What I experience
This manifesto is a reflection of about 5 months of “spare time” effort I have spent to unenshittify my life. Without boasting too much, I have had so much success getting “modern experiences” to work on my ancient computers like my iPhone 5 and my iMac G4 that I feel comfortable declaring the things in this manifesto. Basically, if our modern software was not so enshittified, our apps would have better experiences and work on basically any computer hardware built since 2010.
What is a modern experience? For me, this means a basic native application that uses a web api to fetch user data, stores it in a database, and then displays it in the UI with other features to allow the data to be changed by the user and then transmitted over a web api. This is every chat app, every doomscrolling social media app, every “AI” app, and pretty much any other app except games or AV content generation apps.
I am pretty confident that 99% of the time you spend on your phone is spent with these kinds of apps.
What I refuse
- I refuse to accept that modern experiences require modern hardware
- I refuse to accept that modern experiences require 300MB of human-made slop
- I refuse to accept that my data is inaccessible to me
- I refuse to allow my experiences to be actively hostile toward my goals
- I refuse to allow my experiences to be dictated by corporate interests
- I refuse to carry a 7” supercomputer that has no capabilities beyond simple chat and doomscrolling apps (the iPhone)
What I believe
- I believe that modern experiences RUN GREAT on retro hardware
- I believe that 5MB binaries are more than capable of delivering modern experiences
- I believe that my data is my data and I can use it where and how I want
- I believe that GOOD experiences help me achieve my goals
- I believe that I can create my own GOOD experiences
What I accept
- I accept that I cannot fix the modern app and web ecosystems
- I accept that I cannot force Apple to allow everyone to have access to their own data
- I accept that the experiences I create are not 100% feature complete
- I accept that the experiences I create are not 100% bug free
- I accept that AI slop is not beautiful nor consumable by humans
- I accept that AI slop is not free
What I will do
- I will create my own experiences for my own devices
- I will make my data accessible to my own apps
- I will use the devices I want to use (the iPhone 5)
- I will make my AI slop more performant than their human slop
- I will make my AI slop more stable than their human slop
- I will use AI to help me unenshittify my life