There is a rideshare driver somewhere right now navigating city streets, logging routes, calibrating surge pricing. He thinks he's earning a living. He is paying for the car, the gas, the insurance — while feeding the platform the data that makes its AI smarter. He is building, at his own expense, the autonomous vehicle that will replace him.
The car is not the exception. It is the template. Who pays the energy bill, the carrier fee, and the monthly installment on the device that pumps your behavioral data into the cloud twenty-four hours a day? You do. The phone in your pocket is not a product you bought. It is a data collection terminal you are paying to operate.
Artificial intelligence is not a technology story. It is a distribution story. And right now, we are telling it very badly. Over the past decade, AI has compressed the middle class from both directions at once — automating white-collar tasks that once required judgment while boosting the productivity of lower-wage work. What looks like efficiency on a quarterly earnings call is something else on a labor-force chart: hollowing.
The standard political response is Universal Basic Income: a monthly transfer to displaced workers, an acknowledgment that their economic contribution has become obsolete. It is a compassionate idea built on a defeatist premise. The issue is not that people have stopped contributing to the economy. The issue is that the economy no longer recognizes their contributions.
We have been here before.
For seventy-five years, Social Security has been the floor under American retirement. It is the institution most Americans assume will catch them — and it is the one most visibly failing. The 2025 Trustees Report, issued in June by the Social Security Administration, now projects the combined Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance trust funds will run out of reserves in 2034 — a full year earlier than the prior projection. At that point, only 81 percent of scheduled benefits would be payable from incoming payroll tax revenue. Everything above that line becomes an automatic cut.
The program has been running below its non-interest income every year since 2010. In 2024 alone, reserves fell by $67 billion to $2.72 trillion. The 75-year actuarial deficit widened from 3.50% to 3.82% of taxable payroll. These are not forecasts of possible trouble. They are the official ledger of a system already in structural deficit — 185 million Americans paying in, 70 million drawing benefits, and a clock that now reads less than a decade.
In 1950, Social Security paid a benefit of roughly $32 a month. Postwar inflation had gutted its real value. Workers entering the new industrial economy faced the same question today's Gen Z faces: a federal backstop that existed on paper but would not carry them through retirement. That gap is what the Treaty of Detroit filled — not by replacing Social Security, but by building a new institutional layer above it.
The Data Savings Act answers the same kind of question, in the same kind of moment. Social Security will still exist in 2034. It will simply cover roughly four-fifths of what was promised — at the exact moment AI is displacing the work that pays into it.
The floor is dropping while the ceiling is rising. Something must be built in between.
Both existing Senate proposals work inside the Social Security machinery. The Data Savings Act proposes a second institutional pillar — as pensions did in 1950 — beside it.
"It provided pensions of up to $117 a month, including Social Security, for retirees at age sixty-five, and set a standard for other unions that even many non-union employers felt pressure to approximate." — Historian Daniel Clark / In These Times
After World War II, the United States faced a structural economic disruption of comparable magnitude to what AI represents today. Industrial productivity was surging. Traditional labor was being displaced. Workers entering the new economy had no bridge between present wages and future security.
The answer was not a government check. It was a new institution. In May 1950, General Motors and the United Auto Workers — after three rounds of postwar negotiation, after a 113-day strike, after the rival Chrysler strike had left 100,000 Detroiters out of work — signed a five-year contract that became the template for postwar American capitalism. It included a fully-funded, actuarially-sound pension plan paying up to $117 per month at age 65, cost-of-living adjustments tied to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and company-funded health coverage.
Ford and Chrysler signed identical pacts within weeks. The logic then rippled outward. By 1970, more than half of all U.S. collective bargaining agreements contained COLA provisions, and more than a third provided for pensions. The standard of living for UAW members roughly doubled during Walter Reuther's tenure. In 1974, Congress codified these protections in the Employee Retirement Income Security Act — ERISA — which extended the framework to the entire American middle class.
Pensions did not compensate workers for being displaced. They recognized that labor hours had residual value beyond the paycheck, and built the institutional machinery to capture that value over a lifetime. Work became ownership. Pension funds became the largest class of institutional investors the world had ever seen.
That, not a stipend, is the American template for a structural economic transition. And it is the only one that has ever worked at scale.
GM and the UAW agree to a five-year contract providing fully-funded pensions of $125/month including Social Security, cost-of-living adjustments, and company-paid healthcare. Fortune magazine gives the contract its nickname. Ford and Chrysler follow within weeks.
Workers covered: ~400,000 initiallyAfter a wave of wildcat strikes, GM agrees to reopen the contract. The improvement factor is raised to 5¢/hour and group health coverage is extended to retirees. The template locks in.
More than half of all U.S. collective bargaining agreements contain COLA provisions; more than a third provide pensions. The standard of living for UAW members has roughly doubled in two decades. The American middle class is at its historical apex.
The Employee Retirement Income Security Act establishes federal protections for pension participants, requires funding standards, creates fiduciary obligations, and lays the groundwork for IRAs, 401(k)s, and the entire modern retirement system. Pensions become portable, enforceable, and universal.
Workers covered: tens of millionsAt year-end 2025, total U.S. retirement assets reached $49.1 trillion — 34% of all household financial assets — including $19.2T in IRAs, $10.1T in 401(k)s, $10.0T in government pension plans, and $3.1T in private-sector defined-benefit plans. This is the scale of institution that began with a single contract in 1950.
Source: Investment Company Institute, Q4 2025A proposal to do for the AI economy what the Treaty of Detroit did for the industrial one: recognize that everyday participation produces residual value, and build the institutional machinery — personal accounts, pooled funds, fiduciary oversight, tax-advantaged treatment — to return that value to the people who generate it.
Status: open for signatureThe correspondence is not metaphorical. The two systems share the same institutional architecture — what differs is the underlying asset. In 1950, the asset was industrial labor. In 2026, it is digital participation. Both are forms of economic contribution whose long-term value is captured by someone other than the person producing it. Both require an institution, not a transfer payment, to repair that gap.
The Data Savings Act adopts the tripartite structure of the retirement system — individual account, structured plan, pooled fund — and translates each to the data economy. The familiarity is intentional. Congress, regulators, and plan administrators already understand how to operate this architecture. The Act does not invent a new legal form. It extends a proven one.
The individual's personal data asset account. User-controlled and non-custodial, offered by regulated financial institutions or Authorized Data Agents. Provides transparent reporting of the value generated from the individual's data.
Tax-advantaged treatment analogous to IRAs and 401(k)s.
The structured program through which data is contributed into defined economic use cases. Each DSP specifies permitted uses, value-attribution methodology, and distribution rules — programmable, auditable, revocable.
Supports both anonymous (collective) and attributable (individual) contribution models.
The pooled investment vehicle for data-derived assets. May aggregate certified data, enter commercial agreements, and generate returns for participants under SEC oversight and fiduciary responsibility.
Transparent accounting; fair distribution; regulated as an investment structure.
Universal Basic Income treats displaced workers as casualties requiring compensation rather than participants capable of generating new forms of value.
It operates on the premise that human economic contribution has become obsolete — a premise that misdiagnoses the problem. AI systems require continuous streams of human-generated data to function and improve.
A UBI is a transfer. It creates no asset, no institution, no compounding wealth, no claim on the productive system that is replacing human labor.
The Data Savings Act recognizes data generation as a legitimate form of economic contribution. The same way a factory worker's hours fund a pension, a citizen's continuous digital participation would fund their future.
Participation becomes ownership. Contribution becomes a compounding financial asset held in a personal account, professionally managed, fiduciary-protected.
UBI compensates for exclusion. Data Savings rewards inclusion.
You keep your money in the bank. Your data is in the Cloud. You can receive, wire, deposit, and withdraw your money — and you can save it. You have no equivalent control over your data. Others manage and benefit from it.
Banks and telecom carriers operate on interchange fees. When you swipe a credit card, the merchant's bank pays your bank. When a carrier routes a call, fees flow between networks. This infrastructure is what makes the entire financial and communications system function — and it is what returns value to originators.
The Cloud has no equivalent. When a platform monetizes your data, nothing flows back to you. Cloud Interchange Fees would change that — charges levied on cloud platforms for the monetization or transfer of user-generated data, routed into individual Data Savings Accounts.
The numbers are not speculative. The three largest hyperscalers — AWS, Azure, Google Cloud — collectively run at over $400 billion annually and are investing $260+ billion in 2025 alone to build AI infrastructure. A 3–10% Cloud Interchange on that base would unlock $100–300 billion annually — on top of the $500B–$1T in currently uncaptured consumer data monetization.
One million participants across three priority cohorts: gig-economy workers, healthcare data contributors, and financially underserved populations. Priority entry points: California (leveraging CCPA infrastructure) or a federal Treasury pilot vehicle.
Scale pilot outcomes. Stand up the Cloud Interchange framework in coordination with the Treasury, FTC, and SEC. License the first wave of Authorized Data Agents. Introduce DSA portability standards.
Data Savings Act enacted. Every American with a digital footprint has the right to a Data Savings Account. Tax-advantaged contributions. Fiduciary oversight. A new institutional category of wealth — as ordinary as a 401(k) is today.
Full access to and control over personal data held in any DSA.
Voluntary and revocable participation in any Data Savings Plan.
Transparent reporting of value generated and distributed.
The ability to transfer, modify, or terminate participation without loss of accrued value.
Protection from retaliation or denial of service for exercising these rights.
The right to own, save, exchange, invest, and pay with data.
The Data Savings Act does not replace existing privacy protections, including those established under the California Consumer Privacy Act or any applicable federal statute. It extends existing rights into the domain of economic participation.
If you believe the AI economy deserves the same institutional seriousness that America once brought to the industrial one — sign below. Your signature becomes part of a public record sent to the Treasury Task Force, the Senate Banking Committee, and the relevant tech industry leadership.