shitster

DashOff. My car is not your billboard.

What this is

Between July 27 and August 10, 2026, BMW delivered a full-screen promotional banner for the Sony Pictures film "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" to the iDrive Control Display of customer vehicles, cars people already own or lease, running OS 7 through X, built after July 2020. BMW had previously and publicly described that display as a private space, one that would not become an advertising surface. The ConnectedDrive Terms those owners signed require any dispute to go through individual arbitration, and they ban class actions. What they do not ban is 5,000 individual owners each sending their own individual notice, which the Terms already guarantee each of them a personal hearing on. shitster builds the tools to do that: a notice of dispute generator, an arbitration opt-out tool for people still inside the 30-day window, and a letter and call-script generator aimed at Congress. Everything happens in your browser. Nothing is filed, sent, or stored on your behalf.

The three tools

• /bmw.html, notice of dispute. Walks through Section 30.A of the ConnectedDrive Terms, then generates a signed, ready-to-mail notice of dispute PDF addressed to BMW's Customer Relations office, with your own free-text statement of what happened, in your own words.
• /optout.html, arbitration opt-out. For owners still inside the 30-day window under Section 30.B. Computes your exact postmark deadline from the date you first accepted a BMW arbitration provision, and generates a signed opt-out letter. Tells you plainly when that window has already closed instead of pretending otherwise.
• /congress.html, tell Congress. Looks up your representative and two senators from a vendored public dataset, and generates a call script, a copy-paste webform letter, and a printable PDF letter asking them to cosponsor the FAIR Act, the bill that would make clauses like Section 30 unenforceable in consumer contracts in the first place.

Every tool page also carries /why.html, a plain explanation of the legal and procedural argument this whole project rests on.

The legal architecture, in plain English

This project does not try to beat BMW's arbitration clause. It uses it.

• Why notices, not lawsuits. Section 30.A of the ConnectedDrive Terms (Rev. 2026-01-01) requires that before arbitration, a party send a completed notice of dispute by certified mail, then hold an individual Pre-Arbitration Informal Dispute Resolution conference by phone or videoconference, and it explicitly bars multiple people from sharing one conference. That is a real, contractual, individual right, and it costs BMW real scheduling capacity per person who exercises it.
• Why not mass arbitration. Section 30.C waives claims brought as a mass action of 50 or more substantially similar demands filed through the same firm within 180 days, and Section 30.D lets BMW batch arbitration demands 100 to a batch, one set of filing fees per batch. Those provisions govern arbitration demands, not Section 30.A notices, which is exactly why this project stops at the notice stage. Filing en masse plays into the discount BMW built for itself. Sending individually does not.
• Publisher, not administrator. This site generates documents. It does not file them, submit them to AAA or any court, track their status, schedule anything, or coordinate claims across users. The BMW tool ends at the notice stage, with neutral links to AAA's consumer filing page and small-claims resources, described plainly as "decide for yourself" options. No feature here automates a call, auto-submits to a government or corporate system, or algorithmically varies legal language to make letters look different from one another. The only thing that varies letter to letter is what you write in your own words.

Section citations above are to the source terms, committed at docs/bmw-connecteddrive-terms-us-rev-2026-01-01.pdf. Read /why.html for the fuller argument, including the two federal cases (Heckman v. Live Nation Entertainment, MacClelland v. Cellco Partnership) that have started to notice this same one-sided-aggregation pattern elsewhere.

Technical architecture

• Static, client-side site. Plain HTML entry points (index.html, bmw.html, optout.html, congress.html, why.html), each rendering its content into <main id="app"> via a matching ES module. No framework, no build-time server, no backend required to run it.
• Client-side PDF generation. All letters are built in the browser with pdf-lib, using standard embedded fonts. Nothing you type is transmitted anywhere to produce a document.
• Zero-PII design. Form state lives in page memory only, never in localStorage or a cookie, and is discarded on reload. The only network calls the tools make are to a vendored, public congressional dataset, the US Census geocoder (for district lookup, and only the address string you submit for that lookup), and the pledge counter, none of which carry your name, letter contents, or any other personal data.
• Vendored civic data. /congress.html resolves your representative and senators from a committed snapshot of the public-domain unitedstates/congress-legislators dataset, so the tool works without a live API dependency for the data itself. See data/README.md for the source and how to refresh it.
• Optional Cloudflare Worker. The "N notices generated" counter reads a static /counter.json by default, so the whole site works with zero infrastructure. workers/counter.js is a complete, deployable Worker that can back it live instead, with per-IP rate limiting and no stored PII. See workers/README.md to deploy it. Deploying it is optional and nothing in this repo does it for you.

Local dev

npm install
npm run dev

Then open the printed local URL. npm run build produces a static dist/ you can host anywhere; npm run preview serves that build locally.

Deploy notes

This is a static site once built. Any static host works: Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, or a plain object storage bucket behind a CDN. Run npm run build and upload the contents of dist/. If you want the live pledge counter instead of the static /counter.json, deploy workers/counter.js separately (see workers/README.md) and set window.SHITSTER_COUNTER_URL on the deployed site, on every page that reads or bumps the counter (index.html and bmw.html at minimum, all five for safety), not just the landing page. See workers/README.md for a copy-paste snippet and a recommended build-time-define alternative.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. If you are changing copy, keep it factual, plain, and free of hype, no exclamation marks, no em dashes. If you are touching a tool's legal text, do not paraphrase the fixed letter skeletons; the only text that should vary between users is their own free-text statement. If you are adding a new jurisdiction or a new company's terms, start from specs/SPEC-SHARED.md's FACTS section as the model for how facts and citations should be recorded and sourced.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Copyright shitster contributors.

FAQ

Is this legal advice? No. Every tool page carries a disclaimer to that effect. These are self-help templates, not legal advice, and using them does not create an attorney-client relationship with anyone. You act individually, in your own name, at your own judgment. If your situation is unusual, talk to a lawyer.

Why is it called shitster? Because being angry and being precise are not mutually exclusive.

Does this send anything on my behalf? No. Nothing here files, submits, tracks, schedules, or transmits anything for you. Every document is generated in your browser and downloaded to your device. You print it, sign it, and mail it, or you place the call, yourself. The tool prepares, the human acts.

Does this store what I type? No. There is no backend for form data, no localStorage use for personal information, and no analytics or cookies anywhere on the site. Close the tab and it is gone.