Tuesday
Platform Capitalism
“Platform Capitalism,” in Platform Capitalism, electronic edition, by Nick Srnicek, Theory Redux (Polity, 2017).
Tosh, Kaitlin, and Michelle Inez Simon. “The X Effect: How the World’s Richest Man Is Boosting the British Right.” Sky News, n.d. Accessed March 30, 2026. https://news.sky.com/story/the-x-effect-how-elon-musk-is-boosting-the-british-right-13464487.
Platform Cooperative Consortium, https://platform.coop/.
In-class activities
Thursday
Data Brokers
What kind of new Pandora’s box do we open when we not only have these huge quantities of data, but we have tools that can start to scan and analyze patterns in unprecedented ways and at an unprecedented scale that you can never do from human analysts?
—REP. WARREN DAVIDSON (R-OHIO)
Rahul Kanwal and Kevin Walby, Tracking the Surveillance and Information Practices of Data Brokers: A Report (University of Winnipeg, 2024).
Jude Joffe-Block, “Your Data Is Everywhere. The Government Is Buying It without a Warrant,” Technology, NPR, March 25, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/03/25/nx-s1-5752369/ice-surveillance-data-brokers-congress-anthropic.
Thompson, Stuart A., and Charlie Warzel. “Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy.” Opinion. The New York Times, December 19, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html?unlocked_article_code=1.XFA.PqhT.4K9YsoBcBsvA&smid=url-share.
In-class activities
“‘This is what we were always scared of’: DOGE is building a surveillance state” (New York Times)