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I like how idlewords puts it: its like oil. toxic, sticky, and dangerous. flammable. a liability. https://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm https://idlew

• dredmorbius 5y ago
  All analogies melt if you push them loudly enough. Data-as-oil having long-lastinga and difficult-to-distinguish unintended consequences, yes, that fits. But where oil is very nearly the distillation (so to speak) of a perfect universal commodity fuel with universal applicability, data is a near-completely differentiated good, a power multiplier, with rapidly emergent properites of scale in aggregation. Oil is useful to anyone with a stove or simple engine. At the individual level, only personal or general envrironmental data is either available or useful to individuals, whilst aggregators can make use of large pools of data to manipulate, coerce, intimidate, bluff, and call blusters, at scale. To that extent, data and oil are quite different. with emergent benefits to scale coming only at the very largest levels (most especially through imposing embargos), and serves mostly as a capital multiplier data is both infinitely differentiated, and has rapidly-emerging properties in aggregation as a power multiplier. Individuals can largely benefit only from their own specific data.