In Chapter 4, we turn to the contemporary manifestations of the managerial approach. To the extent that we view digital technology as a problem, we tend to think of it as a problem with managerial solutions. In other words, we tend to believe that the right experts, in the right institutions, focusing on the right questions, could make the harms of digital technology disappear. Some want to erect new administrative agencies or private “oversight boards” to govern digital life; some want to empower courts to address the “addictive” features of social media; others prefer to use public officials and NGOs to put pressure on technology platforms themselves. In each of these cases, reformers call on private or public managers to resurrect the goods of robust associations without defending associations themselves. We show that seemingly disparate efforts to address “digital addiction,” fight the “loneliness epidemic,” combat “misinformation,” regulate AI development, and reimagine “privacy” all fall into this same trap. These are often misguided attempts to respond to problems better understood and addressed as the consequences of a social order in which intermediary associations lack the three powers.

In Chapter 3, we trace the origins of the “managerial approach” to technology regulation. In the twentieth century, as mass communication weakened America’s associational life, reformers increasingly entrusted experts and managers with the task of producing social goods such as civility and accurate information. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has increasingly extended robust First Amendment rights to mass media companies, paving the way to an emerging status quo in which digital platforms themselves are “protected speakers” because they “select and shape other parties’ expression into their own curated speech products." Radically constraining the scope of technology regulation, courts have strengthened the authority of private managers over the terms of social life. The modern First Amendment, which once protected the autonomy of robust associations in the public sphere, has come to do the exact opposite: protect the forces of homogenization that undermine robust associations. Meanwhile, even private actors risk offending the rights of platforms when they attempt to build third-party applications – known as “middleware” – that interoperate with dominant platforms to empower users to modify platform features.

In Chapter 2, we argue that the platformization of our social order – the process by which platforms appropriate the infrastructure of our social life – is fueled by three “structural trends.” First, Network Scaling: digital platforms rely on network effects that subsume human activities, imposing opportunity costs on those opting out. Second, Context Collapse: digital platforms appropriate communicative infrastructure at scale, removing the boundaries of membership and information on which intermediary associations depend. Third, Managerial Control: platform managers exercise the competencies that once justified the authority of independent, self-fashioning associations. By itself, none of these “structural trends” need imperil collective action. Our challenge comes from the way in which these structural trends interact with each other, a relationship that we attempt to untangle. We argue that, considered as one, the three structural trends form a self-reinforcing cycle: We let platforms subsume our activities, which undermines our ability to self-organize, which, in turn, makes us outsource more and more activities to digital platforms.

In Chapter 5, we propose an alternative approach to technology regulation that focuses on (re-)building robust associations online and offline. We propose a three-tiered policy agenda. First, we propose measures to change the design of digital platforms to empower users to erect boundaries of information, membership, and authority among themselves. To this end, reformers should legally empower the production of “middleware,” third-party software that interoperates with dominant platforms to let users change the rules of social interaction and content moderation. Second, we propose measures to help intermediary associations assert control over both digital and physical spaces. We consider smartphone bans in schools, a “right to disconnect” outside the workplace, and even subsidies for institutions of art and culture that outlaw the use of technology within their walls. Third, we entertain more radical measures to carve out coordinated times and spaces away from technology. These include local “digital Sabbath” policies that (totally or partially) restrict internet usage for a limited, recurrent period.

The internet once promised to strengthen our associational life. Instead, A Bounded Web shows that digital technology has replaced bounded institutions, where members gather to make decisions together, with porous social networks that platforms administer behind the scenes. In response, scholars and policymakers tend to reduce the pathologies of digital life to technical challenges that demand technocratic solutions. Against this trend, this book offers a new approach to technology policy that emphasizes the need to rebuild diverse and robust associations both online and offline. It defends efforts to build technological boundaries – like smartphone bans in schools – that empower cultural, educational, political, and social organizations to set their own terms for how we gather and communicate. It also calls for legal reform to enable the creation of “middleware” and even entertains the pursuit of local “digital Sabbath” policies to reshape our collective management of technology. Rigorously argued, A Bounded Web asks us to recognize what we’ve lost and imagine what we might build in its place.

This chapter defines the key techniques of African American poetry invested in digital technology and internet community as "remix" and "sampling," and traces how these techniques derive from a pursuit of liberation that, it argues, has been at the heart of the African American poetic tradition since the first enslaved poets wrote. It identifes how Black digital poetics continues to challenges dominant narratives that diminish the Black body as commodity in the service of nationalist and colonizing practices. It demonstrates how digital poetics uses its techniques to imagine non-hierarchical ways of being and knowing.

This introduction offers an overview of the evolving role of artificial intelligence in civil dispute resolution, discussing current developments against the background of broader technological, regulatory and institutional contexts. It examines the dual forces of genuine innovation and persistent hype, clarifies the book’s open and technology-neutral definition of AI, and articulates an equally broad conception of civil dispute resolution encompassing adjudicative but also consensual, formal but also informal mechanisms. The introduction also outlines the book’s comparative ambition and structural organisation, ultimately framing AI as a transformative yet contested actor whose integration into justice systems demands careful, context-sensitive governance.

This chapter examines the discontinuous history of Chinese multinationals and their role in China’s evolving globalization. It highlights that China’s global engagement has been shaped by both market forces and geopolitical dynamics. The first wave, following the Opium Wars, saw Chinese firms competing unequally with Western multinationals, with growth ultimately limited by political forces. A resurgence occurred in the 1980s as China reengaged globally, leading to renewed overseas investment by Chinese firms. Currently, amid rising geopolitical tensions, Chinese multinationals are strategically reorienting investment from developed economies toward emerging markets. The chapter emphasizes the multifaceted impact of this globalization, but also a changing global landscape where politics and power are equally pivotal to understanding the trajectory of Chinese firms’ activities abroad.

The chapter discusses the evolution of justice and dispute resolution in the era of LawTech (LT). Traditional taxonomies of justice are mirrored in new forms of digital dispute settlement (DDS), where the idealized Justice Hercules is compared to the prospect of robo-judges. Currently, LT primarily supports traditional courts as they transition to e-courts. Alternative dispute resolution (ADR) is evolving into online dispute resolution (ODR), with blockchain-based crowdsourcing emerging as a potential alternative to traditional justice. Hybrid models of dispute resolution are also taking shape. The chapter outlines assessment criteria for adopting LT in digital systems, focusing on ensuring that DS in the digital economy remains independent, impartial, and enforceable. Human centricity is core construct for the co-development of LT and DS. This overarching principle requires human oversight, transparency, data privacy, and fairness in both access and outcomes.

Digital technologies influence every facet of our lives – education, health, leisure activities, finances and jobs. You may have heard terms for digital technologies, such as information technology and information and communication technology (ICT). In this chapter, we use digital technology and ICT interchangeably. In the first section, titled ‘Digital technologies and you’, we explore pre-service teachers’ personal and educational experiences with digital technologies and investigate attitudes towards digital technologies in education. A historical overview of technology and associated challenges is presented. The second section, ‘Digital technology in education’, explores the current situation in early childhood, primary and secondary school contexts. It offers some insights into theoretical frameworks, curriculum implications, pedagogical implications and practical considerations for contemporary classrooms. The third section, ‘Using digital technologies in class’, provides numerous suggestions and practical information on how digital technologies can be used for teaching and learning in the classroom.

One of postmodernism’s legacies is ironically that, once it is assumed to be over its characteristic self-consciousness about its own historicity has come to permeate ‘post-postmodern’ culture. This chapter considers why critics and theorists were so keen, especially in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, to declare postmodernism over and to identify what has replaced it. What does this preoccupation with periodicity mean for a society which – due to advances in digital technology – now shares, more widely, a similar uncertainty about its own position in history? The work of some notable twenty-first-century British writers – aware of writing in postmodernism’s slipstream – can usefully be seen as responding to this question. The chapter examines three in particular: Ali Smith’s The Accidental, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Each of these novels conveys a historical ‘out-of-time-ness’, which implies that, ghost-like, the postmodern has both ended and continued.