Cory Doctorow

I've got to like I've got to like ship you a physical thing at a bare minimum.

Right.

Or you've got to find a machine shop or something.

So software has got this like uniquely disidentificatory aspect.

It also had a workforce that was quite powerful and often really cared about users because they were scarce and very valuable.

And so it was really hard for companies to disregard their input.

Of course, now we have lost that power and they didn't unionize the supplies caught up with demand.

They've lost that power in the same way that interoperability has gone away because IP laws expanded to basically ban most of that reverse engineering.

So those are distinct to technology, right?

Those are not characteristics of the NFL.

They're not characteristics of McDonald's, but I am on the one hand, totally fine with people using the word colloquially.

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.