Data is The New Alib Oil

Data is like the oil of the information age, the company with a large amount of data becomes the world’s largest company by market value in the future

Data is like the oil of the information age. In the agricultural era, the land is the most important asset. Political struggle is to control land, and wars between tribes and countries are to fight for land. In the industrial age, the means of production such as machines and factories were more important than land, and political struggles and struggles between nations were to control the means of production. After the second industrial revolution, oil has become the most important asset.

Political struggles and struggles between nations are to control oil. However, in the future, a company with a large amount of data becomes the world’s largest company by market value, which is the general trend.

Previously, the U.S. government said it was considering restricting the payment business of Ant Group and Tencent in the U.S. The reason was data security.

Ant Group’s IPO will raise US $34.5 billion, a scale that broke the US $29 billion records set by Saudi Aramco, which was listed on the Saudi Stock Exchange in December last year. Saudi Aramco Saudi Arabia’s National Petroleum Corporation is the world’s largest oil company.

Its market value surpassed Microsoft and Apple within two weeks of listing, becoming the world’s most valuable company. In August of this year, Apple overtook it with a market value of $1.86 trillion and returned to the “top of the world”.

Now entering the information age, data has become the most important asset, and political struggles and struggles between nations will revolve around the fight for data.

When too much data is concentrated in the hands of a few people, human beings will split into two classes, the class with data and the class without data. Of course, it can also be called the possessing class and the proletariat, because this “property” has different definitions in different historical periods, and it is data in the information age.

The competition for data has already begun. The current leaders are Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc., and the counterparts in China are Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba. Facebook and Tencent are representatives of social platforms, Google and Baidu are representatives of search platforms, and Amazon and Alibaba are representatives of e-commerce.

https://gph.is/2JBLrPo

Social platforms provide a place for everyone to socialize. Essentially, there is no difference between online platforms and offline platforms. Facebook and Twitter, like People’s Park and teahouses, provide a place for everyone to socialize. People’s Park used to have the famous English corner and the stock corner, but now there is a blind date corner. People’s Park collects entrance fees, teahouses collect tea money, pay for operating costs, and earn a certain profit. However, Facebook and Twitter do not charge money.

So what do they rely on to maintain operations and profits?

Rely on attention. Unlike merchants who sell physical goods, “attention merchants” sell attention, They provide people with free places, information, entertainment, and other services to get people’s attention, and then sell this attention to Others, that is, those who need to advertise, are called advertisers.

These companies are called “attention merchants” and we have entered the era of the so-called “attention economy”.

The revenue of social platforms and search platforms mainly comes from advertisers, and selling advertising is their main business or sales attention is their main business. You are their user, but you are not their customer, but their “commodity”.

Why does this happen?

Because you have access to venues, information, entertainment, and other services without paying. There is no free lunch in the world. What you actually pay is your data. They provide you with services for free in exchange for their right to obtain and use your data.

This is the consideration for the contract that you ticked when you didn’t have time to watch when you registered and logged in.

However, even if you have time to watch, it is estimated that you will not leave the tick, because you cannot use these services if you do not tick it. In the information age, life without Facebook, and Google is unimaginable.

For example, in the industrial age, life without electricity, cars, carriages, and candles is unimaginable. In the information age, it is getting harder and harder to be a “Mormon” in the strict sense.

Maybe you are willing to change the consideration of the contract, not to exchange data for the services of social platforms and search platforms, but to use the currency. However, there is currently no such option, and there may be in the future.

Facebook CEO Zuckerberg said in 2018 when he was questioned at the US Congressional hearing due to the “Cambridge Analytica Incident” that he would not reject the possibility of paid products. Facebook may experiment with the idea of paying on social platforms

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

If this is the case, the data of users who pay later will not be misused, and users who do not pay will have no such treatment. Some video applications now do this.

Members can skip the ads, but non-members can’t skip the ads. You can watch the content after the ads are finished. Advertising is becoming more and more targeted, so-called precision marketing is just that.

In CHINA, Discussing in a WeChat group about going to Tibet, an advertisement for Tibet tourism will be posted immediately. However, this function of WeChat obtaining data to push targeted advertisements can be turned off, but it is hidden deep, and it takes a while to find the turned-off switch.

Like social platforms, the main income of search platforms is advertising. Sometimes, they even sacrifice the objectivity and authenticity of the advertising search.

If you search for a disease, the first thing that pops up is the advertisements packaged into answers provided by various hospitals that are not very formal. You must train the ability to find real and objective information in a large amount of garbage interference information.

This kind of “Taobao” ability, whether it is to buy goods or information, is very necessary and important for survival in China at this stage.

Trading platforms are somewhat different from social platforms and search platforms. The income is mainly transaction commission, which is a part of the sales income reached by the seller on the platform; the second is advertising income, and the pits during the big promotion period such as the first focus and sea view rooms.

The fee is quite high. The first focal point and the sea view room are e-commerce terms. They are displayed in different positions on the platform, such as banners and Duitou that enter the door of an offline shopping mall.

In addition to the promotion period, the usual various advertising promotion fees are also indispensable.

The advertising department of the trading platform is an important department.

They use the most advanced technology to collect and analyze data, design advertising combinations, and recommend them to merchants. Alibaba’s advertising department is now called Alimama, and it has been upgraded from a single Taonei e-commerce marketing platform to an entire network marketing platform centered on Alibaba big data.

Now that Double Eleven is approaching, businesses are buying resource packs from Alimama to show their heads on Taobao and Tmall and even the whole network.

The proportion of advertising revenue on e-commerce platforms is increasing. Perhaps one day, the e-commerce platform does not charge merchant platform usage fees and commissions, and it can still make money.

Because businesses must advertise, otherwise they cannot survive. At that time, trading platforms are the same as social platforms, and selling attention has become the main business.

The methods used by major e-commerce platforms to compete for data are becoming more and more radical

According to media reports, Amazon recently launched a new program to directly pay consumers to obtain information about the products they purchase outside of the Amazon website and responses to brief surveys.

The project called “Amazon Shopper Panel” requires users to send 10 receipts a month for purchasing goods at non-Amazon retailers, including grocery stores, department stores, pharmacies and movie theaters, theme parks and restaurants, etc.

Entertainment venues. Participants can get a reward of $10. Besides, users can get additional rewards for every survey completed every month. The survey will ask participants about brands and products that may be of interest, their likelihood of buying products, and their opinions on advertising, etc.

In addition to social platforms, search platforms, and trading platforms, consulting companies, especially political campaign consulting companies, are also quietly using our data. People had not realized the seriousness of this problem before.

A British journalist visited the company dressed as “potential customers”.

Unannounced visit records show that the company’s CEO Alexander Nix introduced how they used their personal data to analyze people’s preferences, do what they like, and target information that makes people feel good about political leaders and trust them.

Manipulate their emotions and control the votes in their hands. He also introduced two other model projects, Kenya’s 2017 presidential election, and the Brexit referendum. The company has secretly participated in more than 200 elections in countries around the world and has always succeeded.

After the record of this unannounced visit was made public, it caused an uproar. There can be no re-election. The personal information of Cambridge Analytica voters came from Facebook, which was leaked by a third-party company that cooperated with Facebook.

The US Congress conducted a two-day hearing on Zuckerberg, and 44 congressmen tortured for more than ten hours a day.

In July 2019, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved a $5 billion penalty on Facebook because the social networking site mishandled users’ personal information.

This is the highest fine ever issued by the US federal government to a technology company

People are extremely afraid of thinking carefully. In the data age, some people use their personal data to analyze and influence their preferences. Are our decisions made by ourselves, or have we become other people’s puppets without knowing it?

https://gph.is/g/Z5ngOrB

We are now at the intersection of two great revolutions. On the one hand, biologists are uncovering the mysteries of the human body, especially the mystery of the brain and human perception.

On the other hand, computer science has given humans unprecedented data processing capabilities.

Scientific research on the human brain and the way the human body works have shown that the various human feelings are neither unique to human spirituality nor represent “free will”.

Feeling is a biochemical reaction that all mammals and birds have, and it is used to quickly calculate the probability of survival and reproduction.

Humans are the primates of all things because human algorithms are the most advanced.

People’s various feelings, fear, anger, guilt, love, etc. Are actually the brain’s biochemical mechanism algorithm, which has undergone millions of years of evolution and polishing.

If a feeling of an ancient ancestor makes a certain mistake, the genes that shape this feeling will not be passed on to the next generation. Therefore, feelings and emotions are not contrary to rationality.

Feelings and emotions are rationality in the evolutionary sense and rationality that you cannot perceive.

You may ask, so why do most couples who fall in love at first sight divorce?

In fact, genes and evolution can’t be blamed for this. They don’t know about marriage. Their purpose is to let you find a nearly suitable person as soon as possible to reproduce your offspring.

Therefore, love generally disappears after knowing each other for 18 months. 18 months is just enough time to fall in love, conceive, give birth, and nurture offspring until the offspring can theoretically survive.

Why don’t we realize that our feelings are actually an operation?

This is because these fast calculations far exceed the threshold range of our consciousness. We do not feel how the millions of neurons in the brain are calculating the possibility of survival and reproduction, so we mistakenly believe that our fear of poisonous mushrooms, our choice of partners, and our views of the European Union are based on the mysterious “freedom will”.

In fact, there is no free will, everything is just an algorithm. Of course, you can also say that there is “free will” if you define “free will” as an algorithm.

When human beings crack the biochemical mechanism algorithm that generates emotion and emotion, they can manipulate emotion and emotion the so-called intuition, inspiration, spirituality, and free will are no longer vague, elusive, and mysterious things.

For example, people thought that lightning and thunder were some kind of a mystery but later learned that it was just a discharge phenomenon. Now people can artificially create lightning, using the high-frequency resonance principle of the “Tesla coil” transformer to create all kinds of dazzling lightning phenomena.

The “Tesla coil” uses a transformer to boost the ordinary voltage up to 500,000 volts, and then discharges from the discharge terminal through a two-pole coil.

If we know the principle of anger, we can make people angry at any time. In other words, if we know the various feelings of people and the principles of emotion generation, we can control people’s decision-making.

In the record of an unannounced visit to Cambridge Analytica, an executive said that given us enough data, we can get anyone elected.

The election has nothing to do with reason. Everything is emotion. As long as you can manipulate people’s emotions, you can manipulate their decisions

When Nixon and Kennedy were running for president and speaking on the radio, it was obvious that Nixon had a clearer mind, more rigorous logic, and more precise expression than Kennedy and polls showed a higher support rate afterward. However, when the television debate, later on, the support rate was completely reversed.

Kennedy’s charm conquered all female voters and most male voters, and the remaining male voters, Kennedy’s wife Jacqueline, helped him win over. No matter how clever and clear Nixon’s political program is, it will not help.

The debate between Kennedy and Nixon was the first televised debate in history for presidential candidates. It can be said that Nixon was defeated by the invention of the television. Political critics say that if Lincoln runs in the television era, there is absolutely no hope of being elected president.

Photo by Science in HD on Unsplash

Suppose one day, we can ask Facebook, Google, Amazon, according to all you know about me, which brand of car is my best choice? They analyzed my preferences based on my social comments, search records, and shopping records, and then told me that it was a Tesla. Then the car advertisement is useless.

Algorithms know us better than ourselves and make purchase decisions that are more in line with our needs on our behalf. At that time, in theory, Facebook, Google, and Amazon can skip advertisers and directly recommend products and services to consumers.

They themselves are the largest advertisers. Their current business model is to sell their attention to advertisers, who then monetize their attention by selling products and services; and in the future, they can directly monetize their attention.

In the more distant future, perhaps biosensors will be implanted in our brains and bodies, transmitting all data about us to intelligent machines all the time. Companies and governments with data and computing power will more easily understand you, manipulate you, and make decisions for you.

Historically, politicians have relied on the ability to understand and manipulate human emotions and biochemical mechanisms. This is their weapon to mobilize the public.

They gave speeches that aroused people’s fear and hatred, and some people sent Jews into concentration camps. They tweeted to arouse people’s fear and hatred, and some took to the streets to beat people of other races. People’s emotions are toys for political figures. They press the buttons of people’s emotions. People sing like gramophones and dance like puppets.

Now with data and computing power, the ability of politicians to understand and manipulate human emotions and biochemical mechanisms has increased countless times

People have nowhere to escape. In the past, if you were dissatisfied with politicians, as long as you controlled your words and deeds and did not show them, the danger was always controllable. However, when your brain is implanted with a chip, your mind is completely exposed.

You see a politician’s slogan. Although there is no expression of disgust or anger, your heartbeat is speeding up, your blood pressure rises, and your adrenal hormone secretion soars. When the data is passed to the secret police, they know what you really think seriously.

Your brain chip will betray you.

The government’s monitoring has not yet reached this level, but it is already quite powerful especially external monitoring.

Photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash

The issue of data attribution may be the most important political issue of this era, and those who obtain data have the world. Does the data about us belong to us? Or a company that provides services to us? Or governments? Or all mankind?

I wonder if this utopia of world unity will come. Even if it comes, it is in the distant future. Before this, the conflicts between individuals, companies, governments, and the country for data among potential data owners will continue. Individuals and companies, individuals and governments, companies and governments, governments and governments, governments, and countries.

The data war between countries will be the most important in the future. If this war is not handled well and becomes a real war, then world unity will end up together

Data is like the oil of the information age, the company with a large amount of data becomes the world’s largest company by market value in the future

Footer