All Publications

The Social Effects and Normativity of Data-Mining, Algorithms, and the Digital Economy Research Team (‘DADE’)

The digital economy has penetrated nearly every aspect of society. Our research seeks to examine the effects of this prolific phenomenon on our social and personal development, our ability to access basic needs and social services, and our political and legal institutions and culture. We examine the connection between data mining, algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence integral to digital services with outcomes across private and public sectors, including medicine and health insurance, labor and the workplace, marketing, criminal law, and political and legal discourse. Our team is made up of faculty and Ph.D. candidates across various disciplines, including law, philosophy, physics, political science, and sociology.

In addition to conducting our research, we are organizing a symposium that will take place in June at UC Berkeley and will result in the publication of a special issue of SCRIPTed, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal from the University of Edinburgh specializing in the intersection of law, society and technology. The symposium will be organized as a workshop for the papers ultimately published in the special issue. The papers will be a mix of empirical, legal, and theoretical methodologies across the sectors examined. The attendees include the faculty and graduate student members of our research team, as well as selected invited faculty from both Berkeley and beyond.

This spring we will continue to research and workshop the topics that will be featured in the special issue of SCRIPTed. These topics include:

  • The utility of using these tools for data collection purposes that previously relied on human responders, such as surveys
  • The potential use of mechanistic interpretability methods to identify systemic means for developing less discriminatory algorithms under U.S. civil rights legal regimes
  • The role of human attention in the production of value in technology markets
  • An analysis highlighting pressing questions concerning predictive algorithms and the right to privacy
  • An examination of pension programs increasing investment in tech stocks belonging to labor-hostile corporations

About the authors

Isabella Mariani

Ph.D. Candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy

Isabella Luisa Mariani is a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley School of Law in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program with a designated emphasis in political economy. Her research lies at the intersection of law, philosophy, and political economy. Her dissertation examines the attention economy, analyzing its effects on our autonomy and interpersonal relationships, the market power of technology companies, and potential regulatory and legal responses.

She is the co-leader of “The Social Effects and Normativity of Data-Mining, Algorithms, and the Digital Economy” research team, which was awarded the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative Collaborative Technology Research Grant for the 2025-2026 academic year. She previously co-led the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix Research Grant for 2024-2025. She was a doctoral fellow with the Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory for the 2024-2025 academic year.

She holds a master of arts in philosophy from the University of Auckland, for which she received first class honors for her thesis, entitled Corruption and Justice: Restoring Institutional Integrity. She is the recipient of the 2016 University of Auckland Faculty of Arts International Master’s Degree Scholarship. She holds a joint honors bachelor of arts in philosophy and political science from McGill University. Her work is funded by the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative.

Dorna Mohaghegh

Ph.D. Candidate, Jurisprudence and Social Policy

Related publications

Collaborative Grant

March 30, 2026

Revisiting network neutrality for the enhanced internet

This project revisits the net neutrality debate in light of contemporary technological realities. Distributed caching infrastructure is no longer incidental; it is functionally necessary for high-performance internet service. The authors propose democratizing caching by requiring that first-hop ISPs offer standardized caching services as a component of baseline broadband access.

Collaborative Grant

March 30, 2026

Visual stimulation in digital content

An increasingly important and overlooked dimension of digital content quality for kids is the level of visual stimulation. This project uses computer vision to quantify these overstimulating visual features that are linked to adverse cognitive and behavioral outcomes.