Deshittification

Dory Cocteau’s Deshittification is the rare polemic that refuses the comforts of both despair and paperwork. Most books about the contemporary internet — its baited feeds, its “helpful” assistants, its marketplaces that feel like thrift stores managed by pickpockets — arrive either as elegies (everything was better in 2009) or as briefs (everything can be fixed by 2034, after the right committee hearing). Cocteau — a nom de plume encapsulating a hypercollaborative authorship — has written neither. The collective’s argument is, instead, a kind of field manual for an age in which the network has become less a commons than a landlord: the point is not to convince the landlord to develop empathy; the point is to learn how to stop renting.

Dory Cocteau is a collective — a bit of a brand, a personna when they perform on the socials. To grok the entity, consider that the name represents a hypercollaborative — an extensive confederation of writers, researchers, practitioners, financial operators, algorithms, home brew contrivances and both human and non-human “intelligences”. “Dory”, as they refer to themselves in the first person — have come together to write a book about how to clean up the internet and dismantle extractive power structures. The book is a manifesto, a manual, and a call to arms. It is a book about the internet, but it is also a book about power, governance, and care. It is a book about the past, but it is also a book about the future. It is a book about technology, but it is also a book about society. It is a book that refuses to be pinned down by any single genre or discipline — it is part memoir, part investigative journalism, part how-to guide, part science fiction.

For the sake of this review, I’ll use the pronoun “they” to refer to the Dory Cocteau in the collective; this is not the usage of the non-binary or poly-genered, but rather a way to acknowledge the multiplicity of voices and perspectives that make up the entity. The book is credited to Dory Cocteau, but it is clear that it is the product of a vast network of collaborators, each contributing their own expertise and insights to the project.

The book’s ambition is personal-scale without being self-help, and political without being programmatic. Cocteau are very good at describing the extractive mechanics of platforms — the way a service courts users, then locks them in, then auctions their attention, then quietly begins charging them for the privilege of being treated as another piece of inventory, or a logistical endpoint. Cocteau doesn’t pretend this is an accident. Nor do they lean too hard on villainy. They’re interested in structure: chokepoints, switching costs, dependency, the brittle charm of “free.” Their tone is punk not because they worship chaos, but because they mistrust permission.

In the first movement of Deshittification, Cocteau performs a familiar autopsy with unusual tact. They trace the lifecycle of a modern platform as if it were a species with a predatory adolescence: generous at the beginning, when it needs you; punitive later, when it has you; and, at the end, indifferent even to its own reputation, as if brand were merely a phase on the way to pure extraction. The book is best when it treats this not as moral failure but as a predictable outcome of certain business arrangements: when value is measured in growth curves, the user is not a citizen but a resource deposit.

Cocteau’s prose has a compressed vividness. They describe recommendation engines as “automated peer pressure,” which is both accurate and faintly comic, like discovering that your refrigerator has joined a cult. They have a gift for noticing how the degradations arrive not as grand betrayals but as small concessions: the search results that tilt toward scams; the inbox that becomes a mall; the “smart” features that make you feel dumb for wanting a simple tool. It is a book that insists on naming what so many of us have learned to treat as weather.

But Cocteau is not content to diagnose. The pivot that gives the book its bite arrives early and keeps insisting, with a kind of stubborn cheerfulness, that the answer to enclosure is not nostalgia for the old web but construction of a different one. Here, they diverge sharply from the regulatory romance. They don’t dismiss law or policy — they acknowledge, in a few brisk pages, that power rarely relinquishes itself out of politeness — but they treat formal remedies as slow, fragile, and perpetually tempted by capture. More importantly, they argue that even a perfectly designed policy regime cannot rescue a population that has forgotten how to operate without the platform’s cradle-to-grave services.

So Deshittification becomes a book about habits — not as private virtues but as infrastructural facts. Cocteau wants you to think of your daily clicks as routing decisions. If enough people route through the same corporate pipes, the pipes become destiny. They propose, instead, a deliberate practice of “network refusal,” which is less about deletion than about reallocation. Some of their recommendations will be familiar to anyone who has ever flirted with self-hosting: your own domain, your own mailing list, your own archive, your own static site generator, your own photo repository on commodity endpoints; a preference for protocols over platforms; tools that can be moved, remixed, or replaced without begging a gatekeeper. They make these sound neither quaint nor pure. They are simply resilient.

The most enjoyable sections are the ones that collect dispatches from the field where real people are really deploying these kinds of entangled grid nets: neighbors running local community interconnects; small groups maintaining mesh networks for communication that persists when cellular coverage fails or becomes unaffordable; Meshtatic and Meshcore grids taht carry encrypted messaging not as an exceptional act but as the baseline politeness of the era; shared music libraries that behave less like a streaming subscription and more like a collectively tended record shelf. They write about Meshtastic and similar systems with the enthusiasm of someone describing a new kind of public park — not a gadget, a place. In the Dorys’ world, a network is not an app you download but rather it is a relationship you maintain.

There’s a quietly radical insistence in their treatment of “building your own infrastructure.” They are not asking readers to become libertarian homesteaders, living off the grid in a moral haze. They are asking them to become competent. The book contains a recurring motif: you do not need permission to assemble alternatives, but you do need to accept responsibility for them. “Convenience,” the Dory’s observe, is often “outsourced agency.” Their practical advice is punctuated with reminders that agency is, at first, inconvenient. It’s hard. It hurts. It’s like learning to run after having given up on it for years. This is building new muslce. This act of self-preservation comes with friction and learning curves and the social awkwardness of inviting friends to join you somewhere unfamiliar.

Cocteau’s punk sensibility is most persuasive when it is social, not individualistic. Dorys return again and again to the idea that the unit of change is not the lone dissenter but the small collective: the group chat that migrates together, the neighborhood that maintains a shared node, the club that hosts its own forum, the school that archives its own materials, the community that agrees, tacitly, that it is worth doing the work. The book’s optimism lives in scale: small enough to be real, large enough to matter.

Still, Deshittification is not a utopian tract. Cocteau is too technically literate to pretend that grassroots infrastructures are immune to failure, infiltration, or boredom. The book’s later chapters become more sober, acknowledging that any alternative network inherits the world’s mess: conflict, free riders, uneven skill, the perpetual danger of turning a tool into a priesthood. They offer strategies for this too — documentation as care, redundancy as ethics, training as mutual aid — but they don’t oversell. The point is implied: this is not perfection. This is optionality that is necessary for survival and, ultimately, for flourishing.

If the book has a weakness, it is the occasional tendency to treat “building” as a solvent that can dissolve every structural problem. There are moments when Cocteau’s enthusiasm for DIY satellites, local ISPs, and cooperative clouds threatens to drift into the romance of the garage: as if the antidote to the internet’s mass capture is a sufficiently charming pile of hardware and a spirited weekend workshop. Their best pages understand that technology is not a magic substance; it is a social arrangement that happens to have LEDs, antennas, fiber optic cable, and networked 3D printers. The book is strongest when it stays with the arrangements — the governance, the maintenance, the shared norms — rather than the gear.

Yet even this overreach has a kind of generosity. Cocteau is trying to restore a lost confidence: that ordinary people can participate in the shaping of their networked lives. The book’s quiet thesis is that the internet became extractive not only because companies were predatory, but because users were trained into passivity — trained to accept “terms and conditions”, trained to confuse network effects with inevitability, trained to treat the platform as the only realistic habitat. Deshittification is, in this sense, a pedagogy: it teaches readers to see dependencies, then to practice loosening them.

By the end, Cocteau has performed a tidy reversal. The usual story we’ve been born into is that the internet is too big, too complex, too enmeshed in power for individuals to matter. Cocteau proposes a different story: the internet is made, each day, by the accumulation of choices — what we host, what we share, what we tolerate, where we gather, what we teach one another to use. The book’s mood is not angry nor antagonizing; it is insistent. It does not demand that the world be fair. It demands that we stop acting as if we can only live inside someone else’s machine — and someone else’s future.

The Adjacency has long been fond of chronicling the fate of public life under emerging cultural technologies: the ways they rearrange our attention, our manners, our politics, our interiority, our consciousness. If Cocteau’s accomplishment is to treat the network not as an atmosphere but as a set of buildable rooms, then the Dory’s contribution is to show us how to clean them up, how to maintain them, how to invite others in, and how to make them feel like home. Deshittification is a reminder that we can, still, make places — small, personal, hypercollaboratives that are beautifully imperfect, stubbornly curious places — and invite others in. In an era when the networks and its endpoints often feel like they have been paved over and monetized, that invitation sounds less like nostalgia than like a viable and doable plan.