Online IPW Lecture: Vili Lehdonvirta - How Silicon Valley built a Digital Single Market and how Europeans can govern it

When: Tuesday, 31 May 2022, 17:00 CET. Where: online

Invitation to the IPW Lecture “How Silicon Valley built a Digital Single Market and how Europeans can govern it

Lecturer: Vili Lehdonvirta (University of Oxford)

Comments: Timo Seidl (EIF / IPW University of Vienna)

Moderation: Gerda Falkner (EIF / IPW University of Vienna)

When: Tuesday, 31 May 2022, 17:00 CET
Where: online (registration required, see below)


Abstract

The early Internet was a lawless place, populated by scam artists who made buying or selling anything online risky business. Then Amazon, eBay, Upwork, and Apple established secure digital platforms for selling physical goods, crowdsourcing labor, and downloading apps. These and other tech giants have gone on to rule the Internet like autocrats. How did this happen? How did users and workers become the hapless subjects of online economic empires? The Internet was supposed to liberate us from powerful institutions, but instead it gave rise to even more powerful ones. In his new book Cloud Empires: How Digital Platforms Are Overtaking the State and How We Can Regain Control, economic sociologist Vili Lehdonvirta draws on six years of research by his research group at the Oxford Internet Institute to explore the rise of the platform economy into statelike dominance over our lives. In this lecture, Lehdonvirta will discuss today’s platform economy against the context of the European Union’s struggles to create a Digital Single Market for the continent, followed by its attempts to regulate the market created by Silicon Valley. Instead of trying to deal with tech giants in the way our grandparents dealt with industrial monopolists, should we be dealing with them in the way our ancestors dealt with aristocrats?


Registration

Please register via eif@univie.ac.at and we will send you the link to the virtual event shortly beforehand