#i will be disregarding the ''sketch'' part of this reward for as long as i GODDAMN WANT

[toodrunktofindaurl]

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[thesinglesjukebox]

ARCA - @@@@@

[8.00]

The longest song we've ever covered on the Singles Jukebox - a masterclass in queer theory and theoretical physics...

Leah Isobel: Before the pandemic shut down every club in the city, I'd started going out dancing by myself. It's a self-care activity I'd been circling around for awhile, a ritual to force my mind to return to my body. When I'm dancing, I want music that keeps me moving; form matters less than continuance, and time doesn't move in the same way. "@@@@@" carries some of that disregard for temporal structure, and not just because it's a single that stretches over an hour. Arca presents it, at first, as a pirate radio broadcast, so she segues from one distinct idea to the next. But over the course of the piece, sections start to bleed into each other without as much space between - she changes its form both more frequently and more seamlessly, like she's sculpting with primordial ooze. The music moves from punishing industrial to club music to piano balladry and back, over and over and over. The challenge she presents the listener is like the one I present myself when I'm dancing: can I stay present and responsive to each new dynamic shift? Can I make my body and mind a coherent, functional system? Now that I'm spending so much time alone, this challenge feels more important than before. Arca embeds an answer directly in the track: "you can shake that pussy, bitch." [9]

Oliver Maier: On the cover of "@@@@@", Arca is draped over a crushed car. The wrecked vehicle suggests a gruesome accident, the freaky wiring suggests a calculated setup, Arca's corpselike diva pose suggests both at once. It's a solid visual metaphor for her music, split between manicured order and grinding chaos, as if any one of the movements (or "quantums") which comprise "@@@@@" could tear a hole in reality if it were allowed to go on for too long unsupervised. They're all jammed into the one track under a title implying continuous motion, signifiers unto signifiers, movement towards an uncertain destination; rather than linger on ideas, it spasms and recontorts itself, like a final boss entering a series of new, stronger phases. It's overwhelming and more than a little exhausting, but "@@@@@" also comprises some of the strongest material she's ever released. The emotional core developed over her self-titled album collapses back onto the freeform mania of her earlier work, and what emerges is Arca at her most cinematic. "Survivors" and "Amantes" warp in and out of focus like transmissions from a dying satellite. "Mujere" is surely the sound of intestines spilling out of a cyborg stomach. "Turner" is "BTSTU" in a blender. So grand is "@@@@@" that it seems to exert itself, burning through calories or fuel (or both) and churning out moments of brutal pathos: the weary trip-hop lurch of "Membrane", or the way that "Gaita" ends with a crawl up a major scale that shatters before it can be resolved (even "Form", the heavenly climax that follows, is a promise for the future rather than a conclusion). Not every moment is essential, and some will have already dismissed it as a glorified series of sketches, particularly with an album proper forthcoming. But in spite of its unwieldy size and shape, "@@@@@" succeeds through its commitment to its own Arca-ness; you meet it on its own terms and you reap the reward, which is to say, the privilege of hearing Alejandra Ghersi salvage scrap metal from another galaxy. Nearly a decade in and she's been in flux the whole time. Chances are this isn't even her final form. [9]

Joshua Copperman: Like contemporary SOPHIE, Arca shifts between cacophony and purely beauty, but there are only rare moments of balance. Quantum (as these songs are called) "Pacifier" nails. Sometimes, the songs just alternate between chaos and order, like how 3D images flicker between the left and right eyes to give the image depth. (Even if they're separate, ideally they merge together anyway.) I just wish I understood this more, particularly why it had to be a 62-minute track instead of a mixtape. These comparisons are amusingly different from Arca, but: On Spotify, They Might Be Giants' opus Fingertips is separated into different tracks just like the proper CD, though there are still recurring motifs and enough in common between the songs to justify a single track. There's just no unifying theme - even 45:33 is "running jams commissioned by Nike." Maybe that's the point. The Diddy laughs if "Recusion" were outright irritating, but the section right after at "Monstrua" is the best part of the whole single. If something isn't working, it's worth toughing out for the parts that do. [7]

Joshua Lu: Described by Arca as a "transmission broadcasted into this world from a speculative fictional universe," "@@@@@" is a body of work that defies contemporary categories. You could try to call it an album, with an adapted "tracklist" of 30 bits; you could call it a single to justify its inclusion on this website, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a single that's also over an hour long. You could compare it to those YouTube channels with 24/7 lofi hip-hop music, intended to be pleasant and firmly in the background of your life, because like those tracks, "@@@@@" is at times ambient and peaceful, not dissimilar to those white noise clips you'd play to help you fall asleep. Other times, though, it veers into more abrasive, disruptive, and pointlessly weird audio clips, actively fighting for your attention like an orchestral symphony intended to be your main source of entertainment. Words (not necessarily lyrics -- they're too fluid to be called them) sometimes flitter by, in English or Spanish, and further draw your intrigue, even when they're too faint and distorted to be discernible. Categories be damned, though -- it's best to consider "@@@@@" a journey, if not into the kind of bizarre world that Arca envisions, then at least into the mind of a talented producer operating without regard for definitions. [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: "@@@@@" feels like the waves on a southern California beach in winter. It opens loud and disruptive, fake dj calls and glitch pops hitting like the crash on the sand, but quickly (relative to its length) switches to more subtly disconcerting moves. The trick is that Arca never lets you regain footing after the first blast-- the cold water washes over you again and again, breaking you just as you thought you understood its logic. And yet it's a baptism I'll come back to time and time again, always hoping for a closure that will elude me. It's the kind of song that can't help but be a puzzle, but it's a puzzle that I'll always try to solve. [9]

Nortey Dowuona: Lick me Dadd! [10]

Alfred Soto: Yeah, no -- I'm not reviewing an hour-long track. I'll review at most ten minutes of tactically deployed squelches, synth drops, and vocals sampled from many a fever dream. [5]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[hearsaykrp]

                 Presenting — kwon loren as the wren.

— info.

name / kwon loren birthday / 931025 pronouns / she/her occupation / clerk at gs25

— traits.

( conniving, risk-taking, empathetic, loyal )

One does not become known for being CONNIVING without a certain kind of track record. As a child what would later become called conniving was simply “being contrary for the sake of it.” But it started as more than that. desiring to be notable, different, contrary by any means necessary meant constant reinvention of the self. a simple lie told once (i hate the color pink!) would become a truth (shying away from anything in the offending shade, despite heretofore having no real opinion on the topic). over time, this ability to spit out a lie and make it a truth became something steadily more manipulative, a sort of resourceful ability to change her own reality in a way that others might not necessarily notice. she was, and remains, careful about it, these inventions. she’ll take a facet of something that cannot be disproven and force it into existence, with a stubborn focus on her goal. 

so imagine, a girl returns a failure and, on a sudden whim when questioned about her plans now that she’s stuck in the town, proclaims herself an up and coming entrepreneur, of the most criminal kind. receiving positive feedback from her compatriots on the topic, she sets about to make it true, pulls her sister into her plan, insists upon her grand plan without properly having one, putting it all together on the fly, digging herself ever deeper into an immoral and terrible hole.  

RISK TAKING is an obvious companion to a girl with a criminal track record of sorts, one riddled with misdemeanors bargained down to slaps on the wrist. vandalizing, trespassing, driving without a license, driving with a suspended license. beyond this, she bargains with fate on a more minor level, a seeming disregard for personal safety that leads her to impulsive and erratic behavior, thrill seeking and yes, to a degree notably attention seeking. 

a sense of EMPATHY is one that creates an unwilling vulnerability in the girl. not to say that she’s aggressively tenderhearted nor that she was particularly naive, but that she tends to immerse herself in the moods of others, lending her to a somewhat mercurial and sulky disposition. rather than ascribing to a certain degree of introversion or extroversion, she plunges into the mood around her, drawn to erratic or irrationally reckless people because she simply feels better around them, less burdened by the latent and nameless anxieties that have plagued her since childhood. she seeks in most aspects of her life to outpace silence and calm, afraid of the quiet spaces in her mind and how easily she can slip back into a depressed malaise when she stops the wheels from spinning. 

it leaves her crafting herself into a reckless perpetual motion machine, forever darting from moment to moment, action to action, and to those friends who stick along for the ride, she is LOYAL to the point of foolishness, willing to turn a blind eye to any unsavory actions or foolish behavior (though perhaps not without resoundingly pointing it out to them in private). though, perhaps her ability to remain loyal in the face of lurid criminal activity may be put to the test in the near future.

— about.

“and everyone knows, girls like dresses,” the boy says, part of an offhand comment in the midst of a normal kindergarten class. and loren, who has never given much thought to her clothing beyond her ability to remain mobile, latches onto the statement. “i hate dresses,” she tells him, and in that instance it becomes true.

in a perverse desire to be as contrary as possible at all times, she has a tendency to eschew anything perceived as expected of her. she pouts when her mother brandishes a pink top, rejects the hello kitty stickers a teacher offers as reward for a task. unruly hair sticks out from a maze of pins and rubber bands that attempt to tame a mane that she longs to unleash.

loren doesn’t walk, she runs. loren doesn’t talk, she shouts. her actions are rough and ramshackle and her opinions are many and fiercely delivered, usually at the top of her lungs. her teachers love her despite themselves. she’s brilliant,  they tell her parents, if only she’d just calm down. if only she’d just be quiet. if only she’d just sit still.  to each other they would say, she’s cute but she is a lot to handle.

this never becomes less accurate. but, as she becomes older, and markedly less adorable,  and much more surly, it also becomes less endearing.

as loren gets older, her voracious appetite for fiction grows. at the knee of her grandfather,  she learns urban legends, drenches herself in stories. she sympathizes with villains and learns too quickly, perhaps, what it means to be morally gray, to be enticed by darker things. she becomes strange and morbid. her vocabulary is very advanced, her teachers say, laughing nervously as they note that she asked how to spell “blood-curdling” when told to use an adjective to describe a sound. her seatmate had written “loud.”

but that’s loren.

always a bit different.

maybe there’s something compelling about it though, something endearing in her relentless pursuit of individuality, as if she could be capable of manufacturing herself to be more than a small town, more than her prim and proper cousin, more than the granddaughter of a semi famous author of horror novels and serial pulp fictions.

so how does such a smart girl, such a pretty girl, end up such a terrible mess? such a collision of contradictions and absurdities, such a morbid and erratic creature?

she has her parents to thank for that.

you see: the expectations start early - no, instantly.

“she’s crying much more than swallow did,” is one of the first things her grandmother says, forever pitting her two children against one another, now extending that cruel courtesy to the two daughters.

the doctor says something about it being healthy, about variations between children being a given, but it’s too late. her mother has heard everything she needs to hear.

“you’re really naming her loren?” her grandmother asks with an imperceptibly arched brow,  and instantly her prenatal nickname, often drug through childhood affectionately, is abandoned in favor of the fullness of her name, a burden of maturity weighing on her shoulders as her mother hoists it onto her, an act of defiance against a mother who’d always found her wanting.

“she looks so much like you,” the elderly woman says, terse lipped, to her daughter. it is not a compliment. loren is old enough now, at eight, to understand that. she examines her features in the polished wood reflection of the table, the dress she’s been forced to wear stained on the collar and the fabric scratching at her skin. swallow sits nearby, looking far more at home in the formal attire- sunday best. loren hates church. the echoing interior, the press of strangers nearby, the weight of expectations, the need to sit still. it gets under her skin. she doesn’t have a word for it yet, the tightness in her chest and the urge to cry that bubble up from nowhere. she’ll learn it later, with a doctor’s prescription and a hushed whisper from her mother that if she ever, ever fills that prescription in town there will be hell to pay.

anxiety.

it’s a constant companion, warping perspective. she fulfills each of her mother’s nightmares, one by one.

it starts with her uncouth attitude as a primary student and continues as she becomes lazy in her hagwon classes. she pouts and huffs through ballet and never takes to piano the way her mother wants her too. she likes to write, though, and her grandfather dotes on her for it- an action that seems to curry no favor with her grandmother, who stares daggers at the two of them as they grow closer. what irony, that the old crone would want the affection and respect of a child she’d never done anything but criticize?

of course, it’s a sham of a marriage. loren learns that later too, secrets blooming under her fingertips. people talk when she’s around. she gets under their skin, and unsettled lips loosen. people pick fights around her, over the top of her head as she sits sketching in the corner, ever the disagreeable teenager. at thirteen she hides behind her hair- too long and too wild, fraying at the ends. she should trim it more often, wear it shorter, style it more fashionably.

her mother won’t stop pestering, so when she’s seventeen she shears it off into a blunt cut bob. it doesn’t suit her face and her mother grounds her for it, screeches about how ashamed she is to have a daughter that doesn’t even take care of her own appearance, doesn’t give a damn what the world has to say.

highschool is an inconvenience. she does well when she cares to make an effort, that’s what her teachers say. but what’s the point in trying when she’s already been written off as second best, crowned the family loser before she’d had a chance to decide if she even wanted to compete against swallow in the first place. if they want to force her to run this race, the least she can do is exercise her own agency by throwing the competition.

after all, it’s much safer to fail on purpose than it is to try and still come up lacking.

so she doodles morbid drawings, preferring ink and pencil, the start black and white of graphite and shitty school ruled paper. writes bleak poetry and thinks of herself as something more special, more significant than she is.

she’s really lucky, honestly, that their literature teacher notices talent beneath all that teenage angst. recommends her to the school newspaper, the literary magazine of student submissions, gets her involved. on the magazine she picks up skills in graphic design, handling layout and submissions. journalism never becomes her forte, but the meager resume and help from her teacher bring two things.

first, they bring rumors of favoritism on his part, which does little to help the general “weird wallflower” girl motif she has inadvertently cultivated,  and school rumor mills run as they do. second, they bring her the escape that she increasingly needs.

it’s not a great school, but it isn’t the worst either. and creative writing isn’t the best major but, again, it’s better than nothing- right? she goes anyway, as her grandmother tuts with disapproval and her mother mirrors the action, the spitting image of the woman she’s hated for longer than loren has been alive. what irony. loren privately promises never to become her mother (or her grandmother) on pain of death.

in university she’s no one. just another kind of weird girl from a kind of weird town. she likes it- no,  loves it. she’s not swallow’s cousin or her mother’s daughter. the rumors that swirl around her,  the expectations that she falls short of, the secrets that reveal themselves to her; these things are all gone, now. for once in her life she feels free, stretches her wings.

her work grows for the opportunity, and by the time she’s graduating there are a few publications under her belt. inclusion in some literary magazines, a poetry anthology, a magazine that publishes short fiction. but all good things come to an end, and with graduation comes the crushing reality that jobs don’t grow on trees, that she’s only been a big fish in this very, very little pond.

in the end, she crawls back home. daddy, always away at the factory to work, is now properly absent, buried up on the hill.  without his minor buffer, her mother’s narcissism and cruelty overflow. loren stays in her house for exactly six months before she spirals back into a breakdown, moves out abruptly in the middle of a fight. with a single duffle bag to her name she ends up on the edge of a bridge outside of town, lingering as she stares into the swirling waters. years of effort on building herself into something real have shattered at a single blow from her mother, and she hates herself for that weakness. she doesn’t sleep that night, just wanders the forest, the outskirts of town, and tries to make a plan.

so there she is, stumbling her way into a shitty lease in a shittier apartment, begging them to waive the key money until the next few months. the first floor houses a gs25 and they’re looking for a night manager, so she takes them up on it. the glaring fluorescents give her plenty of time to brainstorm options for cash, dreams for her future.

she picks up webcomics, self publishing a few false starts before she settles on something she can keep up with, something that starts to pick up a little bit of traction. it’s a strange amalgamation of horror and romance and it won’t ever exist outside of a particular niche, so she branches out. starts drawing more lurid drawings on commision and finds there is an untapped market there, in etching out fantasies for those with alarmingly specific tastes. It’s a strange trade but the money is good when it rolls in and she doesn’t have the income to be discriminatory.

so when a temporary and somewhat uneasy truce forged between her and her cousin grows, is it really a surprise that it ends up in a business deal? and is it all that surprising that with loren involved, it’s one that tilts right out of shady and quickly into illegal? swallow has always been more straight laced, but loren has had her share of run ins with their small town police force, much to the undying shame of her mother.  (you’re just proving that old woman right, she’d say to loren, and viciously loren would smile, a triumphant expression in the face of her mother’s distress)

it’s not an honest job and it isn’t one she likes, particularly, but money is money and she can’t deny her penchant for disappearing under people’s noses comes in handy, her tendency to be overlooked by virtue of being generally seen as “kind of weird” in a harmless way coming in handy. for once, it’s something that makes use of the fact she’s lived in the shadows her whole life - and if that gets her the money to finally set off, stretch her wings under a different sun, someday, well, she’ll take it.

[chris-crossed]

We might not have seen Paige being a mother to her own children but we DID see her finding the right approach to Zachary's issues when everyone ignored his bullying (even the teachers)&when he caused a situation that led to people getting killed or magically beheaded. She also was willing to break cover to guide Billie as a budding witch. Paige was the one to remind Phoebe that Chris' very existence was at stake&that he "WAS meant to be" despite not having any proof whereas *cont*

*cont* Phoebe DID have a direct proof of it due to her vision but chose to conveniently omit the detail about Chris being a part of said vision since only HER future children&happy ending mattered (which she set out to pursue via magic abuse&got rewarded with Coop; and Chris was the one who helped her get that happy ending. When he&Wyatt came back to past again Phoebe only mentioned Wyatt despite the last this family saw of Chris was him dying for them). It is typical for self involved/narcissistic people to play favourites or show selective love for children hence Phoebe’s favoritism of Wyatt&outright disregard for Chris’ traumas or even life. She would whitewash evil Wyatt’s abuse of Chris by labeling it as “picking” - but upon realizing how she&others were going to be affected it suddenly becomes Chris’ destiny to save them, warn them&fade away. Phoebe would excuse little Wyatt’s passive abuse of Chris on the grounds of baby Chris supposedly “getting all the attention”&Leo never being around; yet she would dismiss Chris’ traumas caused by Wyatt who was always favored over him&became a power hungry tyrant/abuser in the original future or Chris’ neglect on part of Leo because “it hasn’t happened yet”. Phoebe herself emotionally manipulated Paige into apologizing - publicly - for “underestimating her”&envied Prue’s success&powers but would disregard actual abuse Chris endured. Morality Bites was the only time Phoebe faced actual consequences - but she later proved to having learned nothing from it when she glamored her former friend to look like Chris&arranged Rick’s murder on part of a pack of demons to clean HER own mess (when she could’ve easily told Paige to orb away his gun&turned him over to cops. But that would mean owning breaking him out of jail&committing felony which was brushed aside because Phoebe “was under influence of adolescence”). Phoebe made a fortune off of being an advice columnist yet she would blame Chris for the issues in his parents’ relationship that existed in every version of the present or future (PL being divorced in the alternative future, Leo bailing on Piper with two kids in Chris’ future with no changes to timeline at all, PL attending family therapy in this timeline). When it’s about Chris’ existence being at the brink of obliteration because he was so focused on saving them all Phoebe would outright state “there’s no WE here”, refuse to help him&later lie how he “wasn’t meant to be” (beyond saving HER&Wyatt and everyone but himself) but her happy ending was. In Forever Charmed when Chris&Wyatt try to explain to her how to get Coop back Phoebe inquires “how this information helps US right now” - because “we” is only applicable to situations when Phoebe’s needs are at play. Paige was willing to risk her soul to save Larry, virtual stranger so she - imo - is a great role model.

Additionally, to give a rough sketch of how the mind of a self involved person works regarding children&playing favourites I have a real life, personal experience based example (I normally NEVER delve into personal issues since it’s unproductive to dwell on them but it’s too applicable). My father cut me out of my life back when I was a kid due to my disability and mental&physical health issues. He took financial responsibility but never failed to remind me how incapable or worthless I am&how much of an embarrassment it is for him to be associated with me when he has two healthy, promising daughters from the second marriage. At one point when my health took another downward turn he stated he would gladly pay for my funeral because it would mean I no longer shame him with my very existence. He caused me to become homeless at 13 while pampering&lauding his other daughters and he IS a good dad to them. He’s objectively done a lot of positive things for quite a few people&loves his brothers (like Phoebe in earlier seasons he is the youngest of them). I’ve long moved on from all those issues but some children would not be able to. In Phoebe’s case she caused Chris to embrace her theory about his destiny being limited to being a sacrificial lamb so Wyatt would be safe&she could get her happy ending(“I’ve actually been wondering the same thing”). If more characters called her out her arc would be less troubling.

Thank you for sharing your personal experience. I’m sorry that you went through that, it must have been a very difficult time. I’m glad you’ve been able to move on from it, and I hope that you are doing well. 

It should be a good reminder that although we are discussing fictional characters here, their problematic behaviour is not fiction, it is something that exists in real people and affects real people every day, and it shouldn’t be dismissed. 

[emilyvonspears]

Blog post: How I tackle the writing process

After spending 10 years blogging about music and entertainment, I finally got serious about being a full-time writer when I began the drafting process for The Worst Rock Band Ever.

In this post I'll share my tips on writing a decent manuscript as well as my personal method of outlining.

Before we get started, I'd like to share a couple of extra tidbits when it comes to the writing process.

I like getting my work done in the morning or early afternoon w a cup of fresh coffee next to my laptop, pumping loud electronic/techno/jazz music to psyche myself up for writing that day. Writing a book doesn't have to be boring, strenuous or intimidating. When handled correctly, it's the most enjoyable and rewarding thing in the world to do

First thing's first: Ideas, Ideas, Ideas!!

You'll have to come up with an idea. Admittedly, it took me 4 years and a shitload of experience to come up with a concept for The Worst Ever Series.

I was working at my old job one hot October afternoon in 2015 when an idea hit me out of nowhere. Right away I sketched a few notes about what I might include in each chapter. Obviously, since I'd never written a book before, what I'd written initially was a whole lot rubbish. Since I was so determined to write a book, once I finally knew what I wanted to create, it was all systems go. You can be inspired by anything but I suggest spending some time in quiet meditation thinking about what you know so you can come up with your best ideas.

Figure out what tone and voice you want to write your book!

It wasn't until I showed my manuscript to a couple of friends that one of them told me they assumed I'd been writing a memoir when I used first person narrative. That was when I realized I needed to compose it in third person, which turned out to be the best choice. I split my story into three installments, each one in a different genre: Feel good, funny contemporary, thriller/horror and the last one a dramatic conclusion to end the last book. Above all else, STAY TRUE TO YOURSELF. Telling your story in your authentic voice is the most important part.

Outline!

Outlining may be tedious but it is well worth it. It provides a blueprint how to map out your story and the direction it should go in. For me, it helps guide me down the right path as well as what parts of the story to fix during the editing process. Outlining for me is more helpful when it comes to remembering what needs to be done in a chapter and a great list of ideas. After I do a draft, I'll go back and mold my outline until both the story and outline match in equal parts.

Get that first draft done!

The hardest part of writing a book will always be getting started but it is essential to anything you're writing regardless of whatever it is. After you've completed draft one - yes, it's supposed to be terrible - I suggest you put it away for a couple of months, possibly even years. You read that right! I say years because that's how long I put away the second manuscript before picking it up in 2019. I find not looking or dealing with your writing for a long time does wonders to improve the execution and storytelling overall.

Draft like crazy!

This should be obvious but first drafts are always terrible, as I said before! It wasn't until I reached draft 5 that I finally had my story where I wanted it, but some manuscripts take longer to draft than just a couple. Remember: just cause your manuscript is 'done' by your terms, it's not completely finished until a professional editor sees it and you go over the entire manuscript several times; editors are expensive and shit ain't cheap!!

I would suggest BETA readers but I haven't had good experiences with that sort of thing in the past, sorry about that! I do think you should round up a friend or two and show it to them so they can show you were you need to improve.

I haven't published my trilogy yet, so I can't really give you advice until that time has come. Until then, work hard at your craft and the results will speak for themselves.

Before I go, aside from the aforementioned tips, it's important to write what you want, however you want and disregard rules preventing your story from being authentically original; just be yourself!

[newstfionline]

How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All

By Jerry Useem, The Atlantic, April 18, 2017

As Christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild.

It didn’t soar, as an economics textbook might suggest. Nor did it crash. It just started vibrating between two quantum states. Amazon’s price for a one-ounce jar was either $4.49 or $8.99, depending on when you looked. Nearly a year later, as Thanksgiving 2016 approached, the price again began whipsawing between two different points, this time $3.36 and $4.69.

We live in the age of the variable airfare, the surge-priced ride, the pay-what-you-want Radiohead album, and other novel price developments. But what was this? Some weird computer glitch? More like a deliberate glitch, it seems. “It’s most likely a strategy to get more data and test the right price,” Guru Hariharan explained, after I had sketched the pattern on a whiteboard.

The right price--the one that will extract the most profit from consumers’ wallets--has become the fixation of a large and growing number of quantitative types, many of them economists who have left academia for Silicon Valley. It’s also the preoccupation of Boomerang Commerce, a five-year-old start-up founded by Hariharan, an Amazon alum. He says these sorts of price experiments have become a routine part of finding that right price--and refinding it, because the right price can change by the day or even by the hour. (Amazon says its price changes are not attempts to gather data on customers’ spending habits, but rather to give shoppers the lowest price out there.)

It may come as a surprise that, in buying a seasonal pie ingredient, you might be participating in a carefully designed social-science experiment. But this is what online comparison shopping hath wrought. Simply put: Our ability to know the price of anything, anytime, anywhere, has given us, the consumers, so much power that retailers--in a desperate effort to regain the upper hand, or at least avoid extinction--are now staring back through the screen. They are comparison shopping us.

They have ample means to do so: the immense data trail you leave behind whenever you place something in your online shopping cart or swipe your rewards card at a store register, top economists and data scientists capable of turning this information into useful price strategies, and what one tech economist calls “the ability to experiment on a scale that’s unparalleled in the history of economics.” In mid-March, Amazon alone had 59 listings for economists on its job site, and a website dedicated to recruiting them.

Not coincidentally, quaint pricing practices--an advertised discount off the “list price,” two for the price of one, or simply “everyday low prices”--are yielding to far more exotic strategies.

“I don’t think anyone could have predicted how sophisticated these algorithms have become,” says Robert Dolan, a marketing professor at Harvard. “I certainly didn’t.” The price of a can of soda in a vending machine can now vary with the temperature outside. The price of the headphones Google recommends may depend on how budget-conscious your web history shows you to be, one study found. For shoppers, that means price--not the one offered to you right now, but the one offered to you 20 minutes from now, or the one offered to me, or to your neighbor--may become an increasingly unknowable thing. “Many moons ago, there used to be one price for something,” Dolan notes. Now the simplest of questions--what’s the true price of pumpkin-pie spice?--is subject to a Heisenberg level of uncertainty.

Which raises a bigger question: Could the internet, whose transparency was supposed to empower consumers, be doing the opposite?

If the marketplace was a war between buyers and sellers, the 19th-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde wrote, then price was a truce. And the practice of setting a fixed price for a good or a service--which took hold in the 1860s--meant, in effect, a cessation of the perpetual state of hostility known as haggling.

As in any truce, each party surrendered something in this bargain. Buyers were forced to accept, or not accept, the one price imposed by the price tag (an invention credited to the retail pioneer John Wanamaker). What retailers ceded--the ability to exploit customers’ varying willingness to pay--was arguably greater, as the extra money some people would have paid could no longer be captured as profit. But they made the bargain anyway, for a combination of moral and practical reasons.

The Quakers--including a New York merchant named Rowland H. Macy--had never believed in setting different prices for different people. Wanamaker, a Presbyterian operating in Quaker Philadelphia, opened his Grand Depot under the principle of “One price to all; no favoritism.” Other merchants saw the practical benefits of Macy’s and Wanamaker’s prix fixe policies. As they staffed up their new department stores, it was expensive to train hundreds of clerks in the art of haggling. Fixed prices offered a measure of predictability to bookkeeping, sped up the sales process, and made possible the proliferation of printed retail ads highlighting a given price for a given good.

Companies like General Motors found an up-front way of recovering some of the lost profit. In the 1920s, GM aligned its various car brands into a finely graduated price hierarchy: “Chevrolet for the hoi polloi,” Fortune magazine put it, “Pontiac … for the poor but proud, Oldsmobile for the comfortable but discreet, Buick for the striving, Cadillac for the rich.” The policy--”a car for every purse and purpose,” GM called it--was a means of customer sorting, but the customers did the sorting themselves. It kept the truce.

Customers, meanwhile, could recover some of their lost agency by clipping coupons--their chance to get a deal denied to casual shoppers. The new supermarket chains of the 1940s made coupons a staple of American life. What the big grocers knew--and what behavioral economists would later prove in detail--is that while consumers liked the assurance the truce afforded (that they would not be fleeced), they also retained the instinct to best their neighbors. They loved deals so much that, to make sense of their behavior, economists were forced to distinguish between two types of value: acquisition value (the perceived worth of a new car to the buyer) and transaction value (the feeling that one lost or won the negotiation at the dealership).

The idea that there was a legitimate “list price,” and that consumers would occasionally be offered a discount on this price--these were the terms of the truce. And the truce remained largely intact up to the turn of the present century. The reigning retail superpower, Walmart, enforced “everyday low prices” that did not shift around.

But in the 1990s, the internet began to erode the terms of the long peace. Savvy consumers could visit a Best Buy to eyeball merchandise they intended to buy elsewhere for a cheaper price, an exercise that became known as “showrooming.” In 1999, a Seattle-based digital bookseller called Amazon.com started expanding into a Grand Depot of its own.

The era of internet retailing had arrived, and with it, the resumption of hostilities.

In retrospect, retailers were slow to mobilize. Even as other corporate functions--logistics, sales-force management--were being given the “moneyball” treatment in the early 2000s with powerful predictive software (and even as airlines had fully weaponized airfares), retail pricing remained more art than science. In part, this was a function of internal company hierarchy. Prices were traditionally the purview of the second-most-powerful figure in a retail organization: the head merchant, whose intuitive knack for knowing what to sell, and for how much, was the source of a deep-seated mythos that she was not keen to dispel.

Two developments, though, loosened the head merchant’s hold.

The first was the arrival of data. Thomas Nagle was teaching economics at the University of Chicago in the early 1980s when, he recalls, the university acquired the data from the grocery chain Jewel’s newly installed checkout scanners. “Everyone was thrilled,” says Nagle, now a senior adviser specializing in pricing at Deloitte. “We’d been relying on all these contrived surveys: ‘Given these options at these prices, what would you do?’ But the real world is not a controlled experiment.”

The Jewel data overturned a lot of what he’d been teaching. For instance, he’d professed that ending prices with .99 or .98, instead of just rounding up to the next dollar, did not boost sales. The practice was merely an artifact, the existing literature said, of an age when owners wanted to force cashiers to open the register to make change, in order to prevent them from pocketing the money from a sale. “It turned out,” Nagle recollects, “that ending prices in .99 wasn’t big for cars and other big-ticket items where you pay a lot of attention. But in the grocery store, the effect was huge!”

The effect, now known as “left-digit bias,” had not shown up in lab experiments, because participants, presented with a limited number of decisions, were able to approach every hypothetical purchase like a math problem. But of course in real life, Nagle admits, “if you did that, it would take you all day to go to the grocery store.” Disregarding the digits to the right side of the decimal point lets you get home and make dinner.

By the early 2000s, the amount of data collected on retailers’ internet servers had become so massive that it started exerting a gravitational pull. That’s what triggered the second development: the arrival, en masse, of the practitioners of the dismal science.

This was, in some ways, a curious stampede. For decades, academic economists had generally been as indifferent to corporations as corporations were to them. (Indeed, most of their models barely acknowledged the existence of corporations at all.)

But that began to change in 2001, when the Berkeley economist Hal Varian--highly regarded for the 1999 book Information Rules--ran into Eric Schmidt. Varian knew him but, he says, was unaware that Schmidt had become the CEO of a little company called Google. Varian agreed to spend a sabbatical year at Google, figuring he’d write a book about the start-up experience.

At the time, the few serious economists who worked in industry focused on macroeconomic issues like, say, how demand for consumer durables might change in the next year. Varian, however, was immediately invited to look at a Google project that (he recalls Schmidt telling him) “might make us a little money”: the auction system that became Google AdWords. Varian never left.

Others followed. “eBay was Disneyland,” says Steve Tadelis, a Berkeley economist who went to work there for a time in 2011 and is currently on leave at Amazon. “You know, pricing, people, behavior, reputation”--the things that have always set economists aglow--plus the chance “to experiment at a scale that’s unparalleled.”

At first, the newcomers were mostly mining existing data for insights. At eBay, for instance, Tadelis used a log of buyer clicks to estimate how much money one hour of bargain-hunting saved shoppers. (Roughly $15 was the answer.)

Then economists realized that they could go a step further and design experiments that produced data. Carefully controlled experiments not only attempted to divine the shape of a demand curve--which shows just how much of a product people will buy as you keep raising the price, allowing retailers to find the optimal, profit-maximizing figure. They tried to map how the curve changed hour to hour. (Online purchases peak during weekday office hours, so retailers are commonly advised to raise prices in the morning and lower them in the early evening.)

By the mid-2000s, some economists began wondering whether Big Data could discern every individual’s own personal demand curve--thereby turning the classroom hypothetical of “perfect price discrimination” (a price that’s calibrated precisely to the maximum that you will pay) into an actual possibility.

As this new world began to take shape, the initial consumer experience of online shopping--so simple! and such deals!--was losing some of its sheen.

It’s not that consumers hadn’t benefited from the lower prices available online. They had. But some of the deals weren’t nearly as good as they seemed to be. And for some people, glee began to give way to a vague suspicion that maybe they were getting ripped off. In 2007, a California man named Marc Ecenbarger thought he had scored when he found a patio set--list price $999--selling on Overstock.com for $449.99. He bought two, unpacked them, then discovered--courtesy of a price tag left on the packaging--that Walmart’s normal price for the set was $247. His fury was profound. He complained to Overstock, which offered to refund him the cost of the furniture.

But his experience was later used as evidence in a case brought by consumer-protection attorneys against Overstock for false advertising, along with internal emails in which an Overstock employee claimed it was commonly known that list prices were “egregiously overstated.”

In 2014, a California judge ordered Overstock to pay $6.8 million in civil penalties. (Overstock has appealed the decision.) The past year has seen a wave of similar lawsuits over phony list prices, reports Bonnie Patten, the executive director of TruthinAdvertising.org. In 2016, Amazon began to drop most mentions of “list price,” and in some cases added a new reference point: its own past price.

This could be seen as the final stage of decay of the old one-price system. What’s replacing it is something that most closely resembles high-frequency trading on Wall Street. Prices are never “set” to begin with in this new world. They can fluctuate hour to hour and even minute to minute--a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has put something in his Amazon cart and been alerted to price changes while it sat there. A website called camelcamelcamel.com even tracks Amazon prices for specific products and alerts consumers when a price drops below a preset threshold. The price history for any given item--Classic Twister, for example--looks almost exactly like a stock chart. And as with financial markets, flash glitches happen. In 2011, Peter A. Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly (paperback edition) was briefly available on Amazon for $23,698,655.93, thanks to an algorithmic price war between two third-party sellers that had run amok.

[sorayahigashikata]

Chapter 51: "The snow level!"