After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on public v private ownership of data; Guardian, March 31, 2018

Evgeny Morozov, Guardian; After the Facebook scandal it’s time to base the digital economy on public v private ownership of data

"Finally, we can use the recent data controversies to articulate a truly decentralised, emancipatory politics, whereby the institutions of the state (from the national to the municipal level) will be deployed to recognise, create, and foster the creation of social rights to data. These institutions will organise various data sets into pools with differentiated access conditions. They will also ensure that those with good ideas that have little commercial viability but promise major social impact would receive venture funding and realise those ideas on top of those data pools.

Rethinking many of the existing institutions in which citizens seem to have lost trust along such lines would go a long way towards addressing the profound sense of alienation from public and political life felt across the globe. It won’t be easy but it can still be done. This, however, might not be the case 10 or even five years from now, as the long-term political and economic costs of data extractivism come to the surface. The data wells inside ourselves, like all those other drilling sites, won’t last for ever either."