personally I am of the opinion that vegans who are like “the way our food system currently works under capitalism on a large scale is exceptionally cruel to all animals including humans and is not sustainable, so I’m doing what I can to make the most ethical choices available to me about what I eat and encourage others to do the same” are generally very reasonable people who I agree with in spades. but vegans who seem to think human beings are not themselves animals who are ultimately also part of the food chain but instead some kind of other paternalistic higher entity that can never engage in ethical and sustainable hunting practices (and especially the fringe I’ve seen who think other carnivorous animal predators are also evil and need to be eliminated) are people I regard as foolish at best if not actively anti-indigenous and racist
The actual most implausible thing about video game writing is that they'll show us a people-pleasing sad sack of a protagonist where everyone around them treats them as a disgusting pervert for no obvious reason, takes everything they say in the worst possible light, and ascribes vile motives to their most innocuous actions, then turn around and insist that this character is a cisgender, heterosexual man.
it's kind of crazy climate change has occurred at such a remarkable pace that I and everyone else around my age can remember a completely different climate in our childhoods. I truly watched winter gradually disappear in my life.
"You're too young to remember this, but there used to be so many insects outside that you would have to clean them off the windshield after a long car ride" is the kind of sentence that would have been in a cheesy scifi short story earlier in my life, perhaps submitted to a literary magazine and accepted to show support for its environmentalist message - now it's something I've said in earnest.
I was thinking about this post last week and didn’t even bother trying to search for it cuz how in the fuck would you describe it in a way that tumblr search would find
Panetta argued—in a probably conscious paraphrase of Anne-Marie Slaughter—that “girls don’t have to change who they are” to become arms dealers and military officers. Rather, the war machine must change for us. And which female “us” is that? The writer and journalist Rania Khalek once sardonically declared that, in American geopolitics, “all that actually matters is breaking glass ceilings, even if that means breaking the actual ceilings of women in Yemen.”
Real events bore out Khalek’s observation with spine-tingling crudeness when, in 2019, the weapons manufacturer Raytheon (responsible for many lethal drone bombings of Yemenis) wrote a check to the Girl Scouts of the USA, after which the two organizations cosponsored a series of “Cyber Challenges” themed around juvenile females’ career advancement. Smiling cadettes learned code and received “mentorship,” all courtesy of the “defense” megalith that ongoingly profits from selling bombs to Saudi Arabia, which end up obliterating Yemeni school buses.
Occasionally I see people(1) in the comments of posts(2) saying that if people are misunderstanding the OP(3), that must mean the post(4) was poorly phrased. But(5) it is nearly(6) impossible to phrase anything in a way that 100% of the audience(7) will understand(8). If most(9) responses indicate they understand the OP(3), the phrasing is probably(6) not the issue. At a certain point, you(10) have to learn to stop and consider whether your(10) first interpretation is the only or most reasonable interpretation. Trying to spell out(11) anything that anyone could possibly misunderstand quickly becomes unwieldy(12)
--
(1) By "people" I mean a variety of individuals from a variety of demographics. Some of these individuals may actually be bots, but I am working under the assumption that most individuals responding on Tumblr are human beings
(2) "Posts" can refer to text (or other media) posted on a variety of websites, but the fact that this commentary is being made on Tumblr implies that without additional qualifiers, "posts" refers primarily to Tumblr posts
(3) "Original Poster," used online to refer to the individual who started an individual post, thread, etc.
(4) The phrase "the post" now serves as a stand in for posts the OP(3) (in this case me) has seen where a person(1) has made the sort of commentary described here
(5) While not strictly grammatically correct, starting a sentence with "and" or "but" for emphasis is a common rhetorical flourish
(6) Note the qualifier
(7) See (1)
(8) "Understand" here means "interpret in the way the OP(3) intended"
(9) A hard number is not given here because there is no strict threshold, and there are many circumstances where fault is not cleanly divisible between OP(3) and the confused commenter(7)
(10) A general "you" is often used in informal writing as an equivalent of the pronoun "one" and does not address the reader as an individual, because it is not written with a specific individual in mind
(11) Metaphorically referring to explaining something in detail, not literal spelling of words
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:
I think a lot about the nature of the inability to confront the-- I don't know what you'd call it, the id, the Jungian shadow, whatever mid-century German horseshit you want to call it-- and how this manifests in a lot of behaviors that are ultimately externalizations of behaviors that we would otherwise aim inwards. This is a difficult thing for me to articulate but I wanna use this as an example, not because this ask is particularly unique but because it's, if anything, kind of uniquely not
The parts of ourselves we find repellent are parts of us we grow increasingly incapable of accepting AS parts of us, and without putting in the effort of wrestling with those parts, I think we enter a kind of sustained, low-grade long-term madness. We say, "No, that's not right, this can't be me, this can't be a part of me, that would make me Bad, that would make me Repulsive, that would make me Evil." And then the only thing left is frantic denial and suppression, but we can't permanently suppress parts of ourselves, and the Things You Hate About Yourself grow and grow until the things you hate about yourself become not even you but this horrible other entity that represents everything you fear to find.
And two things about this:
First, most of it is a frantic attempt at protecting the ego against some of the most mundane things in the world. The fear of being vulnerable and hurt. The desire to hurt in order to feel less vulnerable. The former is humiliating and difficult to wrestle with, and to admit this sincerely feels like exposing a raw nerve to the world. The latter induces guilt and smears the general narrative constructed by the ego that one is a Good Person, and a good person, according to that narrative, does not feel such vindictive impulses.
Second, these twin phenomena combine and, unexamined, lead to persistent behavior of: a) Externalizing the things within the self that disgust you, because to begin to grapple with that disgust within causes you to just hate yourself further, b) Finding a way to attack that externalized representation, which must needs be in a form that makes you feel protected from vulnerability while also fitting into the narrative of a justified attack, to protect the ego that says you are a good person. And it does feel good in the short term, while harming you in the long run because you're still ineffectually attempting to build yourself up while simultaneously wishing you could lop off the parts of yourself you hate like diseased limbs.
You see this in interpersonal relationships, obviously, in all sorts of veins. This whole topic came to mind because a friend of mine is in an abusive relationship with someone who refuses to accept that the relationship is abusive, because he was abused in his childhood and he (I'm sure sincerely!) does not mean to abuse anyone, and is so horrified by the idea that the lashing out he does in response to very real pain COULD be considered abuse that he needs to protect himself by saying he's being gaslit, that's not true, he's the victim and the abuse is actually being directed at him. You see this in larger scales too, with the biggest example imo being the general culture of suburbia that so effectively wipes out the "unfavorable" elements of communal living that it's induced a sort of permanent hypervigilance and failure of toleration that leads its inhabitants to be, well, [gestures at every viral video of people chomping at the bit to become John Wick because the family two houses down put out their recycling too early].
I think there can be a very real danger in looking at the unpleasant and reflexively going, this is entirely Other to me. I can't be this. The idea of something like this residing in me is intolerable and I refuse to believe something like this could exist in me, I cannot even begin to imagine it without feeling tainted. I can't stand it. I won't believe it. And so you lash out, and it helps a bit, but again you can't really run from yourself, you know?
And I think I'm someone who's, if I may toot my own horn, kinda done the work on this front, and it's difficult as a result for me to feel scandalized on a day to day basis, and I think I'm very good at sitting with my discomfort. I also think this makes me very good at recognizing vulnerability when I see it and acting with sympathy because I know what it feels like to show your belly to the world, while also recognizing when I'm being unkind for unkindness' sake because I'm also not ashamed of recognizing when the desire to knock people down a peg for my own self-esteem comes up. I don't think this makes me a saint or anything (God knows this is a constant, iterative process) but I do think it is deeply freeing, and I think it's led me to act in ways I feel proud of saying were aligned with my personal ethics, difficult, and oftentimes humbling.
Anyway this is just my general feel for it to other people. None of this was directed at anon, specifically, because anon is the type of person to see someone talking about shitting themselves, feel revulsion, feel the need to directly express it because they can't sit with the feelings themselves, but are also not committed nor brave enough to do so without hitting "anon" because at the end of the day, they, too, are aware that there is a difference in power between someone who is gross without care and someone who cares so much they can't be quiet about it. At the end of the day, I have turned my anus into the mouth of a volcano and I am still, somehow, more content than someone who navigated to a blog. To the askbox. Externalized their disgust. Concealed their identity because their personal shame outweighs-- always, always outweighs-- anything they can properly direct outwards. And then spent god knows how long refreshing to see if I responded like picking at a scab because any kind of response I give will assuage that self-disgust (a hurt response helping the part of them that feels vulnerable and small, a rude response helping the part of them that is frightened of being unjust in their behavior, either way: ego temporarily soothed through externalization)
My actual message to anon is, of course: Shut up you dumb pussy, you and I are exactly the same but the difference is you will think of me long, long, long after I forget you
I think a lot about how people revile the homeless and the disabled even though (truly: because) anyone could, at any moment, become either or both. We despise victims even though any of us could have one bad day and end up one ourselves. Every person in the world could be a mirror image of ourselves because of some unfortunate downturn of fate or by the sheer grace of god.
The truth is of course that the very similarities we share with that which we fear or despise is exactly what drives us to derangement. The inability to tackle this makes us hate the reminders even more. This is how you end up disregarding reality, with people insisting much of the things they hate is a choice, that they could lift themselves up by their bootstraps, etc. They want so badly to believe one can opt out of the things they fear because every single day they're opting to believe those things-- vulnerability, weakness, however you want to define it-- don't exist within them.
I saw some anon hate a while back that said "I hate you so much that if you answer this it proves you're desperate for acknowledgement and if you delete it it proves you're a coward." Is there any greater cry for acknowledgement than sending an ask to a blog that would otherwise not know you exist? Is there any greater cowardice than doing so while hiding one's identity? The things we lash out at are ultimately aspects of ourselves. People who are accepting of the worst parts of themselves (not happy with themselves, not reveling in their worst parts as a defense against hate, but just acknowledging themselves as a whole) I've found don't really need to lash out. They can get angry, they can respond to provocation with venom, but the variety of people and actions and behaviors they encounter are not, in and of themselves, perceived as provocations.
I think there's something to be said about how the ease with which you feel scandalized by the world speaks to how little you've managed to plumb your own depths. There's very little out there that you can't find within yourself, and that isn't a condemnation of the self! I think it's the only way to gain real clarity, and through that become truly generous with people you sympathize with and truly, righteously angry with those who choose to be cruel.
actually caring about the rights and safety of children is so stressful right now because a large amount of the time I'm sitting there internally screaming "THAT'S WORSE. THAT POLICY IS GOING TO ACTIVELY CAUSE HARM TO CHILDREN YOU ARE MAKING IT WORSE." and nobody cares because it's not actually about protecting children but the thing is children actually do need more protection very badly, just not like that. REALLY not like that. and the things that would actually protect children (education, greater personal autonomy, access to knowledge and resources that don't hinge on their parents being willing/able to provide them) would give adults less absolute power over them and that upsets too many people who see children as status symbols and tools and extensions of themselves.
It’s strange being a Gen Z lesbian with body confidence when I have a mom who’s still enslaved to 90s heroin chic. I’ve been hitting the gym lately, and I just outgrew my leather jacket. I told my mom and she acted like it was something terrible and assured me I’d lose the weight again. And I was like no. This is a good thing. I want to be a hot lesbian with jacked shoulders wtf are you on about
My mom hits the gym exclusively to lose weight. She’s never picked up a dumbbell. Her hour at the gym is spent on the bicycle machine and treadmill. It’s just the Weight Loss Headquarters to her.
The fact I go to the gym, spend an hour weight training, and go home without stepping on the scale is incomprehensible. She’s like what. You’re going to the Weight Loss HQ and not losing weight?!!!
She can’t fathom that when I’m cooking or working out, being skinny never crosses my mind as a goal. It’s genuinely crazy to her that being thin isn’t my biggest dream in life
fuck, I just realized that if I spend my life being too intimidated to make art then that means I don't even get to make bad art. I end up making NO art. that's way worse
Art, even made by the immature amateur, is a treasure, a testament to the human soul that none of artificial means can truly emulate. So make art for the love of it, for life is short and art is long.
It's hard to really get across how baffling the gatekeeping model of trans healthcare actually is.
Like. You say "maybe patients shouldn't have to put their hand in the pain box from Dune" and people go "but we should be careful". Okay. The pain box from Dune is unrelated to being careful.
"So the pain box from Dune is expensive, has no demonstrable benefit to patients, many patients say the pain box was bad for them. We can remove the pain box at negative cost and it won't be missed."
"Have you considered that this radical activism is alienating moderate supporters?"
gracieabrams
2087
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
dailybridgerton
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
