Last week, Groundwork Collaborative Executive Director Lindsay Owens closed out SXSW 2026 with a headline panel unpacking deceptive AI-powered pricing schemes and offering practical ways consumers can beat the bots.
Lindsay was joined by former Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya and Doha Mekki, former senior Department of Justice antitrust official, to explore corporations’ efforts to weaponize consumers’ personal data to inflate prices, suppress wages, and undermine transparency and basic fairness.
“84% of Americans say that they think that you and I should be charged the same amount for the same item at the same time,” said Owens, author of the forthcoming book, GOUGED: The End of a Fair Price in America. “That’s that fundamental bargain that we started this conversation with: that there was fairness, transparency, uniformity in pricing, and all of that is under assault.”
“Across the economy, especially on these gig platform apps, you see little things where they lure you on, and then for whatever reason, as you become less attractive to them or they know you’re going to keep coming back, the wages go down and down and down,” warned Bedoya. “So this isn’t just prices you pay at the supermarket, it’s also the paycheck you get at the end of the month or at the end of the week.”
“Markets exist to serve people, and people don’t exist to serve markets,” observed Mekki. “I really worry about a regime in which we accept tyranny as a normative proposition…[T]hese issues are not partisan. If people cannot count on basic fair treatment in the market, it does lead to tyranny. It just erodes their basic expectations about being treated with dignity everywhere else.”
To watch the full panel, click here.