So long as everyone follows that advice, we poor suckers have nowhere else to go to get a better deal.

This is a pretty thin pretext. Price-fixing is illegal, after all.

10/

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

pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/don…

11/

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

popular.info/p/feds-raid-corpo…

It's not just sellers who engage in this kind of price-fixing - it's also *buyers*. Specifically buyers of labor, AKA "bosses."

12/

Feds raid corporate landlord, escalating nationwide criminal probe of rent increases

Over the last four years, rents have skyrocketed by an average of over 30% nationwide and are a major factor in the overall inflation rate.

^{Judd Legum (Popular Information)}

Take contract nursing, where a cartel of three staffing apps have displaced the many small regional staffing agencies that historically served the sector. These companies buy nurses' credit history from the unregulated, Wild West data-brokerage sector.

13/

They're checking to see whether a nurse who's looking for a shift has a lot of credit-card debt, especially delinquent debt, because these nurses are facing economic hardship and will accept a lower wage than their better-off compatriots:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loo…

14/

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

15/

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

pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/alg…

16/

But this gets much creepier and more powerful when combined with aggregated surveillance data.

17/

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

18/

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

pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/get…

19/

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

wired.com/story/cfpb-quietly-k…

(womp-womp)

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

pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gou…

20/

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

ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/p…

(Womp.)

(Womp.)

21/

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

pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not…

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

pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/soc…

22/

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

organizedmoney.fm/p/the-wild-w…

23/

The Wild World of Surveillance Pricing with Lee Hepner

Welcome to the podcast Organized Money.

^{David Dayen (Organized Money)}

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

24/

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

thriftytraveler.com/news/airli…

25/

Exclusive: US Airlines Are Quietly Hitting Solo & Biz Travelers with Higher Fares

It's not just Delta. The country's three largest airlines are charging some solo travelers higher fares than groups of two or more.

^{Kyle Potter (Thrifty Traveler)}

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

26/

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

thriftytraveler.com/news/airli…

If the airlines are still pursuing this kind of price discrimination, they'll do something sneakier, like buying our credit histories before showing us a price.

27/

After Blowback, Delta & United Dump Fares That Punish Solo Travelers

After a nationwide blowback, Delta began adjusting its fares to remove the higher prices for solo travelers. Will other airlines follow suit?

^{Kyle Potter (Thrifty Traveler)}

This is something British Airways is already teeing up, offering essentially *zero* reward miles to frequent fliers for partner airline tickets unless they're purchased from BA's own website:

onemileatatime.com/news/the-br…

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

openrightsgroup.org/press-rele…

28/

The British Airways Club: BA Massively Overhauls Loyalty Program

British Airways has rebranded and overhauled its loyalty program, including changing how Tier Points (for elite status) are earned.

^{Ben Schlappig (One Mile at a Time)}

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

29/

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

pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/bil…

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

canada.ca/en/competition-burea…

30/

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

theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/l…

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

(Eh?)

31/

The end of the fixed price

Lately, we aren’t all getting the same price for the same product. Is the rise of data-driven “personalized pricing” corporate innovation or just next-gen gouging?

^{The Lately staff (The Globe and Mail)}