Digital Constitutionalism

Discussion

Dhruv Deepak and Ben Manski:

"Digital Constitutionalism is a practice around digital technology that is oriented toward next system design.

The history of the development of the internet epitomizes technology’s constitutional capacities. While now dominated by corporate interests, networked computing originated with J.C.R. Licklider’s vision of technology serving democratic exchange and collective intelligence (Pelkey et al., 2022). Licklider advocated for demilitarizing research and foresaw many of the key developments we now associate with the digital age, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the political implications of networked computing (Dertouzos and Moses, 1979; Licklider, 1963). The displacement of his vision by an internet increasingly dominated by global corporations occurred in constitutional contests over technical standards, protocols, and governance structures. The battle to determine the internet’s technical standards and protocols was ultimately won by the Cisco, AT&T, IBM, Netscape, and Microsoft corporations (Pelkey et al., 2022; Monsees et al., 2023).

Today’s digital infrastructure signifies that constitutional victory, yet it also remains contested terrain where alternative constitutional visions persist (Wolfson, 2014). Indeed, digital technologists and activists continue to reclaim spaces for expression of their values and priorities (Mattoni, 2013). They are designing and implementing technologies that challenge the centralized control of information, allowing communities to assert authority over digital resources, and generating collective identity and solidarity among users and developers (Diani, 2000; Bauwens et al., 2019). In these cases, technologists often join with broad social movements. In particular, technologists are aligning with the long-building cooperative movement and with the much newer solidarity economy movement (Gordon Nembhard, 2021; Scholz, 2023; Papadimitropoulos and Malamidis, 2024). As we will describe in depth further in this article, coders are working with other activists to build alternatives to the extractive business models of corporate tech giants. Platform cooperatives, constructed as alternatives to platform capitalism (e.g., Amazon, Alphabet Inc., Uber), enable workers and users to collectively own and govern the digital platforms they rely on (Scholz, 2023). Building these new digital systems contributes not only to technological innovation but also to the democratization of social and economic relations, tending, we believe, to a new form of commonwealth (Manski and Manski, 2018; Bühler et al., 2023; Papadimitropoulos and Malamidis, 2024).

And that is the intent of these coders. They are deliberately writing the rules for a new society directly into the digital worlds they code. As such, they are constitutional authors. Where the 18th century saw the first triumphs of political constitutionalism, and the 19th and 20th centuries saw the emergence of economic and societal forms of constitutionalism, the 21st is experiencing the rise of digital constitutionalism (Teubner, 2010; Teubner and Golia, 2023). Here, the ordering and internal relations of an entire system is articulated in and enacted from programming protocols and code (De Gregorio and Radu, 2022)."

(https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848/full)

The practice of Digital Constitutionalism

Dhruv Deepak and Ben Manksi:

"As we have noted, while written constitutions require independent and often elaborate enactment mechanisms, digital code narrows the gap between formal and substantive constitutionalism. When digital protocols specify how systems operate, those specifications immediately shape material behavior. This immediacy makes digital constitutional power both more precise and more totalizing than other constitutional forms. Technologists and their collaborators specify a system design, coders encode that design, new capabilities and actions are afforded by the new design, and new configurations of sovereignty follow from those affordances (Figure 1).

This is the primary order of operations in digital constitutionalism, but there are also other orders of operation. For instance, the exercise of sovereign power may facilitate particular kinds of new designs and limit others; consider the control that Apple Inc. exercises over its operating systems. Or consider a different order of operations: The present example of particular affordances may influence later design choices; once Indymedia.org demonstrated the power of DIY digital media tools, major media corporations like CNN emulated them with “citizen reporting” apps such as iReport (Daubs, 2016)

We developed our theory of the constitutive powers of technology in order to explain the significance of the digital commoners and their movement. However, we believe that these same constitutive powers are also present in other recognized forms of constitutionalism, undertaken on municipal, national republican, regional/subnational, regional/continental/hemispheric, transnational/global, economic, societal, ecological, or other terrains. Historically, different sets of actors have wielded the constitutive powers of design, affordance, and sovereignty on these different terrains. Recent scholarship has shown that which actors engage in constitutional action on a particular terrain, and the degree to which they engage, significantly impacts outcomes. National constitutions initiated by social movements and drafted and ratified with authentic and inclusive popular participation tend to produce more democratic and equitable outcomes (Eisenstadt et al., 2017; Manski, 2020). While elite actors often dominate formal constitutional processes, transformative constitutional change requires the practical experiments and lived alternatives that movements generate. Digital constitutionalism thus depends on maintaining connection between technical constitutional authors and broader movements for social transformation (De Gregorio, 2022)."

(https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848/full)

The constitutive powers of the digital commons

Dhruv Deepak and Ben Manksi:

"Digital commons initiatives demonstrate how technical design, affordances, and sovereignty can reshape social and political relations (Kostakis et al., 2015; Singh and Vipra, 2019). Through practical implementations of community-led technologies, from collaborative knowledge platforms to community-controlled networks and beyond, these projects develop foundational elements of alternative digital systems (Kioupkiolis, 2022).

One such alternative system, the digital commonwealth, represents a vision for reimagining society through technology—an integrated technological ecosystem where platforms and infrastructures enable new forms of social coordination (Manski and Manski, 2018; Hanna et al., 2020). This commonwealth transcends isolated resource management systems by creating interoperable digital architectures that facilitate fundamentally different social and economic relationships (Kioupkiolis, 2022). These relationships are built on shared governance, resource distribution systems, and common technological control.

We will return to the concept of the digital commonwealth in detail in parts 8 and 9. The sub-sections that immediately follow, however, examine four key types of digital commoning projects, analyzing how each mobilizes design, affordance, and sovereignty toward constitutional alternatives. Peer production systems establish frameworks for managing shared resources; platform cooperatives demonstrate new models of democratic enterprise; data sovereignty and digital rights initiatives develop technical frameworks for community control over information; and digital governance platforms enable new forms of collective decision-making.

In analyzing these implementations, we identify key approaches that together outline possible constitutional frameworks for a digital commonwealth. Each approach mobilizes technology’s constitutive powers in distinct ways. The technical architectures, interface capabilities, and governance protocols of these systems demonstrate how digital technologies can be structured to enable different patterns of resource access, participation, and control (Dulong de Rosnay and Stalder, 2020; O’Neil et al., 2021)."

(https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848/full)