Surveillance Capitalism or Information Republic?

Recent years have seen growing concerns about corporate surveillance. Critics of surveillance capitalism often use the language of domination and unfreedom to describe these new socio-technological conditions. Yet there has been little sustained normative analysis that has diagnosed the new forms of domination introduced by surveillance capitalism or considered the remedies needed to remove them. That is what this article provides. We draw on the latest republican literature to argue that surveillance capitalism introduces new forms of domination that compel ordinary citizens to subject themselves to surveillance and allow corporations uncontrolled power to determine the terms of surveillance, while also subjecting corporations to new incentives of extraction. Traditional republican remedies for domination were not designed to address these new challenges. We therefore outline a vision of an Information Republic that can do so.