Who Elected Big Tech?
How Your Phone Hijacked the Constitution
Allison Stanger(Author)
Yale University Press
Will be published approx. on 8. June 2027
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-300-27814-9 (ISBN)
Description
How technology companies became de facto governors of public life-and how democracy can evolve to survive
Across the globe, technology companies have risen from innovative disruptors to powerful actors that are shaping public discourse, the democratic process, and individual freedoms. With the help of advertising, data extraction, and algorithms, today's platforms influence what billions of people see and believe, yet they bear no legal responsibility for it. They manipulate this distribution with an eye only to profit, and they are heedless of the political or social consequences of doing so. These companies are entities the framers of the Constitution never contemplated, making political interventions they never imagined.
In Who Elected Big Tech?, Allison Stanger combines technological expertise, First Amendment scholarship, and political theory to explain how this happened and what it means. She traces the legal origins of platform power, shows how algorithms structure attention and quietly normalize manipulation, examines the evolution of content moderation from simple rules to opaque systems of control, and reveals why these questions grow only more urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.
Preserving human agency and values requires more than regulatory tweaking, Stanger argues. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how democratic societies govern the digital world. Stanger provides essential context for understanding our predicament and guidance for finding a path forward-before unchecked technological power erodes freedom and equality beyond repair.
Across the globe, technology companies have risen from innovative disruptors to powerful actors that are shaping public discourse, the democratic process, and individual freedoms. With the help of advertising, data extraction, and algorithms, today's platforms influence what billions of people see and believe, yet they bear no legal responsibility for it. They manipulate this distribution with an eye only to profit, and they are heedless of the political or social consequences of doing so. These companies are entities the framers of the Constitution never contemplated, making political interventions they never imagined.
In Who Elected Big Tech?, Allison Stanger combines technological expertise, First Amendment scholarship, and political theory to explain how this happened and what it means. She traces the legal origins of platform power, shows how algorithms structure attention and quietly normalize manipulation, examines the evolution of content moderation from simple rules to opaque systems of control, and reveals why these questions grow only more urgent in the age of artificial intelligence.
Preserving human agency and values requires more than regulatory tweaking, Stanger argues. It demands a fundamental reimagining of how democratic societies govern the digital world. Stanger provides essential context for understanding our predicament and guidance for finding a path forward-before unchecked technological power erodes freedom and equality beyond repair.
Reviews / Votes
"Stanger asks the question that should keep every policymaker awake: who governs the infrastructure of public discourse, and by what authority? Her answer-no one, and that's the problem-is delivered with devastating precision. Who Elected Big Tech? is essential reading for anyone who believes that code should serve the law, not override it."-Audrey Tang, CyberAmbassador.TW and first Digital Minister of TaiwanMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Product notice
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 235 mm
Width: 156 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-300-27814-9 (9780300278149)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Allison Stanger is Distinguished Endowed Professor at Middlebury College, an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and codirector of the GETTING-Plurality research network at Harvard University. Her books include Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy.