Critical research on digital technologies–from platforms to new AI applications–has primarily focused on the large tech companies that develop and operate them, as well as on their impact on end users. There are, of course, good reasons for doing so. For one, it is clear that only a handful of American and Chinese tech companies–Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu–control the computational infrastructures underpinning most popular platforms, mobile applications, and AI services (Jia et al. 2018; Luitse & Denkena 2021; Plantin et al. 2018). Hence, these companies set the technological standards on which a wide variety of other companies, public institutions, and societal organizations rely. Furthermore, leading tech companies not only wield infrastructural power, but they are also dominant economic actors. Connecting content and service providers in virtually every economic sector, they control key markets and economic processes (Gawer & Srnicek 2021; Moore & Tambini 2018; Poell et al. 2021). As such, they can be understood as prominent political actors at the center of the online world (Van Dijck et. al 2018; Culpepper & Thelen 2019). Finally, concerns about the impact of new digital technologies on end-users are also fully justified, given that they rely on large scale data collection, are fundamentally privacy invasive, and tend to privilege specific types of users, content, and services over others (Hintz et al. 2018).
While such critical insights and perspectives are vital, there is still a limited understanding of the larger political economy in which digital technologies are developed and employed. There is especially too little attention for the state as the key actor in shaping the digital political economy. Research that has focussed on the state has primarily been concerned with the use of data and commercial technologies in state surveillance (Andrejevic 2019; Dencik et al. 2018;) and with ideological shifts in governance towards machine learning logics and dataism (Fourcade and Gordon 2020). Although these are clearly urgent issues, this outlook is too narrow to understand how states shape the distribution of power and opportunities in the digital realm and how they are also shaped by such distribution. As this panel will examine, states promote particular economic rationalities, invest or fail to invest in public infrastructures and services, develop legal and policy frameworks that enable specific types of labor relations and business models, etc. At the same time, the state is a central focus for technology providers who seek to embed themselves within central functions of the state and establish long-term and complex relations across areas of traditional state power. As such, states both shape and are shaped by the broader political economic environment in which platforms, mobile applications, and new AI services are developed and operate.
The papers in this panel bring together critical perspectives on the relationship between states and digital technologies. They explore how commercial platforms and AI come to be embedded in the state and wider society, with what consequences, and how we might imagine state-tech relations differently. The first paper outlines the terms under which welfare states become interwoven with third-party services by leveraging infrastructural power - with significant ideological implications. This theme is further developed in the second paper that argues that contemporary state-tech relations mimics a tenant-landlord relationship that risks displacing public infrastructure. Continuing this discussion, the third paper explores the role of the state in facilitating such a displacement, making a case for a continuity rather than discontinuity in the marketisation of public services. Finally, in the fourth paper, a call is made to resuscitate a public infrastructure imaginary and radically transform the role of the state and models of regulation in the platform economy by advancing an ‘attention as a scarce public resource’ rationale.
References
Gawer, A. R., & Srnicek, N. (2021). Online platforms: Economic and societal effects. Panel for the Future of Science and Technology (STOA) European Parliament.
Jia, K., Kenney, M., Mattila, J., & Seppala, T. (2018). The application of artificial intelligence at Chinese digital platform giants: Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent. ETLA reports, (81).
Luitse, D., & Denkena, W. (2021). The great transformer: Examining the role of large language models in the political economy of AI. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 20539517211047734.
Plantin, J. C., Lagoze, C., Edwards, P. N., & Sandvig, C. (2018). Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook. New Media & Society, 20(1), 293-310.
