Cory Doctorow

I do have a kind of weird cohort of people that follow me around on the internet and scold people in my mentions who use and shitification loosely on my behalf.

And I'm like at great pains to say, please stop doing that.

You know, the only way to maintain like a

rigorous technical definition of this word would be to confine its use to a group of irrelevant insiders.

I'd much rather 10 million normies use it loosely and then one million of them go read my book than have it just be like 10,000 people who agree with me entirely already.

The other thing that I would say though is that digitization is turning other sectors into tech sectors.

So like nurses, hospitals really like to hire them as contractors because they can do union avoidance when they hire contracted nurses.

They used to contract them through staffing agencies and there'd be a few in every big town.

Now there's four national apps and they all call themselves in their marketing materials, Uber for nursing.

And because of regulatory capture, we haven't had a new consumer privacy law to Congress since 1988, when Ronald Reagan made it illegal for video store clerks to disclose your VHS rentals.

Every other form of consumer privacy violation is legal federally.

And so when the app offers the nurse the shift, there are data brokers who will sell the app

the nurse's credit card history.

And nurses who have more credit card debt and whose debt is more delinquent are paid a lower wage.

It's a desperation premium.

Think about that the next time you're having your catheter changed, right?

And these nurses, they're not working in the tech sector.

but they're working in a sector that has been digitized.

You know, like the coal bosses in old Tennessee or any Ford songs would have happily done this to their coal miners, but like hiring all the Pinkertons to follow the miners around and figure out who's willing to accept a lower wage.

And then hiring the guys in green eye shades to like change the ledger to mark down their pay packet was just not practical.