Philosophy
Symmetric information as fairness
We take a fair market to be one built on symmetric information: both sides know what the thing being sold actually is, its nature, and the criteria it can be rated on, not only its price. That symmetry is the whole claim here. This layer does not promise to fix markets outright; it claims that making information symmetric is the fairness mechanism, and stops there.
What your criteria are
Symmetric information means naming the criteria a thing can be rated on and letting each person weight them for themselves: how local it is, how important regenerative production is. Our sense is that criteria like these matter to everyone to some degree, but everyone rates them differently. Local production, for instance, matters to most people, but usually not at the expense of quality: in Frankfurt, for example, a product being not made in Europe, or being German-made, reads as cool, one illustration of how the same criterion lands differently depending on where and who you are. Once the criteria are named, they become sliders, and pricing sits alongside them rather than standing apart from them.
Purchased attention versus real preference
Our sense is that some large corporations reason from a position of dominant market share: they already hold it, human beings are creatures that can be conditioned, so marketing spend gets used to reinforce the position they already have. That reasoning, along with other pressures, pushes buying away from what is actually fairly priced and well made, and toward whatever has been made most available, most attended to, most exposed, the mind share that has been purchased, and purchased on adverse incentives. Price stops being the deciding factor. Availability, attention, exposure, and mind share take its place.
We do not read this as individual marketers freely choosing an unfair game. People and companies get pushed into it: revenue and profit sharing across the economy is currently concentrated rather than distributed, and the way things are managed is not organized to give everyone solid employment and a contribution that is valued. It is organized so that solid employment and valued contribution go to the fewest people, not the most. Under those constraints, spending on manufactured attention functions less like a free choice and more like something people are forced into.
Search and AI amplifying manufactured attention
This shows up most directly in search: search engines currently give results shaped by advertisements and by the ability, and the intention, to "manufacture" attention, rather than results shaped by what someone is actually looking for. AI is increasingly part of this same attention machinery too, though our sense of exactly how remains unsettled.
What the tool changes
The tool this reasoning points to is another version of, another addition to, ideal groceries, or "ideal food": ask what the criteria actually are, let them balance differently for different people, and let decisions follow from that. Buyers get to decide on their own criteria instead of on purchased exposure. Sellers, in turn, get to make better pricing decisions, because they can price against the real exposure of a buyer's preferences instead of only the exposure that advertising bought.
The original dictation
Ever since then, more of a fair market will be one with symmetric information. More symmetric information is symmetric with what is the thing that you want, like the nature of it, and what are the criteria that are part of that. So, for example, how do you rate them? How local is it? How much is regenerative production important to you? I, in general, believe that it's important to everyone, but rate it differently. And also, like local production, I guess, to most it's important, but not at the expense of quality. For example, in Frankfurt, something like not made in Europe, or something like German-made, is cool. In any case, so with these criteria, then there are sliders, essentially, for these criteria, and we then have the pricing.
Currently, my sense is that some big corporations are saying, "Well, we have dominant market share right now. Human beings are also creatures that can be conditioned, and thus we will spend our marketing to reinforce our market position." And this, as well as other things, leads to a situation where we, instead of doing what is actually fairly priced and well-priced and so forth, we look for and do the things that are, whatever. Price is then not the issue anymore, and it's not another factor, but it's like availability and attention and exposure and mind share that has been purchased, and has been purchased with adverse incentives. People don't have a choice to do marketing for something that they are forced to because of the way that we are currently revenue-profit sharing, which is concentrated, and the way that we are currently managing things, which is not finding ways for everyone to have solid employment and a contribution that is valued, but for the least amount of people.
And so something that would be cool would be to say, to have this kind of tool, which is also, by the way, another version of, or another addition to, ideal groceries, or can be ideal food, to say, "Okay, what are the criteria?" And then it's just differently balanced for different people. And then, based on that, we can make good decisions, including the sellers can make better decisions about price, knowing what the buyer has exposure to. But currently, we have search engines which are not giving good results because of advertisements and the ability to, quote-unquote, "manufacture" attention or the intention to do so. There's a lot of AI as well in place.