Incredulous or Inevitable? : Data as a Commodity
We live in a tech-dominated world. Silicon Valley is the heart of the new-American gold rush. The nerds have emerged from the dark of their basements and wrested away the spotlight of the fast-riser, wild-west cavalier Suits of 80’s Wall Street lore. It’s hoodies and flip-flops now, and one could debate for days if society is better or worse for it. One thing is for certain: we aren’t slowing down soon. In fact, as long as mantras like “move fast and break things” exist, there’s no real intent to do any such thing. But while we’re moving fast and breaking things, it’s important to look at the pieces and ask if they were even that great when we first put them together in the first place.
When sites like Youtube, Facebook, Google, and Instagram rose to cultural prevalence, it was largely innocent; they created products that were universally useful, and as such, generated global interest. The allure of all of them, of course, was also that they were completely free. Therein lies a problem: because our friends, the Suits, see a product with enormous interest and have now attached absurd valuations on their inevitable success, but the product generates very little revenue. What is a hoodie-clad CEO to do? As Jaron Lanier puts forth in a New York Times piece that is definitely not idealist in its title, Jaron Lanier Fixes the Internet, “How do you combine…socialism—everything must be free—and capitalism—we have to have tech heroes—there’s one little space in the middle, and that little space is advertising.” And that’s all it took for our flip-flopped friends to corrupt themselves all the way into a level of insidious behavior as to compete with their Wall Street counterparts of yore.
These sites, behemoth companies, realized they had a unique resource: the behavior patterns of their users. With this realization, it was off to the races for the optimization of collecting and storing data. These companies realized that the more optimally they can perform this function, the more and more valuable they can become. Why? Because this data was unlike anything advertisers had ever seen. The specificity with which your interactions with these sites can define you as a target demographic to an interested advertiser is ludicrous. The price that advertisers are willing to pay for that sort of specificity: equally ludicrous. Why make a shot in the dark, paying for airtime on a channel that you may or may not be watching, when the advertisement can be hand delivered to where the agency knows you are likely to be? Or maybe they already know what you want.
What all this moving fast and breaking of things did was create what is essentially a shadow economy. One of the most valuable things in the world today has no real tangible value assigned to it. It’s an oxymoron. All of the companies above, and now companies that previously had no skin in the game, are all scrambling to be competent and optimal gatherers of user data. All in the name of targeted advertising; trying to gather it themselves to not rely so heavily on the tech giants, or trying to optimize to become the next big dealer at the table. Either way, what they aren’t doing is spending all their time and resources optimizing their product. That is the level of value in which the ability to harvest data is placed. There are no numbers yet, but there is an importance. This is the backdrop for the idea many refer to as surveillance capitalism.
But it is precisely that lack of a number that brings us to Jaron Lanier and the idea of Data Dignity – the term he coined for a far-reaching idea of how users can assume some control of their data. What it also infers—at its core—is that data be considered a commodity. Lanier and Glen Weyl in their piece in the Harvard Business Review titled A Blueprint for a Better Digital Society, they assert:
“People will be paid for their data and will pay for services that require data from others. Individuals’ attention will be guided by their self-defined interests rather than by manipulative platforms beholden to advertisers or other third parties. Platforms will receive higher-quality data with which to train their machine learning systems and thus will be able to earn greater revenue selling higher-quality services to businesses and individuals to boost their productivity. The quality of services will be judged and valued by users in a marketplace instead of by third parties who wish to influence users. An open market will become more aligned with an open society when the customer and the user are the same person.”
There is an entire methodology for achieving this. And in theory, it’s quite nice. Through third party entities, operating somewhat like labor unions, called MIDS, people stand to have their data valuated, and receive payment. That’s the number we’ve been searching for this whole time. And that may be danger of such a system, because at that point we will have succeeded in making data a commodity, and there are a number of ways one could view that as either a positive or a negative.
Critics of Data Dignity and its implications would assert that what it fails to do is acknowledge the root of the issue. To accept data dignity would be to accept the farming of our data. It would be an acceptance of surveillance as a means of production. As media and culture sociologist at London School of Economics states, “Just the act of requiring us to live our lives while continuously being tracked from corporations is itself an undermining of human dignity.” Co-writer of a book on this subject with Couldry, Ulises Mejias, takes it one step further, “Imagine that you suddenly discover that cameras have been placed to capture every moment of your life, including your most intimate moments. The company says, ‘Well, we are not going to remove the cameras, but we are going to pay you to continue to record all of this information.’ Instead of addressing the injustice, they offer you payment. I don’t think this is dignity at all. In fact, it’s the opposite of dignity.” Another glaring weakness that many scholars are quick to point out is that of the user being coerced into selling their data outright. That statement in itself, should be difficult to conceptualize. But this issue is only addressed in plans for Data Dignity as something, “MIDS cannot allow to happen”. And while that sentiment can certainly be easily agreed upon, what happens when powerful political and lobbying entities decide to apply the pressure? Or even users, if the money is enticing enough?
There are even still more operational attacks on the viability of such a future. From a logistical angle, many point to Jaron’s simplistic statements that things would “need to be invented”. Now, that’s nothing crazy to say in the world of tech. Inventing is their business. But as law and economics professor at NYU, Christopher Jon Sprigman, points out, “Contracting, payment infrastructure, termination fees. There’s going to have to be all the economic and regulatory apparatus that goes along with that.” He argues that by the end of all that transacting, the amount of money people would receive would be “crumbs,” but what the tech companies would receive, “is the rhetoric of property.” Again, this is the idea that data is now a commodity. You are now the owner of that property, property that is yours to buy and sell. And in fact, how would we be able to “check the books” to see the true value of our data? There are many questions on the table, still.
What these critics and others are digging at is that Data Dignity is a seemingly bold term applied for the idea of people getting paid for a resource that they never truly willingly gave away. The fact of the matter is that large tech companies manipulated the rules of engagement between themselves and the user. Consent became an quick-click button attached to an impossibly long document called the User Agreement, and they strapped that tactic on to the back of the mass appeal that they garnered through offering a “free” service. So while Lanier’s plan does course correct, it never looks back at the broken pieces and asks if we should have ever allowed this invasion to happen anyway. While it is usually good practice to adapt to an ever-changing world in positive and meaningful ways, when it is changing this quickly, should we not consider if the changes are necessary? Is it necessary for companies to have access to our data? Is it inevitable? Would it happen without our consent anyway, one way or another?
What’s for certain is that this concept is forging ahead. Jaron Lanier and Co. having been the leadership of a Data Dignity team under the office of Microsoft’s CTO. While this could be a shrewd tactic of Microsoft to separate themselves from the somewhat maligned Tech giants discussed earlier on, it also insinuates a real focus into the viability of such a future. There has been minor pushback in relation to this idea of a breach in privacy: many disclaimers on websites that explicitly ask permission. There is also the rise of alternative search engine DuckDuckGo, who only time will tell how it will meet the needs of its investors. Facebook has rivals now spawning, though none come remotely close to its draw. And so we have to possible avenues, here it seems, where both focus on the user reclaiming the “dignity” of the choice to have privacy.
On one hand, it is an outright rejection of data collection without much, much stricter regulation. On the other is an acceptance of data collection as an inevitable practice that we have no recourse to avoid forever. Either, it can only be assumed, would lead to a more ethical digital society. The advertisement and political machines currently perpetuated through a short-term contest for click-throughs generated through rage-baiting is an unsustainable system for maintaining the “dignity” of the user. In any regard, it’s manipulation that needs to be rooted out from these systems, and that manipulation stems from the issue at hand: data as a commodity.
Until the idea of data having a valuation attached to it—whether tangible or not—this toxic environment will continue to thrive unchecked, for there will be no incentive from the most powerful beneficiaries of the system to cease its deployment. It is easy for us to all agree with Jaron Lanier that there need be a blueprint for a better digital society, and it is important to have the conversation of how we achieve that. It is also important for us to decide emphatically how we define dignity when we refer to “Data Dignity”. Is it that we get the due recompense for the collection of our behavioral patterns? Or is that just moving the marker forward, making a dystopian world of data breach more palatable? Perhaps we need to move the marker back and examine whether or not that breach of privacy was ever dignified in the first place.
