I love all things underground. Just the hope of a new digital revolution makes me feel giddy). This hope was given to me by Andrew Keen two weeks ago in berlin at the next conference. Now I don’t agree with him 100% but I think anyone who is researching as much as he is and bringing it all together in context to the world, and who ends up painting a scenario that I at least want to be aware about as a possible future. Here are some of my notes rewritten from the talk and my own evalution of this scenario: Now Andrew Keen started out by stating that first we lived in the villages, then we lived in the cities and now we increasingly live on the internet. We are facilitating the digital economy by doing public living, and by living publically and documented, data (and especially personal data) becomes the new oil. This whole social media frenzy isn’t just a part of looking into the future, it’s a race to owning the future. Because these social media sites (or brands or companies if you will) wants to own your personal data. Real identities generates massive ammounts of data and personal information. Think about it, the reason Facebook is worth so much money because it’s a way to know everything about us in a very near future.
So, what is this digital revolution for or against?
The recipe for succes is that if you become an owner of other peoples personal data, you’ll become a billionaire. We as a culture choose to be on social media sites and we chose to give away our data for free. We do this because: social media is turning more and more narcisstic social media isn’t just a part of the world, it is the world.. and the knowledge economy is changing, we are all becoming brands.. the two big problems in this is: We are their products: each of us are driving the economy, because the brands behind the social media only have value if they know us intimately. and that data is the new currency in an age where everything is free. So I get all rebellic and Naomi Klein-ish when I read this – what is the counteract on this ? where’s our digital revolution ? Well to me a viable business model for a future startup who wants to tap into the digital revolution, would be to create value out of privacy: secrecy. A secrecy layer. I love secrets and I think secret data is going to be a very important part of your public profile – the problem with it is that if you want to add this layer or the secrecy, then you have to own your own identity on the social media sites – something that isn’t used a lot these days. So if this is actually happening, if personal data is the new oil, then secrecy will be the new digital revolution, or a huge part of it.
