CONCEPT
Technology as the New Policymaker
Latanya Sweeney’s reframing of digital power: the rules that govern daily life are increasingly set not by legislatures and courts but by the designers of technical systems—who were not elected, cannot be petitioned, and whose values are encoded in code that becomes effective law before any actual law catches up.
The most consequential idea in
Latanya Sweeney’s work is not a finding but a reframing that reorganizes how one understands power in the modern world. We imagine that the rules of common life are set by the institutions designed for that purpose—legislatures, courts, agencies—all answerable, however imperfectly, to a public. Sweeney’s contention, crystallized during her year as the first Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission, is that this picture has become a comforting anachronism. Increasingly, the rules that actually govern daily conduct—what may be known about you, what you can access, how you are treated, what is possible and what is forbidden—are set not by law but by the
design of the technologies that mediate nearly every transaction. The architecture of a platform, the defaults of a system, the logic of an algorithm: these now function as policy, binding behavior as surely