#monopsony — Public Fediverse posts

Historicising Enshittification

Lineages of the bad internet

by Arvind L. U.
Disjunctions Magazine
September 2026

https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/historicising-enshittification/

Historicising Enshittification

Lineages of the bad internet

by Arvind L. U.
Disjunctions Magazine
September 2026

https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/historicising-enshittification/

Historicising Enshittification

Lineages of the bad internet

by Arvind L. U.
Disjunctions Magazine
September 2026

https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/historicising-enshittification/

Historicising Enshittification

Lineages of the bad internet

by Arvind L. U.
Disjunctions Magazine
September 2026

https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/historicising-enshittification/

Historicising Enshittification

Lineages of the bad internet

by Arvind L. U.
Disjunctions Magazine
September 2026

https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/historicising-enshittification/

Why your fare cost so much, and uber drivers get paid so little:
It is the result of a highly calculated corporate strategy known as surveillance pricing (or algorithmic personalized pricing).
In a genuine free market, prices function as transparent signals shaped by open supply and demand. Both buyers and sellers see the market rate, ensuring fairness. If a business overcharges, consumers walk; if it underpays, workers leave for a competitor.
Surveillance pricing completely subverts this dynamic by weaponizing information asymmetry. Using a massive hoard of data, the platform creates an invisible digital partition between the customer and the service provider. Instead of a shared, transparent marketplace, the algorithm isolates both sides into separate, closed-door negotiations where the platform holds all the cards.
For the passenger: The algorithm calculates the exact upper ceiling of what you will tolerate paying at that specific second—factoring in everything from your immediate location, time of day, and urgency, to your historical behavioral trends.
For the driver: The platform acts as an electronic monopsony (a market with many sellers but only one dominant buyer of labor). It isolates the worker and calculates the absolute structural floor of what that specific driver will accept to keep their car moving. By dangling unpredictable, variable incentives, it extracts hours of uncompensated labor (waiting and idling time), leaving the driver to absorb all the capital risk, vehicle depreciation, and fuel costs.
By blinding both sides of the transaction, the platform acts as a centralized command structure rather than a passive matching service. It systematically strips away the "consumer surplus" (the extra value and savings a buyer gets) and the "producer surplus" (the fair profit a worker keeps) and absorbs that wealth entirely for itself.
This mechanism is profoundly anti-free market because it replaces transparent competition with a proprietary information monopoly. True markets thrive on decentralized, shared knowledge; this system relies entirely on keeping everyone else in the dark.
#SurveillanceCapitalism #GigEconomy #PlatformCapitalism #FreeMarket #Economics #monopsony

"The minimum wage in Mexico has more than doubled in real terms over the last six years. This is no small feat, especially if we take into account that the policy neither led to feared job losses nor price increases. This was partly because the Mexican minimum wage was well below those of other Latin American countries. With the latest increase, however, Mexico’s minimum wage is now greater than those in half of the region. Each successive increase has helped more people—in the first year, the increase benefited 13.3 percent of the formal labor force and by 2025 it benefited 37.4 percent, representing around 8.4 million workers.

With the radical shift in Mexico’s wage policy, these recent increases in the minimum wage—while translating into an average income growth of 25 percent in real terms and a significant decrease in poverty and inequality—have only begun to chip away at corporate power. The share of wages has only grown slightly, and the negligible increase in unemployment and inflation underscores drastic asymmetries in the relationship between employers and workers. The Mexican labor market is extremely monopsonistic, in part because there are relatively few large companies, but also due to poor labor law enforcement and weak unions. Common labor practices in Mexico allow firms to exercise more power to determine wages well below what they would be in a perfectly competitive market, which has led to the prevalence of high profits at the expense of working conditions.

Analyzing the historical evolution of the minimum wage in Mexico is fundamental to understanding how the Mexican wage policy has become a successful and innovative model. Its implementation has reduced poverty for millions of people and generated unprecedented growth in family income, defying traditional forecasts that linked minimum wage increases with uncontrolled inflation and unemployment."

https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/mexico-minimum-wage/

#Mexico #MinimumWage #Poverty #PovertyReduction #Monopsony