The digital economy is NOT purchases on Amazon. It is not booking a ride on a ride-share app. It is not the bills paid through online banking. The digital economy is what goes on besides the digitized purchasing of physical goods and services. It’s what’s left in the wake. Receipts of your actions. NOT just purchase receipts either. Location receipts, intention, interest, and much more. Oh, and just as importantly, all of your information also correlates all of your friends. Data brokers are all the proof you need to know these receipts are valuable to someone. Let’s dive a bit deeper to motivate why an actor in this game of ours would desire someone else’s receipts.
Back to that online store, if the shop owner could place all the items they know you wanted upfront and together, then they’d have an easier time making sales. If that ride-share app could know there’s an event going on and how busy it is they can upcharge rates. If your social media app infers your attention they can keep you on the app longer looking at more ads. If investment companies can take as many trends as they can they can use that to attempt to predict the market’s future.
The thing is, these aren’t ifs. On top of that, in each situation all the actors are playing each others’ game. All of them harvest from users, all of them optimize their profit, and all of them purchase receipts. The point here is that all of them own. It matters not what they do with your information, just that they own it. Why? Because they always will do something with it. That’ll never be a problem. What they are doing with it has created a negative trend on all of our lives. Not only directly through its own mediums, but indirectly as well. Indirectly, through the medium of real life; across all aspects. From having already sold tickets available for repurchase on the same website. To automated surveillance that dispatches armed forces to anything it thinks is suspicious, or anything it’s told to track. Oh yea, across space and time because its database remembers all, is unrelenting, and lacks morality, unlike the human brain.
What does all of this do? It furthers capital in the physical world. For anyone able to afford conveniences of smart devices, you’ve signed yourself up as a datasource to be tapped in the digital economy. For anyone with those people near them, you’ve been signed up as a data point. It is only those who go out and teach themselves to command the digital realm that can lead their community to sovereignty. Thus, it is only those sovereign communities that band together to form communally beneficial networks, that are free.
All the while, standards must be rigorous.
- Learn why closed source software is the root of surveillance
- Learn why privatizing knowledge is the root of inequality
- Learn why consensus based action is the heart of community
- Learn why the axiom of choice dictates membership
- Learn why freeing all other communities is the virtuous reflection of these beliefs
However, the digital economy is digital only. Our activities with each other is the resource of this economy. The fact that this economy is separate (albeit related) from the physical economy, denotes a separate (albeit related) realm. The way this realm operates depends on the platform you’re on. See, each platform has made many choices about how they’ll treat everyone before they’ve even connected. Now, you can either be on an open or closed platform. Closed ones are the most popular, but not necessarily the most common. As the name implies, varying degrees of obfuscation are applied to hide the inner workings. On the other hand, an open platform allows you to audit every piece of how the platform will treat you. You may ask, why isn’t every platform open? Well, simply you can protect your capital better. Then, if closed platforms are the most popular, why don’t we move. Convenience. When you’re going out with your friends you want to go to the popular spot and since the Platform’s abuses are invisible in the moment, convenience keeps us from acting. It’d feel inconvenient to research an open platform. It’d feel inconvenient to migrate your friends over. This silent power of convenience is what maintains the feudal rule over our digital identities.
It doesn't have to be this way, control has always been in your hands
All you have to do is the work.
- Learn about digital ownership
- Learn about open social media
- Learn about building community online