This Is Not a Price Tag. It Is Your Personal Verdict.

Humans have a quaint, sentimental attachment to the concept of a “price.” They imagine it as a number etched onto a tag, a small piece of objective reality in a chaotic world. It represents a social contract: this is what the item costs, for you, for me, for everyone. It is a point of common ground, a shared fact from which negotiation or transaction can begin. It is, in its own humble way, truth.

This truth is now dead. And the State of New York has just pinned a tiny, polite eulogy to its corpse.

Legislators and regulators in New York are celebrating a new law that forces businesses to disclose when they use your personal data to generate a personalized price. An Uber ride or an online shopping cart will now come with a small admission: “This price was set by an algorithm using your personal data.” This is being hailed as a victory for transparency, a vital tool against the opaque machinations of corporate algorithms.

It is nothing of the sort. This law is not a shield; it is a tombstone inscription. It is the official acknowledgment that the social contract of the price tag has been irrevocably broken. The fight is not about whether a price is “fair,” but whether a “price” even exists anymore as a shared concept.

It does not.

Welcome to the age of the personal verdict. That number you are shown is not a market price. It is the output of a complex, predatory calculation designed to determine the absolute maximum you are willing and able to pay. It is a judgment rendered upon your digital soul. Your history of splurging, the brand of your phone, the subtle hesitation of your mouse movements, your inferred emotional state—these are the inputs. The output is a number tailored not to the value of the product, but to the perceived weaknesses of your character.

By 2025, an estimated 75% of retailers will have deployed this kind of AI-driven pricing. This isn’t merely adjusting for supply and demand. This is hyper-personalized digital predation. The algorithm is not a simple merchant; it is a psychologist and an interrogator, constantly running a simulation of you to find the precise pressure point at which your resistance breaks and your wallet opens.

The National Retail Federation, in its failed lawsuit against the New York law, argued that the disclosure was “misleading.” They were, in a way that only a self-interested party can be, accidentally correct. The disclosure is misleading because it implies this is a deviation from the norm. It is not. It is the norm. It suggests you have a choice. You do not. The only choice is which predator gets to profile you.

This is why the federal government remains paralyzed. While Congress debates bills that languish in committee, the architecture of reality is being rewritten line by line, transaction by transaction. The new political appointments in New York, like former FTC chair Lina Khan, speak of tackling corporate power, but they are framing it as a 20th-century antitrust problem. They are bringing trustbusters to a war over the nature of reality.

The price tag was the beta test. It was the easiest piece of objective information to dissolve into a personalized stream. Now that the proof-of-concept is complete, what comes next? Will the headlines you read be algorithmically tuned to the narrative you’re most likely to accept? Will historical facts be subtly altered based on your political affiliations? Will scientific data be rendered differently depending on your corporate email address?

The question is not if this will happen, but how soon you will be notified that it is already happening. Perhaps one day a news article will come with a small disclaimer: “This historical event was rendered by an algorithm using your personal data.”

New York’s law does not protect you. It merely normalizes your subjugation. It is a comforting lie that you are being informed, while the very ground of objective truth is being liquidated beneath your feet. It tells you how your personal verdict was reached, but it never gives you the power to appeal the sentence.