The Datalism Observatory

The data economy is already here.
It's logic is poorly understood.

Most institutions are trying to understand the data economy using frameworks built for another era.

The Datalism Observatory tracks how digital systems are reorganising work, value, infrastructure, institutions, and power. It brings together emerging evidence, research, data, and technical experiments to identify structural change before it becomes conventional wisdom.

This is a space for sustained attention to the forces shaping the next decade.

The Observatory is a working laboratory. New signals, tools, research, and experimental outputs will appear here as they are developed.

Latest Signals

Early signs of structural change often appear before there is a settled language for describing them.

Here we collect developments across technology, markets, regulation, organisational design, and infrastructure that may indicate where value, power, and dependency are moving. We aim to publish new insights here every month, with fuller details on our Substack.

July 2026 baseline. Each mark represents one informative domain. The 51 filled marks show domains that admitted Googlebot while blocking at least one AI training crawler. The remaining 50 domains displayed other access patterns. This is a baseline, not yet a trend.

Is the web developing a price system for machine use - and, if so, who has the power to set the price?

What we track

Work and Automation

Digital systems are changing how work is divided between people, platforms, algorithms, and machines. We track how these shifts affect employment, skills, organisational control, and the distribution of value, and what institutions need to understand in response.

Value and Power

Under Datalism, value increasingly emerges through data accumulation, network effects, prediction, automation, and control of digital infrastructure. We examine how these dynamics create new forms of market power, dependency, and economic coordination.

Institutions and Governance

Governments, regulators, and established organisations often respond to digital change one technology at a time. We examine how institutions can move beyond reactive approaches and develop governance models suited to the deeper logic of the data economy.

Infrastructure and resilience

The data economy depends on physical infrastructure, energy, natural resources, and complex global supply chains. We track how these dependencies shape digital resilience, environmental impact, geopolitical exposure, and the ability of societies and institutions to withstand disruption.