This suggests, in my mind, a strategy of worker empowerment and deliberative governance rather than command-and-control regulation. At the firm or workplace level, new forms of unionization and collective bargaining could address the everyday invasions of privacy or erosions of autonomy that arise through technological monitoring. Workers might block new monitoring tools that they feel are unduly intrusive. Or they might accept more extensive monitoring in exchange for greater pay or more reasonable hours.

Workers could also be woven into state and federal policy-making in a more sustained fashion. They could be guaranteed seats on new administrative boards established to consider responses to technological change, for example, or given a formal role in a more robust industrial policy that aims to create high-skill jobs and to train workers to take them on. Such proposals update a classic theme in information law: the potential for new technologies to encourage greater democratization. The twist is that to exert democratic control over contemporary technologies, we may need to repurpose a paradigmatic “old-economy” tool: labor unions.