THE DATADOLLAR

Before, it was the petrodollar, forced by weapons to buy barrels. Today, a different, quieter, and more effective instrument rules: the data dollar. The economy stopped running on fossil fuels alone and started running on informational fuels, and the price of that fuel—the data that allows us to calculate risk, set prices, profile behavior, allocate credit, and buy attention—remained anchored in the same unit: the dollar.

While oil lubricated machines, data lubricates algorithms, and algorithms feed on digital transactions that the system pushed with a clear agenda: more credit and less cash, more control and less privacy, more speculation and less saving, more gambling and less investment. Online payments, online shopping, online brokers. Everything online, everything recorded, everything quantifiable. The digital panopticon as a business model.

1. Datafication

To feed the models, it was necessary to abolish the anonymity of cash and replace it with traceable transactions. Deposit accounts replaced banknotes, cards became ubiquitous, points of sale multiplied, the universal product code (UPC) turned merchandise into information, and electronic rails—ACH in 1972, SWIFT in 1973—standardized financial messaging.

American Express, Visa, and Mastercard didn't just spread plastic: they built databases of purchasing habits and found the repeating pattern that banks love: where, when, how much, and what you spend. The state did its part: the Bank Secrecy Act (1970) imposed reporting and record-keeping requirements; the Patriot Act (2001) expanded KYC/AML, normalized “national security letters,” and elevated financial surveillance to a regime standard. Each technical step brought a political leap: converting economic flow into computer-readable material. The UPC (1974) made inventory scannable; the POS connected it to payment; the card identified the buyer; and regulations required those records to be retained and shared “in the name of security.” The algorithm, at last, had something to feed on.

2.Financialization

At the same time, financialization and deregulation changed the very essence of progress. Savings and productivity, the old drivers of growth, gave way to debt and speculation. The dismantling of the Glass–Steagall Act was completed in 1999; the dot-com bubble burst in 2000; September 11 opened the door to total securitization under the Patriot Act; decimalization of quotes (2001) and Reg NMS (2005) fueled a hyper-fragmented market that gave birth to high-frequency trading, minimal spreads, latency as an advantage, and ephemeral liquidity.

The promise of “democratizing” Wall Street came in the form of cheap platforms, but the organic result was different: the annihilation of patient savings to be replaced by the stock market casino with volatility as spectacle. Between 2000 and 2008, the system learned to live off carry trade and leverage; when everything collapsed, the Federal Reserve inaugurated QE as a maintenance serum. From then on, the political economy of the dollar was defined: asset prices are maintained with easy credit; risk is hidden in layers; citizens “participate” via apps while real capital arbitrates collateral, bases, and margins.

3. Digitization

Digitization completed the circuit. Big tech companies grew at an unprecedented rate because they enjoyed three simultaneous advantages: access to extravagant financing, preferential access to massive data flows, and institutional access to public infrastructure that others paid for.

The internet was born out of ARPANET; GPS and critical protocols were driven by the Department of Defense; Siri came out of SRI with DARPA funding; In-Q-Tel invested in Palantir and Keyhole (which would eventually become Google Earth); AWS closed its contract with the CIA in 2013 and turned the cloud into a public service for the deep state.

The garage myth provides romance to a much more prosaic architecture: cheap capital, strategic contracts, regulatory capture, and acquisition of competitors. Meanwhile, the digitization of brokerage reshaped the retail market: E*TRADE and Schwab online marked the 2000s, Robinhood made zero commissions the standard in 2019 and forced the entire industry to match. More passive flow to indices (SPY, QQQ), more gamification, more “buy the dip,” more insensitivity to valuations. Phones became trading terminals; household balance sheets, a shadow of US-domiciled ETFs; local savings, a raft against the tide of global dollar indexation.

From control by force to control by architecture

The financial system, which yesterday imposed itself with uniforms and ships, today governs with data types, risk panels, and programmable credits. Mass surveillance is no longer the exception but has become the norm: multiplied FinCEN SARs; MCCs to categorize consumption; geolocation purchased from data brokers without a court order; browsing histories converted into scores; social media exploited to profile ideology; and, when necessary, the button: deplatforming, shadowbanning, account closure. Information—who you are, what you buy, what you think, who you meet—has become the most valuable commodity.

You are not the customer: you are the product, the collateral, the explanatory variable of a model that decides whether you can fly, whether your limit is raised, whether you are sold insurance, whether you are granted credit, or whether you are silenced. The panopticon no longer needs guards: the light is provided by your screen and the mirror is your history.

Here, the DATADOLLAR appears in all its clarity. The digital economy—cloud, ads, marketplaces, app stores—bills in dollars; CPMs for attention are calculated in dollars; server and storage contracts are in dollars; financial benchmarks that swallow global savings are in dollars.

Data is the oil of the century, and the dollar is the unit of account for that oil. The fact that the dollar's share of official reserves has fallen from ~72% in the early 2000s to around 58% in 2024 does not change the essence: almost 88% of currency transactions still involve the USD on one side, margins and repos are collateralized with Treasuries, and the price of human attention—the central commodity of the information economy—is set in dollars. Trade flows are diversifying; balance sheet and data flows continue to pass through the same counter.

The plandemic accelerated the DATADOLLAR

The immediate future of the DATADOLLAR was encoded during the plandemic: stablecoins appeared as an escape valve for citizens from banks and as a feeding valve for the US Treasury. USDT exploded in 2017, USDC in 2018, and between 2019 and 2021, the stablecoin market jumped above $100 billion. What is behind these tokens? Very short-term Treasury bills, repos, cash in custodial banks.

Every digital dollar on a merchant's phone in Nigeria or a programmer's in Buenos Aires is equivalent to demand for T-bills held in a money market fund in New York. BlackRock launches BUIDL to tokenize Treasury liquidity; Franklin Templeton tokenizes its first money market; Visa tests settlements with USDC; PayPal issues its own stablecoin; Stripe pays freelancers in tokenized dollars; and the DATADOLLAR closes the loop: global savings finance the United States' unpayable deficit through fintech rails, while users believe they have escaped traditional banking.

Tokenization as a control tool

The plan to tokenize everything—invoices, inventories, collateral, bills, promissory notes—is the natural culmination: if everything is a token, everything is collateral; if everything is collateral, everything can be leveraged; if everything can be leveraged, everything can be taxed in the form of exported inflation. CBDCs, even though they bear the stamp of central banks, are born of the “private sector”: identical rail architecture, identical dream of programmability, identical consequence of control.

There is no naivety in this. The DATADOLLAR—or fintech dollar—is not imposed solely by the explicit violence of the old military complex, but by the overwhelming convenience of its design: liquidity, collateral, jurisprudence, rails, APIs. They changed the pipes, not the center of gravity.

For this regime to fall, someone would have to offer, at scale, what only Wall Street and its technological periphery offer today: a deeper capital market, more widely accepted collateral, a more efficient payment infrastructure, a cheaper and more ubiquitous cloud, and more monetizable advertising. Until that exists, data will continue to be denominated in dollars, stablecoins will continue to fill wallets around the world, and useful idiots will continue to finance the US fiscal Ponzi scheme by buying Treasuries wrapped in UX.

Citizens will believe they chose an app; in reality, it chose them. And from now on, their lives will be priced in dollars, their credit in scores, and their freedom in terms and conditions. Data is the new oil. The dollar remains the yardstick. And the panopticon is now complete after more than half a century of design and implementation.