Despite its professed commitment to radical libertarianism and a non-state theory of money, the crypto industry is actively cultivating government intervention in markets on its behalf. From recruiting states to accept cryptocurrency for tax payments to pushing for the establishment of a Bitcoin reserve, crypto interests are partnering with the government to craft demand for currencies that hardly anyone uses.

There is, at present, a conceptual mismatch between the strategies of accumulation that are dominant in the digital economy and the basic assumptions that underlie the legal regimes tasked with regulating accumulation. To begin to address this discrepancy, legal actors in these regimes need a better understanding of how companies translate social data into profits and power.

Companies and their investors extract large amounts of wealth from people’s data. Yet because tax law treats users of digital platforms as consumers, rather than producers, neither these users nor their home countries receive any compensation in return. How might international tax law be used to mitigate the harms of this exploitative arrangement?