Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
One of 2026's better tech-related coinages is "dickover," John Gruber's term for
a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction; e.g. asking the user to accept “cookies”, subscribe to a newsletter, install the website’s mobile app, agree to terms of service, or anything else that the user couldn’t give two shits about.
These are bad everywhere, but they are especially terrible in the UK and EU, where websites practice a form of malicious compliance to the GDPR, Europe's landmark privacy law. Under the GDPR, websites are required to secure your affirmative consent to process your data. The obvious way that websites should respond to this is by not collecting your data unless there's a damned good reason for it, but the actual response is to repeatedly shove cookie-consent dialogs in your face before letting you use the site.
These are absolutely unnecessary. Your browser can be configured to transmit a "global privacy control signal" by default that tells websites you don't consent to be spied on while you look at their pages:
But many websites punish you by throwing up a "Global Privacy Control detected" dickover that forces you to click through to affirm their confirmation of your confirmation that you don't want to be spied on.
If you don't have the GPC set, websites will demand that you tell them whether you want to be spied on – and they'll do it again, every time you visit them. The website operators falsely claim that they have to do this under the terms of the GDPR (or other laws, like California's CCPA). This is a lie. Every privacy law contains an exception that allows websites to store data about you for a "legitimate interest," and that obviously includes setting a cookie that says, "don't ever spy on this user."
What's a legit interest? Well, I can tell you what it isn't. Facebook claimed that they had to spy on you, even if you opted out by laboriously clicking through one of their dickovers or by transmitting a GPC signal to their servers, because you had also clicked through their terms of service, which say, "Facebook is going to spy on you with every hour that god sends, from asshole to appetite, abandon hope all ye who enter here" (a direct quote). Facebook claims that this is a contract with you, whereby the company has promised to spy on you, and if they stop, they would be violating the contract, which might make you mad, so they are legally required to eavesdrop on every conversation you have and follow you everywhere you go:
This is bullshit, and the European Court of Justice affirmed it. But despite the fact that surveillance advertising companies are happy to stretch the definition of "legitimate interest" to cover "spying on you because our ToS say we will," these same companies insist that "legitimate purpose" can't possibly include "remembering the fact that you told us not to spy on you the last time you were here," and so every time you click through to one of many popular websites, you get a dickover, and the only way to make it stop is to "consent" to being spied upon.
But it doesn't have to be this way. While the right answer to this kind of rampant lawlessness is stonking fines and even the corporate death penalty for repeat offenders, internet users have a myriad of options available to them for banishing dickovers to the scrapheap of history. These measures aren't difficult to avail yourself of, and using them will make your life infinitely better, so I'm going to tell you about some of them.
Before I start, one note: these measures only work on browsers, not apps. An app is a webpage wrapped in the right kind of IP law to make it a felony to change how it works, which is why companies are infinitely horny to get you to use their apps, not their websites:
What's more, these measures really only work on desktop browsers, because mobile browsers are apps, and are severely limited by law and mobile operating systems, making it hard-to-impossible to customize them so that they'll respect your rights. This is true of all mobile browsers, but it goes triple for iOS (iPhones and iPads):
Finally, this mostly only works on Firefox, and it works worst on Chrome, Google's monopolistic browser. When it comes to customizing your browsing experience to get rid of annoyances like dickovers and ads, Chrome is hands-down the worst choice, and Google is about to make it much, much worse, forcing a change that will kill the most popular blockers. Stop using Chrome, switch to Firefox:
So, once you're on your actual computer, using Firefox, how can you disenshittify your internet experience? The first thing to familiarize yourself with is Reader Mode, a built-in Firefox feature that switches any webpage to a black type/white background column of text. Just click the little "page view" icon next to the Firefox location bar or use the key combo "ctrl-alt-r."
Some power tips for Reader Mode: Firefox tries to guess whether a given page should have a Reader Mode option based on its layout. This sometimes blocks Reader Mode on pages that badly need it. You can force Firefox to always allow you to try Reader Mode by going to "about:config" in your location bar, then searching for "reader.parse-on-load.force-enabled" and toggling it to "true". If you switch to Reader Mode and the page breaks, you can switch back by hitting ctrl-alt-r again.
Many websites' "soft paywalls" (which allow you to read an article or two before getting a demand to register and/or pay) can be defeated with Reader Mode. Just hit ctrl-alt-r and see if the whole article appears. If it doesn't, try one or both of: a) reloading the page while still in Reader Mode, and/or; b) Clearing cookies for the page (click the shield next to the site's URL in Firefox's location bar, then click "Clear cookies and site data"), and then reload.
That's Reader Mode, and it comes built into Firefox, and can be installed via various extensions on other browsers. Now let's move on to more advanced techniques, starting with "Kill Sticky," a bookmarklet that deletes any "static" elements in a web-page you've loaded (broadly, this is anything that won't change position when you scroll your browser).
Just click the "Kill Sticky" bookmarklet and all the static elements in the current tab go away. This includes things like navigation bars, which are often (but not always) useless annoyances. The original Kill Sticky, created by Alisdair McDiarmid, is 13 years old, and it still works great, but eight years ago, gala8y created a new version that caught some outliers that the original Kill Sticky missed. I've been running gala8y's version for a year now with no problems, and I recommend it as your second line of dickover defense (after Reader Mode):
https://github.com/gala8y/kill-sticky–forked
Kill Sticky is great for getting rid of the dickovers on a website you're not planning to visit more than once. But if you visit a dickover website regularly, you can permanently block its dickovers by using the Adblock Plus (ABP) browser extension:
https://adblockplus.org/
Once you have Adblock Plus installed, you can instruct your browser never to render a given website's dickover. Just load the website, hover your pointer over the dickover, and click your right mouse-button (Mac users need to ctrl-click). This will pop up a Firefox context menu, and at the bottom of that menu is "Block Element…".
Select "Block Element," then move your mouse around the screen. Different regions of the screen will glow pink, showing you which element (part of the page) ABP can access there. Once you've highlighted the dickover, click the "Preview" button on the ABP dialog in the bottom right corner. This will show you how the page looks after you've banished that element.
If it's an element you want to delete forever, click "Create" and ABP will create a new rule for that page that blocks that element. Note that many dickovers consist of several elements, each atop the other, and after you block one element, you might have to repeat the process to delete the element "behind" it, digging your way down to the actual webpage. Each element you block is listed in the top pane of the ABP dialog box. For example, here's Wired.com's UK dickover:
If you block an element by accident and want to restore it, just delete its corresponding line in the Block Element dialog. When websites change their layouts and their dickovers come back, just add the new one to the Block Element for that page. No need to delete the old entries.
Finally, if all else fails, there's Remove Paywall, a website that tries several different ways to load a page without its interrupters, nag screens, regwalls and paywalls:
https://www.removepaywall.com/
It's also available as a browser plugin, so you can just right-click on any page and select "Remove Paywall" from the pop-up menu. Remove Paywall often loads a page with all of its dickovers, and you can use all the techniques enumerated above – Reader Mode, Kill Sticky and Block Element – with Remove Paywall versions of pages.
Back in 2024, Ed Zitron tried an experiment: he bought Amazon's bestselling laptop and tried to use it, discovering it to be a horror-show of shovelware, including processor-devouring preinstalled spyware that rendered it all but unusable:
https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/
Zitron's (excellent) point is that technically proficient people have better computers than most users, and these computers are configured in better ways, and as a result, we participate in a fundamentally different internet to the one that normies are forced to use.
It's an excellent observation, and Zitron's point – that these laptops were actively enshittified by hardware makers and OS vendors – is an important one (the essay is called "Never Forgive Them").
But to this point, I would like to add another: we have a duty and obligation to the people we love to show them how to seize the means of computation. The normies in your life need the tips and tricks I lay out in this article more than anyone. Sure, it takes some doing to install Firefox, Kill Sticky, Adblock Plus and Bypass Paywalls; it takes a minute to figure out Reader Mode.
But if you install these tools for the people you love and show them how to use them (or just reconfigure the sites they visit most frequently to block dickovers and other annoyances), you will permanently improve their internet experience, clawing back hours of annoyances every week, while also protecting their privacy.
Anyone who is confused by switching to Firefox is also going to be confused by the deceptive language and practices that go along with dickovers. By leaving your unsophisticated loved ones exposed to dickovers, you're not decreasing the amount of technological confusion they're likely to experience in a day – you're vastly increasing the amount of danger they face as a result of that confusion.
There's never been a better time to disenshittify your cherished normies' computers. The AI companies' illegal monopolization of the memory market has sent the price of new computers, RAM and storage skyrocketing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BORRBce5TGw
All of us – but especially normies – are having to do more with less. The best way to squeeze extra performance out of any computer (but especially an aged and underpowered computer) is by switching to a free/open operating system like GNU/Linux and replacing your proprietary, resource-gobbling apps with free/open alternatives:
Seizing the means of computation isn't theft, it's bargaining. Commercial surveillance companies will tell you that by spying on you, they are simply engaged in a marketplace exchange in which you swap your privacy for access to online services. But they are running a very curious sort of market: it's a "market" where as soon as you stop to browse someone's wares, the stallholder gets to reach into your pocket and clean out your wallet. In "markets," prices are announced and bargained over, not set unilaterally and extracted from anyone unwise enough to cross the threshold.
Adblocking, dickover blocking and other customizations are a way for you to bargain back, to answer the opening bid of "How about you give me all of your data forever and let me do anything I want with it?" with "How about 'nah?'"
Dickovers are companies' illegal response to privacy laws. Privacy laws are the public response to companies' out-of-control data theft and weaponization. They call us thieves, but they're the ones who embarked upon a generation-long campaign of unrestricted data plunder. What they call "theft" is just self-defense.
A generation ago, publishers and advertisers fell in love with pop-up ads. Early pop-ups were virulent in ways that are hardly imaginable today: visiting a website summoned dozens of pop-ups, some of them employing dirty tricks like spawning as an invisible 1×1 pixel, or running away from your cursor when you tried to close them. They auto-played sound and music. They were Satanic.
We got rid of pop-ups by installing pop-up blockers. Browser vendors (starting with Opera, then Mozilla) blocked pop-ups by default. Soon, pop-ups simply ceased to exist for the majority of internet users, and at that point, the same companies who'd insisted that they would go out of business unless they could fill your screen with pop-ups quietly gave up on them and found another way to advertise.
No one should ever have to look at another dickover. If dickovers become invisible for everyone on the web, there won't be any dickovers. Companies claim they need dickovers to survive. It's bullshit. They want dickovers, but if dickovers cease to be rendered on their target audience's screens, they'll switch to less invasive tactics, just like they've always done.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
My parents are definitely in the age bracket where, every time I visit them, they have a request for tech support (phone, computer, or printer). Thanks for the reminder to set them up with a better browser and a better configuration upon my next visit.
I'm not sure I'm up to the challenge of exorcising their haunted printer, but I'll be giving it a go in a few weeks!
I've recently learned that escaping enshitification is actually really easy. When I was younger I would use FOSS (free and open source software) because I usually couldn't afford anything else. Back then the paid options were usually significantly better than the unpaid options so when I finally got money I started using the paid stuff and completely forgot that Foss existed.
If you don't know why Foss is awesome its not just that its free. Open source software has a huge set of advantages. Most software is proprietary meaning that its code cannot be viewed by other people. Open source softwares code can be viewed by everyone and people can contribute their own code to make it better. Open source is often more secure than proprietary because more people have more eyes on it and more people have contributed to it's security. Its also easy to know how much privacy you have with every software because you can read the code. No more "trust me bro I'm not harvesting and selling your data" you know if they are collecting and selling because the code is publicly available.
In the last two months I have been switching almost completely to Foss. I was worried at first because when I stopped using Foss over 10 years ago the average Foss software was genuinely worse than the paid proprietary alternative. Thankfully things have really come full circle. 90℅ of the software I have tried in the last 2 months works better than the proprietary alternative and is 100℅ less obnoxious.
So here is a list of every Foss software I have tried and recommend. There is way more than this available. This list is just what I have used and like personally. Anyone can feel free to add and we can turn it into a master list. Please just take these as a place to start and do your own research to see if these softwares will work for your use case before you fully ditch your proprietary software.
Operating systems
Graphene os: android alt. Security and privacy focused. The most secure and private smartphone currently available.
Linux mint: easy to use linux, 100℅ better than windows.
Pop!: The Linux distro you should use if you have nividia hardware and want to play games using said hardware. Very intuitive and easy to use.
Kubuntu: Ubuntu Linux with KDE desktop. This is the linux distro one I am currently using and I don't have any plans to jump ship again. Better than windows and better than Mac. The companion app for your phone makes life soooo easy. Its pretty and easy to customize to a ridiculously granular level. No fucking notes.
Kindle jailbreak- ko reader: use jailbreak to free your kindle from the tyranny of the bezos. It will download ko reader which is a Foss OS that has every fucking feature you always wished kindle had and let's you read whatever the fuck you want, and have whatever the screensaver you want (no more ads!). Soooo fuck amazon and use this. I genuinely cannot recommend it enough.
Linux FOSS: (some available on windows and android as well)
Calibre: Foss desktop eBook library. Packed with features. You will want to use this with koreader to make managing your kindle easy.
Manuscript: skrivner alt. Does absolutely everything I need.
Bitwarden: password manager (use a keepass fork if you want self hosted)
Next cloud: private google drive and cloud alternative that you can self host if you want but it's not required. App available
Proton VPN: to the best of my knowledge it is the only Foss no log VPN you can get. You can pay for higher speeds. App available
Quad9dns: free encrypted DNS provider. App available.
News software:
Use any Foss RSS reader and for the love of god stop getting news from social media. Take control of your feed!
Apps (I only know for android)
Fdroid: great app store to find Foss android apps and download them.
Antennapod: you can get all of your podcasts fetched to one feature rich app via RSS feed. No need to rely on spotify or music steaming services.
Openreads: it's good reads but private and 100℅ stored locally. No amazon, no social media aspect, it just tracks your reading, you can import your good reads but if you want to import from storygraph you have to make a good reads burner account, import to good reads, then import to openreads. The menus Navigation on this one is a bit cumbersome but honestly good reads app is worse.
Newpipe: YouTube frontend that let's you have YouTube subscriptions, watch YouTube in the background, and blocks all ads, without logging in to YouTube. You will want to use this one with a VPN set to Canada (or any other country) so YouTube doesn't keep blocking it in order to force you to sign in. But even with that extra step its worth it for the privacy and the lack of ads.
Proton mail: one of 2 more private gmail alts. But you should note that email cannot be 100℅ anonymous or private.
I think that's it. There are still a lot software varieties I am slowly finding.
I know people get mad at the name, and I understand why, but straight-up I've been using GIMP for 15 years and it's a good solid art program made under the GNU program. It's worth a look.
Blender is an amazing FOSS suite for 3D modeling and animation, as well as digital sculpting and motion tracking. Pros use it. It’s a staple in game development. It’s what the Academy Award winning film “Flow” was made on. It’s not the bland name alternative to an industry standard; it is an industry standard.
Krita is a fantastic FOSS application for digital painting. Everyone I’ve ever talked to who uses it has loved it to death.
OBS is the absolute go-to choice for screen recording and live streaming. You can use it to record your entire desktop or a specific window, capture audio from multiple sources, and even add overlays, webcam feeds, or transitions to your videos.
VLC Media Player is the best media player, hands down. It’s lightweight, it’s reliable, it supports virtually every audio and video format known to man, and it has built in media conversion and even basic editing. I truly can’t imagine why anyone would use a media player that isn’t this one. It’s just the best there is, easily, no contest.
Audacity is a fantastic multi-track audio editor and recorder. It’s free and it’s good, and podcasters love it for a reason.
And believe it or not, Thunderbird is a really good email client now. I’m not even joking. If you used it back in the day and hated it, please give it another chance, because the glow up is unreal.
Just tacking on that while FOSS is usually free as in costless the term "free" in open-source spaces typically means "non-proprietary". It isn't a bad idea to look into which of these projects accept donations and to donate if you can. Blender is an amazing program. Genuinely I like it better than Maya or 3DSMax and it is struggling to maintain its project because it has gotten so large in its pursuit of giving artists things that are actually needed but very few of those artists are donating on download.
Other projects (LibreWolf browser comes to mind) reject donations specifically because they don't want to be in Blender's position (often these have an ideological pursuit, like LibreWolf and privacy).
If you see a Donate option when you go to download an open-source project please consider giving them something. Anything you can afford. The non-proprietary (i.e. "free") nature of these projects is so important but I'd hate to see the best of them tank because "free" isn't actually "free".
Spoke to a gen z person the other night and apparently the young folks don't know about the very legal sites from which you can access public domain media (including Dracula, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and other Victorian gothic horror stories)?
Like this young person didn't even know about goddamn Gutenberg which is a SHAME. I linked to it and they went "aw yiss time to do a theft" and I was like "I mean yo ho ho and all that, sure, but. you know gutenberg is entirely legal, right?"
Anyway I'm gonna put this in a few Choice Tags (sorry dracula fans I DID mention it though so it's fair game) and then put some Cool Links in a reblog so this post will still show UP in said tags lmao.
Spreading the news to my followers - if you weren’t aware of this before, here’s the link to Project Gutenberg - https://www.gutenberg.org/
Project Gutenberg is a gigantic collection of books that are in the public domain. You can read the books through the site or you can download them in various formats so you can get the format you prefer for your eReader of choice.
It is free.
It is legal.
I was reviewing the list of the top 100 books downloaded yesterday and I saw a fair few that I had to read for college classes - so if you’re a college student and your professor assigns you to read Plato or any number of older works, check here before you buy a copy.
I reread the Anne series several years back - they were free through this. I need to reread Pride and Prejudice at least once a year, and my e-book version is from this. Someone recommended Jekyll and Hyde to me a few weeks back and I got a free copy from this. When I went to Haworth on my last holiday before the plague times, I brought books by the Bronte sisters with me to read or reread that I downloaded from here. It’s a great resource.
Yes yes yes! I was honestly so flabbergasted that this young person hadn't heard of the gutenberg project! It's been around for AGES, maybe longer than the kindle has? And it's such a huge project and wonderful resource! It used to be a household name (or maybe that's just my family, thanks to my dad being a cheapskate nerd [affectionate]). I was so glad to be able to share this resource and others with them though, and I wanted to make sure no one else was missing out!
If you look at the first reblog from me I also recommended a few other resources, most of which were from www.archive.org, home of the Wayback Machine! They run openlibrary.org, where you can check out ebooks of some public domain titles! They even have the Bone series by Jeff Smith!
And archive.org itself has all kinds of public domain media including music and movies! For Dracula fans, here's a radio show adaptation of the book, starring Orson Welles! And here's a 1920 movie adaptation of "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," starring John Barrymore, the grandfather of Drew Barrymore!
I'm so excited to see people falling in love with classic media through Dracula Daily! Let's keep that fire blazing!
Also, if you can't handle reading things, check out libirvox.org! it's a free audio book project taking public domain works and people doing free audiobooks! there's a lot of great stuff on there, but it takes things in the public domain and makes audio books out of them!
it's a super nice project, and you can find some really nice readers there!
Also don't think a book is old because it's in the public domain
lots of writers and publishers are prepared to waive future profits for entirely petty reasons
because of this the entire works of Philip K Dick [petty writer who found himself with lots of hangers on during his life] and HP Lovecraft [his publisher - who was his wife and hated him] became public domain on their death
Sherlock Holmes entered public domain this year, it's always worth checking because you can save a fortune
and the more popular the classic - the more likely someone has uploaded it
Anything published (in the US) from 1927 or earlier (this number goes up every year for quite a while), and
Anything published between 1928 and 1963 that wasn't renewed, and
Anything published before 1989 without a proper copyright notice.
(Don't go looking for things in that third category unless you've studied a LOT about copyright law. Mostly that covers things like "weird little newsletters" and "self-published booklets" and sometimes fanzines. But most publications have a copyright notice in them.)
There's also some oddball exemptions here and there; copyright law is a tentacled mess. But those are the basic guidelines. (Except for audio. Audio has its own set of rules. It's weird.) (I mentioned tentacles, did I not? Double the amount of them you were thinking of.)
There are a lot of works from the 50s and early 60s that were not renewed, especially short stories published in magazines.
Project Gutenberg began in 1971; the first text was the US Declaration of Independence, shared through the university computer system. That was the start of "hey computers + public domain text = FREE BOOKS FOR EVERYONE."
Adding on that Project Gutenberg is not just Eng language texts either! I know specifically about the French texts because I did independent study French lit in high school and all my sources were Project Gutenberg acquired (Candide my beloathed) but there's many open source texts available in a number of languages.
Oh man, yeah, young people definitely need to learn this. I read so many public domain things when I was fresh out of college and penniless but still needed entertainment. Just going straight to Wikisource works too:
And yes, Sherlock Holmes is in the public domain. But I got bored with Sherlock Holmes after a few months, and became much more pumped when I discovered his mirror opposite, Arsene Lupin. Because when you're not only young and penniless but living through the Great Recession, what you really want to read about isn't the world's greatest detective solving crimes. It's the world's greatest thief robbing fat cats blind while pantsing the police along the way.
And you can Ctrl-F find words in electronic texts.
This is so powerful that in the old times they made a whole-ass index of every word in the Bible, called a concordance. It is now possible for every electronic book
i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.
as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”
small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.
i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.
#the boys about audrey: she is the mother i never had. she is the sister everybody would want. she is the friend that everybody deserves. i don’t know a better person.
so embarrassing to watch yourself become obsessed with a character that feels tailor made for you specifically to become obsessed with. feels like i fell into a trap made just for me. like damn they got me. those are all the things i like and go crazy for
@pscentral anniversary event: take four
↳ event 09: comfort / event 43: childhood favourites
[The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, Rock-a-Doodle, Bartok the Magnificent, Titan A.E., A Troll in Central Park, Thumbelina, All Dogs Go to Heaven, Anastasia]
I remember being at the monitor and my intimacy coordinator and producer were like, “Is that kiss too sweet?” I remember just being like, “I don’t care. It’s so good. It’s sweet. I want it to exist.” It wasn’t scripted that way, but at the same time it was Episode 2 so there had to be hesitation. But I was like, “I love it. I just want to watch them kiss each other.” When Ilya takes his hoodie [from Shane], they just had it.
— Jacob Tierney on the stairwell scene [via Gold Derby]
it's crazy to me that out of all the different social media platforms, tumblr is the one where Heated Rivalry fans are the most normal. that feels so backwards. we're all so old.
whether in literal years or just in our souls, we are elderly. we are worldweary. we're like, "i am NOT here for reality. fantasy only, baby! i just want to live in this fictional world and forget about the real one for a while. i want to think and write and talk about made-up scenarios for these fictional characters. even if we're talking about the real people, we're talking about the fictionalized versions of the actors' public personas. we're playing with dolls, here, people. this is not real life. that's kinda the point. idgaf who that 25-year-old is actually fucking. that's his business. that has nothing to do with this. leave the kid alone ffs"
and i love that. it's a pleasure to play dolls with you, fellow 'old' people
