CIPIL Evening Seminar: 'Governing After the Digital Phase Shift'

Speaker: Professor Julie Cohen, Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law & Technology, Georgetown Law 

Biography: Julie E. Cohen is the Mark Claster Mamolen Professor of Law and Technology and a faculty co-director of the Institute for Technology Law and Policy at the Georgetown University Law Center. She teaches and writes about surveillance, privacy and data protection, intellectual property, information platforms, and the ways that networked information and communication technologies are reshaping legal institutions. She is the author of Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2019); Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, 2012), which won the 2013 Association of Internet Researchers Book Award and was shortlisted for the Surveillance & Society Journal’s 2013 Book Prize; and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

Abstract: This lecture will introduce an early-stage book project. It will advance and discuss two propositions: First, the emergence of networked digital technologies has catalyzed a transformation in political economy that moves on both structural and molecular levels. I use the metaphor of a chemical phase shift—a transformation in the nature and structure of component-level interactions that dramatically alters systemic behavior—to describe the digital transformation. Although considerable attention today is focused on giant technology platforms that dominate search, social networking, and commerce, it is equally important to highlight a set of parallel structural transformations in finance and to underscore the deep and persistent entanglements between the two domains. Across both domains, the emergence of networked, programmable, platformized digital infrastructures and supply chains has enabled seamless, flexible reconfiguration and exploitation of activities and resources of all kinds. The first part of the book will map the digital phase shift, linking it to the emergence of vast constellations of power that have come to seem unknowable and ungovernable. In fact, they are neither, but to see them clearly, it is important to begin by jettisoning some basic preconceptions about how economic and social activities are connected and arranged.

Second, the digital phase shift has confounded existing legal and governance regimes in part because it has given rise to a novel mode of power that is infrastructural. As instantiations of private power, networked digital infrastructures have presented thorny conceptual and practical challenges for political regimes of all persuasions. Even if such environments were to be publicly built and operated, however, their operations would flout traditionally understood rule of law precepts (such as general and prospective application) and resist conventional modes of political and bureaucratic control and accountability. The second part of the book will develop a clear and rigorous account of infrastructural power and use it to shed light on the challenges now confronting various governance experiments underway around the world. (The third part of the book, which I’m not yet ready to discuss in any detail, will develop a set of principles for effective public governance of infrastructural power.)

Please note: this event is a hybrid event - it will take place in person in the Cambridge Law Faculty. For those who are unable to make it in person, please register to attend via Zoom.