The Future of Liberal Democracy: Technology, Law, and the Threat of Data Colonialism

Information and communications technology (ICT) challenges fundamental presuppositions of law and democracy, creating a new horizon for reimagining liberal democracy. For example, Helene Landemare (2021) argues that contemporary democratic theory rests on eighteenth-century understandings of society, technology, and communication, which are no longer persuasive because of the transformative revolutions of information science and communications technologies. She argues that the new technologies call us to reimagine the institutions of democracy. Law too must be and is being, reimagined. Two features of the emerging view of law are (1) a minimal ontological realism; and (2) a complex systems model advanced by Bruno Latour and Manuel DeLanda (who are indebted to Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Whitehead). This new jurisprudence also suggests, as argued by Ruha Benjamin and others, that the emerging social order continues patterns associated with colonialism and discriminatory practices that normalize discrimination and inequalities.