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This lecture, titled "More Data, More Power? Towards a Theory of Digital Legitimacy," is based on a paper Amanda Greene co-authored with Samuel Gilbert.
Companies like Facebook have immense power, and they accumulate data on a scale that is historically unprecedented. Are these two things linked? A logic of “more data, more power” seems to offer a diagnosis of illegitimate digital power and a remedy for it, such as regulations that limit data collection. In this talk, Amanda Greene will call into question the logic of “more data, more power” and consider some other ways of thinking about digital power and its legitimacy. The old models of sovereign power and structural power are also inadequate, because they fail to accommodate something crucial: the fact that digital power is an empowering power. Companies like Facebook empower users to interact through versatile permission structures. Drawing on Searle’s theory of institutions and Hart’s theory of a legal system, Greene and her co-author, Samuel Gilbert, show how these permission structures facilitate the creation of new powers through a process of collective recognition and acceptance. They consider how entities that provide us with such versatile—and thus unsteerable—means of empowerment can come to be legitimate, and they propose a new framework for digital legitimacy that can assign responsibility for the patterns of empowerment and disempowerment that are sustained by companies like Facebook.
About the speaker:
Amanda Greene is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at University College London. At UCL she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in legal and political philosophy, as well as contributing to the core courses in the European Social and Political Studies Programme. Her research examines the nature of legitimate political authority, especially as it relates to democracy and political realism. She also writes about free speech, human rights, and the morality of markets. She is currently completing a book entitled The Morality of Power: Legitimacy in Politics, Business, and Civil Society. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University, M.Phil. from Oxford University, and B.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill. She has held research fellowships at the University of Chicago Law School, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva. Before entering academia, she worked as a strategy consultant for the Boston Consulting Group and as a development advisor for NGOs in India and Australia.