The concept of Chicago’s new social media amusement tax makes sense: Platforms profit by extracting and monetizing personal data, and that extraction should be taxed with some value returned to society. But the tax’s structure reveals a misunderstanding of how surveillance capitalism really works.
By taxing the collection of data rather than the ownership of it, Chicago quietly prices access to a resident’s entire digital life at 50 cents, once.
Under the ordinance, which will likely be challenged, the city imposes a 50-cent monthly tax on social media companies for each Chicago user above a 100,000-user threshold, levied on the …
