If you spend time in this corner of the internet you already know the argument. You do not need me to tell you that the pipes got centralized, that eight companies own most of what's addressable, that payment rails can and do freeze accounts on political grounds, that algorithmic ranking is upstream of almost every consensus the civilian population thinks it arrived at independently, or that the word "decentralization" has been laundered into a marketing term for products that are structurally the opposite of decentralized.
You know. I know. We know.
What we have not done well, as a community, is explain any of this to people who are not already in the community. Every explanation tends to collapse into either a whitepaper (unreadable) or a vibe (unconvincing), and the people we most want to reach — the founders trying to ship against extractive infrastructure, the writers trying to keep a career without a Stripe account, the parents noticing that their kid's entire social existence runs through four companies whose interests are not aligned with the kid — those people bounce off both.
I wrote a novel for those people. It came out in 2023. It is called Petshitter. It is $0.99 on Kindle this week and then it goes back up.
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The two protagonists are named Ted Kazinsky and something worse. Yes. Those names. That's the setup. They meet on a blind date, they fall for each other in fifteen days, they start a company that appears to be a dog-waste logistics app — request a shitter, a shitter arrives — and the app is a front. The real project running inside Petshitter.com is a mesh network called Waspnest, built on Gopher, not HTTP. No DNS registrar to seize. No hosting provider to subpoena. No ad auction to corrupt it. No ranking algorithm because ranking is the attack surface. It is an internet the incumbents cannot see, because the incumbents are looking at the dog app.
Every one of the thirty chapters opens with an epigraph from the actual Unabomber manifesto. The real text. The argument of the book — and I am going to say this plainly because this corner of the internet is where saying it plainly is least likely to get me banned — is that Theodore Kaczynski was a murderer and the 1995 diagnosis was accurate. Surveillance as infrastructure. "Freedom" redefined as consumer choice inside a cage. Economic consolidation around the pipes. Exits engineered into hermitage. He predicted all of it from a cabin without electricity. He was right about the disease. He was evil in how he responded to it.
The novel asks: what would the manifesto have produced if the author had built exits instead of mailing bombs?
Waspnest is the fictional answer. A quiet, unmarketable, structurally invisible alternative that the centralizers never learn to see because it does not resolve to any authority they recognize as an authority.
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Here is why this book belongs in this feed specifically:
The people already here get it. You already know that mesh networks are not a toy, that alternate protocols are not retro cosplay, that the most honest decentralization is the kind that does not look like decentralization — that does not announce itself with a token launch and a podcast circuit. The hardest thing to build is the thing the incumbents do not know to be afraid of.
Petshitter is that argument in narrative form. It is also a love story and a startup satire and — because I care about this more than I probably should — a functional tool for explaining to your non-onchain friends what you have been saying at dinner for three years. Hand them the book. It does the work so you don't have to.
$0.99 this week. Back to $4.99 when the Countdown ends.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BPXSGT59
— CD
Book dedicated to "all the founders who have to deal with this shit." You know who you are.