The Marginal Cost of You

Sir Martin Sorrell told Fortune this week that AI flattens a company: when information reaches everyone, the people who built careers on controlling it lose their leverage. His image is a Mexican village that never had a library and then had the internet, because “the marginal cost of information … is zero.”

He’s right, and it’s one of the genuinely good things technology has done.

But zero marginal cost cuts two ways: what we can find out, and what can be found out about us. Storing one more fact about a person also costs nothing. Inferring a second from the first costs nothing. Keeping both forever costs nothing. The economics that put a library in a village with no library is why it became rational to collect everything about everyone and work out what it was for later.

Sir Martin names the half where information got cheaper for us. He doesn’t mention the half where most of the information is about us. Hardly anyone does.

The journalist lists three reasons people are uneasy about AI: global security, personal data security, job security. Sir Martin answers on jobs and returns to the villages. Personal data security is raised by name and never picked up. The word consent appears nowhere in the piece.

Data consent almost never loses an argument, because it almost never gets into one. People have far more leverage over their own data than anyone has told them. That’s what I started The Data Human for.

The marginal cost of information is zero, and so is the marginal cost of you. One built the library. The other built the profile. We’ve only been keeping score of one.