No captain of industry wants to arise from his sarcophagus of a morning, only to discover a mob of hoi polloi building a guillotine on his lawn.

As Thomas Piketty argues, there comes a point where it's cheaper to make society more fair - say, by building hospitals and schools - than it is to pay for all the gaiter-wearing gun-thugs you'll need to weed out the guillotine-building projects that spontaneously erupt under conditions of gross unfairness:

memex.craphound.com/2014/06/24…

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Mass surveillance shifts the guillotine equilibrium in favor of being greedier, by making it cheaper to identify and neutralize incipient guillotine-builders, which means that you can raise the greediness floor without seeing a concomitant rise in your guard labor bill.

And there's *lots* of money to be made by raising the greediness floor, the corollary of which is that any time you fail to act with sufficiently shameless greed, you leave a *ton* of money on the table.

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That's the substance of the shareholder lawsuit against Unitedhealthcare, alleging that after Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United CEO Brian Thompson‡, United failed to screw enough patients hard enough:

nbcnews.com/business/business-…

‡ Luigi didn't do it. I saw him playing pinochle in Los Angeles that night, and I'll swear to it in court.

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UnitedHealthcare sued by shareholders over reaction to CEO's killing

A group of investors sued UnitedHealthcare Group on Wednesday, accusing the company of misleading them after the killing of its CEO, Brian Thompson.

^{Matt Lavietes (NBC News)}

But there's another way in which surveillance abets rampant billionaireism: when companies spy on us, they can change the rules of their services to increase how much we pay them, and decrease how much they pay us. When companies do this to their customers, they call it "personalized pricing" - but everyone else calls it what it is, *surveillance pricing*:

pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/pri…

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When a company charges you more than someone else for the same service (say, Uber jacking up the price of a ride because your phone battery is about to die, or an airline charging you extra because they know you have a funeral to attend), they're effectively re-valuing the dollars in your bank account. The fact that the cab-ride that costs you $20 and costs someone else $15 means that your dollar is only worth $0.75.

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But companies also do this to their workers, something Veena Dubal calls "algorthmic wage discrimination":

pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/alg…

For example, the apps that hospitals use to hire contract nurses first buy their recent financial information from an unregulated data-broker, checking to see whether the nurse has a lot of credit-card debt, because if you owe a lot on your Visa, the app can offer you a lower hourly wage and you'll still take the shift:

pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loo…

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This is re-valuing your labor. If my debt means that I get $20/h for a shift that would pay you $25/h, the app is saying my hours are only worth 80% of what yours are worth.

This kind of price-fixing is an example of a phenomenon I call "twiddling," which is when a company changes its underlying business logic (prices, costs, recommendations, search rankings) on a per-user, per-session basis to shift value from customers and suppliers to shareholders:

pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twi…

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There's lots of kinds of twiddling: the fact that apps generate so much fine-grained, up-to-the-second surveillance telemetry about our use of them means that zuckermuskian social media bosses can make pretty good guesses about how many ads and boosted posts they can enshittify into our feeds without us switching off the app:

pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/pot…

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If you were studying this stuff in an MBA, they'd call it "optimization." Mass surveillance allows the optimization of guard-labor, by identifying threats to the status quo for targeted enforcement, which is much cheaper and effective than indiscriminate enforcement. Commercial surveillance allows buyers to figure out the most an individual consumer will pay, and raise prices accordingly; and to calculate the lowest wage a worker will accept, and lower pay accordingly.

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Commercial surveillance allows companies to "optimize" their products to be *nearly* so enshtitified that we quit them, but not quite, maximizing the value they can shift from us to them.

To be free people, we don't merely need to be ungovernable.

We need to *become unoptomizable*.

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How do we do that? Well, there are lots of policies that would make it harder for the ultra-rich to "optimize" us so that we are easier to fleece and abuse, but every "optimization" starts with surveillance. After all, you treasure what you measure, and if you can't observe a worker or a customer - or a citizen getting ready to build a guillotine - you *can't* optimize them.

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That's where "privacy first" comes in. There are a *lot* of people angry about a *lot* of problems that are all rooted in the unregulated, unrestricted practice of mass surveillance by governments and their corporate partners:

pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/pri…

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Pulling together people angry about being turned into deepfake porn, people angry about parents who've gone Maga or kids who've become anorexic; Fox News cultists angry about the use of reverse warrants to identify Jan 6 rioters or Tiktok millennials quoting Osama Bin Laden; immigrants angry about ICE plundering commercial databases to locate their next victim; and people angry about online racial financial, hiring and housing discrimination makes for a hell of a coalition.

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If we make it illegal to spy, we make end the conditions for rampant billionaireism. We become unoptimizable.

Billionaires are overgrown toddlers, after all. They don't acknowledge the humanity of others - indeed, they probably don't even believe that the rest of us are really *real* (we're "NPCs"):

pluralistic.net/2025/08/18/see…

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