Data is not the new oil

People keep saying that data is the new oil. It is a useful image for a five-second pitch and a dangerous one for everything that comes after.

Oil is a finite, fungible commodity. A barrel from Texas is the same as a barrel from Saudi Arabia. You buy it, you burn it, it is gone. Data is none of that. My browsing history is not interchangeable with yours. It does not get consumed when used — it gets copied, indefinitely, often in ways neither of us can audit. And unlike oil, the value of any single data point is almost nothing; the value lives in the aggregation.

The better analogy, I think, is water. It needs to be cleaned. It can be poisoned. It pools in places we did not expect. And whoever controls the reservoirs has a kind of power that does not show up on any balance sheet.

If we keep using the oil metaphor, we will keep designing oil-shaped policies for it: drilling rights, royalties, extraction taxes. None of which protect the actual thing at stake, which is the integrity of the person on the other end of the pipeline.

Noroom — the data union I am building — starts from the opposite premise. Your data is not a resource to be extracted; it is a part of you that, with consent, can be pooled with other people’s to negotiate from strength. We will talk about the mechanics in another post.