Clapback
When “safety,” “compatibility,” or “industry practice” is doing more work than the explanation deserves.
A personal action project
Ranting is not enough.
If something unfair keeps bothering me, I want to do more than be right about it. I want to make an action out of it.
The manifesto
Anger is a signal. Action is the point.
shitster started with something that happened to me. BMW put a movie promotion on the dashboard of a car I own. I could have written a rant. Instead, I made DashOff.
Then I noticed that the feeling did not stop at my car. It shows up whenever somebody uses a contract, a regulation, a safety argument, or plain institutional inertia to make an unfair thing look inevitable.
I do not think a practice becomes fair because the target is big, foreign, unpopular, or capable of fighting back. If it bothers me when it happens to a consumer, it still bothers me when it happens to an outsider, a challenger, or a company.
The shitster budget
Every company should expect one.
A shitster budget is money, time, and stubbornness reserved for pushing back when somebody turns legality into a shield for unfairness.
It can fund research, a small independent venture, a claim, a public record, or a campaign. The form is not the point. The point is refusing to treat a bad rule as the end of the conversation.
The people who write the rules have been using legal arbitrage for years. Reading the rulebook and answering back is not a dirty trick. It is the whole idea.
A recurring test
The two-face test.
I pay attention when a rule is sold as universal but stops at the boundary of somebody else's industry, safety rationale, or commercial interest.
Interoperability can be a public principle for an integrated digital platform, then a safety question for an integrated vehicle system. A charging standard can be environmental necessity in one product category and disappear in another. I am interested in the gap between those explanations.
This is not a list of conclusions pretending to be campaigns. It is a test: if this principle is real, why does it stop here?
Campaigns
The first action.
Campaign 01
DashOff
My car is not your billboard. DashOff gives BMW owners the exact self-help documents needed to use the dispute process BMW wrote into its own terms.
Things I have not stopped thinking about
A rant can be an unfinished brief.
We can figure it out later
A legal blind spot worth naming before somebody normalizes it into the baseline.
I do not know how to figure it out
An open question is still worth keeping in public view until somebody finds the leverage.
I have not thought about it yet
The next unfair thing that stays annoying long enough to deserve more than a rant.