The Ownership Gap: Digital Capital and the Structure of Economic Recognition

This book identifies and analyzes a structural condition in contemporary capital formation termed the ownership gap: the divergence between those who materially contribute to the formation of durable capital systems and those who hold residual ownership claims over the resulting assets. The argument proceeds in four stages. First, it examines how codification, persistent measurement, and large-scale aggregation transform distributed human participation into formative input at the capital formation stage — a threshold at which activity becomes asset without altering ownership. Second, it identifies two engines that drive this divergence: automation without continuity, which transfers accumulated expertise from human actors into owned infrastructure, and participation as infrastructure, which converts ongoing human activity into the substrate of durable capital systems. Third, it evaluates why the policy instruments most commonly proposed in response — competition enforcement, income redistribution, consent mechanisms, and jurisdictional containment — are structurally downstream of the formation stage and do not address the origin of asymmetry. Fourth, it introduces the Human Capital Trust as a directional institutional construct, identifies three structural features distinguishing ownership-based correction from antitrust and redistributive instruments, and specifies operational dimensions for governance, beneficiary determination, and surplus-flow accounting. The ownership gap is distinguished from adjacent arguments concerning wage suppression, market concentration, and behavioral surveillance. It is an architectural condition, embedded at the moment capital forms and shown to compound over time through persistence, irreversibility, and intergenerational transmission of ownership claims. The paper argues that ownership categories, which have historically evolved in response to shifts in capital formation logic, may require recalibration under contemporary conditions of digital capital accumulation.