HOW TO PARTICIPATE

Participants are invited to attend in-person in the North Quad Room 2435.

TITLE

Exploitation and Platform Power

SPEAKER

Daniel Susser is an associate professor of information science at Cornell University.

ABSTRACT

Big tech “exploits” us. This has become a common refrain among critics of digital platforms. It gives voice to a shared sense that technology firms are somehow mistreating people—taking advantage of us, extracting from us—in a way that other data-driven harms, such as surveillance and algorithmic bias, fail to capture. But what does “exploitation” entail, exactly, and how do platforms perpetrate it? What would a theory of digital exploitation add to existing discussions about platform governance? In this paper, I argue that claims of exploitation help surface important but undertheorized normative intuitions about the platform economy—intuitions about legitimacy, consent, and unfair bargains—and that work on exploitation in philosophy and political theory offers indispensable conceptual and normative tools for navigating and addressing these problems.

This talk is co-sponsored by ESC and the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS).