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If this is the solution, I want my problem back. Don't follow me, I am lost.
Apple's mouse charges face down. Windows removes the 'no' button. The bank holds your money and demands permission. This is hostile design.
TSA catches shoes but misses weapons. Government offices demand three copies for a meaningless stamp. This is bureaucratic rot.
Neither requires a master plan. Like a mother who uses daily guilt to control her child without a blueprint. The power dynamic is not engineered. It builds itself.
You flip the mouse. You strip at checkpoints. You click 'not now'. The system does not need to plan your submission. The daily friction builds the power structure automatically. You bend because fighting takes effort.
A company doesn't care what you write. They'd need a government order to touch you. No opinion. A contract and nothing.
Some small platform, one guy running it, can delete you the moment you annoy him. No order needed. No court. Just his mood, dressed up as a rule.
IRC, no rules at all. You don't say "she" fast enough, you're gone. No clause, no appeal. Just a man with a button and a grudge.
Store, covid, a mask. A security guard, not a cop, decided you were the enemy of the room. Your neighbour wanted you in a cage over a piece of cloth. Nobody paid him to want that.
A company has a price. A believer doesn't.
Search for apple and get a phone. Read about freedom and get a router upgrade. Language is transactions. Human experience is product features.
Click Big Bang theory, get sitcom commentary. The highest output is vomiting feelings about last week's consumption. Not thought. Just signals. Display to prove herd membership.
Some attempt authenticity. A cat shitting. A hamburger swallowed. Just meat recording its own functions. There is no mind to document.
The web is not broken. It exposes minds. Consume. Parrot. Comply.
The mind is the fire. The web is fuel. The burning is the default state. There is no escape. There is only the burning.
You ask for text. Just a few words. They don't sell text. Text is free. So they sell the wrapper.
You get HTML, CSS, and two megabytes of JavaScript. Fifty million lines just to render your banana cake recipe. Then the platform. The likes, the comments, the feed from your new tribe. You want an email client. Just send a message. They give you an AI assistant, a calendar, a crypto wallet, and a monthly fee.
You want the potholes fixed. But you cannot just buy the asphalt. You have to buy the whole ideology. You want clean water. You get a political party, a culture war, and a tribe to defend.
You can't just buy the water. The buyer comes bundled too. Wrapping, pretending to be someone.
The real merchandise here is the self. Strip the packaging and there's nothing there.
There is no self. Just the fear of finding that out.
I get an idea. Few words, a sentence or two. I start writing. After few lines it's clear it's going to be shit, a novel. Explaining, examples, luckily not many metaphors, as my English level does not allow it.
The first spit is lazy mode. I talk until everyone falls asleep and I can leave. Done. Mind just keeps going until it feels everything is covered.
The second distilled version requires more work. No pressure to be right or understood. No fillers. No saying the same thing three times. And the title.
Long version serves the writer. Short one respects the reader.
I canceled the OpenBSD server. Moved to free Cloudflare. The infrastructure doesn't matter. I get an extra pack of cigarettes now.
I used a feed reader for almost a month. Too long. I killed it. Reading is just consuming other people's vomit.
I wrote my thoughts. Sent emails. The spam filter caught it. The machine did its job.
POSSE it, they say. Own your content.
Publish once, fork it five times. RSS, Mastodon, Bluesky, webmention, pick your parasite.
Fix the typo in two minutes. Already too late.
Fossils wearing your name.
POSSE. Webmention. ActivityPub. AT Protocol. Fediverse. IndieWeb. Micro.blog. Bearblog. Pika Pulse. /now page. /uses page. Discovery feed. Own app . Own icon. Own font.
Same rats, smaller cage, better lighting.
Killed a man Tuesday. Checked his oil, packed a lunch, drove three hundred miles to do it. The boy looked like his nephew. Same jaw, same stupid haircut.
Wednesday he kissed his daughter on the forehead. Told her to be good. Meant it.
No animal forgives itself. It just eats and moves on.
He needs God, a flag, and a stranger with more stripes. Three lies stacked on a fresh grave.
Friday he is at his daughter's recital. Claps loudest.
AI flooded the internet.
Google broke search.
Company poisoned the river.
Pharma knew, shipped anyway.
Parliament voted.
Fairy tales. A man did every one of those things. With a name, a face, a paycheck.
Doctor says six months. Your opinion was five years.
Prayer changes nothing. Morphine does.
You argue with your father about it anyway. Right up until he stops breathing. You were right.
He is dead.
Heart stops. No referendum.
Bella doesn't know she is humiliated.
Sweater on, box ready, camera rolling. Confused face. Laughing. Share. Forty likes. Love you Bella.
In nature, predator kills and eats. Clean. Honest.
Bella gets something worse. Alive, dependent, no exit. Dressed up, laughed at, photographed daily. Death would be more honest.
You call it love.
You read, you write, day after day. It either entertains you or not.
You can read every fact that exists about food and human biology. All of it. You will order your pizza anyway. You can see all the data that random corporation extracts from you. You will open Gmail anyway. You have stances, ideals, and all that shit. On the surface. In words.
You cry about the semantic web presented over 27 JavaScript files and broken HTML. You write about a book you read yesterday and one you will read tomorrow. Maybe split it with a banana cake and a picture of a bird.
Your 2000-word deep analysis of some fictional character from the latest TV series is safe. Costs nothing. Nobody will punish you. Nobody will argue. Nobody will read it.
Including this.
Last week, Frenkie left X. He joined Bluesky. He wrote an essay about it. Kept the account "just in case." Frenkie is now free. He can write about climate change. His first manifesto from his new MacBook. The temperature in the room is good. The air conditioner works, delivered just yesterday by Amazon delivery.
Life is good.
His next piece is an essay about digital minimalism and independence. His minimalist platform allows him to post his piece over email. The essay is perfect. Ten language tools smoothed every edge. All good, loading frenkie.privacy@gmail.com and sent. Published. Job done. Frenkie can continue to scroll through other helpful videos about freedom and humanity.
300 000 years. The same brain. The same performance. Different costumes.
It's futile.
Few months ago Cloudflare introduced Markdown for machines:
As a business, to continue to stay ahead, now is the time to consider not just human visitors, or traditional wisdom for SEO-optimization, but start to treat agents as first-class citizens.
Feeding raw HTML to an AI is like paying by the word to read packaging instead of the letter inside.
You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript. This needs a browser built by thousands of engineers just to show you a paragraph.
Machines get the clean version.
Someone invented human.json protocol. A protocol for humans, about humans, to make the web more human. In JSON. Braces, quotes, colons, commas. Needs a parser to read it.
Meanwhile Google shipped Open Knowledge Format for AI agents. Markdown files.
The people building the human web chose the machine format. The machines moved to the human format.
Web browsers are not document viewers. They are customer acquisition channels for massive tech ecosystems. They don't serve users, but corporations. AI features, VPNs, crypto wallets, and countless of other nonsense.
Markdown, on the other hand, is a public good. It would empower writers to publish their words independently. It would strip out countless CMS systems, frameworks, trackers, and ads. All those things where the money sits. Markdown is practically anti-platform. It's simple.
Why implement simple Markdown when there is already a bloated PDF viewer and you can play AAA games in a tab, or generate images in some chat window? Markdown is an alien in that world.
Not supporting Markdown in a web browser is a choice. That choice tells you exactly who the modern web is built for.
