Not “your data has value” — you don’t own the value it creates, and you were never paid for it.
Free products are not free; something else pays for them. Shoshana Zuboff’s 2015 paper — the first formal statement of the argument she later expanded into her 2019 book — named the mechanism: companies at the center of the AI economy do not primarily sell products to users, they extract behavioral data from users’ activity and convert it into predictions, which they then sell to advertisers and other third parties. The user is not the customer in this arrangement; the user is the raw material.
This is the mechanism behind a specific, easy-to-miss line in how AI is often pitched as “free.” A locally-run model costs compute and electricity but nothing in surveillance — the data never leaves the machine. A cloud model or API call routes every prompt through someone else’s servers, where it can become training data, a behavioral signal, or both, with no guarantee the user who generated it sees any of the resulting value. That asymmetry — value flowing up, extracted without payment or consent — is precisely what Zuboff’s “Big Other” describes: a form of power that doesn’t need to coerce, because it operates through infrastructure most users never see.
Source: Zuboff, S. (2015), “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” Journal of Information Technology, 30(1), 75–89.