There’s no shortage of free information out there. It’s everywhere you turn these days—social platforms, data, products, education, news, content. The sources of such information compete for your clicks, and then it’s not about adding objective value anymore. It’s about telling a story—a narrative that inevitably favors the owners’ interests over the users. But as historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson ironically explained at Schwab’s 2018 IMPACT conference in Washington, DC: "The owners become fantastically wealthy. And the users don’t realize that if the service is free, then they’re the product."
