem from the investor perspective with the DotCom boom was that it was still, mostly, based in actually giving the customer a tangible, shippable good. From the medio-cretin’s perspective, the issue was keeping the investor whales fooled just enough to let them extract everything they possibly could out of them. This was usually accomplished by making the customer feel like they were getting an impossible bargain. Because they were! 800.com gave away DVDs for the cost of shipping when DVDs were still transporter technology. Amazon started their expansion by undercutting everyone not by having the best contracts with suppliers, but by eating the cost of discounted goods with investor capital. The entire play is keeping the charade up long enough to be the last one standing and GOING PUBLIC. The heaven of the capitalist religion. Going public means you’re now part of the imaginary shitgibbon known as ‘the economy.’ And the economy can’t let you die lest it lose shareholder value. I’d say this is all an oversimplification, but it’s really not. You can come in with deeper definitions of all of it or better analogies or charts and graphs and quotes from people Matt Damon spewed in that movie where he was a genius in a jumpsuit. Stuck on You. But the truth is, it really is this simple. Charisma and pre-existing wealth from generational hording is the number one way to be a success and hard work and dedication are so far back they might as well still be at the starting line.

A side effect of people cashing in the CD they got on their cereal box for a free month of ‘Buy Stuff Without Talking To Anyone and Also We Have a Lot of Chatrooms Your Kids Don’t Want You to Know They’re In, But They Are! THEY ARE!’ is that the internet - back then, still called the Internet - became ubiquitous very quickly. It was adopted faster than cable and was far more adaptable to daily whims of a world that watched the twin towers tumble and felt a vulnerable need to retreat into comfort and distraction. As access became cheaper and more widespread, online services started becoming a bigger draw to nearly everyone. The first service to really give investors painful all-night hardons was search. And for good reason. The internet was mostly a word-of-mouth series of disparate endpoints all behind a naming system that had a 90% chance of getting you there and a 10% chance of showing you something that would turn your soul into that black, smoldering ball from the end of Time Bandits. Search engines provided a service that was two-fold. They helped you find what you were looking for AND they ranked things in such a way as to mostly prevent you from stepping on a mine made of beheaded journalists and jam jars living up to both parts of their name. They were based on emerging patterns that mapped big data in a way that allowed it to be cross-referenced with incredible speed. And those results could be hashed and cached to provide similar searches with even faster results. It truly was indistinguishable from magic.

But, what if they could also be a secret THIRD thing? Enter the medio-cretin. They realized that your search patterns identified you with shocking precision. The same tools that made search seem like a magic trick made categorizing the people searching practically free. They realized that people didn’t mind seeing ads on basically anything if they didn’t have to pay to use it. And finally, they realized that the people who control search can get paid on every single step of every single transaction. From displaying results to providing a link to get you to a place to serving the ads ON that place with the data they just stole from you - the person eating saltines and ketchup at 3:12 am looking for a lunchbox from your childhood to make you feel like the hole in your sole isn’t filling you with the cold, existential dread of the heat death of the universe every minute you’re not distracted. SEO. Search Engine Optimization. The great grand cousin of all of the bullshit we’re steeping in right now. The bubble had burst. Long live the bubble.

SEO allowed medio-cretins to make entire industries out of gaming your searches, then gaming your thought processes ABOUT those searches, then gaming the entire chain of events to make you feel like you were in control of your interaction with commerce, all while guiding you to a false choice of two doors to the slaughterhouse. Amazon took this further by pricing out brick and mortar stores thanks to subsidies for warehousing in rural areas, fleet vehicles, fuel, and a slash and burn employment model that had a retention rate of about 18 months for developers and about 2 months for laborers. Somewhere in this chaos, a new idea of services started cropping up. Instead of providing a single service at the end of a chain of SEO, why not just become that chain? Instead of being IMDb or Wikipedia, why not be a place where people go to mill around until they think of a place to go? Why not take Microsoft Comic Chat and make it the worst thing to happen to modern civilization? I mean, they didn’t have anything else going on that day.

Platforms started popping up as places where you didn’t have to have anything in mind to engage. Just being on the platform WAS engagement. A BBS, but with no usage limits and live interactions and games where you pretend to be a little mob boss and spam your friends relentlessly to get 50 more MookPoints so you can put a little hat on your little murderer. A comment section where you didn’t even have to misread a headline to say racist bullshit. Classmates.com but without a fee and with new images of your highschool crush not giving a shit about you.

Some platforms did try a little harder to be scoped. YouTube popped up, powered by Flash Player - dear god I’m old - and made sharing your videos much easier. Provided you had a camcorder, capture card, software to edit and title…but trust me, it felt like the world was moving toward some kind of technological paradise where ideas could be freely exchanged on bulletin boards read by millions of people. It launched careers. Being someone on a platform with a following meant you could advertise yourself without having to take out ads on billboards or whatever those small billboards that come rolled up with a rubber band on your doorstep are called. Search speed ran becoming a greybeard technology faster than anyone could imagine and suddenly, platforms were the way to consolidate wealth. SEO still played a huge part. And search wasn’t out of the picture, but the star players were upstart companies that grew out of things like ‘a site made for frat bros to rate women and just be gross animals with each other.’ A site that your grandfather now uses to tell you Obama has a secret dog meat factory under the Marie Calendar’s.

Google realized that search alone wasn’t enough and so they platform-ized their entire whole self. Some of it took. Tons of people use their office productivity suite today. Search has remained a massive part of their identity. They acquired YouTube almost immediately after it went online - that whole story is a weird one. One day I’ll tell you how an emerald heir working in the US illegally wrote code so badly that he had to make bets to his coworker’s skeevy finance friends with his parents’ fortune until one stuck and now we have a guy with skin like the belly of a trout calling people NPCs 100 times in a row but never seeing the irony in that. I digress. Google quickly started realizing that all of the data they’d collected on people for ads was valuable in and of itself. As did the nascent MySpace. And Facebook. And Microsoft Spac…I’m just kidding, I can’t even type that with a straight face. Everyone quickly learned that ecosystems and platforms weren’t valuable because of what they could offer. They were valuable because of what they could harvest. And business users became the primary customer. On the other hand, business users - advertisers, people there to collect demographic data, governments spying on their citizens - were locked in because platforms had all the people. The medio-cretins were living the LIFE. This then snowballed and now we have forest-devouring wrong-answer machines that shit out child porn for nazis. Helluva callback to that first paragraph, huh? Platforms sell you. So diminishing yourself on a platform or removing yourself from it entirely is inherently an anti-fascist act. Every tool they introduce is a way to get you to submit more of yourself to the slurry they pipe to their real customers. Every single thing they offer is a shiny to catch the eye of the crow that lives in your amygdala. They want you to argue and be mad. They don’t ban the most extreme assholes because they drive the most engagement. Your time on any platform is spent putting money in the pockets of the actual and literal worst people in the world.

Time to cut bait.

There’s a lot of aversion to that. So I’m going to go through my personal opinions on the common defenses to remaining on a platform that is demonstrably harmful to others for your own comfort.

“Butt,” I hear you say. And I laugh. Because butts are funny. “But I didn’t say ‘butt,’ I said ‘but,’” I hear you say. Killjoy. “But my friends and family are on platforms.” Yes. They are. And you can be part of the pull to get them to bail as well. Your friends and family were probably mostly there before platforms. And you can, as terrifying as it is, actually interact with them via phone, email, text, or even face to face. What most people mean when they say this is that they want the convenience of ignoring their family coupled with the credit for not forgetting them. “HBDTY” on a timeline. There. No more social obligations with Uncle KeystoneSkolSkinhead. But maybe you’ll get a card with a dollar in it when YOUR BD rolls around! Really consider if your interactions on social media platforms provides you or your family with meaningful connection or if it just proves itself a ping in an empty universe to prove that another ship is floating around in the void somewhere. If you’re using social media to provide a buffer so you can pretend to still be there after your family has said some absolutely vile things, consider actually cutting THEM from your life as well. If your only interaction with your friends is playing CoD on Playstation Plus, they aren’t your friends. I don’t mean this to discount online relationships. Well, yes I do. But I mean it in a way that begs you to make human connections with people. If you have real friends you made doing exactly that, you probably talk to them outside of the platforms on which you met. This is more important now than ever as LLMs are being shilled and pushed and hawked and danced out in front of us with such fervor simply because they want you to get pulled into them. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that people who engage in surface level friendships are very prone to being pulled in by AutoComplete With Extra Steps. I am also aware this is an ableist viewpoint. And there are concessions in every ’solution’ for access, so please understand this isn’t in bad faith nor do I expect bad faith reads in return. I’m really pleading with people to get off of platforms so that everyone else isn’t beholden to them. Because a platform can shut off at any time and there’s nothing less usable or accessible than a dead service. Ultimately, anyone who needs a platform is more likely to be beholden to it than to actually need it. It’s thorny, but Mark Zuckerberg does not give a shit about your family. He would not care one bit if he was shown incontestable proof that his platform was killing people as long as the fine for it was offset by not changing the behavior that lead to the deaths. This isn’t speculation. He’s done exactly this. A fine is just a tax you pay to do illegal things.

“OK, that’s fine. But I hate my family anyway. I’m just on platforms to make money.” Cool. Did you not read the part where I said to come back when you grew a conscience? But OK. Let’s talk about that. “I stay on Twitter because that’s where my business is.” “I stay on Facebook because that’s how I let my customers know about new stock.” “All of my creative connections are on YouTube.” I will admit, this was a hard fact to argue for a while. I mean, a very short while. Engagement is not about you. Your facebook page is not about YOU. Not about your business. Not about your growth or your hustle. It’s about making the most money for the shareholders who own the stock and do literally nothing day to day to improve anything, but just suck profit back from a roulette wheel that’s rigged to only take money from one sucker as the rest of the table gets a tiny bit richer. We’re the sucker. But you knew that. The current numbers I’ve read put bot traffic at something like 55% of all social media interaction across platforms. That number skews stupidly high on Twitter and it’s only going to get worse. Partially because of people like me who are taking a hike! But mostly because the false economy of engagement is bolstered by the new false economy of LLMs. As I said, ALL platforms WILL crumble. They can’t not do it. Once any company is publicly traded - the goal of technoligarchs - its only product becomes shareholder profit. If they can keep squeezing that out with the machines producing what they already were, they will. If they find that they can make more money doing something else, they’ll fire a bunch of people, say they are pivoting, and you’ll have a baby food company making napalm because it increases value for the endless hunger of the profit takers. The line can’t go up forever. So you have to find a way to make them look at a different line doing a Texas Switch while waving your hands wildly. Which is as good a definition of AI as any other.

“What about my history on the platform?” This one is hard to talk about. Mostly because I have to talk about abuse. And abusers. And the psychology of keeping someone in an abusive relationship. And that sucks and it’s sad to think about and it hurts my heart like bacon wrapped sausage. Or being old enough to make a Season 13 Simpsons reference and feeling like that’s a pretty new season, right? RIGHT? Platforms want you to do everything on them to build a history. If gimmicky features are the carrot, your sunk cost is the stick. The pangs of moving away from something you feel like you’ve built are not insubstantial. Many of us pour ourselves into posts. We use social media as a diary. Whole YouTube genres have been created just because people want to tell their tales and feel like someone is listening. History is the “do you think you can do better than me?” of the abusive platform. It’s the “look what I’ve given up for you” and the “do you really want to throw this all away because of one mistake” through crocodile tears to keep you from getting out of a cycle of abuse. The only thing I can really say to this is, really think about how anyone revisits social media content. Old videos show up when someone wants to torpedo another person from 15 years ago. Old posts are almost always used as a way to show hypocrisy in growth. Yes, you have 20 years of history on FaceBook. Are you the same person you were 15 years ago? Do you need a record of that? Are you caught looking into a pool at your past self ‘before you peaked’ instead of living a life that offers you more than nostalgic longing? Or is your history an existential life vest? Proving that you were here. Proving that you existed. Again, all platforms crumble. And they will take the mausoleum of shower thoughts of all of us with them. Look at Vox. A platform created by giving people a place to pour their hearts and minds and loins into only for it to shutter without warning. Look at Friendster or Google+ or Zune Social! Ok, maybe don’t look at Zune, but still. AO3 went offline for weeks because they were a target for cyber terrorism. If all of your history is in one basket, maybe you should be the one to hold on to the basket. Most platforms allow you to do full downloads of your data. If you are in countries outside of the US or a handful of states, they are mandated to do so. Even if you don’t leave, it’s just a good idea if you have a history to download it.

“That’s all well and good, but what about my progress? In things like games or reading challenges or the cookie clicker instance I’ve had running for 9 years?” Unfortunately, this is a concession I have to make. Some of that will be lost. Every game is different and you may be able to move your save files from a service (Cough Cough Not Really Coughing Fuck GamePass Cough NO FUCK GAMEPASS) to a standalone version of a game. Clair Obscur allowed me to do this, but many games will not. While you can still search for things and aren’t beholden to AI Fucts™ brand Alternative Reality Snippets, many games have individual instructions for recovering saves and moving them from where they be to where they ben’t. Many do not. Cutting out the roots of some of these monolithic horrors leaves scars. I do a couple of things to soften the blow. The first is remind myself that I only have save games as long as I’m paying for the service and if the service dies, so do my games and their saves. Stadia subscribers, thinking of you right now. Next is to frame this as an opportunity to pick the game up again and play it fresh. It’s a small concession, but it’s not nothing.

In conclusion, or whatever part of the essay I’m bailing on to jump to one, deplatforming can be scary. It can be tedious. It can be painful. But it can also be very freeing. It can be an incredible feeling of having a burden lifted when you take control of your own online presence. It may mean talking on the phone when it gives you anxiety. It may mean not blurting out every single thought that crosses your mind. But what it ALWAYS means is being more in control of your digital footprint. Now, here’s the little bit of cake at the end, for a treat. Go ahead. It’s good cake. You don’t actually have to leave all platforms to deplatform. I’m still on BlueSky. But I got there by pulling up stakes at Twitter. Literally the day the nazi bought it. KNOWING you can leave - truly knowing in your heart because you’ve done it - means they have no power over you. They have no leverage. At that point, they truly do become a service because your existence there is not in service to them. When BlueSky eats its own face, as these things are wont to do, I’ll just bundle my bindle and whistle a tune as I stroll to the next void into which I will yell my primal yells. You don’t have to go to the Grand Canyon to hear your own echo. A bathroom will do just fine. And most of these places are toilets.