Technologists as Activists

Discussion

Dhruv Deepak and Ben Manski :

"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)