The List

A friend sent me a list.

Not a portfolio. Not a set of side projects. More like a record of small irritations he had decided not to keep living with.

A pitch-tracking app for his son. A high school course planner pulled out of an 83-page PDF the district apparently believes someone is reading. A version of YouTube with most of YouTube removed. A way to watch Mariners games in Portland, despite rules that say he can’t.

He sent it because he thought it was funny. It had accumulated.

He is not a programmer. Sociologist by training. Works at a tech company. Builds these things in the evenings after dinner using what he called “vibe coding,” which seems to mean the threshold for making software has dropped enough that you don’t have to think of yourself as someone who makes software.

At first glance, the list reads like hobby. Or productivity. Or the kind of quiet personal optimization people don’t usually admit to.

Eight things. None of them dramatic.

Then you look again.

The course planner shows four years at once. Boxes you can actually move. Requirements that don’t disappear into footnotes halfway down page 47.

The YouTube version opens to a blank screen. No recommendations. No autoplay. Just a search bar and the videos he already knows he wants.

The Mariners game plays as if the blackout rule never existed.

Nothing has been fixed.

And yet, each one changes the terms on which something else is allowed to operate.

It’s easy to name this and move on.

Hobby. Workflow. Personal tooling.

Those names let the whole thing slide back into the category of “guy with projects,” which feels incomplete somehow. But I kept coming back to it.

The course catalog still sorts students. Tracks, prerequisites, eligibilities. That structure hasn’t gone anywhere. But now it sits inside something that can be moved around. The sorting still happens. Just not in only one direction.

YouTube still runs. The same videos, the same infrastructure. But it no longer gets to decide how attention is assembled in that room.

The blackout rule still exists. It hasn’t been challenged or overturned. It just stops applying, there, in that moment.

None of this is unprecedented. People have always found ways to live alongside systems that don’t quite fit. Rewriting forms. Ignoring rules selectively. Carrying unofficial practices next to official ones.^[1]

What feels different here is that this is just somebody tinkering in their house after dinner.

Not around the system.

Inside it.

At home. Without much ceremony. By someone who wouldn’t describe what he’s doing as political and would probably be uncomfortable if you did.

There’s a familiar way of describing this kind of activity. You encounter a system. You navigate it. Maybe improve it. Reduce friction. The system remains what it was.

That description works fine right up until you actually look at what changed.

He didn’t improve YouTube. He changed what YouTube does in his living room.

The course catalog wasn’t understood more clearly. The situation it created—someone trying to piece together a four-year plan from a document built for administrative use—was replaced with something else.

The blackout rule still defines who is allowed to watch what, and where. But the situation in which it applies has been rerouted.^[2]

After that, it’s hard to look at the list the same way. Less like a set of projects. More like someone deciding, piece by piece, which parts of these systems get to live in his house.

There’s a long-standing argument buried in infrastructure and classification work that systems like this don’t just describe the world. They arrange it. They decide, quietly, what counts and what doesn’t before anyone shows up to use them.^[3]

You don’t usually notice that arrangement.

You notice it when fitting starts to cost you something.

Or when you stop fitting at all.

These adjustments are narrow. They don’t travel well. They depend on time, access, and a certain proximity to the system itself. The kinds of advantages that are unevenly distributed and likely to stay that way. The systems that matter most are still mostly untouchable. Housing. Healthcare. Decisions you don’t really get to refuse.

Their rules still prevail.

Which makes this moment harder to place.

Something has become adjustable.

Just not evenly.

And not where it would matter most.

There’s a version of design that announces itself. It stages an intervention. It makes a case.

This isn’t that.

No one is staging anything here. It’s just a guy trying to watch baseball.

Still, it’s not an entirely different thing.

The course planner changes who controls the pace of a family’s planning conversation. The stripped-down YouTube changes how attention gets composed. The VPN shifts where a boundary holds.

Each move is small. The kind of thing you barely notice while it’s happening.

But together they unsettle an assumption these systems rely on: that once they enter a household, they arrive intact.^[4]

We don’t quite know what to do with this when it happens this way. The louder versions at least make themselves visible. This one tends to disappear into the background. Registered, if at all, as someone who built a few things to make life easier.

It keeps the work from being counted. It makes it harder to see what, exactly, has started to change.

Somewhere in Portland, a baseball game is playing in a living room it technically isn’t supposed to be in.

Eight small adjustments in one house. Nothing that would register with the systems involved.

And still, it is enough to suggest these systems are maybe not arriving quite as intact as they once did.

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^[1] Michel de Certeau would probably recognize some of this. His whole argument about “tactics” was basically that people keep finding ways to operate inside systems they don’t control, usually without permission and often without announcing it as politics (The Practice of Everyday Life, 1984).

^[2] This also brushes up against Paul Dourish’s long-running push to think about computation less as interface and more as lived arrangement. Not screens exactly. Situations. Habits. What systems end up doing in practice once they arrive somewhere. (Where the Action Is, 2001; The Stuff of Bits, 2017).

^[3] Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star remain useful here because they treated classification systems as active infrastructure rather than neutral description. Categories do things. Usually quietly. You mostly notice them when they stop fitting your life very well (Sorting Things Out, 1999).

^[4] Carl DiSalvo’s work sits somewhere nearby too, though his examples tend to be more public and deliberately political. What’s happening here feels smaller, more domestic, less interested in announcing itself. Still, the family resemblance seemed worth mentioning (Adversarial Design, 2012).