Year: 2024-2025
Research Team Type: Faculty-led
Organizers: Sarah Song, the Milo Rees Robbins Chair in Legal Ethics Professor of Law, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science; Isabella Luisa Mariani, Graduate Student, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, Berkeley Law
The digital economy has penetrated nearly every aspect of our social and political lives. Our research seeks to examine the effects of this prolific phenomenon on our social and personal development, our ability to access basic needs like healthcare, and our political and legal institutions and culture. Specifically, we will examine the connection between data mining and algorithmic systems integral to online platforms with outcomes across public and private sectors. These sectors include private health insurance, online esports, marketing, and political and legal discourse.
We seek to understand what the mining of personal data and the construction of algorithms (including predictive algorithms) mean for our political community, considering issues of political radicalization, social and emotional development, access to basic needs, and epistemic and political rights such as freedom of speech and privacy.
Our approach is interdisciplinary in that we consider perspectives from Sociology, Political Science, Law, Philosophy, and Political Economy to address the social, political, and normative implications of the digital economy. Weaving these perspectives and their respective methodologies will enable us to grapple with the vast effects of the rise of digitality and the exploitation of personal data that sustains the digital economy, and what potential solutions private actors, politicians, and lawmakers have to address them.