Felix Stalder on Sun, 27 Jul 2014 12:26:04 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> paying users for their data |
On 07/24/2014 17:51, Wolfie Christl wrote: > Maybe the other way round: If users would have been paid for > their data, business models driven by personal data would be less > attractive or would look different at least Hi Wolfie, you are right, paying individual users for their personal data doesn't work, one way or the other. The bottom line is, the data of a single person has very little exchange value, hence the need to aggregate such enormous amounts to extract some value out of it. But there is something else I found fascinating in these numbers. Facebook is a near global monopoly, it provides services to 1'300 million people. I'm not sure there is another company (except Google) that has such a reach and provides something of value to so many people. Yet, it is a relatively small company generating just a tiny bit more than two dollars of revenue per person. So, it's a small company, serving the entire world. One must assume that it has destroyed much more exchange value than it produced. But it does so, extremely profitably, with a profit margin of close to 30%. For a relatively small number of people, this shrinking of markets is profitable, but it's still a shrinking of markets. One the one hand, it's a good thing -- since markets, as they expand in reach, are shrinking. Profits require extreme scales and near monopolies, only then one can compensate for the shrinking of markets through expansion profitably. This process seems like snake eating its own tail. Yet, as long as we all depend on markets to for our daily survival, the prospects for most people are brutal. Given the harsh social cnsequences, this makes all the control aspects in these technologies (facebook & nsa) terrifying. Unless, we learn to live outside the markets as we know them which will require to redistribute wealth on massive scale.. Felix -- ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| http://felix.openflows.com |OPEN PGP: 056C E7D3 9B25 CAE1 336D 6D2F 0BBB 5B95 0C9F F2AC # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org