The Crimes of Digital Capitalism

Aitor Jiménez’s The Crimes of Digital Capitalism: Corporate Crime in an Age of Exploitation arrives amid growing enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and digital transformation. Published by NYU Press in March 2025, it has won the 2025 Outstanding Book Award from the American Society of Criminology �" a timely contribution to the debate over Big Tech’s power.

Reviewed by Dr Matiur Rahman

The book’s central claim is simple but unsettling: the vast social harms tied to digital technology are not accidents of otherwise beneficial innovation. Exploitation, surveillance, dispossession and inequality are structurally built into digital capitalism’s business model �" conditions the system requires to keep expanding, not failures of it.

Jiménez’s key contribution is bringing corporate criminology into the digital economy. He is less interested in whether a company has broken a specific law than in why so many harmful practices remain perfectly legal �" even celebrated as innovation. Labour exploitation, aggressive data extraction and algorithmic discrimination operate within existing regulatory boundaries, while environmental damage is treated as an unavoidable cost of growth. Law, he argues, cannot be the final measure of justice, since powerful interests help shape the very rules that govern them.

One of the book’s strongest qualities is its refusal to treat digital technology as immaterial. Cloud computing and artificial intelligence are often imagined as clean and weightless, yet Jiménez shows this economy depends on minerals, energy, factories and human labour at global scale. His chapters on extractive industries challenge the assumption that digital and green transitions are automatically benign, showing how legal frameworks often normalise the damage extraction leaves behind.

The book is equally attentive to how platforms have reshaped work, promising flexibility while quietly producing insecurity. Workers are managed by algorithms and evaluated continuously through data, with the human supervisor steadily replaced by invisible digital management answerable to no one in particular.

This is where the book becomes strikingly relevant to Bangladesh, often held up internationally as a digital success story: mobile connectivity has expanded rapidly, mobile financial services now underpin everyday transactions, and platforms increasingly shape commerce and public life. Jiménez’s framework suggests the more important question is not whether Bangladesh becomes more digital, but whose interests that transformation serves, and who absorbs its costs.

Bangladesh is now the world’s second-largest source of online gig labour after India, and its platform workforce illustrates the book's argument precisely. Ride-sharing drivers, delivery workers and freelancers are presented as symbols of flexible, modern work. Yet, platforms retain tight control over pricing, ratings and access to customers while offering none of the protections traditional employment guarantees. Independent assessments of platforms operating in Bangladesh have found labour rights falling short of basic standards, with existing law offering little clarity on who is accountable when an algorithm, not a person, decides a worker's income.

Data extraction poses a comparable risk. As daily life in Bangladesh moves through phones, financial apps and digital public services, citizens generate vast quantities of personal information with little understanding of how it is collected, stored or monetised. Jiménez’s insight is that data is never a neutral resource �" it is a form of power, and whoever controls it can shape markets and the choices available to individuals. With draft data-protection legislation still untested, this question remains wide open here.

Algorithmic discrimination extends the concern further. Automated systems are often presented as objective because they run on mathematics, but they are built within societies already marked by inequality �" when their underlying data reflects existing bias, algorithms reproduce it faster and at greater scale. A country with pronounced disparities of income, gender and geography, with more than half its population still offline, cannot assume imported or locally built AI will correct inequalities it was never designed to notice.

If the book has a limitation, it is that its theoretical framework is more developed than its engagement with Global South political economies. Digital capitalism does not behave identically everywhere; weak regulatory capacity, foreign-technology dependence and large informal economies produce vulnerabilities distinct from those Jiménez documents in Europe and North America. This reads less as a flaw than an invitation for research grounded in economies such as Bangladesh's own.

The Crimes of Digital Capitalism succeeds because it shifts the terms of the debate. Rather than treating digital harm as a technical problem awaiting a software fix, Jiménez reads it through political economy and social justice. This is not an anti-technology argument; its value lies in refusing technological romanticism altogether. Technology is neither automatically liberating nor inherently oppressive �" its consequences depend on the structures shaping its design and deployment.

That distinction carries weight for a country still deciding what its digital future should look like. Innovation without accountability can widen inequality, and digital expansion without enforceable rights can manufacture new exploitation while advertising progress. Jiménez’s most necessary warning is his most uncomfortable: a society can grow steadily more technologically advanced without growing any more just. For Bangladesh, the task ahead is not simply to build a digital future, but to decide, deliberately, who it is built for.