Copyright and other industries capture our data to sell which produces a harmful competition over our attention. This attention economy creates new profit possibilities for industry conglomerates.

A final set of strategies for multi-dimensional commodification involves skimming, or appropriating the data traces generated by an underlying resource, by natural phenomena, or by commercial or social activity. Once converted into streams of data, the information can be combined and processed to identify underlying patterns and devise services that exploit the patterns to generate profits. As noted in Part 2, one type of skimming strategy that features prominently in the political economy of informational capitalism involves data harvested from people and populations. A related strategy, pioneered by social media companies, appropriates the data traces from user generated content posted online. Notably, this model leveraged widespread resistance to early enforcement efforts by the major copyright industries, which sought to transpose their own slicing-based strategies for clearing rights at scale to public-facing online environments.15 As an alternative, online intermediaries developed a different model that leverages large amounts of highly granular viewing and listening data collected from the very same users who sought open access to online content.16 That model, however, looks very different than the one that the original open-access activists envisioned. In its mature form, it combines advertising revenues with slicing and tethering strategies targeting different user and right holder populations. Multi-dimensional commodification strategies merit careful attention from scholars of constitutionalism for two reasons, both involving the ways that such strategies redistribute economic power. First, multi-dimensional commodification arrangements bite with special force on fictitious commodity resources—the resources whose status within a system of political economy has such profound implications for human and social wellbeing. Land, labor, money, natural resources, and people may not have been created by or for the market, but data about them appears to suffer from no such deficiency. When generated and extracted in an environment offering sufficient flexibility and processing power, it can be manipulated to generate seemingly infinite new profit possibilities.17 Multi-dimensional commodification strategies enable the isolation and perfection of interests in old and new fictitious commodities that are more neatly amenable to economic exploitation than the underlying resources would be. Often, the new ventures can be designed to operate in ways largely unconstrained by preexisting protective regulation—for example, by substituting gig work arrangements for formal employment arrangements that would be subject to protective labor regulation, by devising new instruments for extracting rents from land and those living on it, or by concocting complex mechanisms for profiting from underlying financial dealings without engaging the various forms of banking, investor protection, and consumer protection regulation to which those dealings are subject.18 Such ventures can appear to be appealing investments for a variety of reasons. As capital flows into arrangements for layering, slicing, tethering, and skimming, however, the apparent economic imperatives surrounding configuration and exploitation of such arrangements grow commensurately, creating powerful new pressures on distribution and control of the underlying resources—and on the human beings and human societies that they affect. Second, multi-dimensional commodification strategies, and the scaled-up information processing and service delivery operations upon which they increasingly rely, tend to engender specialized intermediation arrangements—and those arrangements, in turn, can come to embody large concentrations of economic power. (The exceptions tend to involve multi-dimensional commodification ventures operated by large, sophisticated entities that can provide scaled-up information processing and service delivery for themselves.) For these reasons, moreover, multi- dimensional commodification strategies tend to elicit and thrive within a particular set of structural and organizational logics, to which I turn next.