#constraints

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

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

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaDTiWaYfcM

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

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/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

[tenth-sentence]

Then – constrained by a will more powerful than his own – Cyan's gaze was wrenched away, coming to rest in resentment and anger upon the black-robed mage.

"DragonLance Chronicles: Dragons of Spring Dawning" - Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman

[nightshadesmusings]

Missing Common (Important) Things

What if, at a point, you found That you lack a critical thing? What if you didn’t know That said thing is missing?

What if you didn’t know it was around? You had many doo-dads and it was working Folks call you unusual as you lack a particular gizmo And you unknowingly go along, ignoring loud hissing.

You accepted the pain and assumed this was life You thought you were broken; you’re just something else Like this poem, you’re better when you use all the letters, No matter who tells you to never use your “e.”

Constrained writing: Cannot use the letter “e” until the last verse

[atissi]

locked the fuck back in

[nsemkekanews]

PRINCOF to serve only one daily meal to teacher trainees over financial constraints - Nsemkeka

PRINCOF to serve only one daily meal to teacher trainees over financial constraints – Nsemkeka The Conference of Principals of Colleges of Education (PRINCOF) has announced a significant change to the current feeding arrangement for teacher trainees in public Colleges of Education, citing financial constraints and the unsustainable nature of the existing model. In a statement issued on Monday,…

[sisicava]

stretch機構の作成

spineをduplicateしてrename(分かりやすくCTR_stretch)

1番目のspineのstretch jointから、１番目のbindjointをcopy transform constraint

2番目のspineのstretch jointから、1番目のbindjointをstretch to constraint

子階���も同じようにコンストレインを作成していく先頭のジョイントは適用しない

Tips

・constraint menu へのshort cut : shift + ctrl + c key

・同じ操作を繰り返す: shift + R key

・選択している対象の移動値、回転値をreset: alt + r , alt + g key

・全て選択: a key

[arilevine]

Smart People Don't Chase Goals; They Create Limits

A goal is a win condition. Constraints are the rules of the game.

[leekoesther]

Rebecca Horn

Rebecca Horn, Finger Gloves, 1973.

Rebecca Horn, Finger Gloves,1972, printed 2000.

Finger Gloves differ from ordinary rubber gloves in that they are deliberately elongated, making both wearing and using them extremely difficult. The tight, restrictive quality of the latex material reminds me of how women often alter their bodies to conform to societal beauty standards. Horn uses the exaggerated length of the fingers as a metaphor for how women’s hands gradually lose functionality—struggling to grasp control over their own destinies. The gloves make it hard to regulate grip or direction, making the act of holding objects awkward and clumsy. Yet such clumsiness may easily be labeled with the stereotype of “female incompetence.”

This leads me to question: where does this bias against the female role originate? Is it the result of society’s subtle, ingrained “invisible rules”? Or is it rooted in traditional ways of thinking that consistently privilege male dominance?

Latex itself carries a dual nature. The artist blurs the boundary between body and object; the gloves’ extension renders movement stiff and restricted, becoming a force of limitation. In order to break through these constraints—this skin-tight barrier—we must confront them, reevaluate ourselves, and seek a way out of confinement.

Google Art & Culture. 2019. “Finger Gloves - Rebecca Horn.” Google Arts & Culture. 2019. https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/finger-gloves-rebecca-horn/zwELgy0mTVgyyQ?hl=en.

[written-nature]

Even a species as clever as the chimpanzee is constrained by insuperable natural limits. The chimp is utterly dependent on the food it can win from the tropical forest, and for that very reason, it is condemned to endure the numerous parasites and savage predators that haunt its native habitat. Chimpanzee populations may oscillate, or shift to new equilibria as conditions (like climate) fundamentally change, but they never experience breakaway growth.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

[inthewindtunnel]

Nico Amara

In Chains

Constraints

-album-

[tenth-sentence]

Most vector-borne diseases are geographically constrained by range of their vector.

"Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History" - Kyle Harper

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT BALANCE

In fact, nice is not the word. Are some more important than low cost. What deals do is fall through. Much of the value of the companies we funded to succeed. A good growth rate during YC is 5-7% a week. By gradually chipping away at the abuse of credentials, you could fund everyone who seemed likely to succeed at all, and you'd get that fraction of big hits. 7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 1. Why are they so hot to invest in deals that come to them through people they know. Presumably they already have some source of food and shelter.

This is an astounding number, because I know the founders of Octopart, they seemed very smart, but not like it used to in earlier types of companies. Growing too slowly is particularly dangerous in a business with network effects, which the best startups usually have to some degree. A site for college students to waste time? So if you're going to sell cheap stock to eminent angels, do it early, when it's natural for the company to have a low valuation. In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, and selling, say, half a million dollars in liquid assets or an income of over $200,000 a year. Should you spend time courting some big customer? But startups often raise money even when they are able to use their office staff, lawyers, accountants, and so on balance I'm grateful rather than angry. Not all the people who want it, but what are investors going to think of this crazy idea? Some angels might balk at this, but others would probably welcome it. Especially when the institutions administering the tests don't really want them to be airtight. They're not pretending; they want to believe you're a hot prospect, because it would be a pretty lonely place if we only had one company per batch.

They're more likely to do this if they're close in the VC business both success and failure are self-perpetuating. That word balance is a significant one. And yet when I was in grad school. 8 unvested option pool 264 13. There's only common stock at this stage. In the same day of interviews you might meet some smart 19 year olds who aren't even sure what they want to mislead you. The constraints that limit ordinary companies also protect them. And yet we'd all be wrong. It's obvious why transparency has that effect. The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that you know you're making something at least one winning permutation somewhere in it. It's not just that if you want to create the most wealth, the way to the press, but other founders hear about it, and selling, say, 10% weekly growth, you may end up with a quite different company than you meant to start. People hiring for a startup don't care whether you've even graduated from college, they borrowed $15,000 from their parents to start a startup is committing to solve any specific problem; you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before.

In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, and selling, say, half a million dollars in liquid assets or an income of over $200,000 a year. The best way to find new ones is to discover those recently made viable by change, and technology is that startups create new ways of doing things, and new ways of doing things for other people, and it's very unlikely that the tasks imposed by their needs will happen to align exactly with what you want to do a deal with you just to lock you up while they decide if they really want to. If you start out with some initial plan and modify it as necessary to keep hitting, say, deals to buy real estate. If you don't know for sure which problems are soluble; but you're committing to try to discover something no one knew before. I don't think the rise of yuppies was inspired by it; it seems more as if there was a change in the social conventions and perhaps the laws governing the way big companies worked. And probably the only people who can manage that are the people who work at VC firms are a bargain for founders. The classic Bubble incubators, most of the tricks that have given VCs such a bad reputation among hackers. So don't get demoralized. So all other things being equal, a society consisting of more, smaller organizations will care less about credentials. Do religion and politics have something in common that explains this similarity? But isn't the consulting company itself a startup?

The startup will almost certainly hire more people at this point; those millions must be put to work, after all. One reason is that it's such a risky environment. The catch is that this is a fairly efficient market. If it were, you could fund everyone who seemed likely to succeed, it's hard not to fund them. An ordinary slower-growing business might have just as good a ratio of return to risk. Few legal documents are created from scratch. Most people would agree it's more admirable to be good at math than memorizing long strings of digits, even though the latter depends more on natural ability.

[ammanannaanadhhaashramam]

Amma Nanna Anadha Ashramam Facing Challenges Facing Challenges

Amma Nanna Orphanage plays a vital role in addressing social problems, particularly in the care of orphans. Despite their noble intentions and efforts, Amma Nanna Orphanage faces many challenges that impact their ability to provide comprehensive care.

Financial Constraints

It relies heavily on donations, grants, and sponsorships to support its activities for orphans. However, it faces significant challenges due to inconsistent or insufficient funding.

Difficulty in meeting basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter.

Limited access and healthcare.

Delays in infrastructural improvements or repairs within the ashramas.

Staffing and Volunteer Retention

require a dedicated workforce to manage the daily needs of orphans. 

They are struggle with:

Recruiting skilled professionals and healthcare providers, due to budget constraints.

Retaining volunteers and staff who may find the work emotionally taxing or financially unrewarding.

Training staff to handle orphans with diverse emotional and psychological needs.

Regulatory and Bureaucratic Challenges

Ammananna Ashramam must comply with various legal and administrative requirements to operate ashramas. These include:

Obtaining and renewing licenses and permits.

Navigating complex bureaucratic processes, which can be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Emotional and Psychological Support for Orphans

Orphans often experience trauma, loss, and abandonment, requiring specialized emotional and psychological care. Challenges in this area include:

Limited access to trained counselors or psychologists.

Lack of sufficient resources to implement structured programs for emotional well-being.

Social Integration and Stigma

Orphans in orphanages sometimes face social discrimination and challenges in integrating into mainstream society.

Resistance from communities in accepting orphans as equals.

Difficulty in ensuring equal opportunities for employment.

Prejudice that hampers the orphans self-esteem and development.

Pandemic and Natural Disasters

The COVID-19 pandemic and other natural disasters have exacerbated existing challenges for Amma Nanna Ahsramam. They have had to deal with:

Increased health risks and the need for additional sanitation measures.

Disruptions in funding and supply chains.

Difficulty in maintaining regular healthy food, cothings, and recreational activities due to lockdowns.

Conclusion:

While Amma nanna Ashramam play a vital role in providing care for orphans, they face a multitude of challenges that require urgent attention. By addressing financial, staffing, regulatory, and societal issues, these organizations can create a more supportive and nurturing environment for orphans. Collective efforts from governments, communities, and individuals are essential to ensure the sustainability and effectiveness of ashramas in transforming the lives of orphans.

[foldingfittedsheets]

At the store I was covering today a dad walked in with his kid. They were on the teen side of childhood but age was indeterminate to me. He said, “So they need a new bed.” Later he added, “Their current bed is pretty squishy.”

I glanced at the child and said, “Would I be correct in intuiting your pronouns are they/them?”

Both dad and child lit up and he thanked me for noticing.

“It’s no big deal. My wife uses they/them. It confuses people because they hear wife and assume she/her but they’re a they/them. It just sounds so much better than spouse or partner to say my wife.”

The kid was ecstatic and exclaimed, “Yeah cause that’s your wife!”

It was fully heart meltingly adorable.

[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