Jon Penney
York University
Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age
Abstract
Today, states, companies, and extremist actors are increasingly weaponizing surveillance, law, censorship, and technology to chill, manipulate, and repress us. And as the Trump administration's deeply chilling recent actions demonstrate, it is not only surveillance capitalism or overreaching national security driving these threats: the aim is often to chill critics, dissenting speech, democratic opposition, and victimize disfavored groups. Now, with far right/extremist movements established in the North America, Europe, Asia, and beyond, how these threats chill fundamental rights and are corrosive to democratic societies is a national and international concern. But conventional approaches to this challenge in law, public policy, and research are deeply flawed. In his new book Chilling Effects, Penney critiques conventional accounts and advances a new theory and understanding of the repressive and conforming effects of technology, state, and corporate power, and offers a roadmap of how to respond to their weaponization today and tomorrow.
About
Jon Penney is an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, where he serves as York Research Chair in Artificial Intelligence, Data Governance, and the Law. A legal scholar and social scientist, his research examines the intersection of law, technology, and human rights, with particular attention to AI, machine learning, automation, privacy, security, and digital surveillance. He is a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, a Research Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, and a Research Associate at Cornell University’s Citizens and Technology Lab, and has held research affiliations at Harvard and Princeton. His award-winning interdisciplinary research has received extensive international attention, and he is the author of Chilling Effects: Repression, Conformity, and Power in the Digital Age (Cambridge University Press, 2026), which examines how surveillance, law, and technology can shape behavior and threaten freedom and democracy.