SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, TWO HORNS OF THE DILEMMA: DIGITAL LIBERTARIANISM AND DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM

  • Kyle Lauriston Smith

Abstract

In the article “Thomas Aquinas, Ronald Dworkin, and the Fourth Revolution: Law in the Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” I argued that Surveillance Capitalism – an emerging economic model highlighted by Shoshana Zuboff – operates at the level of social imaginary and emergent law. In this context, I compared the thought of Ronald Dworkin and Thomas Aquinas on the foundations of law and articulated three distinct foundations of moral and legal reasoning. First, moral and legal norms are grounded in ontological norms – or descriptive ought statements that effectively (though imperfectly) articulate the interactions of powers and possibilities in an inherently orderly cosmos. Second, they operate within the horizon of custom. I analyzed custom in terms of social imaginary and emergent law and recognized some tension between these concepts – we must balance the role of the community and the individual in understanding how custom comes about and influences human behavior. Third, I argued that moral and legal reasoning rely upon virtuous exemplars in their formation and that they aim at developing both individual and communal virtue in their application. Surveillance Capitalism presents a threat to these three foundations because it seeks to operate primarily within an economy of attention and only secondarily in an economy of action. By doing so, those who employ and benefit from Surveillance Capitalism hope to shape the customs that ground the rule of law. Finally, considering this I argued that law and policy approaches are insufficient as a sole or primary response to the challenges posed by Surveillance Capitalism. Law and policy do play a role in an effective response, but they must be developed in tandem with and in support of personal habits and communal virtues in both the general populace and in the data engineering and science community. To these areas of focus, we may add the development of technologies that actively protect both privacy and reasonable freedom.

References

Adam, Alison. (2022). “Postcolonialism and Technologies of Identification.” Pages 211 to 230 in the Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Technology. Edited by Shannon Vallor. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Enos, Olivia. (2023). “Centralizing Power and the Heavy Hand of the Regime: The International Challenges of Technology and Human Rights.” Pages 263 to 293 in The Digital Public Square: Christian Ethics in a Technological Socie-ty. Edited by Jason Thacker. Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic.
Klar, Rebecca. (2023). “AI ‘Wild West’ Raises National Security Concerns.” The Hill. Irving, TX: Nexstar Media. [Online]: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3888433-ai-wild-west-raises-national-security-concerns/.
Leamer, Nathan. (2023). “The Wild West of Tech Policy: A Convergence of Optimism and Pessimism in the United States,” Pages 43 to 72 in The Digital Public Square: Christian Ethics in a Technological Society. Edited by Jason Thacker. Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic.
Lee, Doowan and Brandao, Shannon. (2021). “Huawei is Bad for Business.” Foreign Policy. [Online]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/30/huawei-china-business-risk/.
Lessig, Larry. (2015). “Deja’vu All Over Again: Thinking Through Law and Code, Again.” Presentation at Coalition of Automated Legal Applications Workshop. Sydney: Coala Workshops. [Online]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcYJTIbhYF0.
News Release. (2019). “China’s Algorithms of Repression.” Human Rights Watch. [Online]: https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/05/01/chinas-algorithms-repression/reverse-engineering-xinjiang-police-mass.
Polyakova, Alina and Meserole, Chris. (2019). “Exporting Digital Authoritarianism: The Russian and Chinese Op-tions.” In Democracy and Disorder: The Struggle for Influence in the New Geopolitics. Washington, DC: Brookings Insti-tute. [Online]: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FP_20190827_digital_authoritarianism_polyakova_meserole.pdf
Thaler, Richard and Sunstein, Cass. (2021). Nudge: The Final Edition. New York, NY: Penguin.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019a. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: Public Affairs.
Zuboff, Soshana. 2019b. Surveillance Capitalism and Democracy. Lecture at the Alexander von Humbolt Institute for Internet and Society. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ0josfRzp4 (accessed on 9 August 2022).
Published
2023-08-21
How to Cite
Smith, K. L. (2023). SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, TWO HORNS OF THE DILEMMA: DIGITAL LIBERTARIANISM AND DIGITAL AUTHORITARIANISM. IJRDO Journal of Law and Cyber Crime, 3(1), 1-4. Retrieved from http://cpcalendars.ijrdo.org/index.php/lcc/article/view/5761