"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.
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@pluralistic e-label experiments are not a recent phenomenon. I worked at an online grocer in 1998, and brick-and-mortar stores were already experimenting with it. They were even looking at changing prices as you reached for an item. Looking at how keen you were to buy it, then making you negotiate for price by gesturing toward the item, or pulling away.
Once consumer-goods merchandisers crossed over from B&M to ecommerce, it was already game over.
@pluralistic it also applies to the products, services, and attitudes of corporations who sell things or services, not just platforms. The devolving corporate culture & lack of government oversight has transformed the reason US businesses to exist from selling those products & services to just being a stock market manipulation tool. The unstated policy of most public corporations is pretend to care, but prioritize share price maximization over everything else.
@kgoldsholl@pluralistic Also, the way that companies have converted their sites to platforms. E.g. B&Q, a chain of UK DIY shops, used to have a website that sold their stuff. It was fine. You could buy the things that they also sold in their shops. Now it's a PLATFORM and it lists products sold by loads of random other firms. There's no guarantee of quality, no idea who you're dealing with if things go wrong.
I have long been an advocate (within my own small circles) of aggressive pricing stability regulation. I got thinking about this a few decades ago in response to gasoline pricing, an industry prone to dramatic price swings, price wars, and accusations of collusion and gouging.
The concept goes something like this: once you set your price, you need to stick with it for a defined period of time (for gas, something like 7-10 days) Allow ‘sale’ prices, but limit the proportions of sales to regular pricing (1-2%) with exceptions for perishable products.
Some people may say we already have some of these, but they are weak, very poorly enforced, and lead to insignificant slap-on-the-wrist / cost-of-doing-business type penalties. So the next part of addressing things meaningfully are penalties scaled to affect the bottom line.
A business that engages in price fixing or profiteering or manipulative pricing strategies should face penalties of gross revenue for that product line or category for at least the period they engaged in the practice, possibly more as a punitive measure.
That will provide businesses with incentive to stay well clear of infractions, and clear a bunch of scummy exploitative businesses and business practices out of our economic lives.
Corporations may be fictional ‘people’ but in my books there is no inherent right to ‘life’ for them.
@DavidM_yeg@pluralistic I'm strong believer in corporate death penalty. It should go like this: if you do corporate crime, all shares are nullified and a court holds hearings to determine what activities of the business have important public need to continue. Those are auctioned off or operated publicly, everything else is liquidated and proceeds seized.
Interesting how so many supposed free marketers talk as if stockholders are somehow entitled to safety in their investments, when instead an incorporation was dreamed up to insulate them because what they were doing was inherently risky and we wanted people to able to only risk their investment, and not have to risk also losing their home and the shirt off their back.
Also, "boom and bust" is – shock, horror – part of the capitalist playbook. I remember being a bit aghast when during the 2008 financial crisis @CrimethInc were the only folks vocally reminding people that seeing companies fail was, in fact, part of capitalism. When you need anarchists to remind you of basic tenets of capitalism, you know something is very wrong.
@DavidM_yeg@dalias@pluralistic@CrimethInc This conversation has just bought back to mind this line i read many moons ago, and must try and find the origin of: "I'll believe corporations are people the day Texas executes one".
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:
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:
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?
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:
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:
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:
This doesn't have to be bad! As Planet Money 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 perishables - day-old lettuce, yesterday's bread - grocers put them on the shelves next to fresher, more valuable products, leading to billions of dollars in food-waste and and unimaginable quantities of methane-producing, planet-cooking landfill.
In Norway, ESLs are 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?
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):
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:
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):
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 fraud apologetics. Dynamic markets sound good, but they're catnip for cheaters. "Just be eternally vigilant" is miserable advice, and no way to live your life:
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