This course will cover the digital political economy, particularly on the commercial development and use of digital technologies such as AI and digital platforms. The course will pair foundational texts with current legal scholarship on computerization, mass media communication, surveillance, and behaviorism. The aim of the course is to provide historical and theoretical perspective on digital technologies and their social impacts, and to apply that perspective to evaluate legal approaches to understanding and regulating digital society.
The course will be organized around major features of digital systems and relevant areas of law. Topics will include some of the following: 1) the datafication of life (and the assetization of data), and how privacy, trade secrecy law, and labor law have facilitated and hampered datafication, 2) attention and engagement maximization, and how these business strategies raise consumer protection and online speech issues, 3) the physical computing hardware of digital life and the geopolitics and supply chain constraints that shape computing power, 4) digital platforms (TikTok, IG, Uber, DoorDash, Amazon)—how they work technically as matching mechanisms, and the possible antitrust issues they raise as well as Section 230 legal immunity platforms enjoy for hosted speech, 5) genAI, the ongoing copyright issues AI raises, and other proposed legal solutions to AI-based harms.