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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system. If that wasn't true, why would your "choose" commercial surveillance, abusive workplaces and other depredations?

In other words, economics is the "look what you made me do" stick that capitalism uses to beat us with. We wouldn't spy on you, rip you off or steal your wages if you didn't choose to use the internet, shop with monopolists, or work for a shitty giant company. The technical name for this ideology is "public choice theory":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Of all the terrible things that economists say we all secretly love, one of the worst is "price discrimination." This is the idea that different customers get charged different amounts based on the merchant's estimation of their ability to pay. Economists insist that this is "efficient" and makes us all better off. After all, the marginal cost of filling the last empty seat on the plane is negligible, so why not sell that seat for peanuts to a flier who doesn't mind the uncertainty of knowing whether they'll get a seat at all? That way, the airline gets extra profits, and they split those profits with their customers by lowering prices for everyone. What's not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. With only four giant airlines who've carved up the country so they rarely compete on most routes, why would an airline use their extra profits to lower prices, rather than, say, increasing their dividends and executive bonuses?

For decades, the airline industry was the standard-bearer for price discrimination. It was basically impossible to know how much a plane ticket would cost before booking it. But even so, airlines were stuck with comparatively crude heuristics to adjust their prices, like raising the price of a ticket that didn't include a Saturday stay, on the assumption that this was a business flyer whose employer was footing the bill:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

With digitization and mass commercial surveillance, we've gone from pricing based on context (e.g. are you buying your ticket well in advance, or at the last minute?) to pricing based on spying. Digital back-ends allow vendors to ingest massive troves of commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker industry to calculate how desperate you are, and how much money you have. Then, digital front-ends – like websites and apps – allow vendors to adjust prices in realtime based on that data, repricing goods for every buyer.

As digital front-ends move into the real world (say, with digital e-ink shelf-tags in grocery stores), vendors can use surveillance data to reprice goods for ever-larger groups of customers and types of merchandise. Grocers with e-ink shelf tags reprice their goods thousands of times, every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Here's where an economist will tell you that actually, your boss is right. Many groceries are perishable, after all, and e-ink shelf tags allow grocers to reprice their goods every minute or two, so yesterday's lettuce can be discounted every fifteen minutes through the day. Some customers will happily accept a lettuce that's a little gross and liztruss if it means a discount. Those customers get a discount, the lettuce isn't thrown out at the end of the day, and everyone wins, right?

Well, sure, if. If the grocer isn't part of a heavily consolidated industry where competition is a distant memory and where grocers routinely collude to fix prices. If the grocer doesn't have to worry about competitors, why would they use e-ink tags to lower prices, rather than to gouge on prices when demand surges, or based on time of day (e.g. making frozen pizzas 10% more expensive from 6-8PM)?

And unfortunately, groceries are one of the most consolidated sectors in the modern world. What's more, grocers keep getting busted for colluding to fix prices and rip off shoppers:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaw-bread-price-settlement-1.7274820

Surveillance pricing is especially pernicious when it comes to apps, which allow vendors to reprice goods based not just on commercially available data, but also on data collected by your pocket distraction rectangle, which you carry everywhere, do everything with, and make privy to all your secrets. Worse, since apps are a closed platform, app makers can invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers them to figure out how they're ripping you off. Removing the encryption from an app is a potential felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (an app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to install a privacy blocker on it):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

Large vendors love to sell you shit via their apps. With an app, a merchant can undetectably change its prices every few seconds, based on its estimation of your desperation. Uber pioneered this when they tweaked the app to raise the price of a taxi journey for customers whose batteries were almost dead. Today, everyone's getting in on the act. McDonald's has invested in a company called Plexure that pitches merchants on the use case of raising the cost of your normal breakfast burrito by a dollar on the day you get paid:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Surveillance pricing isn't just a matter of ripping off customers, it's also a way to rip off workers. Gig work platforms use surveillance pricing to titrate their wage offers based on data they buy from data brokers and scoop up with their apps. Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There's plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses' wages. These apps buy nurses' financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This week, the excellent Lately podcast has an episode on price discrimination, in which cohost Vass Bednar valiantly tries to give economists their due by presenting the strongest possible case for charging different prices to different customers:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/

Bednar really tries, but – as she later agrees – this just isn't a very good argument. In fact, the only way charging different prices to different customers – or offering different wages to different workers – makes sense is if you're living in a socialist utopia.

After all, a core tenet of Marxism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." In a just society, people who need more get more, and people who have less, pay less:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs

Price discrimination, then, is a Bizarro-world flavor of cod-Marxism. Rather than having a democratically accountable state that sets wages and prices based on need and ability, price discrimination gives this authority to large firms with pricing power, no regulatory constraints, and unlimited access to surveillance data. You couldn't ask for a neater example of the maxim that "What matters isn't what technology does. What matters is who it does it for; and who it does it to."

Neoclassical economists say that all of this can be taken care of by the self-correcting nature of markets. Just give consumers and workers "perfect information" about all the offers being made for their labor or their business, and things will sort themselves out. In the idealized models of perfectly spherical cows of uniform density moving about on a frictionless surface, this does work out very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

But while large companies can buy the most intimate information imaginable about your life and finances, IP law lets them capture the state and use it to shut down any attempts you make to discover how they operate. When an app called Para offered Doordash workers the ability to preview the total wage offered for a job before they accepted it, Doordash threatened them with eye-watering legal penalties, then threw dozens of full-time engineers at them, changing the app several times per day to shut out Para:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

And when an Austrian hacker called Mario Zechner built a tool to scrape online grocery store prices – discovering clear evidence of price-fixing conspiracies in the process – he was attacked by the grocery cartel for violating their "IP rights":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is Wilhoit's Law in action:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit#Wilhoit's_law

Of course, there wouldn't be any surveillance pricing without surveillance. When it comes to consumer privacy, America is a no-man's land. The last time Congress passed a new consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from revealing which VHS cassettes you take home. Congress has not addressed a single consumer privacy threat since Die Hard was still playing in theaters.

Corporate bullies adore a regulatory vacuum. The sleazy data-broker industry that has festered and thrived in the absence of a modern federal consumer privacy law is absolutely shameless. For example, every time an app shows you an ad, your location is revealed to dozens of data-brokers who pretend to be bidding for the right to show you an ad. They store these location data-points and combine them with other data about you, which they sell to anyone with a credit card, including stalkers, corporate spies, foreign governments, and anyone hoping to reprice their offerings on the basis of your desperation:

https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

Under Biden, the outgoing FTC did incredible work to fill this gap, using its authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (which outlaws "unfair and deceptive" practices) to plug some of the worst gaps in consumer privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

And Biden's CFPB promulgated a rule that basically bans data brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

But now the burden of enforcing these rules falls to Trump's FTC, whose new chairman has vowed to end the former FTC's "war on business." What America desperately needs is a new privacy law, one that has a private right of action (so that individuals and activist groups can sue without waiting for a public enforcer to take up their causes) and no "pre-emption" (so that states can pass even stronger privacy laws):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

How will we get that law? Through a coalition. After all, surveillance pricing is just one of the many horrors that Americans have to put up with thanks to America's privacy law gap. The "privacy first" theory goes like this: if you're worried about social media's impact on teens, or women, or old people, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about deepfake porn, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about algorithmic discrimination in hiring, lending, or housing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about surveillance pricing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. Privacy law won't entirely solve all these problems, but none of them would be nearly as bad if Congress would just get off its ass and catch up with the privacy threats of the 21st century. What's more, the coalition of everyone who's worried about all the harms that arise from commercial surveillance is so large and powerful that we can get Congress to act:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Economists, meanwhile, will line up to say that this is all unnecessary. After all, you "sold" your privacy when you clicked "I agree" or walked under a sign warning you that facial recognition was in use in this store. The market has figured out what you value privacy at, and it turns out, that value is nothing. Any kind of privacy law is just a paternalistic incursion on your "freedom to contract" and decide to sell your personal information. It is "market distorting."

In other words, your boss is right.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Safeway_supermarket_interior,_Fairfax_County,_Virginia.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #personalized pricing #surveillance pricing #ad-tech #realtime bidding #rtb #404media #price discrimination #economics #neoclassical economics #efficiency #predatory pricing #surveillance #privacy #wage theft #algorithmic wage discrimination #veena dubal #privacy first

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goldfish-afterhours · 1 month ago

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ROB THEM BLIND - FIVE

— Home // Genshin Impact Bank Robbery AU

Back in school, there was always that one student who followed all the rules as if it were the law. They would always be quiet at their seat by the bell, always have their assignments done on time, and, to everyone else’s annoyance, would remind the teacher when they forgot to collect the homework.

The last person Lumine would pin as this type of person was Xiao, but right now, if being a bank robber was the equivalent of being a student, Xiao was a teacher’s pet.

“...got it? Everyone must be in their place. Do not change the plan, even if you think you see an opportunity. I don’t care if you think you’re able to get away—we stick to the plan,” Xiao said. Zhongli, Ajax, and Itto were on an overnight mission, so Xiao was now in charge of the remaining three members for this operation. Kabukimono sat on the couch, looking bored out of his mind. Lumine and Thoma were in two rickety chairs. Together, they formed a small semi-circle around Xiao, who was standing and lecturing as if he were a professor teaching a lesson. “Whatever happens, stick to the plan. No matter what. Does anyone have any questions?”

“I got one,” Kabukimono said, raising his hand. “Do you have to act like you got a stick up your ass?”

Thoma coughed. “Come on, guys, let’s try to keep things civil.”

Xiao crossed his arms. “Would you rather have a gun up your ass? That can be arranged, either by the security guards or me.”

“Now, now, let’s not get too feisty,” Thoma said, placing himself between the two shorter men.

“I’d rather have a gun up my ass at this point than listen to you ramble on and on about your stupid plan.” Kabukimono stuck his tongue out.

“Kabi-”

“Fine then, get shot and die, fucker. See if I care.” Without another word, Xiao stomped out of the room.

Thoma sighed, rubbing his temples. “Kabi, couldn’t you have been a little nicer? You know Xiao’s having a hard time with this right now. He just doesn’t want anything to go wrong.”

Kabukimono leaned back on the couch. “His bad memories are not my problem.”

Lumine had tried keeping out of it, but now she was too curious to stay silent. “What bad memories?”

Thoma opened his mouth, hesitating, before giving her a weary smile. “Xiao’s…spent some time in jail. I’m not sure if I should be telling you this, he doesn’t talk much about it. But,” his voice dropped to a whisper. “...I heard he went through hell there.”

Lumine’s eyes widened. “Jail? So he was caught for robbing banks?”

“Nah, not banks. This was way before the Guili Assembly was formed. He joined up with Zhongli long before any of us, even Ajax,” Kabukimono said, yawning as if he was merely talking about the weather. He gestured in Thoma’s direction with a nod of his chin. “That innocent-looking guy you’re sitting next to has also spent some time in the slammer, believe it or not.”

“Well, I wouldn’t really say I’ve ‘spent some time in there’,” Thoma chuckled. “I was in the custody cell for, maybe, two hours? That’s like nothing.”

“Maybe. Wonder how fucked up you would’ve turned out if you stayed there longer?” Kabukimono linked his hands together in front of him before stretching his arms towards the ceiling. “Maybe you’d turn out like that bastard. From what I know, he was in there for so long, who knows what kind of person he was before that.”

Lumine coughed. “So if he wasn’t in jail for robbing banks, what was he there for?”

“Murder,” Kabukimono said flatly, just as Xiao walked back into the room.

A vein bulged on Xiao’s neck. “If you’re going to talk shit, at least do it to my face,” he said, voice low but enable to suppress the anger spilling into his tone.

“What are you going to do about it, huh? Make me your next victim? Go crying to Zhongli again?” Kabukimono sneered. He leapt from the couch, ready to attack,

“Now, now, let’s settle down-” Thoma started.

“Settle down, my ass. I know you’ve been talking just as much shit as he has,” Xiao said, cocking his head in Kabukimono’s direction. Guilt immediately bloomed on Thoma’s face. Before he could respond, however, Xiao left the room again.

“...Shit,” Thoma sighed. He lowered his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m sorry, Lumine, but do you mind going after him? He probably needs someone right now.”

“Sure,” she said. The chair groaned as she jumped to her feet and rushed after him.

Despite the way the walls were peeling, they insulated sound well. It was only when Lumine left the room did she hear Xiao’s footsteps. He hadn’t made it far down the hall. He was no longer stomping, but his head was down and shoulders were slumped forwards.

Lumine quietly headed towards him and lightly tapped his shoulder. “Hey. Are you okay?”

The moment her finger made contact with his skin, his entire body tensed. He flinched hard and turned around. When Lumine saw the expression on his face, she almost felt guilty. His mouth was open in fear but his eyes were half-closed as he recoiled from her touch. It was like he expected that she had tapped him on the shoulder only to hit him after.

But his expression quickly trickled away like water in an open hand once he realized it was Lumine. “...Yeah. Sorry,” he mumbled.

“No, I’m sorry. I was the one who asked.” Lumine looked down at her shoes. “I just wanted to get to know you better, that’s all…I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

She heard him take a deep breath. “No, it’s fine,” he responded.

Lumine looked back up at him, and to her surprise, he had a light dusting of red on his face. They exchanged glances for a second before Xiao immediately averted his eyes.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Xiao coughed, crossing his arms. “Y-Yes.”

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but…” Lumine leaned against the wall behind her. “What happened?”

Xiao’s face grew tense again. He pressed his lips together into a thin line, and for a moment Lumine thought she had gone too far. But he took another deep breath, chest rising before falling, and opened his mouth.

“Venti and I grew up in the same slums, about a hundred kilometres east from here. We decided to pool whatever money we had, try to get out.” Xiao started.

So he was a slum kid. Suddenly, his small stature—he was practically the same height as Lumine—and jumpy nature made sense.

“...But there was no way for us to survive in the city. No one wanted to hire some kids from the slums. So we started b and e’s.”

“Breaking and entering,” Lumine said.

“Yeah. We usually watched the houses for a while, figure out their schedule, and wait for them to leave before going in.” Xiao twisted a thin silver ring on his pinky finger and his eyes darkened. “...But we messed up. It only took one mistake. Someone was home. And they had a gun pointed right at us, so…” His voice trailed off, but Lumine could guess what happened next.

She put a hand on Xiao’s arm, right over his tattoo. He flinched at her touch, but he didn’t pull away. “You had no other choice,” she said, sounding as delicate and gentle as possible.

Xiao nodded slowly. “‘No other choice,’” he echoed, his voice hollow. “Yeah…that’s what Venti said too, after he shot him.” His hands balled into fists. “Neither the police nor the court thought so, though. And Venti…”

“Were you two sent to different jails?”

“No. I left him alone for five minutes to hide the gun, and he was gone. The police looked for a long time too, but they couldn’t find him. It was like he disappeared into thin air.”

The two of them sat in silence, the elephant in the room crushing them against the peeling walls. Lumine considered ignoring it, but Xiao was finally opening up to her. Confiding in her, even. So she gave it a go.

“Do you ever think you might have been betrayed?” she breathed, afraid the question would knock him over and shatter him like glass if she spoke too loud.

To her surprise, however, Xiao was calm. “I’ve considered it,” he admitted. “That bastard left me for dead. But…”

“But?”

“...But I can’t bring myself to hate him. We had each other when we had nothing else. And he was my partner in everything. Partner in crime, partner in suffering, partner in life.” Xiao lifted his head to look at Lumine for the first time since this topic was brought up. And for the first time, Lumine noticed just how young he was and just how dark the bags under his eyes were, no doubt from the countless nights this troubling question weighed on his conscience. “You know, sometimes you remind me of him. He was also reckless, like he didn’t care for his own life. But he was kind and cared for the people around him, no matter how small or insignificant.”

At this point, Lumine could not stop the tears falling from her eyes. This man—no, this boy—had clearly been betrayed in one of the worst ways possible. And yet, he didn’t harbour any negative feelings towards the one who had obviously stabbed him in the back. Instead, he clung onto his naivety until his fingers bled.

How much Lumine wished that there was someone who thought of her the way Xiao thought of Venti.

Her crying seemed to startle him. His lips parted as his yellow eyes widened in alarm. “Are you crying?” he asked.

Lumine wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “N-No. Just something in my eyes, that’s all.”

“Let me see.” Xiao used his thumb and index finger to tilt her chin towards him, gently pushing her arm away from her face. Her eyes burned and she tried to stop herself from sniffling, but she could do nothing to stop the tears from trickling down her face.

Xiao swiped at her wet cheeks with his thumb. “Why do your tears fall for someone like me?” he asked softly.

“Who else would they fall for? You went through such hard things. I’m sorry I brought up such a painful past,” Lumine croaked.

Panic lit up Xiao’s face. He looked right and left of the hallway. When he confirmed they were alone, he wrapped his arms around Lumine. His embrace was warm and gentle, just barely touching her skin as if he was afraid that she would break if he hugged her too hard.

“Please, don’t cry,” he whispered in her ear. “I’m okay. We’re okay now.” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than he was trying to convince Lumine.

He flinched around her when Lumine grabbed his arm. “I’m here for you now, Xiao. We’re all here for you now. I know Kabukimono sounds harsh, but I’m sure he means well. None of us would betray you like Venti did, I promise.”

Xiao was still tense, but he tried to relax into her touch. “...Thank you, Lumine,” he murmured. “Even if you did betray me…I don’t think I could hate you either.”

“That won’t happen,” Lumine said fiercely. “Come on, we have a robbery to do, right?”

“Right.”

“And what are we going to do, no matter what?”

Xiao exhaled a laugh, and Lumine felt warmth bloom in her chest. This was the first time she had seen him smile, let alone laugh. “We stick to the plan.”

“That’s right. Let’s go.”

#my writing #rob them blind #rtb #xiao #zhongli #genshin au #bank robbery au #lumine #itto #wanderer #thoma #childe #tartaglia #genshin series #genshin impact

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