Amen, brother.

I'll also point out, in my sandwich-board-wearing way, that the entire mental illness industry is based on a similar dynamic. Rational responses to societal failures are blamed on the individual and treated individually at great cost and, not surprisingly, poor effectiveness.

Your thermostat has opinions now. Your television requires a login. Your car updates itself overnight, and sometimes when you start it in the morning, the interface has rearranged itself, as if someone broke in and reorganized your dashboard while you slept.

Your earbuds won't play music until they've updated their firmware. Your refrigerator wants to be on your Wi-Fi.

a little repetitive but ⅓ of it was fun to read.

⅔ was better not read 🤷

https://www.terrygodier.com/phantom-obligation

The previous one was also a good read.

I loved this article. Pretty sure it has html only so not sure why everyone complains.

That fact that this is one of the most grossly over-engineered websites I've ever seen really undercuts the point of the article for me.

It's a fucking blog post. Not everything needs to have animated UI and fancy scrolling and interactive elements. Just let me read, Jesus Christ...

Thank you for sharing this

I got my iPod back out recently. It's so nice that something is not advertising, tracking, updating, and bothering the fuck out of me constantly.

People, if you have an iPod and you're a privacy nut, dig that thing out of the drawer and charge it up. Never thought I'd think it was such a treasure in 2026.