Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=fcri20 Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fcri20 Data-owning democracy or digital socialism? James Muldoon To cite this article: James Muldoon (2022): Data-owning democracy or digital socialism?, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, DOI: 10.1080/13698230.2022.2120737 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2120737 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 05 Sep 2022. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1007 View related articles View Crossmark data Data-owning democracy or digital socialism? James Muldoon University of Exeter, Exeter, UK ABSTRACT This article contrasts two reform proposals articulated in recent debates about how to democratize the digital economy: data-owning democracy and digital socialism. A data-owning democracy is a political-economic regime character - ized by the widespread distribution of data as capital among citizens, whereas digital socialism entails the social ownership of productive assets in the digital economy and popular control over digital services. The article argues that while a degree of complementarity exists between the two, there are important limitations to theories of data-owning democracy that have not yet received significant attention within the literature. The bulk of the article highlights three ways in which digital socialists would consider a data-owning democracy to fall short of achieving a more just digital economy: a lack of workplace democracy, limitations in terms of scope, and a lack of democratic control over long-term investment decisions in new technology. The article thus contributes to deter - mining what is at stake in recent debates about how to democratize the digital economy. KEYWORDS Digital economy; data markets; data-owning democracy; digital socialism; freedom; socialism Data and digital assets are an increasingly critical aspect of the global econ - omy. As we spend more of our time online, technology companies take in record profits with new modes of value extraction (Cohen, 2019 ; Zuboff, 2019 ). From Amazon to Google and Meta, data-driven companies extract, analyze and redeploy data about their users to sell advertising products and improve their services. Not only are our working and social lives becoming subject to an ongoing process of ‘datafication’, but the largest of these tech companies now wield more power than some nation-states (Van Dijck, 2014 , p. 198). Their infrastructural power allows them to exercise disproportionate influence over the structure of consumer markets and public debate (Teachout, 2020 ). The dominant liberal response to the increasing discrepancy in digital power has been to call for greater government regulation and oversight (Benthall & Goldenfein, 2020 ). This has involved moves to enhance the CONTACT James Muldoon [email protected] REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2022.2120737 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.protection of individuals’ data and privacy in addition to limiting the power of large tech companies to control markets and buy up competitors (Khan, 2017 ). Regulators on both sides of the Atlantic aim to introduce rules to regulate