Science and Democracy Lecture: Who Elected Big Tech?

Allison Stanger is Middlebury Distinguished Endowed Professor; Affiliate, Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University; Co-Director, GETTING-Plurality Research Network, Harvard University; founding member of the Digital Humanism Initiative (Vienna); and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research examines the interplay between technology, policy, and democratic values. Stanger has testified before Congress several times and served as an advisor to Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning Staff andthe US Department of State. Her next book, Who Elected Big Tech? is under contract with Yale University Press. Stanger is the author of Whistleblowers: Honesty in America from Washington to Trump (Yale University Press, 2019) and One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and the Future of Foreign Policy (Yale University Press, 2009). She is the co-editor (with Hannes Werthner et. al.) of Introduction to Digital Humanism: A Textbook (Springer, 2024), and co-editor (with W. Brian Arthur and Eric Beinhocker) of Complexity Economics (SFI Press, 2020).

Abstract: With the advent of the AI age, we face a constitutional crisis, not merely a regulatory vacuum. Private technology companies have evolved into "digital sovereigns"—entities that exercise quasi-governmental power over speech, commerce, and civic life without shouldering the constitutional obligations that bind governments. The First Amendment was designed to protect speakers from government censorship, but it says nothing about private algorithms that determine which voices get heard and which get buried. This structural "First Amendment mismatch" between eighteenth-century constitutional frameworks and twenty-first-century digital reality threatens democratic self-governance itself. Drawing on archival research, internal corporate documents, and interviews with industry leaders, the book traces how Section 230 created a governance framework beyond constitutional safeguards, examines how this misalignment has compromised privacy, autonomy, and integrity, and presents competing visions for our digital future—dominarchy or democratic renovation.

Co-sponsored by the Harvard University Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University Center for the Environment (A Center of the Salata Institute), and the McQuillan Institute for Science, Technology, and the Human Future.

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