The blog post which coined the term “enshittification”…

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Funded by the Swiss National Research Fund, Discarded Digital is a field research project conducted by Nicolas Nova, Anaïs Bloch and Thibault Le Page about the use/re-use/repurposing of digital technologies from the recent past. Both an inquiry into the second (and probably third) life of digital rubbish and an exploration of alternatives to e-waste recycling businesses this project aims at (1) documenting lesser known practices in the field of art, design and preservation, (2) grasping the kind of artifacts that emerged from them, and (3) understanding the skills they rely on and the knowledge they produce.

Technology is the active human interface with the material world. But the word is consistently misused to mean only the enormously complex and specialised technologies of the past few decades, supported by massive exploitation both of natural and human resources. This is not an acceptable use of the word. “Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and a technology that isn’t “hi,” isn’t necessarily “low” in any meaningful sense. We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology “ at all.