Amazon's burying of this vital information will be familiar to #DouglasAdams readers, as the "#BewareOfTheLeopard" tactic. It's not even the first time Amazon's deployed it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/27/beware-of-the-leopard/#relentless

Another group of scholars recently coined a useful term to describe this ripoff: in a paper published last week, @timoreilly, #MarianaMazzucato and #IlanStrauss dubbed the costs of all this complexity #AttentionRents:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

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The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new #UCL #InstituteForInnovationAndPublicPurpose paper by @timoreilly, #IlanStrauss and #MarianaMazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

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