A new social contract for technology

Abstract

The tides of public sentiment in the United States have turned squarely against Silicon Valley's leading internet firms. Long-running Congressional inquiries; employee-led backlashes and news leaks; expert analyses that have uncovered deep-rooted social concerns; and aggressive journalistic inquiry-these and other actions have pushed the executives of America's most successful technology firms under the public microscope. Around the world, there is clear nonpartisan concern about the unaccountable ways that technology companies have invaded personal privacy, threatened the viability of traditional forms of work and the economic welfare they provide to workers, and challenged the backbone of democracy and free press. There seems to be increasing consensus that the commercial internet has become a privately controlled public sphere in which citizens are exposed to a multitude of perspectives all on the same "playing field." This paper's contribution is to argue for the need of a "social contract" for technology-a set of principles that technology corporations and states must adhere to so as to ensure that we overcome the zero-sum path we are headed to today.

Have your cake and feed it forward too: YouTube, oral cravings and the persistent question of media addiction

“…However, also below such ideals, corporate digital platforms, in line with other cultural-industrial branches, have reached a point at which unfettered growth is no longer sustainable and cannot be upheld as an unblemished aim. Instead, after the era of growth, an era of maturity needs to be rung in (cf., Srinivasan and Ghosh, 2023). Such maturity, in turn, must go together with the clear resolution on the part of national and international governing bodies that 'big tech' needs to be reined in and regulated.…”

Crowdfunding platforms as conduits for ideological struggle and extremism: On the need for greater regulation and digital constitutionalism

“…Moreover, though pragmatic arguments suggest a human rights‐based framework offers reasonably firm grounds on which to build substantive models of platform governance (Suzor et al, 2018; Suzor, Dragiewicz, et al, 2019), it is inevitable that even ‘good‐faith actors’ will interpret such rights ‘in radically different ways’ (Haggart & Keller, 2021, p. 4). Similarly, thought‐provoking and praiseworthy calls for ‘a new social contract’ for internet regulation (Srinivasan & Ghosh, 2023) may prove hard to operationalize in irreconcilably Manichean contexts where one platform doggedly insists on personal liberty while another prioritizes collective safety. This was apparent in GiveSendGo's insistence that the suppression of speech is more dangerous than any speech itself, which clashed sharply with GoFundMe's harm minimizing stance.…”

Democracy in the digital era

“…Previous contributors to this journal have also shown how the dominance of the internet by a handful of large monopolistic companies is at odds with a democratic system of governance because it places private actors who are not accountable to the voting public in a position of immense power (Srinivasan & Ghosh, 2023). The “big tech” companies have the power to regulate global socio‐technical systems, control the flow of information in society, and manipulate markets, all of which is a concentration of power that is at odds with democratic principles of accountability.…”