When Algorithms Became the Asshole: How Dynamic Pricing Turned Commerce Into a Casino
From Oasis tickets that quadruple while you wait to Uber knowing your phone's dying— inside the $100 billion industry built on exploiting your desperation
Let me tell you about the moment I realized we'd crossed a line.
It was August 31st, 2024. My neighbor Sarah, a die-hard Oasis fan since '94, had been in the Ticketmaster queue for six hours. Six. Hours. When she finally reached checkout, those £150 standing tickets she'd budgeted for? They were now £415. Not from scalpers. Not from some shady resale site. From Ticketmaster itself, using what they cheerfully call "dynamic pricing."
She closed her laptop and cried. Twenty minutes later, my phone buzzed. It was raining, and my Uber home—normally $23—was now showing $67. "High demand in your area!" the app cheerfully explained, as if I couldn't see the fucking rain myself.
This is what happens when we let algorithms eat the world without asking if they should.
The Great Con: How We Got Here
Remember when Uber first launched? They were the good guys, disrupting those evil taxi monopolies with their fixed meters and regulated prices. Fast forward to today: Uber uses a rather sophisticated computational algorithm to figure out how high to raise its surge prices. For riders, the bad news is that the algorithm is a closely guarded secret. The disrupted became the disruptor, except worse—at least with taxis, you knew what you were paying.
The playbook is always the same. Start with low prices to kill the competition. Get everyone hooked. Then, once you've got market dominance, flip the switch. Drivers protesting outside Uber's London headquarters claim that so-called "dynamic pricing" is now in effect 24/7. What started as "surge pricing for busy times" became the permanent state of affairs. Last year, the Belgian newspaper La Dernière Heure conducted a test using two smartphones, one with 84% battery and the other with 12%, to request a ride. The phone with the low battery was offered a price a euro higher for the same ride.
They're literally charging you more because they know you're desperate.
The Oasis debacle was just the latest chapter in this dystopian pricing saga. Some tickets from the official seller Ticketmaster had jumped to more than four times the starting price, with $100 standing room tickets later costing $466 before fees. The band claimed ignorance—"we had no idea!"—while Ticketmaster pointed fingers at promoters, who pointed at artists, who pointed back at Ticketmaster. Meanwhile, working-class fans who'd saved for months to see their heroes reunite got priced out by an algorithm that decided they hadn't demonstrated sufficient "willingness to pay."
The Cure singer Robert Smith called it "a greedy scam". When Robert fucking Smith—a man who's made melancholy a career—is calling you out for being depressing, you've got problems.
The Algorithm Wars: David vs. Goliath Gets a Software Update
But here's where it gets interesting. While Ticketmaster and Uber were perfecting the art of algorithmic exploitation, a Stanford computer science student named Aktarer Zaman decided to fight back. He created Skiplagged, which exposes inefficiencies in airline pricing, such as hidden-city, to find you deals you can't get anywhere else.
The concept is beautifully subversive: Airlines will charge you $763 for a direct flight from San Francisco to Newark, but the same airline, on the same day, will sell you a ticket from San Francisco to Orlando with a Newark layover for $216. Skiplagged just points this out. You book the cheaper flight, get off in Newark, and save $500+.
The airlines' response? Not to fix their insane pricing. Not to be more transparent. But to sue. American Airlines filed suit against Skiplagged in federal court. In its complaint, American alleges that Skiplagged's practices are "deceptive and abusive." You know what's actually deceptive? Charging different prices for the exact same service based on arbitrary endpoints.
American Airlines, Southwest, United, and Orbitz have all taken Skiplagged to court. Most of these lawsuits were either dismissed or settled out of court. The courts basically said: "You created this stupid system. Don't cry when someone points out how stupid it is."
From Personalization to Persecution: The Data Trap We Built Ourselves
Twenty years ago, we thought personalization would be amazing. Amazon would recommend books we'd love! Google would show us exactly what we're looking for! Every experience would be tailored just for us!
What we got instead was a surveillance economy where every click, hover, and hesitation gets weaponized against us. Uber predicts the "willingness to pay" for a rider by combining various real-time data along with user history. It predicts if a given rider is sensitive to surge or in other words, Uber figures out if a rider will accept a surged price or will wait for 15–20 minutes for prices to fall back. They've literally gamified human desperation.
The shift from third-party cookies to "zero-party data" isn't the privacy win companies want you to think it is. Sure, you're "voluntarily" sharing your preferences through that fun quiz about your style preferences or that helpful survey about your shopping habits. But that data goes straight into the pricing algorithm. You think you're getting personalization. You're actually getting priced.
Companies are building what they call "predictive models" that can forecast with 90%+ accuracy not just what you'll buy, but exactly how much you'll pay for it. They know your breaking point better than you do. They've turned behavioral economics into a weapon, and we're the targets.
The Economics of Exploitation
In one study conducted in collaboration with Uber, researchers found that surge pricing doubled the number of drivers during a busy period after a sold-out concert in New York City. This is always the defense—surge pricing "increases supply." But here's what they don't tell you: In one example, the rider was quoted £46 ($58) while the driver was only offered £26 ($33). That meant Uber was taking a 43% commission.
The algorithm isn't just setting prices. It's managing a two-sided exploitation machine. Squeeze the customers for maximum revenue. Pay the drivers minimum viable wages. Keep the difference. It's not a marketplace; it's a toll booth where the toll changes based on how badly you need to cross.
Senator Sherrod Brown expressed concern that frequent and opaque price changes and diminishing competition are making ride-hailing services less affordable, and that pricing algorithms enable corporations to charge higher prices in circumstances where consumers have the greatest need and fewest choices. When U.S. Senators start sounding like anti-capitalist revolutionaries, you know something's broken.
What's Actually Coming (And It's Worse Than You Think)
Based on what I'm seeing from inside the industry and the patterns emerging globally, here's what's about to hit:
The Battery Level Economy: That phone battery test in Belgium? That's just the beginning. Your device's battery level, your location history, the weather, your calendar appointments, your credit score—it's all going to factor into the price you see. Not in five years. Now. The infrastructure is already being built.
Emotional State Pricing: Companies are developing sentiment analysis that can detect stress, urgency, or excitement from your typing patterns and app behavior. Stressed about making a flight? That Uber to the airport just got 40% more expensive. Excited about a date? That restaurant reservation system just added a "peak dining" surcharge.
The Subscription Squeeze: Everything will have a "surge-free" subscription tier. Pay $49.99/month for Uber Plus to avoid surge pricing! But wait—there's still "super surge" that even subscribers pay. And "ultra surge" during "special events" (defined as whenever the algorithm wants more money).
Social Graph Exploitation: Your friends all paid surge prices for that concert? The algorithm now knows your social circle has money and "values experiences." Your prices just went up across the board. Forever.
The Resistance Handbook: How to Fight Back
Alright, enough doom and gloom. Here's how you actually beat these assholes at their own game:
The Skiplagged Strategy: Use it. Yes, airlines will hate you. Yes, they might ban you from their frequent flyer program. Do it anyway. Every hidden city ticket you book costs them money and exposes their pricing scam. Also: never check bags, never connect your frequent flyer account, always book one-way tickets.
The Uber Hustle: Delete and reinstall the app regularly. Use multiple accounts with different phones if possible. Always check prices on multiple devices. Walk a few blocks away from surge zones before booking. Schedule rides in advance when possible—the scheduling algorithm is dumber than the real-time one.
The Ticketmaster Workaround: This one's harder, but: Use multiple browsers and devices during presales. Clear everything between attempts. Consider VPNs to different cities. Join fan clubs for presale access. And when all else fails? Wait for the tour extension—artists always add dates, and the second round usually has less dynamic pricing because the algorithms have already squeezed the die-hards.
The Data Defensive: Lie. Constantly. Every preference quiz, every survey, every "help us serve you better" form—feed them garbage. Be a 73-year-old professional yodeler who makes $12 million a year but only shops at 3 AM on Tuesdays. Poison their data wells.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Here's what nobody wants to admit: We asked for this. We wanted cheaper rides than taxis. We wanted to buy concert tickets from our phones. We wanted personalized everything. We voted with our wallets for convenience over fairness, for disruption over regulation, for innovation over protection.
The algorithms aren't the problem. The algorithms are just math. The problem is we've built an economy that rewards extraction over value creation, that treats customers as data points to be optimized rather than humans to be served.
The direction in which we have been pointed by the gig economy's pricing models is actually in many ways neoliberalism's apotheosis, where each of us is a number evaluated by various algorithms, with our behaviors used to inform our prices, without our even knowing it.
Choose Your Fighter
So here's where we are: Every transaction is now a battle between your algorithm and theirs. They have machine learning and behavioral prediction. You have Skiplagged and browser incognito mode. They have billions in VC funding. You have Reddit threads explaining how to game their systems.
It's not a fair fight. It was never meant to be.
But here's the thing about unfair fights—sometimes David wins. Not because he's stronger, but because he's willing to break the rules that Goliath wrote. Skiplagged didn't beat United Airlines in court by playing nice. They won by exposing the absurdity of the system itself.
My neighbor Sarah? She didn't get her Oasis tickets. But she did learn something valuable: The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed. The question is: Who was it designed for?
Because it sure as hell wasn't her.
And it wasn't you either.