In honor of Labor Day, here are my workplace rules of engagement:

1. I try not to suck. I have not “quiet quit.” I have a personal investment in my work and hope to be known as a quality professional.
2. At the same time, I won’t be consumed by my work. I’m here for a long time, not a good time. I employ various psychological and technological devices to ensure my work life doesn’t interfere with all the other things I want to accomplish.
3. Accordingly, if we find ourselves working together and you approach me with warmth, openness, and collaborative energy; treat me as an equal; and take my actions in good faith, then I will do my best to match your stance.
4. And if you approach me with a clinical, detached attitude; or try to initiate status transactions against me; or signal that you consider my perspective to be a nuisance; or sexually harass me, you creep, then I will activate an appropriate set of defenses. You might not experience the closeness or humor that I share with other colleagues.
5. My defenses do not necessarily represent a judgment against you. Your detachment and pretend objectivity may be a reasonable adaptation to our environment in light of your temperament and life goals.
6. But you also can’t count my guardedness as a mark against me. I am only fighting for my life.

xkcd 1357 is the famous “Free Speech” meme about how getting banned from a Facebook group or college campus doesn’t count as a violation of free speech because, legal reasons:

This xkcd is from 2014, and it had the right take for the Tea Party/Obama era, when the Free Speech Defenders™ were mainly interested in using their First Amendment rights to espouse racism and homophobia. It made sense to provide some pushback and point out that people should be able to create little private enclaves where they can police speech a bit more aggressively.

Unfortunately the world has shifted, and the problems have shifted. These same transactional exceptions to free speech (“Sure, you can say that, but I will impose X consequence”) are now leveraged against people who don’t suck. I think this makes it clear that xkcd’s allegiance to the letter of the law in 2014 was a bit shortsighted, and lacked reflection on why we actually have a First Amendment and what we are actually trying to protect.

In my opinion, in 2026, we … don’t really have free speech. Maybe we have it in a narrow, legal sense—your boss can’t say “You’re fired and by the way it’s because of your political beliefs.” But I don’t think we have real free speech of a form that would impress any of the Enlightenment thinkers.

There was a viral post recently called “Being kicked out of the tech industry.” TL;DR, OP has been laid off from every job and is struggling to find a new one. These posts are, unfortunately, getting more and more common and I will not attempt to contradict the broader reality that the job market in tech kinda sucks right now. Nor do I find “kicked out” guy to be 100% sympathetic–actually, his post evinces a strong tendency to blame others for his circumstances and he comes across as a bit hardheaded and difficult to work with (just my intuition, sorry).

However, someone in the lobste.rs comments managed to write a response to the post that attacked it in, IMO, the most soul-crushing way possible. “I would probably never be able to hire you,” went the comment, because you post too much about politics on your blog. Not “during working hours,” not “using company IT,” just: “your website.” “Sorry no one told you before,” the commenter concluded.

(Seriously, what’s with the epidemic of this narcissistic, condescending tone online? You see it in both sides here. “never be able to hire you” dude, just say you wouldn’t hire him, no need to play the stupid “my hands are tied” game.)

This is pretty sad, right? In my opinion, if you can’t post your political beliefs without risking unemployment, you don’t have freedom of speech. I don’t care if the law doesn’t technically protect kicked-out guy because the politics weren’t cited explicitly in rejecting him; that’s a problem with the law. This is a clear case of society failing to create the kind of open commons necessary in a free society.

And by the way, reforming the legal implementation of freedom of speech doesn’t have to mean nobody can have safe spaces of the sort portrayed in the xkcd. The point is to pursue a middle ground between utter free speech absolutism and “free speech winter,” which is what we currently have, where everyone’s afraid to speak their mind because they don’t know what the consequences are anymore. Don’t even get me started on the abysmal speech policing of immigrants, who aren’t even covered by the fig leaf of legal protection offered by the First Amendment.

Right now it’s easy to make this argument because we’re in a right-wing moment, thus it seems especially urgent to protect the speech rights of those not in power, i.e. the left. But in a few years (🙏🙏🙏🙏) the pendulum will swing back, and we need to remember not to fall back into the xkcd 1357 trap of assuming that the legal framework is exactly as strong as it needs to be.

OK??

I was on a long, overnight flight this week and three rows in front of me was this middle-aged man telling his entire life story to the poor lady next to him. In full outdoor voice. Like, just short of a shout; the sort of volume you’d use to speak to a 20-person board room without a mic. The more he drank, the louder he got. Not swearing, not saying anything rude, just broadcast mode: So that was my fourth year in the Marines. And then…

Um yeah that shit kinda sucked because I, and everyone around us, was trying to sleep and stuffing various combinations of earbuds, tissues, pillows into ears but this man would not shut up. At some point I had managed to doze off only to be awoken by his pronunciation of like, a comma, and I went to the bathroom and from inside the closed room I could still hear him yammering on.

On my way back to my seat I used all my courage and walked up to him and said, “Excuse me, could you please keep your voice down?”

He stared at me for probably 5 seconds with a look of total bafflement. Like he cannot understand what is happening to him right now.

And then he actually SALUTES me. And goes: “Yes sir.”

And then he spoke at a normal volume the rest of the way :)

Still feel bad for that lady though. Anyway here’s Wonderwall.

I haven’t really used Reddit over the past 10 years or so, ever since they did the terrible website redesign and started pushing people toward the even-worse app. But I have an account and log in once in a while since it continues to be the best/only place to get semi-human information about products, local issues, whatever.

Anyway, I have been bored lately, so I went on Reddit to get a sense for how much I could sell some old junk for, and have been sucked into the Reddit portal for a few days ever since. They really have the “engagement bait” thing down pretty good. You used to have to curate your home feed by subscribing to subreddits that interest you, but now it recommends related topics based on what you click/read and it’s very easy to get lost in a vortex where it shows you tons and tons of opinions that enrage you in the most relateable way.

Where was I going with this? Well, I share the common opinion that these algorithmic feeds are probably doing something bad for the human soul and on other sites (Tumblr, Twitter back when I did that, Mastodon) I have always aggressively configured the app to show me only things I directly follow. But that was an easier choice to make 10 years ago, when the algorithmic feeds were still kind of bad and would surface a bunch of generically popular stuff (sports, celebrities) that it was easy for me to regard as merely a distraction.

Now, the algorithmic feeds are “good.” Not good as in chicken soup, but good as in, shit, this is a really interesting headline, I just want to read the top comment, that’s it, etc. until 2 hours whirls down the pool. And the truth is, Reddit is unlike other social media sites in that (at least to me) the population on Reddit seems quite “normal.” People don’t have super extreme political beliefs or shape their whole life around one issue the way they do on Tumblr or Twitter, they mostly just complain about every day nuisances such as HOAs and bad customer service.

It’s like … a warm and fuzzy blanket that turns off the critical-thinking part of your brain. Everything that trends on Reddit is so cut and dry, easy to process. Relationship issue? Break up with him.

If I know myself, then I will get bored of this and move onto something else in about a week or so, but it is unsettling to see just how easy it is for a website to turn my brain into mush.

So I’ve noticed that when a customer service phone line is experiencing high volume, nowadays they try to build a “safety valve” where they upsell you extra hard on trying to solve your problem via the website and/or make you say “I really need an agent” a few extra times before they put you through. This is pretty annoying but at least there still is a path to a living, breathing representative who can solve your problem as long as you are willing to wait on hold.

However, I recently encountered a truly evil, novel variant of this safety valve. Basically, I needed someone in the billing department at a company to correct an error. Only billing department staff have the power to do this; a regular customer service representative can’t do anything but forward the call to billing.

Naturally, when you first call the company and say “Agent please” 17 times, the agent who finally picks up after waiting on hold is just a general purpose customer service rep. I spoke with the customer service rep and she said, “OK, yeah, you need to talk to billing for that, let me put you through.”

Waited on hold for five minutes, and someone picked up: “How can I help?” I explain my problem. “OK, yeah,” he says, “That’s something you’ll need to talk to billing for. Can I put you through?”

Uhh, sure? 5 more minutes on hold, another rep answers: “Hello, this is customer service, with whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

FRICK man