Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Over the past several years, the digital economy has been a notable uptick in interest from scholars across areas of law. This should come as no surprise. The digital economy encompasses some of the largest companies in the world, whose business models pioneer and spread new strategies to concentrate private power across the political economy more broadly. Digital companies have transformed commercial and social life, and they raise problems of concentrated private power. They are also charged with a slew of downstream disruptions resulting from collective pursuit of that power: global, social, and interpersonal forms of dislocation, oppression, impoverishment, alienation, and a range of other harms.

Key to understanding—and thus intervening on—the law and political economy of these dynamics is an understanding of information itself. Relatedly, for legal scholars interested in how law structures power (and vice versa) it can be helpful to pay close attention to how information features in strategies to accumulate and exercise power, and how law both facilitates and challenges those strategies. This Chapter will focus on information in the form of social data—the material store, in digital form, of information about people. Such data can be collected directly from a data subject but doesn’t have to be. Data about one person can be collected from another. Indeed, social data need not be collected directly from people at all, if such data can be used to reliably infer human behavior or activity.

Comments

This is a draft chapter/article. The final version is available in the Research Handbook on Law and Political Economy edited by John D. Haskell, published in 2025, Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803921198.00036

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