Links, March 20, 2026

§Zen fascists will control you…

An essay that touches on both the granola-to-fascist pipeline that we saw emerge during early COVID, the self-help complex, and the nature of therapy. This is a hard one to summarize, but I think its lead-in sells it:

In 1979, a punk band from San Francisco recorded a song about the Governor of California. It was a joke, mostly. Jerry Brown was a Democrat, a Buddhist, a man who dated Linda Ronstadt and discussed limits and simplicity at a moment when America was in no mood for either. 

The Dead Kennedys called him a “Zen fascist” and suggested, with cheerful malice, that he would one day run concentration camps fuelled by organic food. I’m not sure that anyway, even the band, took it entirely seriously.

They should have.

§The human.json Protocol

human.json is a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.

I’ve added one here.

§Mapping Google’s Unmappable City

404 Media on the only city in the US not on Google Street View:

In North Oaks, homeowners’ property extends into the middle of the street, meaning there is literally no “public” property in the city, and the roads are maintained by the North Oaks Homeowners’ Association

and a delicious workaround:

The national airspace is technically managed by the Federal Aviation Administration, and “airspace” starts directly above the ground,

Software Sucks, Programming Sucks, and So Do Computers

§If computers are the future, why are computer users expected to be permanently illiterate?

I have run into the issue at the heart of this piece in my work so many times I’ve lost count:

We’re told constantly that computers are the future, both the future of work and the future of personal efficiency, yet the computer vendors seem intent on keeping users in a state of permanent illiteracy. The term “power user” has become almost a slur, as if power users were abnormal in some way rather than simply possessing knowledge about computers, a normal consequence of experience with computers… unless the computers provide no room for personal growth. It’s alleged that power users make unreasonable demands on the computer vendors, demands that if satisfied would ruin the computing world for everyone else.

If you want to provide people with tools for learning, it is not unreasonable to ask them to learn a bit about working with the tool. There is a sentiment I’ve fought against a lot, which I’d summarize as if an interface is too complicated to make in Bootstrap, no one will be able to figure it out. We may as well confine our vocabulary to a third-grade level, our music to the pentatonic scale, and get our power tools from Fisher-Price.

The thing about “easy to use” is that it’s relative to expectations, and it seems the expectations anymore are that rather than empowering people to use the computer to its fullest, we’re instead supposed to dis-empower them via chatbots and “product manager knows best” limitations.

§The 49MB Web Page

An explanation of what happens when you load a web page on a leading newspaper’s website:

Before the user finishes reading the headline, the browser is forced to process dozens of concurrent bidding requests to exchanges like Rubicon Project (fastlane.json) and Amazon Ad Systems. While these requests are asynchronous over the network, their payloads are incredibly hostile to the browser’s main thread. To facilitate this, the browser must download, parse and compile megabytes of JS.

Running ad adblocker is the moderate position at this point. I wouldn’t be surprised to see browser extensions which return zipbombs to sites like this before long.

§You and Your Spinner Can Go to Hell

on that note:

So, the goal became “nice numbers from Google” and not “nice user interface”. Over time, as people correctly applied good UX research to their designs, the cargo cult↗effect became “show a spinner, because good apps use a lot of spinners”. Somewhere along the line we lost sight of what we’re actually trying to do.

§If you thought the speed of writing code was your problem - you have bigger problems

A bit about the many problems with the software development process these days:

Your PM hasn’t talked to a real user in two months. Your requirements arrive as a Jira ticket with three sentences and a Figma link to a design that was approved by someone who’s never used the product. Your engineers are making fifty micro-decisions a day about behaviour, edge cases, and error handling that nobody specified, because nobody thought about them.

And they’re guessing.

§Programming Sucks

The previous link reminded me of this classic, which I haven’t shared here yet:

This file is Good Code. It has sensible and consistent names for functions and variables. It’s concise. It doesn’t do anything obviously stupid. It has never had to live in the wild, or answer to a sales team. It does exactly one, mundane, specific thing, and it does it well. It was written by a single person, and never touched by another. It reads like poetry written by someone over thirty.

§The Last Quiet Thing

On the invisible labor of managing our technology.

The problem was never how many things you own. The problem is that owning means something it never used to. Everything you buy is the beginning of a relationship you’ll be maintaining until one of you dies or gets discontinued.

Personally I went for the plain text version, because the scrolling animations were a bit much.

§I’m OK being left behind, thanks!

I stopped being an early adopter when it became apparent to me that the things pushed towards early adopters were mostly scams.

“You don’t want to get left behind, do you?” They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what’s the point of “getting in early”? It’ll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.

Part of the crypto grift was telling people to “Have Fun Staying Poor”. That weaponisation of FOMO was an insidious way to get people to drop their scepticism.

I fell for a few mail-order scams as a teenager; you learn to recognize the signs.

And AI is a Fascist Project

§The Ends of AI

This piece starts talking about the Chatbot psychosis phenomenon and then gets to the heart of it:

Part of the long arc of the Oligarchs’ political project has been exactly this: to individuate — to make your relationship be with the platform itself; these days, via an unwitting stream-of-consciousness testimonial that the user engages in with a chatbot.

The bigger AI project asks that you abandon meaning and feeling, to believe in a neutral, objective, all-knowing source built from massively large datasets hosted in hyperscale data centres. AI asks that you buy into the idea that more data means being closer to The Truth. It means that you should want to offload your limited cognition to the super machine. And perhaps most dangerously — that you understand all of this as a scientific endeavour.

§Overthinking AI

If your argument in favor of something requires you to set aside your ethics or your morals, then you don’t have ethics or morals.

They (and so am I) are disgusted by the lack of ethics, environmental consequences, the horrible uses of AI on the daily, horrible companies, horrible people. And we are looking around and everyone else is eating it up and enjoying it. This is the tipping point. And I get that.