Information: The Silo I Spent a Decade Breaking

Every category so far had a handicap: the waste was physical. Slag is heavy, heat cools down, a harvester can only be in one field. Now remove the handicap. Information is the only resource on the map you can trade without losing (share a dataset and you still have the dataset) and it travels at the speed of light for approximately nothing. By every rule in this book, data should be the most traded waste on earth.

It is the least. The European Commission, preparing its data legislation, put a number on the back door that stays shut: around eighty percent of industrial data is never used.¹ Not shared and used by others: never used at all. Collected by sensors somebody paid for, stored on servers somebody pays for, backed up, secured, and then nothing. Four of every five bytes, dead on arrival. If the 97 percent is the economy's biggest locked room, data is the key rusting inside it.