Associational Data Rightsdata-rights.info

Introduction

Why a different future for the digital economy is still available, and what it would take to choose it.

1,124 words · 5 min

Silicon Valley culture is characterized by the motto, “move fast and break things.” Read charitably, it evokes a spirit of openness, innovation, and creativity. But for many Americans, the motto is emblematic of an elite tech culture that is itself broken, out of touch, and largely insulated from the social and economic consequences that its technologies unleash upon the world.

Frontier AI labs (“Big AI”), including Open AI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, are racing to build superintelligent AIs to outperform and ultimately replace humans in every sphere: from work, to relationships, to politics, and even human thought and decision making.1 Elon Musk claims that within a few years, AI will be “unequivocally smarter than humans in every way.”2 An Open AI employee said in 2026 that he “would prefer a world of rapid RSI [recursive self-improvement, where AI models train their own successors without any human involvement] and human disempowerment.”3

Even if they do not succeed, the same Big Tech companies, like Meta, TikTok, Google, and Amazon, that have surveilled, censored, and re-wired the brains of an entire generation, are poised to use AI to further dominate attention, monopolize our markets, and shape our beliefs and actions at scale.4 But it is not just the largest players. A growing number of mid-sized firms use AI to profile individuals, families, and communities with data harvested from a wide range of digital services and compiled by a shadowy web of data brokers.5

While these forces threaten individual dignity and freedom, their communal and wider societal implications are equally severe. The bedrock institutions of family and civil society are in the AI revolution’s crosshairs: Young men and women, already awash in a sea of digitally-induced distraction and erotica, are now tempted to turn to AI “companions” and chatbots with their most serious problems and intimate secrets, and to forgo human friendships, romance, and marriage altogether;6 family and marital bonds are being steadily replaced by screens that serve up an endless supply of AI slop personalized by AI algorithms optimized for addiction;7 schools and workplaces risk becoming sites of mass social engineering, deploying powerful AI systems to surveil and replace human instruction, learning, labor, and thought;8 algorithmic pricing threatens to further exacerbate the affordability crisis for struggling families;9 and widespread public concern with Big Tech’s AI surveillance and manipulation is undermining social trust, and with it, the necessary conditions for republican-self governance at the communal and societal level.10

This trend toward dehumanization and social decay is largely driven by the race to capture data from every domain of human life. For too long, tech companies have enjoyed unrestricted access to the data we co-produce during the course of our lives, both on and offline “irl.” All of that data, paired with AI’s growing capabilities of pattern recognition, prediction, and automation, have produced vast power asymmetries between human communities and the countless digital services they interact with daily. Those asymmetries have also resulted in parallel misalignment between the values and interests of the tech industry and the people it is supposed to serve.

Rather than compete to provide the most value and social benefit for the data they extract, tech companies often mask their commercial surveillance behind “free” or subsidized services, which they utilize to harvest as much consumer data and intellectual property as possible to develop products, derive insights about groups, and influence community members without affording them privacy, control, or fair value. The result: a consumer tech ecosystem that has done great damage to family life and marriage formation,11 and that is keeping us atomized, dependent, and scrolling alone.12

These effects have reached beyond the household into the other institutions upon which familial flourishing depends. AI and the digital economy’s hunger for data is propelling the extraction of data from workers, artists, writers, and business owners, threatening to further diminish and centralize cultural production and commerce, and to disrupt social relations and truth seeking in the most important areas of civil society, including religion, education, and public life.13

Silicon Valley’s current anti-human trajectory is bleak. But a different future is possible if we choose to embrace it. The 2025 statement, A Future for the Family, offers that alternative pro-human blueprint for the future centered on the flourishing of the permanent things, the social institutions and communal structures that give life meaning and that serve as the enduring bedrock of American society:14

The family plants the seed and forms the foundation of the future, through the begetting and raising of children who will carry the human project forward. As such, the family, technology, and a dynamic and fruitful future are intrinsically connected, and the present conflict between them must be overcome.15

Instead of smart devices and sensors that constantly feed data to outside tech companies and advertisers, we imagine a future where your home is your castle, where data serves your family’s needs and only leaves with your permission and when absolutely necessary; Instead of screen-based devices that pull attention away from friends and family, we imagine new distraction-free interfaces that facilitate interaction with locally hosted AI models that serve humans on terms set by them and the institutions they inhabit; Instead of AGI that some believe will replace human labor, creativity, and relationships, we envision a competitive ecosystem of what Max Tegmark refers to as, “tool AI,” designed to supplement, not supplant human judgment, solve real human problems, and foster ideal economic conditions for family formation and flourishing.16

To realize that future, public policy must give families and communities a voice in the development, deployment, and governance of AI and the larger digital economy. While regulatory floors to protect data privacy, kids, and families are necessary, society must fundamentally rethink the social contract between its essential institutions and private tech corporations. That starts at the data layer.

Galvanizing pro-human, pro-family AI innovation requires ensuring that data flows to digital products and services designed with human flourishing in mind. It requires moving away from asymmetric data and AI governance, toward more evenly distributed polycentric governance.

A new class of associational data rights, chiefly a right to collective informational bargaining exercised through Data Rights Associations (DRAs), are crucial for addressing data’s complexity as well as the significant power asymmetries between human data co-producers on the one side, and the vast ecosystem of AI developers, deployers, tech platforms, and data brokers on the other. DRAs, like cooperatives and labor unions, would be empowered by law to secure fair terms from tech companies on behalf of individuals, households, and human scale communities. We envision DRAs as a new intermediary layer of digital rights bearing entities which would restructure data markets and provide strong incentives for firms to respect the privacy, control, and economic interests of families and communities over the long-term.

Footnotes

  1. https://www.compactmag.com/article/big-techs-war-on-human-achievement/. ↩

  2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=adgbH9FixW0&ref=compactmag.com. ↩

  3. https://x.com/zetalyrae/status/2080056964126822536?ref=compactmag.com; And https://www.compactmag.com/article/big-techs-war-on-human-achievement/. ↩

  4. https://www.heritage.org/technology/report/combating-big-techs-totalitarianism-road-map; https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/17/17344250/google-x-selfish-ledger-video-data-privacy; and UNC-Chapel Hill, Study Shows Habitual Checking of Social Media May Impact Young Adolescents' Brain Development(Jan. 3, 2023), https://www.unc.edu/posts/2023/01/03/study-shows-habitual-checking-of-social-media-may-impact-young-adolescents-brain-development/; ↩

  5. https://theconversation.com/us-government-ramps-up-mass-surveillance-with-help-of-ai-tech-data-brokers-and-your-apps-and-devices-277440; https://fortune.com/2026/02/25/amazon-ring-jamie-siminoff-shark-tank-success-pivot-to-ai/; and https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-cameras-license-plate-readers-explained-2026-8. ↩

  6. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-05536-x; and https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf. ↩

  7. Wendy Wang & Michael Toscano, More Scrolling, More Marital Problems: Less Sex, More Divorce Worries for Couples Distracted by Phones, Institute for Family Studies (July 26, 2023), https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/research/final-2ifstechmarriageresearchbrief.pdf. ↩

  8. https://americancompass.org/teaching-to-the-tech/; https://www.fastcompany.com/91577271/ai-surveillance-is-destroying-the-workplace; and https://onlabor.org/training-your-replacement-one-keystroke-at-a-time/. ↩

  9. https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/algorithmic-price-fixing-and-housing-justice-reimagining-legal-and-policy-roles-and-paradigms-to-protect-chicagos-rental-housing-market/; and https://www.consumerreports.org/money/questionable-business-practices/instacart-ai-pricing-experiment-inflating-grocery-bills-a1142182490/. ↩

  10. https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-remains-near-time-low.aspx. ↩

  11. Wendy Wang & Michael Toscano, More Scrolling, More Marital Problems: Less Sex, More Divorce Worries for Couples Distracted by Phones, Institute for Family Studies (July 26, 2023), https://ifstudies.org/ifs-admin/resources/research/final-2ifstechmarriageresearchbrief.pdf. ↩

  12. James A. Roberts, Phil D. Young & Meredith E. David, The Epidemic of Loneliness: A 9-Year Longitudinal Study of the Impact of Passive and Active Social Media Use on Loneliness, Pers. Soc. Psychol. Bull. (Dec. 30, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672241295870. ↩

  13. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-are-reportedly-shredding-millions-of-books-to-train-models-tech-giants-outsource-to-middlemen-to-secretly-buy-up-books-for-training-material; https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/where-ai-thrives-religion-may-struggle; https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20251016-people-are-using-ai-to-talk-to-god; and https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/gauging-ai-threat-free-and-fair-elections. ↩

  14. https://firstthings.com/a-future-for-the-family-a-new-technology-agenda-for-the-right/. ↩

  15. https://firstthings.com/a-future-for-the-family-a-new-technology-agenda-for-the-right/ ↩

  16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWh1MIMQd1Y. ↩