We made a very particular and gargantuan mistake around the turn of the century. In 10, 9, 8— We had these two incredible drives. 1, happy 2000! 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 love Steve Jobs, the hero hacker who became a millionaire and a billionaire. So how do you combine— I’m going to make a Venn diagram with my fingers— socialism, everything must be free; capitalism, we have to have tech heroes. There’s one little space in the middle, and that little space— You know, the advertising model started out really cute, but the computers got more and 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? The simplest way to get this idea is, you‘ll get paid for your data, and more than you think, plus you’ll pay for services that are free now. But in the balance you’ll do better. My colleague Glen Weyl and I are charting out how to make a better future, how to make a future where people feel their value, earn 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 going to potentially make money from that data. They’ll be able to 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 going to get a royalty over time as that system is used. O.K., so how does this work? We’ll 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. We 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 a MID. It stands for Mediator of Individual Data. A MID is an organization that’s bigger than an individual, but smaller than a whole nation. A MID is a little like a labor union where they’re still enjoying some strength in numbers. Some MIDs will be easy to get into. There will be tens of millions of people in them for certain kinds of sort of ordinary data, let’s say. There will be other MIDs that’ll be hard to get into. Every MID will 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 in little micro-payments. Others might pay you every month or every year, or average it out over a year, so it’s really predictable. And that means you’re not just going to earn in the moment, but you’ll build up a stream of income from your data that will become like a pension in 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 going to answer all of those concerns in the next episode.