Chapter Three provides a thorough exploration of the multifaceted experience of being Qizilbash within the Ottoman realm and the consequential implications of such an identity within the intricate Ottoman–Safavid geopolitical landscape. By scrutinizing a diverse array of Qizilbash texts, artifacts, and ceremonial practices, the chapter elucidates the complex processes entailed in shaping and perpetuating a collective sense of belonging. Additionally, this chapter seeks to integrate a discussion of the Ottoman state’s surveillance strategies into the analysis of Qizilbash subjecthood formation within the empire.

Chapter 3 presents the other side of the coin, namely AI risks and harms. Automated decision systems, chatbots, recommender systems, and other AI-powered software and platforms have been found to cause potential risks or actual harms to affected persons and communities. Such risks and harms include bias and discrimination, surveillance, inaccurate, incorrect and unreliable output, disinformation, misinformation or manipulation, harm to life, livelihood and wellbeing, privacy violations, decline in product and service quality, political polarization, online radicalization and algorithmic censorship, and job replacement. Some of these harms, such as bias and discrimination, have already been experienced frequently, while others, like job replacement, point to future risks. It is also worth noting that AI risks and harms often aggravate existing social and political problems. For example, political polarization and radicalization, while exacerbated by algorithmic curation, appear to have origins in societal divisions. Finally, AI is criticized for causing system-level harm in the form of environmental degradation, exploitation of labor, and market concentration.

Chapter 6 looks at the failures of educational innovation during the Covid-19 crisis. As schools scrambled to adapt to remote learning, remote proctoring technologies rapidly expanded. They implemented surveillance systems that violated student privacy and disproportionately harmed vulnerable students. Despite claims of maintaining academic integrity, remote proctoring created a stressful, punitive environment that prioritized monitoring over genuine educational support while failing to do nearly enough to address the inequalities at the heart of accessing and using digital resources. Sadly, the rush to innovate missed crucial opportunities to upgrade core educational infrastructure and truly support students during a time of unprecedented challenge. As if this wasn’t bad enough, some schools continue to use remote proctoring software. A pandemic problem has thus become the new normal.

Chapter 5, “The Failed Promise of Covid Innovation,” presents the pandemic as a crucial case study of how innovative thinking let us down at a time of great vulnerability. Simply put, the early days of massive fatalities made COVID-19 a health crisis. But those days also can be seen as a powerful lens for understanding high-tech failure. From contact tracing apps to thermal imaging cameras and digital vaccine passports, there was a fever pitch of government and corporate enthusiasm for innovative solutionism that was predestined to be unreliable and, thus, in context, dangerous. While we acknowledge remarkable breakthroughs like the rapid development of mRNA vaccines, we also make the case that additional effective responses could have come from upgrading existing systems rather than trying to do things entirely new.

Chapter 4 critically examines the fact that sometimes innovations not only fail to solve crucial problems, but are the problem itself. Specifically, it explains why Ring doorbell exemplifies the threat of home surveillance innovation. The billion-dollar Amazon subsidiary sold millions of Americans on the promise of security via surveillance without any credible evidence that its system works. But rather than encouraging people to adopt proven security upgrades, such as better locks and secure package drops, Ring wins customers by making its digital innovation seem essential amid a climate of rising fear. By fighting against boring yet effective alternatives, Ring’s anxiety-inducing features have further normalized intensive networked surveillance and helped turn innocuous neighborly interactions into potential threats.

In Chapter 10, we conclude with an overview of the broader themes seen throughout this work, showcasing the tell-tale signs of innovation failure. These patterns go to the core of our work, lessons learned from past innovations that can help us to avoid repeating similar mistakes in the future. No one, not even the cagiest upgrader, is going to be able to predict every new technology that will succeed or flop. But with this mindset, you can avoid some of the more obvious traps that investors, politicians, and the public continue to fall for, while valuing the evidence-based alternatives we so often neglect.

Suicide is a global phenomenon, with implications for HICs and LMICs alike, bec,ause of interconnectedness. Social injustice increases societies’ suicide risk and it is easily and frequently exported. Suicide is preventable but not always individually. Suicide prediction is difficult or impossible, so those measures that effect everyone work best. Hence assuring good quality, timely mental health coverage for the whole population is important. Those with the least resources must be targeted, as they are at greatest risk..

The Communist Party is building a digitally capable state to remain at the vanguard of social and political development in China. CPC leaders are advancing digitalization forcefully throughout the governance and economic system through various policy initiatives. Informatization serves both better governance and public service, by overcoming previous bottlenecks and spatial challenges in administration. It also enhances the party state’s surveillance and monitoring capabilities. The CPC’s goals for China’s future under its continued rule require a digital infrastructure and economy that is both efficacious and subject to the Party’s control. To this end, the CPC is building out a comprehensive governance architecture for cyberspace, including the world’s most expansive data regulatory regime. The current leadership regards these digital capabilities as a key part of its comprehensive governance model that will enable the CPC to implement its domestic and international vision for China in the coming years.

Evidence is essential to suicide prevention. Delay until the evidence base is complete is not possible, so cautious advice must be given to policy makers on imperfect evidence. This means recognising uncertainty, including the risk that the advice may cause more harm than good. Evaluation during implementation is critical but frequently neglected. The UK has a system of nationwide statistics, supplemented by a National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Safety in Mental Health (NCISH) into all apparently suicidal deaths during or after mental health care. In addition, there are recently devised real-time statistics of suspicious deaths. There is a system of self-harm registers, independent of official systems. These systems have generated unusually good information on suicidal deaths and self-harm, leading to tangible improvements. However, like all evidence, it is still imperfect.

The progressive digitalization of industries and services has direct effects on the organization of labor. Telework is foremost a consequence of the general increased use of information technology in our professional and private lives. The organizational changes of labor due to digitalization however challenge the functionality and effectiveness of labor law. The employer’s comprehensible concerns, that teleworkers might pursue private interests at home, serve in practice as a justification for implementation of closed meshed monitoring measures. Hence, we face a significant paradox: even though teleworkers enjoy a putative higher degree of autonomy because they are not present at premise and therefore not subject to the employers’ physical authority, they are exposed to a higher degree of dependency rooted in digital control measures. Data protection acquires increasing importance for workers. Labor protection in many cases cannot be separated from data protection. This chapter argues that this evolution is not sufficiently mirrored by the law, and then analyses in its first part the existing shortcomings and loopholes exemplified by the problem of digital surveillance of telework. In its second part the chapter seeks to identify possible legal mechanisms to create or even foster interaction between labor and data protection law.

Historical tensions over race and nation have bubbled over time and resurfaced again since the Brexit vote in the forms of increased racism and a “hostile environment.” British Muslim identity and belonging has been a complex process of negotiation in the British Isles and beyond. This chapter explores how transnational Muslim identities in Britain form digital interconnections and face disruptions in an increasingly securitized global architecture in which the digital serves as a place of contestation and surveillance. Through summary close readings from selected writings by Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid, Ayisha Malik, and Zaffar Kunial, this chapter emphasizes how Muslim writers translate the limits of a national English identity for migrant groups after Brexit through new representations of enclosed spaces such as gardens and parks.

Susser provides a thoughtful examination of what we mean by (digital) exploitation and suggests that regulation should constrain platform activities that instrumentalize people or treat them unfairly. Using a diverse set of examples, he argues that the language of exploitation helps makes visible forms of injustice overlooked or only partially captured by dominant concerns about, for example, surveillance, discrimination, and related platform abuses. He provides valuable conceptual and normative resources for challenging efforts by platforms to obscure or legitimate those abuses.

The Human Rights Act requires courts to decide cases in conformity with the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights in so far as possible. Employees must bring a claim under UK employment law and then the rights, whether at common law or under statute, should conform to the Convention rights such as the right to respect for private life, freedom to manifest a religion, and freedom of expression.