Information’s ‘Un’-civilization: The Imperative for a New Approach to Law and Economics?

– Prof. (Dr.) Upendra Baxi

This exploration of law and economics raises many related issues. First, we consider ways in which law and economics movement and theory may be said to have revolutionized legal thinking. Second, we illustrate the near-total commoditization of personal data by leading ‘artificial intelligence’ ‘cyber firms and their coalitions, creating both digital warfare and modernized lawfare. Third, we dwell on Shoshanna Zuboff’s central conception of surveillance capitalism, which constitutes the third modernity which stands for a future where “a genuine inversion and its social compact are institutionalized as principles of a new rational digital capitalism”; these present a scary picture of the “informational mapping of all of the territories on the planet”, “the unremitting locating of individuals”, and the “capture of body information and health and behavioural data”. This continual data mining, fourth, introduces a “rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge and power unprecedented in human history, ostracizing “people from their individual self-direction”. Fifth, explored are some ways of critiquing the very notion of ‘information civilization”. Sixth, in conclusion, we raise the question of the law and economics agenda about law as a soft technology trying to regulate hard technologies and how, if possible, to reverse the imageries of the ‘end of law’.

Keywords: data mining, information civilization, ‘infoglut’, future of law and economics, lawfare and warfare, ‘surveillance’ capitalism, ‘platform power’.

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