Pluralistic: Itch scratching (25 Sep 2026)


Today's links

  • Itch scratching: Love, care and self-actualization.
  • Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
  • Object permanence: 9/11 x Viridians; Announcing Wikipedia; Infinite Copyright Mickey; Floppy shoulder bag; Wells Fargo's long sleaze; Corbyn wins Labour leadership; Interop v internet monopolies; The billionaires aren't all right; RIP Mike Ford; PGP didn't cause 9/11; Flying Solaris boxen; "Unelectable" Corbyn; Algorithmic management; "That's Disgusting!"; Tax breaks for repair expenses; Climate denial driven by economic doctrine; "100% pumpkin" has no pumpkin; Copyright reversion; "Scholars of the Night"; Apple threatens EU.
  • Upcoming appearances: Edmonton, Boston, Brighton, South Bend, Hudson, Calgary, Winnipeg, Paris, OVancouver, Victoria, Ottawa, Kilkenny, Montreal.
  • Recent appearances: Where I've been.
  • Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
  • Colophon: All the rest.


A shirtless bald man seen from behind. He has contorted one arm between his shoulder blades to scratch an itch. The itchy area glows red, as do the abstract clouds surrounding him. Small angelic figures caper in the mist.

Itch scratching (permalink)

The thing about a maddening itch between your shoulder blades is that it feels so good when you scratch it, and even better when someone else scratches it, and better still if that person hits the right spot because they love you and they've performed this service for you so often and attentively that they know exactly which spot to hit.

One of the recurring themes in Spider Robinson's short stories and novels is people who have close relationships suddenly realizing that they have acquired a psychic link. He comes up with endless ways to play this scene out, but my favorite – I think it's from one of the later Callahan's tales – is when one person scratches another between the shoulder blades and hits the exact right spot the very first time and they realize that they are now psychically linked.

Maybe it's a primate grooming reflex, maybe it's receiving a gesture of love and care. Maybe those are the same things. Having your itch scratched for you feels good. Not just primates, either: cats with the flexibility to reach any part of their body with all four of their paws and their teeth will nevertheless purr like a badly-tuned diesel outboard when you scratch them just right.

Since the outset, the free software/open source movement has extolled the virtues of technological self-determination, which is to say, deciding how the computers and programs you use will work. This is often described as "scratching your own itch."

There is no question that scratching your own itch in this way is hugely and enduringly satisfying. On my laptop, I have a variety of little scripts and keybindings and bits of automation that I've built up over the years and every time I use one of these, I get a little hit of brain-reward.

The latest: I got tired of alt-tabbing to get to the file explorer, only to discover that I'd closed all my file explorer windows, meaning I had to mouse over to the dock and open a new one. So I bound "Windows key + E" to opening a file explorer after reading a message board post from an ex-Windows user who'd done this (apparently this is a standard Windows keybinding).

I've fully retrained my fingers to type Win-E rather than alt-tab when I want to get at a graphic filesystem and every time I do, I get the tiniest little pleasant jolt of pleasure. I scratched my own itch!

But even better than this are the little scripts that other people have thoughtfully made for me over the years. The oldest of these still in daily use is more than 20 years old, a bash script called "boingpic" (from when I was still working on Boing Boing). When I run this, it iterates interactively through the files ending with "jpg" or "png" on my Desktop, tells me how wide they are, prompts me to resize them or hit enter to keep their size, and then rsyncs them to the directory on my server that corresponds to https://craphound.com/images/.

If this strikes you as weird and inefficient, that's fine, because it does exactly what I need it to do, and I've memorized it through long, long use. And on top of all that, boingpic.sh was written for me by my dear old friend Seth David Schoen, when we were one of a bare handful of EFF staffers in the early oughts and hung out together all the time. Every time I use it, it reminds me of Seth, and good times, and I feel good.

For centuries, people have fought for the right to self-determination. The disability rights rallying cry "Nothing about us without us" actually dates back to 16th century Poland (it was the basis for the formation of a Polish parliament that wrestled power away from the king). Any parent who has avoided a conflict over getting dressed for school by swapping out "Put your clothes on right now!" for "Which would you rather put on first, your shirt or your socks?" knows how far even a little autonomy can go.

I worked as a computer programmer from the age of 17 to about the age of 29, and while I was never a spectacular coder, I was good at it, and I wrote a lot of code for myself that precisely met my needs, which always felt great. It's one of the reasons I have always championed low-code/no-code software development tools, from Logo to Hypercard to Visual Basic to Scratch. Sure, the code that you write with one of these tools might not be "efficient" from a CPU/memory-usage perspective, but the point is that you write it. You don't have to convince someone else to do you a favor, you don't have to part with any of your money – and you don't have to try to get someone else to understand what you mean when you describe the tool you want.

When I worked at Bakka Books (the world's oldest surviving science fiction bookstore, in Toronto), we organized our inventory using an extremely idiosyncratic Filemaker database created by the store's then-owner, John Rose. John lovingly tended that Filemaker app, tweaking it on his days off to make it better suited to the very specific needs of a science fiction bookstore with a giant used section and an important sideline in keeping collectors' want-lists that we consulted whenever we bought more used books. There are doubtless "better" bookstore stock-keeping systems (including the one that Bakka uses now, in its latest incarnation as BakkaPhoenix), but that Filemaker app was John, a presence in the store even when he wasn't there, embodying his management and literary and retail theories on a MacSE by the cash-register.

I am highly skeptical of vibe-coding in the sense of writing code for other people to use. But when I meet people who've vibe-coded their own apps for their own use to scratch their own itches, I completely get their excitement. They've scratched their own itch! I know exactly how good that feels:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/03/rod-logic/#making-flippy-floppy

Sure, I have concerns about this kind of personal vibe-coding, the biggest of which is that if you aren't a skilled programmer, you might end up vibe-coding an app that you can't adequately assess, so it might contain subtle defects that make you vulnerable to security risks and/or expose your sensitive information to the public internet. But there are domains and use-cases where I am totally willing to accept that vibe-coding can enhance someone else's life in important ways, by letting them build exactly the widget they need, and if (when) it breaks, they can just do it again.

This is even better than "nothing about us without us." It's not just insisting that someone else "gather your requirements" before producing a tool that you will rely on and require. This is you, producing that tool for yourself, which means that you might be able to embed features and affordances into it that you can't even articulate, let alone defend. There something undeniably great about scratching your own itch and hitting exactly the right spot.

Even so: the experience of working through your requirements with someone else is clarifying and disciplining, because while you are the domain expert on your needs, that doesn't mean you're the domain expert on how to address those needs. You have the worm's eye view of your life and your needs, while an expert can have the bird's eye view that comes from working with many people, exposing them to many ways of solving problems, including ones you've never thought of.

Darren, the contractor who put in our new kitchen a couple years ago, had ideas for cabinet- and appliance-placement that had been refined by seeing, demolishing, building and revising orders of magnitude more kitchens than we had ever cooked in, and moreover, he clearly cared about our long-term happiness in our own home. The kitchen is great.

That care makes all the difference. Skilled craftspeople can bring expertise to the project that doesn't trump your needs, but can be co-equal with them. Scratching your own itch is great, having your itch scratched by someone who cares enough about you to know where your itch is, that's even better. But best of all is for that person to find the itch you didn't even know you had and scratch that, too. That's something that relies on the human connection that the best free/open source projects embody, the co-creation and community between developers and users.

If you've ever filed a bug against a free/open project and worked through the testing the devs need to squash it, you've experienced that co-creation. The devs want their code to work, because they care about the users, and you as a user can help other users and the devs by reciprocating that care through conscientious, patient, attentive bug reporting and testing.

I think that so much of the outrage about slop code – floods of garbagey pull requests and bug reports – is the result of the collapse of this dynamic. Slop's not merely annoying or time-wasting: it's a betrayal of the love and care that goes into writing and maintaining code for others. Your cat can scratch any part of its body, but it wants you to scratch it, and it will hiss at you and even claw at you if you scratch it the wrong way.

(Image: Orrling and Tomer S, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Surveillance is a security failure https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2001/sep/27/onlinesupplement.afghanistan

#25yrsago 9/11: the Viridian take https://web.archive.org/web/20011023095346/http://www.viridiandesign.org/notes/251-300/00272_au_revoir_belle_epoque.html

#25yrsago Announcing Wikipedia https://web.archive.org/web/20060517024408/http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/24/43858/2479

#25yrsago Phil Zimmerman says PGP can't be blamed for 9/11 https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/24/162236/philip-zimmermann-and-guilt-over-pgp

#20yrsago RIP, sf writer John M Ford https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/25/rip-sf-writer-john-m-ford/

#20yrsago Gigantic Little Nemo book does justice to the loveliest comic ever https://memex.craphound.com/2006/09/25/gigantic-little-nemo-book-does-justice-to-the-loveliest-comic-ever/

#20yrsago 747s as flying Unix hosts: SCADA in the sky https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/25/747s-as-flying-unix-hosts-scada-in-the-sky/

#20yrsago Mickey Infinite Copyright mashup https://web.archive.org/web/20061027141551/http://python.net/~goodger/projects/graphics/#mickey-s-infinite-copyright#mickey-s-infinite-copyright

#20yrsago HOWTO make a shoulder-bag out of floppies https://web.archive.org/web/20061025050629/http://www.instructables.com/id/E86165FIENERIE2PV6/?ALLSTEPS

#15yrsago TOSAmend: turn all online ā€œI Agreeā€ buttons into negotiations https://web.archive.org/web/20110925122850/https://www.owocki.com/2011/09/02/tosamend-the-easy-way-to-modify-web-service-terms-of-service-agreements/

#15yrsago Thatā€™s Disgusting! Awesomely gross picture book https://memex.craphound.com/2011/09/26/thats-disgusting-awesomely-gross-picture-book/

#10yrsago Swedish law will let you write off the money you spend fixing things rather than trashing them https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/19/waste-not-want-not-sweden-tax-breaks-repairs

#10yrsago Climate denialā€™s internal contradictions spring from a need to defend economic doctrine https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-016-1198-6

#10yrsago Thereā€™s no pumpkin in ā€œ100% canned pumpkinā€ https://web.archive.org/web/20160927152542/https://www.foodandwine.com/news/i-just-found-out-canned-pumpkin-isnt-pumpkin-all-and-my-whole-life-basically-lie

#10yrsago The AI Now Report: social/economic implications of near-future AI https://web.archive.org/web/20161014142521/https://artificialintelligencenow.com/media/documents/AINowSummaryReport_3.pdf

#10yrsago Whistleblowing Wells Fargo loan officer describes years of fraudulent, criminal culture in the bank https://truthout.org/articles/wells-fargo-whistleblower-they-are-all-riding-the-stagecoach-to-hell/

#10yrsago Writer in 29th year of solitary confinement barred from reading his own book https://solitarywatch.com/2016/09/20/writer-in-solitary-confinement-is-barred-from-reading-his-own-book/

#10yrsago Despite sabotage and dirty tricks, Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership race in unprecedented landslide https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37461219

#10yrsago Who decided Corbyn was ā€œunelectableā€? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8os-nKuoM3o

#10yrsago The democratization of censorship: when anyone can kill as site as effectively as a government can https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/09/the-democratization-of-censorship/

#5yrsago Demonopolizing the internet with interoperability https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/24/comcom-acm/#cacm

#5yrsago Copyright reversion, bargaining power, and authorsā€™ rights https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

#5yrsago The Scholars of Night https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/mike-ford-rides-again/#cold-war-zeitgeist

#1yrago Apple threatens to stop selling iPhones in the EU https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/26/empty-threats/#500-million-affluent-consumers

#1yrago The billionaires aren't OK https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/24/robo-lickspittle/#just-not-evenly-distributed

#1yrago Rage Against the (Algorithmic Management) Machine https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/25/roboboss/#counterapps

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

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A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • ā€œOnce Is Enemy Action,ā€ a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 511 (19222 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

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