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Because circulation was never a profitable business, the Internet hardly required a large leap of imagination. Instead of selling journalism to readers at a loss, media would give it away for nothing. Media executives bet everything on a fantasy: Publishing free articles on the Internet would enabl…

It's a basic, intuitive right, worthy of enshrinement: Citizens, not the corporations that stealthily track them, should own their own data. The law should demand that these companies treat this data with the greatest care, because it doesn't belong to them. Possessing our data is a heavy responsib…

[...] We're certain that our tech giants achieved their dominance fairly and squarely through the free market, by dint of technical genius. To conjure this image of meritocratic triumph requires overlooking several pungent truths about the nature of these new monopolies. Their dominance is less tha…

[...] data is infinitely renewable. It continuously allows the new monopolists to conduct experiments to master the anticipation of trends, to better understand customers, to build superior algorithms. Before he went to Google, as the company's chief economist, Hal Varian cowrote an essential handb…

[...] Capitalism has always dreamed of activating the desire to consume, the ability to tap the human brain to stimulate its desire for products that it never contemplated needing. Data helps achieve this old dream. It makes us more malleable, easier to addict, prone to nudging. It's the reason tha…