Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology

by Azeem Azhar

One approach is to embrace the notion of data as property. As the pop star will.i.am wrote in The Economist in 2019, ‘The ability for people to own and control their data should be considered a central human value. The data itself should be treated like property and people should be fairly compensated for it.’39 The argument is appealing. By putting a price on our data, we could create a more efficient market for the digital labour we all undertake. Well-known figures ranging from Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Democratic congresswoman, have pushed the idea that pricing and compensating us for our personal data would help reform the data economy. But this would be, in my view, a mistake. As we’ve seen in this chapter, the creeping monetisation of private life is the problem. Do we want to further marketise our experiences on exponential platforms – to turn our messages to friends and family into a commodity, and allow Facebook to give it a price tag? You might also be disappointed to learn how much you would actually earn from this approach. Facebook made about $7 in profit for every user in 2019. If each user was to take half of the firm’s profit, that would net them the price of a coffee. A year. The truth is, an individual’s data is worth little – sorry, Mr i.am, even yours.