E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine.
Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber.
Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money.
Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.
The truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics.
People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine.
Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."
If our cash system deems dollars with certain serial numbers worth only $0.80 because they have history in the illicit drug trade, that cash is no longer fungible.
How is that functionally different than a system where a dollar of essential goods suddenly becomes $1.20 across most sellers for a particular consumer due to reliable inferences from an digital dossier inaccessible to the user?
In both cases, consumer confidence suffers. The biggest difference I see is that there's a rabid contingent who correctly yell, "Don't fucking mess with that!" with regard to currency fungibility, and a bunch of people saying, "It's complicated," with regard to surveillance capitalism.
Edit: again, to be clear-- I'm talking about individually tailored prices insidiously affecting large numbers of consumers in a consolidated industry for essential goods.
Edit 2: I know surveillance capitalism isn't the same thing as making currency be non-fungible. I'm looking for insight on what the difference is in terms of consumer confidence and other economic impacts.
Edit 3: clarification to narrow my question. If you can't tell yet, I'm earnestly looking for knowledge from someone who studies economics.
You know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.
With an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.
you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?
I don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff.
People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.
Except it does? Capitalist countries don’t seem to have any famines. You could argue that for profit prisons are similar to gulags in some ways but the important differences are so vast it’s hard to compare them honestly.
Sure keep saying that to yourself. All of you sound so damn sure when speaking about socialism. Like the first nation to pierce the firmament of human fabric wasn't a socialist one. And that the union wasn't making great strides in technology.
Such great strides in technology, their standard of living was so high that their president was literally shocked just by the abundance of food in a normal western grocery story.
Is that necessarily true?
E.g., suppose I'm grocery shopping online and get put in behavioral histogram bin #1. You're in bin #2 because of stuff like impulsive browsing habits and low battery. Your bin's price for chips is consequently x% more expensive than mine.
Now, suppose both of us get separate uber rides from the same location. Similar data bins end up with your low battery generating y% higher price for your Uber.
Seems to me enough consolidation and behavioral data-based pricing practically impedes the fungibility of currency. Because while you and I can still borrow and pay back the currency directly to each other with impunity, the literal price of goods and services we can buy with that currency will be different. I.e., if you buy me a sandwich on Monday and I pay you back with a sandwich on Tuesday, you're losing money.
Edit: for the steel man of what I'm saying, imagine most grocery and convenience stores have shifted away from static pricing to something like qr codes. Also, assume pricing based on personal data is rampant across industries for most basic private goods and services.
The truth is, price differentiation is something we've been doing for centuries, just with much worse heuristics.
People are triggered when you frame it in terms of one cohort paying more than the rest. However, if there's a sticker price that basically nobody pays, with most customers getting a discount based on how rich the heuristics say they are, that's suddenly fine.
Transit tickets work this way in most of Europe. There is a sticker price, but most people don't pay the sticker price. In practice, most tickets are purchased by school children, university students, seniors etc, and they all have varying levels of discounts. Whether you think of it as a "student discount" or as a "probably-rich-person surcharge", it doesn't really matter, in the end, the result is the same. Same applies to cinemas, museums, amusement parks. Here, you even have some grocery store chains that give you discounts if you have a "large family card."
Stick to the steel man.
If our cash system deems dollars with certain serial numbers worth only $0.80 because they have history in the illicit drug trade, that cash is no longer fungible.
How is that functionally different than a system where a dollar of essential goods suddenly becomes $1.20 across most sellers for a particular consumer due to reliable inferences from an digital dossier inaccessible to the user?
In both cases, consumer confidence suffers. The biggest difference I see is that there's a rabid contingent who correctly yell, "Don't fucking mess with that!" with regard to currency fungibility, and a bunch of people saying, "It's complicated," with regard to surveillance capitalism.
Edit: again, to be clear-- I'm talking about individually tailored prices insidiously affecting large numbers of consumers in a consolidated industry for essential goods.
Edit 2: I know surveillance capitalism isn't the same thing as making currency be non-fungible. I'm looking for insight on what the difference is in terms of consumer confidence and other economic impacts.
Edit 3: clarification to narrow my question. If you can't tell yet, I'm earnestly looking for knowledge from someone who studies economics.
You know what else we've been doing? Replacing 2 consumers with 1 consumer when the 1 consumer has more money and is easier to statisfy. Eventually it'll be a couple of billionairs selling a few boner pills for a few million dollars.
That may be true, but capitalism has nothing to do wit betting or prediction markets.
You can have those with any government or market style.
With an individual tendency towards betting? No. But I think Capitalism absolutely is a huge part of the fanatical drive to financialize everything, and the broader regulatory environment that enables the creation of entities like Polymarket and Kalshi.
The price of everything and the value of nothing.
Capitalism is just a projection of our natural competition for scarce resources onto an economic system.
There is nothing natural about distributed ownership and abstract financialization.
Resources would not be scarce if some people were not hoarding.
The supply is greatest at the source.
hoarding what?
you could dekulak all 3500 billionaires, magically transmute their make believe money into hard cash, and that $20 trillion would yield less than $2500 per human. hooray?
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Are you going to work for free?
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Betting with one another predates any notion of capitalism, or economy.
True, but capitalism eventually makes gambling the whole economy.
How?
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I don't think it does. Capitalism only allows one to save one's fruit of their labor to use down the line. You exchange it for money, then use that money to buy other stuff.
People using it to gamble has more to do with gambling people than with capitalism people. You can have gambling in communism or socialism, only stakes there are limited because the fruit of the labor of people doesn't belong to them like in capitalism.
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Capitalism neither prevents gulags nor famines.
And you can bet (pun intended) someone will create them on purpose if they can make profit from it
Doesn't the US already have an above average incarceration rate and private prisons? Maybe, just maybe, there's some relation?
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It actually did prevent lots of famines.
Except it does? Capitalist countries don’t seem to have any famines. You could argue that for profit prisons are similar to gulags in some ways but the important differences are so vast it’s hard to compare them honestly.
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Please do share what capitalist country had a famine in the past century.
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Sure keep saying that to yourself. All of you sound so damn sure when speaking about socialism. Like the first nation to pierce the firmament of human fabric wasn't a socialist one. And that the union wasn't making great strides in technology.
Such great strides in technology, their standard of living was so high that their president was literally shocked just by the abundance of food in a normal western grocery story.
Agree, comrade. 140 million dead are a small price to pay for our socialist utopia.
We just need one more chance.
Whether you like it or not, socialism is the key.