How Facebook Will End

...and all the photo sharing sites and dating sites and streaming TV and video conferencing apps, and all the internet companies that sell your information - and mine - to whoever wants it wholesale.

Andrew Yang has a great suggestion:

Make them pay us back. Retroactively.

Op-Ed: Andrew Yang: Make tech companies pay you for your data

I'm not what you would call a "Yang Ganger". I've been critical of UBI here, and specifically critical of Yang's approach to it here ... but in this case, we're talking about an international public payout that gives people back money that they earned for these companies.

Yes, you read that correctly - all that time you spent annoying your friends with "wacky" videos and badly laid out memes means money. Money that you earned for other people and didn't get a red cent.

And it's time to collect! The future is pretty fun sometimes.

But doing this could be the online equivalent of Coronapanic 2020's effect on the economy: taking the mighty machine that has made us all fat, dumb, and happy and rolling it off a cliff. Not a high cliff, but still...

"But Mario," I hear you saying, "What about my cat videos and chatting about romance novels with my friends? Where will I log in to goof off at my desk now?!"

That's an opportunity, isn't it?

As with the upcoming Flash-pocalypse, everyone with even basic coding skills (and design, writing, visual creative, digital infrastructure, and marketing skills) needs to be hunkering down and building the next generation of online product. All hands on deck!

And thanks to things like crowdsourcing, hopefully it won't all depend on brainwashing your parents to be fascists while selling the data on every store you visit, online or off (ever check your private data on Google?) to every marketing company that wants it for pennies on the dollar.

Hopefully.

UPDATE

It's starting. Get involved here.

FUN FACTS

Facebook (aka Instagram, WhatsApp) is worth more, at $650 billion, than Poland (GDP estimate: $557 billion) or Sweden (GDP estimate: $545 billion).

Google (aka Alphabet, YouTube) is in the club of trillion USD companies with Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Only 16 countries in the world have a trillion+ USD GDP.

<- I compiled the data at this link, and the numbers are based on estimates between the IMF and UN data. Rust is really great.

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