Silicon Valley and the State: Towards a Political Theory of Technology Corporations

The power of contemporary technology corporations has been at the center of public and academic debate over the past decade. Yet despite repeated calls for serious disciplinary attention, corporations in general have been under-theorized within political theory, often thought of as exclusively the domain of economic or business concerns. This thesis thus seeks to explore a political theory of corporations. It asks: how can we conceptualize the power of corporations? Can and how do corporations challenge or defy the power of states? And do new technologies create or change this power? I examine how technology corporations have come to control digital infrastructures and what kind of power this confers over both the public and the state. By situating my analysis within a global history of corporations, I demonstrate that corporations have always had an uneasy and contested relationship with existing political authorities. Engaging with this longer history draws attention to the need for political theory to broaden its understanding of corporations beyond workplace authority, as economic or market actors or as recipients of government outsourcing and treat them as political actors. Part I considers property relationships in the cloud, interrogating how cloud computing corporations have created new structures of dependency upon which users rely upon. Part II examines how corporate controlled digital identification infrastructures have come to underpin the ability to access a variety of different social, legal and political privileges, including the ability to undertake monetary transactions. Part III explores how corporations have structured spaces of rule, and in particular the ways in which technology corporations have leveraged the construction of the internet as territorialized space to govern as state-like sovereigns.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Utrata, Alina

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Sharman, Jason

• corporations
• political theory
• politics
• technology

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/61690d72-48ed-4cb1-8fb9-c96c6a8f43c3/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0002-8554-2057

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/372175