The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation. Your inability to imagine a world where you don't get exactly what you want becomes a manifesto.

Once the platforms got large enough to be unstoppable, once they captured enough of the regulatory apparatus to write their own rules, the libertarian rhetoric got quietly shelved like a college poster you took down before your in-laws came over. Meta no longer pretends it stands for free speech and seemingly takes delight in putting its thumb on the scale. TikTok users have invented an entire euphemistic shadow language to evade automated censorship like "unalive," "le dollar bean," "graped" that would have made 1996 Barlow weep into his bolo tie.

Copyright and patents matter when they're Apple's copyright and patents. Or Googles. Or OpenAIs. Go try to make a Facebook+ website and see how quickly Meta is capable of responding to content it finds objectionable.

People did not get better because they went online. Giving everyone access to a raw, unfiltered pipeline of every fact and lie ever produced did not turn them into better-educated people. It broke them. It allowed them to choose the reality they now inhabit, like ordering off a menu. If I want to believe the world is flat, TikTok will gladly serve me that content all day. Meta will recommend supportive groups. There will be hashtags. There will be Discords. There will be a guy named Trent who runs a podcast. I will never have to face the deeply uncomfortable possibility that I might be wrong about anything, ever, until the day I die, surrounded by people who agree with me about everything, including which of the other mourners are secretly lizards.

Marx, Ecology and the Lie of Separation

[We can go beyond "consume better, recycle better, choose sustainable products" to ask "who owns the land? who controls energy? who profits from extraction? who bears the waste and breathes pollution? who labours? who has water? who gets sacrificed for development?"]

The Diary Of A CEO: Jefferson Fisher

[Walk into a room as if you've been there before and everyone else is visiting.]

[I want to know the names of helping staff, how many times they've done this today, how they're doing, because it's too easy to just talk to the "important" people.]

[Let your breath be the first word.]

[In times of emotional crisis, they walk instead of running. Being calm is contagious.]

[Announce whether either of you is under capacity, and if both are then make a plan for kindness towards each other.]

Prepare your “no” and keep it handy

I took an hour to write a really nice “no” in advance. Considerate, but decisive. Not too long, but not too short. Generalized and versatile for all situations.

this refusal is the kindest I could have written. Yet it took three seconds to send. And I can use it over and over again.

The Giant's Cup

[Increasing speed and distance over time by a maximum of 10% per week made each run was challenging but not insurmountable.]

hope:Re

an open-source tool that shields your artwork from unauthorized AI training and style mimicry.

It applies invisible adversarial perturbations to your images, making them resistant to generative AI systems that attempt to learn or reproduce your unique style without consent.

I Deleted My Second Brain

over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

I’ve been sober for six years now, and that kind of milestone does something to your perception of time. It creates a before and an after, and it invites you  -  forces you  -  to take stock.

PKM systems promise coherence, but they deliver abstracted confusion. The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it  -  and move on. But the insight was never lived  -  it was just stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We don’t think in folders. We don’t retrieve meaning through backlinks. Our minds are improvisational.

This mirrors a deeper psychological error: the belief that by naming a goal, you are closer to achieving it, that by storing a thought, you have understood it, that by filing a fact, you have earned the skill to deploy it

I don’t think I want a map of everything I’ve ever read. I want a mind free to read what it needs. I want memory that forgets gracefully. I want ideas that resurface because they mattered, not just because an index card was forced to the forefront by some complex system of levers and pulleys.

Our bodies remember

["Indian belly" as a meme distracts from systemic famines during British colonial rule that resulted in millions unalived and future generation bodies storing energy maladaptively.]

delphitools

A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.

No logins, no registration, no data collection. I can't believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web.

Netzwerk Reparatur-Initiativen

Germany has a network of "repair cafés" where you can learn to fix your broken stuff instead of buying new things.

Belief is the key ingredient

[Talking about the world's problems is optimistic, rather than pessimistic, because it implies we could and should be doing better.]

[Standing up to power relies on believing change is possible.]

[The powerful speak with a tone of inevitability to convince you that change is not possible.]

[There is no secret sauce: any prolonged collective act of non-compliance will do.]

politicians play, civilians pay

Mestre Manoel & Carcará

aspiring to one day clown with such mastery

Lessons Learned from Personal Recovery Stories

[Healing can be perceived as a threat to the wounded if it indicates that they resist changing.]

The secrets revealed in SpaceX’s IPO filing

SpaceX bought $131 million of Cybertrucks from Tesla in 2025 at the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price.”

In 2025, SpaceX also purchased $506 million worth of Megapack energy storage products from Tesla. l

Musk’s xAI has paid Tesla about $731 million since the beginning of 2024 through February 2026.