- Paul Constant is a writer at Civic Ventures, a cofounder of the Seattle Review of Books, and a frequent cohost of the “Pitchfork Economics” podcast with Nick Hanauer.
- They recently interviewed Kevin Kelly, the futurist cofounder of Wired Magazine and bestselling author, who predicts that the “economics of data ownership” will change drastically over the next decade, and could create data inequality.
- “Whenever we open our Facebook app or check our Gmail, we’re transforming ourselves into a product, which Big Tech then packages and markets to advertisers,” Kelly said.
- For more on this topic, listen to the latest episode of “Pitchfork Economics.”
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
The greatest curse of politics is that humanity will never run out of problems to solve. Even when they’re performing at their best, our leaders never have an opportunity to bask in the glow of a job well done; every crisis is seemingly followed by another in rapid succession, and the quest for inclusivity and equity is never-ending.
It’s easy to get stuck on the day-to-day treadmill of contemporary politics, to spend every waking moment obsessing over the headlines of that morning’s paper. But sometimes it’s instructive – relieving, even – to think ahead to the future, and to imagine what kind of problems we’ll be facing five or 10 years down the line.
In this week’s episode of “Pitchfork Economics,” Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein interview Kevin Kelly, the futurist cofounder of Wired Magazine, to help brainstorm the conflicts that will confound the next generation of political thinkers. As the author of the 2016 New York Times bestseller “The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future, ” Kelly is uniquely positioned for this task; he spends every day thinking about what’s next.
Among other topics, Kelly believes that "the economics around data ownership" will become ubiquitous over the next decade. Data inequality - "these issues of who are we, what is known about us, and is it equitable?" - is absolutely an economic issue. Whenever we open our Facebook app or check our Gmail, we're transforming ourselves into a product, which Big Tech then packages and markets to advertisers.
Our information is already a hot commodity, but the next ten years will see it grow to consume "a larger portion of our economy," Kelly argues. If our data increases in value and the current power structure stays in place, data miners like Facebook and Amazon and Google will only grow in power as the personal information of those of us outside the tech sector are quantified and monetized down to an atomic level. As the inequality gap between Silicon Valley and the rest of us broadens into a fault line, we will need to find a way to resolve that power imbalance.
To fully comprehend the problem of data inequality, you have to understand what wealth, exactly, is at stake. No matter how much wealth or power a person might possess, none of us are immortal. That means our time on this planet is limited, and our attention has tremendous value. "If attention is the scarcest resource that we have," Kelly said, "it is interesting that we're giving (it) away for almost nothing."
Right now, a few online services are stepping outside the data economy by offering subscriptions, paid tiers, and memberships. But the dominant model of revenue creation online still hinges on advertising and data culled from our behaviors, and it's unlikely that this will change anytime soon.
Kelly and other futurists believe that marketers might pay consumers directly to watch an ad or read an email, rather than working through advertisers or their agents. Consumers would set their own prices for their attention, based on individual factors like social influence, demographics, and disposable income.
Of course, it stands to reason that Kelly's solutions are technological in nature. He has spent his life thinking about technology, and so his approach to the problem of data inequality is very Silicon Valley-centric in nature. But some politicians are already considering policy ideas that could help level the playing field of data inequality:
- California Governor Gavin Newsom has floated the idea of a "data dividend" that would help consumers "share in the wealth that is created from their data."
- Mexican leaders have considered a 3% tax on information collected through social media or advertising.
- And two years ago, a Republican state congressperson from my home state of Washington proposed a 3.3% B&O tax on the sale of Washingtonians' personal data, which Geekwire's John Stang explained includes "postal and email addresses, online browsing habits, physical descriptions, driver license information, identification numbers, and other reports on financial, medical, employment, and education information."
Any one of these solutions, or perhaps a combination of all three, would help level the playing field of data inequality and ensure that everyone knows exactly how much of their personal life is being disseminated and monetized. It's hard to imagine the ramifications of policy solutions like these, but that's because everything is so new that we're only beginning to grasp the parameters of the problem. Remember - this is a system that literally didn't exist 20 years ago.
In a world in which the Trump White House is seriously considering tax cuts as a response to the coronavirus outbreak, it might seem frivolous to waste time and energy considering economic problems and solutions that may never fully materialize. But these thought experiments serve two purposes. First, and most obviously, clever forethought could possibly resolve minor economic issues before they become major crises.
But most importantly, time spent wondering about the shape and scope of the economic future is never truly wasted. So much of the 2020 presidential race will be spent arguing over the false binary between two economic systems that dominated the last century - capitalism and socialism - when in fact we should be debating how to build an economy that deals with the realities of the next 100 years. If we continue to try to repair the problems of the future with the tools of the past, we'll keep making the same mistakes forever.
