Guest 2

From this perspective, no.

It functions more like a public good.

Exactly like that.

My decision to sell my data creates negative externalities for you, even if you guard yours carefully.

Well, say I sell my location data.

Combined with social network data, it could reveal your movements, your relationships, even if you never consented.

That's the tragedy of the data commons.

Individual transactions, rational maybe in isolation, undermine the collective good, especially with de-anonymization techniques getting so good.

Instrumentarian power.

It means you might be selling your future ability to choose freely, to be spontaneous.

Because A.I.

trained on all this data isn't just knowing things about us.

It's creating systems designed to nudge, steer, manipulate, ultimately control behavior.

As one scholar put it, yeah, potentially a series of algorithmically guided steps towards predictable outcomes.

Spontaneity, genuine free choice gets squeezed out.

That's the deep concern.

And it connects directly to that temporal mismatch problem.

The temporal mismatch.

We sell data now for immediate, maybe small benefit.

But the harm doesn't.