No. of Recommendations: 3
In 2022 Cory Doctorow coined the term
enshittification to describe
how the quality of online products and services declines in quality over
time. I think it's pretty much unavoidable, and I hope to discuss ways
we can mitigate this process in our digital lives.
Here's a starter article (notably on a forum --
Medium -- which itself
is likely going through it's own enshittification:
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-...Here is an example of where this can take us:
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-...Excerpt:
Take Shiftkey: nurses are required to log into Shiftkey and indicate
which shifts they are available for, and if they are assigned any of
those shifts later but can’t take them, their app-based score declines
and they risk not being offered shifts in the future. But Shiftkey doesn’t
guarantee that you’ll get work on any of those shifts — in other words,
nurses have to pledge not to take any work during the times when Shiftkey
might need them, but they only get paid for those hours where Shiftkey calls
them out. Nurses assume all the risk that there won’t be enough demand for
their services.Each Shiftkey nurse is offered a different pay-scale for each shift.
Apps use commercially available financial data — purchased on the cheap
from the chaotic, unregulated data broker sector — to predict how desperate
each nurse is. The less money you have in your bank accounts and the
more you owe on your credit cards, the lower the wage the app will offer you.
This is a classic example of what the legal scholar Veena Dubal calls
“algorithmic wage discrimination” — a form of wage theft that’s supposedly
legal because it’s done with an app.-Rubic
