01
The offer
What a data machine is worth to people who want to move a government, and what it costs to say no.
Forthcoming
Dawn of Data
Twenty years inside the machine, by the person who helped build it.
A consortium with no household name put a quarter of a billion dollars on the table for the engine he had built, and told him what they intended to do with it. That conversation is where the book starts.
Data is people. Data itself is neutral. What matters is who holds it and what they do with it.
I spent a decade building one of the most sophisticated behavioural-data engines ever put together. I know what it can do, because I made it do it. I know what it is worth to the people who want it, because they told me, in a room in Washington, with a signed letter of intent and a number on it.
This is not a book about being afraid of technology. Data is neutral. What matters is who holds it and what they do with it, and almost nobody outside the industry has ever been shown that clearly enough to decide what they think. That is the gap this book exists to close.
Without giving it away
What's inside
02
A day in the life of your data
Twenty-four ordinary hours, reconstructed from the other side of the glass. Most of it happens before you have picked up your phone.
03
How we got here
The trade did not grow in the dark. It grew in the open, because almost nobody outside it could read what was happening.
04
Bad actors
The people who abuse what the industry built, and the ones who handed it to them by leaving the door open.
05
The machine eats
What changes when the models start training on all of it, and why the consent you gave in 2014 is doing work you never agreed to.
06
Self-defense
The part most books leave out: what actually works, what is theater, and what you can do this afternoon.
“The same people who were shoved into lockers in high school are now sitting on top of an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars, quietly rebuilding the foundation of everyday life.”
Be told first
No list, no sequence, no marketing. One email from me when it is available, and nothing else.