The result is leverage pervasively used to select information competitive with customer value. And also used to drain margins from ad buyers and all upstream economic input.

People complain endlessly about the downside to surveillance and personalized manipulation, but don't seem to have an appetite for more than that.

I view the centralization, surveillance and manipulation as all ethical problems, because they all involve negative externalities (weaponizing unpermissioned or dark-permissioned information, manipulating people based on their past behaviors and characteristics, and bleeding product providers).

Scalable ethical problems that pay, are not resolved by any means that don't resolve the ethics with economics. I.e. law or hard regulation, backed up by considerable fines ensuring risk-reward losses for perpetrators, and criminal charges for serious or repeat offenders.

Given the tremendous centralization and privacy violations, the problem is orders of magnitude worse than normal price fixing.

The basic idea is that the real value in advertising is as a signaling mechanism, and targeted advertising removes most of that signal.

I feel like personalized pricing has some of the same issues, in that it erodes consumer trust and makes it more and more difficult for consumers to confidently spend their money in the market. I am not sure how we fix the problem, though, because it is a collective action problem; any individual company will need to use personalized pricing to compete, but that behavior will hurt the economy as a whole.

I don't know the solution to this problem.

I imagine trying to continuously cycle accounts will run into various blocks, e.g. you can't sign up using your email/phone/credit-card because it is already linked to an existing account.

I hate the way the world is going. As the article states, Uber can probably classify my exact spending habits to maximize a price I'm willing to pay for. But id much rather them have to treat me as a new soul every time, and hopefully along those lines have to fight a bit harder to get my business.

The most obvious possibility omitted is that your wife got the first, easy, cheap car and then Uber had to quote you a higher price to get a second car. Cars don't fall from the sky; if two people successively ask for bids, how else could it work? What if the app quoted you both the cheap price for the only car within X blocks, and you bought it before she did? Is it suddenly going to go 'oops sorry, changed my mind, it now costs twice as much'? Sounds like a very bad experience to me! More sensible to give the first person a low quote and then when - unexpected and unpredictably - someone requests something similar, quote them the higher price reflecting the sudden local micro-shortage.

I say 'no thanks' when the cashier wants to know my phone number, even if I am paying cash.

It is almost impossible to remain anonymous in the consumer space, even if you are really trying.

so people want efficient markets and price discovery..but only when it results in them paying lower prices? otherwise the law should step in and preferably set prices by fiat or magic?

ok my personal take on buyng knick knacks in chatuchak is.. assume everything is cheap , thats why i come to thailand, i can afford this...

Ridiculous.

It's not the invisible hand, it's the very material effect of both surveillance technology and social and psychology studies.

I find it very dystopian what is described here. Enshittification at the high level and the end of trust

Of course there was always wiggle room, but they are either expected (like for the case of prices, the sales, haggling in some countries), or at the marge, but once everything around you is controlled by the algorithm that knows you better than yourself, what's the point ?

Yeah there will always be people with the mindset allowing them to thrive in these situations, and I'm maybe a dinosaur looking at the metro coming down.

But I don't believe that we can live in a sane society dedicated to extract the maximum value possible from individuals before throwing them away like garbage and where nothing is stable or predictable.

It seems distasteful on the surface of course but could it be macroeconomically a good thing?

Obviously the fatal flaw is that capitalists are running it for their own gain but logically how would it play out?