Between Truth and Power

Abstract

This book explores the relationships between legal institutions and political and economic transformation. It argues that as law is enlisted to help produce the profound economic and sociotechnical shifts that have accompanied the emergence of the informational economy, it is changing in fundamental ways. We are witnessing the emergence of legal institutions adapted to the information age, but their form and their substance remain undetermined and are the subjects of intense struggle. One level for legal-institutional transformation involves baseline understandings of entitlement and disentitlement. Both lawyers and laypeople tend to think of legal entitlements as relatively fixed, but the ongoing transformation in political economy has set things in motion in ways that traditional accounts do not contemplate. In particular, the datafication of important resources and the shift to a platform-based, massively intermediated communications environment have profoundly reshaped both the organization of economic activity and the patterns of information exchange. The authority of platforms is both practical and normative, and it has become both something taken for granted and a powerful force reshaping the law in its own image. Another level for legal-institutional transformation involves the structure and operation of regulatory and governance institutions. Patterns of institutional change in the networked information era express a generally neoliberalized and managerialist stance toward the law’s projects and processes. They reflect deeply embedded beliefs about the best uses of new technological capabilities to manage legal and regulatory processes and account for activities of legal and regulatory concern.

Left to Other Peoples’ Devices? A Political Economy Perspective on the Big Data Revolution in Development

“…As Julie Cohen has described in relation to advanced economies, businesses have powerful incentives to shape digital infrastructures in ways that make ‘unfettered collection the default position’ while obscuring ‘the distributive politics of appropriation’ (Cohen, ). She suggests that information and technology firms have made a concerted effort to shift public discourse away from the need for privacy and towards the valorization of greater data disclosure by members of the public (see also Puschmann and Burgess, ).…”

“…While actors such as UN Global Pulse and WEF have framed such efforts as a ‘win‐win’ for everyone involved, these projects fit within a broader political economy (Cohen, ; Lyon, 2007/2014). Drives for greater emission, personalization and centralization reinforce corporate strategies seeking control over Africa's economic information infrastructures.…”

Proceduralizing control and discretion: Human oversight in artificial intelligence policy

“…''The ongoing processes of judicial retrenchment and reconfiguration are the products of a complex encounter between the liberal-activist paradigm underlying the traditional, courtcentred system of procedural justice, the affordances that networked digital technologies offer for large-scale information aggregation and processing, and the ascendant ideology of neoliberal governmentality.'' 13 If human oversight is the solution, what is the problem? Karen Yeung conceptualises problems caused by algorithmisation by differentiating between (i) process-based concerns, (ii) outcome-focused concerns and (iii) predictive personalisation of services.…”

“…As Cohen states, legal institutions are not fixed but instead influence and are influenced by managerial economic logic and affordances of technological structures. 46 Yeung and Lodge emphasise the cumulative effect of legal and technological normativity, where the technological design is applied for regulatory purposes, creating new forms of control. 47 This normativity of technological architecture has long been recognised, some declaring it sui generis 48 and others arguing for a more generic concept of normativity that would not differentiate between regulatory and technological design.…”

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“…However, as we engage in online life, we not only perceive being subtly watched by an external power but also employ surveillance tools from within in many contexts and for many purposes [Accoto C., 2019]. Surveillance is indeed welcomed as a means to attain greater security, convenience, and efficiency [Cohen J., 2016] and only seldom queried or resisted as being inappropriate or excessive [Lyon D., 2018: 151].…”