A dinner synthesis of my book “Immaterial Capitalism” (About datalords and cryptography, aka how privacy has helped infoplutocrats so far)

by adding information to the classic economic categories work, production, capital, clearly the equation changes and capitalism as we know tends to disappear.

if information “eats the world” and it is not a private good, capitalism will be over.

if the only way to ensure excludability (like privacy needs imply) is through data/services access control, feudalism follows (like we have today, thanks to datalords who are info-plutocrats).

in a positive feedback loop, data concentration by datalords (who are gatekeepers to markets) erodes willingness to compete by new entrants (who don’t have access to the same information and thus can’t have effective competition in service and price personalization); competition traditionally is a driving force of capitalism; competition is now for the market and not in the market.

capitalism restoration can derive from cryptography by enabling rivalry and exclusion of immaterial goods (and thus reconstruct a new version of immaterial capitalism).

(in analogy to “landlords” I previously wrote “infolords”, but I think “Datalords” captures the idea better, so I corrected this post 9.11.19)

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