As the data economy permeates every aspect of our lives, a growing number of thinkers are questioning how it is regulated, who has control, and how the profits are shared.
The big data era has created valuable resources for public interest outcomes, like health care. In the last 18 months, the speed with which scientists were able to respond to the covid-19 pandemic—faster than any other disease in history—demonstrated the benefits of gathering, sharing, and extracting value from data for a wider good. Access to…
For the past several years, economists, and government leaders have regularly sounded alarms about the dangers of big tech monopolies. On her 2020 campaign website, for example, Senator Elizabeth Warren said “big tech companies have too much power, too much power over our economy, our society, our democracy.” In the months since the election, politicians…
Over the past two decades, the data economy has permeated every aspect of our social and economic lives. Now, a growing community of voices is seeking a new social contract between the tech industry and citizens. Early optimism about the transformative power of the internet has given way, more recently, to a sense that the…
The digital revolution is here, but not everyone is benefiting equitably from it. And as Silicon Valley’s ethos of “move fast and break things” spreads around the world, now is the time to pause and consider who is being left out and how we can better distribute the benefits of our new data economy. “Data…
It’s “time to wake up and do a better job,” says publisher Tim O’Reilly—from getting serious about climate change to building a better data economy. And the way a better data economy is built is through data commons—or data as a common resource—not as the giant tech companies are acting now, which is not just…
Each innovation challenges the norms, codes, and values of the society in which it is embedded. The industrial revolution unleashed new forces of productivity but at the cost of inhumane working conditions, leading to the creation of unions, labor laws, and the foundations of the political party structures of modern democracies. Fossil fuels powered a…