People: What EU law does not understand about tech

Abstract

This essay’s core claim is that EU tech law does not fully understand technology, since it does not account for its diverse negative impacts in the everyday lives of people in European societies. Placing a central focus on EU’s digital regulation, I argue that EU law mostly sees technologies as products that should circulate at an ever-greater rate and volume in the internal market, to the benefit of consumers. This market-driven vision justifies a light-touch risk-based approach that creates a compliance apparatus which does not force tech companies to change unjust or harmful aspects of their business models; instead securing and legitimising them. Using a critical social theory approach, I argue that much of technology’s meaning and impact on the everyday lives of people is missed by EU law’s current depoliticised and technocratic approach to tech regulation. Taking the tech stories of This is Europe as a starting point, I illustrate how EU law systematically neglects the harms caused by technology or through technology to many individuals and communities in their everyday lives. Those affected range far beyond consumers and tech users. They include, for example, delivery platform workers forced into extreme anxiety due to task volume and app surveillance; several minorities systematically targeted by online abuse; or the migrants exposed to tech-mediated degrading treatment in European border facilities. All in all, EU law does not fully see, and therefore, epistemically excludes these lived experiences of tech harm from the regulatory dialogue. This leads me to some concluding reflections centred around a fundamental questioning of EU tech law’s legitimacy. Particularly, I argue that a legal regime that does not recognise and is not responsive to the lived realities of harm of those which it regulates ultimately fails at a deeper, politico-moral level.