CITIZEN DREX - WHO RECEIVES THE DATA DIVIDEND?

From the Body-Territory to State Income

A person opens their eyes.

Before placing their feet on the floor, their body has already been working throughout the night.

It breathed.

It repaired tissues.

It organized memories.

It regulated temperature.

It dreamed.

Upon waking, the person touches a phone. The platform records the time, the approximate location, the sequence of clicks, the time spent looking at one image, and the speed with which another is abandoned.

The body continues producing signals.

Yet none of these processes appear on a payroll.

The economy usually calls something “work” only when it can be contracted, measured, commanded, and converted into income. But from the first cellular process to the final gesture, human life remains continuously active.

Not every activity produces commodities.

Not every activity increases someone’s wealth.

Not every activity needs to generate profit in order to possess value.

A child learns a word and expands a language.

An older person preserves a community’s memory.

A mother remains awake beside a feverish child.

A person with reduced mobility teaches the city to recognize barriers that other bodies do not perceive.

A young person speaks with someone who was thinking about giving up.

None of these events need to appear in the gross domestic product in order to sustain a society.

Perhaps the problem is not only who gets paid for work.

Perhaps it is a social organization that requires every life to prove its usefulness before recognizing its right to exist with dignity.

When “work” becomes a colonial word

The problem is not only the origin of the word “work.”

It is the way colonial modernity organized its meaning.

To work came to mean placing the body, time, and attention at the disposal of an external structure of accumulation.

The landowner.

The emperor.

The Crown.

The factory.

The proprietor.

The bank.

The platform.

The person produces, but another structure determines what possesses value, how much will be paid, and who will keep the excess.

Essential activities such as caring, cooking, listening, teaching, raising children, or supporting people during illness have frequently been treated as natural, familial, or feminine obligations.

At the same time, financial operations capable of generating returns through interest, arbitrage, asset appreciation, or price fluctuations are recognized as sophisticated economic activities, even when they produce no food, water, housing, or concrete improvement for the community.

This does not mean that all credit or financial activity is useless. Financing can make housing, research, businesses, and infrastructure possible.

The problem begins when the economy broadly rewards the speculative circulation of wealth but demands that care prove its productivity.

Financialization has also reached Brazilian households. The expansion of credit can relieve immediate needs, but it can also increase structural vulnerability, especially when low-income people must continuously borrow to sustain everyday life.

Debt purchases future time.

The platform captures present time.

Between the two, the Body-Territory is kept permanently occupied.

Human societies did not begin by abandoning those who could not produce

An idea is often repeated about humanity: in ancient societies, only strong and productive individuals could survive.

Archaeological remains tell a more complex story.

Argentine researchers studied the skeleton of a Late Holocene hunter-gatherer in Patagonia who survived a severe fracture of the tibial plateau. The injury would have greatly restricted mobility. The healing process indicates that the person probably received direct assistance with basic activities and, later, adaptations that allowed some degree of autonomy to be recovered.

In a broader study published in 2025, Victoria Romano, Gustavo Flensborg, and Alejandro Serna analyzed the remains of 189 individuals from Patagonia. Around 20 percent displayed traumatic injuries. The most serious cases would have required intensive care and a reorganization of group activities. Mobile people altered their routines so that temporarily or permanently immobilized individuals could remain alive.

At the Windover site in Florida, a young person of approximately fifteen years lived with a severe congenital spinal condition, progressive loss of mobility, infections, and limb atrophy. Survival for so many years has been interpreted as evidence of sustained attention and care around 7,500 years ago.

In Tennessee, the analysis of a young woman from the Mississippian period identified chronic disease, physical limitations, and probable practices of care. Her place in the community was not reduced to what her body could materially produce.

In the Andes, historical records and recent studies describe specific social categories for people with bodily differences, chronic illnesses, and disabilities. In Tawantinsuyu, the hank’akuna could be exempted from certain obligations, receive community care, and perform functions aligned with their possibilities.

This does not make the Inca Empire a universally benevolent society. It does, however, demonstrate that reduced productive capacity did not necessarily mean exclusion from social existence.

Archaeology cannot prove which emotions motivated every act of care.

But healed bones can demonstrate one thing:

Someone remained alive because other people reorganized life around them.

The community did not first ask how much that person would produce after recovery.

It cared so that the person could remain among its people.

The Body-Territory should not have to deserve the State

In the BrainLatam hypothesis, the Body-Territory is—or should be—the smallest unit of the State.

The State does not begin in the palace.

It does not begin in the central bank.

It does not begin in the corporation.

It does not even begin in the municipality.

It begins in each living body, situated within a community and dependent on water, food, care, relationships, and a Biome.

Territory is not only the external space surrounding the body.

It enters through breathing.

Through water.

Through food.

Through language.

Through fear.

Through information.

Through affection.

If the Body-Territory is the smallest unit of the State, it should not receive public resources only when it proves poverty, incapacity, or productivity.

It should permanently participate in public wealth because it constitutes the State itself.

This is where State Income begins.

It would not be a salary.

It would not be a pension.

It would not be an emergency benefit.

It would not be government charity.

It would not be payment for clicking, working, or providing data.

It would be a permanent, individual, and unconditional monetary flow delivered to every Body-Territory as the material expression of citizenship.

Operationally, it could use a future public retail central bank digital currency: Citizen Drex.

Brazil’s official Drex continues to be developed and tested as a tokenized financial infrastructure. It does not currently correspond to universal income deposited directly by the State into the accounts of the entire population.

Citizen Drex and State Income are BrainLatam hypotheses, not functions currently announced by the Central Bank of Brazil.

The State does not pay for usefulness; it recognizes its smallest unit

State Income would not be granted because every person produces the same amount of value.

It would be granted because no person should be required to produce market value in order to possess the right to material existence.

A child receives it because the child is a Body-Territory.

A person with a disability receives it because they are a Body-Territory.

An unemployed person receives it because they are a Body-Territory.

An older person receives it because they are a Body-Territory.

A person who produces a great deal also receives it because the right does not depend on the humiliation of proving need.

Universality prevents the State from transforming income into an instrument of obedience.

No government could threaten to remove the income because a person criticized an authority, refused a particular job, or voted for another party.

The payment would not purchase submission.

It would recognize belonging.

The difference from many income-transfer policies would lie in its foundation.

It would not merely be a policy against poverty.

It would be a constitutional reorganization:

If the Body-Territory is the smallest unit of the State, part of public money must begin with it.

Captured attention also produces wealth

Today, even when we are not formally working, we continue producing informational value.

The time spent in front of a screen allows content to be tested.

A pause reveals interest.

A movement helps predict routines.

Relationships allow profiles to be formed.

Emotions increase or reduce engagement.

Researchers have described how platforms combine attention capture, large-scale data analysis, and behavioral design to keep users connected and expand information extraction.

Within this system, habits that once appeared to belong to the person are reorganized by adaptive digital environments.

The citizen is not necessarily employed by the platform.

Yet their attention participates in the production of revenue.

It feeds advertising auctions, predictions, recommendations, model training, and corporate valuation.

Time was captured.

Data was extracted.

The prediction was sold.

And the person received another advertisement.

The body belongs to the citizen; mass extraction belongs to public sovereignty

Here, the analogy with the subsoil returns.

Land may belong to a citizen, but the mineral resources beneath it are constitutionally treated as public assets. Their exploitation requires authorization and may generate participation in the resulting wealth.

In the digital world, this principle could be adapted.

The body belongs to the citizen.

Their intimacy does not belong to the government.

Their religion, health, voice, face, conversations, and movements remain protected by individual rights.

Consent, when required, remains personal, informed, and revocable.

But mass economic extraction carried out across millions of Body-Territories should not be treated as a purely private relationship between each user and a platform.

When millions of traces are combined to create models, profiles, and predictions, a form of collective wealth emerges.

The proposal can be summarized as follows:

The Body-Territory belongs to the person.
Privacy belongs to the person.
Mass economic extraction is subject to public sovereignty.
The dividend returns to the population.

The State would not own thoughts or conversations.

It would be responsible for regulating the economic concession to extract value at scale.

Paying for the concession would not legalize violations of privacy.

No public contribution could purchase consent.

Rights would come first.

Then the limits of exploitation.

Finally, the distribution of wealth.

From data to State Income

Revenues obtained through the mass economic extraction of data could become part of a broader architecture for financing and legitimizing State Income.

This architecture could include:

contributions on behavioral advertising;

taxation of the commercialization of profiles and predictions;

public participation in the commercial training of models;

royalties from natural resources;

revenues from collective infrastructure;

environmental funds;

returns associated with Biome Income;

and public monetary issuance governed by transparent rules.

This does not mean that the State would need to collect exactly one unit of currency before distributing one unit of currency.

A monetarily organized State possesses instruments of issuance, taxation, credit, and macroeconomic management.

The political question is where money begins to circulate.

Today, a large share of money reaches the population as debt.

In the BrainLatam proposal, part of it would begin as belonging.

Citizen Drex would be the infrastructure.

State Income would be the right.

Data extraction would be one source of collective return, but it would not be a condition for receiving the income.

Even a person who does not use social media would remain a unit of the State.

Neuro Challenge Latam: how much of life would return if attention belonged to us?

The Neuro Challenge Latam can begin with a simple experience.

Imagine that every person already receives State Income through Citizen Drex.

Imagine also that communities receive Biome Income for preserving water, soils, forests, mangroves, and biodiversity.

Now open a social network.

Ask yourself:

How long would I remain here if my survival did not depend on visibility, promotion, or permanent availability?

Would I accept the same terms?

Would I tolerate the same amount of advertising?

Would I permit the same level of tracking?

Would I choose to dedicate part of this time to the community, care, rest, art, or the territory?

In experimental studies, EEG and NIRS could compare simple and complex privacy policies, contextual and behavioral advertising, payment with preserved rights or surrendered rights, and different forms of explanation.

These technologies could indicate effort, confusion, conflict, or withdrawal.

They could not determine whether a person had freely consented.

Nor could they calculate the value of a life.

The goal would be to reveal when an interface demands so much effort that the citizen eventually accepts without understanding.

But the larger question would remain political:

What informational choices become possible when the Body-Territory no longer negotiates its privacy from a position of need?

Life is not a résumé submitted to the State

We can return to the person who opened their eyes.

Throughout the day, they will care, remember, choose, forget, teach, rest, and leave traces.

Some of these activities will be called work.

Others will remain invisible.

Some will generate salaries.

Others will sustain lives without receiving payment.

But none of them should determine, by itself, that person’s right to participate in public wealth.

Ancient societies reorganized their movements to care for injured bodies.

Andean communities created social places for different bodily configurations.

Families still sustain, every day, what the economy does not know how to measure.

Perhaps our economic model is not advanced simply because it transforms everything into an asset.

Perhaps it is outdated because it still asks how much a body produces before asking what that body needs in order to remain alive.

State Income affirms something that comes before the market:

You do not receive because you proved yourself useful.
You receive because the State begins with you.

Citizen Drex would not be the price of our data.

It would be the recognition that every Body-Territory constitutes the smallest unit of a wealth that has always been collective.

Essential References

Romano, Victoria; Serna, Alejandro; Vega, Emiliano; Prates, Luciano. A Disabling Injury Reveals Interpersonal Care Among Hunter-Gatherers in Patagonia. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, 2022.

Romano, Victoria; Flensborg, Gustavo Ariel; Serna, Alejandro. Bone Trauma and Interpersonal Care Among Late Holocene Hunter-Gatherers from Patagonia, Argentina. International Journal of Paleopathology, 2025.

Correa Trigoso, Denis Elvis. An Approach to Public Policies for People with Physical Disabilities During the Inca Empire. Revista Española de Discapacidad, 2022.

Hechler, Ryan Scott. The Fourth Lifeway: Recognizing the Legacy of Bodily Difference and Disability Within the Inka Empire. Disability Studies Quarterly, 2022.

Posada, Julian. Embedded Reproduction in Platform Data Work. Information, Communication & Society, 2022.

Miceli, Milagros; Posada, Julian. The Data-Production Dispositif. 2022.

Grohmann, Rafael et al. Click Farm Platforms: An Updating of Informal Work in Brazil and Colombia. Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 2022.

Grohmann, Rafael et al. Platform Scams: Brazilian Workers’ Experiences of Dishonest and Uncertain Algorithmic Management. New Media & Society, 2022.

Braz, Matheus Viana; Mendes, Thiago Casemiro; Ferreira, Yasmin Alexandre. Managerialist Ideology and Data-Training Platforms for Artificial Intelligence: Working Conditions and Worker Health in Brazil. Reciis, 2022.

Ferreira, Camila Caroline de Oliveira. The Indebtedness of the Working Class in Brazil: Elements for Analysis Through the Category of Labor-Force Superexploitation. Serviço Social & Sociedade, 2023.

Cabello, Sebastián M. Analysis of Data Governance Models in the Public Sector: A View from Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and São Paulo. ECLAC, 2023.

González Zepeda, Luz Elena; Martínez Pinto, Cristina Elena. Artificial Intelligence Centered on Indigenous Peoples: Perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean. UNESCO, 2023.

Filgueiras, Fernando; Lui, Lizandro; Veloso, Maria Tereza Trindade. The Institutional Grammar of Data Protection and Privacy in Brazil. Dados, 2025.

ECLAC; CENIA. Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index 2025. 2025.

Central Bank of Brazil. Drex Pilot and First-Phase Reports. 2026.