Digital Technologists and the Constitution of the Next System

* Article: Deepak D and Manski B (2025) Coding the future: digital technologists and the constitution of the next system. Front. Sociol. 10:1362848. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848

URL = https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2025.1362848/full

"We argue that digital commoners are producing the elements of a digital commonwealth, a new form of democratic economic polity."

Abstract

"Digital technologists are coding the world of our immediate future. Digital commoners are a subset of digital technologists who aim to expand the spheres of life held in common, strengthen mutual aid, and create the conditions for shared participation in power. Relying on an understanding of technologists as activists, of technology as a movement, and of digital code as constitutional design, we analyze the digital commoners and their movement. Relying on a theory of the constitutive powers of digital technology in the areas of design, affordance, and sovereignty, we examine platform cooperatives, peer production systems, data sovereignty initiatives, and digital governance platforms, and analyze how these initiatives align with broader movements for system change. We argue that digital commoners are producing the elements of a digital commonwealth, a new form of democratic economic polity. Finally, we call on scholars and academic institutions to intervene and support digital commoning efforts, amplifying technologists’ capacity to code the future toward shared goals."

Contents

Ben Manski et al.:

"We introduce conceptualizations of technologists as activists, of technology as a form of movement, and of digital coding as a form of constitutionalism.

Centering the agency of technologists and the historicity of technologization allows us to turn in parts 3 and 4 to a theorization of the constitutive powers of digital technology and of the practice of digital constitutionalism. Paying attention to the constitutive powers of design, affordance, and sovereignty, we argue, allows us to understand digital commoners as constitutional authors.

In part 5, we analyze the efforts of digital commoners to create platform cooperatives, peer production systems, data sovereignty and digital rights initiatives, and digital governance platforms, each an important element for creating a digital commons.

Then, with part 6, we describe how these, when linked with elements produced by the closely-related solidarity economy, municipalist, just transition, abolitionist, and democracy movements, enable the emergence of an alternative vision for reorganizing society that challenges both state-centric and corporate-driven technofuturist paradigms.

As described in parts 8 and 9, we identify this alternative as a digital commonwealth, an economic political system where communities design digital technology to organize economic relations, embed democratic governance, and enhance collective wellbeing (Manski and Manski, 2018; Hanna et al., 2020). We conclude in part 10 with an argument for the necessity of thoughtful and purposive academic intervention."

Excerpts

Technologists as Activists, technology as a movement, code as constitution]]

Dhruv Deepak et al. :

"An activist is someone who has made the decision to take part in changing society; instead of simply living an ordinary life, the activist steps into the extraordinary work of making history (Flacks, 1988). A movement is collective action toward shared goals for changing society; when this action is directed toward a freer society for more people, it is described as a social movement (Touraine, 1988; Buechler, 2000). These definitions are drawn from the work of social movement scholars, and our approach to studying technological change draws significantly from social movement theory. For the purpose of our study, a technologist is a form of activist working for societal change, and technology itself is a form of movement.

Various scholars explain movements as responses to opportunities, threats, and other changes in the structure of society (McAdam et al., 2001; Tarrow, 2011) or as processes through which individuals come together on the basis of shared identities to engage in social conflict (Diani, 1992; Melucci, 1998; Flesher Fominaya, 2010). However, technologists are not merely responding to short-term changes in external conditions. Their work reflects a more strategic collective praxis aimed at reshaping societal systems (Taylor, 2000; Barker et al., 2013; Manski, 2019; Kioupkiolis, 2022). Rather than accepting a reductionist notion of technological determinism, which assumes that technology autonomously drives social and economic change (Bimber, 1990), we view technologists as strategic actors who are intentionally shaping technology to challenge entrenched power structures and reconfigure the world (Rozas et al., 2021; Scholz, 2023). While technology conditions the available pathways of movements, movements also shape the trajectory of technology (Mattoni, 2013; Flesher Fominaya and Gillan, 2017).

The decision to describe technologists as “a form of activist” relies on the recognition that there are different types of activists—student, youth, Indigenous, women’s, labor, LGBTQ+, among many others. All share in common their conscious agency engaged in the work of social change, yet each brings different knowledge, positional power, resources, and skillsets to their particular activism. However, just as not all students are activists, not all technologists consciously engage in the task of making history; what concerns us are the extraordinary actions of technologists who consciously produce technology in order to produce societal change, often embedding their visions and priorities into their creations (Scholz and Schneider, 2017).

Thomas Paine, the 18th century radical democrat, internationalist, and revolutionary, saw his design of the iron bridge as more than a feat of engineering; it was a political intervention aimed at strengthening the geographic and cultural unity of the nascent republic in the United States (Gray, 2016). Similarly, Marie Curie’s pioneering work in radioactivity was guided by humanist values, reflecting a commitment to improving the human condition and challenging prevailing social hierarchies (Zarevich, 2022). In contrast, Herman Hollerith’s mechanical tabulator, while a technical breakthrough, was designed to be used to categorize populations based on eugenic criteria, demonstrating how technology can reinforce harmful ideologies through seemingly neutral technical processes (Black, 2012; Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva, 2008).

These examples highlight the multiple valences of technological innovations and help clarify that technological change is, at least in part, produced ideologically. Technologists like Robert Owen, who integrated his political views into his experiments with community formation, pioneered social innovations that shaped labor rights and the cooperative movement (Podmore, 1905; Miliband, 1954; Gray, 2016). The rivalry between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, often framed as the “War of Currents,” exemplifies how differing strategic commitments—radical versus incremental—can shape technological development (Bijker et al., 2012).

Note that the strategic commitments of technologists as technologists are toward particular visions of technology. This is what we mean when we write that “technology is a movement.” For technologists, technology in itself is a good and technological progress (however that is understood) is a primary goal. It must be said that the movement of technology is autonomous from other kinds of movements in society (e.g., social, national, religious, authoritarian) even as it relates to and overlaps with them. In this, we are in agreement with Charles Tilly that each kind of movement articulates an essentially distinct type of politics (Tilly and Wood, 2020). And we take from Eyerman and Jamison the understanding that movements are “actually constituted by the cognitive praxis that is entailed in the articulation of their historical projects,” and that, “the actual types of knowledge that a social movement articulates or is interested in obviously varies from movement to movement” (Eyerman and Jamison, 2007).

For social movements generally, and for the broad social movement of history, the movement’s cognitive praxis is oriented toward creating the conditions for universal human flourishing through the socialization of daily life (Touraine, 1981; Wright, 2010). To the extent that a movement is oriented toward the express articulation of system design, it is engaged in constitutionalism (Manski, 2020). Different movement forms may intersect. Thus, a movement may be religious and social; it may be national and authoritarian; it may be technological and constitutional. For us, therefore, 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)

See also: Technology and Code as Constitution

The constitutive powers of digital technology

Dhruv Deepak and Ben Manksi:

"Digital technology is fundamentally reconfiguring the conditions of social life, from communication, law, and governance, to identity, exchange, and community. It possesses constitutive powers that define and organize the relationships between people, beings, and things. While these powers originate through the agency of technologists and historical movements, once enacted they exert their own autonomous force. As such, they warrant analysis. We identify three types of constitutive powers of digital technology: design, affordance, and sovereignty. Analyzing these powers illuminates how digital technology is reshaping the world and provides a framework for understanding its constitutional role. We believe that design, affordance, and sovereignty appear in all forms of constitutional action. However, as compared to classical constitutionalism, where there is usually a significant gap between formal and substantive law (which is to say, between the “law as text” and the “law in action”), the immediacy of digital code to material relations makes the empirical study of digital constitutionalism highly accessible.

Design is the deliberate articulation of relationships between people, beings, things, and systems. In digital contexts, design decisions determine who can access technology, how it can be used, and how power flows through it. Design channels and stabilizes possibilities while enabling new ones. It also reflects intentionality, which shifts the focus from merely regulating technology to using technology as a tool for reconfiguring social relations and creating new systems of governance.

When technologists design digital platforms and systems, they encode specific values, principles, and power relations into technical architectures (Winner, 1980; Dafermos and Söderberg, 2009; Pazaitis et al., 2022; Della Porta et al., 2022). This encoding process is explicitly constitutional; it establishes basic rules that shape interaction and institution formation.

The political significance of digital design can be seen well at scale: When transnational corporations like Google and Meta design their platforms, they create governance structures that, while formally private, perform traditionally public functions. These design choices constitute new forms of authority that often bypass traditional democratic processes (Zuboff, 2019; Birch, 2023). Conversely, the architecture of Wikipedia embodies principles of openness and collaboration. Its design allows anyone to contribute and edit, decentralizing knowledge production and challenging traditional hierarchies (Dafermos, 2020).

Affordance refers to the capabilities and actions enabled through a technology’s design. The concept originated in the work of perceptual psychologist Gibson (1986), but it was Donald Norman, a product designer and engineer, who popularized the notion of material “affordance” in the context of human-computer interaction (Norman, 2001). Affordances refer to how the internal structure of an object makes possible, and thus “affords,” particular uses. Technological affordances can be defined as a “type of action or a characteristic of actions that a technology enables through its design” (Earl and Kimport, 2011, p. 132).

The uses and products of a particular technology are conditioned by external forces, and thus, contingent. Yet emerging from their material structure, technologies possess their own autonomous power invoking specific uses and what they produce (Leonardi, 2012; Robey et al., 2012). The debate over affordance as a constitutive power is informative. One school of thought believes human agency is constrained by what people believe technology makes possible; another argues that the most crucial aspect of technology is how users put it into practice (Orlikowski, 2007). Still others remind us that technologies often possess affordances unplanned by their designers (Bimber, 1990). When technology and social structures interlock, a process of “imbrication” occurs, where the material agency of technology and the agency of human beings overlap (Leonardi, 2011). As technology mediates human action, it transforms social relations and materially alters the world (Cardullo et al., 2019).

Digital technology possesses affordances that mediate social relations and invoke particular uses, enabling new forms of agency (Earl and Kimport, 2011; Leonardi, 2012; Robey et al., 2012). For example, open-source platforms like GitHub provide affordances for collaborative software development, enabling technologists from around the world to contribute to shared projects (O’Neil et al., 2021). These affordances democratize access to technological tools, promoting innovation and collective problem-solving. But affordances can either constrain or enable democratic participation, depending on their design (Leonardi, 2011; Cardullo et al., 2019). Proprietary software and closed platforms limit user customization and lock communities into specific ecosystems, reducing their autonomy. The affordances of surveillance technologies, such as facial recognition systems, can reinforce authoritarian control and erode privacy rights, demonstrating the dual-edged nature of technological affordances (Cardullo et al., 2019).

Sovereignty refers to the receiving of general recognition of exclusive domain, and therefore, the related capacity to establish the rules for a particular field of action. In digital contexts, sovereignty is about who holds authority over digital infrastructures and how power is exercised. Sovereignty is often treated as a stable fact, yet there are always processes and movements underway that call sovereignty into question (Manski and Manski, 2018).

Historically, sovereignty was associated closely with different forms of state authority, and technological change was associated with changes in the organization of society and the form of the state (Marx, 2024). Thus, by the 18th century, the Western adoption of the printing press had enabled the spread of republican ideology and the rise of popular sovereignty (Young, 2006; Cameron, 2013). In the 19th century, steam engines and steel technology made possible the giant railroad corporations that secured for themselves a radically different relationship between corporate capital and the state (La Follette, 1897; Grossman and Adams, 1993). And in the 20th century, nuclear technology enabled a new geopolitical sovereign in the world system - the superpower - even as the AK-47 multiplied the insurgencies that undermined superpower hegemonies.

The development of digital technology in the 21st century is producing what appear to be contradictory forms of sovereignty. On the one hand, state and corporate surveillance capabilities have expanded dramatically, creating new challenges for collective economic rights and digital rights. The integration of artificial intelligence with surveillance systems enables unprecedented monitoring of social activity (Reich et al., 2021). Governments and corporations around the world have adopted advanced surveillance technologies to monitor and control populations, often under the guise of national security or public health.

Yet other innovations in digital technology have fragmented traditional forms of state sovereignty, enabling communities, workers, and networked users to assert authority over critical systems. Distributed ledger technologies such as Blockchain and Holochain introduce the possibility of decentralized governance, where authority is distributed across a network rather than concentrated in a single entity (Papadimitropoulos and Malamidis, 2024). Similarly, Indigenous data sovereignty movements assert control over digital knowledge systems, challenging colonial practices of data extraction and exploitation (Walter et al., 2021; Foxworth and Ellenwood, 2023)."

(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)