*By André Vellozo, DrumWave CEO
You pay taxes to governments, interest to banks, and license fees to tech companies—just for the right to exist in the modern world. But in exchange, you generate something far more valuable than what you pay: data.
Between techno-feudalisms and techno-oligarchs, it’s time to reference your/our stake in this outdated language we insist on using to describe today’s challenges.
Here’s to the capitalist and communist of the past and the future:
The Industrial Revolution created a class of people who could only survive by selling their labor. They were called the proletariat. As industrial profits soared, wages stagnated, and working conditions deteriorated, something broke. Labor movements emerged. Strikes, unions, and revolutions followed. The system had to bend, or it would break.
Today, we are witnessing the return of that same imbalance—but with a new name and a new platform. This time, the exploitation isn’t happening on factory floors. It’s happening on platforms, screens, clouds, and chips. The labor isn’t physical. It’s digital. And the new exploited class is you.
Welcome to the age of the techno-proletariat.
Every step, every search, every swipe you make trains an algorithm, enriches a profile, triggers a payment, refines an ad, feeds a model. You are working. Constantly. But you’re not getting paid. Not in money. Not in equity. Not in recognition.
And here’s what makes it even more perverse:
You’re paying to work.
And it looks like we don’t even miss those good old days when we all used to work for pay.
Back in the 19th century, when factories and machines took over the rhythms of life, work ceased to be seasonal or tied to the sun. Factory owners pushed for 14 to 16-hour workdays, six days a week. The goal wasn’t productivity—it was output. Machines couldn’t rest, and neither could the people who operated them.
Today, the machines are in your pocket. And your screen time? It’s now averaging 7 to 10 hours a day—every day. Unlike factory workers who clocked in and out, the techno-proletariat is always logged in. We respond to pings at midnight. We track our steps in our sleep. We create behavioral data in real time. And it never stops.
But the most damning echo of the past?
Children.
During the Industrial Revolution, children were sent into coal mines and textile mills. They worked dangerous shifts because their labor was cheap, and their rights were nonexistent. Today, children aren’t spared either. But instead of coal, it’s code. Instead of mills, it’s mobile games. Instead of punch clocks, it’s screen time trackers.
Children are online for 5 to 8 hours a day, generating data that trains facial recognition, sentiment analysis, and recommendation engines. They are digital workers before they can read the terms of service. They are unpaid participants in an invisible economy that sells their attention before they’ve even learned what privacy means.
This isn’t about limiting screen time. It’s about recognizing what screen time actually is: unpaid labor for trillion-dollar corporations.
Just like the industrial worker once operated machines to create surplus value for factory owners, the modern Citizen-Client-User operates digital tools that generate vast wealth, except now that labor is invisible, unaccounted for, and unrecognized by any legal or economic framework.
Let’s be clear: data is labor, and data is capital. And if we’re creating both, we should own both. But we don’t. That is the root of the problem. And the spark for the next revolution.
The entire tech economy – Web2, Web3, and AI – is fueled by this asymmetry. Silicon Valley doesn’t run on innovation. It runs on extraction. It monetizes behavior, automates culture, and commodifies humanity, all while pretending it’s giving you freedom. But without data ownership, you are not free. You are a product. You are a peasant in a digital fiefdom.
The techno-feudalism we live under is subtle. It’s wrapped in clean UX and free apps. But make no mistake, it consolidates power faster than any empire in History. And if we don’t push back now, the next chapter of this Economy will not be written by people. It will be written by algorithms and enforced by terms and conditions you’ll never read.
But there is a way out. It begins with one simple, radical act:
Own your data.
From 2025 to 2030, we have the chance to rewrite the rules. To shift the economic architecture from application monetization to data monetization. To give the techno-proletariat a voice, a wallet, and a stake.
This isn’t about privacy. It’s about power. It’s about money. It’s about liberation.
The digital revolution has happened. Now it’s time for the digital reform. If data is the new oil, then data ownership is the new land reform.
Everything we have built, which we call the Economy, was done on top of people’s savings. If the world is heading to a Data Economy, the best thing you can do is start saving your data for the future.
Americans, Brazilians and people everywhere can’t save money because they don’t have money to save. But they can and will save data. And data has a lot of value.
We’ve been users. Now, it’s time to be stakeholders.
Congress needs to enact legislation to return data to the people.
Own your data. Own your future.
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