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.

On the need for low-carbon and sustainable computing and the path towards zero-carbon computing.

The past few years have seen various attempts within computing, programming and hacker communities to apply ‘degrowth’ principles to their work – i.e. sketching out ways to de-couple digital technology from the growth-focused imperatives of capitalist societies. These efforts have so far progressed in a piecemeal manner, led by assorted groups with broad interests around ‘radically sustainable computing’ (Heikkilä 2021). The hope, of course, is that these initial developments might signal the beginnings of mainstream change.