Posts Tagged ‘Apple’
[PyConUS2025] Enshittification and the Path to a New Good Internet: Cory Doctorow
Lecturer
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist, and special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He maintains the daily blog Pluralistic.net and has authored numerous works, including the recent novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle (sequels to Red Team Blues), the solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, and the nonfiction volume The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Earlier books encompass the Little Brother series, Chokepoint Capitalism, Red Team Blues, and How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism. Doctorow co-founded the UK Open Rights Group, serves as a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and Visiting Professor of Computer Science at the Open University, and holds a Visiting Professorship of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. Born in Toronto, he resides in Los Angeles. He was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2020, received the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award in 2022, the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity in 2024, and honorary doctorates from York University and the Open University. His professional site is craphound.com and his X handle is @doctorow.
Abstract
Cory Doctorow examines the concept of enshittification—the progressive degradation of digital platforms—and situates it within broader economic, legal, and technological structures. Drawing on examples ranging from nursing labor apps to Google search, he argues that platform decay arises not from technological inevitability or novel forms of corporate malice but from deliberate policy choices that dismantled four traditional disciplining forces: competition, regulation, interoperability, and labor power. Doctorow contends that reversing these choices can restore a functional digital commons and enable a “new good internet” capable of supporting collective resistance to larger crises.
The Anatomy of Enshittification and the Mechanism of Twiddling
Doctorow opens by redirecting expectations away from a conventional critique of online platforms toward an unexpected domain: nursing labor. A January 2025 report from the Groundwork Collective documented the rise of three dominant “Uber for nursing” applications—ShiftKey, ShiftMed, and CareRev—that allocate shifts through opaque algorithmic pricing. Before offering a wage, these platforms purchase a nurse’s real-time financial data from brokers. Nurses carrying substantial or delinquent credit-card debt receive systematically lower offers because desperation reduces reservation wages. Doctorow presents this practice as paradigmatic of enshittification: a three-stage process in which platforms first court end users with high-quality service while locking them in, then degrade the user experience to extract value for business customers, and finally extract remaining surplus for themselves until only a minimal residual value keeps both sides attached.
He illustrates the sequence with Google. In its early years the company minimized advertising and invested heavily in engineering, producing superior search results while simultaneously purchasing default placement across browsers, operating systems, and carriers—expenditures that eventually rivaled the cost of acquiring an entire Twitter every eighteen months. Once users were locked in, Google increased the proportion of advertising and rendered ad labels ever more subtle, enriching publishers and advertisers at the expense of searchers. When growth plateaued at roughly 90 percent market share, internal documents revealed a deliberate decision to degrade result quality so that users would issue multiple queries, thereby multiplying ad impressions. Concurrently Google entered collusive arrangements such as “Jedi Blue” with Meta to rig advertising markets against publishers. The contemporary search results page—dominated by AI-generated material, barely labeled advertisements, and SEO spam—exemplifies the terminal stage of enshittification: a “homeopathic residue” of utility sufficient only to prevent mass defection.
The technical enabler of these shifts is what Doctorow terms “twiddling.” Because modern platforms rest on Turing-complete machines, they possess effectively infinite adjustable parameters. Prices, rankings, recommendations, and wages can be altered on every interaction according to real-time data. Algorithmic wage discrimination, the term coined by legal scholar Veena Dubal, is merely one instance of twiddling applied to labor markets. Uber pioneered a similar technique with drivers: initially elevated offers induce acceptance of rides; subsequent micro-adjustments gradually erode compensation below sustainable levels once drivers have incurred sunk costs such as vehicle purchases. Digitization converts what would have been prohibitively labor-intensive wage theft into an automated, low-cost process.
Doctorow rejects the popular maxim that “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” Payment confers no protection. Apple’s simultaneous introduction of a third-party tracking opt-out and a secret first-party advertising surveillance system demonstrates that even customers who pay a premium can be productized. In the nursing example, nurses, patients, and hospitals are all subject to extraction. Enshittification productizes anyone who can be productized; dignified treatment is not a loyalty perk exchanged for money rather than attention.
Policy Origins and the Collapse of Disciplining Forces
Platforms were not born enshittified. Early Google, the original iPhone, and early Facebook delivered genuine value. Doctorow insists that the transformation resulted from policy decisions enacted within living memory by identifiable actors who were warned of the consequences yet faced no subsequent accountability. These decisions dismantled four constraints that once moderated corporate behavior.
The first constraint is market competition. Classical antitrust, exemplified by Senator John Sherman’s 1890 legislation, sought to prevent the emergence of “autocrats of trade.” Beginning in the 1980s, Chicago-school economics inverted this logic, treating monopolies as presumptively efficient. The result was concentrated markets across pharmaceuticals, hospitals, insurance, beer, athletic shoes, and professional wrestling. Mark Zuckerberg’s internal memo that “it is better to buy than to compete,” followed by the unchallenged acquisition of Instagram, exemplifies the new orthodoxy. Hospital consolidation, itself a defensive response to pharmaceutical mergers, left nurses and patients exposed to monopsonistic power and algorithmic wage platforms.
The second constraint is regulation. Concentrated sectors readily capture their regulators. A sector of one hundred firms is a rabble; a sector of five is a cartel capable of coordinated lobbying. Doctorow cites the United Kingdom’s Competition and Markets Authority, previously an effective investigator of technology monopolies, whose leadership was replaced by a former Amazon executive. In the United States, the last comprehensive federal privacy statute dates to 1988—the Video Privacy Protection Act—leaving data brokers free to sell financial dossiers that enable wage discrimination against nurses.
The third constraint is interoperability. In the physical world, interoperability requires careful standardization; in software it is nearly free because any valid program can be executed. Ad blockers, alternative ink cartridges, and tools that reveal hidden tips for DoorDash drivers are all forms of adversarial interoperability that discipline platforms. The 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Section 1201, however, criminalizes the circumvention of access controls, converting reverse engineering into a potential felony. Parallel anti-circumvention provisions were exported through trade agreements to Europe, Canada, and elsewhere. Consequently, apps—websites wrapped in digital rights management—became preferred over open web interfaces, and independent repair of tractors, ventilators, and automobiles became legally hazardous.
The fourth constraint is labor power. Technology workers historically enjoyed scarcity-based leverage without formal unionization. They could refuse to implement degrading features and simply change employers. Mass layoffs since 2023—half a million jobs—and simultaneous executive bonus increases have eroded that leverage. The current enthusiasm for AI coding tools is, in Doctorow’s view, driven less by productivity gains than by the prospect of replacing workers who might otherwise resist enshittification.
Pathways Out of the Enshittocene
Because enshittification is the product of specific policy choices rather than technological destiny or inevitable historical forces, those choices can be reversed. Doctorow surveys an emerging global antitrust revival that is largely bipartisan and independent of billionaire funding. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, parallel statutes in Australia, Japan, South Korea, and even China, and coordinated enforcement actions demonstrate renewed vigor. Market studies produced by one jurisdiction are readily adapted by others, creating a multiplier effect.
Regulatory capture can be mitigated by shifting enforcement away from captured national venues (for example, moving GDPR claims out of Irish courts). Right-to-repair legislation in Europe and Canada remains partially frustrated by residual anti-circumvention rules, yet the political opportunity now exists to repeal those rules. Doctorow argues that any jurisdiction willing to legalize reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and independent app stores would instantly become a technology export powerhouse. A Canadian app store charging a three-percent transaction fee rather than thirty percent would raise authors’, musicians’, and software developers’ revenues by roughly twenty-five percent overnight. Diagnostic tools priced at one hundred dollars per month rather than ten thousand dollars per manufacturer would attract global demand. The resulting competition would simultaneously lower costs for users worldwide and attack the most profitable lines of business of the largest American technology firms.
Doctorow situates these technical and legal interventions within a larger polycrisis—climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, and xenophobia—whose perpetrators have weaponized centralized platforms. The “insidete” was purpose-built for such co-option: giant corporations willing to trade a habitable planet for modest tax advantages, default algorithmic feeds, and government-backed intellectual-property barriers to exit. Yet the architecture was chosen, not inevitable. A new good internet combining the technical self-determination of the early web with the accessibility of Web 2.0 services remains possible. Such an internet would enable coordination and mutual aid in the face of cascading crises. Doctorow closes with the injunction that the community must build it.
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[KCDUK2024] Sustainability Chronicles: Innovate Through Green Technology With Kepler and KEDA | KCDUK2024
The Imperative of Cloud Sustainability
At KCDUK2024, Katie Gamanji, a Senior Field Engineer at Apple and a prominent figure in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), delivered a compelling session titled “Sustainability Chronicles: Innovate Through Green Technology With Kepler and KEDA.” Katie’s presentation addressed the critical need for environmental consciousness in the tech sector, particularly within the cloud native ecosystem. With a decade of Kubernetes driving industry transformation, Katie emphasized the urgency of integrating sustainability into technological decision-making, given the tech sector’s 1.4% contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions.
Katie outlined the global context, referencing the Paris Agreement (COP21) and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG13), which call for proactive climate action. She highlighted that adopting renewable energy could reduce tech emissions by 80%, a potential that major cloud providers like GCP, AWS, and Azure are pursuing through net-zero targets. Katie’s narrative framed sustainability as an integral part of operational efficiency, introducing the concept of GreenOps, which aligns resource optimization with reduced environmental impact.
Measuring Emissions with Kepler
Katie introduced Kepler, a CNCF sandbox project developed by Red Hat and IBM, as a pivotal tool for measuring application emissions in Kubernetes. Kepler leverages eBPF to collect energy consumption data, converting it into CO2 emissions using hardcoded emission factors for coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Deployed on a local Kind cluster, Kepler’s Grafana dashboards provide granular insights into emissions per container, day, and namespace. This capability enables organizations to identify high-emission workloads and implement targeted optimizations.
Katie encouraged community engagement with Kepler, noting its sandbox status and potential for growth. By providing feedback or contributing features, practitioners can enhance Kepler’s utility, fostering a collaborative approach to sustainability. Her demonstration underscored the importance of observability in addressing emissions, setting the stage for proactive workload management.
Scaling with KEDA and Carbon-Aware Operator
To move beyond measurement, Katie introduced KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler) and its Carbon-Aware Operator, which optimize application scaling based on carbon intensity. KEDA, a graduated CNCF project, scales workloads in response to external events, such as carbon intensity data from grid providers like WattTime or Electricity Map. The Carbon-Aware Operator adjusts replica counts inversely to carbon intensity, maximizing replicas when renewable energy is abundant and minimizing them during high-emission periods.
Katie’s local deployment showcased this dynamic scaling, visualized through Grafana, where low carbon intensity correlated with higher replica counts. This approach exemplifies proactive sustainability, aligning computational demands with environmental impact. Katie’s advocacy for KEDA highlighted its evolution from a niche solution to an industry standard, encouraging practitioners to explore its potential for green innovation.
Community-Driven Sustainability
Beyond technology, Katie emphasized the role of community in driving sustainability. The Kubernetes community’s inclusive ethos fosters innovation through open governance and diverse contributions. She highlighted the CNCF’s Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for Environmental Sustainability, which promotes green practices across projects. Initiatives like the Green Reviews Working Group and sustainability white papers offer avenues for engagement, encouraging practitioners to contribute beyond code.
Katie’s call to action urged attendees to diversify technical boards and create welcoming spaces for new ideas. Her narrative wove together technological innovation and community collaboration, positioning sustainability as a shared responsibility. By integrating tools like Kepler and KEDA with community efforts, the cloud native ecosystem can lead in green technology, shaping a sustainable future.
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[DevoxxGR2024] Devoxx Greece 2024 Sustainability Chronicles: Innovate Through Green Technology With Kepler and KEDA
At Devoxx Greece 2024, Katie Gamanji, a senior field engineer at Apple and a technical oversight committee member for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), delivered a compelling presentation on advancing environmental sustainability within the cloud-native ecosystem. With Kubernetes celebrating its tenth anniversary, Katie emphasized the urgent need for technologists to integrate green practices into their infrastructure strategies. Her talk explored how tools like Kepler and KEDA’s carbon-aware operator enable practitioners to measure and mitigate carbon emissions, while fostering a vibrant, inclusive community to drive these efforts forward. Drawing from her extensive experience and leadership in the CNCF, Katie provided a roadmap for aligning technological innovation with climate responsibility.
The Imperative of Cloud Sustainability
Katie began by underscoring the critical role of sustainability in the tech sector, particularly given the industry’s contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions. She highlighted that the tech sector accounts for 1.4% of global emissions, a figure that could soar to 10% within a decade without intervention. However, by leveraging renewable energy, emissions could be reduced by up to 80%. International agreements like COP21 and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have spurred national regulations, compelling organizations to assess and report their carbon footprints. Major cloud providers, such as Google Cloud Platform (GCP), have set ambitious net-zero targets, with GCP already operating on renewable energy since 2022. Yet, Katie stressed that sustainability cannot be outsourced solely to cloud providers; organizations must embed these principles internally.
The emergence of “GreenOps,” inspired by FinOps, encapsulates the processes, tools, and cultural shifts needed to achieve digital sustainability. By optimizing infrastructure—through strategies like using spot instances or serverless architectures—organizations can reduce both costs and emissions. Katie introduced a four-phase strategy proposed by the FinOps Foundation’s Environmental Sustainability Working Group: awareness, discovery, roadmap, and execution. This framework encourages organizations to educate stakeholders, benchmark emissions, implement automated tools, and iteratively pursue ambitious sustainability goals.
Measuring Emissions with Kepler
To address emissions within Kubernetes clusters, Katie introduced Kepler, a CNCF sandbox project developed by Red Hat and IBM. Kepler, a Kubernetes Efficient Power Level Exporter, utilizes eBPF to probe system statistics and export power consumption metrics to Prometheus for visualization in tools like Grafana. Deployed as a daemon set, Kepler collects node- and container-level metrics, focusing on power usage and resource utilization. By tracing CPU performance counters and Linux kernel trace points, it calculates energy consumption in joules, converting this to kilowatt-hours and multiplying by region-specific emission factors for gases like coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
Katie demonstrated Kepler’s practical application using a Grafana dashboard, which displayed emissions per gas and allowed granular analysis by container, day, or namespace. This visibility enables organizations to identify high-emission components, such as during traffic spikes, and optimize accordingly. As a sandbox project, Kepler is gaining momentum, and Katie encouraged attendees to explore it, provide feedback, or contribute to its development, reinforcing its potential to establish a baseline for carbon accounting in cloud-native environments.
Scaling Sustainably with KEDA’s Carbon-Aware Operator
Complementing Kepler’s observational capabilities, Katie introduced KEDA (Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler), a graduated CNCF project, and its carbon-aware operator. KEDA, created by Microsoft and Red Hat, scales applications based on external events, offering a rich catalog of triggers. The carbon-aware operator optimizes emissions by scaling applications according to carbon intensity—grams of CO2 equivalent emitted per kilowatt-hour consumed. In scenarios where infrastructure is powered by renewable sources like solar or wind, carbon intensity approaches zero, allowing for maximum application replicas. Conversely, high carbon intensity, such as from coal-based energy, prompts scaling down to minimize emissions.
Katie illustrated this with a custom resource definition (CRD) that configures scaling behavior based on carbon intensity forecasts from providers like WattTime or Electricity Maps. In her demo, a Grafana dashboard showed an application scaling from 15 replicas at a carbon intensity of 530 to a single replica at 580, dynamically responding to grid data. This proactive approach ensures sustainability is embedded in scheduling decisions, aligning resource usage with environmental impact.
Nurturing a Sustainable Community
Beyond technology, Katie emphasized the pivotal role of the Kubernetes community in driving sustainability. Operating on principles of inclusivity, open governance, and transparency, the community fosters innovation through technical advisory groups (TAGs) focused on domains like observability, security, and environmental sustainability. The TAG Environmental Sustainability, established just over a year ago, aims to benchmark emissions across graduated CNCF projects, raising awareness and encouraging greener practices.
To sustain this momentum, Katie highlighted the need for education and upskilling. Resources like the Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) certification and her own Cloud Native Fundamentals course on Udacity lower entry barriers for newcomers. By diversifying technical and governing boards, the community can continue to evolve, ensuring it scales alongside technological advancements. Katie’s vision is a cloud-native ecosystem where innovation and sustainability coexist, supported by a nurturing, inclusive community.
Conclusion
Katie Gamanji’s presentation at Devoxx Greece 2024 was a clarion call for technologists to prioritize environmental sustainability. By leveraging tools like Kepler and KEDA’s carbon-aware operator, practitioners can measure and mitigate emissions within Kubernetes clusters, aligning infrastructure with climate goals. Equally important is the community’s role in fostering education, inclusivity, and collaboration to sustain these efforts. Katie’s insights, grounded in her leadership at Apple and the CNCF, offer a blueprint for innovating through green technology while building a resilient, forward-thinking ecosystem.