Enshittification Update

Cory goes deep shit

I've really enjoyed watching Cory Doctorow's coined "Enshittification" snowball over the last year. It even made it into a few 'words of the year' at the tail end of 2024. Much deserved.

In the most recent episode of his brilliant podcast Craphound, we listen to him deepening the theme in his Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto a couple of weeks ago.

He describes how various "Uber for nurses" gig work apps reduce wage bids to contract nurses with poor credit scores because the algo acts on a simple assumption: more desperate the contractor = more prepared they are to work for lower compensation. Compounding their desperation.

For all the excitement and wonder about the power of AI, it's important to understand how algorithms can so easily be used in the service of so many many abuses of this kind. AI enhances the ability to fox everyone in the chain while pursuing objectives, which is why we need to be particularly thoughtful and vigilant at this time when exuberance is sky high and critical faculties and regulations pretty non-existent.

Here's the episode