Think of labor law: as #VeenaDubal writes, gig-work companies practice #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination, turning your paycheck into a slot machine that pays out more when you are more selective about which jobs you take, and which then docks your pay by tiny increments as you become less discriminating about answering the app's call:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

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Without these constraints, corporate twiddlers can engage in all kinds of ripoffs, like #WageTheft and #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Twiddling is key to the #DarthVaderMBA ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further"), in which features are confiscated from moment to moment, without warning or recourse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

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The best way to steal from drivers is with #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again.

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Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means.

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A sleazy boss can hide their wage-theft with a bunch of confusing deductions to your paycheck. But when your boss is an app, it can engage in #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination, where your pay declines minutely every time you accept a job, but if you start to decline jobs, the app can raise the offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

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* move your media files and apps from any platform to any device or service, even if the company that sold them to you objects:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

A new, good internet gives powers to users, and takes power away from corporations:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

On a new, good internet, companies can't practice #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

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Like Lyft, Uber practices #AlgorithmicWageDiscrimination, #VeenaDubal's term describing the illegal practice of offering workers different payouts for the same work. Uber's algorithm seeks out "pickers" who are choosy about which rides they take, and converts them to "ants" (who take every ride offered) by paying them more for the same job, until they drop all their other gigs, whereupon the algorithm cuts their pay back to the rates paid to ants:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

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