It may be said that the Digital Economy, also known as
the New Economy or the Internet Economy, started in Silicon Valley, in
California, during the 1990’s. The term was coined from the title of Don Tapscott's 1995 best-seller, The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked
Intelligence, one of first books to show how the Internet would change
the way we do
business.
One of the commonalities of all
economic revolutions, whether the Industrial age, Colonialism, or the introduction
of Banking, and thus modern Capitalism, is the disruption they cause, not only
to economic patterns, but also to society at large; repercussions that
reverberate for decades, sometimes even centuries. An example would be the economic
revolution that occurred at the beginning of history, when humans moved from hunting/gathering
to agriculture, leading to the establishment of towns and cities, the
flourishing of language and literature, and the formation of a class of people
much wealthier than the rest.
A common feature all these economic
revolutions share is the transfer of assets from common ownership to private
ownership. During the move to an agricultural society, land, which the
hunters/gatherers considered common to all, became privatized. Without
privatization of land, agriculture would not have been possible. During the
Industrial revolution, resources needed for production, such as water, timber, and
iron ore, became privatized, allowing profits from these resources to
accumulate to industrialists or their share-owners.
The digital economy is privatizing
information, specifically, personal information. In almost all cases, it is
being gathered surreptitiously, stored on servers beyond our reach, for
indeterminate periods of time, and sold to other companies (and more ominously,
to police and other government authorities,) for profit. We know, for example, that Facebook
can come up with a relatively good idea of who you are; what you read, your political
inclinations, your sexuality, what you buy and what you watch; but most people
have no idea how much personal data is being gathered. For example, Google is
able to access, from smartphones, data about when you wake up, when you get
into a car and every place you visit--and download all that information onto
their servers, and sell that information to advertisers. Using algorithms, they
are able to determine items you may buy: for example, stopping at a school
every day signals interest in children’s or educational products; and at a
hospital, medical or pharmaceutical products.
History has shown that invariably,
developments of this sort lead to social backlash. The Magna Carta was
essentially a revolt by the British Lords who owned (relatively) smaller
amounts of land against the King, who exerted ownership rights over the entire
country. The revolt against the Industrial Revolution led to the idea of Communism,
whose central tenet is the common ownership of the means of production.
The revolt against the Digital
Economy will center, naturally, around the ownership of personal information.
Currently, ordinary people have not challenged the existing legal and political
systems on this topic. Google, Amazon and Facebook, among others, have
privatized personal data. They collect it from you at no cost, with relative
secrecy, and for the profit of their shareholders. This privatization has led
to enormous profits—Mark Zukerberg’s billions are a prime example.
This push-back is at its infancy.
There have been calls for governmental regulation of Facebook, but given its
wealth and power, and the lack of exposure of this issue, it remains to seen
how far these calls will go. If history repeats itself, the future will hold a
struggle where ordinary citizens will have to claw back their rights to own, or
at least, fairly share, their personal information with extremely large,
secretive and manipulative companies who are well on their way to create
real-time, moving digital avatars of each one of us in their computers.
Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper - A Novel," published by Books We Love. He lives in Calgary, Canada, with his wife Anuradha, son Rishi ,daughter Gopi. He can be sometimes be spotted chanting mantra absent-mindedly in the city's parks.
