#Data platform 2025

[boonars]

Day 2: Microsoft Fabric Architecture & Core Concepts – The Backbone of a Unified Data Platform

Microsoft Fabric Architecture Explained | Core Concepts for Beginners (2025) Published: July 3, 2025 🚀 Introduction After understanding what Microsoft Fabric is in Day 1, let’s now open the hood and look at its powerful architecture. Microsoft Fabric isn’t just a collection of tools—it’s a cohesive, integrated platform built with modern data challenges in mind. In this article, we’ll break down…

[acuvate-updates]

Revolutionizing Enterprises: CXO’s GenAI Transformation

1. Unlocking AI’s Potential: A Strategic Overview

AI adoption, embraced by 70% of executives, promises enhanced customer experiences despite challenges. Understanding and integrating AI into business operations is essential. Explore our guide for actionable insights, ensuring businesses not only survive but thrive in the AI-driven era.

Learn more about Artificial Intelligence impact in 2025

AI Reshaping Decision-Making in 2025

Generative AI, like GPT, simplifies business processes. It transforms decision-making with its user-friendly interfaces, self-learning capabilities, and efficient sorting.

Furthermore, it’s a budget-friendly solution with no training fees, making it accessible for businesses of various sizes.

Our guide aims to offer practical insights for responsibly adopting this transformative technology. Following our roadmap allows businesses to navigate the Generative AI landscape, ensuring success in the constantly changing digital environment.

To stay informed and up to date with the latest trends, join our webinars featuring industry experts from organizations like Microsoft, Shell, and more.

C-Suite Roles Transformed by AI

Strategic AI Adoption Tips for Leaders

To successfully adopt AI, prioritize it for strategic goals, use tailored features, and embrace multilingual capabilities. Ensure secure deployment for data integrity. Offices that adopt AI enjoy streamlined processes, ongoing innovation, and secure frameworks.

2. Transforming C-Suite Roles with AI

Empowering CIOs: Innovating IT with AI

In enterprise IT, AI, particularly models like GPT, empowers CIOs to break traditional boundaries and improve operations through groundbreaking innovations.

Use Cases:

· Smart IT Helpdesk Support: AI ensures 24x7 support with human-like conversations, reducing user effort and cost.

· Smart Search: AI transforms data management, improving user engagement with easy-to-use search capabilities.

· Next-Gen Customer Support: AI automates email-based queries, crafting personalized responses for enhanced customer experiences.

To stay informed and up to date with the latest trends, join our webinars featuring industry experts from organizations like Microsoft, Shell, and more.

Implementation Tips:

· Prioritize AI for strategic goals.

· Personalized and multilingual capabilities.

· Ensure secure deployment for data integrity.

· Offices embracing AI experience streamlined helpdesks, continuous innovation, and secure frameworks.

Empowering HR with AI: From Administration to Leadership

Use Cases:

· AI-powered Talent Acquisition: AI streamlines global recruitment, automating candidate screening and optimizing interview scheduling.

· Efficient Employee Onboarding: AI redefines onboarding by using chatbots to create personalized experiences and promote communication across departments.

· Personalized Employee Engagement: AI’s learning capabilities drive adaptive engagement activities, ensuring timely interventions and integrating feedback loops.

· Data-Driven Learning and Development: AI changes learning through advanced knowledge mining, personalized modules, and interactive interfaces.

Implementation Tips:

· Align AI integration with strategic HR goals.

· Leverage AI’s personalization and multilingual features.

· Uphold data integrity and fortify security during deployment.

· Offices leveraging AI experience streamlined recruitment, efficient onboarding, personalized engagement, and reimagined L&D.

Also, read more about How GPT-powered Chatbots Can Help HR Leaders Drive Engagement and Retention

AI-Powered Marketing: A CMO’s Secret Weapon

Use Cases:

· AI-Powered Brand Engagement Solutions: AI revolutionizes brand engagement with personalized content, human-like communication, and timely identification of upsell opportunities.

· Smartly allocate ad spending: AI enables CMOs to allocate budgets wisely by analyzing real-time market trends predictively.

Implementation Tips:

· Prioritize AI Integration aligned with core marketing goals.

· Leverage Multilingual Features for global brand reach.

· Strategize Deployment with a focus on data integrity and customer privacy.

· Offices with AI experience tailored brand engagement, proactive ad spend decisions, and seamless multilingual marketing.

Explore the Power of Generative AI for enhancing CX — Marketing and Customer support/ Engagement

AI: The COO’s Catalyst for Operational Agility and Efficiency

In the realm of Operational efficiency, Chief Operating Officers (COOs) orchestrate processes to optimize resources.

Use Cases:

· Simplifying the supply chain: Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides a high-level perspective, facilitating proactive demand forecasting and prompt corrective actions for effective supply chains.

· Enhancing Operational Communication: AI-powered chatbots ensure role-specific information flow, facilitating real-time feedback and swift issue resolution.

· Driving Operational Cost Optimization: AI analyzes data for cost leakage points, recommends resource redistribution, and encourages real-time cost insights.

To stay informed and up to date with the latest trends, join our webinars featuring industry experts from organizations like Microsoft, Shell, and more.

Implementation Tips:

· Justify Integration Effort with improved operational KPIs.

· Leverage Iterative Learning for continuous process refinement.

· Prioritize Data Security, safeguarding organizational assets.

· Offices with AI experience data-driven supply insights, intelligent communication, and dynamic cost optimization.

· In the dynamic field of data management, Chief Data Officers (CDOs) use AI, including GPT and other generative AI models, as strong supporters to decode large datasets effectively.

Use Cases:

· Enhancing Data Intelligence: AI’s advanced algorithms mine data, providing insights that shape business strategies through predictive modeling and intelligent summarizing.

· Managing Unstructured Data: AI’s NLP features efficiently process and convert unstructured data into organized, clear formats, enhancing data processing efficiency.

· Enhancing Data Governance: AI simplifies data management by automating organization, ensuring compliance with regulatory policies, real-time breach detection, and maintaining data standards.

Implementation Tips:

· Start with a clear data strategy aligning AI’s abilities with major data challenges.

· Prioritize data protection in AI adoption for utility and security.

· Invest in continuous training, refining AI models for better understanding of organizational data.

· Offices with AI experience automated, intelligent data insights, streamlined data, and proactive, AI-assisted data governance.

3. AI’s Impact: Boosting Enterprise Efficiency

Discover how advanced AI, including Azure OpenAI’s GPT, is reshaping enterprise operations. Explore real-world use cases across departments, showcasing the profound impact of Generative AI on organizational efficiency.

AI Integration Across Departments

SharePoint Search Integration

Structured Data Insights & Summarization

AI enables the effortless transformation of structured data into actionable intelligence. This module analyzes tables and databases, extracting meaningful insights presented in user-friendly natural language summaries, empowering teams for informed decision-making.

R&D Assistant

In Research and Development, AI acts as a dedicated assistant, leveraging internal and external data sources for comprehensive reports and analysis.

Customer/Consumer Support

Elevate customer support with an AI-powered chatbot that delivers personalized and context-aware responses. By training the model with customer support data, this solution ensures accuracy and seamless integration with existing systems.

HR Chatbot

AI becomes an invaluable virtual assistant in HR, guiding employees through common queries with personalized responses. From leave requests to company policies, this intelligent chatbot ensures a seamless and efficient employee experience.

IT Chatbot

Revolutionize IT support by using an AI-powered chatbot. The chatbot can troubleshoot common issues, give step-by-step instructions, and escalate complex cases. Enhance user experience and streamline technical support with this essential tool.

To stay informed and up to date with the latest trends, join our webinars featuring industry experts from organizations like Microsoft, Shell, and more.

Document Comparison/RFP Validation

AI streamlines procurement and HR processes by comparing documents. Quickly analyze text documents for similarities, differences, and changes, ensuring accuracy in document validation and specifications.

Procurement Assistant

Automate and streamline the procurement process with an AI-powered assistant. Generate purchase orders, request for quotations, and vendor evaluations based on predefined templates and user inputs, ensuring efficiency and accuracy.

Search Integration with SAP JAM/ServiceNow KB/Salesforce KB

Bridge the knowledge gap by integrating AI with ERP and ITSM systems. Enable interactive conversations beyond search results, enhancing user understanding and engagement with content.

Knowledge Management Solution

Empower your workforce with a Knowledge Management Solution seamlessly merging AI with Azure Cognitive Search. Unlock information from diverse sources, fostering a culture of knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

Integrate innovative AI use cases into your strategy for streamlined processes and enhanced user experiences.

4. Unlocking AI’s Power with Acuvate: A Comprehensive Guide

As businesses embrace AI’s transformative potential, Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) take center stage, enhancing productivity. Our guide delves into AI FAQs, ensuring data security and adaptability for enterprise needs.

To stay informed and up to date with the latest trends, join our webinars featuring industry experts from organizations like Microsoft, Shell, and more.

Acuvate Advantage

Experience the Org Brain GPT framework, combining analytics and enterprise security. Acuvate’s expertise, spanning 16 years, ensures customized AI solutions for streamlined processes.

Explore our AI trends guide to boost your organization’s capabilities. Request a demo or insight into Acuvate’s transformative AI solutions for enhanced performance.

Also, read our other blogs on the AI revolution on Medium

9 Must-Watch Webinars of 2025 for Tech Enthusiasts | Medium

- AI-Driven Transformation: A CXO's Guide to Generative AI Success | Medium

GPT Revolution in AI - A Strategic Guide for CXO | Medium

Emerging Energy Technologies: Data, AI & Digital Solutions in 2025 | Medium

[insightfultake]

India’s Cybersecurity Gamble: Can Mobile Number Verification Stop Digital Fraud?

India is one of the largest digital economies in the world, with over 1.16 billion mobile connections and a fast-growing base of digital users. From banking apps to food delivery services, mobile numbers have become an essential identity tool. But with that growth has come a dark side — a surge in cybercrime. Now, the Indian government is preparing to launch a new rule that could change how we use mobile numbers online.

[sagetitansteam]

How Martech Evolution Is Empowering Brands to Do More with Less

INTRODUCTION

From modest origins, marketing technology—MarTech—has developed into a potent toolkit enabling firms to reach more with fewer resources. This is seismic, not merely gradual change.  Today, even small teams can deliver campaigns that once required vast budgets and headcounts. In this post, we explore the martech evolution, how it’s reshaping brand marketing, and why it matters for forward-thinking businesses.

What Is Martech, and Why Does the Evolution Matter

10 years ago, marketing meant billboards, print ads, and manual email blasts. Solutions were siloed: analytics lived in spreadsheets, customers were managed in clunky CRMs, and content calendars smoldered in endless shared docs.

Fast forward to today. Martech is an interconnected ecosystem of tools and platforms—automation, AI, predictive analytics, customer data platforms, and more—working together to streamline, personalize, and optimize marketing like never before.

Key Drivers of Today’s Martech Revolution

AI-powered automation & personalization: Tools that dynamically personalize email, web experiences, and ads based on behavior.

Cloud-based, scalable platforms: No more software installations—just seamless integrations via APIs.

Unified customer data: CDPs break down department silos, offering a 360° view of a customer’s journey.

Data-driven insights: Dashboards and predictive scoring help marketers act faster and smarter.

5 Ways Martech Enables Brands to Do More with Less

1. Automating Tedious Tasks

Marketing teams spend countless hours on repetitive tasks—segmenting audiences, scheduling social posts, and generating reports. A modern martech stack automates these with workflows and bots that trigger email sequences, post content, update leads, and even analyze sentiment, without manual intervention.

✅ Outcome? Marketing teams can focus on creative strategy and high-impact tactics rather than administrative drudgery.

2. Personalizing at Scale

Personalisation used to be limited to “Dear [First Name]” email merges. Now, AI-driven tools tailor messaging, visuals, and offers based on real-time website clicks, purchase history, or engagement levels.

➡ ️ With martech, brands can offer highly relevant experiences—leading to better engagement and conversions—without needing a large data team.

3. Smarter Budget Allocation Through Analytics

Marketing investments must be justified. Modern dashboards automatically measure everything—clicks, conversions, engagement, and attribution—across channels.

Brands can now identify underperforming ads, double down on high ROI campaigns, and reduce waste—helping them do more with less marketing spend.

4. Rapid Campaign Experimentation

Deploying multiple campaign variants—A/B testing subject lines, creative executions, landing pages—is easy with modern platforms. Algorithms automatically determine the best performers, letting brands iterate quickly.

Recent research shows optimization using martech tools can increase conversion rates by up to 20%.

5. Unified Data for Cohesive Marketing

A fragmented tech setup can result in inconsistent messaging. CDPs consolidate customer data from CRM, web, mobile, chat, and email sources—creating a unified profile.

This enables cohesive cross-channel campaigns: for example, customers who abandon carts get personalized emails, social retargeting ads, and supportive chat outreach.

Case Studies: Real Brands, Real Impact

Case 1: A Boutique Retailer

Problem: A small online shop struggled with manual email list updates, generic promo blasts, and poor ad spend ROI.

Solution: They implemented an integrated martech stack: email automation, CRM sync, web-based segmentation, and paid-media reporting tools.

Result: Email automations recovered 15% of abandoned carts. Personalized campaigns improved click-through rate by 25%. Paid spend efficiency reduced cost per acquisition by 20%.

Case 2: A Fast-Growth SaaS Company

Problem: Marketing campaigns felt sporadic and untargeted. The team lacked insight into high-value lead behavior.

Solution: With a CDP and predictive scoring engine, they centralized customer interactions, identified top prospects, and automated tailored nurture flows—delivered via email, chat, and LinkedIn.

Result: Sales-qualified leads increased by 30%, and marketing spend yielded a 4x ROI.

6 Essential Martech Components for Maximum Efficiency

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

Centralizes customer data and enables unified profiles across touchpoints.

Marketing Automation Platform

Deploys and schedules email campaigns, drip sequences, and dynamic content.

AI-Driven Personalization Engine

Analyzes behavior and adapts content and offers in real time.

Predictive Analytics & Attribution Tools

Measure ROI, optimize budget, and forecast trends based on historical data.

Content Creation & Collaboration Suites

Streamline ideation, review, and publishing workflows among teams.

Reporting Dashboards

Provide transparent, real-time visibility into campaign performance.

5–6 Smart Keywords to Include

Use these thoughtfully (1–2% density) to maintain SEO relevance:

martech evolution

marketing automation

customer data platform

AI‑powered personalization

data‑driven marketing

predictive analytics

Best Practices for Martech-Driven Brand Empowerment

1. Start with Outcomes, Not Tools

Evaluate what you aim to achieve—better ROI, more conversions, improved retention—and then choose martech solutions aligned to those goals.

2. Prioritize Integration & Interoperability

An isolated tool is useless. Ensure your marketing automation, CRM, CDP, analytics, and creative platforms all connect fluidly.

3. Build a Data Governance Strategy

Track consent, brand policies, and data privacy upfront. This is especially vital when using third-party martech providers.

4. Invest in Training and Enablement

Even the most powerful platforms fail without expertise. Dedicate time to training, don’t neglect onboarding, and maintain an enablement-focused mindset.

5. Iterate with a Test-and-Learn Approach

Martech is meant for experimentation. Run small tests, compare results, and apply learnings continuously.

What’s Next for Martech?

Here’s a glimpse into emerging trends shaping the future of marketing:

🧠 AI-First Capabilities That Go Beyond Segmentation

Next-gen martech will use generative AI to craft copy, creative assets, even full campaigns—tailored for each audience segment.

🎥 Immersive Channels & Omnichannel Experiences

Expect seamless transitions between social, mobile, chat, voice, and even AR/VR—fueled by unified customer profiles.

🔄 Closed-Loop Attribution in Real Time

No more guessing which channel fills the funnel. Real-time cross‑channel last-touch, first-touch, and multi-touch attribution will guide smarter spending.

How to Begin Your Martech Evolution

Audit your current setup List tools, siloed systems, and manual workflows. Categorise gaps—data loss, redundant tasks, siloed customer experiences.

Define clear goals Are you looking to reduce costs per lead? Improve email engagement? Strengthen retention? Set measurable KPIs.

Choose tools carefully Consider integration, scalability, vendor support, and pricing—not just features.

Start small, then scale Pilot one automation campaign, one predictive engine, and one personalisation layer. Measure, refine, then expand.

Monitor performance continuously Meet weekly to analyse dashboards, apply insights, and tweak workflows.

Why SageTitans.com is Your Martech Partner

At SageTitans.com, we specialise in helping brands strategically adopt and scale martech. Whether it’s a customer data platform, marketing automation, or AI‑driven personalisation, our experts ensure seamless implementation, onboarding, and ongoing optimisation.

We champion a holistic strategy over tool stacking.

We offer template libraries and custom campaigns built on industry best practices.

Our learning academy ensures your team remains up-to-date with the martech ecosystem.

➡ ️ Explore our martech solutions page or schedule a free strategy call to discuss how you can do more with less.

Final Thoughts

The martech evolution is not just about fancy software—it’s a fundamental shift in how brands operate. It’s about unleashing efficiency, precision, and customer-centricity without expanding headcount or budget.

By automating repetitive tasks, personalizing experiences at scale, making data-driven decisions, and fostering rapid experimentation, brands can truly do more with less—and stay ahead in a competitive landscape.

If you’re ready to embrace this future and empower your brand with streamlined, effective, and affordable marketing—SageTitans.com is here to guide you . The tools are ready; it’s time to level up.

[codecrafted]

10 Biggest Data Science Trends to Watch in 2025 Data science is evolving faster than ever! From generative AI and real-time analytics to edge computing and ethical AI, 2025 is set to bring groundbreaking changes. 🌐💡

Whether you're a data enthusiast, professional, or just curious, this list breaks down the biggest trends reshaping how businesses and tech teams work with data. Learn about synthetic data, low-code tools, quantum computing’s potential, and more.

[balu88r-blog]

Online Course : ಇಸ್ರೋದ ಉಚಿತ ಕೋರ್ಸ್, ಉಚಿತ ರಿಮೋಟ್ ಸೆನ್ಸಿಂಗ್ ಡೇಟಾ ಅನಾಲಿಟಿಕ್ಸ್ ಕೋರ್ಸ್, ಸಂಪೂರ್ಣವಾದ ವಿವರ ಇಲ್ಲಿದೆ ನೋಡಿ….!

Online Course – ಬಾಹ್ಯಾಕಾಶ ಕ್ಷೇತ್ರದಲ್ಲಿ ಭಾರತದ ಹೆಮ್ಮೆಯ ಸಂಸ್ಥೆ ಇಸ್ರೋ (ISRO) ನಿಮಗೆ ಒಂದು ಅದ್ಭುತ ಅವಕಾಶವನ್ನು ನೀಡುತ್ತಿದೆ! ಮನೆಯಲ್ಲೇ ಕುಳಿತು, ಯಾವುದೇ ಶುಲ್ಕವಿಲ್ಲದೆ, ಇಸ್ರೋದ ರಿಮೋಟ್ ಸೆನ್ಸಿಂಗ್ ಡೇಟಾ ಅನಾಲಿಟಿಕ್ಸ್ ಕೋರ್ಸ್ ಕಲಿಯುವ ಸುವರ್ಣಾವಕಾಶ ಇದು. ಈ ಕೋರ್ಸ್ ಕೇವಲ ಜ್ಞಾನವೃದ್ಧಿ ಮಾತ್ರವಲ್ಲದೆ, ನಿಮ್ಮ ಪದವಿ ಅಥವಾ ವೃತ್ತಿಪರ ಜೀವನದಲ್ಲಿ ಹೊಸ ಮೈಲಿಗಲ್ಲ�� ಸ್ಥಾಪಿಸಲು ಸಹಾಯ ಮಾಡುತ್ತದೆ. ಹಾಗಾದರೆ, ಈ ಕೋರ್ಸ್‌ನ ಸಂಪೂರ್ಣ ವಿವರ, ಪ್ರಯೋಜನಗಳು ಮತ್ತು ಅರ್ಜಿ…

[certivo]

PFAS Compliance 2025: How Global Regulations Are Disrupting Manufacturing | Certivo

PFAS compliance is no longer optional. In this Certivo short, CEO Kunal Chopra explains how the 2025 global regulatory crackdown—from the EU’s REACH to the US EPA’s TSCA rule—is reshaping the manufacturing landscape. This video is a must-watch for product manufacturers and compliance teams looking to stay ahead. Certivo’s AI-powered compliance platform simplifies PFAS data collection, reporting, and risk management.

📺 Watch this clip: https://youtube.com/shorts/j5B3PBdGJzo

📺 Full Podcast: https://youtu.be/kA86gqKMBIk

🌐 Learn more: https://www.certivo.com/solutions

[jcmarchi]

GridCARE Emerges from Stealth with $13.5M to Solve AI’s Power Crisis with Generative Grid Intelligence

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/gridcare-emerges-from-stealth-with-13-5m-to-solve-ais-power-crisis-with-generative-grid-intelligence/

GridCARE Emerges from Stealth with $13.5M to Solve AI’s Power Crisis with Generative Grid Intelligence

GridCARE, a pioneering grid intelligence company, has officially emerged from stealth with a $13.5 million seed round, aiming to solve one of artificial intelligence’s most pressing bottlenecks: access to reliable power. The oversubscribed round was led by Xora, a deep tech venture firm backed by Temasek, with participation from a coalition of climate, AI, and infrastructure-focused investors.

The timing couldn’t be more urgent. The global AI market is projected to reach $757.6 billion by 2025 and grow to $3.68 trillion by 2034, according to Precedence Research. This explosive trajectory is placing unprecedented strain on the world’s power grids. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that electricity demand from data centers will more than double by 2030, with AI leading the charge. The U.S. alone is expected to see data centers account for nearly half of all new electricity demand growth, soon surpassing the energy use of entire heavy industries like steel, cement, and chemicals.

“Power is the new kingmaker in the AI arms race,” said Amit Narayan, CEO and founder of GridCARE. “Companies that secure reliable energy fastest will dominate the next generation of AI. GridCARE gives our partners that critical speed advantage.”

AI-Powered Grid Analysis to Accelerate Data Center Buildouts

Rather than waiting five to seven years for new substations and interconnections, GridCARE enables developers to bring AI infrastructure online in just 6–12 months. The company’s platform uses Generative AI and grid physics modeling to pinpoint underutilized electricity capacity across thousands of utility networks.

This “time-to-power” optimization allows developers to deploy GPUs and CPUs faster—essential in a competitive landscape where the AI model arms race is defined not just by the best algorithms, but by who can run them at scale first.

GridCARE acts as a bridge between utility companies and hyperscalers, simplifying complex, fragmented processes around grid access. Developers can offload the burden of power acquisition while utilities gain new revenue opportunities and better utilization of existing assets.

“GridCARE uncovers previously invisible grid capacity,” said Peter Freed, former Director of Energy Strategy at Meta and now a partner at New Horizon Group. “It opens a new fast track to power, enabling power-first AI data center development.”

From Stanford to the Smart Grid Frontier

GridCARE’s team is steeped in experience at the intersection of energy, AI, and sustainability. CEO Amit Narayan holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and previously founded AutoGrid, a climate-AI company acquired by Schneider Electric. He began applying chip-level signal optimization techniques to the electric grid over a decade ago while collaborating with Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute.

Co-founders include:

Ram Rajagopal, Stanford professor and AI-for-energy systems expert

Liang Min, Director at Stanford’s Bits & Watts initiative

Arun Majumdar, Founding Dean of Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability and former VP of Energy at Google

Their collective mission: to unlock strategic flexibility from the grid without building new fossil-fuel infrastructure.

Utilities Embrace GridCARE for Smarter Infrastructure Planning

GridCARE isn’t just popular with developers—it’s quickly gaining traction among utilities like Portland General Electric (PGE) and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E).

“The rise of AI presents the biggest new electricity demand surge we’ve seen in decades,” said Larry Bekkedahl, SVP at PGE. “Collaborating with GridCARE enables faster, more confident infrastructure decisions.”

PG&E’s EVP Jason Glickman echoed this sentiment: “Smarter use of the infrastructure we already have is one of the most promising solutions to AI’s energy demands. GridCARE helps us unlock that potential.”

GridCARE also promotes a forward-looking concept known as Power Caching—a localized energy strategy akin to edge computing. Just as edge networks bring frequently accessed data closer to users to reduce latency, power caching co-locates energy generation near AI data centers to reduce grid stress and transmission losses.

By supporting localized generation at the site of consumption, Power Caching improves resilience and eliminates long-distance power congestion—an increasingly common issue in gigawatt-scale AI clusters.

Strategic Backing and Vision for Scale

GridCARE’s backers include:

Breakthrough Energy (founded by Bill Gates)

Sherpalo Ventures

WovenEarth

Clearvision

Clocktower Ventures

AI and energy visionaries like Tom Steyer, Ram Shriram, Balaji Prabhakar, and Gokul Rajaram

Their involvement reflects growing recognition that solving AI’s power crisis will define the next decade of innovation.

“GridCARE has found a solution to AI’s most limiting constraint: energy,” said Phil Inagaki, CIO of Xora. “Their generative AI platform has the potential to reshape how we think about grid access and scale.”

Powering the AI Revolution Starts with Reimagining the Grid

As generative AI reshapes everything from search engines to scientific discovery, the race to scale these models hinges not just on algorithms, but on electricity. GridCARE is stepping in where others are stuck—transforming how power is sourced, modeled, and delivered for the AI age.

With deep tech roots, a founding team shaped by Stanford’s sustainability mission, and a platform that turns gigawatt-scale grid complexity into actionable opportunity, GridCARE isn’t just accelerating infrastructure—it’s laying the foundation for AI’s next leap forward.

[lmsintmedia]

Best Free Courses to Learn Digital Skills and Get Certificates in 2025

Why Digital Skills Matter More Than Ever in 2025 You don’t need to attend a physical university or break the bank to build a valuable, money-making skill set. Right now, in 2025, digital skills are the new currency. From Lagos to London, businesses are looking for people who can design, code, analyze, market, and manage—all online. Whether you’re unemployed, underpaid, or just starting out, the…

[zubair-adib]

The Future of Digital Marketing: Trends to Watch in 2025

Introduction The digital marketing landscape is evolving faster than ever. With advancements in artificial intelligence, changing consumer behaviors, and new regulations shaping the industry, businesses must stay ahead of the curve. To remain competitive, marketers need to adapt to the latest trends that will define digital marketing in 2025. In this article, we will explore the key digital…

[boonars]

Day 1: What is Microsoft Fabric? A Complete Introduction to Microsoft’s Unified Data Platform

What is Microsoft Fabric? Complete Guide for Beginners (2025) Published: July 2, 2025 🚀 Introduction In today’s data-driven world, organizations are constantly challenged with managing, transforming, analyzing, and visualizing ever-growing datasets from disparate sources. Enter Microsoft Fabric — a revolutionary, end-to-end data platform that combines the best of Power BI, Azure Data Factory,…

[techdirectarchive]

Install Veeam Backup and Replication with the default PostgreSQL

Since ransomware remains a persistent and immediate threat to global business operations. Organisations frequently face minimal time to mitigate impact, restore systems, or assess damage during attacks. Therefore, in this article, I will show you the steps to install Veeam Backup and Replication with the default PostgreSQL to protect our critical business data. Please learn how to upgrade Veeam…

[terastalungrad]

I don't think I've ever known a time in Doctor Who fandom where so many assumptions were made so strongly and believed by so many. So here's a quick FAQ about the current state of the show:

Will Disney renew their deal to co-produce Doctor Who?

We don't know.

Disney usually wait until 1-3 months after a show has finished airing before confirming a renewal. They have renewed a few shows earlier - when they've been a massive hit, or in order to start production early to get a special ready for Christmas - but 1-3 months is the norm.

Were Disney happy with the Gatwa episodes?

We don't know.

We don't even know their metric for success. Number of viewers? Number of new subscribers? Critical acclaim?

Disney didn't renew Andor beyond its second season, even though the show's been hugely acclaimed. Indeed, Disney have pulled the plug on several shows - the streaming landscape has changed a lot since the original Doctor Who deal, with most streamers tightening their belts.

Did Ncuti Gatwa quit because of uncertainty about the show's future?

We don't know.

People quit their jobs for all sorts of reasons. Usually, there's more than one reason.

Would Ncuti Gatwa have stayed if Disney had renewed early?

We don't know.

It is possible. Gatwa's contract was with Bad Wolf, not Disney. The contract might have been for three years, as with other modern Doctors - in which case he'd have still been under contract if they'd started filming a third series in time.

But this is speculation, since we don't know what was in the contract.

Did Ncuti Gatwa fall out with Russell T Davies?

We don't know.

It's interesting to me that Davies was present on set for Gatwa's final shoot. He wasn't present for Eccleston's. But this may mean nothing. It's also - of course - none of our fucking business.

Did the final episode originally have a drastically different ending?

We don't know.

We do know a week of additional shooting was added in February.

This isn't unusual. Extra shooting also occurred for The Church on Ruby Road (the scene where the Doctor saves a baby from an inflatable snowman) and The Robot Revolution (the scene where we meet Belinda's housemates).

One possibility is that, counter-intuitively, filming more material might actually save money. There are tax breaks in the UK for episodes of television that cost a certain amount - so spending a little extra to meet the threshold might save a larger sum in tax.

We don't know what was in the final episode. Behind-the-scenes show Doctor Who Unleashed featured a scene that wasn't in the final episode - a party at UNIT HQ - but it's limited data.

Has the BBC cancelled Doctor Who?

No.

British TV has never worked like American network TV, so "cancellation" isn't the right word. The BBC haven't yet commissioned new Doctor Who - and can't do until Disney decide whether to co-produce. Whether it's a yes or no from Disney, nothing further can be commissioned until the answer comes.

Will a different streaming service co-fund Doctor Who?

We don't know.

If Disney turn it down, though, it seems like a safe bet. Disney Plus is a massive platform - Doctor Who is a drop in the ocean of their shows. A smaller streamer might see more value in Doctor Who.

If X people will subscribe to a service just for Doctor Who, it's a question of how much each service cares about the number X. Disney's one of the services that needs X subscribers the least.

Doctor Who has two advantages in 2025 that it didn't have in 2022, when the last deal was made:

Firstly, the rights to stream the Eccleston to Whittaker eras in the US are about to revert to the BBC from HBO Max. Streamers love catalogue shows (i.e. shows with loads of episodes, like Friends and Star Trek), so that's a great package to sweeten the deal of a co-production. Pay for 26 episodes, get 175 free.

Secondly, the BBC are developing a children's cartoon version of Doctor Who aimed at -year-olds - with exactly the same format as Bluey, one of the biggest ever successes on streaming. Bearing in mind the BBC co-produced Bluey, this seems like a very attractive show to offer any streaming service willing to fund the main show.

Indeed, this seems so good to me that even if Disney weren't originally going to renew, this might tempt them to change their minds.

Is Billie Piper playing the new Doctor?

We don't know.

It looks like she is! That's usually what it means when one Doctor regenerates into a different actor. But unlike with Tennant in 2022, Piper isn't credited as the Doctor, and neither has there been a press release confirming her as the Sixteenth Doctor.

Why hasn't the BBC confirmed Billie Piper's role?

We don't know.

Maybe they don't want the news to be overshadowed by negative press attention to the future of the show. Maybe production company Bad Wolf wants an air of mystery and intrigue around Piper's role. Maybe she isn't playing the Doctor in some way. Maybe there's a reason we haven't considered.

Will Russell T Davies be showrunner for the next series of Doctor Who?

We don't know.

We don't know anything - and it's possible nobody does. Davies has said that Bad Wolf has plans ("it's our job to have plans").

I do think it's likely the BBC will keep Bad Wolf and Davies if possible. If nothing else, there isn't a long list of companies who can make this show, or showrunners of Davies's experience and acclaim who want to make this show.

Why are people behaving as though they know all the answers to all these questions if we don't actually know them?

I don't know.

[probablyasocialecologist]

A collective of “gay furry hackers” has claimed credit for hacking into the Heritage Foundation in opposition to its right-wing political and social proposals for next year, known as Project 2025. Hacking group SiegedSec wrote in a post on social platform Telegram that it was responsible for a cyber attack which secured 200GB of files from the think tank, which included passwords and user information for “every user” on its database. The attack was part of its #OpTransRights campaign, which targets right-wing organisations the group believes have had a significant impact on mitigating trans rights. Other targets include right-wing media outlet Real America’s Voice, the Hillsong megachurch and a Minnesota pastor.

10 July 2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

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