Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age [Paperback]

This book exposes the weaponization of surveillance, law, and technology to chill and control us, and how we should respond.The chilling effects of surveillance, big data, weaponized law, online abuse, and new forms of AI-driven repression are a growing threat to freedom and democracy. This book offers a new theory of chilling effects to better understand the dangers they pose and how to best respond.The chilling effects of surveillance, big data, weaponized law, online abuse, and new forms of AI-driven repression are a growing threat to freedom and democracy. This book offers a new theory of chilling effects to better understand the dangers they pose and how to best respond.In Chilling Effects, Jonathon W. Penney explores the increasing weaponization of surveillance, censorship, and new technology to repress and control us. With corporations, governments, and extremist actors using big data, cyber-mobs, AI, and other threats to limit our rights and freedoms, concerns about chilling effects  or how these activities deter us from exercising our rights  have become urgent. Penney draws on law, privacy, and social science to present a new conformity theory that highlights the dangers of chilling effects and their potential to erode democracy and enable a more illiberal future. He critiques conventional theories and provides a framework for predicting, explaining, and evaluating chilling effects in a range of contexts. Urgent and timely, Chilling Effects sheds light on the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and in the future.Introduction; Part I. Conventional Chilling Effects Theories and their Limits: 1. Law's Flawed Theory and its McCarthy Era Origins; 2. Privacy's Useful but Limited Theory; Part II. A New Understanding: 3. Social Chilling Effects; 4. A Conformity Theory of Chilling Effects; 5. A Taxonomy of Chilling Effects; Part III. Implications: 6. The DlÃ!