"Platform Power and the Manufacture of Public Trust"

Digital platforms and their corporate leaders have risen to unprecedented economic, political and cultural power over the last three decades. How did these companies acquire the public trust that allowed them to achieve monopoly status, tremendous surveillance capabilities and ubiquity in our lives and institutions? Drawing on her research about the tech giant Amazon, Emily West will address this question, and then consider how digital platforms now seek to contain the growing “techlash” against their power and social impacts, especially given the implications of generative AI for platform power. The lecture is free and open to the public.