CONCEPT
Versioning
The strategic practice of offering multiple versions of an information good at different price points — the default pricing architecture for information markets, now extended to AI as the versioning of cognitive amplification itself.
Versioning is the pricing strategy of offering different versions of the same underlying good at different price points, allowing customers to self-select into the version matching their willingness to pay. Shapiro and Varian devoted an entire section of Information Rules to the strategy, demonstrating that information goods make price discrimination both uniquely feasible (because marginal costs are near zero) and uniquely consequential (because the pricing architecture shapes the distribution of consumer and producer surplus). AI platforms practice versioning with sophistication that raises a specific moral question absent from previous applications: when the versioned good is a cognitive amplifier, the stratification affects not merely productivity but intellectual capacity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The canonical illustration is the IBM LaserPrinter E, physically identical to the full-price LaserPrinter but containing a chip that artificially slowed its printing speed. IBM invested engineering effort to produce a deliberately degraded product because a lower price without quality degradation would have cannibalized the premium version's sales.