Susskind warns that unchecked Big Tech power has shifted our democracies into a dangerous “digital lifeworld,” where code increasingly functions as law-governing our behaviours, perceptions, and choices often without transparency or accountability. He argues this concentration of technological power undermines key democratic ideals like freedom from domination, civic equality, and shared public life, drawing on republican theory to highlight its political nature.
To counter this, Susskind outlines a comprehensive framework for a digital republic, featuring new legal standards, regulatory bodies, platform-specific duties, professional codes for technologists, rights for users, algorithm audits, and citizen assemblies to govern digital systems. His vision is a society where technology supports democratic values rather than subverting them-a world in which citizens assert political agency amid digital transformation by programming our governance, not being programmed by it.