Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving beyond 'Free'

摘要

In the previous paper in this session and in a forthcoming book (Posner and Weyl forthcoming), one of us argues that by creating or strengthening absent markets, we can simultaneously address the inequality, stagnation, and sociopolitical conflict afflicting developed countries. He calls such cases "radical markets" because of their transformative emancipatory potential. A promising example was suggested years earlier by another of us, who wrote a book (Lanier 2013) highlighting the social problems with the culture of "free" online, in which users neither are paid for their data contributions to digital services nor pay directly for the value they receive from these services. While free data for free services is a barter, he argued that the lack of targeting of incentives undermines market principles of evaluation, skews distribution of financial returns from the data economy, and stops users from developing themselves into "first-class digital citizens." In this paper we explore whether and how treating the market fordata like a labor market could serve as a radical market that is practical in the near term.