What does fake news tell us about life in the digital age

Here's a three part blog post on the Law and Political Economy blog, where I try to wrestle with how we think about the role of technology in political economy.  Would love to hear comments, criticisms, refinements, since this is half of what I spend my time thinking about these days.

Part 1. Why the dominant economists' explanation of how technology causes inequality operates to legitimate inequality and constrain the universe of workable responses, while holding an implausible view of the interaction between technology, markets, and institutions.

Part 2. Unfortunately, pro-labor economists who argue that inequality is a function of politics and institutions don't have a good explanation of how technology interacts with these.  Polanyi starts to do more, but his relatively narrow treatment of technology is also limiting. 

Part 3. A proposal for how to integrate technology, institutions, and ideology into a political economy such that the politics of technology are an appropriate site of struggle, rather than either a distraction (as lefty labor economists usually have it) or a source of legitimation for inequality (as mainstream economists do).

This is part of a series of posts that came out of a workshop that Amy Kapczynski, Jack Balkin, and I organized in the spring, bringing together a fabulous group of people thinking about law, technology, and political economy.