The corporation is a person the law invented so that capital could be pooled and risk could be shared. It is an artificial person under the law, and what it produces is what I want to call artificial data... An artificial person produces artificial data about its artificial life, and takes human data as its own, and the law treats all of it as the corporation's to keep.

Nothing in that chain reaches into a human being. And nothing in that chain works in reverse. The corporation cannot turn human data into artificial data by collecting it... The human data the corporation has taken from you is what it was when you made it. The corporation has it. The corporation processes it. The corporation uses it. None of that makes it the corporation's.

Every system decides what to count. That decision — which always looks like a technical choice — is also a decision about what to ignore. And a decision about what to ignore is, eventually, a decision about who the system can and cannot see ... Mississippi's GDP per capita is higher than France's, the United Kingdom's, and Italy's. By the number the world uses to measure prosperity, Mississippi outperforms some of the most developed nations in human history ... My step-grandparents lived in Forest, Mississippi. I lived in Paris. No number can make those places equivalent ... A corporation's moral compass, if it can be said to have one, points only at profit. In a person, we would call that greed. In a corporation, it is the law ... This is the system. It was built to count money and to serve the people who own it. It does that work with precision. Everyone else is invisible.