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In the digital era many African countries sit at the crossroads of potential futures embodied in digital era technologies and past paths that have been a product of colonial and post-colonial authoritarian rule. This intersection may encompass existing zones of contestation and unearth new ones based on ethnicity, religion, region, age, and other sources of division. The digital era illustrates the potential collision between future paths as envisaged by many young people in Africa and past paths that continue to benefit those who govern and the laws that empower them. The intersection of past and potential future paths offers considerable potential for protests that might lead to actual conflagrations. The 2020 #EndSARS protests in Nigeria, which involved young people who in Africa today are engaged with and use technologies widely, provoked a violent response from rulers threatened by the prospect of future paths that have potential to change power dynamics.

Olufunmilayo B. Arewa is the Shusterman Professor of Business and Transactional Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Her degrees include an M.A. and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Her research focuses on technology, music, film, business, and Africana studies. Prior to becoming a law professor, she served as a Foreign Service Officer in the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C. and Montevideo, Uruguay, and practiced law in the technology startup arena in Silicon Valley, New York and Boston. Her book Disrupting Africa: Technology, Law and Development will be published later this year by Cambridge University Press.

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, online activities are no longer limited to desktop or laptop computers, smartphones and tablets. Instead, these activities now include ordinary tasks, such as using an internet-connected refrigerator or washing machine. At the same time, the IoT provides unlimited opportunities for household objects to serve as surveillance devices that continually monitor, collect and process vast quantities of our data. In this work, Stacy-Ann Elvy critically examines the consumer ramifications of the IoT through the lens of commercial law and privacy and security law. The book provides concrete legal solutions to remedy inadequacies in the law that will help usher in a more robust commercial law of privacy and security that protects consumer interests.

Stacy-Ann Elvy is a Professor of Law and Martin Luther King, Jr. Hall Research Scholar at the University of California, Davis School of Law. Her research focuses on “the commercial law of privacy” and its relationship to emerging technology, and human rights law. Professor Elvy is a past recipient of the Otto L. Walter Distinguished Writing Award and the UC Davis CAMPSSAH Faculty Scholar Award, in addition to the Rising Legal Star Award from the New York Law Journal. She is currently an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Principles for a Data Economy project and a contributing peer review editor for the technology law section of the online legal journal Jotwell.

To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there's nothing law can do to keep up with technology. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology - a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. To secure the benefits of changing technology, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate.

Joshua Fairfield is an internationally recognized law and technology scholar, specializing in digital property, electronic contract, big data privacy, and virtual communities. He has written on the law and regulation of e-commerce and online contracts and on the application of standard economic models to virtual environments. Professor Fairfield's current research focuses on big data privacy models and the next generation of legal applications for cryptocurrencies. In 2017, he published Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom with Cambridge University Press. His most recent book Runaway Technology: Can Law Keep Up looks at the intersection of law and language.

Too many CEOs tell a simple story about the future of work: if a machine can do what you do, your job will be automated. Another story is possible. In virtually every walk of life, robotic systems can make labor more valuable, not less. Frank Pasquale tells the story of nurses, teachers, designers, and others who partner with technologists, rather than serving as data sources for their computerized replacements. This cooperation reveals the kind of technological advance that could bring us all better health care, education, and more, while maintaining meaningful work. Sober yet optimistic, New Laws of Robotics offers an inspiring vision of technological progress, in which human capacities and expertise are the irreplaceable center of an inclusive economy.

Frank Pasquale is a noted expert on the law of artificial intelligence (AI), algorithms, and machine learning. He is a nationally regarded scholar, whose work focuses on how information is used across a number of areas, including health law, commerce, and tech. His expertise encompasses the study of technological advances and the unintended consequences of the interaction of privacy law, intellectual property, and antitrust laws. He is one of the leaders of a global movement for “algorithmic accountability.” In media and communication studies, he has developed a comprehensive legal analysis of barriers to, and opportunities for, regulation of internet platforms. In privacy law and surveillance, his work is among the leading research on regulation of algorithmic ranking, scoring, and sorting systems, including credit scoring and threat scoring.