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Pluralistic: Agents vs ecommerce (28 Oct 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow


Today's links


A blasted, dark, cratered moonscape, dominated by an overturned shopping cart, which is being swarmed with killer robots from pulp magazines.

Agents vs ecommerce (permalink)

The first widely read piece of tech criticism I ever wrote was "Metacrap: Putting the torch to the seven strawmen of the meta-utopia," a response to the underlying philosophy of the "Semantic Web" that I published in 2001:

https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm

The piece holds up surprisingly well today (if I do say so myself), and not just for its criticism of the ontological incoherence of "web semantics." The most relevant concept I develop in that piece is a criticism of any plan that starts with "first, everyone else in the world just needs to set aside their needs and advantages in favor of my priorities, and then my plan will work."

This is especially relevant today in the context of "agentic AI." When this idea was first mooted, the big idea was that you could instruct a chatbot to venture out onto the public, unstructured web and it would do your bidding, for example, finding all the flights that fit your criteria and comparing prices for all of them, picking the best one and booking it for you.

This idea quickly foundered. Each step in that process was too complex and specialized for a single chatbot; so the notion quickly gave way to "swarms" of specialized chatbots – one to search the web and identify likely travel websites; one to search those websites; one to evaluate flights against your criteria, one to handle the transaction, and so on.

Through specialization, these bots could be made far more accurate, but at a price: both the literal price of all the extra computation that goes into powering a "swarm" versus a single process, and the reliability price that arises from complexity. That's because error rates are multiplicative: combine two bots with low failure rates into a single system and that system will have a higher failure rate than any of its components. This compounding error rate only increases as you add more and more bots, so every time you add a new specialized bot to decrease the error rate in its area of specialization, you increase the overall error rate of the system by adding more complexity to it.

Despite this, companies pressed on ahead with "agentic," without any regard to the realities or consequences. For example, Microsoft has repeatedly announced that it will modify Windows to eliminate all forms of PC-side privacy and confidentiality, sending a continuous stream of screenshots to Microsoft's cloud servers so that your Microsoft "agent" can access your private data on Microsoft's cloud:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

But the real fix for "agentic" is for everyone in the world to rearrange their affairs to the benefit of AI agents. This is the same demand that the Semantic Web people made in the early oughts, and it has the same problems. The Semantic Web people operated on the assumption that there were freestanding, objectively correct ways of describing things and that everyone who put information on the web would eventually come to see that adopting these correct semantics was to everyone's advantage.

In reality, these semantic differences are the expression of real, serious, unresolvable philosophical, technical, moral and political arguments. The reason that some media outlets won't describe trans women as women isn't because they lack an appreciation of objectively correct semantic classifications – it's because they're bigots. That's the same reason "race realists" insist that there is a biological category called "race," that exists despite everything computational genomics has proved:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#race-realism

In my book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, I predicted that a similar dynamic would play out when it came to agentic AI and websites. The reason websites are so inhospitable to bots is that ecommerce sites don't want to be legible to automated tools:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

Ecommerce websites deploy a wide range of sleazy tactics to raise prices, including surveillance pricing:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/07/gouged/#aeropain

They use market power to rig whole categories, forcing prices up:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/10/15/enshittipedia/

Multiple law-enforcers, Republic and Democrat, state and federal, have sued companies for "drip pricing" and "junk fees" that make it impossible to know what the actual price is until you've spent a long-ass time going through the purchase process:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

Surveillance pricing, drip pricing, junk fees, price fixing and "most favored nation" deals are the source of all the growth in profitability by the economy's largest, most important firms. These tactics require opacity and are antithetical to the kinds of automated comparison-shopping that agentic peddlers promise:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/#enforcement-priorities

These tactics are facially illegal and despite this, they are widely practiced. Cheating is so profitable that it's cheaper for firms to buy off regulators and pay fines than it is for them to stop criming. The fantasy that these same companies would welcome agentic shopping bots with open arms is just as implausible as the idea that if we feed enough words to the word-guessing program, it will wake up and become a "super intelligence":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal

What's more, the AI companies know this. Google's big plan to make AI profitable is to sell merchants the power to combine its surveillance data with its AI tools to price-gouge shoppers:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

And right on time, ecommerce websites are mass-blocking AI agents:

https://gizmodo.com/online-shopping-platforms-turn-against-third-party-ai-agents-2000831298

They're doing it in part because AI agents allow shoppers to cheat (for example, by renewing a "temporary" hold on a used item to block other buyers indefinitely), but also because they don't want automation tools on their platforms at all. These tools are a frontal assault on all the most exciting (and sleaziest) ways to make money in the waning hours of end-stage capitalism. Far from welcoming bots, ecommerce sites were always going to block them.

It's easy to come up with amazing applications for technology if you're allowed to assume that you can get everyone else in the world to set aside their priorities and their interests in favor of yours. But unless someone has a plan to do that, we shouldn't take them seriously.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Hack your Aibo https://web.archive.org/web/20010516005338/http://aibohack.com/

#20yrsago History of calculator watches https://watchismo.blogspot.com/2006/10/calculating-history-of-led-calculator.html

#15yrsago How Occupy has shifted the national debate https://www.salon.com/2011/10/27/the_victory_ows_has_already_won/

#15yrsago UK public reimbursed Margaret Thatcher was reimbursed for more than £500K in personal expenses https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/oct/28/margaret-thatcher-expenses-claim

#15yrsago Depression the Hyperbole and a Half way https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html

#15yrsago Philippines president Duterte says God threatened to crash his plane if he didn’t stop swearing https://www.khaosodenglish.com/news/international/2016/10/28/duterte-says-god-told-stop-cursing/

#15yrsago Public safety codes are now free online for all https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/28/public-safety-codes-are-now-free-online-for-all/

#10yrsago Dr Seuss estate has crushed a kickstarter for a Seuss/Trek mashup https://web.archive.org/web/20170425161011/https://www.popehat.com/2016/10/26/popehat-signal-help-defend-a-seuss-trek-parody-under-fair-use/

#10yrsago Undercover with a prepper militia that patrols the border to fight “drug cartels” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/undercover-border-militia-immigration-bauer/

#10yrsago The “Blacks for Trump” guy used to be in a murder cult https://web.archive.org/web/20161027133828/https://fusion.net/story/362459/blacks-for-trump-michael-the-black-man-yahweh-cult/

#5yrsago Europe's trustbusters lose the plot https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#filternet

#5yrsago All of science gets a general index https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

#5yrsago The new DRM-breaking exemptions just dropped https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

#1yrago Raymond Biesinger's "9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off" https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-me

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

  • “Once Is Enemy Action,” a science fiction novel about the origins of modern technofascism. Today's words: 518 (30331 total).

  • "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

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Pluralistic: The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing (30 Jul 2026)

✇Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
By: Cory Doctorow


Today's links


The Golden Gate Bridge, wreathed in rising fog. To the right of the scene sits a giant crying baby in a top-hat, his chubby fist resting on an antique cash-register that has been fitted with a CCTV. The CCTV emits a cone of red light that is zapping a female figure - an engraving in the style of a revolutionary French woman storming the Bastille. The woman holds aloft the severed head of Ben Franklin as depicted on a US $100 bill. His eyes glow red.

The stupidest imaginable excuses for surveillance pricing (permalink)

With "surveillance pricing," businesses have finally found something AI can do way, way, way better than people: price gouging.

As the name suggests, "surveillance pricing" is the practice of charging every customer a different price for every transaction, based on the massive surveillance dossiers that Big Tech companies and data-brokers have assembled on everyone in the world. Congress hasn't updated federal consumer privacy law since 1988 (when they passed a law banning the disclosure of VHS rentals), so pretty much any form of consumer surveillance is fair game.

This is where the AI comes in. One thing AI is indisputably great for is multivariate statistical analysis. You can feed an AI "behavioral data" (information about where you go, what you do, what you buy, who you talk to and what you say) about all of your customers and ask it to cluster them according to their shared traits. Then you can direct the AI to automatically run a series of small experiments to discover the maximum markup each group will stomach under which circumstances.

This works without you having to direct the AI to rip off certain groups of people – it will simply find the most vulnerable people and rip them off the most. If you're hiring in an industry that practices a lot of tacit racial discrimination, a system like this can figure out on its own that people of color typically accept lower wages because there are fewer employers bidding for their labor, and recommend lowball salary offers, all without you ever typing "please be racist" into your AI prompt.

This works so well that Google has announced that it is their plan for making a profit off of AI, after losing hundreds of billions of dollars on chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/21/cod-marxism/#wannamaker-slain

In the before times, marketers and demographers had to dream up demographic categories based on limited data and run focus groups to figure out how to maximize revenue from each market segment. Now an AI can segment the data to any degree you choose, and continuously, automatically experiment on each segment to find their weak spots.

It's "theory-free." You don't have to discover why a group is willing to pay more under a given set of circumstances, you merely have to observe and weaponize this fact. You don't have to know why one group of purchasers consistently accept higher prices between 6AM and 8AM – you can just automatically jack up prices on them without knowing or caring that you're gouging parents of young children who are re-ordering essential supplies while trying to get their kids to school in the morning.

I thought up that example. I don't know if it's really happening. But here's something that really is happening: ecommerce sites charge parents of newborns extra when they order thermometers in the middle of the night. I'm not saying that anyone ever sat down and said, "Parents with sick children will pay whatever we charge for a thermometer at 2AM." They didn't have to: this is the kind of thing an automated system can do without any human intervention:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/p246202_surveillancepricing6bstudy_researchsummaries_redacted.pdf

The goal of surveillance pricing is to shift all the "consumer surplus" (the difference between the highest price you're willing to pay and the price you actually pay) to companies. It's a form of cod-Marxism where you are gouged according to your ability (to pay) and charged according to the desperation of your need:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

The problems of surveillance pricing are well documented. Under Biden, the FTC did a landmark study on the practice, developing a rich factual record that documents the role surveillance pricing plays in the affordability crisis:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

Companies are already using this technology to rip you off, and they're slavering for the chance to do more of it. Instacart was recently caught marking up some shoppers' items by as much as a third:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/11/nothing-personal/#instacartography

The problem is that as much as companies love this, shoppers hate it. Last summer, Delta announced that it was going to surveillance price every seat on every flight, only to face such a massive backlash that they had to make another announcement bemoaning the fact that we'd all misunderstood their (unambiguous and extremely damning) announcement and they were actually going to do no such thing:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/30/efficiency-washing/#medallion-clubbed

One thing the Mamdani campaign impressed upon every politician in the country is that people are pissed about affordability and they will support anyone who stands up for the public against AI-equipped price gougers. The problem of course is that those price gougers are highly organized and have deep treasuries (stuffed with money they stole from us). With surveillance pricing, politicians face a familiar conundrum: if they do the thing that's popular with voters, they'll enrage donors.

One way to cut this knot is to enact legislation that seems to address the problem, but stuff it with so many loopholes that it does nothing. This lets you declare yourself the people's champion without doing anything to protect them from the donors who prey on your voters. That's the approach they took in Maryland:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/30/something-must-be-done/#there-ive-done-something

But in California, they're actually doing something about surveillance pricing. AB-2564 is a smart, well-written bill that bans surveillance pricing. It contains an easily evaluated test for surveillance pricing and carves out legitimate reasons for offering different prices for the same purchase (for example, when it costs more to deliver the product or service):

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB2564

Now we're in for the hard yards of turning this bill into a law. That's where California's cities come in. When municipal governments pass resolutions supporting a state bill, it makes it much easier to get that bill through the state legislature (and conversely, without support from major cities, it's that much easier to kill the bill before it becomes law).

A few days ago, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors was on the verge of passing a resolution in support of AB-2564. Now, that vote is stalled, thanks to a letter sent by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, an organization that has been pissing in San Franciscans' faces and telling them it was raining since 1850:

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/community/board-not-yet-ready-to-weigh-in-on-state-surveillance-pricing-ban/article_0ae4d143-cced-4988-abda-0b71bcbe524c.html

The Chamber's letter is – to use a technical term – flaming garbage. It raises the most spurious objections imaginable, claims about the bill's language that are belied by its plain, easily understood text. These objections are demolished in a letter the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent to the Supervisors:

https://www.eff.org/document/letter-sf-bos-re-surveillance

In the letter, EFF explains that claims that surveillance pricing will lower prices are overblown and not borne out by evidence. But more importantly – as EFF points out – privacy is a human right, and the idea that you should have to give up your privacy to get a fair price is just a fancy way of saying that privacy should be the exclusive preserve of people who can afford to pay more:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms#Legislation

EFF's letter goes on to address the Chamber's objections. Far from creating uncertainty about which conduct the bill addresses, AB-2564 crisply defines surveillance pricing as:

a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information collected through electronic surveillance.

The Chamber raises other tired objections, falsely claiming that banning surveillance pricing will end common discounting strategies like offering seniors cheaper movie tickets, or giving cheaper rates to retain customers who call to cancel their service. EFF replies by pointing out that all the Chamber's concerns are covered by the three comprehensive carve-outs in the bill: the ability to charge higher rates when it costs more to service a given customer; offering discounts to retain customers who want to cancel their service; and finally, discounts for criteria anyone can meet (like an "early bird special"), for membership in a broadly defined group (like "seniors"), or for participation in a loyalty program.

The San Francisco Supervisors could have figured out at a glance that the Chamber was bullshitting them. All it takes is a cursory read of the statute. But now they don't even have to do that: EFF has painstakingly debullshittified the Chamber's FUD.

Surveillance pricing is grossly offensive. When a company charges me $0.50 for a product that it charges you $1 for, they're essentially saying that your dollars are worth half as much as mine are. Companies shouldn't be able to reach into your wallet or your bank account and chop your money in half:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/24/price-discrimination/#

No wonder AB-2564 has plenty of backers, from EFF to Consumers Union:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/press_release/california-state-assembly-passes-key-bill-to-prohibit-surveillance-pricing/

San Francisco's city government should be on that list of supporters.

(Image: Takkk, CC BY-SA 3.0, modified)

Hey look at this (permalink)


A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago RIP, Wau Holland, founder of the legendary hacker clan, the Chaos Computer Club. https://web.archive.org/web/20010805192406/https://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45728,00.html

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines can be beaten with a switch-flip https://web.archive.org/web/20061007120702/http://openvotingfoundation.org/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=1

#20yrsago How thieves steal RFID-enabled cars https://web.archive.org/web/20060812065423/https://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey_pr.html

#15yrsago Official London anti-terrorist publication says anarchists should be reported to local police https://web.archive.org/web/20110801233618/https://communitysafe.gov.uk/articles/5962-griffin-weekly-briefing-sheet-attached/attachments/801/download.pdf

#15yrsago French copyright enforcers: “Pirates are big spenders on legit content” https://www.techdirt.com/2011/07/28/another-day-another-study-that-says-pirates-are-best-customers-this-time-hadopi/

#15yrsago Perma-cookie wars continue: KISSMetrics sneaks cookies back onto your computer even if you turn off every cookie vector https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1898390

#1yrago You can't fight enshittification https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.


A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)


A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)


A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027


Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

How to get Pluralistic:

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Pluralistic.net

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https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

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Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X

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