Mastodawn

Have Y'all seen what Walmart is doing? They're implementing digital pricing, where you have to scan a QR code with your phone, or use their app, to find out what the price is. Talk about data mining. They also took out all the handheld scanners, so it forces you to use your phone. I think Kroger and Target are also looking into doing the same thing, including dynamic pricing, which is a fancy way of saying price gouging, with price fluctuations based on demand, kind of like how Uber does peak demand pricing. I hate it.

As an old, I don't even take my phone with me everywhere. I don't always want to bother keeping up with it, so I leave it at home on the charger. I guess people like us don't count.

So, to retail stores with no prices, even on clothing merchandise tags, restaurants with no physical menu, and businesses whose website info. can only be accessed via social media: I want nothing to do with you! I will find a way to get what I need, without you.

These stores also want to use facial recognition software to get information on your buying habits, so it's a great time to mask up in public spaces.

I wish I were being paranoid. The truth is, I probably don't even know the half of it.

Hot Dog Water, Zero Fux 3d ago

My response is to get all my shit and price check as I CHECK MYSELF OUT and leave them piles of crap that is priced wrong.

I'll cost them every pirated cent they tack-on by killing their register availability and stuffing employee go-back carts.

MissConstrue 3d ago

@GGMcBG @kimlockhartga

Beloved and I went out to dinner in Denver, a special occasion, fancy restaurant…girl, I put on heels. And makeup. We get to this place, with the ambience and the candles and the waiter handed me a leather portfolio with a QR code.

I looked at it, I looked at him, I looked back at it, and said “No, I will not be starting this evening with a security breach, thanks. May we please have menus.” And I was fully prepared to walk out if they didn’t have them.

My phone is not your business asset. Do not assume I will provide your infrastructure or architecture for free. Fuck off with all of that.

@MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga

Externalities again !
I wonder to what extent the 'efficiency' gains of technology are actually achieved by moving the costs, and the work, on to customers - where of course it is unpaid labour.

@dacig @ChrisMayLA6 @ReggieHere

UkeleleEric 1d ago

@GeofCox @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6 @ReggieHere I suspect it is more down to them getting access to your data to sell on. That's why I tend to avoid downloading apps for anything that I can do physically or via a website (where I can control popups and cookies).

Yes, Apps are mostly evil little data gatherers.

Capitalism's answer to objections is of course to drop the website and insist that users install the App.

@GeofCox @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May 1d ago

@UkeleleEric @GeofCox @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ReggieHere

Luckily as someone without a smartphone, for the most part anyone who moves to an App loses me....

Nicole Parsons 1d ago

@GeofCox @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6 @ReggieHere

Remember the source of these "business models"

1. Oil oligarchs who steal oil from the indigenous & poison the air, land, & water of their neighbors & refuse to pay restitution.

2. Tech oligarchs accustomed to unpaid content & unpaid content moderators.

3. AI oligarchs who stole all human knowledge & are ransoming it back on a meter that they price fix.

4. Justices & politicians so corrupt they don't pay staff

Controlling knowledge is the twenty-first century equivalent of controlling the means of production, but unlike capitalist control of natural resources, tools and machinery in previous iterations, knowledge is both an asset in its immutable form and a weapon when its corrupted to manipulate social and economic outcomes.

@GeofCox @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

.....it may sound a bit negative, but I think we may be on the verge of a new dark age of information as Big Tech corporates start to poison the wells of free and validated information to consolidate their advantage and drive demand for their new knowledge products.

@GeofCox @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

GeofCox 18h ago

You remind me of the great Guy Debord, writing in the 1960s...

"The complex process of the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge already gets 29% of the yearly national product of the United States... In the second half of this century culture will hold the key role in the development of the economy, a role played by the automobile in the first half."

@Npars01 @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

I wonder what he'd have made of the hype cycle that dictates so much today?

Controlling knowledge won't be enough for people wed to marketing and perception management.

@Npars01 @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

MissConstrue 17h ago

@ReggieHere @GeofCox @Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

I dunno man, unlike Richard Dawkins, who is out here with his full chest talking about his AI girlfriend Claudia, I think Guy Debord would have been training revolutionaries on how to firebomb the data centers. I think, based on his work, he would have seen the utter depravity that we have let capital drag us in to, and would have raised a battle flag against it.

The French are very good at resistance. He would have had pointers. :)

GeofCox 16h ago

@MissConstrue @ReggieHere

Yes - I don't think much about the recent evolution of capitalism would have surprised Debord - see - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle

I think this direction has long been evident - and I share your worries about Big Tech - but I see this more in terms of a much older - and inherent in capitalism - struggle between privatisation/commodification and the human reality of social and environmental co-operation and harmony.

If we focus on the direction of hyper-capitalism in the pretty extreme unbalanced form that has been allowed to take hold in the US, it's a worrying picture - and this focus is very natural because the role the US Tech dominated internet plays in many other countries. But it's still a struggle - and I think that the more Big Tech undermines the reliability of current internet knowledge through its attempts at increasing privatisation/commodification, the more people, and alternative economics - the European Social Model, China, the Global South's rejection of colonisation - will be empowered. In other words I think Big Tech is undermining the foundations of it's own edifice.

@Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

The Society of the Spectacle - Wikipedia

Yes, this exactly, but the 'empowered economic individual' created under neoliberalism has created an empowered and individualistic form of non-compliance:

@MissConstrue @Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6
https://mastodon.social/@ReggieHere/116815757021874514

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May 16h ago

@GeofCox @MissConstrue @ReggieHere @Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig

In the realm of critical political economy there was at least a couple of waves (during my quarter century career) when people re-discovered Debord and a form of situationist political economy - I always found his work a little to allusive but that's just me; lots of my colleagues got a lot out of it

The French are very good as resistance and they retire earlier and with better pensions than the English for their troubles.

I was thinking along the lines of an individualist, asynchronous and anonymous resistance, which using your post as as an example might mean one person placing an idea, and then several other people independently adding other examples, more details and refinements, and so on to execution....

@GeofCox @Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

.....obviously neither of us are advocating for data centres to be bombed here, which blurs the edges of civil resistance.

ing @GeofCox @Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig @ChrisMayLA6

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May 17h ago

@GeofCox @ReggieHere @Npars01 @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig

he of the 'beach beneath the cobbles'?

Had to look that one up.

@GeofCox @Npars01 @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig

MissConstrue 10h ago

@ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox @ReggieHere @Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig

Sous les pavés, la plage! is a perfect example of how the French protest better than any other group of people. What an elegant bit of semantic kit that phrase is. The memetics of it are…chef’s kiss.

@MissConstrue @ChrisMayLA6

It is great, though I'm not sure it's Debord - might have a more ambient May 68 origin.

@ReggieHere @Npars01 @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May 17h ago

@ReggieHere @Npars01 @GeofCox @MissConstrue @GGMcBG @kimlockhartga @dacig

see also Bite Size Economics No.s 7 & 20 for some background on that... with which I concur