River's Blog

Individualism Won't Solve Our Problems

2026-02-01T00:00:00Z

February 01, 2026

Last week, I published a blog post titled The Internet Doesn't Suck: Blame Big Tech, Not The Internet. In it, I argued that the annoyances or issues we find with the internet are not inherent to the technology we use. Rather, Big Tech is designing these platforms in their own interests, which contradict our own — leading to the problems we're all quite familiar with. I wrote this to contradict a popular sentiment among Social Media critics, digital minimalists, and modern-day Transcendentalists that somehow "social media is the problem." I fear this is just not the case. I would much rather people place the blame where it truly belongs: on the corporations who are intentionally turning the knobs to slowly make digital platforms more and more unbearable.

https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/the-internet-doesnt-suck/

Of course, though it is important, the management of social media platforms is by no means the only issue related to tech that plagues our society. I chose to use it as an entry point because it proves useful for dissecting the underlying mechanism that has allowed all of tech to get worse suddenly. It's also easy because people have a very visceral connection with social media. Everyone knows that social media is getting crappy, so you don't really have to sell them very hard on the premise.

Enshittification

Before heading any further, I want to go over Cory Doctorow's description of the process of "enshittification", which is his model of how and why platforms and services decay. Here's how he spoke of it during his talk at DEFCON 31:

"First, [a platform] is good to its users, then, it abuses its users to make things better for its business customers; finally, it abuses those business customers to claw back all the value for itself. Then, it dies."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

I'm going to try not to get to caught up in the weeds in talking about this, but if you'd like to learn a bit more, totally feel free to read or watch his full speech, linked above (or read his new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Went Wrong and What To Do About It. I haven't read it yet, but it's definitely on my list).

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

So, as stated, things start out good at first. When Facebook started, it really wasn't a bad platform. It showed you exactly what you wanted from people you followed, and didn't show you crap you didn't ask for from content creators you don't know. This was the era where "social media" wasn't a misnomer. You actually interacted mostly with your friends on these platforms.

When Instagram started, it was being propped up as an alternative to the (now enshittified) Facebook. It was better to its users because it had to be in order to ignite an exodus from the incumbent platform.

Of course, we know how the story goes. Instagram, just like Facebook, slowly started to enshittify. Whereas they used to only show posts from people you actually follow in your feeds, in a reverse chronological order — now most of the posts in your feed come from random "featured" accounts that you didn't follow or ask to see^[1]. Ads have seemingly increased at an exponential rate. They've added all kinds of features directly designed to distract you into using the app longer than you had intended to.

Moderation is also important, as it's the thing that keeps the interactions between users from degrading into a bar fight, though that's a highly detailed discussion that I won't be able to do justice here. Perhaps I'll make a post on it in the future. Suffice it to say that a company which feels the need to treat its users well will also invest into developing good moderation policies in order to prevent the more nasty elements of user interaction online.

The Montgomery Bus Boycotts

So what's it going to take to fix this system?

Well, I'll tell you what's not going to work. Trying to "boycott" Instagram isn't going to solve it. Especially if you do it on your own. The issues with Big Tech are giant and messy and deeply entrenched, and simply avoiding the platform isn't going to solve those systemic issues on its own.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/

When black organizers in Montgomery, Alabama were fed up with the racism of the public transit system and decided to engage in a bus boycott, they didn't do it by all just waking up one day and deciding "dammit, these buses are pissing me off. I'm just gonna walk to work instead."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_bus_boycott

The Montgomery Bus boycott was an organized, collective movement. It saw it's members acting as a group, not as individuals. The boycott was organized, and happened all at once, and thus could also be called off all at once (once their goals were achieved). It involved grassroots organizing, cooperation with labor unions and organizations like the NAACP, as well as the creation of an ad hoc organization, the Mongomery Improvement Association (MIA) to coordinate the boycotts. This was not an individualistic boycott. Had the community simply just casually decided to not individually support the buses, their efforts would not have succeeded the way that they did.

https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/montgomery-bus-boycott/

An individualistic boycott has absolutely no hope of succeeding, because it tries to levy our own (admittedly weak) individual force against a giant systemic problem, rather than organizing together into a group which can multiply our forces together into something much stronger than the sum of its parts.

"Yet what force on Earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one? But the union makes us strong!"

— Solidarity Forever, traditional folk song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rgo9L_2l7QU

So let's fight back

We need to take a stab at Big Tech from a collective position, acting as a group, not as individuals. There's a few ways we can do that.

Anti-trust

First and foremost, we can work together to push for good policy and enforcement. Get the FTC to actually enforce anti-trust law again. The FTC is an agency that was created for the sole purpose of policing the misconduct of corporations — such as when they try to monopolize, or when they harm the consumer in other ways. Since the Reagan-era, under presidents both Red and Blue, the FTC has been neutered. For the past 40 years, the agency has largely operated under the theory that unless a monopoly has direct, (easily) visible harms to the consumer, we shouldn't stop them. This has the end result of allowing corporations to consolidate into gigantic centers of unstoppable power.

For a very brief 4 years under the Biden administration (problematic as he might've been otherwise), we saw the revival of true anti-trust action. He appointed Lina Khan to chair the FTC, and under her leadership, we saw incredible strides for consumer rights, and punishment for monopolies. We saw a gigantic case against Google for operating an illegal monopoly — and the court even found them guilty!^[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lina_Khan#Actions_and_policies

Of course, that all came to an end under the Trump administration, who has predictably returned the FTC to its role of playing lapdog for mega-corporations (as long as they fill his pockets with enough shitcoins to make him happy).

https://www.citationneeded.news/trump-memecoin-dinner-guests/

Access Control laws

Beyond just anti-trust, there's several other things we could do to topple the Big Tech empire. It seems fairly clear to me (though I admit some readers might not agree) that the root cause of these issues is the mass consolidation of power and wealth by corporate tech giants, and so that's where I'm aiming my attacks. If we can get tech companies into a position where they actually have to compete more ardently with one another in order to stay in business, I think we'll begin to see a lot more good things start happening in our world.

The United States has instituted something known as an "anti-circumvention law" in the form of DMCA 1201. What this law does is make it a crime to bypass an "access control" (a piece of software designed to prevent you from modifying your device). For instance, if Apple doesn't want you installing 3rd party apps on your phone, all they do is create an access control on the iOS operating system. Even though it's actually quite trivial for hackers and individuals to invent workarounds for these access controls, DMCA 1201 makes it a federal crime to bypass them. It's also a federal crime to even describe how you might bypass them. So what we've basically created is a special kind of "legal saran wrap" where access controls are quite easy to bypass, except for that doing so is arbitrarily illegal.

The power that this gives to tech companies is immense. It means they can prevent you using your own computer how you want to. Anytime there's a way to use some piece of software in a way that benefits the user to the detriment of the corporation, they can simply send out an update where they prevent that usage. And they further prevent undoing that update by wrapping it in legal saran wrap that makes it a crime to undo.

This is why Apple is able to charge a 30% fee on all transactions that happen in apps that come from their App Store. If it were legal to install apps through a different app store, everyone would use that app store instead. But because it's impossible to do so, that means that Apple can screw you over without losing your business. As a result, you pay an extra 30% on all transactions through your phone.

This kind of anti-consumer bogus has embedded itself into everything from smartphones to tractors to medical equipment to smart fridges. A repeal of DMCA 1201 (or it's international equivalents in other countries) would mean that tech companies actually have to compete for your business, instead of making it a crime to use competitors on the devices they sold to you.

Privacy

By now I hope you're starting to realize that tech-related social issues are important for more reasons than just "Instagram is annoying to use". This next point is going to start dipping into some of the heavier implications of Big Tech being so powerful.

One of the many reasons why these corporations have so much power is because of the vast amount of data they can collect on us. The fact that they're even allowed to collect and use all of this is really beyond ludicrous. One of the most egregious applications of all this data is in the practice of surveillance pricing. Surveillance pricing is the act in which a corporation will spy on you, spy on how desperate you are, how long you've gone without a paycheck, how bad your credit score is, how many mouths depend on you, and how stressed out you are in general with the weight of being broke, and they will selective jack up the price of goods or services for you based on all that data that they spied on you. Alternatively, some surveillance pricing systems work on the employment side of the economy instead, algorithmically reducing your pay when they know you can't afford to turn the work down. The end result in either case is that they get more of your money.

For example, a 2023 report "On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination" by Veena Dubal, a professor at UC Law San Francisco describes the way that Uber algorithmically discriminates against you in your wage based on your behavior patterns:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

The same job, in the same time frame, and the same quality, will yield two different payouts based on who's doing the work. Uber's algorithm for payment calculation is incredibly opaque, so it's difficult to understand what all goes into it, but it's clear to see that at the very least, they're using the data they collect on you when you use the app itself to determine your rate.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

There's also nothing really to stop apps like this from approaching the data brokerage market, buying your data for pennies, and using that info to more accurately gauge your desperation. On the flip side, there's also nothing to stop Uber from selling their data about you back into the industry for other corporations to have.

Gig work isn't the only place seeing this type of thing, either. It's also happening in shopping, where your dollars are being priced at a different value because you're more or less desperate. Take Instacart, which was recently found to be charging different prices for different shoppers of the same goods. The study was conducted by Groundwork Collaborative, Consumer Reports, and More Perfect Union, and they found differences in pricing that could add up to as much as $1,200 a year between various families purchasing the same exact products.

https://groundworkcollaborative.org/work/instacart/

Again, we don't entirely know what is behind the variation in pricing, but internal data collection is a likely candidate, as is data bought for cheap from 3rd parties.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/business/instacart-algorithmic-pricing.html

The only reason this kind of algorithmic discrimination is even possible at all is because US citizens do not have federal privacy rights. The US hasn't passed a new federal privacy law since the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act, which was a law to protect the privacy of your Blockbuster checkouts! Clearly, the mass adoption of the internet has changed a few things, and we need to pass new laws to protect us against new threats. The shady dealings of the data brokerage industry need to be heavily stomped out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

Additionally, internal data retention of this scale should also be regulated, in order to make it more difficult for this kind of twiddling to take place. If Uber isn't allowed to store every micro-decision you've ever made on their app, they won't be able to create an algorithm in order to determine the worst conditions under which you'll continue to work for them. If Instacart can't run experiments on what the highest price you'll pay for a carton of eggs is, they can't screw you out of being able to put food on the table for your family.

Solidarity Forever

So that's what to fight for. I'm not going to lie, it's a big to-do list. I don't know exactly how we're going to get all of this done, or what techniques for inspiring change we should use in favor others. I do know one thing thing though, and it's that we're not going to be able do it on our own.

If you want things to change, you must dismiss from your head the idea that your solo actions will affect any kind of real change. We simply cannot afford to think that we're all going to just individually act in ways that eventually add up to a systemic overhaul. That's not how any of this works. The only way we can change society is by participating in it as a society. By being larger than ourselves. By acting in organizations, coordinating and timing our efforts with one another in order to make the largest impact. When we work together, our strength multiplies, and becomes greater than the sum of what we can all do on our own.

It's become this kind of assumption in society that individual action is at the heart of social change. This is a piece of literal poison that comes from Neo-Liberalism — a school of thought pioneered by none other than Ronald Reagan and Margret Thatcher. They want you to focus more energy on not buying supplies from Amazon than you do on using those supplies to protest systemic problems. They want you to spend more time finding apps other than Twitter to organize your movement under than you do actually organizing your movement. As Cory Doctorow has eloquently put it:

"Squabbling over whether using a social media network makes you a Nazi generates far more heat than light – so much heat that it incinerates the solidarity you need to actually fight Nazis."

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/22/optimized-for-unoptimizability/

Do not buy into the lies of "voting with your wallet". That is right-wing intellectual poison that the left has bit down on, and we need to spit it out post haste! If the effective way to make change is to "vote" with your wallet, then that means people with thicker wallets get more votes than you. It also means that the people who have no reason to want social change are almost always going to have more votes than the people suffering who need change in order to survive.

So what do we do instead? I'll be honest, I've got very little experience in this field. I'm a young college student living in a tiny town that sees very little political activity. Still, here's some of the advice that I personally am going to be trying out myself based on stuff I've read several places online.

The big picture is that we need to get organized and working with other people. Tech-related activism groups, your local DSA, a workers union if that's something you can safely do, whatever. We need to be working with each other. We can't expect to solve things on our own. Don't feel obligated to do everything though, our strength comes from our numbers. Just do something, anything, and do it with other people.

One resource that is incredibly useful if you're going to be pushing on tech-related issues is the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They're a digital rights non-profit that has resources for grassroots organizing, as well as putting out news on items that demand our attention, like when Congress is voting on a critical tech bill. They make it easy to contact your local reps when that happens, and all you need to do is subscribe to their email updates.

https://efa.eff.org/toolkits

https://act.eff.org/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks

If you don't have the time or energy to join a proper organizing group, then just reach out and connect with community for the sake of getting to know people. Just knowing people at all means that you have something to draw from when you do want to get involved later.

Also, of course, not every fight needs to be about tech. If you want to help out at a local community fridge or soup kitchen, that's fine! It means more people have their basic needs covered. It means you're reaching out into the community, and strengthening a local network by being involved. That's good both because getting people fed is good, and also because it means you're connected to a group of people who might be willing to organize together in other ways in the future. It gets you plugged into the community.

https://infosec.exchange/@tinker/113589807117870451

We don't need to all be superman. We just need to all be one of the millions of people who are pushing on an issue. Just being involved counts for something.

Technically, Instagram has a way to (kind of?) disable this feature. They've designed it in the most cruel way possible for the kinds of people who might find distracting features difficult to counter: The setting only disables the feature for 30 days. After that, featured posts are enabled again, secretly, without a notification. If you want to keep this feature disabled, you have to change your settings every 30 days, because it KEEPS. TURNING. ITSELF. BACK. ON... ↩︎
Unfortunately, the remedy was incredibly lackluster. This was a great start, but it wasn't enough. I hope to see more energy out of them in future administrations. See Cory Doctorow's post about this for more info (pluralistic.net) ↩︎

The Internet Doesn't Suck

2026-01-23T00:00:00Z

January 23, 2026

I think about social media a lot. I'm a computer science student at an undergraduate college, and I also happen to have an intense interest in political science and some of the humanities. I feel like it's almost natural from there that I would spend a lot of time thinking about the way we as humans use all this technology that makes up our world and our lives.

Back when computers were just a footnote in our everyday lives, back when only your more well-off friends had smartphones, I could forgive you for seeing deep analysis of the way humans interact online as a trite or unimportant endeavor. Today, however, I think it's well understood the amount of impact that these online networks can have on our real world.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/13/digital-rights/

I've often criticized current social media platforms for being designed in the interests of profit, which directly contradicts the interests of the actual people who use those platforms. Often a response to these criticisms — and indeed, I've been in this camp myself previously — is to decry the very idea of social media entirely.

"Hear ye, hear ye, brethren, as I shout from the rooftops! It is time to disavow from the oppressive state of social media platforms! Indeed, social media is simply a tool of the bourgeoisie to push down on the proletariat in order to further oppress the little man!

The only thing we have to lose are our chains! Disavow of all social technologies today, my brothers and sisters! Delete Instagram!"

— Me, probably. Circa 2024 (dramatization)

Is that really a good idea though? Should we be disposing of the very idea of a social networking technology that allows you to see baby photos of your out-of-state sister's first-born child on your smartphone while scrolling your feed? A technology that allows you to reconnect with the people you went to high school with, or to easily contact people on the fringes of your social circle? I don't think I've ever heard somebody criticize those features, and yet, they're the very stuff that allows us to call the platforms we criticize "social media".

In all fairness of course, the options of what actually exists are, well — abysmal, to say the least. I don't think that it's in any way unfair for somebody to look at the landscape of platforms that exist right now and to say "wow, social media is awful. These apps were a mistake," because, well, they are awful. And the fact they have been allowed to get this bad has been a detriment to our society.

I'm largely avoiding answering the question of "why do you think social media sucks," because if you're reading a blog on a website in the year of our lord 2026, I'm going to guess that you're at least partially clued in to why some people might be upset. For those who aren't, I invite you to open your screen time statistics for your phone. It should be somewhere in the settings. I'm going to guess that if you're in your 20s or 30s, you probably have a very strong desire not to look at that screen, for fear of how bad it might look. If you're one of the few people whose daily screentime tends to stay under an hour or less per day, then I guess you're better off than most of us. Most of my friends have daily times of several hours spent just scrolling on social media, wasting time, and not necessarily even having that much fun while doing it.

Why is the internet worse?

Okay, so we've talked about how social media as a concept is great, but that basically every single implementation of it is terrible in practice. While those who are not involved in technology might simply throw out the idea with the crappy execution, those of us who are actually involved in creating technology might want to keep our minds open.

In the world of software, we are only limited by our imaginations and our expertise. We can try to imagine tools that provide the utility we seek, without implementing the features that irk people. We can imagine a social media that doesn't play games with the "attention economy", trying to "increase retention" — corpo-speak for "waste more of your time, when you otherwise would've closed the app". I'd argue that Mastodon is pretty good at hitting all the positive user-experience metrics, without adding in any of the negative features you tend to see on the major platforms, but that's not really the point of this post.

https://joinmastodon.org/

The point is that I think people need to increase their creativity and imaginations. To criticize existing apps is fine, but I fear too many people forget that it's not really a problem with the format of the apps or tools, but rather, it's a problem that originates with the corporate, monopolistic structure of the designers of these tools.

Facebook doesn't suck because it's social media. Facebook sucks because Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta shareholders demand that the company make more and more money from this product every year. It sucks because they were allowed to buy up or corner nearly all their competition without drawing the ire of the FTC in the form of an anti-trust case.

The internet isn't worse today than it was 10 years ago because of the format of our communication tools. It's worse today because the companies who design our online experiences have been allowed to consolidate to the point of no longer needing to compete in the market. As a result, these major companies no longer need to create better products so that you will use them instead of a competitor, because now, there is no competitor to speak of!

A lack of privacy rights for US citizens means that these tech firms are also able hoover up all kinds of data about you, using that to enrich their own pockets on data brokerage market, as well as in targeted ad placements. The US hasn't passed a new federal privacy law since the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. It was a Reagan-era, pre-internet law that made it illegal for the clerks at Blockbuster to tell journalists what videos you've checked out at their store (really, Blockbuster!).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

We deserve more than this, and for a number of reasons, but if for nothing else, we need it so that tech firms cannot use all of our data as leverage in their eternal struggle to enlarge themselves.

https://riverseeber.net/blog/post/data-rights/

Anti-circumvention laws such as DMCA 1201 also play into this. They make it impossible for people to modify apps and software whose creators have a vested interest in you not being able to modify it. Companies are able to wrap their apps in something known as Digital Rights Management, or DRM, suddenly making it a crime to modify the app. The power this gives to firms is immense. It locks up our devices, so that they cannot behave in ways that benefit the user at the cost of the corporation.

All of these factors have led to the slow and continual enshittification of everything online, to the point where some people now negatively associate the internet and (certain types of) technology entirely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8

So to recap: Technology and the internet is a good thing. Not all the apps and software we use in our daily lives is good though. That's largely because they've slowly enshittified over time due to their corporate ownership. What we need is to fix the system to prevent this enshittification from happening in the first place, not tell people to embrace mountain-man lifestyles or Butlerian Jihad (though I'm sure both have a proper time and place associated with them).

Data Rights

2025-12-23T00:00:00Z

December 23, 2025

Anybody who's even slightly involved in tech-related activism will know that there is just simply a lot of jargon and technical details involved in the issues. Worse still, there's also just a lot of distinct issues: There's the fight for Net Neutrality, the right to use secure encryption tools, the right not to be spied on in public, the list goes on and on.

It tends to be understood by those more deeply involved that all of the distinct issues related to tech are actually interconnected — it's no coincidence that people of the same creed tend to fall on the same side on a lot of these issues — the difficulty is of course in trying to convey that to the uninitiated. You and your hacker buddies might see the connection between Right To Repair, DRM, surveillance pricing, and enshittification; but the rest of the world just doesn't see it, and so our movement gets splintered as we lose people to the sheer breadth of the discussion.

I propose that what we need is a unifying set of basic virtues (basic for non-tech people!!) that makes it easier for the uninitiated to parse out which side is fighting for freedom, and which is pushing to hamper personal liberties. Something that makes it easy for people to talk about all aspects of issues related to tech: enshittification, data brokerage, surveillance pricing, right to repair, and even the high-tech spying being conducted by ICE and other federal agencies. It's all one big related movement, and these issues are part of the same fight, even if their effects seem wildly distinct from one another.

Data Rights

Data Rights is the name I would give to this model of virtues. Here's the definition I'm working with currently:

"Data Rights is a movement that pushes for self-determination over your data, freedom over how you can access that data, and what you do with it."

That covers several domains of tech issues into a single big topic issue.

This movement isn't really new. Lots of people are of course trying to push for this stuff already. Lots of people already understand why the issues are interconnected. What I'm doing here is just presenting one way to verbalize that idea. If you think my approach is inefficient or not as good as other approaches, feel free to disregard it, and go on your own existing ways. This is mostly just me throwing this out into the air to see if it sticks or not.

With that out of the way, lets look at how we can use the Data Rights approach to look at various different issues:

Privacy

Self-determination over your data means that you should be able to control who gets your data, and more importantly, who doesn't. We need meaningful consent systems where it is possible to avoid being spied on without needing to exclude yourself from society. It's not enough to say "if you don't want Facebook tracking you, don't use Facebook". That's not good consent. Facebook is where people are. You might be on Facebook so you can follow updates from your local community — support groups, your kid's after-school sports group, or just out of state family. You can't expect a person to have to choose between ditching all that social infrastructure, or else being spied on by Mark Zuckerberg. That's not consent, that's coercion.

Interoperability

Beyond just controlling who has access to your data, you should also have a right to interact with that data in any manner that you choose. Facebook should not be allowed to dictate how you access your account and feed. If you want to use an alternative Facebook client to access your account or view your friends posts, that needs to be legal^[1]. If you want to read your audiobooks using your old iPod, or on a different app than Audible, that should be legal^[2]. DRM that locks your data up and tells you that you can only interact with it using special programs go against this virtue. It needs to be legal to unlock DRM.

Encryption and Freedom of Speech

We can even argue for certain free-speech goals under this model. So long as the content I'm sharing is legal, I should have a right to transfer that data to interested parties who would like to have it. If I want to text my friend using an End-To-End Encrypted system (such as Signal, WhatsApp, or Matrix), I should be legally allowed to do this^[3]

It's all connected

Right now, ICE agents are prowling around the United States like secret police, arresting our neighbors who don't look white enough, asking questions later. Oftentimes these people are either US citizens, or else immigrants who were staying here legally, but weren't given due process.

https://www.propublica.org/article/immigration-agents-detained-mistreated-citizens-congressional-investigation

ICE agents are sweeping into communities with such a high level of effectiveness thanks in part to the amount of surveillance tech they are deploying (or hijacking) on our communities. By fighting this surveillance tech, we make wins both for general privacy, as well as wins in stopping ICE from invading our communities.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/16/amazons-ring-to-partner-with-flock-a-network-of-ai-cameras-used-by-ice-feds-and-police/

By fighting for DRM-breaking to legalized, we make wins both for general consumers of electronic media, but also anybody who owns hardware controlled by software, such as iPhones, smart fridges, insulin pumps, printers, hospital equipment, John Deere tractors, Teslas, and just about anything else in our computer focused world that's currently being locked down by software that's illegal to modify. Not just that though, it also creates a new niche for small businesses to pop up, who would be able to apply that DRM-breaking for users for a small fee.

DRM-breaking would also mean you could install alternative app stores, which aren't controlled by Apple or Android — meaning Apple wouldn't be able to stop you from downloading apps like ICEBlock, which allow vulnerable people to keep track of where ICE agents are, so you can stay safely away from them.

https://apnews.com/article/apple-ice-iphone-app-immigration-fb6a404d3e977516d66d470585071bcc

Is Data Rights the only issue?

So, Data Rights for sure is limited to the extent through which technology interacts with society. Data has to be involved in some way, but since basically any kind of thinking that a computer does is going to involve data, any breaches of human decency committed by a computer are going to included. Tracking you around the world, trying to decrypt your private messages, preventing you from using your tech the way you want to use it — all that stuff is connected to Data Rights.

At the same time, there's a much larger issue going on under the surface of all this. The reason that any of these issues around tech even exist has nothing to do inherently with tech. The issue stems from corporate power, and the gap between the interests of these corporations versus the interests of regular humans. If Amazon actually cared about regular people, they wouldn't be nonconsensually handing the camera feed of your front porch over to law enforcement so that they could track license plates and pedestrian movements across the entire city. If John Deere wasn't single-handedly focused on money, they wouldn't be wrapping their tractor controllers in DRM that made it impossible to use 3rd party manufactured replacement parts.

Not that these companies are ever going to care about people over money — they're companies, after all. But it illustrates the point that the enemy here is in big corporations that are run by billionaires who do not care about how many people they hurt.

Anti-Trust

Truly, what needs to happen is that the US (and other countries, too) need to enforce anti-trust law against these companies. Though he was spectacularly disappointing in most areas, the FTC under President Biden was actually the most energized and vigorous we've seen it since the pre-Reagan era — largely thanks to the chair he appointed, Lina Khan.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever-2/

We need to keep that kind of pressure up. First of all, it stops companies from hurting regular people (by punishing them when they misbehave), and it also forces them to actually compete with each other (meaning they have to actually follow the model proposed by Adam Smith — y'know, offering us better products at market in order to out-sell their rivals). It also means they'd have a lot less idle money sitting around waiting to be used for lobbying, bribes, or other nefarious purposes.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright

While anti-trust enforcement might be the most important thing we should be doing against the threat of corporate power against regular people, that doesn't mean it's the only tool at our disposal. There are so many others things we can do in the mean time while waiting for anti-trust cases to move forward. Given the ways that nearly every major corporation has been using tech to advance its influence, it might then be worthwhile to take a look at the ways we allow or don't allow that tech to be used — both by regular people, and by the corporations themselves.

The big picture

So here's the full picture. You, me, our various communities, we're all involved in this struggle between the 99% of us who have our humanity, who care about other humans, and then there's the 1% (the billionaires and owning class) who see humanity as just something that effects their profit margins. We're involved in a fight against them. I'm not talking about a coordinated anti-capitalist revolution fight or anything — just the eternal struggle between working class interests (keep prices affordable, provide livable wages, etc) and corporate interests (make union-busting legal, legalize price-fixing, defund the FTC, etc).

Along that fight, there are a number of levers we can pull on to get what we want. The anti-trust lever works, and it's by far the most effective of them all, but it's not the only thing we can do. Among the other levers involves the whole array of switches in Data Rights.

We can pass privacy laws that would make it illegal for companies to be collecting these vast stores of data on us. Without all that data, they wouldn't be able to analyze our levels of financial desperation in order to increase prices and decrease our wages when we're more desperate. (Uber does this, and there was a recent study that showed Instacart was too).

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/

We haven't passed a new federal privacy law since 1988, and that was a law banning journalists from getting access to the movies you checked out at Blockbuster! We are 6 presidents removed from the last law actually protecting regular humans from being spied on. The internet has clearly created some changes that need to be addressed by further legislation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

We also need to remove some legislation, such as the DMCA 1201, which makes it illegal to circumvent DRM locks. It's the thing that prevents you from installing alternative app stores on your iPhone that aren't controlled by Apple. It's the reason you can't move your audiobook library to a competing app. It's the reason John Deere is able to permanently brick all the tractors in an entire country from a server room in Los Angeles if Uncle Sam tells them to (likely with a tariff- or tax-shaped punishment if they don't comply). Not that I don't want to see Russian thieves thwarted when they steal from Ukrainian farmers — but it seems a worrying power to place in the hands of any single government or corporation. Imagine the Machiavellian things that could be done with that kind of power, especially under our current president.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/01/europe/russia-farm-vehicles-ukraine-disabled-melitopol-intl/index.html

Fighting for changes to our digital world is not the primary fight, but it provides a hell of a lot of levers and controls that will help us pull through in that much more important fight of us vs the 1% who would see us toiling in squalor and chains.

In the US, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 makes Terms of Service violations a federal crime. Thus, Facebook is able to easily criminalize the usage of alternative Facebook clients by banning their usage in their Terms of Service. See also: A really good EFF one pager on the subject. ↩︎
A law known as DMCA 1201 makes it a federal crime to circumvent digital locks. As a result, companies like Amazon have placed digital locks around products that you've paid for, which make it impossible to read your audiobooks (for example), unless you do it in their store. It also means that if they ever want to delete all your books in your library if you stop paying your ever increasing subscription fee, they're perfectly capable of doing that, and you can't (legally) do anything to recover those books without just buying them again somewhere else. ↩︎
Though not illegal in the US currently, End-To-End Encryption (E2EE) is constantly under threat by very real bills that would see the technology banned if passed. Luckily, none of these bills have passed the President's desk to become laws, yet. ↩︎

Post-Semester Linkdump

2025-12-08T00:00:00Z

December 08, 2025

Well, it's been a minute since I've made a post. I've been busy busy busy going through a crazy semester in college. There was nothing in particular that made it this stressful, just a large collection of several independent factors all dragging me down in tiny ways. With the semester now coming to a close and everything sorting itself out, I wanted to come back and make another post.

I haven't really been doing a deep level of creative thinking lately, and haven't had the time to read any new books, so this post is just going to be a linkdump, since that seems easy and fun for me to write. I'm mostly copying the idea from Cory Doctorow, but who's keeping track anyways?

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

With us on the topic, I recently caught up on a good post he made last week, "Normie diffusion and technophilia". The basic idea is that "early adapters" of new technologies aren't just doing it because they're "tech-savvy," if fact, most often they aren't savvy at all -- at least not innately. The majority of people who switch to using new technologies, especially communication technologies, do so because they have some intrinsic need to switch away from what already exists.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/27/early-adapters/

Speaking of new communication tech, I've recently started using Mastodon. It's a decentralized social microblogging network. It's designed with fire exits built in -- that is to say, if or when Mastodon (the company) gets bought up by private equity and decides it wants to screw the user instead of being nice to them (much like Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, TikTok, Tumblr, etc are screwing their users already), users of Mastodon (the product/network/platform) can leave to a server that isn't as shitty. When they leave, they just add back all their old friends again -- even the friends who didn't switch to the new server.

It's a lot like how you have an Android, your cousin has an iPhone, and your uncle still has a flip-phone for some reason, and yet all of you can talk in the same group chat together. Now apply that concept to social media and that's the Mastodon network. If Mastodon (the company) goes full Elon-mode, you still have other options on the Mastodon network you can switch to, without losing access to your friends. It promotes competition, and keeps the server owners from going crazy like they have with all the major corporate platforms.

Anyways, I make a few tweets (I've been informed they're called "toots") on there from time to time, and I plan to post links each time I make a new blog post, so if RSS isn't your thing but you still want to follow my blog posts, you can follow my account on Mastodon. The cool thing about open platforms is how easy it is to syndicate in many different places from a single account. Check out some of the other places it's possible to follow the account from over on my Follow Me page.

https://riverseeber.net/follow-me/

Since we're on the topic of Mastodon, here's a cool little site I found that tracks how decentralized in practice the various platforms are that purport to be theoretically decentralized. It shows the Mastodon network being fairly decentralized, Bluesky/AT Proto being highly concentrated. It's also got some stats on other networked services like Git or Web Hosting that you can look into as well.

https://arewedecentralizedyet.online/

I recently read a pretty good post by Robert Kingett about web accessibility and his experience as a blind user trying to get corporations to fix their unusable shit -- and actually succeeding and seeing results. If you create things that get used by people with accessibility needs -- that is to say, if you create things -- you should really give this a look. Accessibility is heavily under looked, and the few advances we've made as a society since Bush senior passed the ADA are being threatened to be pulled back as Republican politicians have been criticizing the measure in recent years. Now is probably a good time to start paying attention to people's accessibility needs.

https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/20250724/

Awhile back, I watched a great video about writing and AI (but mostly just about writing). The video is titled "You are a better writer than AI. (Yes, you.)" on YouTube. It took things pretty foundational, and has changed how I think about a lot of things when it comes to communication. I recently gave it a rewatch and managed to still get something out of the second go around. I don't really know how else to explain it other than by letting you watch it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5wLQ-8eyQI

It seems we're getting into rapid-fire mode here. In case you've never looked into it before, here's some reasons why Salvation Army is kind of an awful organization that doesn't deserve your money (hint: it's not even primarily just the homophobia).

https://libcom.org/article/starvation-army-twelve-reasons-reject-salvation-army

While I don't necessarily agree with point #3 in the article (I'd say they're being overly harsh on religion as a concept), what I'm trying to share is that Salvation Army has made a mission out of upholding the status quo of economic inequality, actively making things worse for poor people on an institutional level. They've been fighting with the working class since their founding. As far back as in the early 20th century, they would engage in constant altercations with union workers and organizers. The Union organizers would counter protest the Army by singing their songs back at them with new lyrics satirizing them. Joe Hill wrote "The Preacher and the Slave" in this fashion back in 1911. Here's a good performance of it by legendary folk singer Pete Seeger, along with some good commentary and history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj02R-R8Who

Since we're somewhat on the topic of history, how about I include this blog post I read from an actual historian about how "The Dark Ages" is a stupid term when used in the pop culture sense, and how the fall of the Roman Empire was a good thing, actually. All delivered in the format of a rant against an annoying Twitter (well, Bluesky) interaction.

https://going-medieval.com/2025/11/25/on-contrarian-history/

Going from that, here's an interesting little short blog post about excellence, discussing Mamdani's victory speech, and drawing ties to the writings of Marx. Not much to say on it, it's super short, just read it if you're interested.

https://coreyrobin.com/2025/11/15/excellence-over-mediocrity-from-mamdani-to-marx-to-food/

Finally, let's round things off with a fun card game I found while doing some research for my tabletop RPG games. It's called Scoundrel, and it's a solo dungeon crawling game. It can easily be modified to be played with multiple players, or to include additional mechanics. I'll be using it at some point for sure. Just thought I'd drop the link for anyone else who plays TTRPG games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fP-QLtWQZs

Isaac Asimov, Robots, AI, and Luddism

2025-09-24T00:00:00Z

September 24, 2025

I just finished reading The Caves of Steel (1953) by Isaac Asimov. I really enjoyed it. I guess it's a little weird to write a review for a 70 year old book, so instead I decided to put together whatever the hell this post is. We go over the book, but then also its implications on modern society, as well as draw-backs to the 19th century Luddite movement that occurred during the Industrial Revolution. Hope you enjoy, it's a little non-traditional.

The plot

So this book was actually my first Asimov novel. The plot follows that of one Lije Baley, a detective who lives and works in the heavily socially stratified big city of New York. The highly dense and compact nature of this city in the future means that most people don't have kitchens or bathrooms in their own houses or apartments, and must go to communal places for this. The entire city is encased in a dome, and shielded from the air and sunlight of the outside world.

Understandably, this unnatural way of living lends itself to some backlash movements. The Medievalists, as they're called, want a return to a time they refer to as the "Medieval" age. It becomes clear that what they mean by this is the 20th century or so, which to them is long, long past.

This society is slowly being introduced to some very primitive robots — working in retail centers, and one in the detective office. All of them are quite dull, unable to perform advanced tasks. Even still, this represents a threat to the labor force, especially in a society such as this, where getting fired means decent from all of the comforts in life that you know, total abandonment at the bottom of society. (Are we sure this was written in the 1950s not the 2020s?) Anyways, this fear of unemployment creates a sense of Luddism within the minds of many Medievalists or even just regular folks.

https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/on-the-origins-of-dunes-butlerian

On top of all this, the culture of Earth must tolerate some pompous, upper class society, called the "Spacers", who live, you guessed it, up in space right above Earth. The Spacers are of high social standing, and tensions between the cultures are high, not least because of the push by the Spacers to introduce robots into the Earth culture.

It is inside of this context that one of the Spacers are murdered within their own home in Spacetown. The Spacers expect it to be someone from Earth. They start up a joint investigation, with Lije Baley, an Earth man, being partnered up with R. Daneel Olivaw, a very advanced robot from Spacetown. In fact, Daneel even passes for a human upon reasonably close inspection.

The investigation follows through looking into Medievalist secret societies, conspiracies, corruption, and Luddite aversion to automation technology which threatens the livelihood of the working class. By the end of the novel, Lije comes to change his view from that of a vague Medievalist, instead to believe in the cooperation between robots and humans, a transition to a so-called "C/Fe society" (Carbon-based life integrating with Iron-based life).

Luddism

The word Luddism is, of course, not actually used within the novel, but I mention it because I feel like the themes are overtly present in the Medievalist backlash to robots working positions once held by humans. In the real world, Luddites were a group of textile makers during the industrial revolution. They stood opposed to the ways in which textile automation technology was being used. More specifically, the tools were being used to take power away from the textile workers, and it was outputting lower quality products for consumers than when it was all just made by hand. Luddites had no issue with the idea of automation. What they didn't like was the way it was being used as a means by the owning upper-class to take away power from the poor working-class.

In truth, Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.

— Cory Doctorow, Locus Magazine

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/

Even back in the 1950s, the awareness of where computers were headed was presently in the minds of many, who perhaps might have reason to worry about being replaced and laid off. In a certain capacity, those fears were justified, as the computer would become more and more advanced, and take a seat in various positions once ran by humans. Of course, at the same time, it brought in a whole new set of positions needing humans to fill. So life goes on.

The bringing in of the computer was in some ways used as a threat to workers, but for the most part, it was simply done out of pragmatism. Humans tend to be pretty bad at performing repetitive, pattern-based actions which do not require discretion. On the other hand, computers are pretty good at these kinds of activities. What computers aren't good at is activities that require a certain level of situational context and discretion. Computers aren't good at determining whether or not you're returning this library book late for good reasons or not. They just know that its late. That's why we created self-checkout machines at the library, but still have a staff of librarians which can be a human to help you escape the strict rigidity of the computer bureaucracy. They can listen to you explain that your car broke down so you couldn't get it returned, and they can override the fees on your account, giving you amnesty. A computer is not suited towards that kind of task.

Right now, AI is being peddled as some kind of technology that attempts to replace humans in their everyday jobs. At the same time, AI is pretty bad at any task where it needs to replace a human. Humans just perform too many small, discretionary decisions that current AI models are simply not possible of even realizing they should consider. The models just don't compare to the human mind if they're being made to try to replace the human mind. That's not what this tool is ever going to do, not in the near future anyways.

But AI is not useless. AI has potential for assisting humans, when it's done organically. When your boss fires half your department, but tells you that you need to offset the workload onto "AI integrations" or something like that, the AI is going to perform badly. The department is going to put out shit content compared to what they used to. On the other hand, when you just have a thing you need to do, and you realize that an AI can make a template for this thoughtless task to help speed it up, that's a genuine boost. But those boosts are, much to the chagrin of the employer class, not actually that dramatic, and definitely don't create the kind of productivity boosts that allow you to fire half of every department.

In his blog, Cory Doctorow often explores the ideas of "Centaurs" and "Reverse-Centaurs" when it comes to automation technology. A centaur is a person who, in the natural course of their duties, finds a productive way to use the automation technology to offload some of their own work, making them more productive at the job they've always been doing. It lets them get more done, but at the end of the day, they are free to use the automation tool where they feel it is appropriate, and abandon it in instances where it is not useful or needed. They are given control and discretion over its use. A centaur is a human standing atop a robot body which they can control.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/

A reverse-centaur, on the other hand, is a squishy human being piloted and controlled by the robot! The reverse-centaur is a worker whose boss just fired a bunch of their coworkers, and expects them to pick up the slack by using AI. When the quality of the work goes down, the boss will either not care, or, worse still, they might blame the remaining workers for being so careless, despite the ludicrously cramped deadlines and under-staffing.

Weren't we supposed to be talking about Isaac Asimov?

Right. Back to the book.

It's important to remember that the conclusion of the book involved an acceptance that humans need to learn to cooperate with robots. In the backdrop of the 1950s, it might be easy to mistake calls for robot integration with that of racial integration that were going on at the time. This was my initial viewpoint of the themes of the so-called "C/Fe culture" that the pro-robot faction was calling for. Upon further inspection, it becomes clear that this is not the true nature of things, and the comparison really isn't fair. These robots do not form a culture of their own. The robots are not sentient, and they do not pretend to be. The robots are machines, and do not have desires of their own, besides in how they seek to serve humans.

Despite this, the characters in the book often saw the "C/Fe culture" stuff as being a cultural mixing, notably the Medievalists and others of the anti-robot factions. They feared that these newfangled robots would demand to fill human jobs and be treated with humanity. All this on top of their utter superiority at performing certain kinds of tasks that humans could never hope to achieve (think: basically anything a computer can do better than a human, but then give that computer opposable thumbs and a body to walk around in).

This is the mistaken way that the Earth society looks at robots in. They see them as a threat, as some kind of culture of their own. Oftentimes within the book, Daneel Olivaw — the advanced robot from Spacetown — would shock the humans around him by his utter lack of care for human prejudice against robots. He is not sentient. He does not have feelings to hurt. When Lije Baley admitted that he was prejudiced against robots, Daneel said it didn't matter, so long as they could work together effectively. The robot had no sense of cultural identity that needed to be defended from trampling.

At one point, a Medievalist radical took a swing against Daneel. The robot didn't see it coming, but did his best to back away to soften the blow — not to himself, but to protect the hand of the attacker from being hurt by his metal frame. He didn't care that he was being attacked, he just needed to follow the First Law of Robotics: to protect the human.

At other times, people would express hatred towards the more primitive robots in front of Daneel, then apologize, as if they had offended him. He told them he didn't care, he couldn't be offended even if he tried — he's a robot.

What does this tell us about automation and technology?

The answer is that technology does not inherently threaten humanity. It simply doesn't. Technology is created by humans, in order to best suit humans. Within this story, we are to believe that the people who create and distribute the robots (Spacetown) genuinely hold the best interests of the Earthmen in mind when creating their robots. This is the premise upon which the acceptance of all of this lies. This suits the story well, though it would incorrect to say that it is the only way it could have been.

If, for instance, the story took place in a society that had a fairly strong working class, and which the owning class wanted to assert their dominance by breaking up unions, firing workers for expressing discontent with their conditions, and otherwise just putting down the labor force, the story might be different. It might then be more plausible to say that the owning class is pushing robots down on society in order to take away agency from the working class. In that case, the argument that "by just simply cooperating with the robots, humanity (and the working class) can be better off" would fall flat. You cannot cooperate with a technology that was expressly designed to destroy you.

And this is where we stand in our real world in the year 2025. We must ask ourselves who it is that is designing these so-called "Artificial Intelligence" tools? Are they people who have the best interests of regular people, or are they designed by corporate tech monopolies, which have demonstrated time and time again that they will sacrifice the well-being of countless workers in order to further their power, wealth, and influence?

The AI technologies we are being fed at current time are created by money-hungry monopolists who would love nothing more than to have us all at their mercy. They are forced upon us (often, but not always) by bosses who want to speed up our work speed, while sacrificing both output quality and our own well-being, just in the name of increased profits. This has the result of decreasing quality of life for both consumers and employees.

But it doesn't have to be this way, not inherently. What we are witnessing is a result of our economic system, not a result of the technology itself. The extreme stratification of our economic environment is what leads all of this. AI models are massive and bulky, and are pretty damn difficult to run on cheap hardware, but as the economic incentives begin to make corporations try to get AI models to run on consumer hardware (be it out of the chase of the AI bubble, or simply a desire to get AI spyware running on everybody's smartphone), we're seeing models pop up that are actually reasonably competent that can run on low specs.

What we absolutely need right now, is for more of these reasonably sized tools to keep coming out. Open source models, runnable by anybody. Tools that aren't being gatekept behind a singular service provider, who can refuse access for particular uses it deems inappropriate. We've got a decent amount of tools like this, but it's limited. To be fair, the actual utility of AI in general is limited. But still, the idea that this technology keeps coming out and we're all just going to be better off for it all, even though it's all held up and controlled by our corporate overlords is ridiculous. If this is going to be a Good Technology, then it's going to need to be a technology that People Actually Own, not one that they rent access to, one prompt at a time. Even better than that would be if it were being designed by people who have a shared interest in the collective well-being.

I genuinely think that Machine Learning (it's not actually AI, btw, that would require a level of 'intelligence') has a lot of real potential, especially the LLMs. It's just that everybody has got their heads so far up their own asses about whatever the hell the AI bros think that it's going to revolutionize, that they can't see the potential of what it might actually be able to do if we just stopped fantasizing about firing everyone for just 10 seconds.

Wrap up

Well, not exactly a traditional book review post, but I feel like I covered all the important parts. Major themes, general plot, implied conclusions about technology, and also the way we can turn the text to a modern interpretation. I hope yall enjoyed this less-than-traditional post from me. I enjoyed reading this book, and looking at the way that robots were thought of before the major advent of the computer was interesting, in comparison to how we think of them now within pop culture.

Check this out

Some links after the blog

Pluralistic: It's still censorship (even if it doesn't violate the First Amendment) https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/22/one-throat-to-choke/
More Perfect Union: I Took Bernie Into Deep Trump Country. Can He Win Them Over? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RP8Oxe6OxJc
Snopes: DOJ removed study from website showing most domestic terrorism is right-wing https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/doj-removes-study-website/
- The study in question:
- What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism https://web.archive.org/web/20250911165140/https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/306123.pdf
Vox: Why obvious lies make great propaganda (2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nknYtlOvaQ0

Happy Constitution Day

2025-09-17T00:00:00Z

September 17, 2025

Happy Constitution Day to everyone living in the United States! On this day, September 17, all the way back in 1787, the final draft of the US Constitution was signed, and would slowly make its way to the Congress of the Confederation, being ratified by the 13 states a year later, replacing the Articles of the Confederation.

By the way, if you've never the Constitution in full, or you haven't done it recently, I highly recommend you take today as an excuse to do so. It's fairly short, and can be easily read in a single sitting. It's one of the most important documents that relates to our current legal system in the US.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240930125328/https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/

During deliberation over whether the US should accept this new constitution or not, there were 2 factions that emerged on the issue. The Federalists, who promoted the constitution (which enacted a "federalist" system of governance), and the less creatively named Anti-Federalists, who were weary of potential structural dangers that might come associated with this new system. In order to quell some of the fears by the Anti-Federalists of authoritarian rule and the trampling of civil liberties, Congress passed the Bill of Rights — 10 amendments, codifying certain basic liberties as constitutional rights. The Federalists felt as though this was unnecessary, claiming instead that the structure of the Constitution itself serves as a bill of rights. In Federalist 84, Alexander Hamilton wrote this on the subject:

And the proposed Constitution, if adopted, will be the bill of rights of the Union. Is it one object of a bill of rights to declare and specify the political privileges of the citizens in the structure and administration of the government? This is done in the most ample and precise manner in the plan of the convention; comprehending various precautions for the public security, which are not to be found in any of the State constitutions. Is another object of a bill of rights to define certain immunities and modes of proceeding, which are relative to personal and private concerns? This we have seen has also been attended to, in a variety of cases, in the same plan. Adverting therefore to the substantial meaning of a bill of rights, it is absurd to allege that it is not to be found in the work of the convention.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1404/1404-h/1404-h.htm#link2H_4_0084

Hamilton was right in some ways. He's saying that the Constitution dictates how the government can operate. The government is to be a body composed of publicly elected and liable individuals consisting of varying constituencies from one representative to another. On top of that, it was specifically engineered to create contradictions of power between the different bodies of government, so as to prevent any individual body becoming too over-zealous with power. It creates limitations on which bodies, if any, can conduct certain types of actions. It bans certain actions altogether, such as retroactive application of laws (called 'ex post facto laws'), while at the same time guaranteeing certain rights to citizens, such as the right to trial, (called the right to a 'writ of habeas corpus'). It is a system that has been engineered to prevent tyrannical takeover.

I want to go over that point again, because I think it's important. Our government was designed, in our Constitution, to prevent wannabe tyrants and dictators from trampling over the people, and to prevent them from seizing too much power. Our Constitution was designed with an adversarial threat model for its own leaders. The way the Founders saw it, one of the biggest threats to The United States was our own elected representatives. They designed an entire system, explicitly in order to prevent those representatives — Congressmen, Judges, Presidents — from becoming too powerful.

Testing Our Efforts

Right now, our country is getting a real life test of those safety measures. We're only 9 months into the second presidency of Donald Trump, and he's already ran through a number of structural barriers that have never before been circumvented. Structural barriers considered to be load bearing supports for a functioning democracy.

He's suspended the right to trial for suspected immigrants, making it impossible for a legal citizen to prove that they are not, in fact, the immigrant that ICE thinks them to be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportation_of_Kilmar_Abrego_Garcia

He's ignored court orders from judges because he didn't like their rulings, and had to be fought hand over fist to actually obey them finally:

https://apnews.com/article/aclu-trump-deportations-el-salvador-boasberg-e447c61de031150669d01687edc4b11b

He's been found to have illegally deployed National Guard troops on Los Angeles, with public plans to deploy on other big US cities (more specifically, big cities whose local politics swing left-wing or anti-Trump):

https://apnews.com/article/trump-newsom-los-angeles-national-guard-d6c8450a3ac2de34e669ef0836d22cbc

He's fired certain public officials even when Congress has passed explicit laws insulating them from being fired by the President, such as members of the NLRB. He's discussing doing the same for members on The Federal Reserve, despite there being laws preventing such thing unless there is good cause to remove (not just partisan disagreement).

https://www.npr.org/2025/01/28/nx-s1-5277103/nlrb-trump-wilcox-abruzzo-democrats-labor

The Power of the Pen

In the more abstract, his slew of Executive Orders in the first months of his second presidency have been very explicitly clear grasps by the president for legislative power. The reason why this in particular is worrying is that the Executive and Legislative branches are setup in very structurally different ways, so as to create two very different modes of operation.

I'd like to draw once again upon The Federalist Papers, this time Federalist 70, another one of Hamilton's:

In the legislature, promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit. The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in that department of the government, though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority. When a resolution too is once taken, the opposition must be at an end.

What he's describing here is the inherent innefficiency of Congress. That inefficiency is the point. We shouldn't be passing laws in a "move fast and break things" kind of way. Laws are universally applicable, and if passed without much consideration, could have disastrous ramifications for all kinds of people. The great innovation of our legislative system in the United States is that it is so darn easy to prevent a bad bill from getting passed. This way, disadvantaged minorities can leverage that ability to stop the bill in order to force the majority to add concessions to the bill before you allow it to go through and become law.

In all of this fighting, a great amount of thinking about the bill must occur, and it will continuously go through various improvements, shedding off bad provisions, and perhaps even gaining new good ones that couldn't have been imagined until it came to the debate floor.

On the other hand, once the bill has passed, Hamilton notes that it must be enforced without this same level of deep introspection. The law is the law, and once we've slowly decided what the law is, we must now move to quickly enforce it with haste and vigor. Thus, he argues, the Executive branch must have much energy. This forms the basis for the Framer's argument to have a single person at the head of the Executive branch — The President.

Now, all of this talk about energy in the Executive might seem to support everything Trump is doing in all his vigorous actions as President. The Framers never argued against an energetic Presidency, so this is in line with their vision of America, surely?

The issue is that Donald Trump is not just merely applying the laws that Congress has passed in an energetic manner. If he were simply executing the resolutions which had already gone through intense debate and compromise before becoming law, then the vigor would be appreciated. But Donald Trump is largely creating his own new plans for this country entirely independent of Congress or that deliberatory process. In many cases, as already stated, he is going directly against policies mandated by Congress. What we are witnessing is not 'Energy in the Executive', but rather, legislative energy, which just so happens to originate from the Executive branch.

Is This What America Needs Right Now?

There's an argument going around right now that our country needs all of this. That we need somebody like Trump to come in, destroying and subverting all limitations on his power, in order to actually accomplish important change in our country which has been tied up in governmental gridlock for the past 2 decades. Then, at the end of his 4 years, he's going to be all done with his title of supreme leader, and he's going to leave. Then, when the next President is elected, they'll just never be able to pull the same power plays as Trump, because apparently it's only possible for Trump to do it, and nobody else is charismatic enough to repeat the process after he's already set the precedent.

The idea that "Too Much Democracy is hindering America, and is at the root of all our problems" is a common idea in the minds of a lot of Conservatives right now. Not to say that they don't believe in Democracy, it's just that I've personally seen a lot of complaining about "too much red tape in the system" coming from that side of the aisle. I mean, that's kind of what the whole DOGE project with Elon Musk was about. But it's also an underscore of the entire way Trump 2.0 is behaving.

This is a recent turn of events for Conservatives. Traditionally, Conservatives have believed strongly in the core mission of the Constitution, or at least if they didn't, they pretended to. Back in 2011, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia — a famous Conservative justice who was appointed by none other than Ronald Reagan — sat before the Senate to talk about the role of Judiciary in today's world. He spoke about the way that the US is uniquely set up to contradict power.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ggz_gd--UO0

In the United States, a bill must pass before two legislative bodies, with the same wording, before it is allowed to become a law. Those two bodies are elected in very different manners. Then it is passed to the President, who can veto it if he doesn't like it. Again, the President is elected in a very different manner than either legislative house. There could be immense ideological disagreement between all 3 of them. Scalia explains that to people living in Europe, and sometimes even those within the United States, this entire system seems to amount to nothing more than a big machine that creates endless gridlock. That we can't get anything done.

He says that's the wrong way to look at it. That we're supposed to love the gridlock. The gridlock is the point. He's echoing the same point that Hamilton was making in Federalist 70 where he wrote about the deliberation that was supposed to occur in Congress before a bill could get passed.

Scalia was a staunch Conservative. And his beliefs on this topic are part of what made him a hero to the Conservative side of politics. What I'm trying to demonstrate here is that there's nothing inherently Conservative about believing that we need to brush through this whole system of intentionally engineered friction and lather it in lubrication in order to expedite the process. We do not want the process to be systemically expedited. We want the laws of this land to have been passed before the great machine of debate and deliberation that is our Legislative process. And so if these ideas are not inherent to Conservatism, then I've shown that I'm not attacking Trump for being Conservative, or rapidly instituting Conservative policy. I may dislike those things, but it is what it is. What I'm criticizing him for here — and in the strongest way I know how — is for subverting America's founding principles of contradiction of powers, of checks and balances, of everything that the drafters of the Constitution were fighting for.

He Fancies Himself a King

Trump has decided that his preferred method of governing in this country is to ignore laws passed by Congress, and when Congress has decided not to act in a particular area (perhaps because their deliberation has led them to the conclusion that it would be improper to do so), he finds ways to inaccurately interpret laws that were never meant to serve for those purposes in order to create a legal basis to enforce his private policies.

His basis for trying to invade US cities with the National Guard are prime examples. No law allows him to do this, except for if he claims there to be some kind of national "crime emergency" going on in these cities, a fact that is simply not true. He's also used a similarly faulty basis in how he's announced there to be a "foreign invasion of immigrants" into this country, which is the basis for which he is suspending the right to a fair trial before being deported. Without this trial, there is no way for legitimate citizens to prove that they are in this country legally. If you don't give immigrants a right to a trial before deporting them, it means you're fine deporting US citizens without a trial, since they will have no basis upon which they can prove their legal status if they're denied a court trial.

The fact of the matter is that our President is governing by creating his own legislation. That is the way that kings of old ran their kingdoms. That's not how Democracies run, and it's definitely not how The United States of America runs. We do not have kings in this country, but it seems that our President disagrees with that fact.

We're in a very scary place right now. I don't want to minimize the threat, but I'd like to point out the fact that this is the one thing that this country was designed for. We're seeing a lot of fights right now legally against the president. Culturally, every time Trump gets held up for breaking the law, he decries it as a moment of a "rouge judge" trying to be a dictator over him. So he simply refuses to accept the role of checks and balances, so he tries to delegitimize it. He's ignoring and going against large portions of the law right now, but it's important to remember that he's still being held up. Courts are finding his actions to be illegal and forcing him to stop. There are still moments where Trump does not ultimately prevail.

Just this month, a federal judge found that Trump's use of the California National Guard in Los Angeles was illegal. This is of course coming after most of the damage has already been done, but the ruling sets a useful precedent that this kind of thing will not be allowed to happen in other cities, such as Chicago, which the President has boldly asserted that he will be sending troops to at some undisclosed point in the future.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/5481178-judge-rules-trumps-use-of-us-military-in-la-was-illegal/

People are fighting back against the administration, and some of them are actually winning some ground, even if it is an entirely unfair uphill fight against authoritarianism. The point is that as terrible of a predicament our country is in right now, we are not helpless!

At the same time, I want to urge people to realize that the words coming out of Trump and his supporters mouths are explicitly anti-American and unpatriotic. To break so many of the institutional limits within our Constitution, to decry the concept of checks and balances, it is to spit in the face of our founders and the American promise of freedom. The MAGA party loves to call themselves patriots, and to criticize Trump's opponents on supposed unpatriotic grounds. But the issue is that MAGA stands for values that are antithetical to America and our values laid out in the Constitution. Donald Trump thinks that anyone who stops him from assuming complete and utter control of the government is a rogue agent scheming to become their own dictator. Donald Trump believes that anybody in power who stops him from carrying out his illegal plans has overstepped their bounds. Donald Trump believes that he is entitled to do anything he wants. If you agree with him, you do not believe in America. I'm tired of pretending that the MAGA faction that is destroying the infrastructure of checks and balances in this country isn't un-American.

Fighting Back

If you're a concerned citizen who is scared of the way Trump is proceeding, might I perhaps persuade you to do something about it! If you feel like Trump has massively overstepped his bounds as President, I can't urge you enough, please, we need to go out and get organized! So, what on Earth can we do to stop this man from tearing up our Democracy?

No Kings

If you remember the 'No Kings' protests that took place all across the country in June earlier this year to protest Trump, you might like to know that another day of protest has been planned, this time falling on October 18. If you're tired of President Trump acting as a dictator, you should go to this event. There are so many of these going on across the country. Even in my small, relatively Conservative town within California, there's a local event, so I don't have to drive to a big city to partake. You can check out different locations on the map they provide on their website:

https://www.nokings.org/#map

If you do go, one thing I must urge you to do is to represent an energy of peace. In addition, don't allow them to label you as insurrectionists who hate America. We do not hate America. We love America, and we're showing up to this event because of that. We're showing up to protest Donald Trump because his actions ring in contradiction of this country's founding principles. We say No Kings because we believe that Donald Trump represents everything that this country is not.

Bring American flags, bring printouts of the Constitution, The Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence. Don't burn flags, don't hang them upside down. Even if your intentions are patriotic or pro-American, that's not how it gets interpreted when those who disagree with you see it on social media. Do your best to represent what the anti-Trump faction really is.

Call Your Representatives

I know you've heard this a million times before, but I'm serious, call them. You can send emails too, though I've heard that phone calls tend to be more effective. Pressure them to take action against Trump. Pressure them to speak out publicly on an issue that they're neglecting, even if the Conservative majority in Congress prevents them exerting much direct power against the administration. If your representatives are Conservative, especially make a point to call them. Tell them that their support of Trump's undemocratic actions makes you lose faith in them. Tell them you want them to stop standing in line behind a man who hates this country. Tell them your vote is only cast for people who love this country.

If you've never called your representatives before, it's super easy. Here's a really good video tutorial on how to do it, if you're nervous. Don't worry, your representatives aren't going to be the ones picking up the phone, it'll just be an office secretary who takes down your information.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GX_ERS7U_WQ

Vote

This is a little preemptive, but it's important. The November 2026 Congressional election is going to be crucial if we want to stop some of the worse effects of the Trump takeover. It's common for there to be a blue wave in midterms during Republican presidencies, and vice versa. At the same time, there's an ongoing effort, initiated by Trump, to get red states like Texas to Gerrymander their district map outside of a census year, in order to squeeze out some extra Republican seats in the House. There's talk about a counter effort being taken on by various blue states, including California, but in either case, the vote for Congress incredibly important this midterm. If you want Congress to be able to actually fight back against this takeover, having a Democratic majority is going to be vitally important, since we know at this point that Republicans will only ever comply.

I recommend making sure that you're registered to vote, even if you've registered already. Databases can become corrupted, and you might need to register again. You also might need to update some information like your address or vote-by-mail preferences. You can check your registration in just a few easy clicks here. Just click 'Voter Registration Status', select your state, and it will take you to your state's voter registration website. If you'd like to register, click 'Register To Vote,' and proceed in the same manner.

https://www.nass.org/can-I-vote

You might not love Democrats, I sure as hell don't, but don't let that stop you from voting against a Republican who is only ever going to bend the knee to Trump. Vote for somebody who is not happy with the way things are going on right now in DC. Be a single-issue voter, where that issue is the maintenance of Democracy and our Constitution.

Check this out

Some links after the blog

AP News: Tracking the lawsuits against the Trump administration https://apnews.com/projects/trump-executive-order-lawsuit-tracker/
On Not Surrendering in Advance (Or At Any Point Thereafter) https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/on-not-surrendering-in-advance-or-during-or-at-any-point-thereafter/
The Atlantic: Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/09/america-free-trial-services/684072/?gift=jQN1t1D1nkO2TQodBiz5KLmz9qdi35_pconlf7F6jjg
A notional design studio. https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/a-notional-design-studio/

The Web Was Designed to Be Open

2025-08-11T02:25:20Z

July 13, 2025

The Free and Open Web

The internet is a truly incredible thing. Founded on the principle of shared ownership, the internet does not belong to any one group or person, it is shared by all of us. There is no single group you must go through in order to access the internet, nor in order to host an online service. There is no single set of rules governing what is and is not allowed to be posted on the internet. The internet deters censorship because new sovereign territory can be created online simply by hosting a server. With that server, you are created a new space on the internet, a new node added to the network. Within that node, you are free to do anything you like, so long as it is legal in the country you're hosting it in -- otherwise you might get some knocks on your door IRL.

The internet being this way means that it cannot be controlled, truncated, censored, or destroyed by any overzealous entities -- be they politicians, tech corporations, or otherwise anyone else with the power to attempt a move like that. The internet remains strong, unfettered by the whims of would-be autocrats.

Contrast this model with the model we use for many of the online serves common throughout our society. Social Media is almost universally done using a centralized model. You use some service, say Facebook for example. You download an app provided to you by the Facebook corporation. When you want to post your social content online, you upload it through that app up to the Facebook servers. No new or sovereign land is created in this process, all media is retained on the already existing Facebook node. There is no way to host a new node, and let the content on that node be visible as regular Facebook content through the app.

Even if you wanted to host a new server, some piece of sovereign territory upon the web. You would be free to do so, but your content would not show up on the Facebook network. Users would have to leave the Facebook app in order to view your content. There would be no way to view both Facebook content and your content using the same app.

The Free and Open Social Net?

But it doesn't have to be this way. What if we created a social media that worked the same way that the web does? Where the social network consists of distinct nodes controlled and operated by separate people? Those people could each set the rules of what is and is not allowed to exist on their node -- rather than having all content moderation be mandated by a single controlling authority like Facebook? Much like the web, we could create open standards for this technology. That way, anyone can create a program that can view this content. For the web, we called it Web Browsers, for social media, it will be a Social Media Client. A developer will have access to the standard, and will be free to implement any additional features, or organize the app in any way they see fit. We will not be bound and stuck with the design decisions of a single corporation. Users with different tastes will be enabled to cater to their own preferences for visual design of the interface that they want to use.

Many people reading this who have been in tech and hacker spaces long enough may be thinking right now of the decentralized alternatives to corporate social media. Mastodon and Bluesky both come to mind as possible contenders. For Bluesky, I will be brief and say that it is 1) not ready yet as a developed platform, and 2) it is not making enough significant strides for true decentralization. If Bluesky were to disappear from the internet tomorrow, there would not be a feasible way for the rest of the community to continue hosting the network without updating the protocol first.

https://tormentnexus.substack.com/i/152261629/a-protocol-not-a-platform

As for Mastodon, while it is a truly decentralized network that can be entirely run without the help of any centralized authority, the underlying ActivityPub protocol that it relies on is both complicated and confusing, as well as overly vague, leaving many important questions unanswered in the specification, leading to much confusion for developers. The protocol is perhaps a good basis on which to build an actually concrete protocol, but in my own honest opinion, it is overly complicated, and a drain of the valuable time and resources of an open source community of intelligent developers.

Dennis Schubert, a project manager for the Diaspora* project -- another attempt at a social media network, although much smaller that both Bluesky or ActivityPub -- wrote a pretty good article on the issues with the ActivityPub protocol. In that article, he also lays out some of the bigger flaws in the existing Diaspora* project that make it also unsuitable in many ways, but I'll leave that to you to look into.

https://overengineer.dev/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later/

A Clean, Simple Design

I propose a simpler way of doing things. I'm not going to put forward a concrete protocol, as I'm only just starting to work on these ideas myself, but I'd like to lay down the groundwork for what I think should someday become a solid protocol. The so-called "UNIX design principles" promote simplicity and modularity in all things that you create. Each module of your project should do one thing, and do that one thing well. Further modules can be appended to the overall project in order to create a program (or protocol, in our case) that can do many things. Our new protocol would work something like this. You may ignore the more specific details of this description in favor of the general principles I'm trying to isolate in how I create this example. The point is simplicity, which we will achieve through modularity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

You would have two sides to the network. There would be clients, AKA "users", and then there are the servers, which host the content for the users. A user would be free to host their content in any number of ways. It would be a very similar experience to that of hosting a web server. You are free to host it yourself if you know how to, or you may turn to any number of middle men who will do it for you. In the world of the web, this would be services like Wordpress, Medium, NeoCities, GitHub Pages, etc. Unlike ActivityPub, very little server-to-server interaction would occur, if any. When you as a user want to look at a post by your friend, your client software would request the content directly from their server. If you want to interact with that content (commenting, liking, etc), that interaction would be sent to and stored directly on the server where the original post is stored. The post would not be shared around with other servers like it does in the ActivityPub protocol. This is done to simplify things, and reduce scaling difficulties.

As for the design of the clients, and the specific toolings used, feed content would be generated as an RSS feed for each user. So if you are following 5 friends, your client would fetch 5 RSS feeds at refresh time, looking for any posts inside of those 5 feeds that you have not yet seen, and then putting it on your timeline. Content itself would likely be stored as HTML or XML, or something of the sort. The benefit being that we do not need to teach the client software how to handle all 48 thousand content types, from image posts, to videos, to microblogs, to audio notes, to story posts. Instead, we could just encode the content using an extensible format like html or xml that support embedding tags for any content type imaginable. If you want to do an image post, your client software will simply embed an <img> tag into the post. For microblogging, it will put text inside of the <p> tag. Use a format like html and you can encode anything you desire, even things which the designers of this future protocol couldn't have imagined.

The idea here is that we're re-using existing protocols and tools. This lets us re-use technologies for understanding those protocols. Web apps already know how to render HTML, we can simply use the existing engine for reading it. There are plenty of libraries around for reading RSS and XML feeds as machine readable data.

In keeping with this idea, we would also want to create some kind of direct messaging service within the standard, for when users would like to communicate with one another. Perhaps we could use a protocol like XMPP or something similar. The fantastic benefit of this is that smaller servers which don't want to handle storing direct messages could offshore their implementation of XMPP to another server that they simply point to in their metadata file for the user. Perhaps a server might have a user called Alice. She has an account on this server at https://example.com/alice, but the metadata file (perhaps https://example.com/alice/index.xml), lists that her messaging endpoint is at https://external-server.net/alice. Thus, when a user wants to message Alice, they will send an XMPP message directly to Alice at that endpoint on a separate server. Perhaps our example server would even handle the user credentials for the external server, making sure login details always match with the main server.

Should they wish, a user would even be free to hand pick the XMPP server they want to use. Maybe they could do so in order to reduce the number of message inboxes they have, so they can re-use an already existing account to use for their social media DMs as well.

Closing

Perhaps some of the specific recommendations for the protocol wouldn't be perfect. A lot more thinking needs to go into this kind of thing. But as it stands right now, we are very dry on alternatives to the corporate social media platforms that are seen by many as the only real choice available. Creating social media in a way that mimics the shape of the free and open Web in my estimations would leave the world better off, assuming we could actually get it to take off from the ground, achieving a tangible level of success in terms of users and community support.

Use Technology Creatively

2025-08-11T02:25:17Z

July 16, 2025

Email is magic

A good email client is like magic. As technologists, it's easy to lean into the world of the terminal and operating system, messing around with our Linux installations, Desktop Environments, or other things. It's easy to lean into this world and see this part as the "real world of computing", and then look at many of the more business and corporate tools such as email and Office Suites (like Microsoft Office or LibreOffice) as the boring technology, stripped of life.

After all, look at your email inbox that you're forced to use for every service you sign up for. It's littered with corporate newsletters you didn't sign up for, advertisements from companies you don't even have an account with, and political updates from politicians who you thoughts you would care about when you signed up, but you've received over 25 messages in a row so far that have remained unread. (Well, that's my experience anyways).

It's easy to look at this and simply blame the corporate style of technology. But email isn't actually a bad technology, it's just that most people don't realize how good it can be if you simply take a few small proactive steps to improve your experience.

Manage Your Subscriptions

Step number one to gain control is to manage how many new messages are coming in to your inbox. My preferred method for this is to maintain two email accounts. The first account you identify as your email account. It's the email you list on your website, and it's the one you give to contacts. You also will give it to any services for which you actively want to recieve updates from. Not weird marketing emails from a service you don't care to use for more than a week after signing up. Not sales ads from an online store you bought one thing from 2 months ago. Updates that you specifically, intentionally thought to yourself, "yeah, I think I want to get emails from these people, that would enrich my life or help me out in some way." For the other services, the ones that send you junk mail you don't care for, but which you still need an email to sign up with, you sign up through your second email. This inbox does not get checked unless they tell you to check it for something like a 2FA code or a password reset or something like that.

The majority of services you use shouldn't get access to your "real" inbox, they get access to the secondary one. The one you don't check. This reduces the amount of messages you get in your first inbox, allowing you to actually read those few numbers of emails that actually do matter. It also means you can confidently hand your email out to contacts and not get stressed out to the prospect of having to check it once in a while so that you don't miss their message. Herman from Bearblogs mentions something along the lines of this strategy in his post about digital hygiene.

https://herman.bearblog.dev/digital-hygiene-emails/

This method can be further enhanced by using email filters to automatically sort emails into different folders of your inbox, though I personally don't receive enough emails in my "real" inbox to warrant that level of organization. The 4 emails a week I get are easy enough to handle without the extra tooling. That may change if I begin receiving more emails from contacts and real humans.

It's Not Just Email

Fixing your email is a great move, it means you don't miss things. You come off to others as a more put together person. It reduces stress personally from your life. And the fact that it's such a simple move really is a major selling point on this idea. You don't need to do anything drastic, just make a new email (or clean up an existing one, unsubscribing from a few emails you're currently getting on it), and maybe apply some inbox filters if you plan on getting a lot of important messages. This idea is great, and it has a lot of room for further application. We can use the full potential of computing to become more efficient in as many ways as we feel creative, inspired, and compelled to explore. I'd like to detail some of these other tricks you can use. All of these are going to be 1) simple and 2) offer non-negligible payouts for minimal effort.

Text Documents

Having a folder on your computer, just for general working notes is really important to me. I think anyone who works on a computer should have such a thing. Inside of it, you can include all kinds of things. There's of course your general todo lists (I do my day-to-day lists analog, keeping only big picture stuff digital), but then there's all the notes you need for remembering small details on a project you're handling, or for creative thinking while working through a fuzzy problem, or for keeping track of changing details regarding something as time goes by.

I personally advocate for using them as simple text files, using .txt or .md extensions. You don't need to use a Word Document file to do this. Text files are easy to open -- virtually any program will accept them -- and they don't obscure anything. Their pure simplicity is a factor of freedom, not constraint. The fact that it's just text, often rendered in a monospace font, means you are given a free canvas with which to format and organize your document. The simplicity is the point.

If you don't want to use a raw text file, don't. But if you're like me, and are comfortable editing files from raw text editors like vim, or on other operating systems, Notepad, I recommend doing it this way.

(As a side note, if you happen to be looking for a better way to keep all of your endless notes organized, I recommend giving VimWiki a look. It's an easy to install extension for Vim, the terminal-based text editor. It allows you to put hyperlinks into your text documents that point to one another. It's also got a lot of quality of life features that are great, but I don't want to derail too far by going into depth about it. I'll let you look into it yourself.)

https://vkc.sh/vimwiki-101/

https://tinkerbetter.tube/w/6hrXmYYNMjBGJnSE8iJ6NM

https://vimwiki.github.io/

The use of these files is incredible. Not just for writing simple notes, but you can generate detailed logs which will be useful to you as a reference guide. Take, for instance, the idea of a Suspense File. This list is used in order to track not your own progress, but to track things you're waiting on others to do. It's not designed to track them in some controlling, "hurry up and stop making me wait" kind of way. It's more like "oh wow, me and Rachel were talking about doing xyz, but it's been 2 weeks since any news from her. She's probably too busy to make it all work out in time. Let's take a look. If she's making progress, it would be good to know about it, and if not, I'll give her an out and let her off the hook if she needs it." The idea is that people are busy, and the natural tendencies of people working together on a stagnant project is to just let it silently fall through. The point of the suspense file is to make sure if it does fall through, it's because you identified that one of you lacked in the time or resources necessary to make it work, and explicitly communicated that you wanted to drop the project.

That tends to be the more useful aspect of using lists. Lists don't help you know what to do, they help you decide what you aren't going to do. Which projects you don't have time for, and need to ditch.

The suspense file works like this. Each line is a new entry. You can organize it however you like, but this is the method I use, and it's the one Cory Doctorow describes, which is where I learned of the concept in the first place.

Each line starts with "WAITING", followed the category. After that, you describe who you're waiting on, and for what specifically. Finally, add a trailing string of dates for whenever a new development is made. If you communicate back and forth with someone for 3 weeks on a project, you might see over a dozen dates appended to the end of this line. The idea is that it gives you an idea of how long you've been trying to get the ball rolling on something, and how many interactions have taken place so far.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/

An example (fake) entry might look like this:

WAITING Email from Prof. J on CS Club availability for advisorship 2/12, 2/16, 2/20

After 3 separate interactions about it, I might decide that she's too busy and start looking into other options. On the other hand, she might have just been temporarily bogged down, but will be free again starting next week, and that fact just needs to be communicated. Either way, it helps me identify the progress or stagnation of a plan, and easily track whether I need to reach out.

Again, the point isn't to control anyone, or be an incessant nag (that would be weird). The point is to identify which projects are lagging behind secretly without being noticed, so I can communicate with others involved, and see if this is something that can be remedied somehow, or if we need to drop the project in pursuit of other aims that are demanding more of our time.

Keeping Up With Updates

In our age of information overload, where we are often expected to stay up to date with a number of ever changing events at 400 words a second, it can be helpful to institute some simple practices that greatly help us to manage all that information we're expected to take in regularly. We want both to be able to quickly have access to that information without too much mental strain on actually trying to find it, as well as wanting a system in place that allows us to know which information sources we still haven't looked at yet.

The first is simple, we want some database of all our sources like blogs, news sites, product updates, etc in a singular place where we can quickly check all of them. The second goal is a little more nuanced. Perhaps we spent the first 15 minutes of the day checking through our updates, but get cut off before checking the last one. Or, for instance, perhaps we're following a large number of publication sources, but each source only puts out a small number of articles per month. Many times we check, there will be nothing new. It would be worth having a kind of system that keeps track of which source has received updates lately, and which ones we don't need to bother checking in on yet.

Lucky for us, a tool for this already exists that covers both of our needs at once. It's called RSS feeds (or sometimes "Atom feeds". I think there's a nuanced difference between them, but from the perspective of a user, they function exactly the same). You can follow the RSS feed of a publication source online, such as a blog or many news sites. You will store these feed links into an application called an RSS Reader. There's a lot of apps to choose from, but I personally like to use Mozilla Thunderbird for it. That way, it's stored in a folder right next to my emails inside of the same program. You can use something else if you like, there's plenty of options to choose from if you just care to do a quick search online.

When you subscribe to a particular feed through your app, it shows up as a little folder of updates. When you click on the folder, it shows you any recent posts from that source. Unread posts are highlighted a different color so you know you haven't seen them yet. You can read the title of each post and decide if it's worth your time or not. I'm currently following over a dozen feeds, though checking through them often only takes a little bit of time each day. Some days, I use it to keep up with light, enjoyable reading from popular posts on the Bearblogs blogging platform.

https://bearblog.dev/discover/

I also use it to keep up with the news, dev updates relating to Arch Linux, or other projects I'm following, podcasts I listen to, and noteworthy blogs I follow outside of the Bearblogs trending page.

Most sites that post regular articles will have an RSS feed you can follow somewhere. Heck, even YouTube provides one for each channel, even if they don't necessarily advertise about it, or make it easy to find. I use an online tool to convert channel links into RSS feeds.

https://ytrss.pesky.moe/

Without RSS

If you don't have an RSS feed for a site, you get two options. Either don't follow their updates, or find a way to follow it anyways. An easy way to do the second option is to create a basic "startup" bookmarks folder in your web browser. Every time you check your RSS feeds, you'll also open that startup folder, comb through if anything demands your attention, closing each tab once you're finished. This should take usually take a few minutes each day, unless you're putting a bunch of news sources into this folder, which I would not recommend.

You can also use these folders to check up on special pages that require you to log in to your account to view. If you're trying to follow the shipping on a particular product you've purchased, or check if some important lab result from your hospital has been posted to your account yet, rather than stressing about it, you can just right click your folder and "Open All Bookmarks". Comb through if an update has been posted, and be done in less than 5 minutes. Once you've received the update you were waiting on, you can delete the bookmark if you no longer need to check it regularly. You can always add it back again later if you get more labs done, or buy another product.

Conclusion

The point is that each of these tricks are dead simple. They each provide moderate to high payouts for realistically small effort required to institute them. They utilize the power of computing to solve problems that computers are uniquely capable of solving efficiently.

This article has largely been inspired by the general principles laid out in Cory Doctorow's post on Suspense Files (linked above), as well as his Lifehacking liveblog he links to at the beginning of that post. The idea that people who are keen with technology can use that technology in ways beyond just what everyone else is already doing (often without much thinking on the matter). To actually think critically about the tools at your disposal and find clever ways to use them that makes you accomplish more, it's a simple idea but it's also incredibly powerful.

https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt

I'm only really just starting down the path of experimenting with and discovering creative ideas like the ones I've laid out in this post. If you've got any of your own that I didn't mention and you think I'd like it, I'd be happy to hear from you. You can feel free to shoot me an email telling me all about it. I love getting emails from real people -- it's the explicit reason that I ever went about cleaning my inbox in the first place.

Get Off Social Media, Embrace The Web

2025-08-11T02:25:14Z

July 27, 2025

Lots of people right now feel inundated by information. In our digital age, it's like everything is flying at us all at once, and we're always just trying to sip from this super-powered firehouse of information. This is largely the fault of social media. Some people today, especially those of us in our 20s, are looking for an escape from this. People are trying to get away from social media, but we don't want to stop connecting with our friends. We all know that the internet is a great thing! We just want to get away from some of the ills presented by the usage of social media (which is just one of many ways to use the internet).

Many people will have many different strategies for doing this, but in this blog, I'll be presenting a kind of guide for how to use the World Wide Web as a replacement technology -- a new (old) way to stay online, without having to conform to the limiting format of a centralized service like Facebook or Instagram.

Why The Web?

The point of the internet is to facilitate the mass spread of information, without necessarily always needing to go through traditional publishers or gatekeepers. Anyone with an idea can spread it. But when all of that information goes through the bottleneck of a small collection of major platforms -- platforms that can control what is and isn't allowed -- doesn't it seem that we've lost the point of it all?

And even if you're not going at it for publishing subversive ideas or something like that, the web is still better than our existing social media platforms. The web is an open format. The web is less conducive to mindless consumption. The web encourages more intentional use. Every post you see is because you clicked a link and went there. Content exploration is also easier. You get recommended things online by people who share links to them. Those links post to external sites, not just more content hosted on the same service. There's no monolithic algorithms over-analyzing your decisions and coming up with recommendations that show up on your "feed". You have to explore. This already weeds out a lot of the more negative elements of social media, since it requires you to put thought into what you do.

It leads to less negativity from people in the comments, and less anxiety created by impulsive scrolling.

But all of this requires there to be a community on the web. A community of people who put their things on the web instead of social media, and who offer out links to interesting things they found recently.

So let's begin, how do we get on the web, and what can we do once we're there?

Getting on the web

The easiest method for getting on the web is to just sign up for a blog. You don't really have to make it function like a traditional blog though. Blogs are just websites that don't require you to learn HTML in order to create. You don't need to be writing entire articles and essays on here. You can just use it as an easy way to have a webpage and make social posts about yourself.

On Instagram, perhaps you might have posted a dozen pictures you took when you went to an event, with a one or two sentence long caption underneath. You could do the same thing here. Post your images, and include some text at the bottom (read ahead for how to embed your images if your blog provider doesn't host them for you). But you're also free to expand from this if you like. You're no longer creating something for a bored, apathetic audience with a low attention-span, who will ultimately be looking at your post through an algorithmic feed of junk. On the web, the people looking at your posts are likely to have longer attention-spans. If you wanted to write a whole paragraph or two about your experience, you'd be free to do so, without feeling as though people will scroll past and not read what you're trying to express.

Basically, you can use a blog, or the web in general, as a way to post the same type of thing you would normally post on social media. The benefit, however, is that you don't have to cater to the low-attention span that social media creates in people while they're using it. When you're on your computer browsing the web, you're often willing to spend more time looking at a single post than you would be if you were scrolling your phone while bored in line, for instance.

So, let's get into the more specific guide of how to actually do it.

The Guide

The Blog

First thing's first, you need to sign up for a blog service. There's a lot of options out there of course. Honestly, if you wanted, you could even just run a blog by making your own website, but doing all that isn't necessary. My personal recommendation is to sign up with Bear Blog. They're great. It's a small, independent blogging service. They're simple, but offer plenty of customization. And the whole thing is entirely free. There's a paid tier that unlocks some extra stuff, but all of the core features you expect from a blog are available without needing to pay for anything.

https://bearblog.dev/

Anyways, you're going to sign up with something. If you'd prefer a bigger name, you can use something like Substack, Medium, Blogger, or anything else. All these services offer more less the same thing -- a place online that belongs to you.

You might also go ahead and pick a theme for your blog, or even make a custom one yourself, but that's not strictly necessary, it's just nice is all. Some blogging services have a few pre-built themes you can just click and apply to your page, which makes things a lot easier.

Hosting Images

At a certain point, you might get the idea that you want to post some images. This is where we'll need to invoke the use of another service, since most blogs limit the amount of images that they'll host for you. We'll want to find a service that hosts images that can be referenced with a permalink to the image file. The best option I'm aware of for this is Imgur, although alternatives definitely exist. We can make an account on Imgur, upload our images, then right click "open image in new tab" and copy the image URL.

https://imgur.com/

This URL is what we will use to embed it into our blog post. This way, the reader can see the image without having to click on any link. If you're using a service that uses a markdown format, you can embed an image like so:

![Image description](image url)

Where you replace 'image URL' with the URL that you copied, and ideally also fill in an actual description as well.

If you're using a visual editor for your blog, you'll have to dig around for yourself for any image embed buttons.

Examples

Okay, so you've seen the guide, but now you wanna see what the final product should look like in action. I've included two examples. The first is a blog designed by me. You can notice how I'm not trying to be professional or sound like an essayist or anything. I'm just writing like as if this were Twitter or Mastodon or something. There's no reason to try to be super polished about things unless that's what you wanna do. You have to think about this in the same way you would think about social media. Do you feel the need for everything on Instagram to be high fidelity content? If not, why should you feel any differently about a blog where you more less post the same type of stuff.

The second example was done by my friend Trezha, who worked on this idea with me of how the web can be used as a better way to connect online.

"Post-Roadtrip Thoughts" (by me)

https://riverpunk.bearblog.dev/post-roadtrip-thoughts/

"I went to a Concert" (by Trezha):

https://myfirst.bearblog.dev/i-went-to-a-concert/

Closing

The web is an amazing tool that allows for personal creative expression, and enables us to share those expressions with our friends. It's a tool that should connect us together. I find that social media doesn't always promote meaningful connection, and a lot of people my age seem to agree with me. We feel that there are better potential ways to connect with one another than just through the walled garden of social media.

I hope you'll consider creating a space for yourself on the free and open web, as opposed to the locked up platforms of Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or otherwise. You don't have to leave your social media accounts if you get on the web, you can have both if you like. I just feel that society would be better off if more people felt free to create and post things on the web, and so that content could become linked together. We would develop longer attention spans, the things we post would become more meaningful (even if the content itself didn't change much), and people would be free to view it without needing to sign up through an authoritarian tech platform that values money over people.

This article, as well as mine and Trezha's example posts, were made as part of our team's submission for the CS Girlies Hackathon.

How I use VimWiki for note taking

2025-08-10T00:00:00Z

August 10, 2025

I made an earlier post where I tried my best to inspire folks to use simple tech solutions in strategically useful ways in order to get large gains out of the tech they already have. Among one of the things I discussed was the power of using simple text files to keep track of things. I'd like to expand on that point here and give some of my own technical details of what I use. Of course, any old text editor will work for the job. I'm going above and beyond so I can have extra features and efficiency.

https://rseeber.github.io/blog/post/use-technology-creatively/

VimWiki

So we're going to be using VimWiki. It's an extension for the terminal-based text editor vim. First, install vim. After that, the README for the VimWiki project tells you to simply git clone the project into a plugins folder, and run a special command to generate the help pages. It's all just copy paste into the terminal, super easy stuff.

https://github.com/vimwiki/vimwiki?tab=readme-ov-file#installation

Veronica Explains did a pretty good blog post and video tutorial about using VimWiki, which you can take a look at if the official documentation isn't enough for you. My post is mostly going to be about what you can do with it, not necessarily a tutorial on the details.

https://vkc.sh/vimwiki-101/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmEtH5FQs28

Using it

Okay, so now you've got it installed. Open vim, and type "\ww" to enter VimWiki. It will create a folder in your home directory called ~/vimwiki/ where all files will go by default. VimWiki is basically just vim with internal hyperlinks to other text files on your computer. When you create a link to a file and open it, it will automatically create the file, if it doesn't already exist. You never need to leave the editor in order to add new files.

You can of course use nested directories for different types of notes. For instance, you might use ~/vimwiki/blog/ for writing up your blog posts, and ~/vimwiki/daily/ for all the notes you need at the beginning of your day. That kind of thing. All links are relative, so if you add an index page to ~/vimwiki/blog/, you can refer to all posts as simply their filename without the full path.

How I use it

A natural hierarchical order comes out of this system. You can begin at the top level index page, which lists sub-pages of different categories. Each sub-page lists either actual pages, or even more detailed categories, until finally you dig all the way down to a file where you're actually writing in, not just listing links. The hierarchy is saved entirely in your ~/vimwiki/ folder. It's all just files and folders. So if you ever want to switch to a different management system and ditch vimwiki, there's no conversion tool needed, everything is already is an easily readable format. There's no special vimwiki-specific metadata or databases or anything.

I have a few big category pages, including "Journals", "Writing", "Blog", and some for different projects I'm working on, like school clubs or things.

I use the journals folder to keep all my generic notes. There's your typical examples of just brief ideas or little details I need to record for later, but I also like to keep links to or names of media I've enjoyed, or that I plan to take a look at later when I have time. I also keep a todo list and a suspense file.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/10/26/one-weird-trick/

Blog posts + static site generator

Next, I also have the blog folder. This site is self-run using a static site hosting service (GitHub pages currently), and I use the static site generator eleventy to turn my markdown files into html pages based on the template for the site. All I do is install the node package into ~/vimwiki/blog/ and have it generate my site whenever I finish a new post. I've got it configured to output files to a custom directory where I keep the git repo for the website. So when I run the command, it updates my website repo. When I like how it looks, I commit and push the changes, and they become public within a few moments.

Just for convenience sake, I also keep a ~/vimwiki/blog/drafts/ folder which I've instructed eleventy to ignore. Once I finish writing a draft, I move it into the parent folder where it can be seen by eleventy.

Of course, you'll probably want to configure your VimWiki to use markdown files if you're doing this, rather than it's default .wiki files, which I'm unaware as to whether eleventy can support, but I would assume markdown has better support in any case. You also don't necessarily need to use eleventy -- any static site generator that is comfortable for you will do.

https://www.11ty.dev/

The idea to this whole system is that all your external tools for memory are stored into a singular place. Rather than having to think about where you keep movie suggestions, read later list, todo lists, favorite quotes, and notes on different projects, you can just know that everything is in your VimWiki folder. Just start following links down your category until you land on what you're looking for. It eases the friction for getting started on a task, and it also makes it easier to transition from one task to another, since your notes are going to be all stored in the same place.

Cloud sync + mobile access

Okay, this is getting into perhaps the more technical, but still doable. You can actually sync your entire ~/vimwiki/ folder to the so-called ""cloud"" using git. Initialize the repo, and commit all changes. Pick a server you want to use for syncing. I use GitHub because it's what I know, but some may prefer to use GitLab, or even a VPS or something like that if you're hoping for some privacy from Big Tech services.

Anyhow, simply set up a private git repo and push your changes. You'll need to of course authenticate first to prove you're allowed access, but after that it should all work. You want it to be this way so that nobody can read your notes or drafts unless they have access.

If you want to access it from somewhere else, simply git clone the folder to a separate device, edit the files, then commit and push. The benefit of using simple text files instead of more advanced files like Word Documents is that you can edit them from basically any device, even a phone. A lot of file managers for your phone will come with a text editor pre-installed.

You can get even fancier than that though. If you have an Android, you can install a terminal emulator like Termux, which enables you to install packages such as git and vim on your phone. That's what I do, I git pull my vimwiki folder to get the latest version, and then I open it with vim. I even have the VimWiki plugin installed on it too. I make my edits, then commit and push back up. Of course, that's not your only option. All you need is a way to push and pull a git repo to your phone, and some kind of generic text editor.

Closing

I really enjoy my experience with VimWiki, creating a hierarchical note system. I try not to get carried away with the data structure of it all, instead focusing on just keeping notes on important stuff. If you have any other tricks how to make the most out of this tool, feel free to let me know about it! I love endlessly tweaking with my workflow on my laptop to optimize efficiency (or often just coolness factor).