#Deceiver or Payola

[imagionary]

Randomized Fusion between Dave and Cathal! Title is either Deceiver or Payola ^v^

Other concepts under cut:

(Atari head and portable VCR possibilities I ping ponged in my brain)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Meatspace twiddling

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me next weekend (Mar 30/31) in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON, then in Boston with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then Providence (Apr 12), and beyond!

"Enshittification" isn't just a way of describing the symptoms of platform decay: it's also a theory of the mechanism of decay – the means by which platforms get shittier and shittier until they are a giant pile of shit.

I call that mechanism "twiddling": this is the ability of digital services to alter their business-logic – the prices they charge, the payouts they offer, the particulars of the deal – from instant to instant, for each user, continuously:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Contrary to Big Tech's own boasting about its operations, the tricks that tech firms play to siphon value away from business customers and end-users aren't very sophisticated. They're crude gimmicks, like offering a higher per-hour wage to Uber drivers whom the algorithm judges to be picky about which rides they'll clock in for, and then lowering the wage by small increments as a way of lulling the driver into gradually accepting a permanent lower rate:

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

This is a simple trick. The difference is that tech platforms like Uber can play it over and over, and very quickly. There's plenty of wage-stealing scumbag bosses who'd have loved to have shaved pennies off their workers' paychecks, then added a few cents back in if a worker cried foul, then started shaving the pennies again. The thing that stopped those bosses was the bottleneck of payroll clerks, who couldn't make the changes fast enough.

Uber plays crude tricks – like claiming that a driver isn't an employee because the control is mediated through an app – and then piles more crude tricks on top – this algorithmic wage discrimination gambit.

Have you ever watched a shell-game performed very slowly?

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-do-penn-tellers-famous-cups-and-balls-trick-in-12-steps

It's a series of very simple gimmicks, performed very quickly and smoothly. Computers are very quick and very smooth. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye: do crude tricks with superhuman speed and they'll seem sophisticated.

The one bright spot in the Great Enshittening that we're living through is that many firms are not sufficiently digitized to to these crude tricks very quickly. Take grocery stores: they can get up to a lot of the same tricks as Amazon – for example, they can charge suppliers for placement on the most prominent, easiest-to-reach shelves, reorganizing your shopping based on which companies pay the biggest bribes, rather than offering the best products and prices.

But Amazon takes this to a whole different level – beyond simply organizing their product pages based on payola, they do this for search. You ask Amazon, "What's your cheapest batteries?" and it lies to you. If you click the first link in a search-results page, you'll pay 29% more than you would if you got the best product – a product that is, on average, 17 places down on the results page. Amazon makes $38b/year taking bribes to lie to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Amazon can do more than that. Thanks to its digital nature, it can continuously reprice its offerings – indeed, it can simply make up each price displayed on every product at the instant you look at it – based on its surveillance data about you, estimating your willingness to pay. For sellers, Amazon can continuously re-weight the likelihood that a given product will be shown to a customer based on the seller's willingness to discount their products, even to the point where they go out of business:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

Twiddling, in other words, lets digital services honeycomb their servers with sneaky wormholes that let them siphon value away from one kind of platform user and give it to another (as when Apple silently began spying on Iphone owners to create profiles for advertisers), or to themselves.

But hard-goods businesses struggle to do this kind of twiddling. Not for lack of desire – but for lack of capacity. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon Fresh – an online grocery store – can change prices and layout millions of times per day, at effectively zero cost. Jeff Bezos, owner of Whole Foods – a brick-and-mortar grocer – needs a army of teenagers on rollerskates with pricing guns to achieve a fraction of this agility.

So hard-goods businesses are somewhat enshittification-resistant. It's not that their owners are more interested in the welfare of their customers, workers and suppliers – they merely lack the capacity to continuously rejigger the way their business runs.

Well, about that.

Grocers have been experimenting with "electronic shelf labels" in order to do "dynamic pricing" – that means that prices change quickly, in response to circumstances:

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1197958433/dynamic-pricing-grocery-supermarkets

This doesn't have to be bad! As @planetmoney points out, it's a little weird that grocers don't discount milk whose sell-by date is drawing near. That milk is worth less to shoppers, because they have to use it more quickly lest it expire. Instead of marking down the price of perishable goods – day-old lettuce, yesterday's bread, etc – grocers put them on the shelves next to fresher, more valuable products, leading to billions of dollars' worth of food-waste and and unimaginable quantities of methane-producing, planet-cooking landfill.

In Norway, ESLs are pretty well established and – at least according to Planet Money's reporting – they are used exclusively to offer discounts in order to reduce waste. They make everyone better off.

But towards the end of the story, they note that Norway's grocery sector – which alters prices up to 2,000 times per day – has been accused of using ESLs to rig prices, hiking them and blaming them on pandemic supply-chain problems and loose monetary policy. Greedflation, in other words.

Greedflation is rampant in the grocery sector, all around the world. Remember when the price of eggs doubled and they blamed in on bird-flu, even as the CEO of the one company that owns every egg brand you've ever heard of boasted about how he could hike prices and suckers would just pay it?

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

In Canada, grocers rigged the price of bread, the most Les-Mis-ass form of corporate crime you can imagine (do you want guillotines, Galen Weston? Because this is how you get guillotines):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada

EU grocers – another highly concentrated industry – also collude to rig prices:

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

Which is all to say that while these companies don't have to use the twiddling capabilities that come with ESLs to enshittify their stores, we'd be pretty fucking naive to assume that they won't.

And here's the bad news: US grocers like Whole Foods (owned by Amazon, the company that wrote the enshittification playbook) are already experimenting with ESLs. So is Alberstons/Safeway, the massive, inbred conglomerate that has already demonstrated its passion for using twiddling to fuck over their workers:

https://knock-la.com/vons-fires-delivery-drivers-prop-22-e899ee24ffd0/

Economists love "price discrimination" – where prices change based on circumstance, trying to match the perfect price with the perfect customer. On paper, that sounds plausible: if I need a quart of milk for a recipe I'm making tonight and I get a 50% discount on some about-to-expire 2%, then everyone's better off. I get a discount and the grocer gets some money for milk they'd have to throw away at the end of the day.

But these elegant, self-licking ice-cream cones only emerge if the corporation offering the deal is constrained. Perhaps they're constrained by competition – the fear that you'll go elsewhere. Or perhaps they're constrained by regulation – the fear that they'll be punished if they use twiddling-tech to cheat you.

The grocery sector, dominated by a cartel of massive companies that routinely collude to rip us off, is not constrained by competition. And for years, regulators let them get away with ripping us off (though finally that might be changing):

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/us/politics/grocery-prices-pandemic-ftc.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ek0.t2Pr.g4n2usbxEcoa

For neoclassical economists, the answer to all this is "caveat emptor" – let the buyer beware. If you want to make sure that ESLs are only used to offer you discounts and not to gouge prices, all you need to do is note the price of everything you buy, every time you buy it, and triple-check it every time you go back to the grocery store. Just be eternally vigilant!

Thing is, the one thing computers are much better at than humans is vigilance. With ESLs and other twiddling mechanisms, you're a fish on a hook, and the seller is tireless in giving you a little more slack, then a little less, until you finally drop your guard.

Economists desperately want these elegant models to work, but "efficient market hypothesis" is a brain-worm that always turns into apologetics for fraud. Dynamic markets sound like a good idea, but they are catnip for cheaters. "Just be eternally vigilant" is miserable advice, and no way to live your life:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

In his brilliant novel Spook Country, @GreatDismal describes augmented reality as "cyberspace everting" – that is, turning inside-out:

https://memex.craphound.com/2007/07/31/william-gibsons-spook-country/

The extrusion of twiddling technology from digital platforms into the physical world isn't cyberspace everting so much as it is cyberspace prolapsing.

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/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

[cardboardheartss]

Min Hee Jin vs HYBE Situation Continued…

⚠️DISCLAIMER! TAROT CARDS ARE NOT 100% ACCURATE! TAKE EVERYTHING WITH A GRAIN OF SALT! IF MY INTERPRETATIONS ARE INCORRECT FEEL FREE TO CORRECT ME!⚠️

What more about HYBE will be exposed? : 2oS rx, 6oW rx, The Chariot rx, 4oP rx, The Star, 9oP, AoP, Judgement rx, WoF

Well… they are going to continue to fall from grace as more information about them gets exposed. They really can’t control it anymore because us netizens don’t really care a damn for this company and will gladly wait for their downfall. They will get exposed for obviously doing payola/sajaegi for all of their groups. People all over social media will start to wonder if all these groups under hybe (excl. nwjns) deserve the success because it will be exposed that it’s all possibly paid for and gained from connections too (9oP).

Outcome of situation : 10oW, 8oC rx, 3oW, 8oS, PoS rx, PoC rx, Justice, QoP rx, 7oS

Downfall of HYBE loading… they will continue to get exposed and I’m telling you they are going to 1000% regret starting this fiasco. There will be more bad news coming out about this whole establishment and they will try deceive the public again but it will not work because I can see a women I believe, possibly a snake from the building or someone from the outside exposing hybe.

ngl… I’m looking forward to this!✊🏽

What could MHJ expose about HYBE/K-Industry : The Hermit, The High Priestess. The Empress, 6oS rx, 9oS rx, QoP, AoS, QoS rx, 3oS rx, 2oC, KNoS

Unfortunately, MHJ is going through soo much right now. It is taking a toll on her mentally and physically. She’s tired, but she doesn’t want to stop fighting for NEWJEANS, she knows how evil these men are and how much they want to take credit for her work. She feels betrayed, she truly does feel betrayed and this will definitely make her an even more brutal and bitter person but mainly toward men in general and the higher ups in the industry.

She does not have any ideas as to what she could to expose… she’s just numb and tired.

channeled songs :

I was supposed to not post until I finish writing but I had to get this out my chest… I’m praying for nwjns mainly Dani and Hyein. They truly deserve so much more.🥺💘

[stuckinapatriarchalbullshitland]

Dear, Stuck! I followed your suggestion and watched the whole thing with Alicia, but made me so sick. I had a feeling he had a big ego, but I wasn’t expecting this much. Looks fake from beginning to the end and really had the audacity to put himself in the same level as fucking Alicia Keys. Really feeling bad for Camila having to put up with such egocentrism for God knows how long more.

Still didn’t understand what you meant though. Did she give any hints I may have not seen? Another question is, what an artist well established and big like she is would gain for such deal? Just money?

Thanks for being so patient.

In one part of the interview, when he says something she rolls her eyes. I don't have the clip or the GiF but I saw that scene. When you talk about ego, that's what I was trying to say when I recommended you to watch the video, my friend. Here they have tried to defend him because of Alessia Cara and it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if he did it or not, but the fact is that he always sold himself as a perfect boy that he has never been. That is why I am sure that he should not be as loved in the industry as he seems and those who support him, do it for a contract. Otherwise, I think Billie wouldn't have denied him her phone calls when he called her. Such an artist is mediocre. Insulting. Flat. And to answer your question, Alicia did it for a contract. Money gets almost everything in the industry and more with him that he has dedicated his entire career to winning numbers through payolas. He pays for everything, dear Anon. From inflating his numbers with payolas to the support that other artists give him. That liar's mask fell in the same way that he silenced Ellen DeGeneres's mask and that is something that should happen more often in the industry. The bastards are dedicated to selling lies, to sell plastic artists with a giant ego like a building instead of a real artist, with flaws, with problems, with characters that sometimes annoy. But they are real. I think that's why I follow the girls, Camila because she has never hidden all the faces from her and those faces are not to everyone's liking and Lauren, the same. We know that Camila loves to be silly sometimes, but we also know that she has that more serious, grumpy side that we don't always see but she's there and it's the same with Lauren. The diva has never been like this. He has always sold himself as someone perfect that when he starts to show his true face, his fans don't like him and he has to hide again. Poor asshole. And I don't like his attitude, I think the fandom lived deceived by that part that he showed the public and that he hid in real life and well, it is time to stop hiding it. Although of course, even if he brings out that part of him more real to me it will not matter because I do not like him, I never liked him and I never will.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Foodcrime

We are living in a golden age of predatory capitalism, in which businesses that generate real value and stable employment are being destroyed by deep-pocketed quasi-tech firms that lose money on every transaction but hope to make it back by securing monopolies.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the restaurant industry, where a bewildering array of deceptive (and even fraudulent) tactics are being deployed by Doordash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, and Yelp, who have nonconsensually interposed themselves between eaters and restaurateurs.

If this is ringing bells, you might be recalling the infamous May case-study in which a pizzeria owner discovered that Doordash had put up a fake delivery page for his restaurant and was selling his pizzas for less than he charged for them.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/18/code-is-speech/#schadenpizza

Doordash would take the orders, then pay low-waged workers to call the restaurant and pretend to be real customers ordering takeouts. Then other low-waged gig economy workers would pick them up, pretending to be diners, and deliver them.

The end-game was to become a gatekeeper to the restaurant, by offering lower-than-cost pizzas to this guy's customers and then threatening to divert them to a rival unless he paid ransom to Doordash.

The wily pizza owner figured out that he could order dozens of his pizzas to a confederate's home, and simply ship out boxes of half-cooked dough, and bill Doordash a small fortune for a few pennies' worth of cardboard and flour.

It was quite a fun story!

Alas, it was not representative. In the time since, the outlandish, predatory conduct of app companies has intensified, documented in "Rescuing Restaurants: How to Protect Restaurants, Workers, and Communities from Predatory Delivery App Corporations."

https://www.economicliberties.us/our-work/rescuing-restaurants-how-to-protect-restaurants-workers-and-communities-from-predatory-delivery-app-corporations/

The report comes from Moe Tkacik for the American Economic Liberties Project, and it documents the fraudulent, anticompetitive tactics used by tech companies to steal from restaurants:

Merging dozens of companies (online menus, delivery services, etc) into a single giant, then doubling its fees

Creating fake websites for restaurants, then using SEO to make them the top results on Google, and tricking customers into ordering through an app company instead of a restaurant

Imposing anticompetitive contracting terms on restaurants prohibiting them from offering discounts for in-person dining or own-driver delivery

Punishing restaurants that refuse to pay for upsell "marketing services" by banishing them from app search-results

Tricking drivers into becoming dependent on apps for income, merging with competitors so they have no alternative, slashing wages, all while maintaining the fiction that drivers are "independent contractors"

Collecting sales tax on take-out orders that are not taxable and pocketing it

Using tax-evasion techniques to avoid sales- and income-tax at the local, state and federal level

Bribing Google (paying "referral fees") to add "order now" buttons to restaurants' listings that go to apps, not the restaurants' own ordering systems

When restaurants cancel their Grubhub service and build their own ordering systems, Grubhub fraudulently lists those restaurants as "not offering delivery"

Building "ghost kitchens" in shipping containers (etc) that clone the menus and recipes of the popular restaurants they've driven to their knees (while tricking chefs into working under dangerous, low-waged conditions in them)

It's the latest wrinkle on all the predatory businesses whose principle competence is SEO and fraud - think of the fake "locksmiths" that completely dominate all Google searches.

These are bullshit referral services that dispatch an untrained guy with a drill to destroy your lock and charge you a fortune, while the actual, skilled locksmiths in your neighborhood can't be located with a search.

But this is worse, because these predators have fantastically deep pockets, with money from the likes of Softbank (the notorious front for the Saudi royals behind Uber and Wework), and can afford to lose huge sums for years.

Older tech companies, like Yelp, are getting in on the action. As Edward Ongweso Jr reports for Motherboard, Yelp now fraudulently lists Grubhub's call center as the order number for restaurants in its database.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjwebw/yelp-is-sneakily-replacing-restaurants-phone-numbers-so-grubhub-can-take-a-cut

People who calls these numbers are deceived into thinking they are ordering from the restaurants they know and love - instead, they are being victimized by a rent-seeking man-in-the-middle attack that will destroy that restaurant over time.

Tkacik's report concludes with nine recommendations:

I. Investigate and prosecute the apps’ systematic unfair and deceptive practices

II. Prohibit delivery apps from imposing no price competition clauses

III. Ban further anti-competitive mergers in the sector

IV. Enforce and expand local laws curbing predatory commissions and other delivery app abuses

V. Prohibit delivery apps from using loss-leader pricing to harm competition and incentivize consumers to abandon on-premise dining

VI. Eliminate “independent contractor” loopholes and force the third party delivery giants to give their workers the wages, protections and benefits required of employers

VII. Require delivery apps to restrict the use of data collected from restaurants to  limited and specific purposes, and explicitly prohibit them from leveraging data

VIII. Mandate search neutrality within apps and bar payola style arrangements between apps and restaurants

IX. Separate platform and commerce in two ways: (1) Prohibit the combination of online ordering apps and delivery/logistics services (2) Online ordering apps and dark kitchens