The Indomitable Human Spirit - by Aiden Redmond

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The Indomitable Human Spirit<br>and enshittification

Aiden Redmond<br>Jun 16, 2026

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In the wake of all things enshittifying, I’ve felt an overwhelming sense of existential depression in everything I do. Society is crumbling at the hands of a mere few, for the sole purpose of making the big number go up…<br>An aspect of enshittification I’m especially familiar with is companies, tech companies in particular. I’m a software developer by trade, and have loved technology for as long as I can remember. But lately, that same love has not been reciprocated.<br>I often feel powerless in the face of giant corporations breaking the laws without punishment, these same companies exhibiting anti-consumer behavior, and the concept of the “permanent underclass”. There are hundreds, if not thousands of examples of this that occur daily without a bat of an eye from anyone. To name a few…<br>Samsung pushes silent updates to show advertisements on your smart fridge after you have bought the thing1. Amazon can remove books, movies, and shows you have bought from your Library at ANY TIME 2. Google makes you read a few paragraphs of AI slop every time you search something3. Whoop makes you pay a monthly subscription to use a device you already own4. Bambu Labs threatened to sue a developer who forked open source software.5 Apple only offers 100GB and 2TB plans (and nothing in between), to force the average consumer into paying for more than they would need. They also don’t allow you to download that data easily at all.6<br>In the face of this tsunami of spiraling depression of what our society will come to be, I have somehow found ways to find light in the darkness. The following is a collection of short stories/recollections/rambles… of what I’ve found to give me hope, or further uncover what’s actually going on in the darkness.<br>The Power to Make it Yourself

One of my favorite parts about coding is the power it gives me to learn and build just about anything. Once I had the foundations down, I could make any website, app, game, script, or tool I could imagine, with enough time.<br>I find myself frequently needing one tweak, one feature, or one update to many things I use, and I can often implement them. You and I both have hundreds of menial tasks we do on computers every day. These can often be optimized, automated, or improved with code!<br>A few examples of my favorite tools I’ve made:<br>A web scraper to parse HTML websites with manga panels into PDFs

A customizable kana learning tool for learning Japanese

A Firefox extension to display a random GIF of a Pokémon as your new tab page

A script to cut multiple Git branches automatically every 2 weeks

A bunch of parsers to help with the giant zip project

Coding has always given me satisfaction as a creative person, since it allows me to bring ideas to life on a digital level. This has (for better, or for worse) been made much easier by AI. While I’m not here to preach one way or the other, it’s true that the power that I gained by learning how to code, is now in anybody’s hands (with enough money, frustration, and time of course).<br>In a world where things break, aren’t the way you think they should be, or could be better, developers have the power to help, recreate, or redesign them for the betterment of mankind. In a world of great chaos, uncertainty, and pain, gives me great solace.<br>“Amazon” Kindle

Oh Amazon. Where to begin?<br>The Kindle was released 18 years ago, in 2007 and was the most popular e-reader to release at the time. It looks like this

Awesome, right?<br>Well, this Kindle, and all other Kindles released before 2013 are now bricked! You can still read your old books, you just… can’t get any new ones :)<br>This includes and is not limited to the Kindle 1, Kindle DX, Kindle 2, Kindle 3, Kindle Touch, Kindle 4, Kindle 5, Kindle Paperwhite.<br>But that doesn’t even matter, right?<br>Amazon doesn’t even let you own your books, or transfer them between devices. You buy a “content license” to the books you purchase through amazon, which can be revoked at any time if Amazon loses the right to sell that book. Odd, isn’t it?<br>Over the last few years, a community has been slowly building to save the Kindle, and create a device where you actually own your books, can transfer them between devices, and many more customizable features.<br>Enter the jailbreak. Jailbreaking is the act of finding a way around the hard coded limitations on a device put in by the company that created it. A kindle is just a computer after all, which means if you can find away around the restrictions, you can run custom software, which makes the possibilities endless. And yeah…. It can run Doom.

And the kindle above is mine! It’s running KoReader, which allows me to read any book format, however I’d like. I have complete control over every settings. It’s got a Vagabond wallpaper, and I’ve been reading a ton of new manga and books on there. It’s...