sovereignsolace

[sovereignsolace]

What would it take to create a Consumers Union, so that we could hold the line against unreasonable prices? Seems like technology could play both sides of this game, but can we convince consumers to take their money elsewhere? What about industries where there is no elsewhere?

Surveillance pricing lets corporations decide what your dollar is worth

I'm in the home stretch of my 24-city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in LONDON (July 1) with TRASHFUTURE'S RILEY QUINN and then a big finish in MANCHESTER on July 2.

Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay. But when a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.

That's not how economists see it, of course. When a hotel sells you a room for $50 that someone else might get charged $500 for, that's efficient, provided that the hotelier is sure no $500 customers are likely to show up after you check in. The empty room makes them nothing, and $50 is more than nothing. There's a kind of metaphysics at work here, in which the room that is for sale at $500 is "a hotel room you book two weeks in advance and are sure will be waiting for you when you check in" while the $50 room is "a hotel room you can only get at the last minute, and if it's not available, you're sleeping in a chair at the Greyhound station."

But what if you show up at the hotel at 9pm and the hotelier can ask a credit bureau how much you can afford to pay for the room? What if they can find out that you're in chemotherapy, so you don't have the stamina to shop around for a cheaper room? What if they can tell that you have a 5AM flight and need to get to bed right now? What if they charge you more because they can see that your kids are exhausted and cranky and the hotel infers that you'll pay more to get the kids tucked into bed? What if they charge you more because there's a wildfire and there are plenty of other people who want the room?

The metaphysics of "room you booked two weeks ago" as a different product from "room you're trying to book right now" break down pretty quickly once you factor in the ability of sellers to figure out how desperate you are – or merely how distracted you are – and charge accordingly. "Surveillance pricing" is the practice of spying on you to figure out how much you're willing to spend – because you're wealthy, because you're desperate, because you're distracted, because it's payday – and charging you more:

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

For example, a McDonald's ventures portfolio company called Plexure offers drive-through restaurants the ability to raise the price of your regular order based on whether you've recently received your paycheck. They're just one of many "personalized pricing" companies that have attracted investor capital to figure out how to charge you more for the things you need, or merely for the small pleasures of life.

Personalized pricing (that is, "surveillance pricing") is part of the "pricing revolution" that is underway in the US and the world today. Another major element of this revolution are the "price clearinghouses" that charge firms within a sector to submit their prices to them, then "offer advice" on the optimum pricing. This advice – given to all the suppliers of a good or service – inevitably boils down to "everyone should raise their prices in unison." So long as everyone follows that advice, we poor suckers have nowhere else to go to get a better deal.

This is a pretty thin pretext. Price-fixing is illegal, after all. These companies pretend that when all the meat-packers in America send their pricing data to a "neutral" body like Agri-Stats, which then tells them all to jack up the price of meat, that this isn't a price-fixing conspiracy, since the actual conspiracy takes the form of strongly worded suggestions from an entity that isn't formally part of the industry:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

Same goes for when all the landlords in town send their rental data to a company like Realpage, which then offers "advice" about the optimum price, along with stern warnings not to rent below that price: apparently that's not price-fixing either:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

It's not just sellers who engage in this kind of price-fixing – it's also buyers. Specifically buyers of labor, AKA "bosses." Take contract nursing, where a cartel of three staffing apps have displaced the many small regional staffing agencies that historically served the sector. These companies buy nurses' credit history from the unregulated, Wild West data-brokerage sector. They're checking to see whether a nurse who's looking for a shift has a lot of credit-card debt, especially delinquent debt, because these nurses are facing economic hardship and will accept a lower wage than their better-off compatriots:

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

This is surveillance pricing for buyers, and as with the sell-side pricing revolution, buyers also make use of a third party as an accountability sink (a term coined by Dan Davies): the apps that they use to buy nursing labor are a convenient way for hospitals to pretend that they're not engaged in price-fixing for labor.

Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination." Algorithmic wage discrimination doesn't need to use third-party surveillance data: Uber, who invented the tactic, use their own in-house data as a way to make inferences about drivers' desperation and thus their willingness to accept a lower wage. Drivers who are less picky about which rides they accept are treated as more desperate, and offered lower wages than their pickier colleagues:

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

But this gets much creepier and more powerful when combined with aggregated surveillance data. This is one of the real labor consequences of AI: not the hypothetical millions of people who will become technologically unemployed, numbers that AI bosses pull out of their asses and hand to dutiful stenographers in the tech press who help them extol the power of their products; but rather the millions of people whose wages are suppressed by algorithms that continuously recalculate how desperate a worker is apt to be and lower their wages accordingly.

This is as good a candidate for AI regulation as any, but it's also a very good reason to regulate data brokers, who operate with total impunity. Thankfully, Biden's Consumer Finance Protection Bureau passed a rule that made data brokers effectively illegal:

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

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that rule, giving data brokers carte blanche to spy on you and sell your data, effectively without restriction:

https://www.wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-kills-rule-to-shield-americans-from-data-brokers/

(womp-womp)

Also, Biden's FTC was in the middle of an antitrust investigation into surveillance pricing on the eve of the election, a prelude to banning the practice in America:

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

But then Trump got elected and his despicable minions killed that investigation and instead created a snitch line where FTC employees could complain about colleagues who were "woke":

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-statement-emergency-motion.pdf

(Womp.)

(Womp.)

Naomi Klein's Doppelganger proposes a "mirror world" that the fever-swamp right lives in – a world where concern for children takes the form of Pizzagate conspiracies, while ignoring the starving babies in Gaza and the kids whose parents are being kidnapped by ICE:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

The pricing revolution is a kind of mirror-world Marxism, grounded in "From each according to their ability to pay; to each according to their economic desperation":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

A recent episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast featured an interview with Lee Hepner, an antitrust lawyer who is on the front lines of the pricing revolution (on the side of workers and buyers) (not bosses):

https://www.organizedmoney.fm/p/the-wild-world-of-surveillance-pricing

Hepner is the one who proposed the formulation that personalized pricing is a way for corporations to decide that your dollars are worth less than your neighbors' dollars – a form of economic discrimination that treats the poorest, most desperate, and most precarious among us as the people who should pay the most, because we are the people whose dollars are worth the least.

Now, this isn't always true. Earlier this month, the Delta, United and American were caught charging more for single travelers than they charged pairs of groups:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/airlines-charging-solo-travelers-higher-fares/

That's a way to charge business travelers extra – for valuing their dollars less than the dollars of families, not because business travelers are desperate, but because they are, on average, richer than holidaymakers (because their bosses are presumed to be buying their tickets). Sometimes, price discrimination really does charge richer people more to subsidize everyone else.

But here's the difference: when the news about the business-traveler's premium broke, its victims – powerful people with social capital and also regular capital – rose up in outrage, and the airlines reversed the policy:

https://thriftytraveler.com/news/airlines/delta-rethinks-higher-fares-solo-travelers/

If the airlines are still pursuing this kind of price discrimination, they'll do something sneakier, like buying our credit histories before showing us a price. This is something British Airways is already teeing up, by offering essentially zero reward miles to frequent travelers for partner airline tickets unless they're purchased from BA's own website:

https://onemileatatime.com/news/the-british-airways-club/

But BA operates in the UK, where most of the pre-Brexit, EU-based privacy regime is still intact, despite the best efforts of Keir Starmer to destroy it, something that neither Boris Johnson, nor Theresa May, nor Liz Truss could manage:

https://www.openrightsgroup.org/press-releases/uk-privacy-erosion-sparks-eu-civil-society-call-to-review-adequacy-data-deal/

So for now, BA travelers might be safe from surveillance pricing, at least in the UK and EU. And that's the thing, America is pretty much cooked. It might be generations – centuries – before the USA emerges from its Trumpian decline and becomes a civilized democracy again. Americans have little hope of a future in which their government protects them from corporate predators, rather than serving them up on a toothpick, along with a little cocktail napkin.

The future of the fight against corporate power and oligarchy is something for the rest of the world to carry on, as the American hermit kingdom sinks into ever-deeper collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/billionaires-eh/#galen-weston-is-a-rat

And as it happens, Canada's Competition Bureau, newly equipped with muscular enforcement powers thanks to a 2024 law, is seeking public comment on surveillance pricing and whether Canada should do something about it:

https://www.canada.ca/en/competition-bureau/news/2025/06/competition-bureau-seeks-feedback-on-algorithmic-pricing-and-competition.html

I'm writing comments for this one. If you're in Canada, or a Canadian abroad (like me), perhaps you could, too. If you're looking for an excellent Canadian perspective to crib from, check out this episode of The Globe and Mail's Lately podcast on the subject:

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

Just because America jumped off the Empire State Building, that's no reason for Canada to jump off the CN Tower, after all.

(Eh?)

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/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#algorithmic-pricing

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

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

[sovereignsolace]

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

[sovereignsolace]

[sovereignsolace]

[sovereignsolace]

Israel may appear to be "winning" for the moment, but that won't last. Already the media propaganda machine has stated multiple goals for these attacks:

1) Stop Iran's nuclear (weapons) program.

2) Regime change.

Dropping a few bombs won't accomplish either of those goals. And then what? 25 years of boots on the ground? Trump gets bored and walks away?

“I think it’s very possible that the U.S. is on the verge of a major, major military campaign that it wasn’t considering at all just a few days ago and that we may be doing that more or less solely because Donald Trump is jazzed about and attracted by the idea of “winning.” And Israel is now “winning.” So he wants in. It’s important to step back and recognize that there is really literally no one in the inner discussion of U.S. foreign policy today who has any level of foreign policy or military crisis experience at all. That’s a big statement. But I think it bears out. The two heads of the U.S. intelligence apparatus have zero experience in intelligence work. The head of the Pentagon is Pete Hegseth and he appears to have surrounded himself with lackeys. Marco Rubio is both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. He did focus to a degree on foreign policy in the Senate. But he’s never been involved in any national security crisis. He’s never worked in the executive branch. Even the people who are hardcore Trumpers but had some real level of foreign policy experience, like Keith Kellogg, now have other assignments. Kellogg is envoy to Ukraine. The current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs isn’t a career Army Officer. He spent a significant amount of his career in the Reserves. (I don’t think at least — but not certain on this point — that he ever served on the Joint Staff.) The point is that there’s really no one in the room, as it were, who is in a position to keep the President from just riffing. And I think there’s a decent chance that’s exactly what’s happening.”

— Thoughts on Israel’s Iran Campaign and Donald Trump

[sovereignsolace]

The electoral college was contrived long after the founding fathers. They'd probably have done a spit take over that idea as well.

[sovereignsolace]

Well, well, the logical predictions from April 2024 are quickly becoming reality.

"Put all of this together and you have a recipe for making the inflation rate 9 percent again: Slash the dollar’s value, insulate US producers from competition, juice demand with tax cuts, and then throttle supply with mass deportation, and prices are bound to soar."

My my, that's some clearheaded analysis and good writing right there.

[sovereignsolace]

[sovereignsolace]

My city has boulevards. In the summer the (generally 3 meters wide) space between the westbound traffic and the eastbound traffic might be grass or flowers. And in the winter it's a giant pile of snow.

You know what I've never really seen realistically depicted in fiction? The way that people in places that get a huge amount of snow deal with said snow. Specifically in the cities. I get that it's probably not exactly an intuitive thing to think about if you've never lived in a place that gets a lot of snow, and even if you do, you probably figure that they must have some really sophisticated infrastructure systems specifically for this purpose. It's not like they'll just scoop the snow off the streets and gather it into huge piles, and then just climb over the progressively larger and larger snow piles every single year for months while waiting for the piles to melt in the spring.

We do. There's no point in planning more sophisticated systems to get rid of something that'll eventually just go away on its own. So they just pile the snow into randomly designated spaces that cars or people aren't supposed to go through, and let it pile up. There's significantly less street parking available in the winter because some spots where you could otherwise park a car are currently the parking spot of a snow pile three times taller than a car.

You get used to it. And if you grow up around here, it never even occurs to you to think of it as something strange in the first place.

[sovereignsolace]

Ron Johnson knows he is up for reelection this fall, and so he has to pretend to be a human being for a few months before he can return to his usual ghoul form. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Stephen Miller is a cancer.

Unelected. Unqualified. Truly evil.

[sovereignsolace]

lydia davis

[sovereignsolace]

I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

[sovereignsolace]

I saw a post going around a while ago (including from a non-US moot) about getting comfortable lying to law enforcement

Here's the thing. In the US.

DO NOT TALK TO LAW ENFORCEMENT IN THE FIRST PLACE.

If you are in a situation where you're lying to law enforcement, you are already interacting too much. STOP TALKING.

You can ask if you are free to go. You can keep asking.

Per the National Lawyers Guild, ESPECIALLY do not lie to the FBI. Do not say things to them that could be construed as lying. Those are serious charges. The best way around that is NOT TALKING.

In the words of the National Lawyers Guild: SHUT THE FUCK UP.

[sovereignsolace]

If the pioneers, the US government, and the military had followed the Collaboration and Diplomacy approach that you suggest, I think one highly probable outcome is that the Dust Bowl would have been avoided.

Oklahoma only blew away because farmers cut the prairie sod to grow wheat, which they were able to attempt because 1) wheat prices were temporarily high and 2) the government was giving away land it had bought from the investor class who tried (and failed) to make a profit on cattle after the military killed all the bison.

Cattle and bison are both delicious, but bison can survive winter on the high prairie. Sticking with bison would have prevented the plow. And I think a little Collaboration and Diplomacy would easily have led to an alternate history here.

On the Arrogance of Pioneers

Last month I was fortunate enough to free up a few days on my calendar and used the time to escape to the Blue Mountains. It’s an ecoregion that I am incredibly fond of, and it had been a few years since I had spent time there. I made time to visit the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland in Wallowa, OR. This 320 acre portion of the Wallowa Valley is a miniscule fraction of the traditional home of the Wallowa band of the Nimíipuu (Nez Perce), and was purchased by the Wallowa Band Nez Perce Trail Interpretive Center, Inc. with help from a variety of public and private grants. The Wallowa Band have graciously made this place available to the public from dawn until dusk, and it features a gorgeous four mile loop trail as well as waterfront land along the Wallowa River.

I arrived pretty late in the day, and it was quite warm, so I only made it up the switchbacks on the ridge up to the lookout gazebo. Still, the view was stunning, and afforded an incredible view of a large portion of the valley and the mountains that create its western border. I can absolutely understand how Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it (Chief Joseph) and his people would have been heartbroken to be forced away from this place that had been home for so very long, and where their ancestors were buried.

As I drove west on 82 back to my hotel, I passed by several ranches that fenced in everything from quarter horses to longhorn cattle. Signs proclaimed what year some of these ranches were founded; one in particular bragged that it had been around since 1884--just seven years after the Nez Perce War in which the Wallowa band had been violently removed from the valley. Hinmatóowyalahtq̓it himself died of heartbreak in exile twenty years after that ranch was founded on thousands of acres stolen from his people.

What thoughts did this lead to? Find out under the cut.

I spent the rest of the drive thinking about these ranches, and how they reminded me of my travels through the Midwest on my twice-a-year peregrinations back home to the Missouri Ozarks. The highways throughout the Great Plains and beyond are dotted with little museums preserving and elevating the history of the largely white American settlers who flooded into lands west of the Mississippi through the middle of the 19th century. While in recent years some have begun highlighting the indigenous cultures displaced by this colonization, there remains a frequent emphasis on "the pioneer spirit" and the hardships settlers faced in "taming the wilderness" with plows, guns, and livestock.

John Gast's famous painting "American Progress" depicting Manifest Destiny as a giant white woman leading settlers and farmers into a sunlit American West, while in the darkened margins indigenous people, their horses, and wild animals flee before "progress".

But what about the hardships faced by the many thousands of indigenous people forced to leave their homes and settle in reservations hundreds or even thousands of miles away? At least the pioneers chose to go west and take over the land; the indigenous people didn't have a choice, and most folks don't take the time to compare and contrast these two migrations. That goes against the dominant narrative. Manifest Destiny proclaimed that American settlers must spread across the width of the continent, from sea to shining sea, and turn it into farmland. By the time these settlers arrived, the indigenous people had already been reduced greatly in number by European diseases, and those who remained were not seen as properly using the land*.

And yet--and yet--no one questions whether things could have been done differently. In what is now Oregon, the various tribes lived within a complex trade and social network with etiquette and shared cultural practices that helped to keep the peace and respect each other's lands when visiting or passing through. When the first white traders arrived, indigenous communities often folded them into these networks, and traders who respected the boundaries were welcomed. This wasn't unique to the Pacific Northwest, either.

What if this had remained the status quo? What if, instead of Europeans and then the U.S. government waging war on Native Americans and forcing them off their land, we had instead worked toward coexistence with the people who had already been here for thousands of years? What if we had managed the same accomplishments we have, in everything from medicine to transportation, but with collaboration with indigenous people rather than domination? We could have gone in with diplomacy, and instead decided to take the easier scorched earth approach in pursuit of profit and power.

No, we can't change the past. But we can look at the present and plan for a better future. That requires us to look at the stories we tell about how the West was "won", and ask why we cling so hard to the narrative of the "good" pioneers, and the Indians who just got in the way, or who supposedly attacked settlers for no good reason. Every time we dig our heels in and insist that "Well, we won and they lost and that's just how it is" or "They weren't even using the land, and it's been in my family for seven generations and we made that ranch what it is", we cut off the opportunity to expand on those narratives and get the whole story. The defensiveness keeps people from having to ask difficult questions and find themselves with uncomfortable answers.

But then, who wants to be made out to be the bad guy, especially when American exceptionalism has told us for generations that we are the best, the greatest, and we can do no wrong? Once you put a crack in that façade, the whole structure on which the pioneer narrative was built starts to crumble. That's scary for people who have known nothing else, and it's not surprising when people who benefit from owning thousands of acres of stolen indigenous land wrap their arms and legs around the justifications for that theft.

It takes real courage to question generations of assumptions and suppressed history while listening and reading to indigenous narratives that go counter to what you were taught. It is brave indeed to look at your current situation--and the history behind it--without getting bogged down in kneejerk defensive reactions. And it is real strength to not then wallow in so much guilt that you never leave the pity party, but instead search for solutions.

I am certainly not an expert in this. I'm one American of assorted European genetic strains, raised in the Midwest surrounded by small towns and cattle farms but long since ensconced in the Pacific Northwest, trying to figure out how to be a better part of the community. And not just the human community, either, because this discussion about what we did to indigenous people for centuries also extends to our behavior toward other living beings, too. But I do know it starts with at least thinking about and questioning the narratives we've been taught in school, in popular culture, and in how our government has treated indigenous people throughout its entire almost 250 year history. If you're like me, consider this an invitation to do the same.

*Just because indigenous communities in the West weren't practicing intensive agriculture in the American sense doesn't mean they weren't farming. Plants might be spread to new places, controlled burns were used to keep prairies and meadows open, and many cultures relied on seasonal migrations to different parts of their land depending on food availability. Extensive trade networks across the continent meant that extra food often found its way far from its land of origin; preserved camas from the Willamette Valley might ultimately be traded for a bison hide in what is now Colorado.

Much of my work was developed on unceded Chinook land on the Long Beach Peninsula in southwest Washington. To help the Chinook Indian Nation regain their federal recognition, and gain access to resources like treaty rights and healthcare, there are some simple but effective ways anyone can help at ChinookJustice.org.

[sovereignsolace]

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/12/29/the-japanese-micro-forest-method-is-transforming-cities

The Japanese ‘micro-forest’ method is transforming cities

[sovereignsolace]

Roads go ever ever on🏔️

[sovereignsolace]

Calories keep you alive, my friends.

To quote a beloved Boomer in my family: you're going to need about 900 calories every day, just to keep body and soul together. And if you want any amount of personality, you'd better add about a thousand more.

theyre inventing the opposite of ozempic that actually makes you happy. and theyre calling it yummy foods and treats