If the 2018 Facebook-Cambridge Analytica revelations led to a popular “techlash,” the past 12 months can be seen as the year of tech’s reckoning. Meta/Facebook’s collapse in value was a humbling comedown for a company that was previously seen as an unstoppable global force; the cryptocurrency bubble burst spectacularly; Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has people considering the previously unimaginable possibility of a post-social-media world.

More than anything, the events of the past year have served as a potent reminder that tech in all its guises does not exist separate from society, and that the social-technological tension works both ways. Tech issues are social issues, and social issues increasingly have an unavoidable technological dimension. This tension is clearly on display in the first edition of the Digital Rights Archive Newsletter. From cultural policy to finance to labour policy, we see in these podcasts, reports, videos and books the processes of construction of what the International Political Economy scholar Susan Strange would call “bargains”: the negotiation of the basic rules governing 21st century life.

At times, the pull of the digital revolution creates new challenges around the expansion of new business models, and as Fassi-Fihri argues in her book, new rights.

While the technologies and players may be novel, many underlying issues remain the same as they always were. Should the government continue to play its decades-long role in shaping cultural policy, or should we leave it to the (platform-dominated) market? Should companies be allowed to despoil the environment in pursuit of profit? How should financial instruments like cryptocurrencies be treated? How can we maintain competition law in situations where innovations can give rise to increased monopoly pressures? How can workers in both the Global North and the Global South improve their situation?

The very breadth of these works serves as an argument that understanding public policy today requires a sound appreciation for the digital dimensions that they highlight, even as they make clear that digital policy only has meaning within the specific contexts in which digital technologies are deployed, be it, say, culture or finance.

Since this is the inaugural Digital Rights Archive newsletter, it’s worth saying a few words about the archive itself. The articles featured in this newsletter, selected from the Digital Rights Archive itself, offer some starting points on these important and complex issues. If you find these articles useful, there’s a lot more at the Digital Rights Archive.

The Archive is designed to provide policymakers and citizens with a solid knowledge base for understanding digital policy issues. Unlike automated services like Google Scholar, the works included in the Digital Rights Archive, as well as in The Syllabus project of which it is an offshoot, are selected via “artisanal automation”: using algorithms to scour the web, with the best pieces hand-selected for inclusion in the archive. Think of it like algorithmic collection combined with expert curation, automation used to augment, not replace, human action, a small challenge to established orthodoxies at the end of a tumultuous year.