I am Bartleby, The Scrivener.

Or, if you prefer, Lloyd Dobbler from Say Anything

It’s March, I’m miserable, and whatever it is you want me to do, I can tell you what my answer will be: I would prefer not to.

I hate everything. I hate every email and ad I get. Most of my emails are ads anyways. I hate instagram, I hate bluesky. I hate my body. I hate all my clothes. I hate the clutter in my household, I hate the frozen dirty snow still left on the streets. I hate my family obligations. I keep getting angry at people I know, family, friends, even people I know only casually, for not having their shit together more than I do, which is not at all.

I am angry at everything. I get an email from The New York Times Cooking (the only part of the nytimes I look at anymore) and the subject line says “This bright, easy soup is absolutely perfect for right now” and I think fuck you, no it’s not. Who are you to tell me what’s absolutely perfect right now. That soup is far too cheerful, look at it, all orange and creamy, with a swirl of paprika on top. What does that soup know of oppression, or despair? Fuck that soup.

I’m angry that when I opened up the times cooking app to find something for dinner that was not a bright easy soup absolutely perfect for right now, the app wanted me to enable notifications and sign up for more email newsletters about viral celeriac casserole recipes and succulent sheet-pan chicken and vegetable meals. Fuck you app, stop trying to get me to app more. I already paid for you. Just shut up.

I’m trying to help my younger child acquire a real ID, and it’s like some fucking escape room puzzle. Fuck that. I don’t want to. It’s too hard, and it’s deliberately too hard, to dispossess people, to limit their movements, to make them feel insecure and second or third class. This kid’s address at birth is the same as their address now and why do I have to find 3 pieces of paper dated in the last 60 days to confirm they are who they say they are and they live where they have always lived. Fuck that.

Most of the emails I receive these days are ads and I hate them all. If you call a product “must have” a “outfit essential”, “on trend”, “timeless”, “sustainable” “luxe”, “performance”, or “life-changing” I do not want it. If you say there’s a fresh drop or a VIP sale, or a can’t miss one, fuck off. I hate all my own clothes but I hate all the clothes being sold to me too, with their barrel legs and mint greens. I don’t want to wear mint green, and barrel legs make me look fat and old. Fuck that.

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, but a lot of them are on substack, which I also use, and I hate substack. I hate the constant admonitions to like and share. I hate the subscribe or upgrade or gift button every four paragraphs. I hate that substack offers free gift subscriptions that can only be redeemed in the substack app, which I refuse to download because I don’t want to get trapped inside yet another platform. I also do not want to be part of encouraging my readers to get stuck inside another platform. I don’t want to upsell. I don’t want to nudge. I don’t want to make a course or a drip campaign. Of course I want readers but I don’t want to coerce them. I don’t even want to nudge them. I would prefer not to.

I hate my body and I hate every product I’m advertised that purports to help me get a body it insists I would hate less. There is probably no body I would hate less than this one. No, I don’t need you to tell me how great I look or strong or powerful or sexy I look. I have Instagram for that, but I also hate Instagram. I hate how it’s always urging me to do fun things with Meta AI. Substack also wants me to do fun things with AI that I do not want to do. I want every app I use to rip out the AI. I hate Apple for turning on Apple intelligence by default as though I do not have any choice but to get with the picture about AI. I do not want to get with the AI generated picture. I want all the generative ai systems in the world to be unplugged, today, and their data centers taken off the grid, so that we are no longer using up energy in service to slop. Please take your “start drafting with AI” prompt and shove it. I would prefer not to.

I hate every green button. I want to press the gray button and the tiny almost invisible x that only appears after you’ve already been forced to look at something someone wants you to buy. I do not want to add shipping insurance or pay in four interest-free payments. I hate your free shipping over 99 dollars offer. I hate when you tell me how much money I can save by buying now, during your once a year sale. Must-shop sale. Must-have mules! I do not want your must-have mules, your sweat-wicking t-shirt, your timeless luxe cashmere turtleneck. Fuck that. I would prefer not to.

I hate your curated experiences and your luxury wellness resorts. I hate yoga retreats, trance breathing workshops, VIP coaching packages. I hate longevity tech. If you are the 23 year old owner of a startup that makes a clever product to help me kick my phone addiction, but it turns out to be almost intolerably buggy on my iPhone, I hate you for selling it to me without warning that it is intolerably buggy on my iPhone. I know you were probably counting on me losing it or forgetting to ask for a return label in time to return it. You were counting on me being so beaten down by finding the gray button or the almost invisible link or the late-appearing x that I give up on trying to return the buggy product. You and the entire rest of the world trying to sell me things are counting on that, my basic acquiescence to shitty patterns and dark UX and buggy web apps. You didn’t reckon on all this hate. You didn’t realize how deeply I have become a bartleby, how stubborn I have become in the face of an entire world that is designed to maximize profit, to steal my time, my energy, my attention, and my money. You didn’t understand how even the word Product makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth these days.

Product. Reach. Maximize. 10x. Profit. Growth. Engagement. Recurring Revenue. LLMs. The Blockchain. Upgrade. VIP. Customer. Fuck that. I would prefer not to.

I resent my every interaction with an automated system designed to frustrate or repel me from accomplishing whatever it is I want to do and instead to herd me along whatever path it’s been designed to herd me along, not the path it wants, because an automated system wants nothing, but the path that PEOPLE, human people! put in place in order to maximize the extraction of value from me, mash me up into money. This entire system we have going here is one villainous machine with giant suction cups all over our bodies, sucking out our very lives. Mashing us up into money for Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and a few dozen other men. I hate it. I am not here on this earth to be mashed up into money for the sake of Capital. I would prefer not to, and when I mean I would prefer not to, I mean I absolutely fucking refuse to, I’d like to see you try, I am having absolutely none of it.

Call me an ill-tempered luddite. I don’t care. The luddites were actually really fucking cool, I’d be honored to stand in the reflected glow of the luddites. Tell me how Tech has done so many beautiful good things in the world. I will point you to the wanton destruction of our federal government, the cruelty, the carelessness, the violence at the heart of the project the executive branch is currently engaged in, and you will say yes, yes, i see that this is terrible, but surely this is not the fault of the technology itself? And I will say of course not, the tech itself is almost a distraction, the entire worldview of the industry is the problem, the moral bankruptcy of the idea that a small number of Great Men will save us with their especially clever brains and their especially entrepreneurial instincts, just let them automate it all.

You think I will consent to all your cookies because it is easier, but you have not reckoned on my hatred and my stubborness. I do not consent. You think I will fall into line about AI and finally enable it on something or other, but I am Bartleby the Scrivener and I would fucking prefer not to.

I understand, of course, that I should be building something beautiful instead of hating everything, or so I am told by so many of the newsletters that are offering me bold imaginaries of the future and five quick actions I can take today to fight fascism. I am aware that hating everything and stubbornly preferring not to is an unpopular position these days. Too negative. What are you building, though, Amy? What is YOUR VISION for the future?

I do have a dream, and in my dream, lots of us have jackhammers and we are using them on all the asphalt parking lots all over our city and we are planting kitchen gardens and pollinator gardens and drainage gardens and food forests where the parking lots used to be. I do have a dream, and in it, 132 days of the year are festival days and on those days we don sequined dresses and sneakers and we eat and dance all day long, and all the kids are running around playing in the pollinator gardens and the food forests and nobody is scolding the parents for not knowing precisely where their children are at every hour of the day.

Yes, I’ve got a motherfucking dream, and in it, I never have to talk to a chatbot ever again, I talk to a person, and we joke about the weather while helping each other get something kind of annoying done. I have a dream, and it is not to die every day by the thousand cuts of living in a society that cares only for profit, not to spend my precious time dodging upsells and scammers and bots and advertisers and businesses that want my data. My dream is not to be stuck inside of boxes inside of boxes inside of boxes, looking for the grayed out x, not to perceive my entire society, the entire internet, as an escape room I’m desperate to escape from, because instead of a thousand cuts or suction cups or mosquito bites there’s a there there, a world beyond working, getting, spending, extracting.

So yeah, this present situation: I would prefer not to, with a level of refusal that is increasingly approaching what the psychiatrists would call Pathological Demand Avoidance, but which feels to me like a stubborn resistance forged into steel and made stronger with every demand that I accept the cookies, return to my abandoned shopping cart, fill out this survey, enable notifications, watch this ad, add this product too.

I do not want to be thrown in a blender and mashed up into money.

My dreams are bigger than your goddamn subscription service or your luxury at-home magnesium IV infusion service.

Fuck you, no.

I want love and courage. I want truth, democracy, and solidarity. I want to touch grass and talk to humans. I will find none of these things on your internet, Horatio, I must look in heaven and on earth for them.

anyways, find me in IRL if you can. Or send me an email. I still read emails from humans. Substack wants you to comment rather than reply, but I would rather you reply than comment.

Good luck out there. Remember that sometimes stubborn refusal is valuable in itself. Or, at least, I hope so, because that’s pretty much what I have right now.