BUSGEN 116: Governing the Digital World: Making Democracy Work Online

Course Description

While the internet's roots were democratic in nature, today, most online platforms today are ruled autocratically, with CEOs setting and enforcing rules largely unilaterally. This has led to frictions large and small. Social media platforms police global speech and have deplatformed world leaders; the decisions Apple and Google make for their app stores determine the success or failure of thousands of app developers and affect billions of users; payment services allow some transactions but block others; music streaming services let some artists flourish while tamping down others. As the digital world becomes a more and more important part of our social, economic, political, and cultural lives, shouldn't there be a better way to govern it? In this course, we'll study the governance of online platforms and communities. We'll understand how companies approach these issues today, and we'll dive into ongoing experiments across Big Tech, Wall Street, and crypto to develop new ways of democratizing the online world and transferring more power from elites to everyday users---with the ultimate goal of improving our online lives and even reinventing democracy itself.