CONCEPT
The Platform Consent Crisis
The structural erosion of democratic consent as an increasing share of productive and civic life depends on privately governed digital platforms whose rules are set unilaterally and accepted through the legal fiction of clicked terms of service.
The consent of the governed is the foundational principle of democratic legitimacy. Platforms have built an infrastructure on which democratic life increasingly depends and have structured that infrastructure around a form of 'consent' that democratic theory does not recognize as genuine. Users accept terms they have not read, cannot negotiate, and cannot modify—terms that can be unilaterally changed by the platform at any time. The crisis is structurally distinct from previous challenges to democratic legitimacy: the platform's power is not personal and visible but infrastructural and diffuse. There is no lord to resist, no boss to organize against, only an infrastructure that has become essential to participation and is governed by rules the participants did not create.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Allen's diagnosis of the crisis draws on the history of democratic consent theory and the contemporary political economy of platforms. Consent in democratic theory is ongoing, informed, voluntary, and revisable—none of which describes