Combatting Digital Capitalism: The Criminal Strategy behind Big Tech's Social Harm and the Need for Transformative Justice

This paper proposes rethinking Big Tech's socially harmful behavior as the consequence of a deliberate strategy that is inextricably linked to its business model and thus cannot be corrected by conventional means. The crimes of digital capitalism relate to upstream and downstream operations. It ranges from modern slavery in the context of mineral extraction to Taylorist exploitation in Chinese hardware production industries. It shifts to machinic dispossession in automated warehouses, algorithmic discrimination in welfare systems, and the deployment of policing technologies by private and public actors. Although we all suffer the consequences of a digitized global structure of inequality, the resulting social damage is not equally distributed. The crimes of digital capitalism are, by nature, an inherent and organizational part of an imperialist phenomenon. Hegemonic digital corporations are often headquartered in countries in the Global North, while their victims are disproportionately located in the Global South. Moreover, this structure of inequality is intertwined with prior forms of racial, class, and gender oppression. We need new approaches, methods, and institutions of the commons capable of enforcing concepts of justice that lead to a real and profound transformation that shakes the causes of social harm. Thinking about the crimes of digital capitalism is an exercise aimed not at reaffirming mechanisms for punishment but at producing the necessary tools to abolish the conditions that make them possible. Drawing on the approaches of white-collar crime and crimes of the powerful, and complemented by recent contributions from critical legal studies, the paper lays the theoretical groundwork from which to analyze the crimes of digital capitalism. In doing so, this paper aims to explain why certain specific behaviors of the "digital powerful" are often not criminalized and, moreover, have become essential to the operation of the digital capitalist system of exploitation.