Data is not the new oil

"Data is the new oil" is a phrase that I fucking hate. It immediately causes me to question the knowledge, judgement, and ability of the speaker. I am suddenly overwhelmed with the suspicion that they are the sort of person who thinks Tom Friedman is a deep thinker with profound insights, the sort of management type who reads the Art of War and takes all the wrong lessons from it.

It is wrong, not only in whole, but in every particular part.

Permit me the polite fiction of asking your permission to explain.

What is data?

Per Wikipedia:

Data are characteristics or information, usually numerical, that are collected through observation.^[1] In a more technical sense, data is a set of values of qualitative or quantitative variables about one or more persons or objects, while a datum (singular of data) is a single value of a single variable.^[

Which is to say that data is not as old as writing - it is literally older. Since much of the proto-writing we have are bills of sale and ledgers and tax records. In the modern context that means (and I think this is clear from context) computerized data. And computerized data is very interesting, since computerized data is just any most any kind of information.

Because,while all data is non-exclusive (you knowing the tax records recorded on some Babylonian tablet doesn't preclude me from knowing it), computerized data is also essentially costless to duplicate.  It might be expensive to get, but once you  got it, its basically free to make copies. The same cannot be said for clay tablets.

But still, even the data on clay tablets is not some Vancian incantation, consumed upon use. We do not burn it to power our cars and planes, shape it into "temporary" containers that will outlive us all.

This means that data isn't just not scarce in the colloquial sense, but often also in the technical economic sense; i.e. everyone can have as much data as they want.

Not literally always, since data can still be expensive to gather, laborious to interpret and make use-able, and since secrecy and intellectual property laws create artificial scarcity. But consider pornography.

Pornographers cannot enjoy the protection of secrecy if they hope to make a profit, piracy is rampant (since making a copy is costless and the intellectual property rights of adult performers aren't generally taken seriously), people make amateur films for free (since the computer age has democratized information technology), and people have been making skin flicks for so long that people can get off to videos made before they were born (the stock does not diminish with time). All this translates into a world where the price of the data of pornography is pushed to zero and stays there. It is essentially the case that we, as a society, are post-scarcity in smut. And just as there can be no Saudi Arabia of porn, there can be no Saudi Arabia of data.

Whereas Saudi Arabia is the Saudi Arabia of oil.

What is oil? 

Oil is a kind of stuff. Specifically,  its hydrocarbons buried eons ago now dug up and refined into a fuel that can be burnt for energy. Exploiting (i.e. burning) the "fossilized" chemical energy of buried hydrocarbons like oil is essentially how the human race escaped the Malthusian trap of subsistence agriculture and entered the present era of sustained economic growth and industrialization.

And, not to put to fine a point on it, I think the Industrial Revolution was the single most important event in the history of the world. The Industrial Revolution (and by synecdoche, oil) transformed every feature of daily life in rich as well as poor countries - the keys on which I type this, the power that illuminates this screen, the very structure of the city and civilization in which I live - what oil has not made, it has at least put its dirty little fingers on.

But oil and other fossil fuels are not evenly distributed throughout the globe, and this has consequences. As mineral wealth it easy to control and exploit with violence so, it props up the otherwise weak economies of authoritarian states. Oil wealth can stifling economic growth in developing countries  impoverishing future generations.

And it is not just a valuable commodity but a military necessity. An army with tanks, trucks, and planes will overcome an army without these things in any (conventional) contest. Thus securing a steady supply has been one of the key objectives of American foreign policy. So much so that the idiot in the White House - who never met a subtext that he didn't make text - said that we were only in Syria for the oil

And finally, dreadfully, fossil fuels are the cause of the current climate catastrophe. To use the sterile language of economics, using oil has very large negative externalizes. Which is to say, to make, move, and use it not only harms the makers, movers, and users, but everyone around them - indeed, everyone in the whole world.

With all that, what would it mean for something to be the new oil?

It would have to be great and dreadful, to reshape the whole world in profound ways for good and ill. It would have to be scarce, and unevenly distributed, the sort of thing that a warlord could sell on international markets to finance their tyranny. It would have to be a military necessity, whose abundance or scarcity could make or break empires and war machines, something which even the most scrupulous and ethical of states (lolsob) would be compelled by necessity to buy from the most unscrupulous and unethical. It's use would have to harm the people around its users, and its possessors must, by the mere fact of possessing it, deny it to someone else.

Is data that?

No.

Why do people say it?

Its probably some manner of misbegotten metaphor. "Oil is important, data is important, therefore data is the new oil". Which, is wrong and misleading, and I hate it. Couldn't they be a little more poetic and say something like: "Ink is the new black gold"