Making Sense of Digital Domination

The republican concept of domination in the context of the digital realm has increasingly gained attention. Domination is an instance of superior and arbitrary power. While the discussions on digital domination are a worthwhile expansion of AI Ethics, much of the debate remains limited to online platforms and specific to a particular relation or context. In this paper, I follow Pettit’s account of domination to argue that certain seemingly more innocent AI systems dominate citizens of digital societies. I claim that in such societies, basic liberties, i.e., liberties required to function equally in society, increasingly depend on AI systems that cannot be held to account due to ineffective regulation. This constitutes an arbitrary power relation (i.e., domination) between the AI and the person subjected to the AI. Given basic liberties apply to any citizen of a particular society, all citizens living in modern, digital societies are dominated. Digital domination, therefore, has much broader societal implications than is currently acknowledged in the literature. I conclude by proposing what I believe to be the root source of this digital domination: an ‘innovation-friendly’ approach enabled by socio-economic structures.