Digital technologies, designed and offered by private companies, are rapidly changing how we live our lives and organise our societies - from how we consume news, to how we work, to how we get around. Technological change, however, is not social destiny.
In Ideas, politics, and technological change: essays on the comparative political economy of digital capitalism, Timo Seidl argues that to understand the course and character of digitalisation, we need to understand the political response.
When are data protection regulations introduced that limit the reach of digital surveillance capitalists - and when are they not? When can companies like Uber thwart attempts to regulate them - and when do they fail to do so? Using a variety of methods, from large-n regressions to text-as-data approaches to more qualitative analyses, Seidl shows how we can understand these responses.
Timo Seidl defended his dissertation on 29 January 2021. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Vienna’s Institute for European Integration Research, where he works on a project on the EU’s role in and ambitions for the digital age.
Timo's dissertation is available in open access in Cadmus, the EUI's research repository.