Originally published at: https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/
Today's links
- Surveillance pricing: They spy on you for many reasons, but also to rip you off.
- Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
- This day in history: 2004, 2009, 2013, 2019, 2023
- Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
- Recent appearances: Where I've been.
- Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
- Colophon: All the rest.
Surveillance pricing (permalink)
Noted anti-capitalist agitator Adam Smith had it right: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices.
What's more, once an industry contracts corporate gigantism, it will become too big to jail, able to outspend and overpower the regulators charged with reining in its cheating. Anyone who believes Smith's self-evident maxim had to accept its conclusion: that companies had to be kept smaller than the state that regulated them. This wasn't about "punishing bigness" – it was the necessary precondition for a functioning market economy.
We kept companies small for the same reason that we limited the height of skyscrapers: not because we opposed height, or failed to appreciate the value of a really good penthouse view – rather, to keep the building from falling over and wrecking all the adjacent buildings and the lives of the people inside them.
Starting in the neoliberal era – Carter, then Reagan – we changed our tune. We liked big business. A business that got big was doing something right. It was perverse to shut down our best companies. Instead, we'd simply ban big companies from rigging prices. This was called the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. It was a total failure.
40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.
It turns out that keeping gigantic, opaque, complex corporations honest is really hard. They have so many ways to shuffle money around that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're doing. Digitalization makes things a million times worse, because computers allow businesses to alter their processes so they operate differently for every customer, and even for every interaction.
This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans. Digitalization is a corporate moral hazard, making it just too easy and tempting to rig the game.
That's why Toyota, the largest car-maker in the world, just did Dieselgate again, more than a decade later. Digitalization is a temptation no giant company can resist:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo
For forty years, pro-monopoly cheerleaders insisted that we could allow companies to grow to unimaginable scale and still prevent cheating. They passed rules banning companies from explicitly forming agreements to rig prices. About ten seconds later, new middlemen popped up offering "information brokerages" that helped companies rig prices without talking to one another.
Take Agri Stats: the country's hyperconcentrated meatpacking industry pays Agri Stats to "consult on prices." They provide Agri Stats with a list of their prices, and then Agri Stats suggests changes based on its analysis. What does that analysis consist of? Comparing the company's prices to its competitors, who are also Agri Stats customers:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy
In other words, Agri Stats finds the highest price for each product in the sector, then "advises" all the companies with lower prices to raise their prices to the "competitive" level, creating a one-way ratchet that sends the price of food higher and higher.
More and more sectors have an Agri Stats, and digitalization has made this price-gouging system faster, more efficient, and accessible to sectors with less concentration. Landlords, for example, have tapped into Realpage, a "data broker" that the same thing to your rent that Agri Stats does to meat prices. Realpage requires the landlords who sign up for its service to accept its "recommendations" on minimum rents, ensuring that prices only go up:
https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating
Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein lays out the many ways in which these digital intermediaries have supercharged the business of price-rigging:
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-05-three-algorithms-in-a-room/
Goldstein identifies a kind of patient zero for this ripoff epidemic: Jeffrey Roper, a former Alaska Air exec who quit to found an illegal airline price-fixing service called ATPCO. ATPCO was investigated by the DOJ in the 1990s, but the enforcers lost their nerve and settled with the company, which agreed to apply some ornamental fig-leafs to its collusion-machine. Even those cosmetic changes were seemingly a bridge too far Roper, who left the US.
But he came back to serve as Realpage's "principal scientist" – the architect of a nationwide scheme to make rental housing vastly more expensive. For Roper, the barrier to low rents was empathy: landlords felt stirrings of shame when they made shelter unaffordable to working people. Roper called these people "idiots" who sentimentality "costs the whole system."
Sticking a rent-gouging computer between landlords and the people whose lives they ruin is a classic "accountability sink," as described in Dan Davies' new book "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind":
https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/
It's a form of "empiricism washing": if computers are working in the abstract realm of pure numbers, they're just moving the objective facts of the quantitative realm into the squishy, imperfect qualitative world. Davies' interview on Trashfuture is excellent:
https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/fire-sale-at-the-accountability-store-feat-dan-davies/
To rig prices, an industry has to solve three problems: the problem of coming to an agreement to fix prices (economists call this "the collective action problem"); the problem of coming up with a price; and the problem of actually changing prices from moment to moment. This is the ripoff triangle, and like a triangle, it has many stable configurations.
The more concentrated an industry is, the easier it is to decide to rig prices. But if the industry has the benefit of digitalization, it can swap the flexibility and speed of computers for the low collective action costs from concentration. For example, grocers that switch to e-ink shelf tags can make instantaneous price-changes, meaning that every price change is less consequential – if sales fall off after a price-hike, the company can lower them again at the price of a button. That means they can collude less explicitly but still raise prices:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags
My name for this digital flexibility "twiddling." Businesses with digital back-ends can alter their "business logic" from second to second, and present different prices, payouts, rankings and other key parts of the deal to every supplier or customer they interact with:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Not only does twiddling make it easier to rip off suppliers, workers and customers, it also makes these crimes harder to detect. Twiddling made Dieselgate possible, and it also underpinned "Greyball," Uber's secret strategy of refusing to send cars to pick up transportation regulators who would then be able to see firsthand how many laws the company was violating:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html
Twiddling is so easy that it has brought price-fixing to smaller companies and less concentrated sectors, though the biggest companies still commit crimes on a scale that put these bit-players to shame. In The Prospect, David Dayen investigates the "personalized pricing" ripoff that has turned every transaction into a potential crime-scene:
https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-04-one-person-one-price/
"Personalized pricing" is the idea that everything you buy should be priced based on analysis of commercial surveillance data that predicts the maximum amount you are willing to pay.
Proponents of this idea – like Harvard's Pricing Lab with its "Billion Prices Project" – insist that this isn't a way to rip you off. Instead, it lets companies lower prices for people who have less ability to pay:
https://thebillionpricesproject.com/
This kind of weaponized credulity is totally on-brand for the pro-monopoly revolution. It's the same wishful thinking that led regulators to encourage monopolies while insisting that it would be possible to prevent "bad" monopolies from raising prices. And, as with monopolies, "personalized pricing" leads to an overall increase in prices. In econspeak, it is a "transfer of wealth from consumer to the seller."
"Personalized pricing" is one of those cuddly euphemisms that should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. A more apt name for this practice is surveillance pricing, because the "personalization" depends on the vast underground empire of nonconsensual data-harvesting, a gnarly hairball of ad-tech companies, data-brokers, and digital devices with built-in surveillance, from smart speakers to cars:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars
Much of this surveillance would be impractical, because no one wants their car, printer, speaker, watch, phone, or insulin-pump to spy on them. The flexibility of digital computers means that users always have the technical ability to change how these gadgets work, so they no longer spy on their users. But an explosion of IP law has made this kind of modification illegal:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
This is why apps are ground zero for surveillance pricing. The web is an open platform, and web-browsers are legal to modify. The majority of web users have installed ad-blockers that interfere with the surveillance that makes surveillance pricing possible:
https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/
But apps are a closed platform, and reverse-engineering and modifying an app is a literal felony – several felonies, in fact. An app is just a web-page skinned with enough IP to make it a felony to modify it to protect your consumer, privacy or labor rights:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet
(Google is leading a charge to turn the web into the kind of enshittifier's paradise that apps represent, blocking the use of privacy plugins and proposing changes to browser architecture that would allow them to felonize modifying a browser without permission:)
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai
Apps are a twiddler's playground. Not only can they "customize" every interaction you have with them, but they can block you (or researchers seeking to help you) from recording and analyzing the app's activities. Worse: digital transactions are intimate, contained to the palm of your hand. The grocer whose e-ink shelf-tags flicker and reprice their offerings every few seconds can be collectively observed by people who are in the same place and can start a conversation about, say, whether to come back that night a throw a brick through the store's window to express their displeasure. A digital transaction is a lonely thing, atomized and intrinsically shielded from a public response.
That shielding is hugely important. The public hates surveillance pricing. Time and again, through all of American history, there have been massive and consequential revolts against the idea that every price should be different for every buyer. The Interstate Commerce Commission was founded after Grangers rose up against the rail companies' use of "personalized pricing" to gouge farmers.
Companies know this, which is why surveillance pricing happens in secret. Over and over, every day, you are being gouged through surveillance pricing. The sellers you interact with won't tell you about it, so to root out this practice, we have to look at the B2B sales-pitches from the companies that sell twiddling tools.
One of these companies is Plexure, partly owned by McDonald's, which provides the surveillance-pricing back-ends for McD's, Ikea, 7-Eleven, White Castle and others – basically, any time a company gives you a hard-sell to order via its apps rather than its storefronts or its website, you should assume you're getting twiddled, hard.
These companies use the enshittification playbook to trap you into using their apps. First, they offer discounts to customers who order through their apps – then, once the customers are fully committed to shopping via app, they introduce surveillance pricing and start to jack up the prices.
For example, Plexure boasts that it can predict what day a given customer is getting paid on and use that information to raise prices on all the goods the customer shops for on that day, on the assumption that you're willing to pay more when you've got a healthy bank balance.
The surveillance pricing industry represents another reason for everything you use to spy on you – any data your "smart" TV or Nest thermostat or Ring doorbell can steal from you can be readily monetized – just sell it to a surveillance pricing company, which will use it to figure out how to charge you more for everything you buy, from rent to Happy Meals.
But the vast market for surveillance data is also a potential weakness for the industry. Put frankly: the commercial surveillance industry has a lot of enemies. The only thing it has going for it is that so many of these enemies don't know that what's they're really upset about is surveillance.
Some people are upset because they think Facebook made Grampy into a Qanon. Others, because they think Insta gave their kid anorexia. Some think Tiktok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama bin Laden. Some are upset because the cops use Google location data to round up Black Lives Matter protesters, on Jan 6 insurrectionists. Some are angry about deepfake porn. Some are angry because Black people are targeted with ads for overpriced loans or colleges:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/04/meta_ad_algorithm_discrimination/
And some people are angry because surveillance feeds surveillance pricing. The thing is, whatever else all these people are angry about, they're all angry about surveillance. Are you angry that ad-tech is stealing a 51% share of news revenue? You're actually angry about surveillance. Are you angry that "AI" is being used to automatically reject resumes on racial, age or gender grounds? You're actually angry about surveillance.
There's a very useful analogy here to the history of the ecology movement. As James Boyle has long said, before the term "ecology" came along, there were people who cared about a lot of issues that seemed unconnected. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What's the connection between charismatic nocturnal avians and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? The term ecology took a thousand issues and welded them together into one movement.
That's what's on the horizon for privacy. The US hasn't had a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling the newspapers what VHS cassettes you were renting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
We are desperately overdue for a new consumer privacy law, but every time this comes up, the pro-surveillance coalition defeats the effort. but as people who care about conspiratorialism, kids' mental health, spying by foreign adversaries, phishing and fraud, and surveillance pricing all come together, they will be an unbeatable coalition:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy
Meanwhile, the US government is actually starting to take on these ripoff artists. The FTC is working to shut down data-brokers:
The FBI is raiding landlords to build a case against Frontpage and other rent price-fixers:
https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating
Agri Stats is facing a DoJ lawsuit:
Not every federal agency has gotten the message, though. Trump's Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell – whom Biden kept on the job – has been hiking interest rates in a bid to reduce our purchasing power by making millions of Americans poorer and/or unemployed. He's doing this to fight inflation, on the theory that inflation is being cause by us being too well-off, and therefore trying to buy more goods than are for sale.
But of course, interest rates are inflationary: when interest rates go up, it gets more expensive to pay your credit card bills, lease your car, and pay a mortgage. And where we see the price of goods shooting up, there's abundant evidence that this is the result of greedflation – companies jacking up their prices and blaming inflation. Interest rate hawks say that greedflation is impossible: if one company raises its prices, its competitors will swoop in and steal their customers with lower prices.
Maybe they would do that – if they didn't have a toolbox full of algorithmic twiddling options and a deep trove of surveillance data that let them all raise prices together:
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-05-time-for-fed-to-meet-ftc/
Someone needs to read some Adam Smith to Chairman Powell: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
(Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0, modified)
Hey look at this (permalink)
- Parable of the Sofa https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/06/01/Parable-of-the-Sofa
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A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle https://blog.glyph.im/2024/05/grand-unified-ai-hype.html (h/t Trivium)
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The World's Last Internet Cafes https://restofworld.org/2023/internet-cafes/
This day in history (permalink)
#20yrsago Danny O’Brien’s Life Hacks https://craphound.com/lifehacks2.txt
#15yrsago New fashion copyright bill will let big companies own public domain designs and bury young, indie designers in legal costs https://memex.craphound.com/2009/06/05/new-fashion-copyright-bill-will-let-big-companies-own-public-domain-designs-and-bury-young-indie-designers-in-legal-costs/
#10yrsago A letter from Edward Snowden and the ACLU https://memex.craphound.com/2014/06/05/a-letter-from-edward-snowden-and-the-aclu/
#10yrsago Today is the day we Reset the Net https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKk8MHFLNNE
#10yrsago Crowdscrounging pennies to support Canada’s most important environmental research https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBsTH28AV58
#10yrsago Turn on your data for one minute, AT&T sticks you with a $750 international roaming charge https://jeffreifman.com/2014/06/04/yes-you-can-spend-750-in-international-data-roaming-in-one-minute/
#10yrsago How Wikipedia can become a no-asshole-zone https://web.archive.org/web/20140609085220/http://wikiconferenceusa.org/wiki/Sumana_Harihareswara_keynote
#10yrsago Student’s awesome non-apology for wearing leggings https://www.tumblr.com/urb4n-hipst3rr-xo/86435758488
#10yrsago Google announces end-to-end encryption for Gmail (a big deal!) https://blog.google/products/gmail/transparency-report-protecting-emails
#5yrsago AOC condemns solitary confinement for Paul Manafort https://x.com/AOC/status/1136320114335391744
#5yrsago This is the color of cyberspace https://www.sherwin-williams.com/en-us/color/color-family/neutral-paint-colors/SW7076-cyberspace#/7076/?s=coordinatingColors&p=PS0
#5yrsago New Jersey law would force Verizon to pay the taxes it avoided for a decade https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/06/verizon-stiffed-towns-on-millions-in-taxes-but-might-have-to-pay-it-back/
#5rysago Russia adds Tinder to the list of apps that have to release user data to its cops and spies on demand, without a warrant https://www.zdnet.com/article/russia-says-tinder-must-share-user-data-private-messages/
#5yrsago The best Joker is the woman Joker who snaps after a lifetime of being told to “smile, baby” by shitty men https://www.everywhereist.com/2019/06/i-tweeted-about-the-joker-being-a-woman-who-was-tired-of-this-shit-and-it-now-feels-auto-biographical/
#5yrsago 68% of “ordinary Facebook investors” voted to fire Zuckerberg https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-investors-vote-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman-2019-6
#5yrsago LA’s new homelessness stats reveal a crisis that is only worsening https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopez-06052019-story.html
#5yrsago Patronscan wants cities to require bars to scan your ID with its service so it can maintain a secret, unaccountable blacklist https://memex.craphound.com/2019/06/05/patronscan-wants-cities-to-require-bars-to-scan-your-id-with-its-service-so-it-can-maintain-a-secret-unaccountable-blacklist/
#5yrsago Leaked UK military “Extreme Right Wing” checklist: “using the term ‘Islamofascism'”, adding “-istan” to place names https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/05/29/army-guide-spot-right-wing-extremists-warns-identify-patriots/
#1yrago Wall Street Journal goes to bat for the vultures who want to steal your house https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/05/vulture-capitalism/#distressed-assets
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
- Media Ecology Association keynote (Amherst, NY), Jun 6-9
https://media-ecology.org/convention -
Locus Awards keynote (Oakland), Jun 20
https://locusmag.com/2024-locus-awards-weekend/ -
HOPE XV, Jul 14 (Queens, NY)
https://www.hope.net/talks.html -
American Association of Law Libraries keynote (Chicago), Jul 21
https://www.aallnet.org/conference/agenda/keynote-speaker/
Recent appearances (permalink)
- Capitalist Realism vs. Science Fiction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz-iHWzqGK0 -
All Tech is Human
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKThzsYGjEQ -
RISD Debates in AI keynote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdSEcmplaDs
Latest books (permalink)
- The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
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"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
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"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
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"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books (permalink)
- Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
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Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025
Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
- Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay. Today's progress: 871 words (5651 words total).
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A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
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Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
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Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Latest podcast: Against Lore https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_469/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_469_-_Against_Lore.mp3
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