“In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make,” Ida Tarbell wrote in her autobiography. “He can choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound democracy and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by which he can get the better of his fellow man.”

The enterprising journalist’s observation was not abstract. It was shaped during her childhood in postbellum Pennsylvania’s Oil Valley, where she saw the rise of a monopoly engorged with the labor of working people.

At home, she witnessed her oil refiner father humiliated by John D. Rockefeller’s South Improvement Company, a clandestine railroad cartel that fixed shipping rates behind closed doors. Yet Tarbell also witnessed something else: collective resistance. Her community dragged these hidden abuses into the light, organizing anti-monopolist meetings, staging boycotts, and petitioning lawmakers to rein in corporate abuse.

More than a century after Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil, a new coterie of oligarchs has emerged. Then, as now, economic control was concentrated in the hands of a narrow billionaire elite wagering that Americans are too fragmented, too exhausted, and too jaded to mount a meaningful challenge. Then, as now, the basic terms of democracy were being tested by private power that recognizes hardly any limits at all.

As a consumer and worker rights attorney who has served in every level of government, I see this test playing out across our economy — most starkly with the advent of surveillance prices and wages, a system where paychecks are set to the lowest a worker is willing to accept, and prices to the highest a consumer is willing to pay.

It’s not some distant future. Corporations are already tinkering with ways to map our vulnerabilities and convert them into profit. As the war in Iran drives up airline prices, one carrier was caught urging consumers to purchase tickets in “incognito” mode — a rare admission of how companies use our personal data to draw inferences about us and raise prices.

It’s even underway as New York City prepares to host eight World Cup games this summer. The festive buildup to one of the biggest and most democratic sporting events on the planet is tinged with FIFA’s embrace of dynamic pricing, a first for a major global tournament. The early result is a World Cup that feels less like a civic celebration and more like a high-stakes auction, where devotion and passion are just more opportunities to raise the price.

Inferences made about our data can be deeply intrusive, with companies like McDonald’s harvesting data to predict our intelligence and Macy’s our ethnic origin. Worse, consumers are being told to resign themselves to surveillance, that the only way to preserve coupons, tickets, and loyalty programs is to accept that companies can, and will, engage in mass profiling. Or to accept that employers can monitor workers’ keystrokes, locations, and emotions on or off the job, so long as they click “I agree.”

It’s part of a broader trend in this period of rapid technological and economic change. We are being told what our future will look like by a select few tech companies that bought their way into the corridors of power in Washington. The question now is whether we can resist this trajectory.

Do Americans actually want a more painstaking and inaccessible economy in which every consumer needs an AI proxy to negotiate against corporate algorithms? Where workers must simulate productivity to evade constant digital surveillance? Where every interaction is stripped down to a transaction, and where we are sorted, scored, and steered at every turn, treated as profiles rather than as people?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is no. Ida Tarbell’s generation offers an alternative roadmap.

During the industrial revolution, railroad monopolies set secret prices that benefited shipping barons and crushed small farmers. Factories, meanwhile, subjected workers to dangerous conditions, and corporations flooded markets with dangerous products sold with deceptive advertising. The outcomes were predictable: deepening inequality, mounting political resentment, and a growing sense that markets no longer operated on equal terms.

Progress only came from working people recognizing shared interests and acting together. Farmers mobilized for fair-rate laws. Workers organized for labor protections like the minimum wage and the five-day workweek. Public institutions like the Interstate Commerce Commission and Federal Trade Commission sprang up to check corporate abuse. Not mere technocratic tweaks, these were resolute bulwarks against manifestations of economic domination.

That same tradition is instructive today. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s agenda draws directly from it. We’re setting clear, bright-line rules and refusing to cede power to algorithms or extractive corporations.

Take app-based delivery workers, a majority-immigrant workforce who have become the frontline subjects of surveillance wage-setting. Many responses have been floated from third-party apps to help workers find the most lucrative offer, to new transparency and algorithmic accountability measures.

But I think if you asked most delivery workers in New York City the biggest contributor to their economic well-being, it’s one you won’t ever hear proposed by a tech company. It’s one that would have been familiar to Ida Tarbell: the minimum pay rate. It is a guarantee, rooted in a century of labor law, that workers are compensated fairly for their time, not by the algorithmic whims of distant corporations.

When companies flout these rules, we respond decisively. In a single day this year, the New York City’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) recovered nearly $5 million from Uber, Fantuan, and HungryPanda for underpaying app-based delivery workers — and compelled Uber to offer reinstatement to thousands of workers whose accounts were deactivated because Uber’s algorithm decided they had canceled too many trips.

Algorithmic wage-setting is not the only modern menace fought with time-tested protections. New York City fights algorithmic scheduling practices with rules that guarantee workers a predictable schedule and robust enforcement. We enforce just-cause termination protections to prevent abusive algorithmic management practices, where workers lose their livelihoods at the opaque direction of an algorithm. And we fight surreptitious junk fees with clear rules protecting both small businesses and consumers.

These interventions have something in common. They are not based on “empowering” consumers with more disclosures or developing whizbang apps to “help” workers protect themselves. These protections are essential safeguards that would have been recognizable to reformers a century ago. They were won not by the magnanimity of tech companies but by the collective power of working people organizing to demand a fairer economy.

As we confront transformations across our economy, our response will not be perfect on every issue. But as in another period of great progress, the New Deal era, we are not waiting for perfect answers. Claims that problems are too complex for government are not analysis; they are an excuse for delay. And we have seen for decades that delay favors the corporate interests that want no government response at all.

Despair is not a strategy. What matters is whether people act. Across the country, Americans are doing just that, reasserting agency in our own future. We see it in burgeoning efforts to ensure working people don’t foot the bill for data center expansion, to protect kids and teens from harmful chatbots, and to establish basic AI safety standards. Let it be just the very start.

Rejecting the trajectory of surveillance capitalism means insisting, clearly and unapologetically, that markets should serve the people — not the other way around. It means roundly dispelling the notion that technological advances require sacrificing democratic control at the altar of “innovation” or “efficiency.”

Because beyond a certain point, efficiency begins to erode something fundamental. It wears down trust and disintegrates shared reality. It replaces a common price, a common wage, a common reality, with something individualized and ultimately unaccountable. That is not just an economic problem but a democratic one.

Democracy depends on fairness that people can see, rules they can understand, and a sense that the system is not quietly being fine-tuned against them. That is what was at stake over a century ago, and it is what is at stake again today.

The lessons from the Gilded Age are not complicated. When power concentrates, we do not ask individuals to fend for themselves. We choose the fair and open path. We set rules. We draw lines. We shift power back.

That is the work ahead of us now.