Re: <nettime> paying users for their data

[Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com>]

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



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