Social Data’s Role in Law and Political Economy

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

Abstract

Over the past several years, the digital economy has seen 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.

In what follows, I synthesize recent scholarship to canvass three ways legal scholarship can (and in my view, should) approach thinking about the data political economy. First, data as a commodity or key value form under informationalized capitalism. Second, data as neither a natural resource nor pure extension of individual personhood, but as a constructed and enacted social relation. Third, data as both a subject of law, and itself a means of governing—a form of power.

The three ways to think of data offered here should not be read as staking out hard conceptual fault lines. These approaches can be carved up into greater or smaller parts than three, and the separation between these approaches is contestable—indeed, they are different aspects of the same social processes. The dynamics or insights the three approaches illuminate are deeply interrelated, both as phenomena in the political economy, and conceptually, as categories of analysis by which to make sense of and intervene in the world. However, the three approaches do offer a helpful way to carve up distinct starting positions for encountering the political economy of data, and the way it can upend, confound, and exacerbate legal issues.

This Chapter’s goal is to describe these approaches. One result is that it does not dive into legal specifics. However, several legal issues tend to follow from the approaches. For example, how law contributes to the content and substance of information as form of value and means of exercising power. Or how law can protect and encase data value and data power and thus thwart popular or democratic efforts to remake and equalize data relations. Or how political economic transformations can drive transformations in the purpose and subject of a legal regime.

Finally, the goal of this Chapter is to synthesize and distill the legal scholarship that takes one or more of these approaches to the political economy of social data. At the risk of flattening complex lines of debate and repeating basic views, I at least aim to make explicit some simple starting positions that guide my own work, and that, I believe, frames the work of other scholars who offer valuable insight into the political economy of data. Stating these plainly and in one place may offer others interested in such an approach (or critiquing such an approach), a useful starting point.

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