Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond 'Free'
The 2018 AEA Papers and Proceedings paper formalizing the 'data as labor' proposal: because a handful of platforms are the dominant buyers of user data, they hold monopsony power and capture users' unpriced data contribution as an uncompensated input.
Overview
This 2018 AEA Papers and Proceedings article by Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Jaron Lanier, and E. Glen Weyl formalizes the "data as labor" proposal that Lanier had earlier popularized informally in Who Owns the Future? (2013).[1] The authors argue that because a small number of dominant digital platforms are the near-exclusive buyers of the data individual users generate, those platforms hold monopsony power: they can set the terms on which data is supplied and compensate users with nothing beyond access to the service, capturing as profit the surplus value users' data creates.[1] Their proposed remedy is to build a genuine, priced labor market for data — ideally through collective bargaining structures the authors call "data labor unions" — rather than relying on take-it-or-leave-it terms of service.[1]
The paper is the academic anchor for Chapter 5 of Eric Posner and E. Glen Weyl's Radical Markets (2018), which popularized the argument for a general audience, and for this wiki's existing Data as Labor concept page, which draws its central claims from this paper.[2]
Significance
On the wiki's rent gradient, this paper sits at the contested platform/data-rent frontier: it treats a share of dominant-platform profit as an extractable rent on an unpriced input (user data) captured through monopsony power — an explicit analogy to land rent that is itself disputed. Whether platform profits are rent at all, as opposed to returns to genuine network effects and engineering investment, is not settled in the economics literature, and neither is how to value an individual user's data contribution or operate "data unions" at scale; no large working precedent exists.
See Also
- Data as Labor — the wiki's concept page for which this paper is the primary academic source
- Radical Markets — the book (Ch. 5) that popularized this paper's proposal
- Jaron Lanier — coauthor; originator of the underlying "siren servers" and data-as-labor framing
- E. Glen Weyl — coauthor
- Eric A. Posner — Weyl's Radical Markets coauthor who popularized this paper's proposal
Sources
- Imanol Arrieta-Ibarra, Leonard Goff, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Jaron Lanier & E. Glen Weyl (2018), "Should We Treat Data as Labor? Moving Beyond 'Free'," AEA Papers and Proceedings 108: 38–42, DOI: 10.1257/pandp.20181003 — used for the paper's monopsony diagnosis and data-labor-union remedy. SSRN · AEA
- Eric Posner & E. Glen Weyl (2018), Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society, Princeton University Press, Ch. 5 — used for the popularized book-length statement this paper anchors. wiki summary