Khan and Pozen are right to note the fundamental conflict between “information fiduciary” duties and shareholder interests. I only wish to add two further points in service of a radical skepticism towards the information fiduciary concept.
The concept of an “information fiduciary” is a helpful way of describing the privacy interests that users have in data about them held by online platforms. It provides a good starting point for thinking about platforms’ recommendations. And it has nothing useful to say about other urgent problems online platforms pose.
The multiple, capitalist information fiduciaries of the Balkin proposal and the regulatory regime that Khan and Pozen appear to imagine seem to have little in common. But they are responses to the same problem: that of governing data-driven algorithmic processes that operate in real time, immanently, automatically, and at scale.
In recent years, the concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on platform regulation. In a forthcoming essay, we question the wisdom of applying a fiduciary framework to dominant digital platforms.
In their essence, monetary systems are all very simple. But that essence can be buried and hidden from view by accretions of practices over time. Money systems give rise to additional, ‘emergent’ properties as the groups that develop them grow in size and complexity.
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Like most advocates of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), I didn’t embrace the paradigm because I dig late-night chats about accounting identities. Rather, I found it while pursuing economic justice (following the lead of Angela Harris, Emma Coleman…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Basic legal ideas about taxation stand in the way of proposals for ambitious fiscal policies to address pervasive economic insecurity among both middle class and lower income households. The conventional legal framework posits two primary functions for…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Even amongst critical scholars, there is a tendency to treat international regulation of money and finance as “strictly economic”, distinct from the “social” domains of labor, the environment, and socio-economic rights. This conceptual separation cedes the realm…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Money and property law are mutually constitutive. Property rights are defined and valued in terms of their relationship to monetary instruments, while whether something counts as a monetary instrument for this or that purpose is itself a…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Legal realists and their heirs made it into a truism: law is constantly entangled in value judgment. The statement is typically aimed at undermining one sense of the claim that law and legal judgment are or even…
This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. In 2017, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York published a comic book on the origins of money. The story, called “Once Upon a Dime,” unspools sweetly. Far far away, on the planet Novus, a community of good-willed…
NB: This post is part of the “Piercing the Monetary Veil” symposium. Other contributions can be found here. Luke Herrine — This blog has already hosted several examples of re-thinkings of the nature of money and its relationship to law and power, most recently in a symposium on LPE Contributor Mehrsa Baradaran’s book on money…
In this piece, we hope to describe some examples of the spectrum of organizing tactics and practices that are currently part of both the repositioning of community and the creation of pathways towards the transformative vision abolitionist organizers have set out.
This post is part of an ongoing series on LPE & Social Movements. For the framing pieces, see here and here. Neoliberalism is in crisis. For the first time in decades, alternatives of both terrifying and exhilarating varieties are on the table. The more democratic and humane alternative will only prevail if well organized social movements directly challenge…
The idea that social movements should be central to progressive agendas is appealing; I respond with two questions that aim push this discussion further. First, it is important to explicitly consider what constitutes a social movement – which voices rise to the top, who sets the agenda, and who garners resources? Second, and relatedly, legal realism teaches us that law exists in the foreground and background to shape our capacity to bargain, strategize, and organize. I wonder how lawyers and legal strategy constitute the redistributive imagination of left organizations?
