The Big Data Age puzzle: free lunch or free labor?

This year, Facebook will achieve 6 billion of dollars in revenue, without the need for users to pay a penny. Or, as Jaron says, Facebook's users will create 6 billion of billions of dollars of revenue this year for the company, without a penny paid.

Now, as most people vaguely know, Facebook's value relies on data that users unknowingly accumulate. By analyzing user preferences, identities, personal information, and browsing habits, Facebook's program can tell which ads are most likely to be attracted to each user, and that each site page has a "preferences" button, even if you never press, and will give you feedback to Facebook. Now, even if you're not online, Facebook can track your moves: Make a deal with a database sales company, track what you buy in a supermarket, and use that information to analyze your internal patterns as a consumer.

In the digital age, there's a word that says, "If you don't pay for a product, like Facebook, then you're the product." "That remark was not so correct. Facebook's main product is still the social network itself, and the utility and quality of the product has prompted people to register and share their data. But what makes a good social network? In a way, of course, it requires a clean layout and intuitive features, but the real attraction is its content. So who's offering the content? is the user. In short: User-provided content makes the site beautiful, and their personal information makes the site valuable.

All this explains why a company with fewer than 5000 employees now has a market capitalisation of more than $65 billion trillion. than organic food chain supermarkets "Whole Foods", Mattel toy company, Penney department store, the United States Steel Company, Goodyear Tire Company, JetBlue Airlines and Barnes Bookstore add more. Facebook employees are smart and diligent, but each of them is not worth 13 million dollars. Facebook's users are so tireless that its employees simply keep their lights on and the servers are running well. We work, they profit.

In the Lanier of "the father of virtual reality", this is not only an injustice, but also a fatal flaw in the coming information economy. Lanier in his new book, who has the future, predicts that not only will social networks and search engines profit from our data, but all businesses, including retailers, banks and health-care industries, can benefit. Lanier that they offer excellent services at attractive prices while at the same time causing us to lose our jobs.

In 2011, Anderson, a venture capitalist, wrote in the Wall Street Journal why software is eating into the world, saying technology companies are taking over the economy. The rapid development of computer technology has enabled a large number of industrial and physical retail networks to be replaced by several servers and dozens of of competent programmers. Sometimes emerging technologies are booming, reversing the industry's fortunes, such as Amazon overturning the Borders chain bookstore and the Barnes bookstore. In other industries, the existing giants are quietly becoming software based companies, such as Wal-Mart, which is leading the development of software-based logistics and delivery systems, and is now developing a "social genome" program to map their interests and relationships based on consumers ' online behavior. In other words, Wal-Mart is becoming more like Facebook.

Anderson thought it was "a profound positive effect on the American economy", but Lanier that the future was terrible. He noted that Kodak was also the leader in the digital imaging industry in the 1988, with 140,000 employees worldwide, and that it was now bankrupt and was defeated by companies offering technology services, such as Instagram, for free photography, storage and sharing of photos. Last year, Facebook bought Instagram at $1 billion, when its employees were only 13. So where are the other 139,987 jobs? Lanier's argument is that they are not "officially recorded". Working for Instagram is 100 million active users who get paid not in cash but in the use of Instagram.

Lanier imagined the future, everyone can use free or cheap goods and services, but no job. Computer replacement of workers will greatly improve efficiency, but wealth and occupation is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of people who write code and control the data server, the rest of the people will face unemployment and economic unrest.

Lanier realizes that the revolution in the big data age is inexorably changing the economy. You can stop using Facebook, but can you stop using Google? Maybe now you can, but when the road is full of Google's self-driving car, is 750 megabytes per second traffic to avoid accidents, more skilled than any human driver, you can quit? Most people can't, and now there are 1.6 million truckers in America alone, can they avoid losing their jobs?

In economics, this is called collective action. In the free market, the problem cannot be solved by individual decision, but only by the social changes brought about by the policy or society norm. In many ways, this problem has been entangled in capitalism since the time of Marx, which is only a new form of the same problem. Just as money produces money, data produces data. Power in the Lanier World is not concentrated in the hands of landlords and industrialists, but rather on what he calls "the siren-like server". Companies like Google and Amazon have huge machine networks that lure you into the service and suck your data to fuel the continuous improvement of their computer programs.

Lanier provides a new solution: people should be compensated for providing their own information, calculated in bytes. If your face is in a Facebook ad, and Facebook gets value from your preferences, you can take a portion of it as a reward. In the new Internet architecture, whenever someone uses the data information, the system automatically informs the source of the information and calculates the compensation. Such distant proposals seem to be completely out of reach, at least our numbers are far from being as scary as Rahl imagines.

Lanier mixed up some unrelated issues. For example, the information created by photographers, musicians, and writers is completely different from the data we leave behind when we hang out on the Internet. The former requires efforts to produce products of independent value, and relatively easy to trace back to creators, for such creative work, there are already some pay system, such as electronic royalties. The data we leave behind when we browse the Web, shop, open a networked car or walk through a webcam cannot be likened to Labour, because we do not expend any effort to create it.