
The incorporated woman - waterlesscloud
http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2014/06/who-owns-your-personal-data
======
spindritf
_its “cost of materials” is close to zero largely because those users have no
idea how much their data is worth_

Ten dollars a year on average. Facebook had $7B in revenues last year from
700M users. That's assuming all of Facebook's value comes from users' data
which is not entirely fair. Even if you're an American (making your info more
valuable on average to advertisers), you still spend more on toothpaste,
hopefully.

I get valuing privacy but where did the myth that your data is worth a lot
originate? Most people will give their details for a coupon. Not because they
don't know data's value but because they do and it's almost nothing. You need
to aggregate millions upon millions of users to eke out a profit.

Regardless, I like this bit of cold accounting applied to your own life.

 _she calculated how much had already been invested in JLM in its 35 years of
pre-corporate existence. Her mother figured out how much it had cost to raise
her as a child; college education expenses were added in, as was a modest
inheritance and her earnings to date. Adjusted for inflation, the total came
to just over $1m, and Ms Morone confesses to being dismayed at how little
output this investment had produced._

~~~
YokoZar
A similarly cold calculation I recently did was to compare my lifetime
productivity to the aggregate value of all my blood products. As a regular
plasma donor, it wasn't until age 27 that my total labor output had finally
surpassed my use as spare parts, and that was because of a relatively high
salary.

That calculation doesn't yet include the expected value of my harvested organs
should I die, and while it's harder to put a price on organs than blood (which
is sold to hospitals) it's reasonable to presume they're extremely expensive.

Morbid as it is, this perhaps shouldn't be too surprising in a world where
there are individuals earning 1000 times as much as others. If it were
possible to directly trade lifespan, a 1000x earner could double his lifespan
by shaving 1% off 100 people, compensate them with 2x their lifetime earnings,
and still have 800 times as much as the typical person left over.

~~~
XorNot
Your calculation doesn't take into account cost of production.

Which is close to zero, provided you're willing to lock up a whole bunch of
women as baby factories and go bottom-dollar of keeping the livestock fed.

Organs are considered valuable because it's illegal to sell them, the black
market price doesn't reflect a potential market price. You also aren't de-
rating the general worth of human lives in a society where organ harvesting
like this were common place.

Or to put it another way: there's so much insanely wrong with this that it's
the height of tech-minded naivete to think what you've come up with is a
meaningful number.

~~~
YokoZar
Let's not conflate cost and value here. The price people pay for my blood is
at least the value to them. The same goes for my labor. I'd say the buyer gets
a greater value per dollar paid from my lifesaving blood than they do from my
relatively mundane laboring. By that reasoning I'm more valuable as spare
parts, not less.

The implication of the calculation isn't nearly as sweeping as you think, it's
merely that more people should donate blood. Especially if it has low "cost"
to them compared to others (say, because they're not queasy about it).

Given what we know about what people are willing to pay for both, I think it's
fairly clear what society values more. If an evil genie forced me to choose
between reliving my life in a way that either deprived the world of my blood
products or of my labor, and I knew that on the basis of money alone my blood
was more valuable, then unless I was doing some particularly civic-minded work
it would seem obvious I'd contribute more as an unemployed blood donor.

~~~
XorNot
Of course then there'd be relatively few people doing your mundane laboring...

That's my point: this calculation doesn't produce a meaningful number. It's
why we regulate and exclude it from the market to start with: its get weird
quickly, and its why my example is as it is - because it you really start
thinking about it, making more blood isn't that difficult.

------
Blahah
The title is clearly a reference to The Unincorporated Man [0], a sci-fi novel
set in a future where everyone is incorporated at birth and exchanges their
shares for goods and services, generally losing majority in themselves in
order to get an education, house, etc.

However, they don't mention the novel in the piece. It's worth a read (not
particularly well executed, but some imaginative exploration of the key idea).

0: [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-
unincorporat...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4025200-the-
unincorporated-man)

~~~
Tycho
Recent Charles Stross novel, Neptune's Brood, had a similar concept: you are
born/created with 'instantiation debt' which you spend the first years of your
life working to pay off.

~~~
eru
Saturn's Children, by the same author, also has people as corporations. Said
people are all robots, though, because humanity has become extinct.

~~~
Blahah
Are these novels any good?

~~~
eru
Saturn's Children was pretty good. From what I've heard, everything by Charles
Stross is worth reading.

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Mz
_and assets for which no pricing model yet exists: Ms Morone is still figuring
out how to price “services” she currently gives away for free, such as
compassion._

I honest to god am trying to figure out real answers to questions along those
lines. I think it is a big part of why women make less than men: Everyone
values our emotional intelligence but then expects us to give it away free,
out of the goodness of our hearts, like mom's modeled after "The Giving Tree."

~~~
stealthchk
Women who don't give away their services for free are known as "witches." (The
term has undergone a consonantal shift since the Middle Ages and now starts
with a "b")

~~~
Mz
I can't tell if you are criticizing me or sympathizing. FWIW, it's a space I
have thought a great deal about and I think I have made in-roads. I don't
think it's hopeless. And I am kind of okay with being a "bitch." Successful
men are often called "bastards" for being tough enough to make it. The world
is not a very kind place for most people, regardless of gender, socioeconomic
class, etc.

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danboarder
Increasingly important. A continuation of the 'Attention Economy' movement
circa 2005-7 championed by Attention Trust* back then and Locker Project (
[http://lockerproject.org](http://lockerproject.org) ) more recently working
toward the same objectives.

* [http://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-AttentionTrust](http://www.quora.com/What-happened-to-AttentionTrust)

also see
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy)

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goofooii
Hello,

What does it say about the current state of our laws, that an individual had
to register as a corporation in order to gain MORE protection over their
personal information and their privacy?

Corporations seems to have way too much power, which is often at the expense
of individuals and even governments.

------
lifeisstillgood
Fantastic idea - and nicely taken beyond just art project as an attempt to
create a platform for capturing self-data

I'm utterly intrigued and can't wait to do some digging

