Technology and Human Rights Fellowship

The Fellowship, jointly directed by Professor Mathias Risse and Professor Shoshana Zuboff, invites applicants from a variety of approaches and disciplines. We seek projects that connect to the research programs in Professor Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, her 2022 paper, "Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy, the Deathmatch of Institutional Orders," and Professor Risse’s 2023 book, Political Theory of the Digital Age.

Past Fellows have been post-docs, scholars, academics on sabbatical, human rights advocates, senior leaders in international organizations, and established professionals from many distinct fields (law, healthcare, journalism, education, and more) who share a deep commitment to the Fellowship's intellectual priorities. We welcome early career, mid-career, and more senior theorists, researchers, and practitioners whose work aligns with the Fellowship's’s priorities and purpose.

The cohort meets virtually twice a month for in-depth discussions that draw on Fellows' research projects. Each Fellow is also expected to join an on-campus convening once each semester for a range of programmed events and activities. These are intended to advance group development through intellectual exchange and shared work-in-progress as projects move into their final stages on their way to publication. Travel subsidies are provided.

While on-campus Fellows may also participate in auditing classes, meeting faculty and other experts, leading student study groups, and engaging in the myriad learning opportunities at the Harvard Kennedy School and adjacent institutions within the University.

At the dawn of the digital age, in the late 1940s, George Orwell published his harrowing novel 1984, drawing attention to the wide-ranging possibilities of surveillance that technological developments were increasingly making possible.

For Orwell, imaginable surveillance was largely analog in nature, involving cameras and microphones. It took decades for digital technologies to develop far enough to be deployed systematically for surveillance purposes. But ever since Google developed an exceedingly successful economic logic collecting surplus data from internet searches (around 2002), such surveillance has become a defining feature of our age. In fact, data collection has become so central to capitalist economies that it was apt for Shoshana Zuboff to coin the term “surveillance capitalism” for this whole stage of capitalism, which has generated amounts and concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power that are unprecedented in human history and show no sign of dwindling.

Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism appeared in 2019, and is no less harrowing than Orwell’s work in terms of what it reveals about the use technological advances have been put to. The book also makes clear that our age offers utterly novel ways of knowing and being known, and thus utterly novel ways of unfolding and constraining epistemic agency (agency in the domain of knowledge). As Zuboff's 2022 paper "Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy?" makes painfully clear, we can have surveillance capitalism, or we can have democracy, but we cannot have both—hence the title of this fellowship. These themes have also been developed in Mathias Risse’s 2023 book Political Theory of the Digital Age: Where Artificial Intelligence Might Take Us.

Zuboff’s work offers a comprehensive analysis of capitalist economies in the 21st century, whose novel economic logic is founded on the secret massive scale extraction of human data from day-to-day use of every connected interface from laptops, cellphones, and apps, to social media interfaces, GPS systems, household aids, ubiquitous public sensors, cameras, and more.

The secret massive scale extraction of human generated data created the necessary conditions for the wholesale commodification of human experience and answered Silicon Valley's desperate search for the key to data monetization. Commodification of the human is expressed in new profit-driven capabilities associated with behavioral prediction, targeting, and control of individuals and whole populations. Surveillance capitalism flourished through its abilities to direct behavior at scale in ways that advance commercial objectives at the expense of human freedom. .

Zuboff’s work is both conceptually rich and practically enormously significant. Her work offers characterizations of the nature of the current crisis, as well as plenty of ideas for conceptualizing the protections that individuals need from efforts to commercialize their lives and that democratic institutions need from becoming mere epiphenomena of corporate power. Her work opens our eyes to the limitations of human possibilities, individually and collectively, in light of these overbearing corporate interests—and challenges us to find ways out of this trap of commercial dependencies.

Much is at stake when the design of our informational environment and thereby, effectively, the design of the human future is left to the highest bidder, and the subtitle of Zuboff’s book captures it well: we are involved in a “fight for a human future at the new frontier of power.” It is no exaggeration to say the Enlightenment ideal of personhood itself (and anything associated with it) is at stake. Democracy stands to lose out as a model of governance against newly sophisticated versions of autocratic governance: such governance has enhanced its effectiveness through surveillance, whereas democracy is undermined thereby (think of the near-collapse of the information environment in the United States and other places and the possibilities of targeted advertisements to influence elections).

The rapidly developing possibilities of Artificial Intelligence are merely feeding into the underlying structure of surveillance capitalism and will likely only enhance this unprecedented concentration of wealth, knowledge, and power. And the more internet use increases across Asia, South America, and Africa, the more these issues become pertinent there as well.

Risse’s Political Theory of the Digital Age establishes a foundation for the philosophy of technology, allowing us to investigate how the digital century might alter our most basic political practices and ideas (in ways that already establish important synergies with Zuboff’s work). Risse engages major concepts in political philosophy and extends them to account for problems that arise in digital lifeworlds including AI and democracy, synthetic media and surveillance capitalism, and how AI might alter our thinking about the meaning of life. Political Theory of the Digital Age offers a systemic way of evaluating the effect of AI, allowing us to anticipate and understand how technological developments impact our political lives.

The book locates the digital age in the sweep of human history and explores how the arrival of AI engages with long-standing philosophical debates in domains ranging from democracy, distributive justice, human rights, and meaning of life. Risse devotes several chapters to an account of epistemic rights under the general umbrella of human rights. Surveillance capitalism is an important background theme in the book.

Project proposals should be outlined in up to 3 pages and include the following elements:

1. Background, context, and time horizon of the research problem.
2. Alignment with Carr-Ryan Center priorities.
3. The anticipated impact of your work and your qualifications for this research project.
4. Executive summary of proposal (up to 200 words)
5. The contact information for two references who can comment on your ability to complete the proposed research. These individuals may be contacted by the Carr-Ryan Center and need not submit documentation unless requested.
6. Relevant writing sample (up to 5 pages)
7. A list of prior publications (with links or up to 3 attachments)

Applications for the Technology & Human Rights Fellowship's 2026-2027 cohort are now OPEN. Apply here by February 22, 2026.