Are We Subjected to Digital Coercion?

As digital technologies increasingly penetrate various spheres of our lives, the pressure to use them also keeps growing. Such pressure reveals an intricate connection between technology and power. In recent years, scholars are increasingly turning their attention to the relationship between digital technologies and power. Digital technologies are fundamentally changing the conditions of social interactions by enabling the creation of new power relations as well as the concentration of power in too few hands. This means that the more our interactions are mediated by digital systems, the more we are subjected to the power exercised through these systems (Susskind 2020; Lazar 2022; Santoni de Sio 2024). But what kind of power is that? The existing normative approaches to conceptualizing and assessing the impact of the said technologies have so far identified and evaluated three paradigmatic ways in which power has been exercised: surveillance, manipulation, and discrimination. In this paper, I challenge these approaches on the grounds that they overlook another very important form digitally charged power might take. Experiencing pressure to have a social media account so that one is not left out or feeling pressure to use large language models irrespective of what one thinks of them both illustrate how actors who drive digital transformations are making us act in a certain way by closing off alternative courses of action. Moreover, this is typically done for the sake of advancing their own ends. This way of characterizing digital interactions mirrors another concept that has historically preoccupied scholars as well as practitioners and yet, is conspicuously missing in contemporary normative approaches to digital technologies – the concept of coercion. Since many agree that coercion constitutes the most robust interference with freedom, assessing the coerciveness of deploying digital technologies allows us to bring them within the purview of legitimating demands. The paper aims to capture the coercive aspects of digital interactions by developing the concept of digital coercion.