80% of corporate wealth is now in just
10% of firms – and those are the firms that have the most personal data and intellectual property.
So, you know, mostly big tech firms, Google, Amazon, Facebook…
Google is actually an interesting narrative arc because Google really
invented the business model of surveillance capitalism.
And that is the business model of essentially tracking everything you are doing,
saying online and increasingly offline, and using it to build a profile of you and then
selling that information to advertisers who want to target you down to a microscopic level.
So, think about that now as it moves into healthcare, into finance, into insurance.
Here is a real-world example that is happening…
Insurance companies are now putting sensors
in some countries in some markets where this is legal – sensors in peoples’ cars
or homes –so let’s say I’m now driving with my child in back and I don’t stop quickly enough
at a stop light. That will be tallied – I might get a black mark on my insurance.
First of all that’s I think incredibly creepy but it also has the effect of completely changing the
business model from a business model of the collective, in which it’s about risk
sharing and risk pooling – to separating all of us - suddenly we are all individual risks,
and perhaps you and I can be insured but perhaps there is a pool uninsurable people over here.
It creates this real
tier system within society where there are people who can be completely disenfranchised.
First Wall St and then Silicon Valley really have more power than any other entity.
I see so many similarities between the way that Wall Street had both
monetary capture of politics but also cognitive capture of politics before the financial crisis
and to a certain extent after and the way Big Tech has captured the debate now.
With the banks, there is at least some requirement for how they kind of mark things on the books.
With tech firms - you don’t have that – so it’s really a very opaque system
We are not doing transactions in dollars or sterling, we’re doing transactions
in data –and that is a barter transaction. It’s a very opaque transaction.
So if you think about what Adam Smith would have said you needed for a properly functioning market.
You need equal access to information, you need a transparent transaction – so both parties
need to understand what’s being exchanged – and you need a shared moral framework.
Now you could argue that in the era of big data – none of those things are in effect.
Think about the most opaque transaction in the financial crisis – you know,
the derivatives – weapons of mass financial destruction - and the kinds of transactions
that we are doing on an hourly basis now are just as opaque if not more so.
We don’t really understand what is happening in the algorithmic black box.
One of the reasons that the big tech companies have been so reluctant
to police political advertising is they don’t want to open up that algorithmic black box.
One of the possibly elegant answers to some of the problems we’ve been talking
about - from privacy, to competitiveness, to innovation – would be to create digital
data banks where companies of all sizes, in all industries, could have access to data,
but only in a way that citizens and democratically elected governments would decide.
Suffice to say, we need to move from old capitalist model
to a kind of a new more equal sharing of this wealth pie.