Deception and Capital
Words and Images by Tom PazderkaImagine that you just bought an airline ticket. You purchased an upgrade that, in bold letters, exclaims that for an extra $200, you will have the ability to reserve seats at no charge to you by calling the airline. So, you call the airline to reserve your seats only to be informed that, indeed, you may reserve seats free of charge, but only 30 hours prior to take off during the online check-in period. Before this time frame, you will incur charges for your seat selection. Frustrated, you protest, only to walk away from the phone call with the understanding that what the airline just did wasn’t actually fraudulent. It was deceitful for sure, but not fraudulent. Sure enough, after checking over the tiny fine print, you find there is a reference to this period of ‘free’ seat selection of 30 hours prior to boarding, buried within the text.
This is the kind of practice that defines today’s ‘late-stage capitalism.’ It’s a strange phrase that’s been in use for over a century, and hardly anyone who uses it even knows its origins or how it is possible that capital can be in a late stage for a hundred years and outlast both communism and fascism that had as their raison d’etre the displacement and overcoming of capitalism. But that is an entirely different question for a different essay.
Perhaps a better way to think of what is going on is in terms of ideology and neoliberalism if you’re into reading Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek, capitalism is predicated on a form of belief not dissimilar to the belief in a Christian God. Every time we as subjects get a glimpse of this god’s nakedness in the form of major crises or, in this instance, hidden ‘artifacts’ that are meant to deceive, our belief is only strengthened through a kind of self-correcting ideological framework. The Christian Church argued that mistakes or deceptions were always the work of the Devil, which radically reinserted the authority of the Church. The fact that the Devil was in itself a concept created out of the Christian dialectic was conveniently forgotten. Economists, on the other hand, reframe mistakes and deceptions as ‘distortions’ rather than problems endemic to capitalism. Problems like inequality and exploitation aren’t simply memory-holed; even though there is a definite tendency toward that end, they are instead subsumed into the functioning of capitalism itself. The inevitable circular argument always arrives: ‘Yes, we know very well that capitalism creates homelessness, economic crises, wars over resources, and vast inequality, but capitalism is the only system equipped to properly deal with these problems.’ Žižek believes that the problem lies in the lack of class consciousness exhibited by the middle and lower classes. In his view, only the upper class is, in the Marxist sense, truly class-conscious; in other words, it is acting in its own self-interest. The upper class thus puts a different spin on the classic notion of Marxist class consciousness by locating it within capitalism.
But what if you are an entirely too online neo-reactionary (NRx) weirdo, or Nick Land is your guy? In the NRx framework, we are dealing with a completely different set of ontological circumstances. Whereas in the Žižekian worldview, what is directly responsible for the ideological reference through which we experience the world is our inherent inability to see beyond capitalism, within NRx, capitalism itself forms the basic structure for its own overcoming. In online message boards like Reddit, this framework is often referred to as ‘The Matrix,’ recalling the late 1990s Hollywood blockbuster. But as the neo-reaction moniker suggests, none of what nRx proposes is actually a good idea. Nick Land’s break with Žižekian-style theorization occurred around the time of the Great Financial Crisis. Žižek argued for a reinscription of Marxist ideas into socioeconomic politics, while Land, perhaps due to his mental breakdown caused by drugs and overexhaustion, made a complete 180-degree turn toward right-wing accelerationism. In his view, ‘minor’ infractions and flaws within capitalism ought to be exploited and accelerated to cause a psychic break with capitalist ideology and to dispel its Christian (i.e., religious) ontology. In other words, more inequality, homelessness, economic crises, and wars ought to be seen as evidence of the capitalist system working correctly. For Land and his followers (Curtis Yarvin, etc.), the overcoming of capitalism is marked by a turn away from the masses, from democracy and socialism, toward the enlightened individual, the new aristocratic (i.e., meritocratic) sovereign, which can only be achieved after a total breakdown of the capitalist model.
Anamnesis | Ash, charcoal, and oil on burned panel 32"x32" 2018
Whatever we choose to call what we’ve inherited from the previous generations, the current kind of capitalism involves far too many loopholes and obfuscations that make any kind of ‘normal’ life near impossible and entirely too frustrating to navigate. But make no mistake, this practice is the result of decades of political and social engineering and is how capitalism is supposed to work. That is the point made by both Žižekian (Marxist, radical left, etc.) and Neo-Reactionary (radical right, alt-right, etc.) critique. The possibility of escaping the matrix is entirely dependent on the ability to pay one’s way out of it, like a first-class airplane ticket.
Consider this in the above example, if you actually spent the time reading through all the fine print and found that one small line about seat selection (whether that actually made a difference in your desire to buy or not to buy the ticket is irrelevant at this moment), by the time you got to the end, the ticket price would have changed, because airlines operate within a different kind of capital structure in which prices are determined within an enclosed computer system which bases price on demand and past performance. This is the reason that plane tickets cost more during the peak holiday season. But ticket prices also change from day to day and hour to hour.
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This market structure was designed specifically by and for the airline industry after it was deregulated in the 1980s by the Reagan Administration, so it isn’t a very big surprise that today many other industries either already use similar shady pricing tactics or are considering implementing them. In March, the fast food giant Wendy’s introduced its plan for ‘dynamic pricing,’ essentially basing its product prices on demand. This means that the Baconator would be more expensive during the lunch hour than in the lull between lunch and dinner and be less expensive on Tuesdays than on Saturdays. Furthermore, it was speculated that Wendy’s pricing structure would be handed over to a proprietary AI computer system which would scrape data including the identities of their customers, their age and weight, in other words, statistical data for everything from individuals to communities and entire cities would be used to determine the price of a meal. It would be entirely feasible in this kind of system that an overweight man would see the cost of a cheeseburger skyrocket as compared to a relatively healthy teenager.
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Not to be outdone, Walmart plans to test digital price tags on their in-store products. While this is sold to the public as an innovation in real-time supply and demand data pricing, in reality, a similar trick is being played behind the scenes. In the world of online shopping, where a huge proportion of customers use their phones to transact and no longer use cash or even plastic cards at checkout, the direct line between digital prices and digital checkout is just waiting to be exploited by unscrupulous corporations who may be able to access sensitive personal data such as creditworthiness (in other words, one’s social credit score), debt to income ratios, past ‘performance’ (how much one buys and where, etc), net worth, and so on, in order to come up with a price that is specifically ‘tailored’ to an individual. Sounds a little dystopian. That’s because it is. And although deception has been a baked-in component of the capitalist market structure for centuries, this kind of obfuscation is somewhat new, but there are precedents.
A few months ago, I went to my doctor for an annual physical. My Blue Shield PPO insurance pays 100% for preventive care, and an annual physical is entirely covered. To my surprise, a few weeks later, I got a bill from my doctor for around $90. Confused and frustrated, I called the office, but the billing person was out on vacation. So the next time I was out near the office again, I walked in to talk to the receptionist. It turns out that I was billed for discussing topics that were not within the scope of the physical, which, in this case, was referencing my worry about my dust allergies. It was a one-two-minute conversation, for which the doctor’s office billed a total of $500, $410 of which went to the insurance company and the rest to me. The receptionist tried to explain the situation by saying that as soon as we began talking about issues unrelated to the physical, a new appointment was effectively started on top of the other. I was, in essence, inside an absurdist comedy, receiving free care during the original appointment, but paying for another on top of the original one I initiated during the free one. Which is actually quite interesting as a concept, because in no other industry would such a thing be possible, except the airline industry with their notorious double booking.
The Country Doctor | Ash, charcoal and oil on burned panel 26" x 26" 2020
The medical insurance system relies on a level of obfuscation that rivals the airline industry and perhaps surpasses it in some way. My counterargument to the receptionist made it quite obvious to her how predatory the system that is in place between the doctor, the patient, and the insurance company really is. It is a triangle in which the two top players always get to win against the third; it’s just not always certain who plays with whom and who plays against whom, though my suspicion is that in the crushing majority of cases, it is the patient that actually loses, whether it is through paying increasingly more ridiculous premiums or increasingly higher doctor visits and in the worst cases, paying for the mistakes and outright deceptions of the doctor’s offices who try to play the system against the insurance corporations without regard for the patients.
The current political campaign ads provide a strange glimpse into the functioning and deception of Big Pharma. California Prop 34, for example, “Authorizes statewide negotiation of Medi-Cal drug prices.” Which means that prices are in fact subject to negotiation and not simply to supply and demand economic forces, or God forbid, competition. There is a level of absurdity that can be reached when this simple premise is forgotten. We’ve been living in a world of unbridled competition, yet prices for most consumer goods, services, and real estate continue to increase year over year. Something isn’t quite right. In a 60 Minutes interview, the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Kahn, highlighted predatory practices that pharmaceutical corporations employ to keep prices for their products high by keeping generic products off the shelves. Pharma corporations achieve such absurdly inflated prices by openly manipulating patent laws. Where one type of inhaler costs only $7 in France, the same exact inhaler will run $500 in the US. To do this, these corporations have issued a patent for a new cap, effectively extending the existing patent on their old product. When the FTC sent a warning letter to four of the companies, three of them dropped their price from several hundred dollars down to just $35. The fact that there exist people with access to ‘the button,’ essentially an ability to change prices at a moment’s notice up and down, ought to fundamentally change our view of inflation as an ‘organic’ byproduct of the market, of supply and demand or of increased money printing. Multinationals have the ability to lower prices; they just won’t because they have no incentive to do so.
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When it comes to the airlines, such tactics are almost expected because the airline industry thrives on the impersonal nature of the billions of transactions that take place every day, every week, every month, every year. It is the same with banks. The majority of where banks make their money is through late fees and service fees, which point to the fact that banks live off the mistakes made by individual users running up debts they cannot pay, overdrawing their accounts, establishing new credit lines, all of which ‘require’ transaction service fees. Where such tactics are not, and ought not to be expected, are at one’s own family doctor’s office. They sour and jeopardize the relationship. If my doctor is ok with deceiving me, what else are they capable of?
Had I known ahead of time that I would be charged for a separate appointment on top of my original one, I would have never mentioned allergies and spared myself the headache of having to haggle over a silly amount of money. But in this case it was literally the principle that was at stake. I was being scammed, or at least it felt like it, and my only recourse was to apply some basic logic to the situation. The receptionist was visibly flustered, her face turning redder by the second as she tried to explain away the unexplainable, a policy that was put in place not necessarily to deceive but to protect the office from the long arms of the insurance and regulatory industries. As with most of these kinds of ‘protections,’ the patient ultimately pays the price. In the retail industry, the consumer swallows all the increasing costs through inflation, while in the medical insurance industry, the consumer/patient swallows all the liability costs, including the actual material costs.
The story has a happy ending, however. After apologizing to the receptionist for making her sweat, I called back to the billing office and talked with the clerk, who was able to reverse the charges on both the insurance side and my side. My takeaway? Reading the fine print will teach you a lot, but it will most certainly waste a lot of your time. Everyone knows today that time literally IS money, and realizing that there are things you don’t know that you don’t know is a lesson that is worth more in real life than on paper.
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Read more from Tom Pazderka about Morality & Resentment in Ojai.
Cover:
Heaven Abyss
Oil, ashes and charcoal on burned panel
43"x57"
2016
