Hey, technology leaders! Could you help me with this math?
I pay $70 monthly for home internet that goes out pretty regularly. I pay $122 for a phone I barely use, except to buy things I’ve been nudged into wanting through a mix of fear and shame. I pay another small fortune for streaming services that still serve me ads. I pay $20 monthly for ChatGPT, $7.50 for a personalized Gmail account, and another $8 for news subscriptions that rile me up, sell my data, and ask for more. I manage this through platforms that track my behavior, encourage overspending, and keep me logged in.
Funny how everyone using your systems pays. Every click, scroll, and engagement supports an ecosystem we don’t control. We pay in surveillance, when our content is scraped, when our work trains an AI model that may replace us, and again when that AI system monitors our credit behavior and nudges us further into financial instability.
Why are we paying you, the tech giants, for the honor of being exploited?
You Didn’t Build This
In 2012, President Obama said something that sparked backlash: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
To be fair, we all knew exactly what he meant. He wasn’t minimizing entrepreneurship. He pointed out that success requires infrastructure: roads, schools, the internet, and community. None of it happens in isolation. It’s built by people, together.
He was right.
In 2025, tech infrastructure still depends on roads, schools, and energy. But the most significant scaffolding is our time, ideas, content, and participation.
You should pay us, not just for the value we create today but also for what you’ve already taken.
I’ve been influenced by many who’ve made this argument before, but here’s my version. A ledger. A receipt for everything you’ve taken without consent, without compensation, and without a plan to give anything back.
You want to build the future on our data? Then pay what you owe. If you’re going to play the AI game, it’s time to pay the AI tax. Here’s how.
I. Data Is Labor
Pay us for creating digital profiles. You collect every search, click, pause, and purchase to build a version of us. That profile is monetized. It has value, but we see none of it.
Pay us per cookie. Every tracking pixel is a micro-transaction in disguise. Our data funds your targeting engine. Start the meter.
Pay us for behavioral data. Scroll depth, read time, and hover speed are passive signals that train your UX and optimize your revenue. Your ToS didn’t truthfully ask permission, and that labor was never freely given.
Pay us for biometric data. You analyze our voices, faces, typing patterns, and eye movements. We deserve compensation if that data is used for facial recognition, security tools, or AI modeling.
Pay us for duplicate identities. Your systems create multiple profiles of the same person across devices and platforms to boost engagement. One identity is invasive enough. Each copy owes a fee.
II. Content Is Value
Pay us when our work trains your AI. If our writing, voice, art, or likeness is scraped to make your GPT smarter or your image generator more realistic, that’s labor. Period.
Pay us when our tone, style, or likeness is replicated. Your systems that write like us, sound like us, or look like us aren’t generative. They’re derivative.
Pay us when we influence algorithms. Our patterns shape your ranking systems and recommendation engines. Every action is training data. Count it and compensate it.
Pay us when we moderate content. We report abuse, flag spam, and curate safe spaces. That emotional labor boosts your trust scores, props your brand, and drives revenue.
Pay us for cultural capital. You profit from memes, slang, aesthetics, and movements you didn’t create. When culture goes viral, someone’s identity is being mined. That value belongs to them.
Pay marginalized communities for disproportionate extraction. Much of what drives online culture originates from BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and disabled creators. Their labor has been used without credit or payment. That debt runs deep.
III. Participation Is Profit
Pay us for our time and attention. Your entire business model depends on capturing human focus. That isn’t free. It’s labor.
Pay us when our behavior drives your bottom line. We click the links, buy the products, and influence others. If you profit from those actions, cut us in.
Pay us for our social networks. Our relationships power your systems. You mine our connections for targeting and trust signals. That’s infrastructure. Pay for it.
Pay us for being part of your business model. Every login, post, and engagement keeps your metrics high and your investors happy. We work for you. We just don’t get paid.
Pay displaced workers. After training on their work, AI is replacing humans in marketing, journalism, education, design, and customer service. There should be a reinvestment tax for every job you automate using borrowed expertise.
IV. Harm Carries a Cost
Pay us when algorithms harm us. There are hiring and resume platforms that reject qualified people. Credit models use biased data. Recommendation engines spread misinformation. You profit from the system. You should pay for the damage.
Pay us when AI displaces us. If your models eliminate our jobs after learning from our labor, that’s not innovation. That’s extraction. Offer severance for the human capital you’ve mined for years.
Pay us when you manipulate us. If your design fuels outrage, addiction, or mental health strain, and you monetize the result, then you owe more than best practices. You owe us restitution.
Pay us when your systems make us vulnerable. Bad APIs, weak authentication, and sloppy integrations put our lives at risk. We carry the burden, and you should bear the cost.
Pay us when we’re test subjects. You run silent A/B tests, deploy experimental models, and tweak interfaces to shape behavior. That’s unpaid R&D. Compensate accordingly.
Pay us when we clean up your mess. Resetting breached passwords, disputing fraudulent charges, and navigating your broken customer service systems is labor. Pay for it.
Pay us for terrible customer service. If your chatbots waste our time or your IVR systems loop us for hours, then we’ve done work for you. Start billing yourselves for our time. Our payment terms are NET 30.
V. The Emotional Economy
Pay us for training emotion engines. Your AI reads tone, mood, and sentiment because it learned from our messages, voices, and posts. That empathy was crowdsourced. We want royalties.
Pay us for the cost of visibility. Being “seen” online often results in harassment, abuse, and dehumanization, especially for women, queer people, and people of color. Platforms profit from that attention. Users absorb the harm.
Pay for language and cultural appropriation. If your chatbot sounds like Black Twitter, Indigenous oral traditions, or queer slang, that’s not magic. That’s memory. Pay the source.
Pay us for building your future. We trained your models, filled your feeds, and sustained your platforms. You don’t get to scale without giving something back.
What You Owe Isn’t Backpay. It’s a Dividend in Humanity.
What we’re asking for isn’t radical. It’s overdue.
This isn’t about gimmicks, tokens, or engagement perks. It’s recognition of unpaid labor. It’s a dividend for building the systems that now dominate the economy and distort our lives.
Do you want to talk about what people deserve? We deserve to be compensated for the work that has been repackaged and sold back to us.
This payment could be universal. It would not be tied to productivity or platform loyalty. It would just be a regular, dignified acknowledgment that humans are the original source code.
You could even pay us monthly. There are platforms for that. You built many of them, and you charge us to use them. We accept PayPal, Venmo, QuickBooks, Stripe, and Bill.com. We charge 3% per transaction.
Love,
Laurie