Choices Sometimes Aren’t

Money, power or data? Which would you choose?

Or are they an unholy triumvirate that should all be replaced by cryptocurrency, love and openness?

Money, so we are told- especially the fiat variety- is the root of all evil. Personally, I am very grateful to money. Because it stops the breakdown of society. “Too late”, I hear you say? The original alternative to money- often portrayed as barter- is actually wholesale killing and slavery. The ‘new’ alternative -crypto- seems to be mired in a Ponzi swamp where the bubble of reputation is the only thing keeping some tokens afloat.

Power? Well, way back in the early 90s I wrote a paper on power in supply chains in which I suggested that power was the ability to control- not necessarily limit- the choices of other entities. This might be for different types of purpose. Clearly, money helps do this as long as you control the source and distribution of currency. As fiat currencies used to be able to do. But tokenization takes many forms. Some of them less than pleasant. And there are lots of other ways in which power can be exercised -from the judicious- and injudicious use of force- through to the skilful deployment of lies.

And this brings us to data. Imagine you could control data- and you can. You can control data channels by centralising them in the form of newspapers, and news channels. Then you just make sure that they only ‘cast data that you want people to receive. And when a bunch of visionary mad people create the Internet, you use the torrent of data it creates to drive your applications in sales, advertising and news channels. Data is the new oil- a remarkable factor of production-as long as we can make it work to purpose. Which we can’t.

So, given that many of us think that we are -if not ‘special’ — at least ‘different’ to all the rest of our species- which single factor would you choose to control and monopolise?

Of course, they are all related- allotropes of the control function. All that is different is the degree to which that control is adaptive. The degree to which the control is concentrated. And the degree to which control is effective, and for whom.

So, if you use this as a starting point for creating a new normal- and hurry, because you don’t have much time left to choose- which of the three would you select?

But don’t let me control you. You could you use something else. But, if so, what?