Four criticisms of data dignity. My data earnings will be too small to be worth it! Not true. The whole world of Silicon Valley is powered by your data. These are trillion-dollar companies, and the value comes from your data. It’s absurd to say it’s not worth anything. It’s absurd to say that you wouldn’t make any money from it if you could. We make an estimate that a small family could, in the very near term, earn something like $20,000 a year from the value of their data. People will never pay for Facebook! People used to think that paying for video would be horrible, and then Netflix happened and we got peak TV. Like when you pay for stuff, it gets better. Poor people will be priced out of the Internet! The public library gave everyone access to printed literature. So if that creative solution was available before the internet, I’m absolutely convinced that we can rise to the occasion to come up with new solutions that are at least that good. It would benefit everybody ultimately. But it would also guarantee that nobody was left out. The tech giants will never go for this! We might see an absolute decrease in the relative dominance of the tech companies, but the overall economy will grow so much that the tech companies will grow more than they would have otherwise. Because using your own data against you will cost money, any company that wants to will be dissuaded from doing that. Instead, they’ll have to come up with productive, creative things to do, where they add value and people want to pay for that value. Value, yes. Manipulation, no. That is a dignified future. In a world where the manipulation machine is shut down, there will still be people who are paranoid. There will still be conspiracy theories. But there will not be a commercial incentive to incite these constantly all the time, 24 hours a day. Our downward spiral, we can stop it simply by stopping the amplification of it. That is the way you make a working democracy. That’s the way you make a humane culture. It’s even worse if you think about the future, where whatever it is you do, whether you’re a nurse, or a bricklayer, or a writer, anything, A.I.s and robots will probably come for your job. The little twist that we don’t want anybody to know is that in order for the A.I. and the robots to work, we need everybody’s data. Let me tell you a story. I had an experience that moved me terribly. I met with a group of elite brilliant high school students. They collaborated on the questions. And the first one was, if we’re going to be surpassed by artificial intelligence, if we won’t be needed, why are we here? I just realized that what we’re doing now with our current culture of technology that’s so tech-centric and just pretends that all the people out there giving us the data don’t matter, that culture is sending a message of human obsolescence. We hear this so often and so much. And it breaks my heart. If you can’t see that, try for God’s sakes. It’s so important. Don’t believe that you’re worthless. It’s a lie. Don’t believe it. I am certain that a dignified data economy is not an option, but a necessity.