Latest / The Overlap / Enshittification: Everthing's an Upcharge!

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Enshittification: Everthing's an Upcharge! · The Overlap

• 0:00
  Samantha Henson is standing at a gate in Sacramento International Airport, and she's holding a guitar.
• 0:08
  Not a chainsaw, not a car battery.
• 0:12
  A guitar.
• 0:13
  One she cares about.
• 0:14
  It's in a bag.
• 0:16
  It's padded.
• 0:17
  It's not one of those fancy cases.
• 0:19
  It's a bag that she's flown with on this same airline for about five years.
• 0:24
  No incident, no problem, just a woman and her instrument.
• 0:29
  She makes her living on, waiting to get on a plane.
• 0:32
  And a gate agent tells her that she's not getting on that flight.
• 0:36
  You know that, right?
• 0:37
  And then sheriff's deputies show up.
• 0:40
  Forget the shouting for a second.
• 0:42
  I mean forget the viral video.
• 0:43
  If you haven't seen it, you can check it out on social media, it's trending.
• 0:46
  Forget the part where a Southwest employee looks at a working musician in the eye and tells her that she should be ashamed of herself.
• 0:55
  Set it all aside and look at the shape underneath.
• 0:59
  There's a federal law actually from two thousand twelve.
• 1:03
  It says a US airline has to let you carry a musical instrument into the cabin, no extra fee, as long as it fits and there's room when you board.
• 1:14
  Congress wrote it down, a president signed it, it's the law.
• 1:19
  And a woman standing in a gate with a guitar that fits on a day when there's room gets the police called on her anyway.
• 1:27
  The law didn't fail because someone broke it.
• 1:30
  It failed because the thing it protects a seat, a bag, the ordinary dignity of getting somewhere you're going with your stuff has been quietly turned into something you buy,
• 1:43
  piece by piece by piece.
• 1:46
  And once everything is something that you buy, the person who won't buy it looks like the problem.
• 1:53
  She wasn't the problem.
• 1:55
  She was the tell.
• 2:11
  Welcome to the overlap.
• 2:12
  I am Joshua.
• 2:14
  This is a show about the systems that run your life while insisting they're just the weather.
• 2:21
  This is not a guitar episode.
• 2:23
  It would be really easy to do a guitar episode or a banjo episode if you know me.
• 2:28
  A bad gate agent, a viral clip, everyone feels righteous for 90 seconds, and then the world moves on.
• 2:34
  That's not the show.
• 2:36
  Today we're doing the machine that made that gate inevitable, the slow.
• 2:40
  Deliberate, extremely profitable process of taking things that used to just come with what you bought a checked bag, a seat next to your kid, a movie without four ad breaks, and
• 2:53
  turning every one of them into an upcharge.
• 2:57
  There's actually a word for it now, you've probably already heard it, in shitification.
• 3:02
  A writer named Cory Doctorow coined it in twenty twenty two and it caught fire.
• 3:08
  Because everybody felt it and nobody really had the word.
• 3:12
  It was the word of the year in 2023.
• 3:15
  It's actually in the dictionary now, and it matters not because it's fun to say, though it really is kind of fun to say.
• 3:21
  It matters because it names a thing that exists in the world a pattern.
• 3:27
  And a pattern means somebody's running it on purpose.
• 3:30
  So why now?
• 3:32
  Well, May 2025, Southwest, the the last big airline that let you check.
• 3:37
  Two bags for free.
• 3:39
  The thing was practically their personality.
• 3:42
  They killed it.
• 3:44
  Bags fly free, gone, after fifty years being a de facto standard in the industry.
• 3:49
  And it's not because they were losing money.
• 3:51
  Southwest is a very profitable airline.
• 3:54
  It's because an investor showed up.
• 3:56
  Now we'll get into that asshole later, but first, back up, because none of this is new.
• 4:01
  And it did not start with an app.
• 4:04
  To understand the bag fee.
• 4:05
  You actually have to go back 30 years before the bag fee.
• 4:08
  I know, I know, I know.
• 4:09
  Um now, for those of us who are millennials, when I say 30 years ago, you immediately think the 1970s, right?
• 4:15
  1978.
• 4:17
  Picture the airline before then, right?
• 4:20
  For 40 years, uh, a board in Washington, the the Civil Aeronautics Board, ran airlines like a public utility.
• 4:29
  It ultimately set the fares, it decided who flew which routes.
• 4:34
  And a Cornell economist named Alfred Kahn looked at that and said reasonably enough that this is sclerotic.
• 4:42
  Let the market in.
• 4:44
  Jimmy Carter agreed with him and in October of nineteen seventy eight he signed the Airline Deregulation Act and stood there and made a promise to the American people.
• 4:55
  Get the government out, he said, and you'll get competition.
• 4:58
  New airlines, more passengers, lower fares, and
• 5:02
  He literally pitched it as a weapon against inflation.
• 5:07
  Set the market free and everybody wins.
• 5:10
  That's a beautiful pitch.
• 5:12
  And we're looking at how it aged.
• 5:13
  Between nineteen seventy eight and two thousand one, eight major airlines and more than a hundred smaller ones went bankrupt or got swallowed whole.
• 5:23
  Eastern, Braniff, Pan Am, TWA, names that used to mean something in the airline world are gone.
• 5:31
  Now the survivors dug in behind fortress hubs, the airports that they own so completely that you cannot fly out of your own city without paying them.
• 5:42
  And then they merged and merged and merged.
• 5:46
  That promised explosion of competition collapsed into a handful of giants.
• 5:52
  And by any real measure, the airline business is more concentrated today than it was before the law.
• 5:58
  was sold to increase competition.
• 6:01
  Khan himself, the the father of this whole idea, lived long enough to admit the turmoil and the consolidation were not the movie that he had been screening in his head.
• 6:13
  He never once saw this bag fee coming, and that's the root.
• 6:17
  Four years ago, they sold you competition and handed you an oligopoly.
• 6:23
  An oligopoly is the one thing you need
• 6:26
  In place before you can charge everyone the same fee and then dare them to walk away from it.
• 6:32
  Which brings us finally to 2008.
• 6:34
  When fuel prices were spiking, the economy was about to fall off of a cliff, and in May, American Airlines does something that no major US air carrier had ever done.
• 6:45
  They announced your first check bag now costs fifteen dollars each way.
• 6:52
  Now those of you who have flown recently know that.
• 6:55
  You would love if they only charged fifteen dollars each way.
• 7:00
  Because for the entire history of flight up until that point, your bag came with your ticket.
• 7:06
  You bought a seat, your stuff came too.
• 7:08
  American takes that apart and says, look, the bag is a separate product now.
• 7:13
  We'll sell you the flight and then sell you the flight's ability to carry your suitcase.
• 7:18
  And people lost it.
• 7:20
  Greedy, insane, ridiculous.
• 7:22
  They swore they would never ever fly American Airlines again.
• 7:25
  And nothing happened to American Airlines, right?
• 7:27
  Because every other airline did it too.
• 7:31
  Within months.
• 7:32
  Delta, United, all of them.
• 7:36
  That handful of survivors from 1978, by 2008, it's basically four airlines that matter in this country.
• 7:43
  Four.
• 7:44
  When there are four players
• 7:46
  Watching each other's earnings calls, they don't need a back room to conspire in.
• 7:50
  They just need to see American, try it, and then the sky not fall.
• 7:56
  And then everybody does the profitable thing at once, and your anger has nowhere to go because every door that you would get pissed off and storm out of has the same fee taped
• 8:08
  onto it.
• 8:09
  Consolidation first, then the fee.
• 8:13
  You can't force a fee on everyone until you've made sure that there's nowhere else to go.
• 8:18
  Remember that order, because it comes up again.
• 8:20
  The industry has a name for the move.
• 8:23
  It's called unbundling.
• 8:25
  That sounds like a spreadsheet word.
• 8:28
  It means take the thing that was once one price, break it into twelve pieces, and then charge for each one.
• 8:37
  And from their side, it's a beautiful thing because people are
• 8:40
  are sensitive to the price of a ticket.
• 8:42
  They will shop, they'll switch for twenty bucks, but but not to the price of a bag once they've already bought the ticket, right?
• 8:49
  You're at the airport.
• 8:50
  Your kid's tired.
• 8:51
  What are you gonna do?
• 8:52
  Leave?
• 8:53
  The hall in two thousand seven US Airlines pulled in about four hundred and sixty four million dollars give or take in bag fees.
• 9:03
  By twenty ten, three point four billion, seven times in two years global ancillary revenue, that means all of the fees together went from about two and a half billion
• 9:16
  dollars in two thousand seven to thirty eight billion by twenty fourteen.
• 9:22
  Fuel prices came back down, but the fees did not.
• 9:26
  And here's the number that tells you it was never really about your suitcase.
• 9:31
  There's a federal excise tax on airfare.
• 9:34
  It's seven and a half percent.
• 9:36
  And it funds the the FAA, right?
• 9:38
  Like air traffic control, the system that literally keeps your planes from hitting each other or falling out of the sky.
• 9:44
  But that atta that tax it actually applies to the ticket, right?
• 9:47
  It does not apply to the fees.
• 9:49
  So when an airline moves a billion dollars out of the ticket and into bag fees, they get your billion and they dodge about seventy five million in taxes on it.
• 10:03
  Taxes that would have funded the sky.
• 10:05
  A bag fee is a tax shelter wearing a customer service costume.
• 10:09
  And economists have looked into this, right?
• 10:12
  Unbundling made the base ticket cheaper on paper and the whole trip.
• 10:18
  Costs more once you add the fees back in.
• 10:21
  It really was never a discount.
• 10:23
  It was a shell game.
• 10:24
  Tattooed 2008 somewhere, and you'll see it every morning because every ad break and checkout upsell at at and guitar, right, at a gate, since then is the same trick in a
• 10:37
  different hat.
• 10:38
  American just did it first in public with a suitcase.
• 10:43
  Now.
• 10:44
  Who's running this today and why is it speeding up?
• 10:47
  So to Dr.
• 10:48
  O's point we talked about earlier, the reason in shidification is a theory and not just a gripe is that platforms decay in a predictable order.
• 10:58
  First, they're good to you, right?
• 11:00
  Like they get you hooked.
• 11:02
  Facebook shows you your friends, no junk.
• 11:05
  Amazon's cheap and fast and great.
• 11:07
  That stage is real.
• 11:09
  The product has to be good.
• 11:11
  To get you in the door, right?
• 11:12
  Then once you're locked in, once leaving means abandoning every photo, every contact.
• 11:19
  They make it worse for you to make it better for business customers.
• 11:23
  Your feed fills up with boosted posts, your your searches, ads that look like results.
• 11:30
  What are you gonna do?
• 11:30
  Leave?
• 11:31
  You can't.
• 11:32
  That was the point.
• 11:34
  And then the final stage, they claw the value back from everyone and hand it to shareholders.
• 11:41
  And what's left is a thing that barely works that you use anyway, because all of the other products that you would use or all of the other services that you would choose, they don't
• 11:52
  exist anymore.
• 11:52
  They were purchased because they got the market share by being nice to you, and there's nowhere else for you to go.
• 11:59
  And so this is where like the lazy explanation, right?
• 12:02
  Like, oh greedy corporations, what are you gonna do?
• 12:04
  kind of runs out of road.
• 12:06
  Because it's not
• 12:08
  Just greed, right?
• 12:09
  Greed is constant.
• 12:10
  Greed is is apparently human.
• 12:13
  If greed by itself explained all of this away, then that would have always been like this.
• 12:20
  It would have just been bad all the time.
• 12:23
  And there never would have been a happy period.
• 12:25
  But that's not true.
• 12:28
  What changed is that four things that used to punish a company for treating you that like this got dismantled entirely.
• 12:34
  One was competition, right?
• 12:36
  That's
• 12:37
  Anytime they tell you about the free market, that's what they're talking about is the idea of competition, right?
• 12:44
  So we stopped enforcing antitrust in like the eighties.
• 12:48
  We've had a couple of big things since then, but it has to be so big and so egregious and so absolutely gross.
• 12:56
  But then it's just like, you gotta split up into a couple different pieces.
• 13:00
  Then two, we had regulations.
• 13:02
  All of that has been gutted.
• 13:03
  Why?
• 13:05
  Because we're making America great again, I guess.
• 13:08
  And then three, your ability to leave and actually take your data with you is walled off on purpose.
• 13:15
  Then four, the workers.
• 13:16
  The engineers who used to have the leverage and the pride to refuse got laid off by tens of thousands.
• 13:23
  You take away everyone who could say, Stop, you know, this is gross, and and the greed that was always there just runs rampant.
• 13:32
  Dr.
• 13:32
  O's word is is unchecked, right?
• 13:35
  The water always wanted to flow downhill, and then they just removed every dam.
• 13:40
  So who's holding the whip on Southwest?
• 13:45
  In 2024, a hedge fund called Elliott Management took a stake from Southwest worth about two billion dollars.
• 13:55
  Activist investor.
• 13:57
  That's a
• 13:57
  Another word that sounds like a clean spreadsheet phrase, right?
• 14:01
  It sounds like they march in with a cause and it means that they they buy enough of your company to force changes.
• 14:08
  And the change is almost always the same.
• 14:10
  More money out, faster and now.
• 14:13
  And the first thing on the chopping block for airlines, well, bags fly free.
• 14:17
  The 50 year old policy customers actually loved that Southwest's own executives called a competitive advantage no longer matters.
• 14:26
  The fund ran the math, money left on the table.
• 14:29
  So in May of twenty twenty five, the last single solitary holdout folds.
• 14:36
  And now every single airline charges for bags.
• 14:39
  There's nowhere left to go.
• 14:40
  If you want to fly, you you gotta you know you gotta pay up forty five dollars on the last flight I took.
• 14:48
  Consolidation first, then the fee.
• 14:51
  One more time.
• 14:52
  The last free door.
• 14:54
  got a lock installed by a hedge fund that had owned the company under a year.
• 14:59
  That's the mechanism.
• 15:00
  It's nothing special.
• 15:02
  It's not some mustache twilling, you know, twirling villain that's like, uh a fund, a stake, a couple of board seats, a a policy people loved dying quietly so a quarterly
• 15:16
  number ticks up.
• 15:18
  And then scale it.
• 15:19
  Every company you deal with either has an Elliott,
• 15:23
  at the table or they're afraid that one's actually coming.
• 15:27
  And you get the whole economy organized around one instruction.
• 15:32
  Get money out.
• 15:34
  Extract it.
• 15:36
  That's what capitalism is.
• 15:37
  It's extracting money from a system.
• 15:40
  The free market is supposed to be what balances that, right?
• 15:43
  The idea of a free market, which includes regulation, which includes anti monopolization, those sorts of things.
• 15:48
  That's supposed to balance out that line between I don't have anywhere to go, let's extract as much as we can from the people who use our services, and they're not going to
• 16:00
  take it anymore, and they can't afford to buy it.
• 16:03
  So they all say, let's just let's pull the money out as fast as possible.
• 16:07
  So included the idea of, oh, it's included.
• 16:11
  Batteries, bags, whatever, whatever that might be in your world, you know, an ad-free experience, that becomes a line item.
• 16:18
  Free becomes, it's a free trial.
• 16:21
  Owning a piece of music becomes renting a piece of music.
• 16:26
  In 2024, airlines worldwide
• 16:30
  Pulled in around $150 billion from just fees and add-ons.
• 16:38
  For some of them, that is the business now.
• 16:41
  The flight is just kind of the cover charge to get in the door where the real selling happens.
• 16:46
  And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
• 16:50
  The streaming service that you subscribe to specifically to escape the ads now has ads.
• 16:56
  Unless you pay more.
• 16:57
  The software you bought, now you rent it, right?
• 16:59
  And the day you stop paying, it just stops working, it doesn't exist anymore.
• 17:04
  Mercedes actually floated charging a monthly fee for the accelerator response your car already has.
• 17:11
  Sitting there switched off until you pay.
• 17:14
  Tesla, heated seats, they're not selling you things anymore.
• 17:19
  They're selling you permission to use things that you thought you owned.
• 17:24
  But the version of
• 17:25
  I have to grudgingly admire the way you'd admire a really well built mouse trap, right up until you remember you're the mouse, isn't even about taking something away.
• 17:38
  Boarding.
• 17:39
  Just getting on the plane.
• 17:40
  Around 2005, an astrophysicist named Jason Stefan got stuck in a jet bridge line.
• 17:47
  He got annoyed, he went home, and he modeled the fastest way to board a plane because
• 17:54
  Right, that's what an astrophysicist does when he has a grudge.
• 17:58
  And by two thousand eight, he'd published it.
• 17:59
  Window seats first, spread out, two at a time, about twice as fast as back to front.
• 18:08
  By his estimate, four to ten times faster than what airports actually do.
• 18:14
  And here's the kicker: what airports do, right?
• 18:16
  Like hurting you on the plane in groups from front to back.
• 18:21
  Isn't the second worst method?
• 18:23
  Front to back is the single worst method there is, the slowest one.
• 18:28
  Out of every single option, they run with the one that takes the longest.
• 18:33
  Why?
• 18:34
  Well the airlines say families, logistics, people don't line up like tidy math.
• 18:43
  Now look, some of that's real.
• 18:45
  But notice the one thing that they will not touch with a ten foot pole, the groups.
• 18:51
  The tiers, priority, premiere.
• 18:54
  First in line this quarter, United actually rolled out a faster method and bragged it saved two minutes per flight.
• 19:01
  So they knew how to fix it, and mostly don't.
• 19:05
  Because if boarding were fast and fair, if everybody got on the plane in eleven minutes, what are you paying for when you buy priority boarding?
• 19:14
  What the hell is economy plus?
• 19:17
  The slowness is
• 19:18
  is the product.
• 19:20
  The misery is the inventory.
• 19:23
  You can't sell the fast lane unless the slow lane hurts.
• 19:28
  So the slow lane has to hurt forever on purpose.
• 19:33
  And look, the newest version doesn't even wait for the misery to naturally occur.
• 19:38
  It makes it.
• 19:39
  Amazon Prime Video, right?
• 19:40
  For years, ad free.
• 19:41
  That was the deal.
• 19:42
  You paid, no commercials.
• 19:44
  Then on one day, January twenty ninth, twenty twenty four, Amazon reached into a thing you were already paying for and put ads in it.
• 19:54
  They didn't lower your price, they didn't ask you, and they said, Do you want it the way it was last week?
• 20:00
  Yeah, that's gonna be two ninety nine a month.
• 20:03
  Extra.
• 20:04
  They took something that you already had, you were already paying for, made it worse, and then charged you to unmake it worse.
• 20:14
  And then they doubled the number of ads they put in.
• 20:18
  Then they quietly stripped the good picture and sound, the Dolby, out of your tier and moved it behind a paywall too.
• 20:27
  And people sued them, saying it was a bait and switch.
• 20:30
  Unfortunately, the judge threw that out in 2025.
• 20:33
  It ruled that the ads wasn't a price increase.
• 20:36
  The judge called it, and I swear on my life, I am not inventing this, a quote, benefit modification.
• 20:44
  Making your product worse is a benefit now.
• 20:47
  And the court just kind of nodded along.
• 20:50
  What's that uh the the Chicago, right?
• 20:53
  Where the the song he starts they start uh
• 20:58
  Mimicking along with him or mi mimicking along with the dance.
• 21:03
  So that's the frontier now, right?
• 21:04
  Pr printers that brick themselves unless you buy the the brand's ink and apps that get slower right until the upgrade button gets pressed and the problem isn't discovered
• 21:15
  anymore.
• 21:16
  It's actually built in.
• 21:17
  They're not solving your problems and charging you, that would make sense, that's value.
• 21:21
  They're manufacturing the problem and then charging you for the escape hatch.
• 21:26
  Take a breath for a second.
• 21:28
  Because look, this stops being clever the second it's a person and not just on paper.
• 21:35
  So let's go back to Samantha Henson at that gate.
• 21:39
  She's a musician.
• 21:40
  A guitar for her is not a hobby.
• 21:42
  It's it's like the tool of her trade.
• 21:45
  It's a laptop for a uh developer, it's a chef knife for a chef, and the it's the thing that that her living gets made on.
• 21:51
  And the law knows this.
• 21:53
  The FAA Modernization Act of twenty twelve says a US airline
• 21:57
  Has to let her carry it into the cabin no fee beyond a standard carry on, if it fits and there's room.
• 22:05
  And that law didn't come from nowhere.
• 22:06
  Congress wrote it because musicians kept getting instruments smashed, destroyed in cargo holes, and shaken down at gates for years, and the government finally said, Look, this
• 22:17
  one's a right.
• 22:18
  Not an upcharge, it's it's a right.
• 22:20
  But look at the world that law has to survive inside.
• 22:25
  And remember the boarding tiers, the manufactured scarcity.
• 22:29
  Henson's standing right in that machine.
• 22:32
  Southwest didn't just kill free bags.
• 22:34
  Under the same pressure they killed, you know, open seating and brought in assigned seats and boarding tiers and priority upgrades and fat extra seat charges.
• 22:44
  The whole experience got rebuilt around one question.
• 22:48
  Who paid more to board first?
• 22:51
  God and the overhead bin.
• 22:53
  Ugh, that shared, finite, first come space became one more thing you compete for based on what you paid.
• 23:02
  It used to be kind of common, you know, like first come first serve.
• 23:06
  It made sense.
• 23:07
  Now it's zoned, right?
• 23:09
  That's a scarcity they built.
• 23:11
  And you know, kind of walked straight into it with a guitar, like you know, you do as a musician.
• 23:18
  And the law says it's supposed to get a spot.
• 23:21
  You see the trap?
• 23:21
  The person exercising a right and the person who just didn't pay look identical to a gate agent whose job is enforcing the tears.
• 23:32
  The agent isn't reading the FAA guidelines.
• 23:36
  The agent is running the hierarchy.
• 23:39
  And a right that doesn't fit the hierarchy gets processed as a freeloader.
• 23:44
  Someone trying to get something for nothing.
• 23:46
  The machine can't tell the difference between claiming what the law guarantees you and cutting the line because it was built on the assumption that nothing is guaranteed.
• 23:56
  Every single thing, every single hair on your head, every part, every piece, every parcel is for sale.
• 24:04
  And then they called the police on her.
• 24:06
  And that's the part that kind of shows you the shape of the punishment, right?
• 24:09
  This wasn't like a bad moment at one gate.
• 24:12
  The agent told her the next flight was off too.
• 24:15
  That if she kept insisting on her guitar, she wouldn't fly for another twenty-four hours.
• 24:19
  Maybe not until the day after tomorrow.
• 24:21
  Every time she stood on her rights, the system offered her a later flight and then a later one.
• 24:28
  So she spent the night in the airport, tried again the next morning, finally got where she was going a full day late.
• 24:34
  Now most of us
• 24:35
  Especially on, you know, with jobs that are you are lucky enough to have paid time off, you don't just get to take an extra day if that's the end of your PTO for the year or for
• 24:48
  the month or for the week or whatever you've got.
• 24:51
  And as far as anyone reporting this could tell, Southwest never once circled back with a real fix.
• 24:59
  Or a dollar of compensation.
• 25:00
  Not a not a voucher, not a free drink on the plane, nothing.
• 25:04
  She has been a loyal Southwest cardholder since 2021.
• 25:08
  She'd bought all the way in and it protected her for exactly zero seconds.
• 25:13
  Because the system that they built does not honor what it promised you.
• 25:19
  It's built.
• 25:20
  To find the next add on, the next upgrade, the next charge, and make it so that no charge cost you a day of your life.
• 25:31
  If you said no.
• 25:32
  So she got off easy, right?
• 25:34
  Strange word for having the cops called on you and but relatively, I mean she had a phone, she sought to film it and it went viral, and suddenly a a multi billion dollar airline has
• 25:45
  a a public relations fire.
• 25:47
  And I'm sure they've already started putting it out.
• 25:50
  But but what I what I've seen as of of reading this, uh I mean as of recording this, uh it was just basics, like, this is our our policy, these are the guidelines, there wasn't room
• 26:00
  and
• 26:00
  Despite the fact that there was
• 26:02
  Most people never get that, right?
• 26:04
  Most people just eat it alone, at the counter, frustrated one at a time.
• 26:10
  And that's really not slop sloppiness on their part.
• 26:12
  That's that's how it was built.
• 26:13
  It was craftsmanship.
• 26:15
  The humiliation is almost always private.
• 26:18
  Too small to fight, too quiet to see, too constant to escape.
• 26:22
  And Henson's guitar was just loud enough to hear.
• 26:26
  The machine was doing to her exactly what it does to millions of people like you and like me.
• 26:32
  A day.
• 26:33
  They treat a person like an obstacle between itself and a fee.
• 26:38
  And she just happened to be holding something that made a sound when it hit the floor.
• 26:42
  Let's zoom all the way back out.
• 26:45
  Because the line from two thousand eight to that gate is straighter than it has any right to be.
• 26:52
  And the move is always the same.
• 26:53
  Take something that was included that people understood was theirs and convert it into a charge.
• 27:00
  The bag, the seat, the bin, the ad free feed you've already paid for.
• 27:07
  And there there isn't enough misery to sell you the escape from.
• 27:12
  They build one.
• 27:14
  And every time they describe it in the same neutral, boring language.
• 27:19
  Unbundling.
• 27:21
  Ancillary revenue.
• 27:23
  Activist investment.
• 27:25
  Benefit modification.
• 27:27
  That's the one where the judge agreed to making your products worse counts as a benefit.
• 27:32
  Words built to make sure that when they take the thing you had, it sounds like
• 27:39
  An accounting adjustment instead of what it actually is, a transfer from you to them.
• 27:45
  Squeezing until they get out dollars.
• 27:49
  But they call that growth.
• 27:50
  See, the economy is actually growing.
• 27:53
  If you look at the GDP, if you look at revenue, and not just in the airline industry, but we're using that as the example here: $150 billion in fees.
• 28:02
  That's a number
• 28:04
  Politician stands in front of and a CEO gets a bonus for.
• 28:09
  But look at what produced it.
• 28:11
  Nothing got built, right?
• 28:13
  No, no flight got safer or faster or more convenient or easy to book.
• 28:20
  No problem got solved.
• 28:23
  They just moved the fence.
• 28:25
  They took away the public commons and they put uh a little gate on it, a little turnstile, like a toll way.
• 28:33
  And they counted the turnstile receipts as growth.
• 28:36
  That's not growth.
• 28:38
  That's encapsulation, it's enclosure, it's entrapment.
• 28:42
  They take something shared, they lock it away, and charge admission, and then they write the admissions down as prosperity.
• 28:51
  It's a growing economy that feels like drowning.
• 28:55
  And it feels that way because the economy's not really growing.
• 28:58
  See, it's extracting.
• 29:00
  There's a difference.
• 29:02
  One we've been explicitly trained not to see.
• 29:06
  Between an economy that makes more and one that just gets better at charging you for what used to be free air, water, land, national parks.
• 29:19
  One creates wealth, the other transfers it upward and hands you the receipt like you uh like it should be good news, like a birthday card.
• 29:28
  And up to now, for some of us, this has been survivable.
• 29:33
  Deeply annoying, yes, but survivable.
• 29:36
  A bag, a movie, a boarding line.
• 29:40
  And here's where it stops being either and it's already happening.
• 29:43
  For a while.
• 29:44
  This was aimed at like things you could in theory walk away from, or you don't have to fly.
• 29:49
  You don't have to have have Amazon Prime.
• 29:53
  That's over.
• 29:54
  They figured out the real money isn't in what you can refuse, it's in what you can't.
• 29:59
  Housing.
• 30:00
  There's a company called RealPage that took the private rent data from landlords all over a city.
• 30:07
  Technically in a free market, those people are called competitors.
• 30:10
  They're legally not supposed to coordinate.
• 30:14
  And it they fed it into one big, gigantic algorithm that told every one of them what to charge.
• 30:22
  Collusion used to need like a uh secret smoky back room, a cigar and a handshake.
• 30:28
  Now it just needs like a software subscription.
• 30:31
  One landlord admitted that within eleven months of turning it on, they had raised rents more than twenty five percent in less than a year.
• 30:39
  The Justice Department and a stack of state attorneys general sued.
• 30:44
  And cities started banning it, right?
• 30:47
  They pointed this machine at shelter.
• 30:50
  The one thing that a human being cannot opt out of.
• 30:55
  And it's everywhere the essentials are.
• 30:57
  Insulin, a drug whose inventors sold the patent for a dollar because they believed that nobody should die for being unable to afford to stay alive, became a monthly bill that
• 31:09
  people have to ration themselves against.
• 31:12
  Your bank charging you a fee for not having enough money.
• 31:15
  That's a penalty for being poor.
• 31:18
  Only billed to the poor.
• 31:21
  This is the frontier now.
• 31:23
  Not luxuries, necessities, subscriptions to live.
• 31:28
  And it hits you differently depending on your bank balance.
• 31:31
  If you have money, all of this is just a rounding error.
• 31:34
  You auto pay, you don't notice the three dollars, you pay someone to handle it, but if you're broke, every one of these is a fight.
• 31:41
  Price compare every fee, cancel and resign to dodge the loyalty penalty, sit on hold to reverse a charge that shouldn't exist, appeal the denial, refill the ink.
• 31:52
  It's a second job on top of the four that you already have to have to pay the rent in the damn first place.
• 31:59
  And it's unpaid.
• 32:00
  And the truth is it lands hardest on the people with the least room to carry it.
• 32:04
  Economists actually have a acute, polite name for the money side.
• 32:09
  It's called the poverty premium.
• 32:11
  The fact that it costs more to be poor.
• 32:15
  But the crueler tax of this is time.
• 32:17
  The hours you f f burn, right, fighting 15 tiny extractions, are the exact hours you'd need to climb out from underneath them.
• 32:27
  The squeeze steals the time you'd use to escape the squeeze.
• 32:32
  That's the loop.
• 32:34
  You run just to stay in place, and they've built an economy that runs on your running.
• 32:40
  And I'll be honest about how it feels because I feel it too.
• 32:44
  Damn it it feels futile.
• 32:46
  Another fee, another tier, another thing that used to be included, and y you're tired.
• 32:53
  God, you're so tired.
• 32:54
  And the tools they hand you to fight it are a joke.
• 32:57
  Complain, boycott, vote with your wallet, and you do it.
• 33:01
  I I haven't been to Chick fil A since like two thousand and four.
• 33:06
  Nothing changes.
• 33:07
  There's still a line around the block.
• 33:09
  And then you decide nothing can change and you shut up.
• 33:12
  You sit down and you shut up.
• 33:15
  That exhausted hopelessness has a name.
• 33:20
  And the name is working as intended.
• 33:23
  That's not you being weak.
• 33:24
  That feeling that intrinsic ick
• 33:30
  Is the product.
• 33:32
  And it's manufactured.
• 33:33
  As deliberately as the ads in your prime video, because a population that believes resistance is pointless is one that you can charge anything.
• 33:44
  So no, we're not ending there because Dr.
• 33:47
  O's real point is that none of this was fate.
• 33:51
  It wasn't technology.
• 33:53
  It wasn't consumers making poor choices.
• 33:55
  It was policy.
• 33:57
  Specific decisions by specific people that stripped out every check.
• 34:02
  Which is grim.
• 34:04
  Don't get me wrong, but flip it over.
• 34:06
  A thing built on purpose can be taken apart on purpose.
• 34:11
  It was decided it can be undecided.
• 34:13
  And the futility you feel is only total if you keep fighting with the broken tools they handed you.
• 34:19
  So watch the word included.
• 34:22
  Watch what comes with the thing you buy and watch it get thinner and thinner slowly enough that you're not supposed to notice.
• 34:32
  It's sixty cents, it's twelve cents, it's a dollar.
• 34:36
  And watch for the sneakier version, the misery they keep on purpose so that they can sell you the way out.
• 34:43
  Keep a running list of what used to be free or quick or yours.
• 34:48
  Because they're counting on you to forget, and the forgetting is how they win.
• 34:52
  Gen Z is actually re-bringing back cassette tapes and LPs and physical media that they can purchase because you own that thing and they've realized it.
• 35:05
  We have amassed some of these things and we threw them away because we were guaranteed a world of audible and
• 35:11
  and Kindle and and all of these other services that you don't realize you don't own what you're purchasing until they change it or redact it or remove it entirely from the library
• 35:24
  without you ever noticing.
• 35:25
  So keep that running list of things that used to be free or quick or yours because they're counting on you to forget.
• 35:31
  And that is how they win.
• 35:33
  And the the crown jewel, the the shiniest turd in this shit pile, that bag fee is really partly a tax dodge, right?
• 35:41
  Uh airfare gets taxed to fund air traffic control.
• 35:45
  Raises for air traffic controllers.
• 35:47
  What have you heard about in the news recently with air traffic controllers constantly having to go on on strike to just get reasonable wage increases?
• 35:56
  That's because airfare gets taxed to fund air traffic control.
• 36:00
  Fees
• 36:01
  Don't get taxed to fund air traffic control, so the safe move on their spreadsheet is to shift your money out of the taxed ticket into the untaxed fee.
• 36:12
  Which means the thing that keeps planes from hitting each other quietly gets defunded so a suitcase can become a profit center.
• 36:20
  That's where fifteen years of this shit leads.
• 36:23
  We are underfunding the sky to upcharge the luggage.
• 36:26
  So let's talk real about fighting back because you've heard the fake version a hundred times and you're right to be sick of it.
• 36:32
  Call and complain, leave a review, vote with your wallet.
• 36:34
  And enough if enough of you do it, maybe, maybe someday they'll listen, but that's not a plan, that's a pacifier.
• 36:41
  You cannot outspend them or out unspend them.
• 36:47
  There may be a dozen people who run this economy and in
• 36:51
  A wallet election where the ballots are dollars, they win every time because they have all the dollars.
• 36:57
  Complaining is a sound you make.
• 37:00
  It costs them not nothing, not a dime.
• 37:03
  So it actually bites in three levels, and kind of take whatever you can reach from this, right?
• 37:08
  Level one is to starve it.
• 37:10
  Not call the company, that's their kind of retention theater, a department built to talk you down.
• 37:16
  Go over their heads.
• 37:17
  Chargebacks.
• 37:18
  Complaints to the regulator, not the business.
• 37:20
  Transportation for airlines, that's the CFPB for banks, the FTC for your state attorneys general for the rest.
• 37:27
  Those cost real money and real attention.
• 37:30
  Small claims court for a junk fee where half the time they don't show up.
• 37:35
  Route around the recurring bleed, refill the ink, buy the dumb TV, block the ads, keep the software you bought, use the library.
• 37:46
  And kill your loyalty.
• 37:49
  Loyalty and auto pay are not like virtuous equalities here, right?
• 37:55
  They're the vulnerabilities these people farm like a crop.
• 38:00
  Quit being corn.
• 38:01
  The loyal customer is the easiest to charge, right?
• 38:04
  Be a stranger, be a flight risk, make them earn it every single month.
• 38:08
  Install an ad blocker in your home network.
• 38:10
  Don't let 'em put in the the company Wi-Fi.
• 38:14
  Buy your own router.
• 38:15
  Yeah, it's a little bit more expensive, but you can buy a used one.
• 38:19
  Find a used one on Facebook Marketplace.
• 38:21
  That's another inshtified platform.
• 38:24
  Craigslist still exists, it's still out there.
• 38:26
  But the point is to be a flight risk.
• 38:29
  Make earn it every single month.
• 38:31
  And what do we talk about more than anything on this uh on this podcast?
• 38:36
  Level two, coordinate it.
• 38:38
  Right?
• 38:39
  One chargeback, that's a little mosquito bite.
• 38:41
  You don't notice that.
• 38:42
  Ten thousand chargebacks in the same week is a crisis meeting.
• 38:46
  Like they they will they will get into a boardroom and start discussing why they lost a million dollars in revenue yesterday.
• 38:54
  And they've spent a fortune making sure you've you you don't feel that, right?
• 38:58
  Like the the whole difference between complaining and organizing, like a tenant unit union is the real answer to to a real page problem.
• 39:07
  Not a strongly worded email, which I'm so incredibly guilty uh of doing, thinking that I I mean it makes me feel better.
• 39:15
  It makes it might make you feel better, and hey, do it too.
• 39:19
  But tell other people about it.
• 39:20
  Tell them not to use it.
• 39:22
  Don't fill out their dumb survey that says why did you leave or do you recommend this?
• 39:26
  Would you recommend this to a friend?
• 39:27
  No.
• 39:28
  Tell a friend not to use that.
• 39:31
  Help them set up some weird pirate network of DVDs that you're sharing between all your friends.
• 39:38
  Create your own little radical red library out in your front yard.
• 39:43
  Shout out to one of our previous guests.
• 39:46
  So build a union that holds together.
• 39:51
  And what they fear most is workers.
• 39:53
  The last like real break on all this was people on the inside that had enough leverage to refuse to build the shitty thing.
• 40:02
  Rebuild that.
• 40:03
  And you're not begging the machine to be nicer.
• 40:06
  You've got your hands on the controls physically.
• 40:09
  And then level three, change the rules, because that's the only permanent fix.
• 40:13
  And I know change the rules is the part where I usually lose most of you right after I finish, you know, riding my unicorn to work.
• 40:21
  Stay anyway because it works.
• 40:23
  Real Page didn't get stopped by a person writing an email and complaining.
• 40:27
  A newsroom exposed it, tenants sued, and the Justice Department and a bipartisan pile of state attorneys general came down on it and cities banned it.
• 40:37
  Not a perfect win.
• 40:40
  The settlement had zero damages and no admission of guilt, and they're already suing back, but the machine got reined in, which proves that the thing
• 40:49
  That they most need you to never learn is this isn't the weather, this isn't physics, this isn't isn't chemistry, it's policy.
• 40:59
  And policy is just a decision some asshole made.
• 41:03
  And decisions can get reversed.
• 41:05
  So here is the reframe, and then I'll let you go.
• 41:09
  It feels hopeless because they handed you the two tools designed to lose complain and boycott.
• 41:16
  And told you that that's the whole toolbox.
• 41:18
  It isn't.
• 41:20
  The tools that work, coordinate, organize, regulate got buried to make you feel naive.
• 41:29
  Made to feel like something for other people in some other decade.
• 41:34
  You can't you probably can't beat a hedge fund by yourself.
• 41:37
  I'm gonna be honest with you.
• 41:39
  If you stand at the register, you know, one angry customer yelling at your in the top of your lungs.
• 41:44
  You're just gonna get the police called on you, and you're gonna get a public disturbance charge.
• 41:48
  The register is an arena that they win.
• 41:52
  And the truth is the lady behind it is only making eight dollars an hour and she's doing her best to be there too, but she was told to stand between you and your anger and the
• 42:01
  borderers.
• 42:02
  Step out of that paradigm.
• 42:04
  This was never about being a smart shopper.
• 42:07
  It's about being a citizen of our country who noticed and who found the others who noticed because the one thing a dozen billionaires cannot survive is the rest of us realizing how
• 42:21
  badly we outnumber them.
• 42:23
  The guitar fit.
• 42:24
  There was room.
• 42:25
  It was the law.
• 42:27
  And they called the police anyway.
• 42:29
  Don't be ashamed.
• 42:30
  Don't be quiet.
• 42:32
  Be awake and a pain in the ass.
• 42:34
  I'm Joshua.
• 42:35
  This has been The Overlap.
• 42:37
  You can find us on FOF.foundation.
• 42:39
  And you can check us out on major streaming platforms: Apple Podcasts, Spotify Podcasting, Podbean, and there's a handful of others if you want to view it at our website,
• 42:48
  FOF.foundation.
• 42:50
  Now that is still free.
• 42:52
  You can have it all without any ads and subscribe to it through the RSS feed or however you'd like to receive it.
• 43:00
  That is all for me for this week.
• 43:01
  I hope to see you guys back again next week.
• 43:04
  Share this podcast with a friend and make sure you rate it five stars, please.
• 43:08
  It helps us out quite a bit.
• 43:09
  Have a good one.
• 43:11
  Be kind to each other and give some company some hell.