Cory Doctorow

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.

So the digitization of nursing is,

has made it possible to enshitify nursing, not in the loose colloquial sense of things getting worse because of greed and a lack of market discipline and regulation, but in the specific technical sense of taking advantage of the technical characteristics of platformization to victimize nurses by eroding their wages.

Yeah.

So the thing that's going to disappoint you when I say this is that it's not a thing you can do as a person, right?

You can't just like shop your way out of the monopoly.

It's like trying to recycle your way out of a wildfire, right?

These are not individual decisions.

The reason billionaires want you to vote with your wallet is their wallets are thicker than yours and they're not very numerous as individuals.

So the only kind of election they can win is the one where you vote with dollars instead of people.