> vacuuming up data in order to segment each customer into Infinitely smaller market segments to charge them maximum prices they can afford Can you explain thi

> vacuuming up data in order to segment each customer into Infinitely smaller market segments to charge them maximum prices they can afford Can you explain this mechanic? I see how segmentation can be related to filter bubbles, which cause externalities (political polarization, etc.). I also see how the Internet exposes "the long tail" that previously couldn't be marketed to. But I don't see how this inflates prices exactly. The classic example of market segmentation, AFAIK, is tomato sauce: They used to think people wanted one kind of tomato sauce; then they discovered they could sell (e.g.) "chunky", "spicy", and "classic", and that people would pay a little more for these. I guess, to use an analogy, you're saying that there used to be something like "American tomato sauce", which was mass-produced and sold for $5, whereas now there's "Blue state tomato sauce" and "Red state tomato sauce" (and more than these, but let's keep things simple), each selling for $7. And maybe even the old "American tomato sauce" is still on the market, but people are nevertheless willing to spend the extra $2 to get the "Red" and "Blue" varieties for some kind of emotional and/or signaling reasons ("I don't want communist tomato sauce in my pantry"). And that these companies are creating the red/blue fracture in order to capture the extra $2 on each jar. But, in this analogy, what exactly is the tomato sauce? I could see the answer being "news" in the feed. I could see the "dollars" being paid by consumers actually being "attention". So then the story becomes that FAAMG are selling eyeballs, which I think is uncontroversial. But to complete the story, you also need to include all the brands that they're selling the eyeballs to. So who are they? Starbucks vs. Chik-Fil-A? To connect to your earlier lines about "competitive markets" and the "free market virtual game", are you saying that new entrants are shut out by this advertising arms race? Is that how you complete the story? Your post is vague but gestures at important things. From it, I'm trying to draw the diagram of the complete "triangle trade" (and maybe it's more than three vertices) happening here. What are the pieces? - Social media (content discovery, filtering, curation). - Content (e.g. news) - Brands (ad buyers) - Consumers (eyeballs) Something like that? Can you spell out how this works with specific examples?