How our local intermediaries will determine the future value of data.
*This is the first of a five-part series called Sequence of the Seashells, outlining decolonial data governance and translocal market infrastructure, which is all about describing how communities can reclaim authority over the compliance chains that determine the value of their own environmental and social data.
The sections are What is Data, The Crusoe Economy, The in-between space is a Caravanserai, Behold! The World Data Organization, and Translocal Intermediaries.Please share and subscribe!
What Is Data?
Data is and is not a resource. It is not sugar or oil, and the pipeline metaphor that has governed decades of technology policy has done more damage than it has produced insight. Oil is extracted, refined, and burned. Once it is gone, it is gone. Data does not behave this way. Value is accumulated through reciprocity. Data provides access, evidence, and relationships. And yet data is also a resource in the most consequential sense: it can be owned, enclosed, withheld, and weaponized. It can be made to serve accumulation rather than circulation, consolidation rather than equity. The same speck of information that empowers a community to make a land claim can, in the wrong hands, be used to dispossess it. Whether data functions as a commons or as a commodity is not a technical question. It is a question of governance — and governance requires intermediaries.
Long before the ledger, before the coin, before the debt tablet, value moved through reciprocity. The anthropological record is consistent on this: in gift economies, in potlatch systems, in the communal land management of Pacific Island communities, in the seasonal labor exchanges of peasant economies across every continent, value was not accumulated only by extraction, it was accumulated through circulation, obligation, and exchange. The quality and depth of the relationships through which things moved defined principled trust networks.
The anthropologist Marcel Mauss when discussing the hau in Maori exchange, describes the spirit of the gift. What he meant was that the object given carries the giver with it, and the obligation to return is not debt in the modern sense but the maintenance of a living relationship (Mauss 12). Value, on that account, is not a quantity. It is a measure of connection. We have not lost this. It survives in every community that still organizes around stewardship rather than ownership, around reciprocal obligation rather than contract. What a decolonial accounting program proposes should not be nostalgia for a pre-monetary past. It should simply be the recognition that these circuits of reciprocal value never disappeared, but were simply excluded from indigenous accounting ledgers. Restoring them does not require abolishing markets. It requires building the intermediary infrastructure through which reciprocal values can be measured, verified, and made legible to the institutions that currently pretend it does not exist.
Data is an immense speck
Dr. Seuss also understood this before the technologists did. In Horton Hears a Who!, the entire narrative turns on a speck of dust, a particle so small, so apparently inconsequential, that every other creature in the jungle dismisses it as nothing. Horton, the elephant, hears something in it. He hears a whole civilization: the Whos of Whoville, with their mayor and their children and their houses and their particular way of being alive. The speck is not nothing. The speck is everything to the Whos. The problem is not that the Whos lack existence. The problem is that the jungle’s accounting system has no category for them. They are too small to be visible, too distant to be heard, too easy to ignore when more powerful creatures have decided in advance what counts as real.
When we visualize data in all of it’s abstraction, it is difficult to think of it as something greater than a speck. Yet data is not only the abstracted, aggregated, platform-harvested data that fills the ledgers of surveillance capitalism but rather the granular, particular, qualitative signal generated by a community, a household, a mataqali, a fishing village, a displaced family living at the margin of a climate event. They are the sequence of seashells, and if we only see it as miniscule, it is easy to dismiss. In our economic global reality, however, the vehicle through which the 21st century’s relationship with technology is determined, data is precisely how we organize and manage economic systems. Whether it gets heard depends entirely on whether there is a Horton in the system — intermediaries with the structural capacity to listen, to verify, to amplify, and to hold the protocol that says: a person’s interaction is a value, no matter how small.
The standard argument for data markets runs like this: data is the new oil, and whoever controls the pipeline wins. That argument has served the consolidators well. It has not served the Global South. It has not served indigenous communities, peasant economies, displaced peoples, or the climate-vulnerable margins of every region. The pipeline metaphor is itself the problem and we are helplessly watching the unraveling of any genuine global security as it is being driven off a cliff by a handful of billionaire madmen seeking to control oil as if it contained an elixir of life.
Some Intermediary categories
The categories like Cooperative Warehousing and Storage Hubs, Regional Logistics Cooperatives, Digital Market Commons Platforms, Community Clearing and Accounting Systems, Circular Economy Fabrication Centers, Community Broadband and Cloud Infrastructure, Ecological Storage and Distribution Facilities, Health and Care Exchange Platforms, Community Insurance and Risk Pools, and Local Procurement and Fair-Trade Exchanges are not simply sectors. They are intermediary types. Each one is a node in a data market that, if properly constituted, can distribute value across communities rather than extract it upward.
This is the central argument: intermediaries are where value is produced, verified, and retained. Without them, data flows toward consolidation. With them, data becomes the basis for a new kind of infrastructure equity.
The Labor of Data and the Invisibility of Intermediary Work
Standard national accounting treats data as a byproduct of economic activity rather than as a product of labor in its own right. The System of National Accounts — the SNA, the framework that governs how governments measure economic output — records what is transacted. It counts the sale, the contract, the commodity that changes hands. What it does not count is what makes transaction possible in the first place: the verification work, the storage infrastructure, the consent protocols, the local knowledge that had to be translated into a form legible to the system before any of it could be used. This labor is real. It has costs. It has workers. It produces value. None of it appears in GDP.
The System of Environmental-Economic Accounting — SEEA — was developed precisely because GDP was recognized as inadequate for measuring ecological and social value. But SEEA inherits the same foundational assumption: value is what can be priced and transacted. Stewardship, reciprocity, and community governance of data and land do not have market prices in the conventional sense, so they remain at the margins of the framework, acknowledged in principle and undervalued in practice.
SDG-SNA-SEEA Harmonization
As preciously described in the Black Paper, the Sustainable Development Goals gesture toward this gap. The 2030 Agenda calls for data disaggregation, for leaving no one behind, for measuring what matters to communities rather than only what matters to markets. But the institutional apparatus through which the SDGs are measured — the harmonization of SDG indicators with the SNA and SEEA frameworks — routes that ambition back through the same accounting logic it was meant to challenge. The result is a system that can tell you the market value of a forest’s timber but not the governance value of the community that has stewarded it for generations.
Stewardship remains, as it has always been, off the books. And yet the intermediary infrastructure through which all of this data moves — the platforms, the clearing systems, the logistics networks, the cloud architecture, the financial instruments that bundle and price data assets — generates some of the largest concentrations of private wealth in human history. That infrastructure is not ungoverned. It is governed very precisely, by Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Brussels, and Geneva, under trade enforcement mechanisms centered in Washington. The communities whose labor, land, and ecological knowledge feed the system are off the books. The infrastructure that monetizes what they generate is not. That asymmetry is not an oversight. It is by design.
Intemerate accounting begins from the opposite premise. Value is not produced at the point of extraction. It is produced and sustained through the chain of stewardship, verification, and intermediation. A Cooperative Warehousing and Storage Hub is not simply a building. It is an accounting node. Every transaction that passes through it — every measurement of food stored, energy used, waste generated, labor contributed — is a data event. That data event has value. The question is who captures it, who verifies it, and who holds the protocol that determines its meaning and for whose benefit.
The intermediary holds the protocol. That is what gives intermediaries their structural importance, and that is why translocal data markets — markets organized around distributed, community-anchored intermediary networks — can produce equity outcomes that platform-based data markets cannot.
Qualitative Value and the Limits of Quantification
One of the persistent failures of natural capital accounting is its insistence that everything must be priced to be counted. Biodiversity offsets. Ecosystem services. Carbon credits. The logic is: if it has a price, the market will protect it. The evidence does not support this. What gets priced is what is already legible to the market. What is already legible to the market is what already belongs to the market’s frame of reference — which is to say, it belongs to the accumulation regime that produced the crisis in the first place.
Intemerate accounting rejects this substitution. Qualitative data — the kind generated by community journals, oral testimony, FPIC protocols, resilience scoring exercises, and participatory observation — is not a degraded form of quantitative data. It is a different register of measurement. It captures what the Variable Data Chart cannot: the texture of reciprocity, the social cost of displacement, the ecological knowledge embedded in a mataqali’s management of its land over generations.
The intermediary’s role here is not to translate qualitative data into a price. It is to hold qualitative data within a governance structure that protects its integrity while making it legible for capital access purposes. Community Clearing and Accounting Systems, Health and Care Exchange Platforms, and Community Insurance and Risk Pools all function in this register. They are not simply financial intermediaries. They are epistemological intermediaries. They mediate between the register of community knowledge and the register of institutional finance, without collapsing the first into the second. And quite simply, they should be benefit the most.
This is the distinction between measurable and non-measurable value that most accounting frameworks refuse to hold.
Protocol and Reciprocity as Accounting Infrastructure
The intermediary categories noted above are not politically neutral. They are constituted by protocols of reciprocity — rules about who contributes, who benefits, who holds the data, and under what conditions it can be used. Free, Prior, and Informed Consent is not only a legal obligation. It should be an accounting standard. It defines the terms under which community data enters the market. Without FPIC embedded in the intermediary’s operating protocol, the community data market becomes another extraction mechanism, dressed in cooperative language.
Regional Logistics Cooperatives and Translocal Procurement and Fair-Trade Exchanges are particularly important in this regard, because they operate at the translocal scale where the most important circulation decisions are made. Global supply chains are extractive because they are governed by protocols written at the top of the value chain. Translocal supply chains can be equitable if the protocols are written at the base — in the mataqali, the barrio, the fishing community, the urban informal settlement — and enforced through community clearing systems that make the terms of exchange visible and contestable.
New technologies make this enforceable in ways that were not available twenty years ago. In fact, the brand new World Data Organization, makes this more possible than it was in 2025. Distributed ledger systems, when governed by community protocols rather than by corporate intermediaries, can provide the immutable verification record that auditors need to certify compliance with FPIC and reciprocity standards. Community Broadband and Cloud Infrastructure is the prerequisite: without community-owned connectivity, the benefits of distributed ledger governance flow to the infrastructure owner, not to the community generating the data.
Small Economies, Large Stakes
Pacific Island Countries and Territories — including Hawaii as an occupied Pacific Island — are among the most vulnerable economies in the world to the current configuration of global data markets. Their ecological assets are substantial. Their data sovereignty is minimal. The Pacific Islands Data Hub concept addresses this directly: a regional data architecture governed by Pacific communities, using intemerate accounting standards to establish the value of ecological stewardship, social resilience, and cultural knowledge as assets in climate finance negotiations.
The same logic applies to indigenous communities in the Americas, displaced populations in conflict zones, peasant economies in the Global South, and poor communities everywhere that generate ecological and social value that the current accounting regime treats as externalities. These communities are not data-poor. They are data-rich and governance-poor. The translocal data market, built on intermediary infrastructure is the mechanism through which governance can be rebuilt from the base.
Circular Economy Fabrication Centers and Ecological Storage and Distribution Facilities belong in this analysis because they are where the material economy and the data economy intersect most concretely. A fabrication center that tracks material flows, repair cycles, and waste diversion is generating the granular ecological data that climate finance frameworks claim to need. The question is whether that data feeds into a community clearing system that retains the value locally, or into a platform-based market that extracts it.
Intemerate Accounts and the Transformation of Small Economies
In the original Sequence of the Seashell proposal, we identified a seven-layer compliance chain, each functioning as an intermediary for environmental data governance.
- Hana ʻikepili — data collection and generation
- Hoʻoponopono i ka ʻano — data cleaning and classification
- Hiki ke hahai ʻia ke kumu — traceability to source
- Hōʻoia ʻia e kekahi ʻaoʻao kūʻokoʻa — independent third-party verification
- Palapala hōʻoia — certification and documentation
- Kūpono no ke kālā — financial compliance and eligibility
- Hoʻoponopono hoʻopaʻapaʻa — dispute resolution and remedy
Kiaʻi puka — the gatekeeper — is the overarching function that governs entry and exit across the whole chain. It serves two purposes. The first is to make visible how OECD compliance chains extract, own, and leverage data value through their own gatekeeping institutions — the standards bodies, the rating agencies, the audit firms, the multilateral lenders — which determine who gets access to capital and on whose terms. The second is to demonstrate that local communities can build their own gatekeeping function: their own access rules, their own compliance standards, their own protocols for determining what enters the chain and what does not. The gatekeeper is not a neutral administrative role. It is where power over data value is actually exercised. The question is whether that power remains under neocolonial governance or in the community.
go to next: 2. Who wants a Crusoe Economy
Mauss, Marcel. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies. Translated by W.D. Halls, introduction by Mary Douglas, W.W. Norton, 1990.
Seuss, Dr. Horton Hears a Who! Random House, 1954.