Every search query, every private prompt in ChatGPT, and every line of code you push to GitHub is being harvested. We are witnessing the largest wealth transfer in human history. Big Tech (Google, Meta, OpenAI) is extracting our “digital exhaust” to build multi-billion dollar LLMs, while the creators of that data receive zero compensation.

In the 20th century, we said “Data is the new oil”. But the metaphor is broken. Oil is a finite, extractive resource. Data, in the AI era, is a productive asset — more like real estate or intellectual property.

If we are the ones providing the “fuel” for GPT-5 and beyond, why are we still digital serfs paying $20/month to access models trained on our own brains?

When we look at the valuations of AI giants — OpenAI at $29B+, Anthropic at $18B — we must ask: What is the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)? The answer is near zero, because the training sets were scraped from the open web under the guise of “Fair Use.”

• LLaMA (Meta): Trained on your social interactions.

• Midjourney: Built on the collective aesthetics of millions of artists without a single royalty check.

• GPT-4: Ingested the entire corpus of human knowledge available on Reddit, Stack Overflow, and personal blogs.

This is Digital Feudalism. We provide the labor (data generation), they own the castle (the model), and we pay for the privilege of living on the land.

The good news? The “Internet of Ownership” stack is finally maturing. We are moving from a Consent-less Extraction model to a Permissioned Liquidity model.

The biggest barrier to data sharing has always been privacy. If I give you my data, I lose control. Ocean Protocol solves this with the Compute-to-Data (C2D) orchestration layer. Instead of moving the data to the algorithm, Ocean moves the algorithm to the data.

• Data owners keep their raw files behind their own firewalls.

• AI researchers buy “compute access.”

• The model trains inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), and only the “learned weights” come out. The result: You monetize your data’s value without ever exposing its contents. This is the foundation of Data Liquidity.

Individual data is a “weak signal.” But aggregated data is a “gold mine.” Vana is pioneering Data DAOs — decentralized unions where users pool their encrypted data to create collective bargaining power. Imagine 10,000 developers pooling their private repositories into a Dev-DAO. They can collectively negotiate with an AI lab: “You want to train a coding assistant on our unique logic? Pay the DAO a 5% equity stake in the model.” Vana turns passive users into Data Shareholders.

The transition to Data Sovereignty isn’t just about money; it’s about the Provenance of human thought.

As I develop my 10-book series on the New Internet Stack, I see a future where every piece of content is a Decentralized Encrypted Asset (DEA). On platforms like Book.io, we are already seeing this in the publishing world. Your books shouldn’t just be “licensed” from Amazon; they should be owned as on-chain assets. Your data should follow the same logic.

1. Audit your footprint: Start using privacy-first tools (Brave, Signal, Proton).

2. Explore Data Markets: Look into Ocean Market or Vana’s Data DAOs.

3. Shift the Mindset: Stop saying “I have nothing to hide.” Start saying “My data is my equity.”

The revolution won’t be centralized. It will be encrypted, peer-to-peer, and sovereign.

About the Author

Artem Teplov is a Technical Documentation & Protocol Specialist based in Los Angeles, CA. He specializes in creating highly accurate Whitepapers and performing technical Gap Analysis for complex DeFi protocols, ensuring full clarity on Tokenomics and risk mechanisms.

Need expert help with your protocol?

• X (Twitter): @Teplov_AG

P.S. If you like my content, please support me as an author, it will inspire me to write new articles! Thank you!

Every search query, every private prompt in ChatGPT, and every line of code you push to GitHub is being harvested. We are witnessing the largest wealth transfer in human history. Big Tech (Google, Meta, OpenAI) is extracting our “digital exhaust” to build multi-billion dollar LLMs, while the creators of that data receive zero compensation.

In the 20th century, we said “Data is the new oil”. But the metaphor is broken. Oil is a finite, extractive resource. Data, in the AI era, is a productive asset — more like real estate or intellectual property.

If we are the ones providing the “fuel” for GPT-5 and beyond, why are we still digital serfs paying $20/month to access models trained on our own brains?

When we look at the valuations of AI giants — OpenAI at $29B+, Anthropic at $18B — we must ask: What is the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)? The answer is near zero, because the training sets were scraped from the open web under the guise of “Fair Use.”

• LLaMA (Meta): Trained on your social interactions.

• Midjourney: Built on the collective aesthetics of millions of artists without a single royalty check.

• GPT-4: Ingested the entire corpus of human knowledge available on Reddit, Stack Overflow, and personal blogs.

This is Digital Feudalism. We provide the labor (data generation), they own the castle (the model), and we pay for the privilege of living on the land.

The good news? The “Internet of Ownership” stack is finally maturing. We are moving from a Consent-less Extraction model to a Permissioned Liquidity model.

The biggest barrier to data sharing has always been privacy. If I give you my data, I lose control. Ocean Protocol solves this with the Compute-to-Data (C2D) orchestration layer. Instead of moving the data to the algorithm, Ocean moves the algorithm to the data.

• Data owners keep their raw files behind their own firewalls.

• AI researchers buy “compute access.”

• The model trains inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), and only the “learned weights” come out. The result: You monetize your data’s value without ever exposing its contents. This is the foundation of Data Liquidity.

Individual data is a “weak signal.” But aggregated data is a “gold mine.” Vana is pioneering Data DAOs — decentralized unions where users pool their encrypted data to create collective bargaining power. Imagine 10,000 developers pooling their private repositories into a Dev-DAO. They can collectively negotiate with an AI lab: “You want to train a coding assistant on our unique logic? Pay the DAO a 5% equity stake in the model.” Vana turns passive users into Data Shareholders.

The transition to Data Sovereignty isn’t just about money; it’s about the Provenance of human thought.

As I develop my 10-book series on the New Internet Stack, I see a future where every piece of content is a Decentralized Encrypted Asset (DEA). On platforms like Book.io, we are already seeing this in the publishing world. Your books shouldn’t just be “licensed” from Amazon; they should be owned as on-chain assets. Your data should follow the same logic.

1. Audit your footprint: Start using privacy-first tools (Brave, Signal, Proton).

2. Explore Data Markets: Look into Ocean Market or Vana’s Data DAOs.

3. Shift the Mindset: Stop saying “I have nothing to hide.” Start saying “My data is my equity.”

The revolution won’t be centralized. It will be encrypted, peer-to-peer, and sovereign.

About the Author

Artem Teplov is a Technical Documentation & Protocol Specialist based in Los Angeles, CA. He specializes in creating highly accurate Whitepapers and performing technical Gap Analysis for complex DeFi protocols, ensuring full clarity on Tokenomics and risk mechanisms.

Need expert help with your protocol?

• X (Twitter): @Teplov_AG

P.S. If you like my content, please support me as an author, it will inspire me to write new articles! Thank you!