Simple Case for a People's Tech Company
March 30, 2025
I’ve been meaning to write about this topic for a while, if nothing else than to substantiate our belief as a company, which animates what we do.
Here, I present a brief market case for a people’s tech company. To be sure, there are many compelling reasons for a people’s tech company, but this one is (uniquely) ours.
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Case Summary
We consumers don’t get fair-market credit for capitalizing tech businesses with our data. If we did, we’d wholly own and control them, and our individual ownership shares would be proportionate to our service activity, which is how we transmit data to tech businesses. It’s time for a tech business to step up and share the wealth this way, no matter the product or service it offers.
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In our market system, if you take a risk to provide a business something that it needs to make money, you get a piece of that business’ profits and a say in what that business does.
The greater the risk you take, the bigger your piece of that business’ profits and the bigger your say in what that business does. In other words, the bigger your “ownership.”
That “something” (above) doesn’t have to be money, like an investment. It can be anything of value, like equipment, intellectual property, or just plain sweat. We see business ownership exchanged for these things all the time.
Weirdly, in our present Information Age, we haven’t seen business ownership exchanged for the information and content, or “data,” that we transmit to tech companies with almost every action we take on their services.
And why not? We know that tech companies, like Big Tech, are built on our data, and we know that data exposes us to some kind of risk, even though we can’t always put our finger on it.
That makes our data “risk-capital” and our service activity, or “clicks,” risk-capital transactions that, in our market system, entitle us to ownership in every tech business that profits from them.
So, it’s time for a tech business to step up and share all its wealth with us on the basis of our clicks—our streams of risk-capital transactions that “capitalize” tech businesses with the data they need to make money. The product or service doesn’t matter.
That's the simple case for a people’s tech company.
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That’ll do it here. After I report on how Washington DC went, I’ll lay out User Co-op’s simple approach to building the first-ever people’s tech company!
Also, please email me with questions, comments, or topics you’d like to see covered.
Matt
March 30, 2025
Matt Martensen
Founder/organizer