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Coded power is social control—power over other people’s relationships. This can be seen today in the top-down control over data exerted by tech oligarchs—billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. DOGE’s takeover of key government institutions early in the second Trump administration was a particularly blatant example of an attempt to exercise coded power by tapping into critical information systems of government. In this book, Co-Pierre Georg and Katharina Pistor call for empowering data producers—that is, all of us who use AI and search engines, or post on social media—rather than those who control proprietary data infrastructures.

Georg, an economist, and Pistor, a legal scholar, explain that coded power emerges when some assert power over the fabric that shapes society. Unchecked, it penetrates deeply into social relationships in order to advance the interests of the coders—the oligarchs—and their clients. Legal coded power goes back centuries. Digital coded power and its effect on our society have become apparent only recently. It is exercised as despotic power imposed by the will of the coders to deny data producers the right to self-determination. Choices about digital technology made in the past, Georg and Pistor argue, were often driven by libertarian ideology rather than technological inevitability. They propose an alternative, decentralized structure, aided by the blockchain and new privacy-enhancing technologies, in which data control is assumed jointly by data creators—and data sharing is determined by creators’ willingness to do so rather than the dictates of digital despots.