For thousands of years, dominant economic models had focused on the extraction of natural resources and the conversion of these raw materials into commodities. Cotton was spun into fabric. Iron ore was smelted into steel. Forests were cut into timber. But with the advent of the Internet, it became possible to create commodities out of our lives—our behavior, our attention, our identity. People were processed into data. We would serve as the raw material of this new data-industrial complex.
