The Digital Revolution and the State: Innovation, Power, and Inequality in the Age of AI

4–5 credits · Undergraduate

This seminar investigates the evolving and contested relationship between technological change and state power in the internet era. It situates current debates around the consolidation of Big Tech, the rapid spread of artificial intelligence, and digital sovereignty within a longer historical and comparative political-economic framework for innovation and regulation. Students will examine how the state has shaped - and been reshaped by - successive waves of technological transformation, from the early foundations of the internet and the rise of Silicon Valley to the global diffusion of AI and platform capitalism. A central concern of the course is the redistribution of power. We will interrogate how global platforms challenge states, disrupt traditional hierarchies, and generate new forms of authority and legitimacy. Particular attention will be given to the tensions between governments and Big Tech, the regulatory challenges posed by monopolisation and globalisation, and the ways platforms exercise control over workers, small and large firms, and consumers in the digital economy. From a comparative and international perspective, we will consider the limits and potential of different national regulatory and fiscal capacities when assessing how states respond to these challenges. The course also foregrounds inequality. We will explore how digitalisation reproduces and intensifies existing socio-economic divides - between those who benefit from digital inclusion and those excluded by design, between global centres of innovation and peripheral economies, and between capital and workers embedded in platform ecosystems. Students will critically evaluate the strategies available to states to mitigate these divides, recognising that institutional capacity, geopolitical context, and regulatory ambition to govern technological change vary widely across countries. Methodologically, the course is grounded in political economy but takes an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on economics, sociology, law, public policy, and economic geography. Weekly seminars are organised around guiding questions that connect core texts across disciplines with current debates, providing the foundation for comparative and critical analysis. Through seminar discussions, students will develop the tools to interrogate the digital revolution as both an engine of innovation and a source of inequality, and to reflect on the evolving role of the state in shaping innovation and transformation in the digital era.