Nope

I Would Prefer Not To...

• cater to people who find me exhausting or unreasonable because I retain a strong sense of self
• mistake billionaires for heroes, let alone decent human beings
• disable my ad blocker
  (no glove, no love)
• discuss my personal relationship with Jesus
  (all you need to know is that he knows me and he knows I’m right)
• accept unchosen duties imposed on me by people I neither like, love, nor respect
• read novels that don’t interest me just because the author is trendy for whatever reason
• pretend that literary awards aren’t popularity contests for the pretentious
• be held accountable by people who are no more than my equals
• bring my “whole self” to work
  (My whole self would be pestering coworkers about unionizing.)
• hear about your product
• subscribe to your newsletter (RSS or GTFO!)
• friend you on Facebook
• connect on LinkedIn
• join your Discord chatroom (it’s not a server, damn it)
• consent to data collection
• allow police to:
  • search me or my vehicle without a warrant or probable cause
  • enter my home without a signed judicial warrant
  • question me without an attorney present
• accept cookies
• accept your terms of disservice
• permit telemetry
• network
• wait until after work hours to use the toilet
  (boss makes a dollar, I make a dime; that’s why I shit on company time)
• police other men to earn your approval as a “good feminist man”
  (Nobody elected me, you aren’t paying me enough, and you sure as hell won’t visit me in the hospital if I end up losing a fight as a result.)
• follow back on social just because you followed me
• refrain from blocking or muting annoying people
• accept unexpected phone calls from numbers I don’t recognize
• socialize at work
• deal with Microsoft Windows at home just to play video games
• go through more than two interviews for a single job opportunity
  (If you can’t make a decision to hire somebody after a phone screen and an in-person interview, then your company is not a culture fit for me.)
• prove that I’m over 21 so that my wife and I can watch porn together
• do a one-way video interview
• pretend that a conservative’s opinion is as valid as my understanding of the facts
• get homework from a therapist
• work unpaid overtime to enhance the company’s culture
• learn yet another front-end framework on my own time
• accept your invite for a meeting that could be an email
• listen to your podcast (I can read faster than you can talk)
• watch your four hour video essay
• accept push notifications
• participate in a society that only acknowledges my existence when it wants something from me
• acknowledge the continued existence of Hacker News
• do an unpaid assignment to prove I can tell a compiler from a Cuisinart
• donate to your idea of a good cause
• be your idea of a good man
• hear about your app idea
• make a performance of my emotions because you think I’m not being vulnerable enough
• give a shit about problems I didn’t cause and don’t have the authority to solve
• reconcile with my family; who I am without them makes it worth the pain
• return to the office when I’d just be returning to a shared desk in an open-plan environment and incurring unnecessary expenses and risk to life and limb in the process
• pretend to be less than what I am for your comfort
• atone for anybody else’s sins but my own, especially over shit that happened before I was born
• leave the United States because you think my criticism of this country and what passes for its culture means I am unpatriotic or disloyal
• do whatever it was Meat Loaf wouldn’t do for love and didn’t dare name

Little Things that Annoy Me

• computers
• having to pretend to be some other asshole’s idea of “normal” so that they don’t feel uncomfortable around me
• women’s rights still being subject to majority votes in state legislatures
• individual rights still being subject either to majority votes in any legislature or the discretion of a single public official
• black men can be summarily executed for selling untaxed cigarattes, but corporations can make the planet uninhabitable with impunity
• people who say only “hello” in chat, and wait for you to reply before asking a question or saying anything substantive, as if they were making a phone call
• the commercialization of the internet
• paying taxes (as the price of civilization) and not getting my money’s worth
• having to worry about a billable hours in a salaried job and not getting time and a half for overtime because of bullshit exemptions in the FLSA
• feeling see whenever I hear “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” by the Blue Öyster Cult
• drivers who don’t use their turn signals before changing lanes
• drivers who lose their minds the second a bit of precipitation hits the pavement
• conservatism and its adherents
• self-righteous progressives fighting fire with empty words while the banks get fat, and the poor stay poor, and the rich get rich, and the cops get paid to look away, as the one percent rules America
• Democratic Party activists who can’t accept that I might only vote for their party so I can stick it to the Republicans (when I’d rather be taking potshots at anybody dumb enough to wear a MAGA hat in public)
• so-called Christian churches that care more about the Old Testament and the Epistles of Paul than about Jesus' teachings are set out in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John
• people who think that the minimum wage is for minimum skill/education and not the minimum a business can be pay works and expect to be tolerated in the US, despite FDR being explicit about this
• private health insurance
• it is still considered uncouth, if not outright criminal, to assassinate busybodies who ask intrusive personal questions
• having to hope that the stock market doesn’t repeatedly shit itself so that my 401(k) might actually have enough to let me retire
• needing separate insurance for vision and dental care
• doctors who give you shit for being fat, suggest diet and exercise like you’ve never tried either, but won’t do anything meaningful to help with an overly insistent appetite and an inability to feel satisfied with sensibly-sized portions
• hearing about how democracy needs to be saved or protected when I spend at least forty hours a week as part of a privately owned dictatorship just to get a paycheck
• working too damn hard for too damn many hours, getting paid too damn little, paying too damn much in taxes on what little I do earn, and still feeling like I’m living paycheck to paycheck despite making almost a hundred grand a year

Parasocial Media Platforms I Refuse to Use

You will not find me actively participating on any of these platforms, if I still have accounts there at all:

Goodreads

It’s owned by Amazon, which is reason enough, but they let me review books I haven’t actually read.

Facebook

This is the toned-down version of FaceMash that Mark Zuckerberg built after almost getting kicked out of Harvard for being a scumbag. He did not learn the intended lesson.

Instagram

More of Mark Zuckerberg’s bullshit.

WhatsApp

Even more of Mark Zuckerberg’s bullshit.

Threads

Dear creeping gods, Mark Zuckerberg’s bullshit never seems to end.

Twitter

It’s the bathroom wall of the Internet, and a Nazi bar under Elon Musk.

YouTube

It’s as amateurish as public-access television, but with more advertising.

TikTok

It’s a YouTube knockoff operated by a corporation may be a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party. (In the US, the government dances to the tune of billionaires, so who am I to gripe?)

Nextdoor

It’s Facebook for gossipy authoritarian homeowners, and if you just bought a house your realtor sold your email address to these assholes.

LinkedIn

It’s the Ashley Madison of job hunting; the jobs are fake and the recruiters are all bots.

Medium

The platform is accurately named, at least; it’s a content farm whose offerings are neither rare nor well-done.

Substack

It’s the Medium of newsletters, and a Nazi bar in the bargain.

BlueSky

It’s a wannabe Twitter that claims to use a federated protocol, but the only site that implements AT protocol is bsky.app, so it doesn’t actually federate. (update: there are AT/ActivityPub bridges, but BlueSky still sucks IMO because it still wants to be the second coming of Twitter when it grows up.)

Nostr

It’s a wannabe Twitter but on blockchain. Only techbros and cryptocurrency/web3 grifters use it.

Farcaster

It’s another wannabe Twitter but on blockchain and named for tech mentioned in Dan Simmons’s novel HYPERION (also, Dan Simmons is a fucking bigot).

Hacker News

It’s a forum run by Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s sociopath incubator, and frequented by College Republicans who majored in engineering or computer science. Many of its commenters tend to fetishize trans women who code as well.

Snapchat

Because I’m not a teenager and my name isn’t Humbert Humbert.

Stack Exchange

It’s basically Yahoo! Answers for techies.

Reddit

It’s the Disney of web forums; it devoured once-independent spaces so it could monetize them, and depends on unpaid moderators to keep its subreddits from being inundated with shit.

Gab

It’s a Nazi bar, and at least half a dozen right-wing stochastic terrorists have posted manifestos there, including the donkey-raping shit-eater who shot up that synagogue in Pittsburgh.

4chan

Must I explain why? Truly? Fine. It’s the sort of wretched hive of scum and villainy that makes Mos Eisley look classy.

Agora Road

It’s a forum for vaporwave fans frequented by paranoid right-wing authoritarians whose brains were rotted by chan culture.

Words I’d Rather Not Use

I suspect most of these come from corporate Newspeak.

• ask (instead of request)
• learnings (instead of lessons)
• doubt (instead of question)
• circle back (instead of get back to you)
• connect (instead of call)