Mmm, yes, What is data?

Imagine two of your old college friends just had a baby they opposed to selfie.

And of course, it's adorable.

And of course you like it.

But soon you notice that your news feed starts to change.

You see promotions for a baby sling that would be perfect for new parents.

And it's even got a logo of your old college.

And look, there's a discount.

So So So you buy it.

You've got a gift for your friends.

The store's made a sale, and somewhere there's a giant tech company that just earned a little commission on the whole thing.

An incredible cloud of transactions like this is the value that makes the digital economy as it is today.

I'm here to tell you that you're being shortchanged.

I came up with a few crazy scenes in Minority Report, the one where our hero is trying to run away from the police.

But he's being grabbed by each billboard into advertising so they can see where he is.

It was supposed to be cautionary, but instead people just think it looks cool.

And in Silicon Valley to this day, decades later, people say, Oh, that new thing you're designing it looks like he came out of minority report.

That's so cool.

And I'm like, Oh God, like what is it?

Take?

What does it take for people to recognize a dystopia?

I kind of feel like it backfired.

What has happened is heartbreaking.

The whole world has become darker.

The way humans respond the most intensely is with fear or anger.

People who are afraid, people who are angry, they pay attention.

We've created a whole civilization based on tricking each other.

Let me show you what I mean.

In order to sell you that baby slaying, A social media company used data.

They know ah, world of things about you and your friends, the least of which are that your friends just had a baby, that you all went to the same college.

But there's even Maur the algorithms that run the whole thing.

They're always adjusting, doing little micro experiments to try to find that little variation that'll keep you clicking.

That'll get you to click on by.

You don't just see your own friends.

You see these other people who are selected because the algorithm thinks they'll catch they might look a little richer, little thinner, a little cuter.

Something like that.

The algorithm doesn't even know.

It just knows that these images get even in this video right now, their algorithms snatching your data with a plan to kick you in the future.

So look, here's the thing.

This whole shadow economy that runs our world now and concentrates all the wealth and reduces your future would not be possible without the data that's coming from you and your friends, You are the fuel for it.

You're giving away all your data for free.

You don't know what day it has been taken from you.

You don't know how it's ultimately used.

You don't have any opportunity to take pride in it.

You don't have any opportunity to make it better.

To you.

It's a mystery.

So you pretend it's nothing, but it isn't nothing when you realize that data is the new oil.

When you realize that this thing being taken from you that you don't think about is the future economic value is your future economic value, it's your future economic power.

The biggest Internet I po ever values the company out more than 31 billion multi billionaire today.

All of a sudden, I hope you can see you're giving away everything in exchange for almost nothing.

We need to affirmatively positively invent a different system that doesn't screw everybody up in the first place.

And you know what?

I think we have a solution.

I think we have charted a way out of this mess and I really can't wait to tell you about it.

We made a very particular in gargantuan mistake around the turn of the century Way had thes two incredible drives.

One was everything should be free.

No more paying for music or newspapers.

Everything should be owned by the people shared by the people.

But we love tech entrepreneurs.

We loved Steve Jobs, the hero hacker who became a millionaire or billionaire.

So how do you combine?

I'm gonna make a Venn diagram.

Oddly, Fingers, socialism.

Everything must be free capitalism.

We have to have tech heroes.

There's what little space in the middle in that little space.

You know, the advertising model started out really, kid, but the computer's got more more powerful.

The algorithms got more sophisticated.

Everything built up, built up, built up until it turned into this crazy behavioral manipulation scheme.

So how do we fix this, Theo?

Simplest way to get this idea is you'll get paid for your data and more than you think.

Plus, you'll pay for service.

Is that a free now?

But in the balance, you'll be better.

My colleague Glenn while and I are charting out how to make a better future, how to make a future where people feel their value, earned their value and have dignity.

All right, what's our banner?

What do we call this thing?

We call this body of ideas, Data dignity.

You should have the moral rights to every bit of data that exists because you exist now and forever in a dignified data future.

When your friends have that baby, they might still post about it.

But they're gonna potentially make money from that data.

They'll be ableto understand, decide and earn if they want to, and you'll be able to as well, let's say you do buy a baby sling.

Your data might have been used to help promote that thing to you in a dignified data future, you're going to get paid, and you're gonna get a royalty over time as that system is used.

Okay, so how does this work will have to invent a lot of things.

So we need to keep track of where somebody's data ends up.

We need to have a universal way of people getting paid and paying, and it's all totally doable.

Way have to invent a new kind of entity that is, an entity that would look out for your interests would deal with all the technical and complicated stuff for you that you would be able to trust by law.

So this new kind of mediator is called amid its tents for mediator of individual data.

Amid is an organization that's bigger than an individual but smaller than a whole nation.

Amid is a little like a labor union, where they're still enjoying some strength in numbers.

Some meds will be easy to get into.

They'll be tens of millions of people on them for certain kinds of sort of ordinary data.

Let's say they'll be other men's.

It'll be hard to get into every mid.

We'll set its own terms.

Millions of people will join the same mid.

It'll be like getting car insurance or something that's very routine some mids might pay you incrementally and little micropayments.

Others might pay you every month or every year or averaged out over years, so it's really predictable.

And that means you're not just gonna earn in the moment.

But you'll build up a stream of income from your data that will become like a pension and a new world that's actually a compelling world.

It's a world that can exist.

When people hear about these ideas of data dignity, they often push back.

It doesn't sound possible.

It sounds weird.

Well, I'm gonna answer all of those concerns.

Four criticisms of data dignity, my date or earnings will be too small to be worth it.

Not true.

The whole world of Silicon Valley is powered by your data, these air trillion dollar companies and the value comes from your data.

It's absurd to say it's not worth anything.

It's absurd to say that you wouldn't make any money from it if you could.

We make an estimate that a small family could in the very near term earned something like $20,000 a year from the value of their data.

People will never pay for Facebook.

People used to think that paying for video would be horrible and the Netflix happened and we got peak TV like when you pay for stuff, it gets better.

Poor people will be priced out of the Internet.

The public library gave everyone access to printed literature.

So if that creative solution was available before the Internet, I'm absolutely convinced that we can rise to the occasion to come up with new solutions that are at least that good.

It would benefit everybody ultimately, but would also guarantee that nobody was left out.

Tech giants will never go for this.

We might see an absolute decrease in the relative dominance of the tech companies, but the overall economy will grow so much that the tech companies will grow more than they would have otherwise because using your own data against you will cost money.

Any company that wants to will be dissuaded from doing that.

Instead, they'll have to come up with productive, creative things to do where they add value and people want to pay for that value.

Value.

Yes, manipulation.

No, that is a dignified future.

In a world where the manipulation machine is shut down.

There will still be people who are paranoid.

There will still be conspiracy theories, but but there will not be a commercial incentive to incite these constantly all the time, 24 hours a day, our downward spiral.

We can stop it simply by stopping the amplification of it.

That is the way you make a working democracy.

That's the way you make a humane culture.

It's even worse if you think about the future, where you whatever it is you do with the you're a nurse or a bricklayer or a writer, anything, a eyes and robots will probably come for your job.

The little twist that we don't want anybody to know is that in order for the A I in the robot's toe work, we need everybody's data.

Let me tell you a story.

I had a experience that moved me terribly.

I met with a group of elite, really and high school students.

They collaborated on the questions, and the 1st 1 was, If we're gonna be surpassed by artificial intelligence, if we won't be needed, why are we here?

I just realized that what we're doing now with our card culture of technology that's so tech centric and just pretends that all the people out there giving us the data don't matter.

That culture is sending a message of human obsolescence.

We hear this so often and so much, and it breaks my heart.

If you can't see that, try, for God's sakes, it's so important.

Don't believe that you're worthless.

It's a lie.

I don't believe it.

I'm certain that it dignified data economy is not an option, but a necessity.