Organized Money

The journalist Lindsay Owens is on Walmart's bad side. After she uncovered several deeply creepy patents designed to surveille and de-anonymize their customers, the company has firmly denied they would ever, ever implement such terrible things. No one really believes them. 
Today on the show, Lindsay explains Walmart's surveillance patents, and more stories from her book Gouged, about the future of pricing, where algorithmically determined personalized gouging could run rampant without regulatory intervention. We also discuss the impact of Lindsay's work, her congressional testimony, and the important role prices play in democracy.

For years, gamers and the gaming industry have been a testing ground for many of the topics we regularly discuss on Organized Money: digital licenses standing in for true ownership; unending subscriptions; dark patterns; endless consolidation; and more. Now gamers are organizing to fight corporate greed. 
Today, David Dayen and Laurel Kilgore speak with Otis East, a founding member of Players Alliance HQ, and Zefrine, a Sims content creator, about the gaming industry, and their work around the $55 billion acquisition of Electronic Arts by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund and its partners, including a "raid" on EA headquarters  As digital distribution gives publishers greater control over the games people buy, East and Zefrine argue that gamers need to organize to defend their rights and ensure that paying for a game still means owning it.

Over the last several weeks, AI regulation fever has swept Congress, with competing ideas coming from various corners of Congress and the AI giants. On the table are solutions ranging from formal bans on superintelligence to a self-regulatory regime similar to banks.

Today, David and Laurel sit down with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA-07) to discuss her approach. The National AI Charter Act Framework, which relies on an old but reliable method of regulating AI companies using corporate charters: "“The crux of this bill is simple: if you want to be an AI company in this country, you have to obtain a public charter that has a broad set of terms and conditions to operate and ensure public benefit without the harms.” With Rep. Jayapal, we get into her bill, a history of corporate charters, and what exactly we want from corporate regulations from AI to healthcare.

With Matt on paternity leave, David is joined by co-host Laurel Kilgour to talk college sports!

The Protect College Sports Act is a piece of legislation which seeks to do the opposite of what it says on the tin. Instead of “saving” college sports, it seeks to roll back the recent spate of state and federal rulings that have granted college athletes more rights over their likenesses, easier mobility between teams, and pay from the schools themselves. The bill just passed the Senate easily, but is likely to face more opposition in the House of Representatives.

Today on the show, we’re joined by Organized Money alum Katie Van Dyck of the American Economic Liberties Project, to discuss the Protect College Sports Act, the recent history of pro-athlete rulings, and the ways the bigwigs who control college sports are trying to sell the bill to Congresspeople, and to the public at large.

Matt is out (for happy reasons), so please enjoy this repeat from last year. It's one of our favorite episodes, and we'll be back soon!
Today on the show, Matt and David sit down with Sam Levine and Stephanie Nguyen, formerly of the FTC under Lina Khan, to discuss the dark side of customer loyalty programs like frequent flyer miles, corporate discount cards, and ordering apps from chains like Starbucks and McDonalds. Their new paper, The Loyalty Trap: How Loyalty Programs Hook Us with Deals, Hack our Brains, and Hike Our Prices, exposes the lengths these programs go to to get you into their ecosystem in order to harvest your data, exploit it, and manipulate you to spend more, sometimes with surveillance pricing strategies. Together they discuss why these programs have proliferated, why they are so effective, and why they have been so difficult to regulate.
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