Technology

Cory Doctorow wears many hats: digital activist, science-fiction author, journalist, and more. He has also written many books, both fiction and non-fiction, runs the Pluralistic blog, is a visiting professor, and is an advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); his Chokepoint Capitalism co-author, Rebecca Giblin, gave a 2023 keynote in Australia that we covered. Doctorow gave a rousing keynote on the state of the "enshitternet"—today's internet—to kick off the recently held PyCon US 2025 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He began by noting that he is known for coining the term "enshittification" about the decay of tech platforms, so attendees were probably expecting to hear about that; instead, he wanted to start by talking about nursing. A recent study described how nurses are increasingly getting work through one of three main apps that "bill themselves out as 'Uber for nursing'". The nurses never know what they will be paid per hour prior to accepting a shift and the three companies act as a cartel in order to "play all kinds of games with the way that labor is priced".

In particular, the companies purchase financial information from a data broker before offering a nurse a shift; if the nurse is carrying a lot of credit-card debt, especially if some of that is delinquent, the amount offered is reduced. "Because, the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come into work and do that grunt work of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying." That is horrific on many levels, he said, but "it is emblematic of 'enshittification'", which is one of the reasons he highlighted it.