The Future(s) of Fundamental Rights

This chapter considers the effects of digital disruption on the recognition and enforcement of fundamental human rights. It maps three overlapping and mutually reinforcing sets of trends. First, traditional mechanisms for defining and enforcing human rights have begun to unravel, and that process has created points of entry for new discourses and practices organized around managerial and technical expertise and optimistic notions of corporate social responsibility. Second, strategies for bottom-up cultural and political production have enabled powerful new forms of resistance but have been far less successful at underwriting new institutional forms dedicated to ensuring more widespread protections for all people. In particular, platform-based, massively intermediated media infrastructures both facilitate and co-opt bottom-up cultural and political production and amplify both benevolence and malevolence. Third, other emergent discourses about the nature and importance of fundamental rights reinforce the normative authority of powerful, nonhuman actors.