Where's my cut?

Understanding our digital sovereignty

“The art of good business is being a good middleman. Putting people together.” - Layer Cake, 2004

Our data is collectively worth billions of dollars to big tech. Technology dynasties have been built on the backs of our daily internet use. As a civilization that knows about how big tech monetizes our data, we must demand to be compensated. Recent conversations around actor/rapper Will Smith’s altercation with actor/comedian Chris Rock, sparked a debate about public figures having no right to expectation of privacy. Proponents of this belief affirm that celebrities must endure ridicule when subject to it. Our perception of celebrities are based on the roles they have played and the personality they display in interviews. We treat them based on a frozen mental image that we have of their persona. Each celebrity evolves spiritually & morally each day, yet we expect them to act like previous versions of themselves. Our collective society behaves with this weird contempt if celebrities don’t conform to our expectations, which include being harassed by the paparazzi and disrespected at award shows. When they lash out, we try to shame them into submission. Pay attention to how our society treats a celebrity who has gone rogue from their expected behavioral pattern. We mock them if they dare speak out on religious or political matters & we treat them like non-persons, just because they are famous. The price they paid for fame was the loss of their sovereignty. The way our society treat celebrities is the same way big tech treats us.

Edward Snowden revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance, with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments. He prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy. Individual sovereignty is the concept of property in one's person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and be the exclusive controller of one's own body and life. Our digital expressions are harvested as data by tech giants. I can not help but wonder what philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes would think about society’s current predicament. When Facebook & Google earn $0.15 per data sale from 48% of the population, how much of that money is ours? Our online data doesn’t get sold once, it gets sold over and over again depending on how many data points we generate. Don’t you love browsing for clothes or shoes online to then see it advertised directly to your favorite social media feed? Comment your favorite way that big tech exploits your data.

Can we really blame big tech for using the advertising model to monetize our data? Everyone wants to use the internet for free. Web2’s advertising model was the only way to both give users a free way to connect to their social circle while giving developers a way to monetize their platform. If you do not pay for the product, that means you are the product. Until now. Ethereum’s ERC1155 smart contract model provides developers with a way to monetize their online platform with both tokens & NFTs. The ERC1155 improves on the ERC721 NFT standard by solving the crazy amount of gas fees it takes to mint & auction NFTs. Entrepreneurs seeking to monetize their websites no longer have to depend on the advertising model, but can convert their web assets into mintable non-fungible tokens and create an ecosystem of transferable tokens. The brave new world of NFTs & Smart contracts is how we get our digital sovereignty back. It’s time to ask big tech, “Where’s my cut?”

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