The Harmful Effects of Surveillance Capitalism and the Motivations of Powerful White Male Leaders of Social Media Platforms

One of the problems we come back to again and again on the Tech Policy Press podcast is the problem of how to govern social media platforms. 

Today’s guest is Paul Gowder, Professor of Law and Associate Dean of Research and Intellectual Life at Northwestern University's Pritzker School of Law and a founding fellow of the Integrity Institute. Gowder is the author of The Networked Leviathan: For Democratic Platforms, a book that he says takes an institutional political science approach to the problem of tech platform governance, arguing “that the goals of effective governance capacity development and of global justice” can come together, and that we can build “worldwide direct democratic institutions to exercise public authority over the operations of the big platforms.”