“Making power visible so we can contest it.” For me, that is a central mission of social science. Who benefits from the way society is organized? Who gets screwed? How may we all be trapped in conditions that keep us from flourishing? This kind of questions gives research an emancipatory impulse, which many legal scholars and critical economists share: we must understand and call out unfair and limiting structures before we can change them – whether in education, in the political arena, in gender relations, in the work place, in the health sector, in global trade, or anywhere else, really. For people to be more in charge of their own lives, we need to know what holds them back. In short, we need to understand where power resides.
I worry about that emancipatory mission as of late. Because digital technologies complicate the exercise of power. Tech adds extra layers to how society works, with all sorts of interactions now passing through tech platforms. That not only obfuscates things. People can lose agency even when no one else is gaining direct power over them. Often it feels like everyone is getting more stuck. Power is genuinely more diffuse, inscribed in digital infrastructures and encoded in algorithms no human can make sense of. For emancipatory social science, that is a unique and rather unwelcome challenge. And I worry that there is little that we can really do about it.
Let me make this a bit more concrete. The common story these days is about extreme power concentration. Elon Musk and the like accumulate riches that would make robber barons blush. Tech is ruled by oligopolies all across the stack. China and the USA build digital empires. The rest of the world struggles to compete or doesn’t even try. Put this together and the picture seems clear: Big Tech (BT to the aficionados) rules the world. What else do you need to know?
Quite a lot, it turns out. Not all digital technology is bad. Singling out the problematic bits requires more detailed analysis, as does winning hearts and minds. So the questions get more specific: which public sector algorithms may end up discriminating people, and to what effect? What are realistic options for the EU to acquire a modicum of digital sovereignty? How do things like internet protocols, submarine cables, but also entrenched computer chip architectures empower some people and disempower others? What is the net effect of AI-powered dating apps on gender relations?
To answer any of these questions, you need to understand the tech in question. Not at engineering-level, maybe, but you do need a solid grasp. And not only that – you need to understand adjacent tech, too: operating systems, data storage, software design. In a nutshell, as more and more social, economic and political life has shifted onto digital substrates, you need to understand these digital substrates in detail to make the power visible. Not that power was always straightforward in its exercise. But the business model of a steel cartel or US railroad bosses was a bit easier to understand than crypto exchanges or the financial and legal constructions underpinning Apple.
Ballooning interconnectedness makes emancipatory social science a lot harder. Because now everything is connected, indeed. As in: things hang together more and more. Take payments. When cash was still used for everyday transactions, the infrastructure for moving that around – bank tellers and ATMs – was relatively mundane. Nowadays, digital payment infrastructures are a whole field of study unto itself that tries to unpack how legacy banks, fin techs, and tech companies leverage their assets to squeeze the others out. But also how, intentionally or otherwise, digital payments systems have ripple effects, like creating new geopolitical dependencies (macro) or keeping people without credit cards from buying things online (micro). Digitalization has exploded the complexity of power relations in payments.
Similar stories can be told about other domains of life: public services, border controls, educational sectors, but also romantic life, entertainment, news media, political propaganda, and so on. Digitization shifts social life onto a web of interconnected technologies. Power structures become more technical, more complex and more diffuse – even if, at the end of the day, the strings converge again in a few hands. That makes detailing what’s going on harder and harder.
To make matters worse, tech moves quickly these days. That won’t be news to anyone. But it’s still a structural handicap for those of us who want to uncover the societal dynamics around it. Because that takes time. Most academics have lots of other things to do, as well – teaching, admin in their universities, etc. Publishing a scientific article can easily take a year, certainly now that many journals buckle under a deluge of AI-crafted manuscripts. When tech is a big part of the story, traditional academic publications have a hard time being relevant to the current moment. Much research in the field – including my own – feels like a never-ending struggle to catch-up with the real world.
There is a growing asymmetry between technical “do-knowledge” and social scientific “see knowledge”. The first is engineering-type knowledge about how to get things done with tools. That thrives. The second is reflective knowledge that tries to make sense of the bigger picture without doing injustice the complexity of things and social relations. That just gets harder and harder.
One alternative – building large “labs” to study digital power in a highly modular way, with a high division of labour reminiscent of what happens in engineering - is not really viable in practical terms. Looking around me, I don’t see that happening. Alternatively, are we ready to skip over the “details” to tell grand stories only? That runs against the ambition to show how power also hides in little nooks and crannies of everyday interactions – think of deeply embedded structural racism in societies. Debunking facile (and often self-serving) narratives has been an important contribution of scholarship in the social sciences and the humanities.
Complex digital tech diffusing everywhere makes it a lot harder to identify obstacles to human flourishing. What do we as social scientists do with that? To be honest, I’m a bit at a loss – and I’d love to hear whether you think. Is the worry is overblown, or does it resonate, and you have ideas for yourself how to deal with it? Either way, I think it is important that as social scientists (and scholars with an emancipatory mission across the academy) we at least have a clear sense of what we’re up against.