In my last session for the year, I had an interesting conversation with a client about his skill development, as he has chosen to learn SQL to support his lean process skill acquisition and application and usage of Power BI. This I think is a very good call as they complement each other heavily and should give him some nice opportunities in the future, as data retrieval, collation and most importantly analysis, are going to be growth positions in the next five to ten years.
This is already a very valuable area, but much of it at the internet level has been monopolized by the largest data collectors who use this information to double-down on their drive for consumption through pay-per-click add revenue and incentivization. This drives content and narrative and because it is centralized from a few sources, it influences demand and supply heavily, pushing people toward consuming from narrow pools of not only information, but also goods and services.
For example, both Vanguard and BlockRock are two of the top 3 major institutional investors of Netflix, Meta (Facebook) and Twitter - as well as in the top 3 of Apple and Microsoft. But, perhaps what is more telling as to how this works is looking at where we might consume information from. You know those lefties at the New York Times and those alt-right extremists of Fox? Yeah - BlackRock and Vanguard are also top 3 investors in both the left and the right argument too.
My point is, no matter where you consume from or what you believe is the correct narrative, all paths make a small selection of companies and people, far wealthier. And, because they are shareholders in all of the major data collectors, they are able to drive any narrative they choose and they are incentivized to use division and polarization to increase consumption. Oh yeas, BlackRock and Vanguard are also top 3 institutional shareholders of Google and Amazon.
Data has extreme amounts of value but it is not the data itself that is valuable. it is how you use it. The collection and collation to organize it is one thing, but where the value is actually generated is from how knowing that can be applied to change behaviors of groups. at a smaller scale, this is the same at normal companies where someone like my client is able to collect data on various topics and then use it to affect change, whether that be through process development or behavior shifts in order to lean the system and generate additional value for the organization.
There is nothing wrong with this, it is a natural part of business and we should essentially be living our own lives in a continuous process of destruction and improvement, disrupting our personal processes, rather than relying on inefficient defaults that are no longer applicable. However, when these same processes are applied uniformly to billions of people across the globe, nudging them all into a narrow bucket selection of belief and behavior, all driven from the same source incentivized to maximize their own wealth at any cost, it is going to get pretty corrupted.
But that is where we are now, so why do I think that more data is going to be better in the future? Well, it is not that there is going to necessarily be that much more data, nor even *different data, but what there will be is decentralized sources of data and data transparency, meaning that an increasing number of people will have visibility and access to use it to alter behavior. That sounds terrible!
However, it is not necessarily terrible if there is low cost to access and wide incentive to apply in narrow cases, where there can be a huge amount of variation and there fore, distribution of usecase, application and competition. Rather than narrative and subsequent activity being controlled by a narrow point with fingers in many pies, there can be many points creating many pies, each operating somewhat independently from another.
This lowers the value of holding information and brings high competition into how that information is being used, with no common agreement as there is when it is all being directed by a common source. this is the value of building into Web 3.0, because it takes back the control of information and provides it freely to all across the blockchains. The explosion of data diving and analysis will be driven by this access to information and the ability to apply what is learned to a narrow and independent usecase.
Then of course, there is the tokenization itself, where in order for those tokens to have value, they are going to need to be connected to usability and that is not just how they can be used, but also whether someone will actually use them. An interesting thing that most don't consider for instance is something like Bitcoin, where it is very possible for the centralized institutions, banks and governments to buy up the supply and control the network - but what happens then?
Just imagine that if I own a Bitcoin and they start doing that, I will find a sell price. Let's say it is 100K. Someone else sells at 500K and another at 1M and so on. Over time, the "banks" own the Bitcoin Network and do with it as they choose after paying an extremely high price for the right, but the value of Bitcoin (or any token) is tied to usage.
This is all opt-in, meaning no one needs to use Bitcoin, so after selling all of the tokens to the centralized institutions, the average person opts-out of BTC and into something else if they feel that there is more incentive elsewhere. And obviously, when a narrow group control and maximize at the detriment of the majority, given the option many will move to greener pastures. This means "owning" a network comes with responsibility to make sure that the userbase will not churn and the token lose value through loss of belief.
This is why while cryptocurrencies can act as currencies, they needn't only act as currencies. They are all kinds of assets and tokens that can be applied in a myriad ways to encourage usage. All they are, are bits of information and while tracking and collating is useful, it is how that information is applied to affect behaviors that matter. Apply it poorly, and people will abandon usage in the same way that a company with an increasingly poor product will lose market share to companies who at least seem to offer a better alternative.
There are many aspects to consider that are along these lines and I will try to look at some of them in more detail later, but what is important to remember is one thing:
It is how you use it that has the potential to be powerful.
We are in a stage of society where there is increasing visibility on data, but that is currently only accessible to a very narrow set of eyes. However, we are entering into a phase where we are able to make much of that data visible and transparent, which will allow us to use it in the ways we choose, which is why I think so many data jobs will be created, as all kinds of organizations start "mining" the data to turn it into useful information that they can apply. This bring high competition to data usage and therefore, lowers the value for the few, while generating a lot more compounding value across the many.
Then, because of the capabilities of web 3.0 tokenization and potential to own the network, we ourselves are incentivized and enabled to better use our data and wealth to earn, distributing more wealth wider and giving room for independent innovation to cater to localized or narrow groups of the population, with highly tailored "content" that the consumer is not only willing to consume, but also look to contribute to and own as well.
At the end of the day, information is rather useless until it can be translated into a process and communicated to actually affect that change. At the moment, it is happening, but it is coming from largely "single-source" profit maximizers who do not care what happens, as long as they make a little more ROI on their investment, they can push into the expansion of their portfolio I ways designed to extract even more for the next round.
Decentralization of information and data doesn't change the game, it just allows billions more people to play.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
